Saving Seafood

Japanese boat owners charged with helping smuggle shark fins

December 17, 2018 — U.S. prosecutors in Hawaii are accusing the owners and officers of a Japanese fishing boat of helping Indonesian fishermen smuggle nearly 1,000 shark fins, worth about $58,000 on the black market.

It’s against U.S. law to remove the fins of sharks at sea. Prosecutors say the fishermen harvested fins from sharks that were still alive, then discarded their carcasses into the ocean. Fins are a pricey delicacy often used in soups

The boat’s owner, Japanese business Hamada Suisan Co. Ltd., and JF Zengyoren, a Japanese fishing cooperative that the vessel belongs to, were charged with aiding and abetting the trafficking and smuggling of 962 shark fins, the U.S. attorney’s office in Hawaii said. The boat’s captain, fishing master and first engineer were also charged.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Fishing crew charged with shark fin trafficking

December 12, 2018 — The owner and officers of a Japanese-flagged fishing vessel were charged in federal court Tuesday with aiding and abetting the trafficking and smuggling of nearly 1,000 shark fins into and out of Hawaii last month.

During a year-long tuna-fishing expedition, the crew of a Japanese fishing boat —the M.V. Kyoshin Maru No. 20 — allegedly harvested fins from about 300 sharks, at least some species of which are protected under the Endangered Species Act and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

One of those species, the oceanic white tip shark, has declined in population by about 80-95 percent across the Pacific Ocean since the mid-1990s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

According to a U.S. Department of Justice press release, the crew cut the shark fins off, “in some instances while the sharks were stunned but still alive, and discarded the finless carcasses into the ocean,” all under the supervision of the captain and at the direction of the ship’s officers.

The illegally-harvested fins were discovered in the luggage of 10 Indonesian nationals, who had been employed as fishermen on the boat. The Indonesian fishermen had been dropped off from the fishing boat at a port in Honolulu and were intending to catch a flight to Jakarta.

Read the full story at The Garden Island

Sailors for the Sea takes new approach to seafood sustainability in Japan

December 5, 2018 — Ryan Bigelow, the senior program manager for Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, sees Japan as a country ripe for seafood sustainability ratings like those his program provides.

Japan’s population consumes a vast amount of seafood – collectively, the country has one of the largest seafood consumption footprints in the world (third behind China and the European Union) – and because of that, an improvement in the overall sustainability of the seafood sold and eaten in Japan can have a major impact.

Seafood Watch’s Buyers Guide, which gives seafood either a “best choice,” a “good alternative”, or “avoid” recommendation to seafood commonly found in supermarkets, is well-known in the United States. (Its ratings are color-coded green, yellow, and red, similar to the colors found in traffic signals.)

The guide is tailored to each U.S. state in order to give recommendations relevant to the seafood available there. They can be downloaded in PDF form on a single page and easily folded into a wallet or pocketbook.

But Bigelow openly acknowledges that Japanese consumers are not familiar with Seafood Watch’s guides.

“We don’t promote our program there,” he told SeafoodSource.

Still, for the fourth consecutive year, Bigelow attended the Tokyo Sustainable Seafood Symposium, which took place at Iino Hall and Conference Center on 1 November. Initiated in 2015, the annual event brings together Japanese professionals involved in the seafood industry to discuss issues surrounding smarter management of global fisheries resources. The all-day program featured a wide range of speakers and panelists.

“We attend the symposium to share our experiences advocating for more sustainable seafood in North America, both our successes and our failures,” Bigelow said. “Hopefully, that knowledge allows the sustainable seafood movement in Japan to grow more quickly and avoid some of the issues we encountered over the last 20 years.”

According to Bigelow, the closest parallel to the Seafood Watch Buyers Guide in Japan is the Sailors for the Sea Blue Seafood Guide.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Only way is up for pollock prices in 2019

November 20, 2018 — The prices for all forms of pollock look set to continue to increase next year, sources in the US, Russia, China and Europe told Undercurrent News.

Prices for pin-bone out (PBO) blocks, double-frozen fillet blocks, and the headed and gutted (H&G) raw material the latter is based on, all look set for higher levels in 2019, having already firmed in 2018, the sources said.

During the China Fisheries & Seafood Expo, held Nov. 7-9 in a venue close to Qingdao, ex-warehouse prices of around $3,500 per-metric-ton were being discussed for PBO blocks for A season. Prices for B season of 2018 were done around $3,350/t. Also, double frozen fillet block prices of around $3,200/t are also being discussed for next year.

“We see the price of $3,500/t reached and confirmed and we will take it up from there,” Fedor Kirsanov, CEO of Russian Fishery Company (RFC), told Undercurrent at the show, of the situation with PBO. US suppliers and also a large European buyer confirmed this level.

The level in the A season of 2018 was around $3,000/t (see image below and use the Undercurrent prices portal for interactive data), a leap from the very low level of around $2,350/t hit in the B season of 2017, as the price bottomed out. The pace of the increase has shocked buyers, but producers have been quick to point out this is only a return to a historical norm.

“We felt the fall was pretty quick. Now, it’s going more back to normal. It’s also not like pollock has gone off the charts. It’s back to a level where everyone can make money. It’s going back to a level where producers can make investments,” Tom Enlow, CEO of UniSea — a pollock, cod and crab processing plant in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, which is owned by Japan’s Nippon Suisan Kaisha (Nissui) — told Undercurrent.

The speed of the price increase has been driven by new markets taking the fish, he said.

“When the prices were very low, the producers looked at new markets. There has been more focus on deepskin for Asia and also surimi. Demand for surimi has been very strong, due to the shortfall in warmwater surimi,” the Nissui executive said. “The shortage in warmwater is the reason Thailand is so hot at the moment for surimi. Also, Japan is stable, but they take almost half of the surimi the US produces.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Ongoing China-U.S. Trade War Likely to Bring Changes to Global Seafood Industry

November 20, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Chinese seafood exports to America have grown this year, despite the trade war. However, the trade war with the U.S. could have global impacts, writer Amy Zhong reports from China.

Chinese seafood exports to the U.S. were US $3.22 billion during 2017, while the exports have risen by 5.75 percent to reach US $2.161 billion within the first eight months of this year compared with the same period last year. But things are starting to shift. The U.S. used to be the largest market for Chinese tilapia, but not any more.

Against this backdrop, a seafood processing seminar was hosted in Dalian in October and participants gathered to talk about issues like global seafood trading and brand building.

China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 created great opportunities for its aquatic processing industry but it has begun to shift attention to the domestic market with the recession of foreign markets, trade conflicts and increasingly great domestic demand. Thus, the Dalian seminar was of great importance in areas such as opportunities and threats the aquatic industry encounters in domestic and foreign markets.

The country used to rely on foreign buyers in its seafood sales from 1981 to 2005, Cui He, the president for China Aquatic Products Processing and Marketing Alliance, was quoted as saying in a recent FishFirst article. Its export ballooned from 2005 to 2013, while its imports also grew between 2013 and 2017. The country’s seafood trading volume exceeded 10 million tons in 2017, which makes it a market larger than any other in the world, according to the story. That means an increasing number of aquatic suppliers have placed more importance on this market with great potential thanks to its steady export opportunities and rapid import increase. Countries like Norway, Canada and Australia have said in the past that China is the main target in their seafood promotions.

Japan, the U.S. and Europe are the three main buyers of China’s seafood, according to the country’s statistics, while other important buyers include South Korea and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Japan ranks first among all of China’s seafood buyers while the U.S. also is significant, buying a lot of China’s white shrimp and tilapia.

Although there seems to be no drastic change to the global seafood market at present, China has played a role of great importance in the processing industry. The trade war does take a toll on some export-oriented seafood companies in Dalian and Qingdao, but it also pushes them to upgrade their systems. In short, more seafood trading stimulates the development of China’s seafood processing sector.

China’s statistics have shown a reduction in China’s reliance on U.S. seafood buyers since 2014. The U.S. anti-dumping policies on shrimp and catfish have influenced China’s processors since the mid-2000s. Lately, the two countries have become competitors in sourcing such seafood as Ecuador’s white shrimp after 2014, with Ecuador selling more white shrimp to China recently. China also has purchased more basa from Vietnam than the U.S. as well.

Recently, the U.S. has removed cod, pink salmon and pollock from its import list that are subject to higher tariffs. Cod has been delivered to China for further processing before being re-exported to Europe, the article said. At the same time, tariffs are having less effect on China’s seafood purchases from the U.S. than its sales to the U.S. Tilapia sales have hurt the most: The U.S. was once the largest buyer, but due to the trade war, it is now looking to other countries for substitutes.

SeafoodNews reporter Amy Zhong also writes that Chinese trade journals say that the U.S.-China trade war could also change the global seafood industry. Seafood businesses worldwide are uncertain whether China can maintain its status as the seafood processing center, since some companies have been forced to relocate to other regions, like Africa. However, China has begun developing business in more countries included in its One Belt, One Road initiative, which in turn has encouraged China to upgrade its seafood industry.

Wang Zhanlu, the director for WTO Division of Agricultural Trade Promotion Center, was quoted as saying countries usually control the agricultural trade more strictly with higher tariffs, but China is comparatively open and is second only to the U.S. in terms of its agricultural imports. In 2017, seafood ranks first in the country’s agricultural exports and accounts for 27 percent of the country’s agricultural export total. Meanwhile, seafood imports account for about 17 percent of its imports.

Zhong writes that according to seafood trade expert Leng Chuanhui, Japan consumes about 8.4 million tons of seafood every year, while it produces around 4.7 million tons on its own. Most of Japan’s seafood are wild harvests, while some are raised in fresh- or saltwater aquaculture. The country buys about 3.7 million tons of seafood from other countries, while its main export markets are Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, while 14.2 percent of its seafood import is from China.

Professor Qin from Guangdong Ocean University was quoted as saying that oysters have also become more popular in China. Global production was only 5.32 million tons worldwide in 2017, while the trading volume was about 70,000 tons. But China’s production rose by 4.7 percent in 2017 compared with that of 2016 to reach 4.87 million tons. Its oyster market value grew by 25 percent to reach 25.4 billion yuan (~$3.7 billion USD) that year. Most of the Fujian, Guangdong and Shandong oysters are currently destined for barbecues, but likely will be more finely processed in the future.

This story originally appeared on Seafood News, it is republished here with permission.

 

Industry launch large-scale squid project at China Fisheries Expo

November 7, 2018 — The following was released by Ocean Outcomes:

Four leading seafood buyers, Chinese seafood industry groups, retailers, fishermen, and sustainable seafood enterprises came together today at the China Fisheries and Seafood Expo to celebrate the much anticipated launch of the East China Sea and Yellow Sea Squid FIP.

The fisheries improvement project—or FIP for short—is a precompetitive project aimed to improve the management and fishing practices of Chinese trawl, purse seine, and gillnet vessels targeting Japanese flying squid. JFS are one of the most commercially lucrative species of squid, and in the Chinese side of East China Sea and Yellow Sea alone, annual production can approach 30,000 metric tons.

“Squids are one of the most loved seafoods, but compared with many species, squid sustainability efforts are lagging,” said Songlin Wang who is leading the project. “Given squid account for about 5% of global fishery landings, it’s encouraging to see that change.”

In the East China and Yellow Seas, China has important domestic fisheries which target migratory JFS stocks. These supply both a booming domestic market and are exported to the Europe Union, United Kingdom, United States, Japan, and South Korea, among many others, by global seafood companies such as those involved in the project.

However, JFS fishing practices and management need improvement in a number of ways to ensure a continued supply of squid products. For example, China lacks a JFS-specific harvest strategy outside of a summer fishing moratorium banning the use of motorized fishing vessels, and it’s difficult to verify the exact catch locations for some squid products from the region.

“Around a third to half of all squid passes through a Chinese seafood supply chain, whether caught, processed, traded, or consumed,” said Dr. He Cui, who heads CAPPMA, a Chinese national seafood industry group with thousands of members. “Given CAPPMA’s commitment to both domestic and global seafood sustainability, it’s in our interest to ensure a future where all squid stocks are healthy. This project will help us explore a path forward.”

The FIP will work to address areas of concern through implementation of a five year improvement work plan designed, in part, to establish science-based stock assessments and bycatch monitoring protocols, harvest rules fit to JFS 1-year lifecycles, and traceability systems to verify and track locations of harvest.

Since its inception, the FIP has grown beyond founding members Ocean Outcomes, Sea Farms, and PanaPesca to include support from a number of industry stakeholders, including, Quirch Foods, Seachill, China Aquatic Products Processing and Marketing Alliance (CAPPMA), Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and local Chinese suppliers Genho, IG and the Zhejiang Industry Group.

The success and growth of the project were due, in part, to the collaborative forum of the Global Squid Supply Chain Roundtable, facilitated by Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, which heavily featured the East China Sea and Yellow Sea Squid FIP in recent meetings at the North America Seafood Expo in Boston, MA.

“We couldn’t have envisioned the enthusiasm and support for this work when this project began three years ago,” said Dick Jones, who has been working to improve seafood industry practices for decades. “Precompetitive industry collaboration is key to ensuring durable and positive change. This project demonstrates that message is catching on.”

JOHN FIORILLO: A Retraction is Not Enough

November 1, 2018 — The following editorial was originally published by IntraFish. It was written by IntraFish Executive Editor John Fiorillo:

Patience may be a virtue but how long must we wait for a scientific journal to decide if it is going to retract a controversial paper that the US government, eminent fisheries scientists and industry executives say is a bunch of crap?

It has been more than a year – yes, I said a year – since US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Assistant Administrator for Fisheries Chris Oliver requested a retraction of the controversial scientific paper published in the journal Marine Policy that alleges a significant portion of Alaska salmon, crab and pollock is entering the Japanese market from illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fisheries.

Last October, Oliver challenged the veracity of the scientific paper and asked that it be retracted to avoid damaging the reputation of the US fishing industry and its fisheries management. In December, a team of top US fisheries scientists, led by preeminent fisheries researcher Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington, joined the US government in demanding a retraction of the paper. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), under which the fisheries are certified sustainable, also came out in support of the industry.

In June, Hance Smith, editor of the journal Marine Policy, told IntraFish: “The status is simply that we have been waiting for additional reviews of the paper. I expect we shall be able to progress shortly.”

Shortly?

On Monday, I asked Smith again for an update on the status of the paper and its possible retraction. I was told: “We are still waiting for a response from the corresponding author.”

Umm. OK. What?

Anyway, this is about more than getting a retraction. This is a scientific paper, that critics — bonafide critics, not crackpots — say is fundamentally flawed. And if that is not bad enough, it is eerily similar to a 2014 paper by the same researchers — Tony Pitcher, Katrina Nakamura, and Ganapathiraju Pramod — that provided estimates for IUU fish entering the US market. This report has been cited at least 59 times in academic reports and countless times in government and NGO reports. In other words, repeat the story enough times and it becomes unquestioned gospel.

The 2014 study was cited regularly by those supporting the creation of the US Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP), which was indeed launched in January and requires a new level of record keeping by US importers aimed at eliminating IUU fish from the US seafood supply chain.

Made up

Hilborn, in December, said the paper at the heart of the current controversy cites several dozen published papers as sources yet none have any mention of IUU fishing. “The paper also lists a number of ‘sources’ of IUU such as ‘unreported catch in artisanal fisheries’ which do not exist,” said Hilborn. “As near as we can tell, the paper made up all of its results without any data on IUU fishing.”

NOAA’s Oliver, in his October 2017 letter to the report’s authors, said the “allegations made in the paper, are absent of transparency regarding the data, and assumptions supporting them are irresponsible and call into question the authors’ conclusions.”

The Japan study claims that an estimated 15 percent of the US pollock entering Japan is from IUU fisheries. Further, the study says between 10 and 20 percent of the salmon and crab coming from Alaska fisheries is IUU. In the paper, Pitcher and the other authors argue for the creation of a seafood traceability program in Japan to thwart what they claim is the importation of seafood produced by IUU fishing activity.

The paper was funded by the Walton Foundation, which has largely skirted the fray. “Independently, we are reaching out to talk with all of the parties to ensure we fully understand the issues,” Barry Gold, director of Walton’s Environment Program, said a year ago.

But Pitcher told me Tuesday in an email that “neither the Walton Foundation nor the Marine Stewardship Council has been in touch with us to ascertain the truth of the matter.”

He also said he has a revised table showing “only 2 percent IUU from that US pollock fishery,” and he says that the revised table “has been waiting to be inserted [into the paper] for almost a year now.” In other words, the original 15 percent IUU estimate is wrong.

“The editor wants us to retract and then resubmit to include the new table, and despite our arguing that is not necessary as they can easily insert a correction, Ray Hilborn in Seattle has queered the pitch by a ridiculous letter accusing us of data fraud and absurd unprofessional threats that the journal will be ‘exposed on his blog,'” Pitcher said in his email to me.

“My co-author has been travelling extensively (earning his living!), and so have I, so neither of us have had the time required to deal with this. We are aiming to get it done before Xmas.”

What a mess.

Look, we need to be able to trust science, especially in this Trumpian era where science is dismantled, devalued and dismissed.

It’s time for the editors of the Marine Policy journal to settle this issue so we don’t allow flimsy science to contribute to the potentially unnecessary creation of another new traceability program in Japan, as it did for the new SIMP program in the US market.

Marine Policy editors need to retract the report, and while they are at it they need to look at the authors’ 2014 report. And stop being careless with fisheries science.

Read the editorial at IntraFish

9 countries and the EU protected the Arctic Ocean before the ice melts

October 12, 2018 —  It’s easy to miss the truly historic nature of the moment.

Last week, nine countries—the U.S., Canada, Russia, Norway, Greenland/Denmark, China, Japan, Iceland, South Korea, and the European Union (which includes 28 member states)—signed a treaty to hold off on commercial fishing in the high seas of the Arctic Ocean for at least 16 years while scientists study the potential impacts on wildlife in the far north. It was an extraordinary act of conservation—the rare case where major governments around the world proceeded with caution before racing into a new frontier to haul up sea life with boats and nets. They set aside 1.1 million square miles of ocean, an area larger than the Mediterranean Sea.

But to really grasp the significance of this milestone, consider why such a step was even possible, and what that says about our world today. For more than 100,000 years the central Arctic Ocean has been so thoroughly covered in ice that the very idea of fishing would have seemed ludicrous.

That remained true as recently as 20 years ago. But as human fossil-fuel emissions warmed the globe, the top of the world has melted faster than almost everywhere else. Now, in some years, up to 40 percent of the central Arctic Ocean—the area outside each surrounding nation’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone—is open water in summer. That hasn’t yet been enough to make fishing attractive. But it is enough that boats may be lured in soon.

So, for perhaps the first time in human history, the nations of the world set aside and protected fishing habitat that, for the moment, does not even yet exist. The foresight is certainly something to applaud. But it’s hard to escape the fact that the international accord is a tacit acknowledgment—including by the United States, which is moving to back out of the Paris climate accords—that we are headed, quite literally, into uncharted waters.

“The Arctic is in a transient state—it’s not stable,” Rafe Pomerance, a former State Department official who once worked on Arctic issues and now chairs a network of Arctic scientists from nongovernmental organizations and serves on the polar research board of the National Academy of Sciences, said last year.

Read the full story at National Geographic

‘Historic’ Agreement Bans Commercial Fishing Across a Vast Swath of the Arctic

October 4, 2018 — As the Arctic’s mantle of protective sea ice grows smaller and sadder by the year, new waters are opening up, setting the stage for industry and tourism to take off. But a vast swath of those chilly seas will soon be off-limits to at least one human enterprise: commercial-scale fishing.

On Wednesday, nine nations and the European Union signed an agreement to place a moratorium on unregulated commercial fishing across 1.1 million square miles of the central Arctic Ocean. These waters are becoming increasingly accessible as Arctic sea ice melts, and conservationists have been pushing for more protections so that exposed and potentially fragile ecosystems can be properly studied before we screw them up beyond repair.

Apparently, Arctic nations and those looking to exploit the ocean’s riches in the future—a list that includes the U.S., Russia, Canada, China, and Japan—are listening. The moratorium, which builds off protections the U.S. put in place in 2009, will be in effect for 16 years unless a science-based management plan can be established sooner, according to a press release from Pew Charitable Trusts. There’s also the potential to extend the fishing ban for additional five year increments depending on the results of a new research and monitoring program, which will focus on how the central Arctic Ocean ecosystem is changing and how best to manage any emerging fisheries.

Read the full story at Earther

Japan, Peru using cutting-edge technology to combat IUU fishing

October 2, 2018 — Japan and Peru, two of the world’s biggest players when it comes to seafood, are hoping to crack down on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in their exclusive economic zones through increased use of cutting-edge technology.

A key player in both countries’ efforts is the Global Fishing Watch, an international nonprofit organization with the goal of “advancing sustainability of the oceans through increased transparency.” Its mapping platform, which can be found on the GFW website, allows anyone to view or download data and investigate global fishing activity in near real-time, for free. GFW was founded in 2015 through a collaboration between Oceana, SkyTruth, and Google.

Global Fishing Watch’s tracking of automatic identification system (AIS) messages from ocean-going boats is now being used to fight illegal transshipment inside and near Japan’s exclusive economic zone. GFW recently signed onto a collaboration with the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency (FRA) and the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS) at the University of Wollongong to investigate IUU fishing and strengthen transparency and governance of fisheries within the region.

To detect pairs of vessels meeting at sea, GFW and analysts at SkyTruth and Google applied machine learning algorithms to more than 30 billion automatic identification system (AIS) messages from ocean-going boats to find tell-tale transshipment behavior, such as two vessels alongside each other long enough to transfer catch, crew, or supplies. AIS is a collision avoidance system that constantly transmits a vessel’s location at sea. These transmissions are collected by satellite receivers and delivered to GFW for automated processing. Nearly all refrigerated cargo vessels carry AIS and those ships receiving fish can be identified and their activity plotted on the map.

Read the full story at Seafood Source