Saving Seafood

First-Ever Fishery Improvement Project Launched in Japan

November 10, 2016 — The following was released by Ocean Outcomes:

Sustainable seafood movement takes a big step forward in East Asia as industry, fishermen, and NGOs come together to launch the “Tokyo Bay Sea Perch FIP”, the first project of its kind in Japan.

Tokyo, Japan — In 2016, the market value of sustainable seafood reached an all-time high of $11.5 billion USD, placing further incentive to increase the sustainability of fisheries across the globe. Asia’s share of global seafood production is up to 69%, by some estimates, but only 11% of this is certified as sustainable seafood production including Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) certifications. As such, implementation of Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs) in Japan will ensure the growth of the Asian sustainable seafood market.

Ocean Outcomes (O2) and Kaiko Bussan Inc. today announced its launch of the “Tokyo Bay Sea Perch FIP”, Japan’s first Fishery Improvement Project (FIP). The project was introduced by Seafood Legacy Co., Ltd. to Seiyu GK, a subsidiary of Walmart Stores, Inc., the American multinational retail corporation and global leader in sustainable seafood, who have decided to support this project that will improve the sustainability of the sea perch fisheries in Tokyo Bay. As part of the project, at the end of October 2016, Seiyu test marketed the “Tokyo Bay Sea Perch FIP” product in 4 stores in the Kanto area and received positive feedback from customers regarding the quality, freshness and the reasonable price of the products. Going forward, Seiyu will discuss its support for this project including continued “Tokyo Bay Sea Perch FIP” product sales in stores and project grant contribution.

  • About Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs)

A Fishery Improvement Project (FIP) is a collaborative project between fisheries stakeholders, such as fishermen, businesses, distributors, and NGOs, to improve the sustainability of a fishery. Two-thirds of the top 25 North American retailers, comprising 90% of the global seafood market, have committed to supporting FIPs. Projects like the “Tokyo Bay Sea Perch FIP” are vital if fisheries want to improve and access global markets.

Tokyo Bay is a major fishing ground for sea perch and a historically and culturally important sourcing region for edomae sushi, the style of sushi created during the late Edo-period (late 19th century) that influenced the nigiri sushi that is common today. The “Tokyo Bay Sea Perch FIP” will ensure sustainable fisheries management and the enjoyment of sea perch for generations to come.

As a first step in the project, Ocean Outcomes collaborated with Kaiko Bussan to complete an assessment of current fishing practices calibrated against internationally recognized best practices standards. The assessment found opportunities to modify fishing practices and gather additional data as steps which could better inform fisheries management and lead to more sustainable practices overall. These opportunities, described in detail in the FIP work plan, include plans to better monitor bycatch of endangered, threatened, and protected species, plans to collect fishery data to better evaluate and monitor stock abundance, and a commitment to work towards a more collaborative management plan.

Below are comments from each organization regarding the launch of the FIP.

Shunji Murakami (Ocean Outcome / Japan Program Director)

“Launching the Tokyo Bay Sea Perch FIP is a monumental moment for the sustainable seafood movement in Japan. Improving fisheries practices benefits both marine resources and fishing communities.”

Kazuhiko Oono (Kaiko Bussan, Inc. / President and CEO)

“Fishery improvement, while a new concept for Japanese fishermen, makes sense. We harvest, process, and sell the sea perch we catch, so our business is completely reliant on abundant sea perch resources. As the resource declines, so does our fishery. This project will ensure we’re harvesting the optimal amount of sea perch while not negatively affecting the amazing environment in which we work.”

Wakao Hanaoka (Seafood Legacy Co., Ltd. / CEO and Founder)

“Our hope for this project is to invigorate the Japanese market in a way that encourages cooperation amongst retailers and producers in the implementation of more sustainable fishing practices. This will benefit ocean ecosystems, businesses, fisheries, and local communities.”

Kumie Wama (Seiyu GK / Vice President of Corporate Affairs)

“Responsible and sustainable fishing practices, which the participants of “Tokyo Bay Sea Perch FIP” have committed to undertake, are very important for the future of marine resources in Japan. As a company that relies on shared marine resources, we consider it our corporate social responsibility to provide environmentally friendly products to our consumers.”

MAINE: Island fishermen learn (more) about aquaculture in Japan

October 27, 2016 — Local fisherman Marsden Brewer and his son, Bobby Brewer, have recently returned from a one-week excursion to Aomori, Japan, where they spent time studying the Japanese methods of growing scallops through aquaculture.

Growing scallops, as opposed to fishing them, has become a topic of interest in the area over the last few years; however, Brewer said it is something the Japanese have been doing for decades.

“They’ve long since brought their fishing industry to its knees as of several years ago, so they had to come up with an alternative way to still use the ocean to feed their families,” said Brewer at his home Tuesday, October 18. “That’s why we went over there, to learn how they do it, because they’ve discovered so many ways of becoming more and more efficient. It’s really quite amazing.”

Brewer said the technique he was most impressed with was a 600-foot-long line that went 15-feet down into the water. Scallops are hung on that line to grow.

“The thing I liked most about that is the line is hung from three buoys. So, if you look at it from above, all you see on the surface are those three buoys. It doesn’t look like a whole system coming out of the water,” he said.

Read the full story at Island Advantages

Japan gives visiting Mainers the scoop on scalloping

October 18th, 2016 — A group of Maine fishermen from Cape Elizabeth to Stonington traveled to northern Japan this month to study mechanized techniques for growing scallops.

Funded in part by a grant from the United States-Japan Foundation, the 10-person group traveled to the coastal region of the Aomori prefecture to learn about the machines that the fishing and aquaculture cooperatives there use to grow scallops on vertical lines suspended in the sea, a farming method proven to speed up their growth. The group also learned about shellfish processing and value-added shellfish products.

“We want to get key people there to see what’s possible in scallop farming and to believe it can be replicated in Maine, although at a much smaller scale,” said trip leader Hugh Cowperthwaite, fisheries director for Coastal Enterprises Inc., which promotes rural economic development. “This exchange allows us to make new and deeper connections. Can this industry find its footing and create jobs in Maine?”

This isn’t the first time that Mainers have traveled to Aomori, which is more than 6,200 miles from Portland. The Japanese shellfish community started the information exchange in 1999, with a focus on how to collect wild seed and grow scallops from juveniles to adults. During Cowperthwaite’s first trip in 2010, he learned how Japan has mechanized several of the most labor-intensive steps of scallop farming.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald 

Sadness prefaces the closing of the world’s biggest fish market, Tokyo’s Tsukiji

October 6th, 2016 — The world’s biggest fish market is Tsukiji Shijo in Tokyo, and it never stops moving.

All night long, refrigerated trucks deliver fresh fish from across Japan and frozen seafood caught around the world. At dawn, Tsukiji’s tuna wholesalers huddle in a chilly room and inspect what’s been hauled in.

“People with sense can tell the quality of the fish right away,” says wholesaler Eiji Kusumoto. “Those without? No matter how much they look at the fish, they won’t know.”

Kusumoto buys 10 to 15 giant tuna each morning at auction. He and rival fish sellers peruse and poke the tuna to decide how much they’re worth. This is serious business: a single fish once sold for $1.8 million.

When bells ring out across the auction floor, the appraisal period is over. Auctioneers holler out prices in a rhapsodic chant, and then the bidding starts.

“The bids are made by putting out your fingers — one, two, three, four. One [finger] could mean 1,000 yen, 10,000, yen, or 100,000 yen. But when you look at the fish, everyone knows which it is,” Kusumoto says.

When the auction’s done, Kusumoto’s tuna are loaded onto wooden carts and rolled to his stall on the market floor. He and his son cut the huge fish with band saws and toss the heads and other scraps into buckets. They lay the deep pink fleshy pieces out for chefs and shopkeepers to inspect.

At Tsukiji, there’s an art to that arrangement.

“We display the fish so that you can see the fat content and color easily,” Kusumoto says.

And if they do it well, they’re sold out by 11 a.m.

Kusumoto and his son are the third and fourth generation of their family to do this kind of work at Tsukiji. And they’ll likely be the last. The market is expected to close this winter.

Read the full story at Jefferson Public Radio 

Maine fisheries experts head to Japan to learn scallop practices, buy machinery

October 4th, 2016 — Expanding on earlier visits to Japan, 10 aquaculture and fisheries experts from Maine are headed for Aomori Prefecture in the northern part of Japan’s main island of Honshu to learn successful techniques to grow scallops and to buy machinery to help harvest them.

“Sea scallops are among the most lucrative commercial marine species caught in the United States,” Hugh Cowperthwaite, fisheries project director at Coastal Enterprises Inc. (CEI), of Portland and the trip leader, told Mainebiz as he was preparing to leave for Aomori last Friday. “The nationwide landings value of sea scallops remained high in 2013 and was ranked fourth among all species with a total worth of $467.3 million. In 2015 the Maine wild caught scallop season witnessed prices at $12 per pound for 20-30 counts … [and up to] $16 per pound for 10 counts.”

Maine’s scallop industry was worth $5.7 million in 2015 for 3,770,760 million live pounds of scallops, down from 2014’s $7.6 million and 5,042,648 live pounds, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. The per pound price remained similar however, at $12.70 in 2015 and $12.67 in 2014.

Read the full story at Mainebiz 

Beware the invasion of China’s ‘little green boats’

September 1, 2016 — In early August, Japan’s coast guard witnessed an unconventional Chinese assault on its territorial waters.

According to Japanese officials I met with last week, at least 300 Chinese “fishing vessels” began incursions into the exclusive economic zone around the uninhabited Senkaku Islands, disputed territory administered by Japan but claimed by China and Taiwan as well.

Japan has seen similar probing activities for years. But in August, the Chinese escalated. There were far more boats than before, and the Chinese sent armed coast guard vessels to accompany these “fishermen.”

This may sound fairly benign compared to the shooting wars in Ukraine and Syria. But for Japan, the matter could not be more serious. Its military assesses that many of these sailors are really Chinese militia irregulars, similar to the non-uniformed “little green men” whom Russia has sent to eastern Ukraine to stir up separatist sentiment. Call them “little green boats.”

Nonetheless, Japan has gone out of its way not to take China’s bait and respond militarily. Instead, it sends its own coast guard to escort the boats and inform them of their trespassing over loudspeakers.

Diplomatically, Japanese officials have taken to lodging angry, formal complaints in late-night phone calls to their Chinese counterparts, a tactic usually favored by Beijing’s envoys.

There are three reasons Americans should watch the rising tensions in the East China Sea carefully.

Read  the full story at the New York Post 

New Tokyo leader postpones plan to move world’s biggest fish market

September 1, 2016 — TOKYO — The newly elected governor of Tokyo has postponed a plan to relocate the world’s biggest fish market, one of the city’s most famous landmarks.

Gov. Yuriko Koike announced Wednesday that she will decide on a date only after an environmental assessment of the new site is completed in January. The move had been scheduled for early November.

The current Tsukiji fish market is to be moved to the site of a former gas plant in Toyosu, a reclaimed area in Tokyo Bay, raising concerns about soil contamination.

“It is a market that handles fresh food and seafood,” Koike, a former national environment minister, said at a news conference. “The perspective of consumers about food safety is valuable, and I believe that citizens come first.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times 

Is the eel industry on the slippery slope to extinction?

July 25, 2016 — As we approach the end of July, supermarkets [across Japan] are beginning to stock up on one of the nation’s much-loved summer fish: freshwater eel.

In recent years, however, the cost of eel has risen sharply and consumers are now facing the upcoming Doyo no Ushi no Hi (Day of the Ox, a day dedicated to eel consumption) on July 30 in the knowledge that they’ll be expected to pay through the nose for a slab of the freshwater fish.

Rampant overfishing and the scientific community’s overall lack of knowledge on the biology of eel has left the industry in a crisis. The dwindling domestic eel population has consequently pushed up prices and forced a number of specialist eel restaurants to close. So scarce is the fish in restaurants these days that it’s almost considered to be something of a luxury item.

“I think that the soaring eel prices are truly unfortunate,” says Torami Murakami, chairman of the All Japan Association for Sustainable Eel Aquaculture. “If prices continue to stay at this level, an important part of Japanese food culture will remain out of consumers’ reach.”

Murakami himself enjoys packing away what has become a delicacy, but realizes that increasing prices are making it more difficult for eel to remain on dining tables across the country.

“Eel has been loved in Japan for millennia,” Murakami says. “It’s crucial that we continue this ancient Japanese food culture.”

The eating of freshwater eel — or unagi — is a culinary romance that has lasted more than 5,000 years. Indeed, eel bones have been found in shell mounds dating back to the Jomon Period, which lasted from around 10,000 B.C. to 200 B.C.

Read the full story at the Japan Times

SUSAN POLLACK: Fishing For Progress: Saying No To ‘No Women On Board’

June 10, 2016 — In 1982, as supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment fought claims that that the proposed amendment to the Constitution would destroy the American family, I confronted an older mythology: Women are bad luck on boats.

I was a young maritime reporter for The East Hampton Star on Eastern Long Island. I loved boats and the sea, and I’d always loved adventure. That summer, I planned to join local fishermen aboard a state-of-the-art Japanese squid ship. This was several years after the United States enacted its 200-mile limit, but before American fishermen had fully developed a squid fishery of their own. In exchange for sharing their technical know-how, the Japanese would be permitted to catch squid in our waters.

I was game.

But as I was readying my boots and gear, I received an unexpected warning from the American sponsors of the U.S-Japan venture: no women on board.

Surely, something must be wrong: I’d spent the previous five years in gurry-soaked oil skins reporting on life at sea on American draggers, lobster boats, bay scallopers, gillnetters, long-liners and clamming rigs. I’d photographed the sun rising over the stern of a dragger hauling its catch of yellowtail and blackback flounders, cod, haddock and scup. I’d spent bone-chilling winter days in an open skiff, culling bay scallops – separating the delicate fan-shaped bivalves from whelks, rocks and seaweed. I’d danced on the boat, not for joy, but to keep warm.

On summer evenings, I’d helped my neighbor lift his gillnets, gingerly plucking out sharp-toothed bluefish and the occasional striper. And I’d finally succeeded in filleting a flounder without mangling the fragile flesh.

Read the full story at WBUR

How unstable supply is forcing Japanese fish farmers to get creative

June 23, 2016 — Fishing for anchovy started late this year in the main producing area of Peru, and the supply of fish meal used as an ingredient in feed for farmed fish is unstable.

In the main producing area of Peru, catches were poor at the end of 2014 and no quota was allocated for the 2015 season. The poor catches are attributed to the El Niño phenomenon, which changes ocean currents and water temperature.

In Peru, the season for catching anchovy for fish meal is usually from April to July and from November to February. Trial fishing was conducted before the season, to determine the total allowable catch. Usually the quota is announced in April, but this year no announcement was made until well into June, so fishing is only getting started. As it is rare for the fishing the season to be extended into August or later, it is likely that the season will simply be shortened, resulting in a continued supply shortage.

The good news is that the El Niño may have ended. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on 9 June reported that El Niño indices were near zero by the end of May. Based on surface and subsurface water temperatures NOAA reported, “For the first time in 2016, atmospheric anomalies over the tropical Pacific Ocean were also consistent with ENSO-neutral conditions.” (ENSO stands for El Niño–Southern Oscillation.)

Spot prices for prime fish meal were at a high point of USD 2,390 (JPY 248,966; EUR 2,119) per metric ton in December 2014. Currently, the price is at USD 1,530 (JPY 159,379; EUR 1,356). So, it is less a problem of price than of unpredictable supply.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource