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Cooke confirms deal for shrimp farmer Seajoy is close to completion

December 3, 2018 — Glenn Cooke confirmed the Canada-based, global seafood group that carries his family name is close to a deal for a shrimp farmer in Latin America, which Undercurrent News has previously reported is Honduras’ Seajoy Group.

Speaking at a roundtable in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, he said Cooke is in the final stages of acquiring “one of the largest” Latin American shrimp farming companies, the Telegraph-Journal reported.

“We are in the process of getting everything approved, but we have basically bought one of the world’s largest shrimp operations,” he said at the event, which was attended by the heads of other divisions from around the world and Karen Ludwig, a member of the Canadian Parliament representing the New Brunswick Southwest district.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

China is Fishing Ever Farther From Home, Adding to Stress on Fish Stocks

January 1, 2018 — China’s fishing fleet, which reaches as far as Latin America, West Africa, and even Antarctica, is adding to a worldwide strain on fish stocks.

So it’s no surprise that Chinese fishermen have been involved in clashes with foreign fishermen and coast guards at great distances from their homeland.

In perhaps the most dramatic clash, which occurred in March 2016, Argentina’s coast guard sank a Chinese trawler that was fishing within its territorial waters more than 11,000 miles from its home base on the China coast. The trawler had tried to ram the Argentine vessel.

Argentine Navy submarines have been assigned to “chase down illegal fishing vessels in the frigid waters off southern Argentina,” according to a Wall Street Journal report from that country published early this month.

Reuters news agency, meanwhile, reported at the end of August that Ecuador had jailed 20 Chinese fishermen for up to four years for illegally fishing off the Galapagos Islands, where they were caught with some 6,600 sharks.

Their vessel contained some 300 tons of near-extinct or endangered species, including hammerhead sharks.

Incidents have also occurred near South Korea and in disputed areas in the South China Sea, where Chinese Coast Guard ships have clashed with Vietnamese fishermen.

Pressures in the Yellow Sea, East China Sea, and South China Sea leading to incidents like this are driving China to fish elsewhere in the world.

Chinese fishermen target West Africa

In April 2017, The New York Times reported from Senegal that Chinese fishermen were increasingly heading to West Africa.

The fishermen are enabled by corrupt local governments and their weak enforcement of fishing limits.

Citing experts, The Times states that West Africa now provides “the vast majority” of fish caught by China’s distant-water fishing fleet.

Fishing off the coast of Senegal, “most of the Chinese ships are so large that they scoop up as many fish in one week as Senegalese boats catch in a year,” The Times report said.

Most of the fish are sent abroad, with some of it ending up as fishmeal fodder for chickens and pigs in Europe and the United States.

For Senegalese citizens, many of whom depend on fish as a source of protein, diminishing fish catches mean higher food prices.

In nearby Sierra Leone, meanwhile, a similar scenario is playing out.

The Economist Magazine reported on Dec. 7 from Sierra Leone that “nearly half of the population” of 7.4 million people in the small west African nation “does not have enough to eat.”

“But the country’s once plentiful shoals, combined with its weak government, have lured a flotilla of unscrupulous foreign trawlers to its waters.”

Most of the trawlers fly Chinese flags, but dozens also come from South Korea, Italy, Guinea, and Russia.

According to Tabitha Mallory, an expert on these issues, by 2015 more than 160 Chinese fishing enterprises had agreements to operate off the shores of some 40 countries, the high seas, and Antarctica. But other Chinese vessels may be operating in more countries illegally.

But in contrast with West Africa, where Chinese fishermen have done great harm to local economies, Antarctica stands out as a new frontier where the fishermen appear to have begun playing by internationally agreed upon rules.

China has joined a commission for the conservation of marine life in Antarctica and has pledged its support for a marine protected area on the cold continent.

However, poor regulation of China’s distant-water fishing (DWF) fleet elsewhere has added to a strain on global fish stocks, according to experts and nongovernmental organizations monitoring the issue.

Greenpeace, a nongovernmental organization which campaigns to change attitudes toward the environment, has found that from 2014-2016, China’s distant water fishing (DWF) fleet — vessels operating outside Chinese territorial waters — increased by 400 to nearly 2,900.

This followed a similar period of expansion between 2012 and 2014, when the fleet grew by 15 percent each year on average.

By comparison, the United States had just 225 large-size DWF vessels, according to 2015 data.

Read the full commentary at Radio Free Asia

 

Could a Partnership Born of Fish 2.0 Become the Red Bull of Seafood?

January 9, 2017 — There’s a global divide at the heart of the seafood industry: the businesses that most need new technologies are often continents away from the businesses creating them.

Small-scale seafood operations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa catch and farm most of the seafood we eat. Startups in the U.S., Canada, and Europe are developing most of the technologies that promise to improve logistics, traceability, fish feeds, and aquaculture production. But distance and limited resources mean these businesses rarely meet. Bridging this divide is an essential step toward both healthy oceans and a healthy, equitable food supply.

That’s one reason we open Fish 2.0 to a diverse range of seafood enterprises from around the world. The Fish 2.0 competition process not only helps ventures improve individually but builds trust and gives technology and product innovators the chance to find and connect with investors as well as other fishing businesses, seafood farmers, and technology creators. Finalists gain insights into parts of the supply chain previously hidden from them and are able to form relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs they otherwise would not have met. The result is new business partnerships that offer unique growth opportunities for investors, as well as solutions to the seafood industry’s most difficult problems.

Aquaculture innovators click

My favorite recent example is the new joint venture between 2015 Canadian finalist and track winner SabrTech and Thailand based runner-up Green Innovative Biotechnology (GIB). SabrTech’s RiverBox system reduces pollution from farm runoff and grows an algae-based feed from the captured wastewater. Bangkok-based GIB has developed a feed supplement that boosts the immune systems of farm-raised fish and shrimp, leading to higher growth rates, greater resistance to diseases such as early mortality syndrome, and lower feed costs. Both technologies solve aquaculture production and cost issues using naturally derived solutions.

Mather Carscallen, president and CEO of SabrTech, and Karsidete Teeranitayatarn, chief innovation officer of GIB, met during the pitch practice session for the Fish 2.0 finals at Stanford University last fall.  Mather helped Karsidete polish his delivery, and the two learned enough about each other to want to stay in touch.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Research supports blaming warmer waters for lobster decline

May 2, 2016 — HARTFORD, Conn. — Connecticut researchers found no pesticides in lobsters collected in Long Island Sound in late 2014, a new study has found, boosting evidence that warming water temperatures are the main culprit in a huge crustacean decline that has decimated the local lobster industry.

The findings raise questions about restrictions Connecticut passed in 2013, amid concern over declining lobster stocks, limiting coastal use of pesticides that can control mosquito populations that transmit diseases, including the West Nile and Zika viruses.

Lobstermen supported the restrictions, believing pesticides contributed to lobster die-offs. Some municipal and environmental officials were opposed, saying the rules would restrict the use of effective mosquito-controlling pesticides that can protect public health and there was no proven connection between pesticides and lobster die-offs.

The renewed debate about pesticides and lobsters comes as concern grows about the Zika virus spreading to the U.S. from Latin America and the Caribbean. The virus is mainly spread through mosquito bites and causes mild illness or no symptoms in most people. But it can cause microcephaly, a severe birth defect in which babies are born with abnormally small heads.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

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