Saving Seafood

The Lunacy of Global Seafood Supply Chains

May 21, 2020 — On a recent locked-down day, cars snaked nose-to-tail through downtown. The destination: a seafood “shop,” popped up on a local commercial fishing wharf. For those who made it in time, $15 bought a pound of scallops, or two pounds of haddock, fresh caught, and delivered in vacuum-sealed bags to the car window, exact change please. For the city’s hard-hit fisher folk, here was a rare bit of good news. The pandemic’s shuttering of restaurants has left those who fish, scallop, clam, and lobster for a living without a major market. Boats are docked, crewmembers let go, pain rippling through a web of marine-related businesses.

“A whole big system is falling apart. It’s not just the fishermen but the people who support them,” says Donna Marshall. Marshall heads up Cape Ann Fresh Catch, like a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, but for local seafood. These days her group is dropping off locally caught haddock, hake, cusk, and lobster to customers’ doorsteps. The work of turning whole fish into neat fillets is being done by laid-off workers from area restaurants, the only paying work they have right now.

Homegrown efforts to keep people in local fish can’t match the collapse of an industry; direct-to-consumer sales are a small fraction of what fishermen sell to restaurants. Still, the seaside solidarity that the crisis has brought to Gloucester matters. “You’re paying your neighbor’s mortgage,” Marshall says. “This person has a family. It’s not some faceless conglomerate.”

Read the full story at The Nation

Long Island fishing industry takes a hit during pandemic

May 13, 2020 — On Tuesday morning, commercial fishing boats sat idle in the water at the Montauk town dock—an uncommon sight, especially this time of year. But lately, it’s become the new normal.

Bonnie Brady, the executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, said that the majority of East End commercial fishermen, who are essential food production workers, are reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. They’ve lost a tremendous amount of sales since many restaurants closed.

“When the restaurants closed, we lost the market with which we sold our fish,” Brady said. “We need to find ways to create markets, to create processing on the fly, long-term create mobile fish markets—anything and everything until we get our present system back in order.”

Pot fisherman Jim Auteri, who catches lobster, was hoping for a banner season.

Read the full story at Fox 5

Lobstering group wants to raise $500,000 for legal defense fund

May 7, 2020 — The Maine Lobstermen’s Association has launched a campaign to raise $500,000 to fund its legal efforts to protect the state’s most valuable fishery from the consequences of a recent federal court ruling that calls for more government protections for the endangered right whale.

Last month, a federal judge found the National Marine Fisheries Service had violated the U.S. Endangered Species Act by its authorization of the U.S. lobster industry – including Maine’s $485 million-a-year fishery – because it failed to report the fishery’s harmful impacts on the endangered right whale.

“This case could lead to closure of the world’s most sustainable fishery,” said executive director Patrice McCarron, whose association is the oldest and biggest lobstering group in Maine. “We cannot let that happen. Right whales are not dying in Maine lobster gear.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Lobstermen launch campaign to save Maine industry; new threats on the horizon

May 6, 2020 — The Maine Lobstermen’s Association is fighting a federal ruling that threatens the demise of the fleet, according to Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

In early April, Judge James Boasberg of the Federal District Court for Washington, D.C., ruled that NMFS violated the ESA in permitting the lobster fishery. The judge’s opinion states that “Congress enacted the ESA in 1973 to halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction, whatever the cost.”

“The MLA has launched a campaign to raise $500,000 to save Maine’s lobster industry,” McCarron said. The MLA is an intervenor in the court case and is the only organization in Maine that has been granted standing to participate in the case.

Whale entanglement data collected by NMFS show that no right whale deaths or serious injuries have ever been documented in Maine lobster gear. This is in stark contrast to the death of 10 right whales in Canada last year.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

MASSACHUSETTS: Lobster season opens on time after right whales move out of Cape Cod bay

May 1, 2020 — Lobster season for the South Shore will begin as planned after endangered right whales, spotted in Cape Cod Bay, moved out of the area.

The Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies estimated five whales, including two mother-and-calf pairs, were feeding in Cape Cod Bay, following an aerial survey on April 25. On Wednesday, another aerial inspection over the area found the whales had moved out of the bay and adjacent waters, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries said in an announcement Thursday afternoon.

The Division previously extended the opening of the season to May 8 because the whales were spotted, spokesman Craig Gilvarg said in a statement. North Atlantic right whales are an endangered species and vulnerable to buoy entanglement and getting hit by boats, because they feed near the surface.

“Everybody is anxious to go,” John Haviland, president of the South Shore Lobster Fishermen’s Association, said. “They’ve been standing around for three months, basically in quarantine.”

Read the full story at The Patriot Ledger

California spiny lobster takes double hit from China market

May 1, 2020 — Coronavirus and Chinese trade tariffs put California’s spiny lobster industry in a stranglehold this past season. If the trade tariffs going into the season weren’t enough, ex-vessel prices plummeted to a third of what they’d been in previous years with announcements that the coronavirus outbreak warranted stopping shipments of live lobsters to primary markets.

Lunar New Year celebrations in China traditionally mark the highest demand for lobsters shipped across the water from the West Coast. But that market deflated as coronavirus kept Chinese consumers home, slashing demand.

As of mid-March, spiny lobster fishermen had put in 76.5 metric tons of product, according to data posted in PacFIN. Ex-vessel prices averaged $12.26 per pound. Much of that value was predicated by deliveries and shipments previous to the outbreak of the virus in China. Both production and values were down significantly from the same period in the 2018-19 season, when the harvest stood at 194.4 metric tons and average ex-vessel prices of $17.04 per pound.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

CAROL SMITH: Maine lobstermen are not a threat to right whales

April 27, 2020 — U.S. District Court Judge James Boasburg’s recent ruling is the latest blow to Maine’s billion-dollar industry. Boasburg’s decision that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration violated the Endangered Species Act by authorizing the American lobster fishery despite its potential to harm the North Atlantic right whale population comes on the heels of new regulations imposed on fishermen last year. With many fishermen just starting to mark their fishing gear according to the new regulations, Boasburg’s ruling has left them in a state of uncertainty. Will this be the end of the industry as they know it?

Maine’s lobster industry provides an estimated 5,500 jobs throughout the state, according to a study conducted by Colby College and Maine Lobster Dealers’ Association in 2016. In a state with a population of 1.3 million, 5,500 jobs may seem expendable. However, the fishermen themselves are often the main source of income for their households. In Washington County, where unemployment is the highest in the state, households dependent on lobster fishermen rely on the fishery for an average of 77 percent of household income, according to a 2012 study by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The death of the fishery would throw many into poverty, and others would be forced to leave their coastal homes to find work.

To add insult to injury, Boasburg’s ruling represents a mere stripe in a pattern of striking injustice. Since June 2017, right whale mortalities have been on the rise, a pattern that has been declared an Unusual Mortality Event by NOAA. However, according to current statistics from NOAA Fisheries, 21 of the 30 dead stranded whales for the UME were found in Canada. Of the nine found in the U.S., only five were confirmed or suspected of entanglement, and not a single one was found in Maine waters. Furthermore, NOAA has only documented Maine lobster gear on three live entangled whales, most recently in 2004. None has been documented on a dead right whale.

Read the full opinion piece at the Bangor Daily News

Right whales: Lawsuit on protections could last for months

April 27, 2020 — A judge’s ruling that the federal government didn’t take adequate steps to protect endangered whales will probably result in another monthslong court battle, parties to the lawsuit said.

Environmental groups sued the U.S. government with a claim that regulators’ failure to protect the North Atlantic right whale from harm was a violation of the Endangered Species Act, and U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled April 9 that they were right. The right whales number only about 400 and are in the midst of a worrisome decline in population.

The government, environmentalists and industry members who are involved in the lawsuit must still return to court to determine a remedy. Boasberg ruled that the risk posed to the whales by the lobster fishery was too great to be sustainable, and that a remedy could ultimately result in new restrictions on lobster fishing.

The whales are vulnerable to lethal entanglement in lobster fishing gear.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

Maine fishermen seek relief, new markets to navigate ‘economic disaster’

April 24, 2020 — With many restaurants shuttered, and typical export pipelines closed, demand for lobster and other Maine seafood is way down, leaving Maine’s $674 million-a-year commercial fishing industry scrambling to find new markets and short-term economic relief to survive the pandemic.

“It appears that we have a long road ahead,” Patrice McCarron, the director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said in the group’s latest newsletter. “While the timeline for the coronavirus and its corresponding economic disaster are unknown, we must prepare for long-term impacts.”

The pandemic has forced the closure of almost one out of three restaurants, according to the latest reports. The restaurant industry, along with food service, consumes about 80 percent of U.S. seafood. It’s worse for lobster, a luxury item, which counts casinos and cruise ships among its biggest customers.

This comes on the heels of the $485 million-a-year Maine lobster industry’s struggle to replace the market it lost in the trade war with China, which had accounted for 1 out of every 3 pounds of lobsters exported overseas, and Canada’s sweet trade deal with the European Union.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Lobstering laws: Will the whales win?

April 22, 2020 — It was December 2000, and both houses of Congress were itching to go home. They just needed to wrap up the budget — the new fiscal year was already 10 weeks old. At last, the House of Representatives announced that agreement had been reached.

There was only one problem. The Clinton administration was proposing restrictions on the billion-dollar Bering Sea pollock fishery, and the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska, was having none of it.

“The fishing limits,” he said, reportedly pounding on his desk, “will put a considerable number of people out of work. Federal control of these magnificent fisheries is not going to be approved by this senator.”

As the man who controlled the purse strings, Stevens, an iconic World War II veteran known to Alaskans as “Uncle Ted,” was arguably the country’s most powerful senator and couldn’t be ignored.

Read the full story at National Fisherman