Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Fishing Heritage Center presents “A Day in the Life” featuring Kevin Rose

March 21, 2017 — The following was released by the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center:

New Bedford, MA – The New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center’s A Day in the Life speaker series continues on Tuesday, March 28 at 7:00 p.m. with Kevin Rose, longshoreman and President/Business Agent of International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1413.

Many see the cargo ships in the Port of New Bedford but few know about those who work to unload the cargo.  For generations, longshoremen have been a part of New Bedford’s working waterfront. Mr. Rose will provide a glimpse into the life of a longshoreman.

Raised in New Bedford, Mr. Rose is a third-generation longshoreman, following in the footsteps of his grandfather and father. For over 25 years, he has worked on New Bedford’s waterfront. He will discuss his life as a longshoreman, his hopes for the future of the Port of New Bedford, and his work as union President and Business Agent.

Admission to A Day in the Life is free to members; $5 for non-members.  The Center is handicap accessible through the parking lot entrance. Free off-street parking available. The Center is located at 38 Bethel Street in New Bedford’s historic downtown. 

For more information please contact the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center at info@fishingheritagecenter.org or call (508) 993-8894.

MASSACHUSETTS: Gloucester’s presence at seafood expo leading to fish sales far afield

March 21, 2017 — The city of Gloucester announced its presence with authority Monday at the massive Seafood Expo North America by hosting an international reception that drew seafood executives from around the globe.

The Gloucester Fresh reception at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, hosted by Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken and featuring state Assistant Secretary for Domestic and International Business Development Nam Pham, continued the city’s marketing drumbeat on the sustainability and culinary benefits of the region’s fresh seafood.

“If you are looking for fresh seafood, the quality that comes off our boats is 100 percent,” Romeo Theken told seafood processors and buyers from Malaysia, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Iceland, Ireland and other seafood producing and consuming countries.

City organizers said the city’s presence at the gigantic show this year has provided more than 100 business leads and 20 meetings between Gloucester seafood companies and international seafood executives.

The Seafood Expo is one of the largest seafood trade shows in the world, drawing thousands of industry executives to the three-day event to buy, sell and network.

This marked the third appearance by the city at the show and the second year that Gloucester has ramped up its game to spread the word internationally on the Gloucester Fresh brand and the bounty of seafood still being harvested from the waters off Cape Ann.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Cape fishermen push dogfish, skate at expo

March 21, 2017 — Chatham fishermen Charlie Dodge, Jamie Eldredge, and Greg Connors walked the crowded aisles of the Seafood Expo North America Monday, one of the largest seafood shows in the world, drawing more than 21,000 attendees and exhibitors over three days.

The men were there to meet wholesale fish buyers and distributors looking to market their catch: skates — a kite-shaped fish related to sharks — and dogfish, a small coastal shark.

Dogfish and skates may not be ready to join heavyweights like salmon and shrimp, but with help from the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, as well as federal and state grants to assist with marketing, they are slowly gaining a foothold in domestic markets.

“It would be way better if it stays within the country,” Dodge said of dogfish, which, like skates is largely exported to Europe and Asia, and fetch relatively low prices, with skates at 23 cents per pound on average in 2015 and dogfish fluctuating between 11 cents and 22 cents per pound. In 2015, cod, by comparison, averaged $1.90 per pound.

Not long ago Chatham was one of the top cod ports in the country, but that stock is considered to be at historically low levels and landings state-wide collapsed from 27.5 million pounds in 2001 to 2.9 million pounds in 2015. Both skates and dogfish are plentiful and considered sustainably managed by organizations like the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the Marine Stewardship Council and Seafood Watch. That message — a local, sustainable and affordable fish — has helped convince institutional clients like the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Plan to save New England shrimp fishery will go to public

March 20, 2017 — The public will have a chance to comment on a plan to change the way New England’s shuttered shrimp fishery is managed with an eye toward saving it.

The regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has been working on a plan to try to make the fishery more sustainable in the long term. It includes options such as changing the way the quota system is managed.

An arm of the commission has voted to send the plan out for public comment.

Regulators shut down the fishery in 2013 amid declining populations of shrimp. Scientists say warming ocean temperature is one factor hurting them.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WCSH 6

Tour of New Bedford’s port ‘sparked ideas’ for global seafood buyers

March 20, 2017 — Xi Du didn’t know anything about New Bedford until last year.

A native of central China, Du works as a customer relationship specialist at Greenco International, a U.S. based exporter of agriculture to Asia.

The company began exporting in 2012, but purchased its first load of scallops last year from New Bedford.

“It’s really interesting. Before I took part in this group I had no idea. What’s New Bedford,” Du said. “But then I looked at the schedule. ‘What a moment, you’re going to bring me here?’ It’s so fantastic. It’s wonderful.”

Du joined 25 others on a tour, which included seafood buyers from around the world, through New Bedford’s port on Friday.

Each buyer is in Boston for the weekend as part of the North American Seafood Expo scheduled for March 19-21 at the Boston Convention Center.

Other buyers from China accompanied Du as well as some from Thailand, France and Poland to name a few.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Cape Cod may use high-tech balloon to spot great white sharks

March 20, 2017 — Researchers and public safety officials may soon have a new tool to track the growing great white shark populations off the coast of Cape Cod.

Shark researcher Greg Skomal, a scientist with the state’s Department of Marine Fisheries whose team recently completed a major study of the region’s shark populations, is considering launching a pilot program to use a high-tech balloon to spot sharks in the waters near Chatham, according to a report in the Cape Cod Times.

A Miami-based company, Altametry SmartBalloon, has developed a balloon with high-definition cameras, video streaming capability and specialized lens filters to peer under the ocean’s surface and alert officials to sharks that near the shoreline.

“I think it has great potential and I’m excited to be trying it,” Skomal told the Cape Cod Times.

Read the full story at Mass Live

New Bedford Standard-Times: Congress can realign the bureaucracy

March 17, 2017 — The designation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts as a national monument last summer might have appeared to be the end of a battle between environmentalists and commercial fishermen, but the installation of an administration focused on deregulation has revived the fight.

The House Committee on Natural Resources on Wednesday held an oversight hearing on the creation of national monuments that included testimony from New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, as well as representatives of extractive industries, academia and commercial tuna fishing. Mayor Mitchell, who couldn’t attend the hearing because of weather-disrupted travel plans, testified about the impact on both the red crab fishery and those fisheries that involve migratory fish that swim in the upper part of the water column. There were questions from committee members that reflected both sides of the issue, including one from a Democrat questioning the validity of the mayor’s argument about migratory fish. The response by University of North Carolina biology professor John Bruno to Democratic Virginia Rep. Don Beyer was that the entire water column needs protection.

Mayor Mitchell also lamented the lack of stakeholder input involved in the monument designation through the executive instrument of the Antiquities Act used by President Barack Obama last year.

Republican Alaska Rep. Don Young also wondered at the Antiquities Act during the hearing, attributing more than just conservation as the goal to the former president: Rep. Young believes the ocean designations made under President Obama were calculated to limit offshore drilling and mining.

Rep. Young noted forcefully that Congress did not create the Antiquities Act to protect oceans, and it represented a clear case of executive overreach.

The Standard-Times is generally in favor of policies that reduce fossil fuel extraction. Nevertheless, Rep. Young’s observation about the Antiquities Act, Mayor Mitchell’s complaint about its use, and the duty of oversight point to the issue of Congress’ intent, which should have weight in the committee’s opinion. Congress has the authority to rein in the bureaucracy, though it doesn’t always exercise that authority.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

The Stubborn Staying Power of the Alewife Herring

March 16, 2017 — Among the rich natural resources that attracted humans to New York’s harbor was a small migratory fish the colonists called the alewife or sawbelly. As these river herring crowded into spawning creeks every spring, they were noted by the earliest French Jesuits, Dutch trappers and English settlers, and were caught and consumed with abandon by Native Americans and colonists alike.

Alewives are bony, tasty, nutritious and relatively easy to preserve; and, in colonial times, they were abundant. The fish could be eaten by humans or fed to pigs or other livestock. It is highly likely that the famous agricultural mentoring between Squanto, a Patuxet native to what is now Massachusetts, and the pilgrims memorializes yet another less obvious use of herring: as fertilizer for the colonists’ inaugural crops.

Middens and hearths excavated throughout the Northeast are filled with the bones and scales of herring dinners past. But as human settlements grew, both the value and limits of this communal resource became obvious. Alewives were protected by the first known fishery regulations in North America, which date to 1623 in Plymouth Colony. Over time, net sizes, harvest schedules and set locations, as well as catch limits, were all strictly regulated in order to protect these valuable fish.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Carlos Rafael plea hearing postponed to March 30

March 16, 2017 — Carlos Rafael’s court date where the fishing tycoon is scheduled to plead guilty to charges in connection with evading fishing quotas and smuggling profits to Portugal has been postponed, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts said on Wednesday.

Rafael will appear in U.S. District Court in Boston on March 30 at 2:30 p.m. He was originally scheduled to appear in court as part of the settlement with the government on Thursday.

The U.S. Attorney’s office had no further details regarding the plea deal.

Often referred to as the “Codfather” as the owner of 36 boats, Rafael faced one count of conspiracy, 25 counts of lying to federal fishing regulators and one count of bulk cash smuggling.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

MASSACHUSETTS: New Bedford Mayor questions decision-making process behind marine monuments

March 16, 2017 — Tuesday’s winter storm prevented Mayor Jon Mitchell from appearing in front of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources on Wednesday, but he still voiced his opinion on the matter of national marine monuments through written testimony.

Mitchell submitted five pages laying out criticism of President Barack Obama’s executive order that created a protected marine area about 130 miles off the coast of Cape Cod last September.

“The monument designation last fall puts New Bedford jobs in peril, specifically jobs associated with the crab and lobster industries,” he told The Standard-Times. “More generally, the authority exercised by the president is something that could be used again and put other jobs at risk.”

In his testimony, Mitchell highlighted two key concerns with the monuments. First, he called the monument “poorly conceived” and again questioned the process of establishing the protected waters.

“It lacks sufficient amounts of all the ingredients that good policy-making requires: Scientific rigor, direct industry input, transparency and a deliberate pace that allows adequate time and space for review,” Mitchell wrote in his testimony.

He also questioned the effectiveness of the monuments in protecting marine life, stating that fisheries focused on fish near the surface of the water would “have no impact on the integrity of the bathymetry and substrate that a monument is meant to protect.”

Proponents of the monument refer to the order as a vital piece to the future of marine life. Dr. John Bruno, a biology professor at the University of North Carolina who attended Wednesday’s hearing, supported the protected waters. He criticized past legislation like the Magnuson-Stevens Act saying it’s failed to protect oceanic ecosystems.

Under the Magnuson-Stevens act, temporary fishery management plans are enacted for finite periods. Monuments like those enacted by Obama under the Antiquities Act, are permanent.

“Permanent is an awfully long time to state the obvious,” Mitchell said. “When decisions like that are made, they have to be subjected to the fullest possible input. I’m certainly not taking the position that this sort of thing should never happen but rather these decisions need to be more carefully made.”

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times