Saving Seafood

Game wardens, Coast Guard chase off illegal fishing boats

April 23, 2019 —  Texas game wardens and U.S. Coast Guard patrols chased eight “lanchas” fishing illegally in U.S. waters back into Mexico on Saturday, confiscating and removing 10 miles of illegal long-lines.

The Mexican fishermen were illegally setting long-lines in the Gulf of Mexico off Cameron County shores, and game wardens confiscated those and freed game fish including 40 sharks and king mackerel along with a single sea turtle.

Long-lining, which is banned in Texas waters, uses hundreds or even thousands of baited hooks attached to a single line. Texas waters stretch nine nautical miles from shore and, following a tip, the wardens and Coast Guard found the lanchas setting their lines a mile to a mile-and-a-half from shore in U.S. waters.

Game wardens found so many illegal long-lines had been set that they had to continue their mop-up operations Sunday.

Lanchas are speedy open boats favored by inshore fishermen and are usually 20 to 30 feet long and powered by outboard motors. The boats cross into U.S. waters and captains set long-lines and then head back to Mexican waters before returning five or six hours later to haul in their catch.

Read the full story at The Valley Morning Star

Study maps where tunas, sharks and fishing ships meet

March 26, 2019 — Overfishing is rapidly pushing many of the world’s sharks and tunas toward extinction. The world’s fastest known shark, the shortfin mako, for example, was recently uplisted to endangered on the IUCN Red List, its decline mostly attributed to overfishing.

But researchers are only beginning to figure out where and when people fish them the most. Now, a new study has some answers.

By analyzing the trails of more than 900 fishing vessels and more than 800 sharks and tunas in the northeast Pacific, researchers have identified regions where the two tend to overlap. This information, researchers say, can be used to manage fisheries, especially in the high seas, the swaths of ocean that lie beyond the jurisdiction of individual countries.

“These fish [sharks and tunas] may travel thousands of miles every year, crossing international boundaries and management jurisdictions,” said Timothy White, lead author of the study and a graduate student in biology at Stanford University, California. “In order to sustainably manage them, we need to know where they migrate and where people fish them, but this info is surprisingly difficult to gather for sharks and tunas of the open ocean.”

Read the full story at Mongabay

Seafood importers backing groups in protecting vaquita

March 18, 2019 — The following was released by the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership:

Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) is pleased to announce eight US importers of Mexican seafood—Aquastar, Artisan Catch (Orca Foods LLC), Del Pacifico, Inland Seafood, Meridian Products, Ocean Garden Products, Santa Monica Seafood, and Seattle Fish Company—have joined together to donate $12,000 to VaquitaCPR to fund removal of illegal fishing gear from the upper Gulf of California.

All eight companies participate in a Mexican Seafood Supply Chain Roundtable (SR) facilitated by SFP for managing ongoing sustainability improvement efforts.

The vaquita porpoise in the upper Gulf of California is critically endangered. The most recent population estimate (2018) indicates, at most, only 22 individuals. Though gillnets were banned from the upper Gulf of California throughout the vaquita’s native range in 2017, illegal use of gillnets by totoaba poachers and shrimp fishermen has continued and is threatening the existence of the vaquita.

“Unless this decline can be stopped by eliminating mortality in illegal gillnets, the vaquita will be extinct in a few years,” said the authors of a 2017 report from the 10th meeting of the Comité Internacional para la Recuperación de la Vaquita.

Through VaquitaCPR, conservation organizations such as Museo de la Ballena and the World Wildlife Fund are working with the Mexican Ministry of Environment and Mexican Navy as well as local fishermen to remove the illegal gillnets from the water on a continuing basis. This gear removal program is critical to the survival of the remaining vaquita.

“The seafood community has a long history of supporting the environmental and social needs of our community. None of these needs have been more important than the conservation, protection, and recovery needs of the vaquita porpoise,” said Lance Leonard, President/CEO of Ocean Garden Products, Inc. “The industry stands united in working with government, NGOs, and environmental groups to identify ways to save this unique mammal. We support the activity of VaquitaCPR and hope to bring attention to the cause with our customers and consumers.”

These companies, along with a number of other Mexican Seafood SR participants, have also sent a letter of support for alternative gear development to the Mexican government and upper Gulf of California shrimp fishermen. In this letter, they request that the Mexican government improve enforcement of the gillnet ban, but also expedite the processes necessary to develop and approve a viable alternative gear for small-scale shrimp fishermen.

“We would like to further express our willingness to collaborate in this important effort through the purchase, distribution, and marketing of the shrimp captures resulting from the adoption of fishing gears other than gillnets and or entanglement nets, which do not represent risk of bycatch to the vaquita marina,” participants wrote in the letter.

The importers are pledging future support to develop a market in the U.S. for “vaquita-safe” shrimp, once it becomes available. The letter was sent to the Secretary of Agriculture and Rural Development, Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources, National Commissioner of Aquaculture and Fisheries, and the National Commissioner of Natural Protected Areas, as well as shrimp producer cooperatives in the upper Gulf region.

According to Megan Westmeyer, SFP Senior Improvements and Strategy Manager, “When the permanent gillnet ban went into effect without a viable alternative gear for the artisanal shrimp fishery, the supply chain lost the ability to use its purchasing power to affect change. Fortunately, these suppliers are determined to see that the upper Gulf of California can be home to both the vaquita porpoise and a sustainable artisanal shrimp fishery, and are taking action to ensure this vision becomes reality.”

Suppliers Challenge Texas Law Targeting Shark Sales

February 20, 2019 — Sharks caught in U.S. waters are dressed in short order, fins are removed and carcasses are packed in trucks bound for Mexico. But an unconstitutional Texas law mandating sharks remain intact has cut off the Mexican market, shark-meat purveyors claim in a federal lawsuit.

Texas-based Ochoa Seafood Enterprises Inc. says in the complaint filed Tuesday in Houston federal court that its business depends on shark meat.

It gets 60 percent of its income from buying the meat from dealers in Louisiana, Florida and North Carolina and shipping all of it in refrigerated trucks through Texas to clients in Mexico City, where it’s filleted and put on grocery store shelves and restaurant menus.

But the company hit a snag last July when a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department agent contacted its owner and said an inspection of its refrigerated truck at the Mexico border had revealed it was shipping shark carcasses with the fins and tails removed in violation of Texas law.

Joined by its shark-meat supplier, Louisiana-based Venice Seafood LLC, and the trade group Sustainable Shark Alliance, Ochoa Seafood sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Executive Director Carter Smith.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

Global shrimp supply will remain high for foreseeable future

January 18, 2019 — The glut in the global supply of shrimp that persisted throughout 2018 will remain in 2019, as cold storage facilities in the United States continue to have supplies lasting months in storage.

A panel of experts at the Global Seafood Market Conference in Coronado, California on 17 January said cold storage facilities in the U.S. had, at times, 30 percent more shrimp in storage in 2018 than they did in 2017.

In addition, the panel predicted that the reserves will not be drawn down significantly in 2019. The primary reason for that is production of shrimp in India, which panelists said will remain close to its record high of 740,000 metric tons (MT), with production in other countries starting to increase as well.

“It all comes back to, ‘What are we going to do with all this shrimp?’” said Jeff Goldberg, president of Fortune Imports.

Estimates indicate that there’s 290 million pounds of shrimp currently in cold storage facilities in the U.S., representing a supply that, with no further production or imports, could last more than three months.

That high amount of supply in storage is coupled with increasing supply coming from countries like Ecuador. Between 2013 and 2018, production of shrimp in Ecuador more than doubled, going from 219,412 MT to 471,026 MT.

Ecuador and India aren’t the only countries with increasing supply. Indonesia, Vietnam, and Mexico also saw growth. The most dramatic growth occurred in Guatemala, which has consistently increased between 30 to 40 percent year-over-year.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Appeals court blocks another US gov’t effort to overcome Mexico gillnet import ban

November 30, 2018 — The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Wednesday shot down an effort by the US National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and other federal agencies to end a four-month-old ban on the import of Mexican shrimp and other seafood caught in the country with the use of gillnets.

The decision to reject a “stay of the order” request backs a US Court of International Trade (CIT) ruling, issued in July, that was sought by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Center for Biological Diversity and Animal Welfare Institute as part of an effort to protect the endangered vaquita porpoise in the northern Gulf of California from being driven into extinction by pressuring the Mexican government.

Widely decimated by the use of gillnets in pursuit of the totoaba — another endangered fish sought for its swim bladder due to black market demand in China — there are believed to be a little more than a dozen vaquita remaining.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

It’s not SIMP, but new rules are stopping US imports of Mexican shrimp

November 23, 2018 — Importers of Mexican shrimp are seeing their trucks stopped at the US border by what seems like a surprise, early version of the new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) seafood import monitoring program (SIMP) rules for shrimp, Undercurrent News has learned.

But it’s not SIMP.

Mayan Seafood, a Canadian company that imports Mexican shrimp into the US, has had two refrigerated trucks containing a combined total of 55,000 pounds of both farm-raised and wild-caught shrimp sitting in Nogales, Mexico, since Nov. 15 — a week — Rod MacDonald, the general manager, told Undercurrent Wednesday.

The problem: US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) wouldn’t allow the trucks entry because Mayan, like a number of other exporters of Mexican shrimp to the US, had not filled out “certificates of admissibility”, a newly required form that must identify, along with other information, the exact time and location of each shrimp catch, the weight of each catch, the name of the boat that made each catch and the type of fishing gear used.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Federal court upholds ban on Mexican imports in vaquita case

October 24, 2018 — A federal court has upheld a ruling from July that banned seafood imports from Mexico harvested by a drift gillnet.

The decision by the U.S. Court of International Trade on Monday, 22 October came after Trump administration officials appealed Judge Gary S. Katzman’s temporary injunction against the practice. Conservation groups sued the administration seeking a ban in an attempt to save the vaquita, a small porpoise on the brink of extinction.

The porpoise lives in the Gulf of California and estimates put the species population at around a dozen. However, roughly half the stock dies each year in encounters with gillnets. The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Animal Welfare Institute, and the Center for Biological Diversity filed the lawsuit in March and claimed the acceptance of Mexican seafood caught by those nets violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Seafood industry leaders reviewing new USMCA trade pact

October 2, 2018 — The day after U.S. and Canadian government officials announced a deal on a new trade agreement, seafood industry leaders from the neighboring countries expressed optimism about the accord, albeit with some uncertainty as they still pore over the details.

Canada’s participation, which was confirmed late in the evening of 30 September, means a new deal will replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, the accord governing trade between the U.S., Canada and Mexico for the past two decades. In late August, Mexican and American officials had reached a tentative agreement on a new deal.

“Today, Canada and the United States reached an agreement, alongside Mexico, on a new, modernized trade agreement for the 21st Century: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA),” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in a joint statement with Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland. “USMCA will give our workers, farmers, ranchers and businesses a high-standard trade agreement that will result in freer markets, fairer trade, and robust economic growth in our region.  It will strengthen the middle class, and create good, well-paying jobs, and new opportunities for the nearly half billion people who call North America home.”

Officials from the Fisheries Council of Canada received a high-level briefing on the USMCA on 1 October.

“We look forward to this apparent deal to help heal our trading relationship with the US and lead to more trading opportunities in the future,” said Paul Lansbergen, council president, in an email to SeafoodSource.

The desire to revamp NAFTA has been one leg of a global trade strategy by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. That strategy has also included numerous proposals to raise tariffs on Chinese imports, including numerous seafood products, as the president seeks to reduce the trade deficit.

The National Fisheries Institute has lobbied heavily in recent months that tariffs on seafood products hurt U.S. jobs as the country imports more than 90 percent of the seafood Americans consume.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Humpback whale sightings around Hawaii declining

October 1, 2018 — Whale researchers are spotting a trend in the Hawaiian Islands — a decline in humpback whale sightings.

Not only are there fewer sightings, fewer male Hawaiian humpback whales have been recorded singing, and the number of mother-calf pairs has been diminishing for the past three seasons, according to the researchers. While the trend has been consistent over the past three years, the scientists refrained from sounding an alarm about the whales disappearing as a new season is around the corner.

“They’re not all gone,” said Ed Lyman, who is with the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. “We are seeing indications of fewer whales near the islands where our effort is … There are still plenty of whales out there.”

The peak of the season is usually between January and March, when thousands of humpback whales migrate from Alaska to Hawaii to mate, calve and nurse their young, although they can be spotted in November or earlier, and stay as late as May.

Lyman, a researcher and the sanctuary’s whale entanglement response coordinator, said for him, the first signs of the decline were in late December 2015.

That’s when he got calls from whale-watching tour operators on Hawaii island, inquiring about their late arrival. Lyman reached out to tour operators on other islands, as well, and found them saying the same thing — the whales were late, and there were fewer sightings. He got the same reports from contacts in Mexico.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser