Saving Seafood

Suspension of visa processing for Mexican seasonal workers hits U.S. farms, fisheries

March 18, 2020 — American farmers are bracing for a shortage of seasonal workers following the State Department’s suspension of routine immigrant and nonimmigrant visa processing in Mexico, including for temporary migrant laborers, beginning Wednesday.

The delay in visa processing for farmworkers comes just as harvest season begins in Florida. Companies responsible for feeding the country are already expecting fewer available workers to manufacture, deliver and unpack groceries as the coronavirus pandemic intensifies.

The seafood industry, including fisheries and crab-picking in Maryland, whose hiring season starts in April, will also be affected by the U.S. government’s decision.

“One of the most important things we need to do is to make sure that our supply chains for food stay in place, and guest workers are a big part of what drives that engine,” said Sarah Frey, founder and chief executive of Frey Farms, which operates in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and West Virginia. “We have to figure out ways to keep going. Right now, feeding people is an essential service.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

U.S. bans more Mexico seafood imports to protect vaquita porpoises

March 11, 2020 — Almost all Mexican shrimp and fish caught from the northern Gulf of California was barred from U.S. trade March 4, as NMFS invoked the Marine Mammal Protection Act in a bid to stop use of gillnets blamed for entangling endangered vaquita porpoises.

The porpoises’ population had already plunged from an estimated 560 animals in the 1990s to 30 surviving by 2017, when the Mexican government officials banned most gillnets in the area.

But the rule was poorly enforced, and the NMFS import ban puts more pressure on the government to carry out blanket prohibition and enforcement that environmental groups and marine scientists say are the only chance for saving the porpoises.

“Mexico has no choice but to eliminate the destructive fishing taking place in the northern Gulf of California that is driving the vaquita to extinction,” said Zak Smith, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s the only hope the vaquita has for survival, and it is required if Mexico wants to resume exporting these products to the United States.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

US to enforce ban on shrimp, other fish caught in Mexico’s Gulf of California

March 6, 2020 — US importers of Mexican shrimp and other seafood should soon be prepared to present documentation certifying that any of the products they are bringing over the border do not match a list of roughly five species caught in the upper Gulf of California using multiple gear types.

The US’ National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) announced Wednesday that it will ban the import of virtually all Mexican shrimp and other fish caught in that region of the country over concerns about the endangered vaquita porpoise. An effective date has not yet been set, but it is expected to be within a month and require importers to maintain a “certification of admissibility” that is signed by a Mexican government official establishing that the products being shipped are not from the upper Gulf of California’s:

  • shrimp trawl fishery, for both small and large vessels;
  • shrimp suripera fishery;
  • sierra purse seine fishery;
  • sierra hook and line fishery;
  • chano trawl fishery, for small vessels;
  • curvina purse seine fishery; or
  • sardine/curvina purse seine fishery, for both small and large vessels.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Fishermen adapt to environmental change in varied ways, UMaine study finds

January 7, 2020 — A study published in Ecology and Society by University of Maine researchers Kara Pellowe and Heather Leslie found that regulations and financial resources that influence how people fish have as great an effect on how they deal with change as where and how they fish.

The ecologists, based at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, took a deep look at how fishermen adapt to environmental and economic change in Baja California Sur, Mexico.

The study includes research that Pellowe conducted as part of her UMaine Ph.D. dissertation in ecology and environmental science, which she completed in August.

Over the last six years, Pellowe has traveled from New England to Baja regularly, working closely with fishermen who harvest chocolate clams (Megapitaria squalida) near Loreto Bay National Park, on the gulf coast of the Baja peninsula.

“Alternatives matter,” says Pellowe. “Having different ways to respond to environmental and economic change is vital for individuals and communities to be able to thrive in changing conditions.”

Read the full story at the Boothbay Register

100 years of tiny seashells reveal alarming trend threatening West Coast seafood

December 17, 2019 — Roughly 100 years worth of tiny shells resting on the Southern California seafloor have revealed an alarming trend that could spell trouble for the West Coast seafood industry, a new study says.

The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggests that the Pacific Ocean along California is acidifying twice as fast as the global average, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a news release on the findings.

Acidification is a serious threat for the seafood industry, researchers said, explaining that “California coastal waters contain some of our nation’s more economically valuable fisheries, including salmon, crabs and shellfish. Yet, these fisheries are also some of the most vulnerable to the potential harmful effects of ocean acidification on marine life.”

Researchers said the findings looked at “the progression of ocean acidification in the California Current Ecosystem through the twentieth century.” That ecosystem extends from southern British Columbia in Canada to Baja California in Mexico, encompassing the Washington and Oregon coasts, according to NOAA.

Read the full story at The Sacramento Bee

Building consumer trust: Wholechain pilots blockchain traceability tech

December 12, 2019 — The journey of the Fair Trade USA-certified shrimp harvested from Altata Bay in Mexico to Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. is tracked and documented using one of the most cutting-edge traceability technologies: blockchain.

Part of a pilot project between Fair Trade USA and blockchain solution provider Wholechain, the Del Pacifico-distributed shrimp in the frozen section of New Seasons Market demonstrate the promise of blockchain to ensure full transparency for a seafood sector rife with obscure supply chains and, sometimes, fraud.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Thanks to Mexico’s inaction, a cartel is causing irreparable damage in the ocean

December 5, 2019 — Mexico is infamous for its brutal drug cartels, which have terrorized not only the country but other large parts of Latin America. But there is one criminal organization that gets little press and that governments have yet to confront: the Cartel of the Sea. Inaction to confront this threat is having a huge economic and environmental impact in Mexico, with broader consequences for the planet.

This cartel’s business is not marijuana, cocaine or meth. It traffics in something that can be even more lucrative: the totoaba, an endangered fish. The cartel extracts the totoaba’s swim bladder, dries it and sends it to China. This is not only affecting the protected totoaba species but is also accelerating the extinction of the vaquita marina, a rare porpoise.

Many people in China believe that the buche — as the totoaba bladder is popularly known in Mexico — has aphrodisiac and medicinal properties, but there’s no scientific evidence to back this. It is also a status symbol: Serving buche soup is a sign of wealth, because one kilogram can cost more than a kilogram of cocaine — it can go for $100,000 in some Chinese cities and in New York’s Chinatown, according to investigative reports published by the nongovernmental organization Earth League International. It also communicates power, because the product comes from illegal fishing and one must have some influence to acquire it.

The Cartel of the Sea operations are based in northwestern Mexico, in the Sea of Cortez, a beautiful body of water that French explorer Jacques Cousteau once called the “world’s aquarium.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

JOHN SACKTON: The Winding Glass: Can we stop IUU fishing by thinking outside the box?

November 21, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Campaigns against IUU fishing by both the industry and environmentalists continually run up against a problem:  government enforcement.

Enforcement is not as much of an issue for rich countries with well-developed fisheries management systems, and strong enforcement histories.

In these cases, when IUU fishing happens, it can be successfully exposed, prosecuted and ended.

For example, in 2012, three Scottish fish factories and 27 skippers pleaded guilty and were fined more than £1 million for illegally harvesting mackerel in excess of EU quotas.

Carlos Rafael, the largest owner of scallop vessels in New Bedford, went to jail in 2017 over falsifying sales records to hide illegal landings.

Similar enforcement has happened in Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Japan, France and elsewhere.

But too often governments are not able to effectively enforce against IUU, either because of lack of will, lack of resources, or simply poor ability to manage fisheries.

Our story today about the Vaquita porpoise in Mexico is a case in point.  Although Mexico is part of an international agreement to close fishing in the Northern Gulf of California, vessels were detected fishing in the closed zone this month.

The response of the UN CITES commission is to monitor the situation and take another look in 2020, a year from now.

There is another way we might approach IUU fishing, using supply chains to bypass governments that are ineffective or too weak to prevent the mixing of legal and illegal catch.

That is a blockchain system.  Last week at the International Coldwater Prawn Forum in St. John’s, Dan McQuade, Marketing Director for Raw Seafoods, a scallop company operating out of Fall River, MA, presented the blockchain system his company developed in partnership with IBM.

It was one of the clearest examples of a blockchain that I had seen.

Block I represents each scallop bag processed onboard a boat.  It is tagged with a printed label giving information on time and date, where caught, boat name, and other parameters as needed, even hold temperature.

Block 2 represents the receiving of this at the scallop packing plant.  Scallops are graded, repacked for distribution either at foodservice or retail.   Block 2 incorporates the link to Block 1, but details processing date, grade, size, license no., etc.

Block 3 represents the distributor, in this illustration, Santa Monica Seafoods.  This tag includes the date received, location, size, and date shipped to their customer.

Block 4 represents the restaurant, which includes date received, size, sell-by date if any, and various consumer marketing materials.

By scanning a QR code, the restaurant customer (or any participant in the supply chain) can bring up all the connected information at each step in the process.  The blockchain is in effect a guarantee that the original raw, untreated scallop, was never mixed with treated or adulterated scallops during its passage through the supply chain.

The technology of the blockchain involves public and private key cryptography, which makes it impossible to alter any of the blocks in the chain, once they are registered.

Raw Seafoods is promoting this as a marketing strategy with IBM to increase customer trust and satisfaction with their all-natural scallops.

But imagine a similar system applied to an area with significant IUU fishing, such as the upper Gulf of California.

In this case, fishing co-ops would be the originators of the first block, detailing product, date caught, and location.  Processors and receivers would be the second block, detailing date received, product, pack, ship date.  Importers to the US would be the 3rd block, again showing date received, customs data if needed, size, count, pack etc.  The buyer, whether a retail or foodservice user of shrimp would be the 4th block, registering the product into their system.

The cost of this would include computers, printers, bar code readers, the cloud computing services, and programming necessary to make it work.  But once in place, it is scalable at a remarkably low cost.  The transaction cost for the entire supply chain could likely be reduced to one or two cents per lb.

Obviously, the system relies on each party putting accurate information into their block.  However, because the record is permanent and instantly traceable, it lends itself to low-cost audits as needed.  For example, if the fishing co-op itself were suspected of laundering illegal catch, data controls like GPS location and date could be added, to make this more difficult.

When IUU fish or shrimp is comingled with legal product, it becomes infinitely harder to track.

The benefit to fighting IUU fishing is that the blockchain tag could become a buying or importing requirement into the US.  This would not eliminate IUU fishing going to underground or other markets, but it would allow non-government entities to provide the resources to control their own supply chain requirements.

Implementation of a system like this in an area with high IUU fishing would not depend on government enforcement action but instead would use the blockchain technology to validate the product from its point of harvest right through to its point of consumption.

This would allow buyers to actually avoid purchasing fish or shrimp that had co-mingled IUU product.

Enforcement to require only legal product, like with toothfish, for example, can be quite successful at reducing and eliminating IUU fishing.  With toothfish, it took years of concerted action by both the legal toothfish industry, governments in the fishing nations, a UN port state agreement and backlisting of IUU vessels, and US laws regulating imports of toothfish.  There simply is not the money or will in the international community to replicate this wherever IUU fishing is taking place.

Investment in a blockchain designed to reduce or eliminate IUU fishing from a regional hot spot could be a far less costly technological solution that does not depend on the enforcement budget of the governments involved.

However, it would depend on the commitment of the legal fishing parties at all levels of the supply chain.  Unless the harvesters at the first level buy into the system, it will not work.  But here, the provision of incentives would be far less costly than a broken enforcement system.

As these chains begin to be implemented for marketing purposes, it may be worthwhile to explore what a real IUU focused blockchain would look like as an alternative to the painstaking diplomatic process of governments convincing each other that they have to spend the resources and act.

This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

In Mexico, gains from fishery management reforms could surpass losses from climate change

October 25, 2019 — Abalone along the Pacific coast in northern Mexico have declined dramatically in the last decade because of lower oxygen levels prompted by climate change. But despite that, the Pacific Federation of Fishing Cooperatives (Fedecoop) has been able to prevent overfishing by limiting the total catch, according to Laura Rodriguez, the associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Latin and South American Oceans Program.

It’s the type of proactive governance that Mexico and Latin America need more of as climate change grows more severe, warping ocean conditions from temperature to acidity, salinity to oxygen levels, all while altering the life histories, distribution, and productivity of marine species, according to Rodriguez.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

NOAA Fisheries report identifies IUU in Ecuador, Mexico, South Korea

October 8, 2019 — NOAA Fisheries has released its 2019 report to the U.S. Congress, identifying the organization’s efforts to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing internationally while also rebuking three countries for lack of sufficient enforcement against IUU.

The biennial report on improving international fisheries management – made to Congress as part of the High Seas Driftnet Fishing Moratorium Protection Act – identified Ecuador, Mexico, and the Republic of Korea has three countries that failed to sufficiently comply with agreed-upon regulations related to IUU. The report also credited Ecuador, Mexico, and the Russian Federation for earlier work to react to IUU allegations made in NOAA’s 2017 report to congress.

Read the full story at Seafood Source