Saving Seafood

Congressmen Seek Investigation Of Hawaii Fishing Practices

December 14, 2016 — Four Democratic congressmen have written to officials at the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claiming that Hawaii’s longline fishing fleet is operating illegally by employing — and in some cases possibly abusing — foreign fishermen.

The congressmen said fishing boat owners who are not in “compliance with the law” should not be allowed to sell their products.

Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva’s staff convened a forum about the matter on Capitol Hill last week. Activists at the event, who described what was happening as modern-day slavery, advocated a boycott of tuna until the alleged abuses stop.

The letter was signed by Grijalva, ranking Democratic member of the Natural Resources Committee; Jared Huffman of California, ranking Democratic member of the Water, Power and Oceans Subcommittee; Peter DeFazio of Oregon, ranking Democratic member of the  Transportation Committee and Infrastructure; and John Garamendi of California, ranking Democratic member of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee.

It was addressed to Adm. Paul Zukunft, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, and Kathryn Sullivan, under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator, and was delivered Monday.

“This illegal activity does not represent American values and has dealt a blow to U.S. credibility as a global leader in fighting (illegal, unreported and unregulated) fishing and human trafficking,” the congressmen wrote.

John P. Connelly, president of the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group, told Civil Beat the industry is looking forward to the response by the Coast Guard and NOAA, saying that it would allow a “clarification” of employment law affecting foreign fishermen working in Hawaii.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat

Reactions to Trump victory trickle in from seafood industry

November 11th, 2016 — Seafood companies and industry groups have begun to issue statements and responses to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.

Trump has said little about the seafood industry directly, but he has expressed favor for policies that reduce environmental barriers preventing the further development American industry, which may lead to changes in the management of U.S. fisheries. Trump has also taken a strong stand against free-trade agreements, and if he acts on pledges to scuttle the Trans-Pacific Partnership framework, add tariffs on Chinese imports and renegotiate or withdraw from the North America Free Trade Agreement, it will likely have an significant effect on the global seafood trade.

The National Fisheries Institute, the trade group representing the American seafood industry, released an official statement on Wednesday, 9 November, though spokesman Gavin Gibbons.

“NFI is prepared to work with incoming President Trump and his administration on all aspects of seafood,” it said. “From trade to fisheries and nutrition, seafood is an important component of a variety of vital sectors. NFI is ready to serve as a resource as this new administration begins to learn the complexities and significance of seafood.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source 

Bait and Switch Still a Favorite Policy for Many Seafood Restaurants

October 6th, 2016 — Happy National Seafood Month!

But do you know what’s in your sushi or that basket of fish and chips? A recent report indicates you might not.

According to research compiled by ocean conservation group Oceana from 200 studies, 20 percent of seafood sold worldwide is mislabeled.

So that tuna you’re enjoying might actually be whale meat, and the “wild-caught salmon” commanding the high ticket price on the menu may actually be cheaper farmed salmon. In other egregious cases, fish containing high levels of mercury are being sold as safer alternatives, and some “caviar” contains no animal DNA whatsoever.

How can this happen? “Seafood fraud is one of those issues that isn’t always under one [government] agency,” Beth Lowell, senior campaign director at Oceana, explained to NBC. “There’s this patchwork of fish management laws, wildlife trafficking laws, food and drug laws.”

Oceana defines mislabeling as “species substitution where one fish was sold as another.” And, according to their research, it’s rampant.

Fishy methodology?

But not everyone agrees that the problem is as widespread as this report indicates. The National Fisheries Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to education about seafood safety, sustainability, and nutrition — and which promotes dietary guidelines recommending Americans include fish and shellfish in their diets twice per week — responded to the Oceana report criticizing their methods.

The NFI cited FDA research that shows the percentage of mislabeled (primarily domestic) seafood is 15 percent, focusing on the varieties at highest risk for mislabeling and/or substitution, including cod, snapper, and grouper.

Others in the industry think all of these numbers are overstated. “My belief is that it’s very, very small,” Wayne Samiere, a marine biologist and owner of Honolulu Fish Company, told NBC. “In seafood, reputation is everything. Who would risk their reputation?”

“You can always go to a restaurant and find something, always dig up some kind of thing going on, but is it going on on a large scale?” he said. “There’s simply no way. A high-end chef in a large restaurant group, these are the guys that will be the most afraid, they have the most to lose. The benefit is very small.”

Read the full story at NBC

HAWAII: US Labor Dept. To Look At Fish Fleet Conditions

September 19th, 2016 — The U.S. Department of Labor is investigating reports of abusive labor conditions affecting foreign workers on American fishing vessels in Hawaii, Civil Beat has learned.

A Labor Department official said the agency is “deeply disturbed” by news reports about the long hours, low wages and inhumane living conditions suffered by up to 700 workers from Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. The official said the agency was reaching out to other U.S  government agencies to try to figure out what to do about it.

“The Department of Labor is committed to ensuring that workers are treated with respect, fairness, and dignity,” said Labor Department spokesperson Jason Surbey in an emailed statement.

A widely published report by the Associated Press found that some workers are held in prison-like captivity at the piers of Honolulu and San Francisco when the ships are being unloaded. When at sea, the AP reported, they work up to 20 hours a day at wages as low as 70 cents an hour.

Some officials in Hawaii were apparently aware of the issues to some extent because many state and federal agencies share jurisdiction over the fishing industry on issues of employment, business licensing, regulatory oversight and coastline protection.

Kathryn Xian, executive director of the Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery, said she became aware of the labor abuses and physical confinement of the workers in early 2014, when she was contacted by a family member of a fisherman who felt trapped by his employer. She said she subsequently learned of “egregious” employment conditions in the fleet.

Gavin Gibbon, a spokesperson for the National Fisheries Institute trade group, said the employment practices on the vessels as described in the report are “entirely unacceptable.”

He said visa programs allow for migratory and seasonal workers “but in no cases do they allow for abuses of the kind the Associated Press has described.”

Read full story from Civil Beat

Oceana going overboard on fish fraud, according to seafood industry group

September 9, 2016 — The National Fisheries Institute (NFI) is calling into question both the findings and motives of the latest fish fraud study by Oceana, a global environmental group. The action marks a break between the two groups since they previously were largely in sync with one another over the worldwide problem of fish fraud, which is where lesser-value species are marketed as higher-value ones.

NFI claims that by finding 20 percent of all seafood mislabeled globally, Oceana’s latest report is both overstating the problem and unnecessarily calling for an expanded regulatory bureaucracy when enforcement of existing laws is all that is needed.

NFI, a trade association representing the seafood industry with a core mission of sustainability, charges that the environmental group has turned to “misleading hyperbole.”

“Mislabeling is fraud and fraud is illegal, period,” reads the NFI statement released on its website. “That’s why NFI members are all required to be members of the Better Seafood Board, the only seafood industry-led economic integrity effort. Our members are at the forefront of getting rid of fish fraud.”

Oceana’s study is misleading because it looked too heavily at commonly mislabeled species, the group asserts.

“Oceana’s focus on the most often mislabeled species distorts its findings by design. It is a common technique that ironically perpetuates a fraud on the readers of these reports,” the NFI statement adds.

Read the full story at Food Safety News

National Fisheries Institute: Proposed USDA catfish grading rules unnecessary

July 27, 2016 — The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced it will develop voluntary standards for catfish grading, a statement that came under immediate scrutiny from the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), which described the step as unnecessary bureaucracy that will encumber U.S. catfish producers.

In a 14 July press release, USDA’s Agriculture Marketing Service said it is developing voluntary standards for grading catfish and catfish products, which it was directed to do by the 2014 Farm Bill.

“The USDA grade shields assure consumers that products have gone through a rigorous review process by highly-skilled graders that follow the official grade standards,” the agency said in a statement. “These standards provide a common language for buyers and sellers of commodities and are widely used by the agricultural industry in domestic and international trading, futures market contracts, and as a benchmark for purchase specifications in most private contracts.”

However, while USDA oversees grading standards for meat products, it has no business getting into catfish grading, said Gavin Gibbons, vice president of communications at National Fisheries Institute, the U.S. seafood trade association.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource.com

Maine lobster suppliers strategize to foil EU ban

May 9, 2016 — Maine lobster suppliers met behind closed doors with dealers from some of Europe’s biggest lobster importing countries in Brussels last week to discuss a pending ban on importing live North American lobsters into Europe.

The six Maine companies joined their Massachusetts and Canadian peers, as well as national trade officials, to discuss the proposed ban with buyers and trade officials from eight European countries, including the three biggest importers of Homarus americanus: France, Italy and Spain. The meeting occurred at the world’s largest seafood industry trade show, said spokesman Gavin Gibbons of the National Fisheries Institute, an American seafood industry trade group.

About 75 people met for 90 minutes to talk about how to avoid the all-out ban that Sweden asked the European Union to adopt in March after finding North American lobsters in European waters.

“Brussels was productive,” Gibbons said. “Unnecessarily excluding live North American lobsters from that market would have real impacts on both sides of the Atlantic, sales and jobs. So, no one is taking this lightly.”

In March, Sweden petitioned the European Union to declare the North American lobster an invasive species, which would ban live imports to the EU’s 28 member states. It based its petition on an 85-page risk assessment that claims the discovery of a small number of North American lobsters in the waters off Great Britain, Norway and Sweden over the last 30 years, including one female lobster carrying hybrid eggs, proved cross-breeding had taken place. The Swedish scientists say a ban would protect the European lobster from cross-breeding and diseases carried by the North American lobster.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

U.S. Tuna Industry Objects To New Proposed Labeling

April 29, 2016 — PAGO PAGO, American Samoa — Tri Marine International, whose local operations include a tuna cannery, and National Fisheries Institute (NFI) both contend that the new interim final rule by the federal government on dolphin safety labeling is due to a recent sanction of the US by the World Trade Organization in a long standing case which pits the US against its neighbor, Mexico. They say it is an unfair and unproductive burden to U.S. seafood companies that does not resolve the protracted WTO litigation, nor improve on the existing dolphin-safe operational performance.

Industry officials told Samoa News that the new interim final rule (or IFR) will only increase operational costs for the US tuna canneries, who are already faced with stiff global competition, and that the US canneries have been adhering to dolphin safe labeling standards set by the federal government for many years.

This was echoed by NFI president, John P. Connelly in an Apr. 22 letter to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), who is seeking public comment on the IFR for “enhanced document requirements and captain training requirements to support use of the dolphin safe label on tuna products.”

“Consumers purchasing canned and pouched tuna from Bumble Bee Foods, Chicken of the Sea, and StarKist should be confident that the ‘dolphin-safe’ label the retail packaging bears means just that,” Connelly wrote.

The three canneries are the major US producers of tuna products.

Read the full story at the Pacific Islands Report

News media sound the alarm on mercury in seafood during pregnancy — was it a false alarm?

April 28, 2016 — A recent 20-page policy report from the Environmental Working Group included alarming news: According to a study they conducted, “nearly three in 10 of the women had more mercury in their bodies than the EPA says is safe,” and rates were highest among women who ate seafood frequently.

Based on this, they issued a news release with the alarming headline of “U.S. Seafood Advice Could Expose Women And Babies To Too Much Mercury, Not Enough Healthy Fats.”

That sounds like important–and clicky–news, and the media acted accordingly: At least a dozen different news outlets wrote about the study, including high-profile publications like The Washington Post (“Why it’s still so hard to eat fish and avoid mercury”), TIME Magazine (“Canned Tuna Is Too High In Mercury for Pregnant Women: Health Group”), and CNN. (“Study of mercury in fish brings call to strengthen government guidelines”)

Seafood industry fires back hostile response that, well, partially made sense

The seafood industry trade group National Fisheries Institute caught wind of the report and resulting news coverage, and fired back big time, with a news release, “Mercury ‘Study’ Out of Step with Real Science.”  They didn’t stop there, turning their ire specifically at TIME Magazine, asking “Seriously….what is wrong with TIME Magazine?”

While it’s debatable whether this miffed tone helps or hurts the trade organization’s public relations effort, NFI does have a point: The news coverage, in general, could have been stronger.

Before we get into what journalists could have done differently, we do want to stress that EWG’s study conclusions–that mercury contamination in fish is more widespread than government agencies acknowledge–very well may be true. It’s just their report doesn’t prove this, certainly not on its own.

Read the full story at Health News Review

NFI and Maine Lawmaker Ask Sweden for Restraint in Proposal to Ban Live Lobster Imports

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [SeafoodNews] By Michael Ramsingh — March 21, 2016 — The National Fisheries Institute (NFI) and a Maine lawmaker are asking for restraint on the part of Swedish officials who have proposed an outright import ban on live lobsters from North America.

Earlier this month Norway and Sweden proposed to ban live lobster imports from North America after several Homarus americanus species were found alive in Swedish waters. The basis for the import ban was environmental and considered the lobsters an invasive species.

However, the NFI’s President John Connelly issued a statement on behalf of its membership asking for Swedish and EU officials to carefully consider the potential of widespread fallout from such a trade restriction.

Following is Connelly’s statement:

It is important to note that there is no EU ban on imported live lobsters from North America. Sweden has raised the specter of such a prohibition but no embargo has been implemented.

We will work with our European colleagues to better appreciate their apprehensions. We need to understand how 32 lobsters found in EU waters over an 8-year period constitutes an “invasion.”

We will also work to identify credible, science-based solutions to reduce the chances of live North American lobsters entering EU waters.

The lobster trade has had a positive economic impact on both trading partners for many years. North American lobster exports to the EU generate about $139 million and are a favorite with consumers across Europe. North American lobsters mean jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.

As the U.S. works on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Canadians implement their own groundbreaking agreement with the EU, we expect the European Commission to consider the least costly solution in addressing concerns.

Europeans releasing live lobsters into the sea, after arrival from North America, is a local law enforcement issue and perhaps not part of an international commerce dispute that could cripple mutually beneficial trade in lobsters. If locals break local laws, let’s not escalate this to a continent-wide ban on trade in lobsters.

Maine Congresswoman Chelli Pingree also took issue with the proposed ban.

“This is a complete overreaction on the part of Sweden.  We have safely exported live lobster to dozens of countries for decades, and even if it’s true that a few Maine lobsters have been found in foreign waters, regulators need to look at the problem more carefully and not just jump to conclusions,” said Pingree. “The idea that somehow lobsters are going to jump out of their tanks and crawl into the sea and survive just doesn’t make sense,” Pingree said. “Some reports have suggested that it’s actually consumers who have bought lobsters and thrown them in the ocean.  Whatever the cause, EU officials should figure out what’s really happening before jumping to any conclusions.”

The discussion on how best to address this problem has barely started, and it will likely be months before any further updates are forthcoming from the EU.  Although some Northern European countries are supporting the Swedish request, it is highly likely that it will be opposed by many southern European countries who have been importing large volumes of North American lobster for many years with no environmental issues whatsoever.

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.