Saving Seafood

It’s all hands on deck to save seafood supply chains

March 17, 2016 — Seafood businesses are embracing an unusual way to reduce the risks posed by unsustainable practices and capacity challenges throughout the seafood supply chain: collaborating with their competitors, and even helping them make money.

That’s not a natural step for many businesses. But as industry leaders are proving, it’s sometimes the only way to address the complex sustainability issues embedded in the global seafood market. Building on their successful collaborations with NGOs (also once considered unthinkable by many in the seafood industry), seafood buyers, marketers and processors are using pre-competitive strategies as a way to ensure their long-term business health.

These strategies — collaborative market actions taken by competitive entities — are often the only way to address the system-level sustainability challenges in the seafood industry.

As in other industries (coffee and forest products, for example) in which pre-competitive strategies have improved social and environmental conditions, seafood businesses are responding to a market where competition for limited resources affects their business more than competition for customers does. If you don’t have the resource base to deliver products, you won’t have any consumers.

Read the full story at GreenBiz

DR. RAY HILBORN: Plenty of Sustainable Seafood Options Available

December 28, 2015 — The rising trend of “trash fish,” or unusual and underutilized seafood species, on fine dining menus in New York City was discussed last week in The New York Times by Jeff Gordinier. The idea is to, “substitute salmon, tuna, shrimp and cod, much of it endangered and the product of dubious (if not destructive) fishing practices,” with less familiar species that are presumably more abundant, like “dogfish, tilefish, Acadian redfish, porgy, hake, cusk, striped black mullet.”

Changing diners’ perceptions isn’t always easy, especially about seafood, but there is certainly momentum building for more diverse seafood species. Seafood suppliers are reporting record sales of fish like porgy and hake. Chefs feel good about serving these new species because, “industrially harvested tuna, salmon and cod is destroying the environment.” A new organization, Dock-to-Dish, connects restaurants with fishermen that are catching underutilized species and these efforts are highlighted as a catalyst for this growing trash fish trend. From a culinary perspective, this trend allows chefs to sell the story of an unusual and sustainable species, which more compelling than more mainstream species like tuna, salmon or cod. From a sustainability perspective, Gordinier implies that serving a diversity of seafood species is more responsible than the mainstream few that are “industrially caught” and dominate the National Fisheries Institute list of most consumed species in America.

Comment by Ray Hilborn, University of Washington

While I applaud the desire to eat underutilized species, it seems as if the chefs interviewed don’t know much about sustainable seafood. Below are a few quotes from the article that give the impression that eating traditional species such as tuna, cod, salmon and shrimp is an environmental crime.

“Salmon, tuna, shrimp and cod, much of it endangered and the product of dubious (if not destructive) fishing practices”

“The chef Molly Mitchell, can’t imagine serving industrially harvested tuna or salmon or cod. “You can’t really eat that stuff anymore,” she said. “It’s destroying the environment.”

“Flying them halfway around the world may not count as an ecofriendly gesture, but these oceanic oddities are a far cry from being decimated the way cod has. “Hopefully they’ll try something new and not just those fishes that are overfarmed and overcaught,” said Jenni Hwang, director of marketing for the Chaya Restaurant Group.”

“A growing cadre of chefs, restaurateurs and fishmongers in New York and around the country is taking on the mission of selling wild and local fish whose populations are not threatened with extinction.”

Read the full commentary at CFOOD

 

Research finds trawling not as devastating as often portrayed

November 23, 2015 — An ongoing two-year independent study on trawling and its effect on benthic sea life — species that live on sea floors where trawling occurs – has found that the practice may not be as devastating as it is portrayed by some NGOs.

The study called, ‘Trawling: Finding Common Ground on the Scientific Knowledge Regarding Best Practices’, is being funded by the Walton Foundation and the Packard Foundation in partnership with the National Fisheries Institute, and is being done by a group of international scientists who are collecting and assessing data of global sea floors where trawling occurs.

The major data collection and analysis for the project has been completed, including assessments of mobile bottom contact gear in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa and most of the US, making it six times more extensive than and previous compilations.

According to Ricardo Amoroso of the University of Washington, who presented the data at this year’s Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle, public perception of trawling is often negative. Common public beliefs include the equivalent of 10 football fields are trawled every four seconds and that trawling is turning the seafloor into a desert.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News