Saving Seafood

USDA Declines to Institute Grade A Catfish Program; Elects to Continue USDC Grading

January 31, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The USDA published a federal register notice today that it will not go forward with a Grade A catfish inspection program. Instead it urges users to continue to use the USDC Grade A catfish inspection program run by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (2008 Farm Bill) and the Agricultural Act of 2014 (2014 Farm Bill) directed the Secretary of Agriculture to establish within USDA a voluntary, fee-based grading program for catfish. Since passage of the 2008 and 2014 Farm Bills, and particularly since the publication of the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) final rule, “Mandatory Inspection of Fish of the Order Siluriformes and Products Derived From Such Fish,” which defined catfish (80 FR 75589), AMS has engaged the U.S. catfish industry and other stakeholders to seek input on requirements for voluntary U.S. standards for grades of catfish.

During the 60-day comment period, four responses were submitted–two from catfish importers, one from an industry institution, and one from a U.S. catfish producer/processor. One importer stated support for a USDA grading program if it included all Siluriformes species (currently, imported products of many varieties of Siluriformes are not eligible to be graded under the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Standard). Two additional responses did not support USDA’s development of voluntary U.S. standards or a grading program. One pointed out the duplicity of creating these under AMS when they already exist under NFMS, noting the unnecessary use of resources to develop a program “and market to a consuming [public] that is not demanding a new U.S. Grade Standard;” the other recommended the use of the NMFS standards and grading program, as these are already familiar to the industry and their customers.

Based on the responses received from the Notice as well as additional feedback from stakeholders through other avenues, including two industry workshops coordinated by AMS and academia and an industry-wide conference call held by AMS in May 2016, AMS has concluded that there is not sufficient interest in USDA-AMS standards for catfish or an AMS-administered grading program at this time.

It is important to note that a standard for catfish, and associated voluntary grading services, are currently available to the industry through NMFS. NMFS maintains the “United States Standards for Grades of North American Freshwater Catfish and Products Made Therefrom” and provides grading and certification services on a fee-for-service basis. Graded catfish and catfish products may bear official marks, including `U.S. Grade A,’ `Processed Under Federal Inspection,’ and `Lot Inspection.’ Additional services provided by NMFS include system and process audits, product inspection, and export certification.

In light of the response from industry stakeholders indicating there is no current need for USDA-AMS standards nor a subsequent AMS-administered grading program for catfish, AMS will discontinue the initiative to establish either at this time. AMS stands ready to assist agricultural industries in establishing voluntary standards and grading programs for commodities for which it has authority to do so; the catfish industry retains this option should the need arise.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Fishing industry backs Chris Oliver for NMFS director

January 27, 2017 — A coalition of commercial fishing, Native and environmental entities is backing Chris Oliver, executive director of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, to become the next head of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The more than four dozen signers of a letter sent to the Trump administration on Jan. 23 included processors Trident Seafoods and Icicle Seafoods, Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, Alaska Marine Conservation Council, At Sea Processors Association, Bristol Bay Economic Development Corp., Fishing Vessel Owners Association, Pacific Seafoods Processors Association, United Catcher Boats, and United Fishermen’s Marketing Association.

Read the full story at The Cordova Times

NCFA: Workshop Meets to Address Bycatch in North Carolina Shrimp Trawl Fishery

January 13, 2017 — The following was released by the North Carolina Fisheries Association:

A workgroup formed by the North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission in 2015 to investigate ways to further reduce bycatch in shrimp trawls met recently in New Bern. The industry work group is a collaborative effort that consists of staff from the Division of Marine Fisheries, N.C. Sea Grant, fishing vessel owners, net makers and a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The meeting recently held at the Riverfront Convention Center in New Bern follows the second year of a three year project, and is showing some very promising results.

The goal set by the Marine Fisheries Commission for the workgroup was set at 40% reduction in finfish bycatch.

Of the devices that were tested, the device achieving the highest reduction in the previous year was further modified for year two, resulting in a 54.5% reduction of finfish bycatch and a 52.2% reduction in bycatch of all types.

It was noted that none of the sampling for the project was done by extrapolation, but by sampling the entire contents of over 180 tows.

The meeting was held while a Petition for Rulemaking, filed by the North Carolina Wildlife Federation and the Southern Environmental Law Center, is being considered by the Marine Fisheries Commission. If the proposed regulations were enacted as proposed by the petitioners, there would be severe restrictions to shrimping in North Carolina.

“In the many years that I’ve been involved with representing the state’s commercial fishermen, there is no one issue that we’ve spent more time on than reducing bycatch in the shrimp trawl fishery”, said Jerry Schill, President of the North Carolina Fisheries Association. “Further, there is no one issue where we’ve had more success than reducing that bycatch. However, with their goal of eliminating shrimp trawling in our state, the onslaught continues. It will not abate until they’re successful”.

The public meeting to address the petition will be held on Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at the Riverfront Convention Center in New Bern, NC, beginning at 12:30pm.

Effort continues to replace humans with cameras on fishing boats

January 9, 2017 — Several years into the controversial effort to bolster Alaska’s fisheries observer program, a top federal fisheries official defended the work at a Seattle gathering of fishermen.

Eileen Sobeck, the NOAA Assistant Administrator for Fisheries, took the stage this past Nov. 18 to talk to fishermen gathered for the annual Fish Expo event to recap the program.

Observers are the eyes and ears on boats, collecting a range of data, she explained.

“We have been monitoring fisheries for decades, and we do it in a lot of different ways,” Sobeck said.

But the details of the program have been under fire over the past few years. Federal efforts to put a human on smaller boats was met with concerns about safety and efficiency, and fishermen’s requests to use cameras have had logistical difficulties.

Over the past few years, the effort to use cameras has increased nationwide, and the National Marine Fisheries Service has been tasked with sorting out how to make that work, both logistically and cost-wise.

Over 10 years, the National Marine Fisheries Service has helped fund more than 30 electronic monitoring, or EM, pilot programs. Expenses include the cost of cameras, the cost to install them, and the cost of going through the immense amount of data they can collect.

“We have, collectively, an interest in being as cost-effective as we can possibly be,” Sobeck said.

That effort has translated into regional electronic monitoring plans that were finished more than a year ago, and are now being implemented with plans for regular reviews, said George LaPointe, one of the point people on the project.

Although monitoring in some fisheries has developed successfully, like in the groundfish fisheries, LaPointe said, the agency is still working toward certain implementation, such as in Alaska’s small boat fixed gear and pot fisheries, where the target date is 2018.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

Overall US seafood exports down slightly from last year

December 19th, 2016 — Updated numbers from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) indicated that the United States is exporting slightly less seafood this year than in 2015, while imports have seen a small bump.

A dismal Alaska pink salmon season may have contributed to the decline in overall exports. NMFS figures said pink salmon exports plummeted from 102,010 metric tons (MT) from January to October 2015 to 34,065 MT in the first 10 months of 2016. The poor season prompted Alaskan lawmakers to seek federal disaster relief funding for fisherman who depend on pink salmon runs.

In the same 10-month period, sockeye exports held almost steady from 2015 to 2016, hovering around 39,000 MT, while Atlantic salmon exports nearly doubled to 10,342 MT. Exports of chinook salmon caught in the U.S. also shot up from just 572 MT to 3,775 MT this year. However, the U.S. saw salmon roe exports nearly halved from 13,097 MT in 2015 to 7,330 MT this year.

The top flatfish export, yellowfin sole, retained robust numbers with nearly 59,000 metric tons shipped internationally, up about 4,000 MT from last year. The country’s largest yellowfin sole fishery is in Alaska’s Bering Sea.

With some species shuffling, tuna exports enjoyed an overall bump in 2016. While skipjack and yellowfin exports saw a year-on-year decrease, albacore exports were up nearly 40 percent to 14,242 MT in 2016 with total tuna exports at 16,654 MT.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Plan for imperiled shark doesn’t please all conservationists

December 19, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — The federal government isn’t going far enough with a plan to protect a threatened shark that lives off the East Coast and has been decimated by the fin trade, some conservationists argue.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is proposing changes to federal fishing rules with the goal of protecting dusky sharks, a large species that is down to about 20 percent of its 1970s population off the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico because of commercial fishing for the species that’s now illegal off the U.S.

Dusky sharks were long hunted for their meat and oil, as well as their fins, which are used to make soup in traditional Chinese cooking.

The fisheries service is proposing a suite of new rules for recreational and commercial fishermen designed to protect the shark, which is sometimes still killed via accidental bycatch by fishermen seeking other species. But conservation group Oceana said the rules aren’t strict enough and leave the sharks vulnerable.

Part of the problem is that the plan focuses on accidental catch of the sharks by swordfish and tuna fishermen, and they are often caught by fishermen seeking other species than those, said Lora Snyder, the Oceana campaign director.

“We see this as more of the same,” she said. “They are ignoring fisheries where dusky shark bycatch is happening.”

The government’s proposal is subject to public comment until Thursday. The proposal comes as a result of a legal settlement between the fisheries service in Oceana after the conservation group charged in federal court that the government was taking too long to protect dusky sharks.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at CNBC

Alaska Continues to Lead All States in Volume of Seafood Landings

December 1, 2016 — A new federal report on the nation’s fisheries confirms that Alaska, with six billion pounds, led all states in volume of seafood landings in 2015, and that seafood consumption by the average American rose by nearly a pound.

The National Marine Fisheries Service report on Fisheries of the United States rounded out the top five states in harvest volume with Louisiana, 1.1 billion pounds; Virginia, 410.3 million pounds, Washington, 363 million pounds, and Mississippi, 304.1 million pounds.

Dutch Harbor, Alaska, for the 19th consecutive year, was the leading US port in quantity of commercial fishery landings, with 787 million pounds, followed by Kodiak, Alaska, 514 million pounds; Aleutian Islands (Other), Alaska, 467 million pounds; Intracoastal city, Louisiana, 467 million pounds, and Empire-Venice, Louisiana, 428 million pounds.

Other Pacific Northwest ports included among the top 20 for quantity were Alaska Peninsula (Other) 268 million pounds; Naknek, 176 million pounds, Cordova, 162 million pounds; Seward, 94 million pounds; Astoria, Oregon, 92 million pounds; Sitka, 87 million pounds; Ketchikan, Alaska, and Westport, Washington, 84 million pounds; and Petersburg and Bristol Bay (Other), 70 million pounds each.

Read the full story at Fishermen’s News

NOAA fishing head: Science, bycatch likely to remain focus under Trump administration

November 30, 2016 — SEATTLE — In a little over a month and a half, Eileen Sobeck will leave her job as the US’s top fishing regulator as the Obama administration appointee leaves to make way for leadership named by incoming president Donald Trump.

Since 2013, Sobeck, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) assistant administrator for fisheries, has led a team of over 4,800 federal employees, one of the major divisions of the  12,000-member agency of the Department of Commerce.

NOAA’s National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) regulates all US ocean fishing that takes place outside of the three-mile coastal limit that falls to the states. Its legal authority stems mainly from the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act, but other laws also require it to protect marine mammals and endangered species.

In a recent interview with Undercurrent News, Sobeck said that despite the upcoming change in personnel, NMFS’s core objectives — to develop and maintain sustainable fisheries, to safeguard “protected resources, and to achieve “organizational excellence” through improved administration — will remain.

“We will always working on our science that’s needed to translate into management practices. I think we’re going to be focused on bycatch issues,” Sobeck, who will leave her post by Jan. 14, said. “We’ve beat the overfishing monster, but we still could be more efficient in maximizing targeted species and minimizing bycatch. That also goes for protected resource bycatch.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Oceana Files Legal Challenge to Northern Anchovy Catch Limit

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — November 29, 2016 — Last week, environmental group Oceana filed a lawsuit alleging that a recent National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) specification rule allows commercial fishing for northern anchovy at levels that threaten the anchovy population and the marine ecosystem. The complaint was filed against the NMFS, Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the District Court of Northern California.

The specification rule in question, announced October 26, 2016 under the Coastal Pelagic Species Fishery Management Plan, set an annual catch limit (ACL) of 25,000 metric tons for the central subpopulation of anchovy. In its lawsuit, Oceana claims that the NMFS did not articulate the scientific basis for this ACL, did not base the ACL and related management measures on best available science, and did not explain how it would prevent overfishing and protect the West Coast marine ecosystem’s food web.

In doing so, Oceana claims that the rule violates the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The complaint claims that the northern anchovy population has severely declined since 2009, and that northern anchovy are “one of the most important forage species” in the California marine ecosystem.

“The Fisheries Service’s actions and failures to act have harmed Oceana’s members’ interest in rebuilding and maintaining a healthy and sustainable population of northern anchovy and a healthy ocean ecosystem,” said the lawsuit, which was filed by lawyers from Earthjustice on Oceana’s behalf. “This harm will continue in the absence of action by the Court.”

Read the full legal complaint as a PDF