Saving Seafood

Billions in fishing subsidies finance social, ecological harm, report finds

July 7, 2021 — A new report shows that the world’s top fishing nations are using subsidies worth billions of dollars to exploit the high seas and the waters of other nations, including some of the world’s least-developed countries.

Published by researchers at the University of British Columbia and supported by the NGO Oceana, the report takes a shrewd look at “harmful fishing subsidies,” payments made by governments that allow fishing fleets to operate beyond their normal capacity. The researchers found that 10 countries — China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, the U.S.A., Thailand, Taiwan, Spain, Indonesia and Norway — spent more than $15.3 billion on harmful fishing subsidies in 2018, which has likely contributed to a number of social, economic and ecological issues.

About 60% ($9.2 billion) of these harmful fishing subsidies used by these 10 nations were spent on domestic fishing, while 35% ($5.4 billion) was spent on traveling long distances to fish in the waters of 116 other nations. The remaining 5% ($800 million) was spent on fishing in the high seas, which are parts of the ocean beyond any nation’s jurisdiction.

China was found to be the top provider of harmful fishing subsidies, worth about $5.9 billion, followed by Japan at $2.1 billion and the European Union at $2 billion.

Kathryn Matthews, chief scientist at Oceana, says the report shows the scale and magnitude of harmful fishing subsidies, which can transfer the risk of overfishing from one place to another.

Read the full story at Mongabay

MAINE: New coral protections set for areas off MDI

June 28, 2021 — A new rule from federal regulators last week creates thousands of miles of “deep sea coral protection areas” in the Gulf of Maine, including two off Mount Desert Island and on Georges Bank.

The new rule designates a coral protection area in an 8-square-mile area southwest of Mount Desert Rock – a small, rocky island about 20 nautical miles south of Mount Desert Island. Vessels are prohibited from fishing with bottom-tending mobile gear in the area, though vessels will still be able to fish for lobsters using trap gear.

The Outer Schoodic Ridge Coral Protection Area will be a 31-square-mile protected zone about 25 miles southeast of the island, with the same restrictions as Mount Desert Rock.

The new rule also establishes a protection area of 25,000 square miles on the Georges Bank outer continental shelf, south of Cape Cod.

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

NGOs call on EU to require electronic monitoring to stop illegal fishing

June 25, 2021 — A group of 52 NGOs, retailers, seafood supply chain companies, and academic groups are urging the European Union fisheries ministers to add cameras and remote electronic monitoring (REM) to fishing fleets to help prevent illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing.

The group, which includes organizations like the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, Oceana, ClientEarth, and more, is calling on the E.U. to mandate cameras for vessels that are above 12 meters in length. Currently, the E.U. is planning mandates to add cameras, but only for certain vessels above 24 meters.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Deep Sea Corals Off Coastal Maine Get Permanent Protection

June 24, 2021 — Fisheries regulators in the Northeast are permanently putting some 25,000 square miles of seafloor off-limits to some types of commercial fishing, in an effort to protect sensitive deep-sea corals.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a final rule this week that bars mobile bottom-trawling gear from vast deep-sea areas along the outer continental shelf off New England and in some smaller areas closer to Maine’s coast.

“The deep sea corals have a very fragile skeleton, and can be broken or displaced with a single pass of these nets, and they won’t recover,” says Gib Brogan, who directs advocacy campaigns for the international group, Oceana.

Brogan says the areas in question don’t see many trawlers right now – but the NOAA designations mark a proactive effort to ward off damaging fishing practices that have emerged elsewhere.

“Looking for other species that are not part of the fisheries in the U.S. There’s a particular piece of gear called a “canyon-buster door” that was specifically engineered to go fishing in the deep water canyons where the corals are growing,” Brogan says.

Read the full story at Maine Public

NMFS enacts ocean-bottom protections for Gulf of Maine corals

June 22, 2021 — The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has enacted the New England Fishery Management Council’s Omnibus Deep-Sea Coral Amendment, effectively protecting deep-sea corals in an area roughly 25,000 square miles in size.

The amendment was first approved on 20 November, 2019, after the council developed the action and the NFMS approved it. The final rule, published 21 June, implements the amendment, which prohibits the use of all bottom-tending gear – with the exception of red crab pots – along “the outer continental shelf in waters no shallower than 600 meters to the exclusive economic zone,” the final rule states.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

IUU vessel-tracker shows possible widespread abuse of AIS switch-off capability

June 22, 2021 — A newly launched map of the locations of fishing vessels involved in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing has one big problem: there’s not much to show.

The new tool, the IUU Vessel Tracker, was launched Wednesday, 16 June, by non-governmental organization Oceana. It uses Global Fishing Watch tracking data cross-indexed with a list of vessels linked to IUU compiled by regional fishery management organizations and Norway-based nonprofit Trygg Mat Tracking. But Oceana said the tool, which allows anyone in the world to track the activities of these vessels in near real-time, is currently tracking just two of 168 vessels on the list. The two vessels visible, the Phoenix and the Nadhodka, are flagged to the Seychelles and Russia, respectively.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Oceana reports Chinese, Spanish squid vessels ‘going dark’ off Argentina

June 4, 2021 — A South Atlantic shortfin squid fishery is dominated by distant-water fleets off Argentina, primarily Chinese vessels that account for an estimated 69 percent of fishing activity, according to a new report by the environmental group Oceana.

From Jan. 1, 2018 to April 25, 2021, the group documented more than 800 foreign-flag vessels logging more than 900,000 hours of apparent fishing activity, based on analysis of Automatic Identification System (AIS) data.

That analysis also showed vessels regularly “went dark” – apparently turning off their AIS transponders – effectively dropping out of sight for 600,000 hours in all. Some 66 percent of those outages involved Chinese vessels, raising the possibility of masked illegal fishing, such as intruding into Argentina’s exclusive economic zone, according to Oceana researchers.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Hundreds of fishing fleets that go ‘dark’ suspected of illegal hunting, study finds

June 2, 2021 — Giant distant-water fishing fleets, primarily from China, are switching off their tracking beacons to evade detection while they engage in a possibly illegal hunt for squid and other lucrative species on the very edge of Argentina’s extensive fishing grounds, according to a new study by Oceana, an international NGO dedicated to ocean conservation.

Every year, vessels crowd together along the limits of Argentina’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) to take advantage of the lucrative fishing grounds.

By monitoring the ships’ tracking beacons between January 2018 and April 2021, Oceana found that more than 800 vessels apparently conducted nearly 900,000 hours of fishing within 20 nautical miles of the invisible border between Argentina’s national waters and the high seas.

“During this three-and-a-half-year period, there were over 6,000 instances in which these fishing vessels appeared to go ‘dark’ by potentially disabling their electronic tracking devices, known as Automatic Identification Systems (AIS),” says the report, published on Wednesday, titled, Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: Vanishing Vessels Along Argentina’s Waters.

In all, these vessels were “hidden” for over 600,000 hours during which Oceana suspects they crossed over into Argentina’s territorial waters for illegal fishing.

“It’s very suspicious that they have their AIS turned off for such a large proportion of the time they are out fishing,” said Marla Valentine, an ecologist at Oceana, an international NGO dedicated to ocean conservation.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Study examines how to build resilient aquatic food systems amid COVID-19

June 1, 2021 — A new study has investigated the details of how the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 impacted the availability and supply of seafood, with fish-producing countries in Asia and Africa reporting huge disruptions of their aquatic food value chain in 2020.

With nearly every fish-producing country in the world reeling from the effects of COVID-19 on production, processing, and supply of aquatic food products, the study identifies short- and long-term policy responses that are likely to shape the seafood market trends in Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar – with spillover effects to global availability and pricing of seafood products.

Read the full story at Seafood Source