Saving Seafood

Chinese tariffs challenge Alaska seafood, new markets emerge

February 27, 2019 — Alaska’s fishing industry provides more jobs than any private sector in the state. On Tuesday, the House Special Committee on Fisheries received an update from the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

The tariff war with China remains a concern. The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute put a lot of effort into selling Alaska’s seafood to China, said Jeremy Woodrow, the interim executive director of the ASMI. For every $10,000 spent on marketing in China, the Alaska seafood industry gets $1 million. But with the tariff war between the U.S. and China, Woodrow said, “We are expecting big drop offs in our Chinese market.”

However, Woodrow had plenty of positive news to report. In December, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan was able to add a provision to the Farm Bill that would require Alaska seafood pollock to be used in fish sticks in American school lunches. Previously, fish sticks in American school lunches were comprised of Russian pollock. Woodrow said this would equate to about $30 million a year. Alaska pollock makes up the bulk of the Alaska’s fishing harvest volume: 57 percent of the 5.9 billion pounds of seafood harvested in a year.

Ukraine has been a growing market for Alaska seafoods ever since the Russians placed an embargo on U.S. fish about five years ago, Woodrow said this market has been steadily growing.

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

ALASKA: North Pacific council to study catch-share proposal for cod trawlers

February 22, 2019 — As pressure continues to build on Pacific cod landings in the Bering Sea, the US’ North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) is taking a hard look at the number of trawl vessels and offshore processors there, Alaska Public Radio reports.

A year after federal regulators dramatically cut the quota in the Gulf of Alaska, trawlers say the congestion is causing a race for the fish.

“You got kind of a perfect storm going on here: You have more and more vessels entering a fishery, you’ve got less fish available to be caught, and now this year in 2019, we ended up with a 13-day season,” Brent Paine, executive director of United Catcher Boats, is quoted as saying. “Four years ago, it never even closed.”

The NPFMC has taken up a request from Paine and others to study a catch share plan for trawl catcher vessels, splitting up the sector’s landings between individual boats before the season begins. A scoping paper is due from its staff later this year.

Such a management structure, which is already used by halibut and pollock fisheries, would limit the number of vessels that can participate in the fishery and reduce competition, the article notes. A specific date range would determine historical participation and therefore who gets shares and how many.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

How The Trade War With China Is Threatening America’s Largest Fishery

February 13, 2019 — Alaskan pollock is an incredibly versatile fish when it comes to cooking. The species is often referred to as a “cousin of cod” because the two species are classified in the same family, Gadidae. This means they have many shared characteristics, including how they taste. Their meat is a flaky blank slate, ready for nearly any preparation you could throw at it. Pollock’s affordability also makes it an attractive species for a variety of markets, from fast-casual to university and corporate dining.

These factors, along with the stability and health of the species’ population, helped to make Alaskan pollock the top species landed by volume in the United States in 2017. It hasn’t always been a top seller though. Back in the 1980s, there was very little demand for the species, but seafood distributors such as Trident Seafoods, based in Seattle, saw pollock’s potential as a cheaper cod alternative. Trident started a pollock revolution and became the largest vertically integrated seafood company in North America. Its founder, Chuck Bundrant, even became a billionaire, with a net worth Forbes estimates at $2.4 billion. Today, Alaskan pollock remains one of the top five most commonly eaten species in the U.S., but the fishery is at risk of being diminished by the ongoing trade war with China.

The species’ dominance could change if markets become unavailable because of shifts in global seafood processing and distribution due to an escalating international trade war. Last summer, China put in place a retaliatory tariff of 25% for seafood products. Then the U.S. proposed a 10% increase for tariffs on seafood imported from China. The issue here is that a portion of seafood caught by American fishermen is shipped to China for filleting and processing before being re-exported back in the U.S. for Americans to buy. While this seems like a wildly inefficient move, it has been, in fact, a commonly used method to cut costs. That meant when Alaskan pollock was processed in China and re-exported to America, it was included on the tariff lists.

After reports came out that the tariffs were harming the American fishing industry, particularly in Alaska, the U.S. announced that certain species of fish caught in the state would be excluded from the tariff list. Alaskan pollock is included in this group and will not be taxed when re-entering America. But the exemption doesn’t solve all problems for Alaskan fishermen and processors.

According to an FAO market report from January, Trump’s trade war “could end up favoring Russian Federation (and Chinese) exporters at the expense of Alaska processors.” This is because foreign fishing competitors can still ship pollock caught in their waters to China for lower-cost processing and then re-export to the U.S. tariff free. It seems like a bad turn of events for Alaskan fishermen and processors.

Read the full story at Forbes

 

How Trump’s trade war kept Russian fish sticks in US school lunchrooms

February 11, 2019 — A trade decision by the Trump administration has inadvertently protected a price advantage enjoyed by Russian-caught fish sold in the US, much of which ends up in fish sticks served to American school children.

For years, Alaskan fishermen have been frustrated by foreign competition from Russia, particularly in the lucrative pollock market. Caught in Russian waters, this cold-water cousin of the cod is processed in China before being sold in the US for use in frozen and breaded fish products, as well as imitation crab meat.

Russian pollock costs less than its US-caught equivalent. That’s helped it gain share of the roughly $200 million US market for frozen pollock, to the point that by 2017, about half the fish sticks served in US school cafeterias were made from fish caught in Russia and pumped with additives in China, according to the Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers, a trade group that represents 14 different seafood companies.

Domestic fish producers thought President Donald Trump would fix all that. The administration’s move to slap a 10% tariff last year on thousands of imports from China was supposed to erase the price advantage enjoyed by Russian fish. But instead of fixing the problem, the Trump administration has made things worse for Alaskan fishermen.

As the Bering Sea warms, this skipper is chasing pollock to new places

February 7, 2019 — The pollock fishing in the Bering Sea was “about as good as it gets,” skipper Dan Martin said as he steered his 133-foot trawler, the Commodore, over a dense school of the fish last month.

From the bridge, Martin watched as his sonar showed the fish streaming into his net – so thick that his instruments couldn’t distinguish the pollock from the ocean floor.

After just a few hours of fishing, Martin had filled the Commodore with more than 200 tons of pollock. As the wind and waves picked up, he started the nine-hour run back to Dutch Harbor, the Aleutian Island port.

The trip was what Martin called “classic” winter fishing: The pollock could be easily found at their traditional spawning grounds. But that’s not the case year-round, Martin said.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

US shutdown delays NOAA surveys that influence groundfish TACs

February 7, 2019 — Some of the important summer research surveys that the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) conducts each year off the shores of Alaska to estimate the health of key commercially caught groundfish stocks like pollock and Pacific cod could face delays due to the recent partial government shutdown, officials said.

In a report to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, said that the shutdown that sent most of its staffers home from Dec. 22, 2018, until Jan. 25 has already affected one research cruise, a winter pre-spawning acoustic survey of pollock stocks in the Gulf of Alaska.

“Unfortunately, due to the delay in starting the survey, the first two legs (in the Shumagin Islands and outer Kenai regions) will not be conducted,” science center staffers wrote in a report to the NPFMC.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Alaska pollock’s new top promoter: Upping price may be only way to grow; trashing Russia could backfire

February 5, 2019 — Given that the harvesters of Alaska pollock are limited in how much they can catch and there is no shortage of sales, the only sensible tack to grow business seems to be increasing the fish’s value on the market, believes Craig Morris, the new CEO of Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP).

Also, he’s not sure it makes sense to keep attacking Russian pollock as an inferior product.

“Russia is making a major investment in their fleet,” he said. “Potentially the quality differences between US and Russian pollock in five to 10 years are less than they are today. I think that’s one of the things we need to talk through … I would hate for us to invest millions of dollars to differentiate ourselves from Russian pollock and then, at the end of that campaign, [find out] the way that we chose to differentiate ourselves doesn’t make any sense.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

USDA confirms major US pollock purchase

January 25, 2019 — A USD 30 million (EUR 26.5 million) commitment from the United States government to buy Alaska Pollock will help mitigate the effects of the U.S.-China trade war on producers.

Due to the U.S. government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Agriculture notified the Association of Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP) via phone that it will soon publish a solicitation so that Alaska pollock suppliers can bid on USD 30 million worth of deliveries to food banks across the country.

The USD 30 million solicitation is in addition to the USD 7.6 million (EUR 6.7 million) that USDA is already purchasing to support the National School Lunch Program, GAPP CEO Craig Morris said.

Morris said the purchase was a win for the U.S. pollock sector.

“We should be really proud that people who are in need are going to get a really nutritious product, and it is great for our industry, which has had challenging times,” Morris said. “There is a lot of demand for our product and this announcement … shows that we are going to have even more demand than a couple of days ago.”

Last fall Alaska legislators pushed for the USD 30 million (EUR 26.5 million) purchase to help offset losses from the U.S.- China trade war, and the news is finally official.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

ALASKA: Pollock ‘A’ season starts amid federal shutdown

January 23, 2019 –Pollock “A” season began Sunday at noon.

This year the total allowable catch is 1.397 million metric tons up from last year’s 1.364 million metric tons.

The partial federal government shutdown has caused some hiccups for the fishery, but it still started as scheduled Sunday.

Unalaska Mayor Frank Kelty said Juneau has two regular fish managers on the job, but local National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) offices like Unalaska’s are closed.

Read the full story at Alaska Pubic Media

NOAA brings back inspectors to get Alaska cod, pollock boats on water

January 21, 2019 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this month brought federal inspectors back from furlough to certify cod and pollock fishing boats in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, but has yet to bring back personnel necessary to free up boats for harvesting in New England, the Washington Post reports.

As the US federal government’s shutdown rolls into its record-setting fourth week, some constituencies have managed to obtain relief, while others remain shut out, according to the newspaper.

Count Alaska’s congressional delegation among those with apparently enough influence or luck.

As an Alaska radio station reported late last month how NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) wasn’t able to do the required inspections of scales for weighing fish on boats or monitoring equipment. Without the inspections, harvesters in their state would not have been able to catch cod starting on Jan. 1 or pollock beginning on Jan. 20.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News