Saving Seafood

US tilapia demand falls

January 15, 2019 — Americans’ consumption of tilapia has fallen in recent years, while demand from Russia has surged, according to a new report.

While the United States is still the largest importer of tilapia, imports slid an estimated 10 KT in 2017, according to a Fact.MR report.

The U.S. trends mimic the global tilapia market, which declined 6 percent in the first two quarters of 2017, thanks to weakening consumer demand, Fact.MR found.

Consumers globally are buying other specialty fish and are more interested in pangasius, analysts said.

“A special palate for pangasius has been witnessed among seafood consumers worldwide,” Fact.MR said in the report. “The U.S. and China continue to remain the largest consumers of pangasius. Following the increasing domestic demand and lower prices of pangasius, Chinese tilapia farmers are adopting farming of other fish varieties including pangasius.”

Meanwhile, the Russian Federation imported 4 KT more tilapia in 2017 versus 2016.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Farm bill’s untold story: What Congress did for fish sticks

December 21, 2018 — The Farm Bill Congress passed last week will be known for many things. It increases subsidies for farmers and legalizes industrial hemp. But for Alaska, the bigger impact might be what the bill does for fish sticks served in school lunchrooms across America.

The national school lunch program has for decades required school districts to buy American-made food. But that doesn’t always happen when it comes to fish.

“There was a major loophole,” Sen. Dan Sullivan said. “Major. That allowed, for example, Russian-caught pollock, processed in China with phosphates, sent back to the United States for purchase in the U.S. School lunch program.”

Let’s break that down: Rather than buy fish sticks made of Alaska pollock, many school districts buy fish caught in Russian waters that are frozen, sent to China, thawed, cut up, sometimes plumped up with additives, refrozen and sent to the U.S. And it qualifies for a “Product of USA” label because it’s battered and breaded here.

“Literally turns a generation of kids in America off of seafood when they have this as fish sticks in their school lunches,” Sullivan said. Aside from being bad for Alaska’s fishing industry, Sullivan said the twice-frozen Russian pollock is bad seafood and kids won’t like fish day at school.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

‘Buy American’ provision survives in US Farm Bill, big win for Alaskan pollock

December 12, 2018 — Alaskan pollock harvesters and processors have scored a major victory over their Russian competitors in the waning moments of the 115th US Congress, promising to end their dominance in US school meals.

A provision championed by senator Dan Sullivan, an Alaskan Republican, to close a major loophole in the US Department of Agriculture’s “buy American” food rules for school systems, has survived and is included in the text of the final 2018 farm bill conference report released Monday night by House and Senate agriculture committee leaders, Undercurrent News has confirmed.

The legislation must still go back to the floors of both chambers for final votes before Congress concludes, which is expected to happen by Dec. 21. But those final steps are considered largely perfunctory and president Donald Trump could wind up signing the bill before the end of this week.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Only way is up for pollock prices in 2019

November 20, 2018 — The prices for all forms of pollock look set to continue to increase next year, sources in the US, Russia, China and Europe told Undercurrent News.

Prices for pin-bone out (PBO) blocks, double-frozen fillet blocks, and the headed and gutted (H&G) raw material the latter is based on, all look set for higher levels in 2019, having already firmed in 2018, the sources said.

During the China Fisheries & Seafood Expo, held Nov. 7-9 in a venue close to Qingdao, ex-warehouse prices of around $3,500 per-metric-ton were being discussed for PBO blocks for A season. Prices for B season of 2018 were done around $3,350/t. Also, double frozen fillet block prices of around $3,200/t are also being discussed for next year.

“We see the price of $3,500/t reached and confirmed and we will take it up from there,” Fedor Kirsanov, CEO of Russian Fishery Company (RFC), told Undercurrent at the show, of the situation with PBO. US suppliers and also a large European buyer confirmed this level.

The level in the A season of 2018 was around $3,000/t (see image below and use the Undercurrent prices portal for interactive data), a leap from the very low level of around $2,350/t hit in the B season of 2017, as the price bottomed out. The pace of the increase has shocked buyers, but producers have been quick to point out this is only a return to a historical norm.

“We felt the fall was pretty quick. Now, it’s going more back to normal. It’s also not like pollock has gone off the charts. It’s back to a level where everyone can make money. It’s going back to a level where producers can make investments,” Tom Enlow, CEO of UniSea — a pollock, cod and crab processing plant in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, which is owned by Japan’s Nippon Suisan Kaisha (Nissui) — told Undercurrent.

The speed of the price increase has been driven by new markets taking the fish, he said.

“When the prices were very low, the producers looked at new markets. There has been more focus on deepskin for Asia and also surimi. Demand for surimi has been very strong, due to the shortfall in warmwater surimi,” the Nissui executive said. “The shortage in warmwater is the reason Thailand is so hot at the moment for surimi. Also, Japan is stable, but they take almost half of the surimi the US produces.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Russian seafood market faces challenge of generational taste shift

October 17, 2018 — A new survey on Russian seafood consumption has outlined the challenges facing suppliers of the domestic market.

The survey, conducted in late August by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM), the biggest opinion research center in the country, asked 1,600 respondents aged 18 or older about their seafood preferences and buying habits. VCIOM presented the results at the II Global Fishery Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia in September, revealing price, quality, and convenience as the three biggest impediments to greater seafood consumption in Russia.

The survey’s results were not all negative – 73 percent of the population said they eat seafood at least once per week. Of that total, 42 percent of respondents said they eat fish several times a week, and an additional two percent said they eat seafood at least once every day. Just six percent said they don’t consume fish at all.

However, hiding deeper in the survey was worse news for the seafood industry. Twenty-seven percent of respondents said they had reduced the amount of fish they had purchased recently, with just 11 percent increasing their seafood buying. Those who had reduced their spending cited higher prices (38 percent) and the absence of seafood of appropriate quality (36 percent) as the main reasons behind the decrease in their consumption.

The survey shows Russia’s seafood market is experiencing considerable headwinds as consumers’ purchasing habits due to ongoing economic hardships and a generational shift in eating preferences, according to Stanislav Naumov, the group director of the X5 Retail Group, the biggest retail company in Russia.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

9 countries and the EU protected the Arctic Ocean before the ice melts

October 12, 2018 —  It’s easy to miss the truly historic nature of the moment.

Last week, nine countries—the U.S., Canada, Russia, Norway, Greenland/Denmark, China, Japan, Iceland, South Korea, and the European Union (which includes 28 member states)—signed a treaty to hold off on commercial fishing in the high seas of the Arctic Ocean for at least 16 years while scientists study the potential impacts on wildlife in the far north. It was an extraordinary act of conservation—the rare case where major governments around the world proceeded with caution before racing into a new frontier to haul up sea life with boats and nets. They set aside 1.1 million square miles of ocean, an area larger than the Mediterranean Sea.

But to really grasp the significance of this milestone, consider why such a step was even possible, and what that says about our world today. For more than 100,000 years the central Arctic Ocean has been so thoroughly covered in ice that the very idea of fishing would have seemed ludicrous.

That remained true as recently as 20 years ago. But as human fossil-fuel emissions warmed the globe, the top of the world has melted faster than almost everywhere else. Now, in some years, up to 40 percent of the central Arctic Ocean—the area outside each surrounding nation’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone—is open water in summer. That hasn’t yet been enough to make fishing attractive. But it is enough that boats may be lured in soon.

So, for perhaps the first time in human history, the nations of the world set aside and protected fishing habitat that, for the moment, does not even yet exist. The foresight is certainly something to applaud. But it’s hard to escape the fact that the international accord is a tacit acknowledgment—including by the United States, which is moving to back out of the Paris climate accords—that we are headed, quite literally, into uncharted waters.

“The Arctic is in a transient state—it’s not stable,” Rafe Pomerance, a former State Department official who once worked on Arctic issues and now chairs a network of Arctic scientists from nongovernmental organizations and serves on the polar research board of the National Academy of Sciences, said last year.

Read the full story at National Geographic

‘Historic’ Agreement Bans Commercial Fishing Across a Vast Swath of the Arctic

October 4, 2018 — As the Arctic’s mantle of protective sea ice grows smaller and sadder by the year, new waters are opening up, setting the stage for industry and tourism to take off. But a vast swath of those chilly seas will soon be off-limits to at least one human enterprise: commercial-scale fishing.

On Wednesday, nine nations and the European Union signed an agreement to place a moratorium on unregulated commercial fishing across 1.1 million square miles of the central Arctic Ocean. These waters are becoming increasingly accessible as Arctic sea ice melts, and conservationists have been pushing for more protections so that exposed and potentially fragile ecosystems can be properly studied before we screw them up beyond repair.

Apparently, Arctic nations and those looking to exploit the ocean’s riches in the future—a list that includes the U.S., Russia, Canada, China, and Japan—are listening. The moratorium, which builds off protections the U.S. put in place in 2009, will be in effect for 16 years unless a science-based management plan can be established sooner, according to a press release from Pew Charitable Trusts. There’s also the potential to extend the fishing ban for additional five year increments depending on the results of a new research and monitoring program, which will focus on how the central Arctic Ocean ecosystem is changing and how best to manage any emerging fisheries.

Read the full story at Earther

US, Russia, China, others to sign agreement preventing illegal fishing in Arctic

October 3, 2018 — The United States is set to join nine other countries and organizations in a first-of-its kind agreement to protect Arctic Ocean waters from commercial fishing.

The pact, scheduled to be signed Wednesday, 3 October in Ilslissat, Greenland, comes after two years of negotiations between countries with coastlines on the Arctic as well as other major fishing powers. Those nations concluded talks last November.

The agreement comes as polar melting has reduced the Arctic ice cap and open new areas in the central part of the ocean for vessels. That means commercial fishing may be viable in those areas.

However, nine years ago, the U.S. closed its exclusive economic zone in the Arctic off the northern Alaskan coast to commercial fishing operations until government officials learned more about the region’s ecosystem. Alaska fishermen have expressed fears that the melting could lead to foreign vessels fishing in U.S. waters.

In a statement released 1 October, the U.S. State Department said the Greenland agreement cuts down chances of illegal fishing taking place in U.S. waters currently off limits to American fishermen.

Under terms of the agreement, the participating nations must create plan to study the Arctic’s ecosystem and not just for fishing purposes.

Michael Byers, an international law professor at the University of British Columbia, praised the countries for their forward thinking on the matter in a Canadian Press article.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Alaska pollock industry: Trump’s China tariff exceptions help the Russians

September 20, 2018 — If president Donald Trump was hoping to get a pat on the back from the Alaskan pollock industry for keeping its re-processed fillets off the list of seafood products to receive additional tariffs when imported from China, he will be sadly disappointed.

Rather, thanks to some apparent confusion over the harmonized tariff codes, the administration’s exemptions appear to help the Russian pollock industry more, advises James Gilmore, the director of public affairs for the At-Sea Processors Association (APA), one of the loudest voices for Alaska pollock producers, in an email to Undercurrent News.

“If our interpretation is correct, Alaska pollock producers face stiff tariffs in China and Russia’s ban on US seafood imports, including Alaska pollock, remains in effect,” Gilmore said. “Meanwhile, our principal international competition—Russian pollock processed in China—enjoys tariff-free access to our domestic market.”

Gilmore’s comments follow closely those made by Fedor Kirsanov, the CEO of Russian Fishery Company, one of the country’s largest pollock quota holders, who told Undercurrent the trade war is helping to boost his prices.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Farm Bill provision would tilt school pollock, tuna purchases back to US

September 19, 2018 — US pollock and tuna harvesters don’t normally care much about the so-called Farm Bill, the massive, every-five-year legislation that helps to, among other things, preserve crop subsidies for American corn and soybean growers and nutrition programs for the unemployed. But they do this time.

That’s because Alaska Republican senator Dan Sullivan has placed a provision in one of the two bills now being worked out in a congressional conference committee that would force the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to more aggressively enforce the “buy American” rules required for schools to receive federal reimbursement for the meals they serve to children, including fish.

The US pollock industry maintains that strapped-for-cash school systems aren’t following those rules, resulting in some 60% of the pollock they serve to be what they claim is less expensive and inferior, twice-frozen fillets sourced originally from Russia. They support Sullivan’s change.

“We are mindful of the need to maximize the use of federal dollars in procuring fish products for school meal programs and for school districts to maximize available school lunch foods,” said the At-sea Processors Association (APA), a group that represents six seafood companies that maintain interests in or operate 16 US-flag, high-tech trawl catcher/processor vessels in the Alaska pollock fishery, in a recent statement.

“However, it is similarly important to maximize the nutritional value of school lunch meals for children and to ensure that students’ early exposure to fish products is positive in order to promote incorporating more seafood meals into diets consistent with federal dietary guidelines.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News