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National Fisheries Institute Statement on Reinstatement of Tariff Exclusions

March 24, 2022 — The following was released by the National Fisheries Institute:

The National Fisheries Institute (NFI) is pleased to have helped lead the effort to reduce costs for its members and promote free and fair trade through the reduction of tariffs.

The U.S. Trade Representative’s decision to reinstate previously expired exclusions on fisheries products will not only benefit American workers throughout the seafood value chain but also will help make the healthiest animal protein on the planet more available and affordable. This is ultimately a tax cut for American families, at a time of significant supply chain and inflationary challenges.

NFI continues to advocate for responsible trade policies that directly benefit American seafood workers and the American consumers who depend on those workers for a reliable supply of nutritious seafood.

Robert DeHaan
Vice President, Government Affairs
National Fisheries Institute

Can the Seafood Supply Chain Hold as Demand Rises?

February 14, 2022 — While the seafood sector appears well positioned for growth, can the supply chain hold as demand rises? The Food Institute takes a closer look at some of the category’s recent developments.

Supply chain implications as demand grows

Fresh and frozen seafood product revenues were higher over the last year and Allied Market Research projects sales to rise at a 2.5% CAGR through 2027.

Yet, potential issues await merchandisers that are unable to keep pace with growing consumer demand for a wider array of seafood options, beginning with the rising interest in preparing seafood at home in reaction to the pandemic.

Supply chain restraints, such as declining quotas for some wild-caught seafood species, are also causing out-of-stocks and increasing the demand for products that are in short supply, which is helping to drive inflation. This includes most shellfish products, which because of fishing restrictions, were facing lower harvests in 2021 and lower quotas in 2022.

Read the full story at The Food Institute

ARA BUAKAMSRI: Major change for the Thai and global seafood industry

July 27, 2017 — Thailand is on the brink of making real progress toward the elimination of destructive fishing and human rights abuses in its seafood supply chains. As a potential yellow card de-listing from the European Commission looms, it remains to be seen whether the country will take the steps needed to fully meet the standards to eliminate human rights abuse in the seafood industry.

It’s fair to say that Thai authorities have made progress in key areas, including reforms to the legal and regulatory framework for fishing that was drawn up in 1947, along with improvements to and the enforcement of labour regulations. At the UN Ocean Conference in New York this year, Thai delegates announced a voluntary commitment to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing by rigorously controlling, monitoring, and inspecting all Thai-flagged fishing vessels operating inside and outside Thai waters. A key piece of this commitment is to eliminate all IUU fishing in Thai fishing fleets by 2019.

Understandably, this progress has been met with criticism, seen by some as insufficient and cosmetic.

Read the full opinion piece at the Bangkok Post

SIMBA Seafood Traceability System Improves Productivity with Real Time Production and Inventory Updates for Management, Operations and Accounting

July 27, 2017 — REDMOND, Wash. — The following was released by Dynamic Systems, Inc.:

Dynamic Systems, Inc., a leader in Automated Seafood Solutions has updated SIMBA to now track production minute to minute as it happens on the plant floor for real-time data.

Most Seafood Processors record plant production and inventory manually using paper and pen or spreadsheets. Although the system works it is time consuming and error-prone.

The SIMBA System now provides real-time information to Management for timely business decision-making. Operations can monitor each production line in real-time and identify bottlenecks or issues as they happen. And Finance can have inventory and shipping data automatically uploaded to their accounting or ERP system for immediate billing.

Plant floor data entry is accomplished seamlessly using touch screens which can be formatted to show each user only what they will need to select. Employees are able to quickly enter multiple attributes per production run, such as species, grade, color, area, etc., and print unique labels for each carton.

SIMBA’s traceability function offers granular data with depth of traceability unmatched.  Track lots through processing, commingling and re-packing. Print audit reports with the punch of a button as soon as the items are packed.

The accuracy and speed of barcode scanning allows SIMBA’s inventory and shipping information to upload in real-time for sales and invoicing. Warehouse personnel use mobile barcode scanners to record carton and pallet locations and to ship against sales orders, work orders or log cartons into specific vans.

SIMBA Solves 3 Huge Problems: “SIMBA has been a great tool for our company. It solved three huge problems: Production Tracking, Traceability, and Shipping Accuracy. We would like to expand the system in the near future.”

New Fisheries Monitoring Technology to Take Center Stage at Seafood Source Webinar

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — October 19, 2016 — This Thursday, October 20, advances in low-cost small-scale fisheries monitoring will be showcased on Seafood Source’s monthly webinar series. Viewers will learn how emerging technology is significantly smaller and cheaper than traditional vessel monitoring systems, and is helping to lead the fight against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. These new tools are also ensuring that small-scale and artisanal fishermen remain competitive as standards for seafood transparency increase.

“Small Vessels, BIG Data: Silicon Valley Takes Up the Fight Against IUU Fishing” will feature Pelagic Data Systems’ (PDS) CEO Dave Solomon and Chief Scientific Officer Melissa Garren, along with Jack Whalen of the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, and will be hosted by Seafood Source editor Cliff White. It will be held from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. EST, and is free to view with registration at seafoodsource.com.

PDS is the developer of lightweight vessel tracking systems made specially for small vessels that are being used to fight IUU fishing, and the exploitation of global fish stocks. It has partnered with fishing and conservation groups to pilot its technology in Southeast Asia, as well as Latin America and West Africa. The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership is a non-profit that works to rebuild depleted fish stocks.

Technology such as the one developed by PDS provides monitoring for vessels that are otherwise unable to accommodate large and expensive traditional satellite-based monitoring systems. Such technology is growing in importance as regulations increasingly put a premium on transparency in the seafood supply chain. Just recently, the U.S. raised standards on imported seafood, making it more important than ever for fishermen to have cheap tracking tools to verify sustainable practices.

Using vessel-monitoring tools can also help small-scale and artisanal fishermen stay competitive as the demand for seafood transparency grows. Certifications for fairly traded and sustainably caught seafood can increase the price of catch, but require more comprehensive monitoring to achieve. New technologies allow fishermen to be proactive in demonstrating they are doing things the right way, without waiting for regulations to force their hand.

Today, 95 percent of the global fishing fleet consists of small-scale vessels, and most of these are invisible to data monitoring. This allows for IUU fishing, which hurts the vast majority of the fishing industry and steals profits from legitimate fishing businesses. Filling in the data gap for small-scale fisheries has the potential to benefit law-abiding fishermen while helping to rid the world of IUU fishing.

Register for the webinar here

NISHAN DEGNARAIN & MICHAEL POSNER: Time to crack down on seafood industry’s worst abuses

May 24, 2016 — Over the last year, a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning news stories have revealed human trafficking, forced labor, and other abuses in the seafood industry. The complexity of global seafood supply chains and significant gaps in regulation have made it very difficult to track, much less remedy, these abuses.

Recently, the U.S. government has begun to expand its efforts to monitor and better regulate the seafood industry, recognizing the links between environmental sustainability and food safety. But these efforts have paid too little attention to addressing labor abuses. The solution to these labor problems will require increased regulation, improved corporate sourcing practices, and greater transparency, all predicated on a sharing of responsibility between industry, governments and other stakeholders.

According to the World Bank an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide depend on fish for nutrition. Demand for seafood will continue to rise in the future, as population growth, increasing income, and the rising middle class in developing countries like China and India drive demand.

Read the full opinion piece at CNBC

Seafood, bioscience get boost from latest Maine tech grants

May 20, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — The city of Ellsworth has landed a state grant to support development of bioscience businesses in the region, as part of a series of grant awards that will also give money to support seafood industry initiatives.

The Maine Technology Institute announced Thursday that it awarded $658,765 through its Cluster Initiative Program, aimed at studying or implementing ways to support or grow certain industries in the state.

The state-financed economic development agency awarded $398,306 to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute to advance its study of creating a market and supply chain for sustainable seafood in Maine.

The latest grant round also delivered $134,189 to Coastal Enterprises Inc.’s Maine Scallop Aquaculture Project, which MTI said aims to study the Japanese scallop aquaculture industry and explore how to adapt them to Maine waters.

Read the full story at Bangor Daily News

JOHN SACKTON: Is the MSC Making a Global Power Grab to Protect Monopoly with New Chain of Custody Program?

SEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton — August 18, 2015 — Something fishy is going on in the rarified world of the Marine Stewardship Council’s global bureaucracy.

At the moment when the Global Seafood Sustainability Initiative is rolling out pilots for benchmarking sustainability standards so as to provide interoperability, the MSC is unveiling a new program, potentially mandatory, that would lock world seafood commerce to the MSC.

The program is called the MSC Online Transaction Solution or MOTS. It is designed to require every MSC chain of custody holder to report monthly all transactions of MSC products under chain of custody, with customer name, invoice number and volume.

The MSC and its auditors could then match sales up and down the supply chain in almost real time.

Why is such a program being proposed?

The infographic for the program looks like this:

The current chain of custody requires visibility one step up and one step down, and it requires full internal batch traceability for companies with MSC chain of custody certificates.

This means an auditor can trace product up and down the supply chain, but there is no centralized electronic database of all MSC certified seafood sales.

If the MSC program had a high level of fraud or misrepresentation, there might be justification for a more rigorous system. But the MSC itself says its DNA testing has found over 99% of all MSC products tested were correctly labeled.

“The results gave us confidence that our chain of custody measures work. With other industry studies showing mislabelling levels closer to 10%, the level for MSC products was extremely low, ” said Alison Roel, product integrity manager in the MSC’s Standards team. 

If there is no credible risk of fraud in the MSC chain of custody system, what is driving the MOTS program?

Some companies are already actively engaged in full supply chain traceability, using new reporting tools sold by traceability companies. 

This can be a competitive advantage for some companies.

For example, a trader in Europe who uses such a system can guarantee to his customer that the fish he purchased from China in fact was MSC certified Alaska pollock from a particular vessel, processed by a particular company. For buyers who want such assurance, these systems will help make a sale. 

But when such information is aggregated across the global seafood industry, it gives tremendous power and leverage to the company that owns the data. 

The MSC says there are currently over 3000 companies with chain of custody certificates. They hope this number will grow to 10,000 by 2020, and they also plan to incorporate Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) products in the same chain of custody process. 

In their discussion document, the MSC says “This expansion of the program into different regions and species is accompanied with increasing concerns around the presence of fraud and Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing (IUU) in seafood supply chains in general. Addressing these challenges with the existing CoC system, such as the traceback and mass balance exercises during audits and across the supply chain, might not be cost effective enough or adequate due to their sample-based and manual nature. “ 

“The need for the MSC to look into new online solutions to maintain the credibility of its well respected CoC program was supported in the stakeholder survey in April 2012 and during several discussions with the MOTS Steering Committee and the MSC’s Technical Advisory Board (TAB). “ 

The stakeholder survey that is cited in support of this massive data collection program, asks questions such as whether users want to see a reduction in costs, reduced fraud, fewer audits and enhanced credibility. Much of these are motherhood and apple pie issues, where of course the survey respondents would say they are desirable. 

The MSC says the program, after further consultation and review and approval by the Board, would be voluntary in 2017 and have a mandatory roll-out in 2018. 

This would mean that any MSC chain of custody holder would have to report monthly – mostly with automated software – the sales volume and customers of all MSC products. 

Normally when sensitive business data is collected by an organization, especially a government or a bank, there is a very strict accountability about confidentiality and use of data.

For example, in the US, there are numerous laws protecting the confidentiality of business information for tax purposes, and of economic data collected by the National Marine Fisheries Service, all of which give businesses legal recourse to prevent abuse, and also result in fines and possible jail terms for officials that violate mandated confidentiality. NMFS for example, will not even report the volumes of catch for individual fisheries where there are less than 3 quota holders, to protect confidentiality. 

The problem with the MSC holding such sensitive data in such a visible database is the lack of accountability that comes from it being an International organization that claims only to work through CAB’s – conformity assessment bodies. 

The weakness of the MSC was highlighted during the current Alaska salmon season when a rogue client openly violated all MSC guidelines and rules regarding certificate sharing, and the MSC said they were totally powerless to take any action. Why should they be trusted to spend the resources and time necessary to secure sensitive chain of custody data when they will not secure compliance with their own rules by client groups through setting up accountability measures. 

Imagine the employee of a certifier in Russia, lets say, who is bribed to reveal the database of all export transactions of a rival company – i. e. all its customers and volumes of sales. The MSC has no control over this. Yes they can decertify the CAB, or the CAB can fire the employee, but the value of the information could be much greater than a simple job or contract.

It is a fair question to ask the industry that given the track record of interactions with the MSC, would they trust the organization with 100% visibility to all their sales and operations.

The other potential avenue of abuse is the visibility it gives the MSC into sales of all products from a fishery not going to MSC oriented customers. 

For example, full visibility of sales from the Norwegian Barents Sea cod fishery could determine what percentage of the fishery – which is 100% MSC certified, is going to customers who don’t pay for the MSC certification. This could give the MSC sales teams leverage to go to these companies, and or their suppliers, to suggest they join the MSC fishery ecosystem.

This is where such a database could entrench the MSC as a permanent seafood monopoly. Major retailers such as Metro and Ahold have committed through GSSI – the Global Seafood Sustainability Initiative – to move towards a benchmark sustainability standard that would be open to all scheme owners that met the basic requirements. It would lessen the role of private standards owners, and prevent the perversion of a conservation scheme into a arms race between standards owners to add features and requirements. 

But if the MSC database required full visibility from every MSC fishery – through the mandatory requirement for chain of custody holders – the MSC would have an effective weapon to cripple attempts to use other certification schemes. 

At that point the MSC would have data to favor its friends, and punish its enemies. 

This is what a sample screen from the Database looks like. 

Of course, the MSC claims that their global data system would be very secure. But in a world where even Pentagon and IRS computers are vulnerable to hacking, the most secure option is not to create such a database in the first place. 

Those companies that want full visibility up and down the supply chain should continue to contract with private traceability companies who can provide it. Putting the MSC into the traceability business, with a mandatory program, is a recipe for disaster. 

The MOTS program is currently being tested and piloted, and there is a public consultation period now open. 

Unfortunately, unlike GSSI and the US government, and other international bodies, the MSC does not promise full transparency for comments received during the consultation, but will only provides a summary in their decision memorandum. 

Therefore the only way this program is likely to be derailed is through the MSC stakeholder committees, especially those representing major fisheries such as Norwegian and Icelandic cod and haddock, or Alaska pollock and Alaska salmon.

These stakeholders will have to make clear that the MSC must remain in a limited role, and not enter into the global traceability business. The MSC has already said its system is 99% effective. 

The best guarantee of robust traceability is to certify entire fisheries, and have open and expansive rules for gaining certificates of custody. For example, in Iceland all the certificates are held by a non-profit body that makes them available to the entire industry. 

In Alaska, the new client for salmon, the Pacific Seafood Processors Association, also holds the certificate in trust so all users who qualify can easily use it.

Since Alaskan, Icelandic, Norwegian, New Zealand and many other major fisheries are fully certified, there is no additional benefit to add the mandatory global reporting to fight fraud in these fisheries. 

Where it is an issue is where the MSC is attempting to certify a small part of a questionable fishery. For example, MSC tuna certifications are questionable because the widespread use of FAD’s means most of the fishing is not qualified for MSC – yet the demand for the label creates pressure for fraud, and the claim a tuna is FAD free when it is not. 

In this case, private traceability systems, such as that implemented by longliner NORPAC where every tuna and swordfish can be traced back to the individual longline vessel, can easily accomplish the goal. 

We think the mandatory global database for monthly reporting of all seafood transactions by chain of custody holders is a step too far, and hope the MSC board and stakeholders will see this for the overreach that it is. 

To participate in the comment system, please go here: 

In the interests of transparency, we will also be happy to reprint a certain number of comments from companies and organizations on this proposal. Just send us a copy.  This proposal certainly deserves an industry wide debate.

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

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