Saving Seafood

Was Your Seafood Caught With Slave Labor? New Database Helps Retailers Combat Abuse

February 1, 2018 — The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, known best for its red, yellow and green sustainable seafood-rating scheme, is unveiling its first Seafood Slavery Risk Tool on Thursday. It’s a database designed to help corporate seafood buyers assess the risk of forced labor, human trafficking and hazardous child labor in the seafood they purchase.

The tool’s release comes on the heels of a new report that confirms forced labor and human rights abuses remain embedded in Thailand’s fishing industry, years after global media outlets first documented the practice.

The 134-page report by Human Rights Watch shows horrific conditions continue. That’s despite promises from the Thai government to crack down on abuses suffered by mostly migrants from countries like Myanmar and Cambodia — and despite pressure from the U.S. and European countries that purchase much of Thailand’s seafood exports. (Thailand is the fourth-largest seafood exporter in the world).

For U.S. retailers and seafood importers, ferreting slavery out of the supply chain has proved exceedingly difficult. Fishing occurs far from shore, often out of sight, while exploitation and abuse on vessels stem from very complex social and economic dynamics.

“Companies didn’t know how to navigate solving the problem,” says Sara McDonald, Seafood Watch project manager for the Slavery Risk Tool.

The new Seafood Watch database, which took two years to design, assigns slavery risk ratings to specific fisheries and was developed in collaboration with Liberty Asia and the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership. Like Seafood Watch’s color-coded ratings, the Seafood Slavery Risk Tool aims to keep it simple — a set criteria determines whether a fishery will earn a critical, high, moderate or low risk rating.

A “critical risk” rating, for example, means credible evidence of forced labor or child labor has been found within the fishery itself. Albacore, skipjack and yellowfin tuna caught by the Taiwanese fleet gets a critical risk rating. A “low risk” fishery, like Patagonian toothfish in Chile (also known as Chilean seabass), is one with good regulatory protections and enforcement, with no evidence of abuses in related industries.

Read the full story at National Public Radio

 

Nonprofits ramp up campaign to increase protections for Pacific bluefin tuna

August 25, 2017 — Ahead of an international conference scheduled next week to discuss rebuilding the Pacific bluefin tuna population, several organizations and influential leaders have urged countries to act quickly to stop what they claim is a steep decline in the species’ numbers.

For years, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch initiative has urged people to avoid the fish because of its low numbers, but the campaign has picked up steam in advance of Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission’s Northern Committee 13th Regular Session in Busan, South Korea, scheduled to begin on Monday, 28 August. Those involved in the week-long talks centered on conservation measures for the Pacific bluefin tuna include the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Japan, with the latter country being the most dominant market for the species.

Among those speaking out included former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who said the current situation not only threatens the ecology but the economy as well.

“Unsustainable fishing isn’t just the enemy of conservation, it’s the enemy of fishermen everywhere,” said Kerry in a statement on the aquarium’s blog. “We know we can do better. That is why we should all be invested in the difficult task of turning things around and getting Pacific bluefin tuna on a path to recovery.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

2017 SeaWeb Seafood Summit packs a sustainable, newsy punch

June 19, 2017 — The 2017 SeaWeb Seafood Summit, which took place 5 to 7 June in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., brought together more than 580 global representatives of the seafood industry, the conservation community, academia, government, and the media for in-depth discussions, presentations and networking around the issue of sustainable seafood.

Here’s a review of the news that was made at this year’s summit:

A major topic of discussion at the conference was pre-competitive collaboration, with several panels and keynotes approaching the issues from different angles. In the pre-conference on Sunday, 4 June, attendees heard from Nira Desai, the director of strategy and learning for the World Cocoa, a key player in the development of CocoaAction, a sustainability movement in the cocoa industry:

Cocoa industry offers seafood a crash course in pre-competitive collaboration

Pre-competitive collaboration will also play a key role in the future of global aquaculture, according to experts at the conference:

Success of “blue revolution” will depend heavily on pre-competitive collaboration, seafood experts say

In other big news for aquaculture, on Monday, 5 June, Seafood Watch upgraded farmed salmon certified by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council to its “Good Alternative” rating, marked “a watershed moment for the sustainability credentials of farmed salmon”:

Seafood Watch upgrades ASC-certified farmed salmon to “Good Alternative”

Later on Monday, 5 June, the 2017 Seafood Champion Awards were handed out at a ceremony in Chihuly Gardens in Seattle. SeafoodSource profiled each of this year’s winners:

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MASSACHUSETTS: Cape fishermen push dogfish, skate at expo

March 23, 2017 — Chatham fishermen Charlie Dodge, Jamie Eldredge, and Greg Connors walked the crowded aisles of the Seafood Expo North America Monday, one of the largest seafood shows in the world, drawing more than 21,000 attendees and exhibitors over three days.

The men were there to meet wholesale fish buyers and distributors looking to market their catch: skates — a kite-shaped fish related to sharks — and dogfish, a small coastal shark.

Dogfish and skates may not be ready to join heavyweights like salmon and shrimp, but with help from the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, as well as federal and state grants to assist with marketing, they are slowly gaining a foothold in domestic markets.

“It would be way better if it stays within the country,” Dodge said of dogfish, which, like skates is largely exported to Europe and Asia, and fetch relatively low prices, with skates at 23 cents per pound on average in 2015 and dogfish fluctuating between 11 cents and 22 cents per pound. In 2015, cod, by comparison, averaged $1.90 per pound.

Not long ago Chatham was one of the top cod ports in the country, but that stock is considered to be at historically low levels and landings state-wide collapsed from 27.5 million pounds in 2001 to 2.9 million pounds in 2015. Both skates and dogfish are plentiful and considered sustainably managed by organizations like the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the Marine Stewardship Council and Seafood Watch. That message — a local, sustainable and affordable fish — has helped convince institutional clients like the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Read the full story at Cape Cod 

JANE LUBCHENCO & BRAD PETTINGER: With America’s fisheries rebounding, we can’t turn back

November 28, 2016 — The following is excerpted from an opinion piece written by Jane Lubchenco and Brad Pettinger. It was originally published Saturday in The Oregonian:

In the last 20 years, one of the country’s most valuable natural resources has transformed from a national disaster to a great American recovery story. But unless you’re a fishery scientist or a fisherman who suffered through the near collapse of a fishery, you’ve probably never heard the story.

We lived it.

We’ve been working along the West Coast for 40 years and can attest to the catastrophic collapse of a once massive groundfish fishery. We know fixing it was hard and messy. But we also know that troubled fisheries in the United States and around the world should look to our success and others for lasting solutions.

In the early 2000s, the fishery was in terrible shape. A number of rockfish species were becoming significantly overfished. As long-lived species, their recovery was expected to take decades. Level of discards of “bycatch” — accidental catch that occurs when fishing for target species – was high. This led to the fishery being declared a ‘federal disaster.’ Fish, fishermen and the communities that relied on them were suffering, and it was clear that if the system hadn’t yet hit rock bottom, it soon would.

Fortunately, potential economic extinction is a strong motivator. Fishermen teamed with scientists, conservationists and government managers. In 2011, we adopted a new approach that would bring science, accountability and long-term sustainability to a system that badly needed them.

Where previous management approaches placed numerous and strict limits on when, where and how boats could fish, the new approach established and managed secure fishing privileges for the fishery. Scientists used sound data to determine the amount of each species that could be caught each year while still allowing the species to recover. That total annual catch limit was divided among members of the fishery.

In five short years, the conservation turnaround has been remarkable and faster than anticipated. Species have rebuilt, bycatch discarding decreased by 75 percent and fishery managers have increased the amount of fish that can be sustainably caught. In fact, the fishery was recently certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council and received a slew of top ratings from Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.

Read the full opinion piece at The Oregonian

Some businesses shun Mississippi shrimp over skimmer nets

May 25, 2016 — Thousands of restaurants and stores across America could be shying away from some Mississippi caught shrimp because a small portion of the shrimp fleet isn’t taking steps to save sea turtles, a watchdog group says.

None of the boats that fish Mississippi waters using skimmer trawls, which allow the net to rise above the water to catch shrimp that can jump over the more prevalent “otter” nets, are required to use turtle excluder devices that allow turtles to escape the nets before they drown. The theory is the nets are emptied more often and therefore the turtles won’t drown.

Oceana, the watchdog group, released a report Tuesday on the effects of using TEDs on sea turtles and bycatch, the portion of the catch that’s gets swept up with the shrimp then discarded. It said the vast majority of Mississippi shrimpers, including most of the boats using skimmers, use TEDs. But because skimmers aren’t required to use them, Seafood Watch, a group that ranks seafood according to its sustainability, has put skimmer-caught seafood on its red, or avoid, list.

Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers Announce Updated Seafood Watch Recommendations for King and Snow Crab in Alaska

March 2, 2016 — The following was released by the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers:

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch® program has just released new and updated assessments on King and Snow crab from Alaska. Bristol Bay Red King (Paralithoides camtschaticus) crab from the Eastern Bering Sea has been elevated to a “Best Choice” by Seafood Watch. With this updated recommendation, all of the major crab fisheries in the Eastern Bering Sea, including two species of Snow crab (Chionoecetes opilio and C. bairdi) and Blue King crab from St. Matthews Island (P. platypus) meet Seafood Watch’s “Best Choice” standard.

The updated Seafood Watch recommendations maintain the “Avoid” status for all crab fisheries in the Russian portion of the Bering Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the Northern Sea of Japan. These “Avoid” listings reflect the fact that stocks are at critically low levels as a result of rampant illegal fishing and highly ineffective management.

“With these updated recommendations the Seafood Watch program is just confirming what we have known for years. King and Snow crab from Alaska is clearly the ‘Best Choice’ if you care about the health of the oceans and wish to support sustainable fisheries. We hope that consumers, retailers, and those in the food service industry will use these recommendations to make informed purchasing decisions and demand King and Snow crab from Alaska,” said Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers Science & Policy Analyst Ruth Christiansen.

View a PDF of the release

Aramark To Source All Canned Tuna From MSC Certified Sources By April 2016

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [SeafoodNews] — October 16, 2015 — Major foodservice distributor Aramark plans to source all of its canned skipjack and albacore tuna products certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) by April 2016.

The $15 billion global supplier of food, facilities management, and uniforms, developed the plan in consultations with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program and the MSC. When the transition is complete in April 2016, Aramark will have converted an estimated 2.5 million pounds of tuna to sustainably sourced product.

“The Marine Stewardship Council congratulates Aramark on its commitment to source from MSC certified tuna fisheries. In making certified sustainable seafood available to its customers, Aramark is helping to raise consumer awareness about the importance of ensuring wild fish supplies for generations to come,” said Brian Perkins, MSC Regional Director, Americas.

All contracted canned tuna products Aramark purchases in the U.S. will meet green “Best Choice” or yellow “Good Alternative” by Seafood Watch recommendations: all skipjack canned tuna products will come from Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified fisheries; and all albacore canned tuna products will be pole-and-line caught or from MSC certified fisheries, whenever available.

“Aramark is committed to providing our consumers with safe, high-quality, nutritious food that is sourced responsibly,” said Scott Barnhart, Senior Vice President, Global Supply Chain and Procurement, Aramark. “By transitioning to 100% sustainable canned tuna, we are strengthening our responsible sourcing practices, while delivering on our mission to enrich and nourish lives.”

This transition is the next significant step in Aramark’s sustainable seafood commitment. The company has already transitioned half of its total seafood purchases to sustainable sources. As of October 2014, 99% of frozen fin fish purchases met the Seafood Watch® “Best Choice” and “Good Alternative” recommendations.

“Aramark’s commitment is helping to transform the marketplace,” said Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly, Director of Seafood Watch®. “By creating more demand for seafood from ocean-friendly sources that protect sea life and habitats.”

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.