Saving Seafood

Sam’s Club Awarded Ocean Champion Award for Certified Sustainable Omega 3 Supplements

Photo Caption: Accepting the award on behalf of Jill Turner-Mitchael is David Badeen, Vice President HealthCare for Sam’s Club. Shown Left to Right – Sam’s Club President and Chief Executive Officer, John Furner; Sam’s Club Executive Vice President and Chief Merchandising Officer, Ashley Buchanan; Sam’s Club VP Health Care, David Badeen; Marine Stewardship Council U.S. Program Director, Eric Critchlow.

October 20, 2017 — The following was released by the Marine Stewardship Council:

The Marine Stewardship Council today awarded Sam’s Club and the Health and Wellness Team the US Ocean Champion award for their dedication to providing certified sustainable supplements to their customers. Under the leadership of Jill Turner-Mitchael, Senior Vice President of Consumables and Health & Wellness, 100% of Sam’s Club private label Member’s Mark fish and krill oil supplement products are traceable to a MSC-certified sustainable fishery.

“I am honored to be presenting Jill and her team with this award on behalf of the Marine Stewardship Council,” said Eric Critchlow, MSC Program Director, USA. “Jill’s leadership in sourcing certified sustainable supplements and allowing the consumer to choose between certified and non-certified is bold and, most importantly, demonstrates to consumers that they can make healthy choices for themselves and the ocean.”

By educating consumers about the importance of sustainably sourced products at point-of-purchase, Sam’s Club is driving measurable change of empowering millions of Americans to choose supplements that support healthy oceans and thriving communities.

“At Sam’s Club we know our members care about having access to quality products at a great value that are healthy choices for themselves as well as the environment,” said Jill Turner-Mitchael, Senior Vice President Consumables and Health & Wellness. “Our team works very closely with our suppliers to source the best product from the best merchants and think this is a great example of how everyone wins when we do just that.”

Only seafood products that carry the blue MSC ecolabel can be traced back through the supply chain to sustainable fisheries, ensuring complete traceability to a sustainable source. To achieve MSC certification, fisheries must meet 28 performance indicators for sustainability across three principles: sustainable fish stocks, minimizing environmental impacts, and effective management. The most common MSC certified sources of Omega-3s include cod, hake, hoki, krill, pollock, salmon and sardine.

Covering more than 70% of the planet’s surface, oceans supply the oxygen we breathe and are vital to human health and well-being. As a leader in the sustainable supplements sector, Sam’s Club is contributing to the long-term sustainability of ocean environments.

North Carolina Fisheries Association Weekly Update for October 13, 2017

October 13, 2017 — The following was released by the North Carolina Fisheries Association:

HAPPY FRIDAY THE 13th!!!

OCTOBER IS SEAFOOD MONTH!

Seafood month got a great kickoff in North Carolina with last Saturday’s Fisherman’s Village on the Morehead City waterfront, and on Sunday morning at the Blessing of the Fleet.

For a message from Chris Oliver, Assistant Administrator for NOAA Fisheries, or NMFS, click the link below.
Message from Chris Oliver about Seafood Month

FROM THE DIVISION OF MARINE FISHERIES:

Advisory committee meetings to focus on cobia management measures – Three advisory committees to the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission will meet on separate dates in October to discuss issues related to the cobia fishery.

The advisory committees will be asked to provide input to the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission on management measures contained in the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission Draft Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Migratory Group Cobia (Georgia to New York). The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s South Atlantic State/Federal Fisheries Management Board will meet Oct. 19 to vote on this plan.

The draft plan includes size, bag and vessel limits to complement federal measures. Most notably, the draft plan includes several proposed options for state-specific recreational harvest targets that will give individual states more flexibility in developing management measures to best suit their needs.

Currently, the recreational annual catch limit for Georgia to New York is managed on a coastwide basis. This has resulted in federal closures and significant overages, disrupting fishing opportunities and jeopardizing the health of the stock.

The N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission will discuss North Carolina’s recreational cobia management measures at its Nov. 15-16 meeting at the Doubletree by Hilton Garden Inn Outer Banks in Kitty Hawk.

For more information, contact Steve Poland, cobia staff lead with the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, at 252-808-8159 or Steve.Poland@ncdenr.gov.

CALENDAR

Oct 15 – 19; ASMFC Annual Meeting; Waterside Marriott; Norfolk, VA

Oct 24; 6:00pm MFC Northern Advisory Committee; Dare County Complex; Manteo, NC

Oct 25; 6:00pm MFC Southern Advisory Committee; Cardinal Drive; Wilmington, NC

Oct 26; 6:00pm MFC Finfish Advisory Committee; DMF District Office; Morehead City, NC

Nov 8; Noon; NCFA Board of Directors; Civic Center; Washington, NC

Nov 15-16; NC Marine Fisheries Commission; Kitty Hawk

Dec 4 – 8; South Atlantic Council; Doubletree; Atlantic Beach, NC

Dec 6; Noon; NCFA Board of Directors; Civic Center, Washington, NC

Dec 11 – 14; Mid Atlantic Council; Westin Annapolis; Annapolis, MD

Lora Snyder: Help Harvey recovery by consuming sustainable Gulf seafood

October 6, 2017 — Many of the men and women who work every day to bring some of the best, sustainable seafood to your dinner plate have plenty to worry about – fishing can be hard business.

Fishers and others in the industry deal with a host of ever-changing variables: fuel prices, market fluctuations, fishery health and abundance, competition with imports, long unpredictable hours and one of the more uncertain wild cards – weather. Changing winds can mean the difference between days’ or even weeks’ worth of income.

And now, weather is becoming even more of a concern. Today, stronger and stronger storms that scientists attribute to warming oceans – a result of human-caused climate change – are becoming more common. These days bad weather is an existential threat to the industry.

According to the Chronicle Hurricane Harvey damaged or destroyed 25 percent of the Texas shrimp fleet. Oystermen predicted shortages of upcoming oyster harvests due to the runoff from Harvey’s historic rains. And then came Irma. Tragically, a Florida shrimper lost his life off the coast of Tampa, when the hurricane bulldozed up the state’s Gulf Coast.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have been devastating, but there is a unique way to help your fellow Americans. This is a great time to get better acquainted with our own healthy and sustainable seafood that’s right here in our backyard.

Read the full opinion piece at the Houston Chronicle

North Korean workers prep seafood going to US stores, restaurants

October 5, 2017 — HUNCHUN, China — The workers wake up each morning on metal bunk beds in fluorescent-lit Chinese dormitories, North Koreans outsourced by their government to process seafood that ends up in American stores and homes.

Privacy is forbidden. They cannot leave their compounds without permission. They must take the few steps to the factories in pairs or groups, with North Korean minders ensuring no one strays. They have no access to telephones or email. And they are paid a fraction of their salaries, while the rest — as much as 70 percent — is taken by North Korea’s government.

This means Americans buying salmon for dinner at Walmart or ALDI may inadvertently have subsidized the North Korean government as it builds its nuclear weapons program, an AP investigation has found. Their purchases may also have supported what the United States calls “modern day slavery” — even if the jobs are highly coveted by North Koreans.

At a time when North Korea faces sanctions on many exports, the government is sending tens of thousands of workers worldwide, bringing in revenue estimated at anywhere from $200 million to $500 million a year. That could account for a sizable portion of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, which South Korea says have cost more than $1 billion.

While the presence of North Korean workers overseas has been documented, the AP investigation reveals for the first time that some products they make go to the United States, which is now a federal crime. AP also tracked the products made by North Korean workers to Canada, Germany and elsewhere in the European Union.

Besides seafood, AP found North Korean laborers making wood flooring and sewing garments in factories in Hunchun. Those industries also export to the U.S. from Hunchun, but AP did not track specific shipments except for seafood.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

A Cheerful Story About Environmental Conservation

October 3, 2017 — October is National Seafood Month, and I have a surprise for you. It’s a cheerful story about environmental conservation. I’m serious. Don’t roll your eyes in disbelief and click away to Facebook right now; stay with me. I know the headlines about the environment have been dire recently, particularly when it comes to seafood. But when I learned the story of West Coast groundfish, a true story about people with diverse perspectives banding together and taking action — and the action worked! — I was floored. And moved, because this could become a model of success for fisheries across the globe.

First, a deep dive

In late 1999, West Coast groundfish fishermen were seeing landings plummet drastically, from a 20-year average of about 74,000 tons annually to an estimated 27,000 tons for the year 2000. At the time, the cause of the crash was deemed “undetermined, but probably natural, causes,” but stock assessments between 1999 and 2002 determined that overfishing (fish being caught faster than they could breed) played a part in the crash. The Pacific Fishery Management Council and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) declared 10 species of West Coast groundfish overfished. The environment had suffered as well, with seafloor habitats damaged by certain types of fishing gear.

Groundfish get grounded

When a stock is deemed overfished, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act requires regulators to develop a plan to rebuild the stock in as short a time as possible, while balancing and incorporating the needs of the fishing community.

Historically, fisherfolk and government regulators have had contentious relationships. Complex regulations can make the hard day-to-day work of fishing even harder. And then there are the environmentalists, who frequently have contentious relationships with both parties. But in the face of the West Coast groundfish disaster, something unprecedented occurred: fishermen, regulators, and conservationists sat down and worked together to save West Coast groundfish.

It wasn’t easy, especially for the fishermen. A management plan was put into place that included individual fishing quotas (IFQs) or “catch shares,” which meant that they had to accept drastic cutbacks on the number of fish they could catch, even species that weren’t overfished because of the possibility of bycatch, or catching a non-targeted species while catching a targeted species. The management plan also included area restrictions, seasonal closures, gear restrictions, and a mandate that a federal observer be on every fishing trip to monitor bycatch.

Read the full story at HuffPost

Salty Girl Seafood: Stop the misinformation: the oceans will not run out of fish by 2048

September 21, 2017 — This last year has been a stark reminder that we must be vigilant about questioning the information that we receive from the media. That today, as we are constantly inundated with a steady stream of the latest news, it is ever more important to question our sources, reflect on the content, and apply a critical eye to everything we read.

Last month, an article published on Forbes.com attempted to educate consumers about the status of our world’s oceans and the fish in them by painting a familiar, but largely unsubstantiated picture that has been repeatedly touted by the media in the last decade: “the oceans may run out of fish by 2048, so you should stop eating them.”

For the 1 billion people who rely on seafood for protein (largely in undeveloped countries), not eating fish isn’t much of an option — and for the many more who use seafood as a nutritious, healthful source of protein as a component of their diets, adding to the misinformation about the status of our world’s fisheries makes the notion of sustainable seafood confusing, as well as potentially damaging for the livelihoods of millions of people who depend on fishing as a way of life.

The best available evidence shows that the oceans, in fact, will not run out of fish by 2048.

Read the full opinion piece at Medium

Vatican official laments lack of fair trade label for commercial fishing

September 21, 2017 — VATICAN CITY — An upcoming world congress by the Catholic organization Apostleship of the Sea will focus on the plight of fishermen, who frequently face exploitation in carrying out their work, according to one Vatican official.

He lamented that no ‘Fair Trade’ certification exists for their product.

“We have to be educated,” Fr. Bruno Ciceri told CNA Sept. 20. “Frozen food here is cheap, but it’s because people are exploited, because there is forced labor, because there are trafficked people that work aboard these fishing vessels.”

Referring to the label given to products from developing countries that adhere to ethical standards of trading, he said, “We talk a lot about ‘Fair Trade.’ I don’t know the day when we will have ‘fair trade’ also in fishing. That will make a difference.”

Fr. Ciceri is a member of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. He is also the Vatican delegate for the Apostleship of the Sea, which provides pastoral care for seafarers and their families.

Read the full story at the Catholic News Agency

James G. Stavridis & Johan Bergenas: The fishing wars are coming

September 14, 2017 — Lawmakers are finally catching up to something that the Navy and Coast Guard have known for a long time: The escalating conflict over fishing could lead to a “global fish war.”

This week, as part of the pending National Defense Authorization Act, Congress asked the Navy to help fight illegal fishing. This is an important step. Greater military and diplomatic efforts must follow. Indeed, history is full of natural-resource wars, including over sugar, spices, textiles, minerals, opium and oil. Looking at current dynamics, fish scarcity could be the next catalyst.

The decline in nearly half of global fish stocks in recent decades is a growing and existential threat to roughly 1 billion people around the world who rely on seafood as their primary source of protein. No other country is more concerned about the increasingly empty oceans than China, whose people eat twice as much fish as the global average. Beijing is also the world’s largest exporter of fish, with 14 million fishers in a sector producing billions of dollars a year.

In order to keep its people fed and employed, the Chinese government provides hundreds of millions of dollars a year in subsidies to its distant-water fishing fleet. And in the South China Sea, it is common for its ships to receive Chinese Coast Guard escorts when illegally entering other countries’ fishing waters. As such, the Chinese government is directly enabling and militarizing the worldwide robbing of ocean resources.

Read the full opinion piece at the Washington Post

Shark Fin Ban Is Misguided, Would Undermine Sustainable U.S. Shark Fisheries, Say Experts

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) – September 14, 2017 – A ban on shark fin sales in the United States would undermine some of the planet’s most sustainable shark fisheries while harming global shark conservation efforts, according to two prominent shark scientists.

In a paper published this month in Marine Policy, Dr. David Shiffman, a Liber Ero Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C., and Dr. Robert Hueter, Director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., call proposed Congressional legislation banning the sale or purchase of shark fins in the United States “misguided.” Environmental group Oceana is pushing the legislation, known as the Shark Fin Trade Elimination Act.

In an interview with Saving Seafood, Dr. Shiffman said the legislation was “well-intentioned” but “overly simplistic.” By withdrawing from the global shark fin market, the United States would remove incentives for its trading partners to build sustainable shark fisheries, and would eliminate an important example of sustainable shark fisheries management, he said.

“We’re a relatively small percentage of the overall trade in shark fins, so banning the trade of shark fins within the U.S. will not have that much of a direct impact on shark mortality,” Dr. Shiffman told Saving Seafood. “But we’re a really high percentage of the sustainably caught, well-managed shark fishery. So removing us from the global marketplace for fins doesn’t help save that many sharks, but it removes this sustainable fishery from the marketplace as a template that can be copied.”

According to Dr. Shiffman, U.S. shark fisheries are built on a strong mix of “scientific research infrastructure” and “management and enforcement infrastructure,” which has helped make them some of the most sustainable in the world. His coauthor, Dr. Hueter, told Saving Seafood that enacting a shark fin ban would undermine decades of progress that went into building those sustainable fisheries.

“We have done a great job working together to rebuild the fish, and at least make the fisheries sustainable and profitable,” Dr. Hueter said. “And that is why this fin ban, in our opinion, is so misguided. Because after all these decades of work to get us to a great point with a bright future, this sort of ban would just cut the legs out from underneath the fishery. It would cause waste, put people out of business who are doing things right, and reward the folks in other nations who are not doing things well.”

Much of the public remains unaware of the sustainable status of most U.S. shark fisheries, a phenomenon the authors attribute to confusion over key issues related to shark conservation. In particular, many do not understand the difference between “shark finning” – the inhumane and illegal practice of removing a shark’s fins at sea – and sustainable landings of whole sharks required by U.S. law. Finning is “just this boogeyman of shark conservation activists,” Dr. Shiffman said. “People don’t understand what shark finning means in many cases.”

“We have sounded the alarm now for 20 years or more about this thing called finning to the point where we’ve gotten people so upset about it that they no longer listen to the subtle difference between finning and fishing,” Dr. Hueter said. “And they think that all sharks that are caught by commercial fishermen are finned animals.”

Should a total fin ban be enacted, rule-following U.S. fishermen would be economically harmed, the authors write in their paper, noting that nearly a quarter of the total value of shark meat sales comes from shark fins. Forcing fishermen to throw out fins from sustainably caught sharks would be wasteful, contradicting a United Nations plan of action to create “full use” in global shark fisheries, they write.

Instead of a fin ban, Dr. Shiffman and Dr. Hueter support policies focused on sustainable shark fisheries management. Dr. Hueter recommended five ways fishery managers could pursue this goal: increase penalties for those caught finning sharks, which Florida did earlier this year; stop imports of shark products from countries that don’t practice sustainable shark fishing; incentivize the domestic industry to process shark fins within the U.S. and provide for the domestic demand; closely monitor U.S. shark populations and support strict measures for sustainability; and increase public education about the problems facing global shark populations.

“Banning is always the easiest thing,” Dr. Hueter said. “Making the fishery so it’s regulated and sustainable and smart, that’s hard. But we shouldn’t be choosing things based on what sounds good or what feels good. We should be doing things based on what works.”

There is broad support in the scientific community for sustainable shark fisheries. In a recent survey of over 100 members of scientific research societies focusing on sharks and rays, Dr. Shiffman and Dr. Neil Hammerschlag, a marine ecologist at the University of Miami, found that 90 percent preferred sustainable management to a total ban on the sale of shark products. Dr. Shiffman believes that sustainable fisheries can go hand in hand with shark conservation.

“I am glad to see that the best available data, over and over again, is showing that we can have healthy shark populations while still having sustainable, well-managed fisheries that employ fishermen and provide protein to the global marketplace,” said Dr. Shiffman, who also writes for the marine science blog Southern Fried Science and frequently comments on shark conservation issues on Twitter. “We don’t need to choose between the environment and jobs in this case if we do it correctly.”

Time for seafood to bridge the gender gap, urges Iceland’s fisheries minister

September 13, 2017 — Gender equality and ensuring that women are given the same career opportunities and means to engage with the seafood industry as men is a major challenge that warrants urgent prioritization, according to Iceland Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir.

Speaking at the World Seafood Congress 2017 (WSC) taking place in Reykjavik, the minister applauded the seafood industry for its continued progress, including adding to the volume and quality of the seafood available to the market and making an increasingly important contribution to global food security. But she called on everyone involved in seafood “to do what they can” to overcome the gender gap that remains in the sector.

Globally, is currently estimated that just one percent of CEO positions in seafood are held by women, despite women accounting for more than 50 percent of all its jobs.

“It will benefit us all – men, women, the seafood sector as a whole. So please let’s all take significant steps to fix the gender gap,” she said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source