Saving Seafood

Russia forced to reshape fleet-renovation project due to sanctions

April 14, 2022 — A month and a half into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a clearer picture of the challenges the Russian seafood sector will be facing as a result of international sanctions is coming into focus.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine immediately caused turmoil in global seafood markets, and the consequences on trade caused ripple effects that still haven’t subsided. Multiple rounds of economic sanctions imposed by the European Union, the U.K., and the U.S. have already impacted the seafood industry.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

US House passes USD 42 billion restaurant funding bill

April 11, 2022 — On 7 April, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Relief for Restaurants and Other Hard Hit Small Businesses Act, which would allocate USD 42 billion (EUR 39 billion) for the Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF) and USD 13 billion (EUR 12 billion) for other businesses impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The funding bill will now be considered by the U.S. Senate.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

US Senate moves to end normal trade with Russia, but seafood ban “unenforceable”

April 7, 2022 — The U.S. Senate voted unanimously on 7 April to end normal trade relations with Russia, at the same time as a hearing of the U.S. House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife attempted to address what members called an “unenforceable” ban on Russian seafood imports.

The Senate vote, coming in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, effectively gives Russia the same trade status as other “pariah” states like North Korea, and will allow U.S. President Joe Biden to continue tightening trade with the country and allow for tariffs of up to 25 percent on Russian seafood – if and when the recently enacted seafood ban is lifted. The decision by the Senate, which according to ABC News is likely to be supported by the House and later signed by Biden, also impacts Belarus and effectively ends “most-favored nation” trading status between the U.S. and Russia.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

DHS more than doubles H-2B visa allocation for final six months of 2022

April 4, 2022 — Once again, the U.S. federal government has announced a short-term expansion of the H-2B visa program, which non-agricultural businesses – including seafood processors – use to hire foreign workers to fill temporary but essential positions.

On Thursday, 31 March, 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced the H-2B visa cap for the second half of the 2022 fiscal year that starts on 1 April will be more than doubled. The 35,000 new visas available will complement the initial cap of 33,000 slated for the final six months of the fiscal year.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Polystyrene bans and phase-outs pushing seafood packagers to seek alternatives

April 1, 2022 –Pressure is slowly building in the U.S. against polystyrene foams and expanded polystyrene (EPS) – commonly known by the trademarked brand, Styrofoam – as communities and states begin to phase out its use due to sustainability-linked concerns.

A synthetic “aromatic hydrocarbon polymer,” polystyrene is the building block of what most people refer to as Styrofoam, and often takes the form of foam or EPS – a separate product made up of polystyrene beads that are injection-molded into custom shapes.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Inflation dragging down UK grocery, seafood sales

March 30, 2022 — Rising inflation is having an impact on grocery sales in the United Kingdom, which dropped 6.3 percent in the first quarter of 2022, according to new data. Fresh seafood sales are also falling due to higher prices.

Grocery inflation reached 4.2 percent for the 12-week period ending 20 March, its highest level since April 2012, Kantar said in a press release.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

ISSF report finds global tuna stock abundance getting worse

March 29, 2022 — The recently released International Seafood Sustainability Foundation’s (ISSF) “Status of the Stocks” report found the world’s commercial tuna catch is increasingly being sourced from stocks that are not at healthy levels of abundance.

This twice-yearly report by the ISSF – a global coalition including seafood industry members and scientific and environmental organizations that promote science-based initiatives for long-term ocean health – provides the results for the most-recent scientific assessments of 23 separate stocks of major commercial tuna species. The stocks include six albacore, four bigeye, four bluefin, five skipjack, and four yellowfin tuna species.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

New paper explains the role of seafood in sustainable diets

March 28, 2022 — The following is an excerpt from an article published by Sustainable Fisheries UW:

Everything you eat costs the planet something. Land for crops and livestock, inputs to grow them, and energy for everything else. Reducing humanity’s dietary footprint will be the toughest conservation challenge of the 21st century. Electricity and transportation will eventually be 100% renewable, but there is no way to replace food—it will always have costs. The challenge will be feeding Earth’s growing population while minimizing the impacts.

On this site, we have chronicled this feeding-the-world challenge over the past few years while covering the science and math of how seafood fits in to it all. Now a new paper has taken an exciting novel approach to the food/conservation dichotomy. While most research has measured environmental impact per unit of  protein or calorie, Koehn et al. 2022, The role of seafood in sustainable diets out last week in IOP Science (open access), measures environmental impact against nutrition, i.e.—how impactful is a food compared to the nutrients it provides? It’s the first paper to quantify and compare environmental impacts to nutrition, a broader and more complete look vs simply calorie or protein.

Comparing the nutrition to impact ratio of various land-based foods is fairly straightforward, especially with meats—there are only a few species of livestock raised for human consumption. Seafood is different: There are hundreds of different species humans eat, all with different nutrient profiles and impacts. Koehn et al. 2022 helps determine which types of seafood can be incorporated into a low-impact diet.

Lead author Zach Koehn said, “Diversity is important when considering how we can meet nutritional needs while limiting GHG emissions. For aquatic foods, some have emissions that are as low per nutrient richness as plants, while others have emissions as high as beef.

Small pelagics (sardines & anchovies), big pelagics (tuna & billfish) and farmed seafood like carps, bivalves, and salmon were found to be lower impact than other animal-sourced food. Nearly all the seafood products studied were lower than pork, lamb, and beef except for shrimp and crustaceans like lobster and crab.

Seafood, in all its diversity, deserves a place at the table when discussing healthy diets for the planet. With more refined data on the impacts of different seafood species, policy-makers and advocacy organizations can shape policies and campaigns to shift diets away from beef, lamb, pork, and shrimp, to lower-impact proteins like poultry and most other seafoods.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

U.S. reinstates China seafood tariff exclusions

March 28, 2022 — The United States Trade Representative (USTR) announced it has reinstated tariff exclusions on 352 products, including several seafood products facing additional tariffs on import from China.

The administration of President Joe Biden announced in October 2021 that the USTR would begin taking comments on whether the U.S. should renew tariff exceptions for 549 products from China, which the government chose to let expire. Initially, the USTR extended tariff exclusions on multiple seafood products in 2020.

“The Office of the United States Trade Representative today announced its determination to reinstate certain previously granted and extended product exclusions in the China Section 301 Investigation,” the USTR announced. “The reinstated product exclusions will apply as of October 12, 2021, and extend through December 31, 2022.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman