Saving Seafood

Nominations Sought for NEFMC

January 16, 2018 — The New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) is seeking nominees for upcoming open seats. The NEFMC is one of eight regional councils established by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) in 1976, and is charged with conserving and managing fishery resources from three to 200 miles off the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The MSA specifies that council nominees must be individuals “who, by reason of their occupational or other experience, scientific expertise, or training, are knowledgeable regarding the conservation and management, or the commercial or recreational harvest, of the fishery resources of the geographical area concerned.” Council members are directly involved in:

  • Developing and amending fishery management plans.
  • Selecting fishery management options.
  • Setting annual catch limits based on best available science.
  • Developing and implementing rebuilding plans.

The NEFMC manages: sea scallops, monkfish, Atlantic herring, skates, red crab, spiny dogfish, Atlantic salmon and groundfish** . Please note that the NEFMC does not manage summer flounder, scup, black sea bass, bluefish, striped bass or tautog.

MAINE
One obligatory (state) seat currently held by Terry Alexander of Harpswell, ME. Mr. McKenzie is completing his second of three possible consecutive 3-year terms.

MASSACHUSETTS
One obligatory seat currently held by Dr. John Quinn of New Bedford, MA. Dr. Quinn is completing his second of three possible consecutive 3-year terms.

Qualified individuals interested in being considered for nomination by the Governor to the Council should contact Samantha Andrews (617-626-1564, samantha.n.andrews@state.ma.us.) Nomination application kits will be made available upon request. All applications are due to DMF (c/o Samantha Andrews, 251 Causeway St, Suite 400, Boston, MA 02114) by the end of day on Monday, February 12, 2018. As part of the application process, the Commonwealth will conduct an initial background review.

Read the full story at The Fisherman

 

Seafood industry seeks new value in fish parts

January 15, 2018 — State seafood marketers are rebranding fish parts as “specialty” products and mapping a path for millions more dollars in sales.

Alaska’s fisheries produce more than 5 billion pounds of seafood each year. When all the fish is headed and gutted or filleted and all the crab legs are clustered, it leaves about 3 billion pounds of trimmings. Some is turned into meal and oil, but for the most part, the “gurry” is ground up and discharged into local waterways.

“Whether that’s heads or guts, milt, or meal or oil or something else, it should be held in high regard,” said Andy Wink, a seafood economist formerly with the McDowell Group. “These are products that are out of our normal range but they are specialty items serving niche markets.”

A new Analyses of Specialty Alaska Seafood Products report compiled for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute takes a look at uses for fish heads, oil, meal, internal organs, crab products, roe, herring fillets, arrowtooth flounder, spiny dogfish and skates.

It makes the point that Alaska’s combined seafood catches, valued at roughly $2 billion at the docks and twice that when processors sell to their buyers, could be worth an additional $700 million or more if so called “specialty” products were added to the mix.

Take fish heads, for example. Alaska produces about 1 billion pounds of fish heads per year, which likely account for most of the processing waste, the report said. Just 1 percent is sold as frozen heads, although a single large salmon head can fetch up to $5 a pound at Beijing supermarkets, according to previous reports. Increasing the frozen market alone could add $100 million to processors’ sales, the report said.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Fading Fishermen: A Historic Industry Faces A Warming World

June 27, 2016 — SEABROOK, N.H. — The cod isn’t just a fish to David Goethel. It’s his identity, his ticket to middle-class life, his link to a historic industry.

“I paid for my education, my wife’s education, my house, my kids’ education; my slice of America was paid for on cod,” said Goethel, a 30-year veteran of the Atlantic waters that once teemed with New England’s signature fish.

But on a chilly, windy Saturday in April, after 12 hours out in the Gulf of Maine, he has caught exactly two cod, and he feels far removed from the 1990s, when he could catch 2,000 pounds in a day.

His boat, the Ellen Diane, a 44-foot fishing trawler named for his wife, is the only vessel pulling into the Yankee Fishermen’s Cooperative in Seabrook. Fifteen years ago, there might have been a half-dozen. He is carrying crates of silver hake, skates and flounder — all worth less than cod.

One of America’s oldest commercial industries, fishing along the coast of the Northeast still employs hundreds. But every month that goes by, those numbers fall. After centuries of weathering overfishing, pollution, foreign competition and increasing government regulation, the latest challenge is the one that’s doing them in: climate change.

Though no waters are immune to the ravages of climate change, the Gulf of Maine, a dent in the coastline from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, best illustrates the problem. The gulf, where fishermen have for centuries sought lobster, cod and other species that thrived in its cold waters, is now warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, scientists have said.

Read the full story at the Associated Press