December 4, 2020 — The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission will hold its regular annual session from 7 to 15 December, with the renewal of the tropical tuna measure on bigeye, skipjack, and yellowfin billed as the main topic up for discussion.
The meeting, WCPFC17, has been complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced the commission to meet virtually, according to WCPFC Executive Director Feleti Teo.
December 12, 2019 — Pacific bigeye, yellowfin, albacore, and skipjack tuna are all reported to be in healthy condition, according to a 2018 stock assessment announced this week during the 16th Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) meeting in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.
The Pacific Community’s (SPC) stock assessment report stated that the estimate of the total tuna catch in the WCPFC Convention Area for 2018 is 2,790,859 metric tons (MT), which represents 81 percent of the total Pacific Ocean catch of 3,443,174 MT, and 54 percent of the global tuna catch, which was 5,172,543 MT.
November 18, 2019 — “Fishing forms the backbone of our local economy,” said Republican Congresswoman, Aumua Amata Radewagen, speaking at the opening of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council’s (WPRFMC) 180th meeting in Pago Pago, American Samoa. Radewagen is a delegate for the U.S. House of Representatives from American Samoa. The sustainable future of the nations purse seine fishery was also the issue in Lt. Governor Lemanu Peleti Mauga’s speech in which he referred to the importance of fishing for the livelihood of the island.
Radewagen mentioned that US purse seiners pay annually up to USD 2 million per vessel to have access to foreign EEZ’s for fishing. Due to marine national monument regulations, these parts of US EEZ’s are now closed for purse seiners.
The seiner fleet provides skipjack and yellowfin tuna for the American Samoa-based cannery owned by StarKist Samoa Co. The fleet has exceeded the limit of fishing days in 2018 and therefore by US regulations, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) announced the closure on October 1, whereby US-flagged vessels have no access to the fishing grounds within the nations’ EEZ which also includes the waters around American Samoa.
The Congresswoman finds it her priority to get the lifting of the fishing closure within the Marine parks – which is still recommended by the US Interior Department – onto President Trump’s agenda. From her perspective, the latest negotiations for the South Pacific Tuna Treaty between the US and the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) nations went backward when 700 fewer fishing days were agreed.
According to a report by the American Samoa Department of Commerce, the Pago Pago cannery provides 25 percent of the territory’s jobs and effectively subsidizes the cost of freight and fuel to American Samoa. If it should shut down, it would be a USD 200 million loss annually to the local economy.
Actually, most employees of StarKist’s American Samoa processing plant are inhabitants of the neighboring country, Samoa, located 137 miles away from American Samoa.
US-flagged purse seiners are owned by US entities and a minority by foreign companies. Only the South Pacific albacore longlining fleet is in American Samoan hands. The reduction of that fleet – that targets albacore – to 13 vessels while China enlarged its fleet is something Radewagen is concerned about. In her view, the US should constantly be active and engaged in the Pacific region and monitor foreign actions that affect the domestic fleet.
February 8, 2019 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is looking for help in tagging tuna.
The Atlantic Ocean Tropical Tuna Tagging Program was established by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas in 2015 to study key aspects of bigeye, skipjack, and yellowfin tuna in the Atlantic Ocean.
As part of the AOTTP, Dr. Walt Golet from the University of Maine and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute will be working with colleagues at the New England Aquarium, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, University of Miami, and NOAA Fisheries to deploy 5,000 conventional tags on tuna in the western North Atlantic Ocean.
The effort will stretch from Canada to Venezuela and also includes the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
Those interested in participating in the AOTTP project and would like to volunteer to tag bigeye, skipjack, and yellowfin tuna, can contact Dr. Walt Golet at walter.golet@maine.edu.
NOAA says every fish tagged will give participants a chance to win one of 20 individual cash prizes, totaling more than $39,000, to be awarded at the end of the project.
August 28, 2018 — The recent research article by Schiller et al. in Science Advances is a novel and useful summary of the key features of fisheries on the high seas – the species captured, the quantities of each targeted species caught, the countries doing most of the fishing, and the destinations of the various products. However, the main conclusion of the article – that high seas fisheries play a negligible role in addressing global food security – needs to be considered with some caution. Context is important – it depends on which countries on the globe we are talking about.
The reason for caution is that one third of the high-seas catch is sold as canned tuna. All skipjack tuna caught from areas beyond national jurisdiction (22.3% of the high-seas catch) is processed in this way, and 70% (9.2% of the catch) of yellowfin tuna caught on the high seas is also likely to be canned (based on the proportion of yellowfin tuna caught by purse-seining in world’s largest tuna fishery). Although much of this low-cost, nutritious food is processed in Asia and destined for Europe and the USA, canned tuna is also commonly found on the shelves of local stores in many developing nations.
Food-insecure Pacific Island countries are a case in point. In these nations, canned tuna provides dietary animal protein when sea conditions are too rough for nearshore fishing or when nearshore fish catches are seasonally low. Canned tuna comprises up to 15% of recommended fish consumption across this region and, even in those Pacific Island countries that process their own tuna, 10-60% of canned tuna is imported. Given that one third of global skipjack and yellowfin tuna catches are taken in areas beyond national jurisdiction, it is reasonable to assume that the canned products derived from these catches help underpin food security in Pacific Island countries with limited access to other sources of animal protein.
As the authors of the study mention, it is also important to consider that present-day patterns of high-seas fish catches are not necessarily a good guide to the future. The latest modelling (see chapter 14) of the expected responses of skipjack and yellowfin tuna in the Pacific Ocean to climate change indicates that greater proportions of the catch are very likely to be made on the high seas in the decades to come. All canned tuna markets are therefore expected to depend more heavily on skipjack and yellowfin tuna caught from the high seas in the years ahead.
January 13, 2017 — PT Karyacipta Buanasentosa (PT KCBS), the Indonesian tuna catch and processing company that is wholly-owned by Yamako Pacific Pte Ltd., has obtained Friend of the Sea certification for its skipjack and yellowfin tuna.
All of the company’s tuna species are fished by pole-and-line by Friend of the Sea-approved vessels in the Western Central part of the Pacific Ocean.
“Achieving the Friend of the Sea certification is an important step forward for PT KCBS and it reinforces our sustainability efforts,” said Masayuki Takaku, general manager at PT KCBS. “It sends a very clear message to our customers and suppliers regarding our continual commitment to sustainability. We are very proud to have achieved this recognition.”
Another company to secure Friend of the Sea certification for its skipjack and yellowfin tuna this year is Freitasmar, a Portuguese company specializing in canned seafood production.
Friend of the Sea certified supplier Frabelle – a fishing company from the Philippines – catches all of Freitasmar’s tuna. The fish are caught by purse seine in the Western Central part of the Pacific Ocean.
January 10, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The National Fisheries Institute, six major seafood companies, and two West Coast Associations sued the Obama Administration over the final US Rule regarding seafood import regulations in federal district court on Friday, Jan 6th.
The six company plaintiffs are Alfa International, Fortune Fish & Gourmet, Handy Seafood, Pacific Seafood Group, Trident Seafoods, and Libby Hill Seafood Restaurants. Also the Pacific Seafood Processors Association and the West Coast Seafood Processors Association joined the lawsuit.
The Final rule was announced on December 9, 2016, and was the culmination of the regulations that were developed at the urging of the Presidential Task Force on Seafood Fraud.
The suit is unusual in that NFI was the leading advocate for action against seafood fraud over the past decade. However, NFI claims that the new rule is not based on a risk assessment with data about seafood fraud, but without evidence will impose enormous and unjustified costs on the American public and the seafood industry.
In a statement, John Connelly, President of NFI, said “The National Fisheries Institute (NFI) and our members have led industry efforts to combat both Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported (IUU) fishing and seafood fraud for the last decade. NFI has supported most U.S. government efforts to eliminate illegal fishing and urged the government to do more to ensure accurate labeling.”
NFI began publicizing and working against seafood fraud more than a decade ago, focusing on the lack of any enforcement over seafood labeling regarding net weights and product integrity. At the time, US buyers were being flooded with offers for seafood with glaze (protective ice coatings) of 20% to 40% of the total weight of the product, leading to a hugely misleading price per lb.
Also NFI worked with the FDA and NOAA on better enforcement of seafood labeling, including attacking mislabeling of species in commerce. As a result of this pressure a number of states increased their enforcement of state labeling requirements on seafood.
Finally, NFI aggressively supported NOAA action against IUU fishing, including traceability requirements on species like toothfish, the signing of the UN Port State Measures Agreement, and the authority of NOAA to blacklist products from IUU vessels from entering the United States.
So why, after a decade of work, would NFI feel compelled to sue over the implementation of the Presidential Task Force rule, through NOAA, to combat seafood fraud.
The simple answer is that the Task Force refused to recognize the major ways in which fraud was already reduced, and would not accept a data driven approach to defining risk.
Instead, the Task force defined 13 species ‘at risk’ that were the target of enforcement under the act, without any verifiable documentation that seafood fraud was a significant problem with these species.
Connelly says in the rush to publish the rule, NOAA and the Obama administration refused to disclose the data used to craft it, and grossly miscalculated compliance costs. The Office of Management and Budget made a back of the envelope calculation under the Paperwork Reduction Act that the cost to the industry would be $6.475 million, based on about 30 minutes additional work on each container.
The industry thinks costs could exceed $100 million per year, with a total economic impact on the seafood sector of as much as $1 billion.
The reason is that there is a total mismatch between the requirements in the rule and the way in which seafood is actually harvested, collected, processed and imported.
Connelly says NOAA “grossly underestimates the cost and impact of the regulation on those companies doing the right thing, and will not solve the problem. NOAA’s fundamental shift from targeted investigation of the suspected guilty to arbitrary and massive data collection from the innocent creates an enormous economic burden on American companies.”
One of the most glaring examples of the overreach is that in the Task Force, there was wide praise for the EU rule on traceability that requires exporters to the EU to certify the vessels from which the products originated. But at the same time, the EU provides a wide exemption to countries that have sufficient internal fisheries management controls. So for example, neither Norway, Iceland, the US, or New Zealand, for example, are subject to this requirement.
But NOAA’s rule makes no exemptions for the lower risk of fraud from countries where enforcement and management is at the highest standard.
The rule would apply to ten species of fish and the five species of tuna, or 15 commodities altogether. The agency has deferred rule-making on shrimp and abalone.
The ten species are: Atlantic Cod, Pacific Cod, Blue Crab, Red King Crab, Mahi Mahi, Grouper, Red Snapper, Sea Cucumber, Shark, and Swordfish.
In addition, Albacore, Bigeye, Skipjack, Yellowfin and Bluefin tuna are included.
The complaint filed by NFI says:
“According to the Government’s own studies, most mislabeling occurs after seafood has entered the United States and even though many U.S. importers subject imported seafood to DNA testing to preclude fraud at the border. The Rule would accomplish its goals by requiring that fish imported into the United States be traceable to the boat or to a single collection point, time, and place that the fish was caught, and that this information be entered into a master computer program operated by the Government.
“The Rule, were it to go into effect, would remake the way in which seafood is caught, processed and imported around the World. These changes to food processing practices in every nation would reduce exports into the United States and would dramatically increase the cost of catching, processing and importing seafood. Fishermen, many of whom are subsistence workers operating in Third World Nations, would have to keep track of each fish harvested, as would the brokers who purchase the seafood from the fisherman, and processors who handle catches from hundreds of fishermen would have to be able to trace each piece of fish to a specific vessel and specific fishing events or to a single collection point. This would require significant changes in the way fish are processed overseas. It would also affect the way in which fish are processed in the United States, because these requirements would also apply to all domestically caught or farmed seafood covered by the Rule that are shipped outside the U.S. for processing and re-imported back into the United States.”
If implemented the rule will drive up seafood prices and reduce consumption, the exact opposite of the advice to consumers from government health agencies.
Alfa Seafood says “The Rule would require processors in Ecuador and Peru, where most of Alfa’s seafood originates, to change the way in which fishermen or brokers document their catches and the way in which processors actually process these catches, so that fish imported into the United States can be traced to a particular fishing event or to a single collection point. This will add hundreds of thousands of dollars to Alfa Seafood’s cost of importing fish, assuming that the processors abroad are willing to modify the way in which they process fish.
Handy says they already use DNA testing for all their imports to ensure accuracy. “If Handy’s processors modified their processing methods to segregate product by Aggregate Harvest Report and gathered the information required by the Rule, both the price of Blue Crab to Handy, as well as at retail, would increase by approximately 28%. The price of Grouper would increase by about 8% with a similar impact at retail.
Libby Hill restaurants says “The Department’s Rule would force Libby Hill to charge more for many popular seafood menu items, thus hurting its business and driving customers to less healthy fast-food options. Further, because of the very real possibility that certain species under the Rule may become less available in the U.S. market, Libby Hill may have to contend with supply interruption that will make it more difficult to attract return customers expecting to be able to rely on the same menu from visit to visit. Because return customers are essential in the fast-casual category of the restaurant industry, such uncertainty could have a debilitating impact on Libby Hill’s business.”
The rule would require the following to be entered for each seafood entry subject to the regulations:
The rule would also reach into the US domestic industry, where currently no such reporting requirements exist, because any seafood exported from the US overseas for processing and re-imported into the US would be subject to the rule. So for example, this would change the entire reporting system for cod and salmon in Alaska.
The suit is being filed now, although the actual date of implementation is January, 2018.
The arguments are there are multiple ways in which this rule has violated the administrative procedures act:
The plaintiffs ask for a ruling that enjoins the effective date of the rule until the agency remedies the deficiencies that have been cited.
The plaintiffs ask the rule be declared invalid.
The plaintiffs ask the court to declare the Agency failed to do the required analysis under the regulatory flexibility act, and to enjoin the rule until such time as that is done.
The suit was filed on Friday in the federal district court in Washington, DC.
This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.