February 4, 2020 — Nine seafood items have received special exclusions from tariffs placed by the United States on goods imported from China.
The items – which must be individually frozen or frozen in blocks to qualify, depending on the harmonized tariff system (HTS) classification code – include Alaskan sole, Alaskan plaice, flounder, sole, slipper lobster, king crab, snow crab, Dungeness crab, and meat from crabs other than king, snow, Dungeness, and swimming crab.
December 26, 2019 — A rare environmental success story is unfolding in waters off the U.S. West Coast.
After years of fear and uncertainty, bottom trawler fishermen ” those who use nets to catch rockfish, bocaccio, sole, Pacific Ocean perch and other deep-dwelling fish ” are making a comeback here, reinventing themselves as a sustainable industry less than two decades after authorities closed huge stretches of the Pacific Ocean because of the species’ depletion.
The ban devastated fishermen, but on Jan. 1, regulators will reopen an area roughly three times the size of Rhode Island off Oregon and California to groundfish bottom trawling ” all with the approval of environmental groups that were once the industry’s biggest foes.
The rapid turnaround is made even more unique by the collaboration between the fishermen and environmentalists who spent years refining a long-term fishing plan that will continue to resuscitate the groundfish industry while permanently protecting thousands of square miles of reefs and coral beds that benefit the overfished species.
Now, the fishermen who see their livelihood returning must solve another piece of the puzzle: drumming up consumer demand for fish that haven’t been in grocery stores or on menus for a generation.
‘It’s really a conservation home run,’ said Shems Jud, regional director for the Environmental Defense Fund’s ocean program. ’The recovery is decades ahead of schedule. It’s the biggest environmental story that no one knows about.”
The process also netted a win for conservationists concerned about the future of extreme deepwater habitats where bottom trawlers currently don’t go. A tract of ocean the size of New Mexico with waters up to 2.1 miles (3.4 kilometers) deep will be off-limits to bottom-trawling to protect deep-sea corals and sponges just now being discovered.
‘Not all fishermen are rapers of the environment. When you hear the word ‘trawler,’ very often that’s associated with destruction of the sea and pillaging,” said Kevin Dunn, whose trawler Iron Lady was featured in a Whole Foods television commercial about sustainable fishing.
December 19, 2018 — West Coast trawlers were on pace to land their respectful IFQ shares of Petrale sole for the 2018 season in early November. Trawlers had landed 4.32 million pounds — about 75 percent — of a 5.79 million-pound quota.
Though the stocks have been declared rebuilt, the fleet saw a slight reduction in the quota for 2018. Last year’s 2017 harvest came in at 6.07 million pounds, which exceeded the 6.05 million-pound quota.
“These guys are still catching a little, as they’re still in shallow since summer,” said Scott Adams, with Hallmark Fisheries in Charleston, Ore.
As the season progresses toward winter, the fish congregate into tighter schools, which means more plentiful hauls for the trawlers.
November 16, 2018 — Seafood fraud/mislabeled seafood is a permanent topic in the sustainable fisheries space. Since 2015, news sources such as The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and the Economist have published stories on the topic of seafood fraud. Nearly every ocean conservation NGO has commented or contributed to the discourse, but Oceana has led the conversation. Oceana has an entire campaign aimed at exposing and reducing seafood fraud globally. Since 2011, they have published sixteen reports on seafood fraud—most recently, a report from Oceana Canada.
There are important differences between seafood fraud and fraud in other food systems. Language barriers, multiple acceptable market names, the sheer quantity of seafood species compared to other animal proteins, and the simple fact that wild capture adds a slew of complications compared to controlled terrestrial farming, should set a different expectation level for seafood labeling standards. There are so many chances for mistakes or miscommunication to happen—far more than any other food supply chain. But the seafood fraud discourse (largely led by Oceana) often excludes these realities and instead points fingers at fishermen, restaurateurs, and retailers for duping their customers.
In this post, I take a look at Oceana Canada’s methodology for determining “fraud” in its most recent report. I consider the results of Oceana’s report through the lens of the seafood and restaurant industries and attempt to illustrate the difference between legitimate fraud and unintentional mislabeling.
Oceana defines Seafood Fraud as, “the practice of misleading consumers about their seafood in order to increase profits.” This is an important distinction from the term “mislabeled” because it assigns an intent to deceive. Fraud is on purpose, whereas mislabeling could be an accident. Most reports on this subject today infer that the seafood industry is actively deceiving consumers on a broad scale, across the most commonly consumed species, both domestically and internationally.
Oceana’s methodology for conducting its seafood fraud reports is suspect. In this post, I focus on the most recent Canadian study, but my criticisms apply to all seafood fraud reports that use the same methods. Generally, Oceana collects seafood samples, DNA tests them, then matches the DNA results to outdated government guidelines. The samples they collect are purposefully not representative of seafood consumption habits. In Oceana Canada’s 2018 report, 382 seafood samples from 177 restaurants and retailers across the country were tested. The aim was to focus on cod, halibut, snapper, tuna, salmon and sole because these species historically, “have the highest rates of species substitution.” The specific species sampled were chosen because of past studies on seafood mislabeling, i.e. they were not randomly sampled. DNA testing then determined if these samples met the minimum labelling requirements as defined by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), an equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
This nonrandom sampling is consistent with previous seafood fraud studies from Oceana. A key parallel across Oceana’s seafood fraud investigations is that “targeted fish of interest” are the focus. Oceana Canada encouraged participants to aim for species that are often marked in other fraud studies, meaning the sample in these studies is not indicative of national seafood consumption rates on average, but instead represents very specific species that have proven to present high rates of mislabeling in previous research.
Of the 382 seafood samples tested in Canada, 168 (44%) were found to be fraudulent, meaning the names of the species did not align with the acceptable market names determined by CFIA standards.
October 29, 2018 — The European Parliament has voted to approve the multiannual plan for management of north-east Atlantic waters, despite the plan’s allowance for unsustainable fishing, said Oceana, ClientEarth and Seas at Risk.
The Western Waters, an area that stretches from Portugal to France, Ireland and the UK, is a heavily-used fishery for cod, haddock, plaice, sole and Norway lobster. In 2017, the area yielded 368,000 metric tons of produce, with a combined first sale value of roughly €1.4 billion.
However, current estimates suggest that as much as 41% of the region’s stocks are overfished. Environmental NGOs have been putting pressure on the EU Parliament to reduce catch quotas in the region as part of the 2013 commitment in the common fisheries policy (CFP) to end overfishing in European waters by 2020 at the latest.
The latest vote has agreed to allow fishing at levels above the scientifically-advised maximum sustainable yield, a move that many NGOs have condemned as being adverse to the objectives laid out in the CFP.
“The Parliament has agreed fishing mortality ranges that, at their upper limit, can exceed the fishing rates above scientifically advised sustainable levels,” said Andrea Ripol, fisheries policy offer at Seas At Risk. “This means that stocks will not be restored to healthy levels, bringing negative socioeconomic impacts in the longer term.”
October 10, 2018 — About a quarter of the world’s seafood caught in the ocean comes from bottom trawling, a method that involves towing a net along the seabed on continental shelves and slopes to catch shrimp, cod, rockfish, sole and other kinds of bottom-dwelling fish and shellfish. The technique impacts these seafloor ecosystems because other marine life and habitats can be unintentionally killed or disturbed as nets pass across the seafloor.
Scientists agree that extensive bottom trawling can negatively affect marine ecosystems, but the central question — how much of the total area, or footprint, is trawled worldwide — has been hard to nail down.
A new analysis that uses high-resolution data for 24 ocean regions in Africa, Europe, North and South America, and Australasia shows that only 14 percent of the overall seafloor shallower than 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) is trawled. Most trawl fishing happens in this depth range along continental shelves and slopes in the world’s oceans. The study focused on this depth range, covering an area of about 7.8 million square kilometers of ocean.
The paper, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brought together 57 scientists based in 22 countries, with expertise in mapping fishing activity from satellite monitoring and fishing logbook data. It shows that the footprint of bottom-trawl fishing on continental shelves and slopes across the world’s oceans often has been substantially overestimated.
Read the full story at Eco Magazine
September 24, 2018 — First, it was Washington wheat farmers and apple growers. Then it was regional wineries. And now, Pacific Northwest seafood companies are getting sucked into the escalating trade war between the Trump administration and China.
The fleet that fishes in the North Pacific, much of it based in Puget Sound, was first caught up in the fight in July, when China imposed sweeping sanctions on many U.S. imports, including virtually all seafood. The immediate risk was clear: China’s tariffs threatened to block access to what many believe will become the world’s largest consumer market for seafood products.
But now there’s a new risk: a Trump administration trade policy that was meant to punish the Chinese, but which could end up making American seafood more expensive for American consumers — a bizarre outcome that could expose the Northwest’s seafood industry to trade-war damage both at home and abroad.
That risk became clear on Monday, when Robert Lighthizer, the United States Trade Representative, released a list of some 5,700 imported Chinese food products that will be hit by heavy new tariffs. Among them, roughly $2.7 billion in imported Chinese seafood items—everything from salmon and flounder to sole and snow crab.
April 6, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — Commercial fishermen and environmental groups agree that a longstanding dispute over the future of at-sea monitoring is far from over, despite recent funding help from Congress.
The monitors are on-board workers who collect data to help inform fishing regulations. The federal government moved the cost of paying for them to fishermen in some Northeast fisheries in 2016.
Democratic New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said last month that a budget bill finalized by Congressional leaders included about $10 million to pay for the monitors. That means fishermen of valuable New England species such as cod, haddock and sole won’t have to pay for the monitors this year.
But fishing groups, and the environmentalists who watch them, say the government and industry need to work together on a long-term solution to make paying for monitoring sustainable. Fishermen say they can’t afford the cost themselves, as it can add around $700 per day to the cost of fishing.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at US News
December 12, 2017 — PORTLAND, Ore. — The following was released by the Pacific Fishery Management Council:
An important West Coast groundfish stock that was formerly overfished has now been rebuilt.
Pacific ocean perch, which is managed by the Pacific Fishery Management Council and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS or NOAA Fisheries), has constrained the West Coast trawl fishery for decades. Pacific ocean perch has been overfished since the mid-1960s when foreign fleets targeted groundfish stocks, in particular Pacific ocean perch, off the U.S. West Coast. The mandates of the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act, the primary law governing U.S. fisheries management, eventually ended foreign fishing within 200 miles of the U.S. coast. The first Federal trip limits to discourage targeting and to conserve a U.S. West Coast groundfish stock were implemented for Pacific ocean perch in 1979 by the Pacific Fishery Management Council and NMFS. Rebuilding plans for Pacific ocean perch were adopted in 2000 and 2003.
Managing groundfish fisheries under rebuilding plans has been an immense challenge for the Pacific Council and the NMFS. These plans required sharp reductions in commercial and recreational fisheries targeting groundfish, and included widespread fishing closures through the establishment of Rockfish Conservation Areas off the West Coast and other measures.
“We are pleased to see that our management strategies have been successful in rebuilding this important groundfish stock, and want to acknowledge the industries’ cooperation and sacrifice in this effort,” said Council Chair Phil Anderson. “We also want to recognize NMFS for committing the resources to monitor and research groundfish stocks to improve the science used to sustainably manage these stocks.”
Since 2003, managing overfished species through area closures such as the Rockfish Conservation Areas has helped to reduce fishing impacts and rebuild overfished groundfish species. In addition, the groundfish fleet has had to limit fishing for other more abundant species to avoid unintentional catch of the overfished stocks. “It is remarkable that the rebuilding of Pacific ocean perch was accomplished 34 years ahead of schedule,” said Barry Thom, Regional Administrator of NMFS’ West Coast Region. “It is the strong partnership between fishery managers and industry and the strong commitment to catch limitations that allowed it to happen.”
These strategies have been used to successfully rebuild eight groundfish stocks, including Pacific whiting, bocaccio, darkblotched rockfish, lingcod, canary rockfish, widow rockfish, petrale sole, and Pacific ocean perch. Canary rockfish was declared rebuilt in 2015 and earlier this year, bocaccio and darkblotched rockfish were also declared rebuilt. These successes reflect the support and sacrifice of West Coast ports and fishermen who recognized the difficult actions and fishing cutbacks necessary to restore the stocks.
Only two overfished stocks—cowcod and yelloweye rockfish—continue to be managed under rebuilding plans. Both have shown dramatic rebuilding progress, with cowcod projected to be rebuilt by 2019 and yelloweye rockfish as soon as 2027. Improvements in the status of these two stocks, coupled with the successful rebuilding of the other eight groundfish stocks declared overfished in the past, will lead to increased fishing opportunities beginning in 2019. The Pacific Council is scheduled to make their final decisions on 2019 and 2020 groundfish fisheries next June at their meeting in Spokane, Washington.
Process
The Pacific ocean perch assessment was developed by NMFS scientists at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center and was reviewed in the Council’s stock assessment review process with a final endorsement by the Council Scientific and Statistical Committee. On December 11, NMFS formally determined the stock’s status as rebuilt.
Council Role
The Pacific Fishery Management Council is one of eight regional fishery management councils established by the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 for the purpose of managing fisheries 3‐200 nautical miles offshore of the United States of America coastline. Altogether, the Pacific Council manages more than 100 species of groundfish. The Pacific Council recommends management measures for groundfish and other ocean fisheries off the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington.
On the Web:
September 6, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — The federal government is giving a Maine science center more than $1 million to investigate the impacts of climate change on important commercial fish species such as cod and sole.
Gulf of Maine Research Institute says it’s getting $1.1 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Portland-based center says researchers will also try to learn more about how fisheries management can be improved in the era of climate change.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Gloucester Times