Saving Seafood

LORI STEELE: Safeguarding Oregon’s Sustainable Seafood Industry: DEQ urged to reconsider unachievable permits

August 21, 2023 — Oregon’s coast boasts the heart of our commercial fishing industry, renowned for its delectable, sustainable seafood that attracts nearly 30 million visitors annually.

The bustling waterfronts not only offer picturesque scenery but also serve as vital economic hubs, providing generational fishing families with a market to deliver their catch and distribute Oregon’s seafood nationwide and across the globe.

As proud stewards of the marine ecosystem, Oregon’s seafood industry has worked diligently for over a century to foster a sustainable environment, supporting thriving communities and vibrant coastal economies. However, our seafood industry now faces a critical challenge.

Read the full opinion piece at the North Coast Citizen

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

New poll finds US voters want assurances merchants are selling legally-caught seafood

March 25, 2022 — The Walton Family Foundation, in collaboration with Morning Consult, recently released a poll that found Americans would eat more seafood if they had greater knowledge of its health and environmental benefits.

The poll’s main focus was on Americans’ views on climate change, and what solutions towards its impacts respondents preferred. Overall, the poll discovered U.S. residents are unified on climate change and see urgent connections between it and the economy, agriculture, and health, according to Teresa Ish, the Oceans Initiative Lead and Senior Program Officer at the Walton Family Foundation.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

ASC launches public consultation for new ASC farm standard

March 1, 2022 — The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) has launched one of its largest-ever rounds of public consultation starting 1 March and running to 30 April, 2022, seeking comments on the new ASC farm standard that will align all ASC-certified species under one standard.

The new single standard will benefit farmers and auditors through greater efficiency, and make it easier for stakeholders, such as NGOs, to assess and compare the ASC’s requirements for public consultation, the ASC said. Additionally, with this single, comprehensive standard, the ASC will be able to respond to changes in markets and the industry quicker than before.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Sustainable seafood purchasing boosted by younger generations, pandemic pressures

December 30, 2021 — Consumers are becoming more interested in the sustainability credentials of the seafood they eat, a long-awaited trend the COVID-19 pandemic may have served to accelerate.

Data from GlobeScan found that in 2020, 38 percent of the consumers surveyed possessed a willingness to reward companies they perceived as responsible, a significant leap up from the roughly 20 percent the firm had historically tallied since 1999.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

In Scotland, Serving Halibut for a Better Planet

November 30, 2021 — Inver restaurant is but a speck on the longest sea loch in Scotland. From its windows, a diner can see the remnants of a 15th-century castle and the rolling hills of the Highlands, but the breakout star is not the view. It’s a meaty halibut head that the chef Pam Brunton grills over wood and finishes with melted homemade ’nduja and a tangle of grilled green onions.

The small halibut she butchers have been raised in sea-fed pens on the Isle of Gigha, a nearby community-owned island whose farmed halibut have become the darling of people who care a lot about where their fish and shellfish come from.

Ms. Brunton, who could be Alice Waters’s Scottish niece, runs Inver with her partner, Rob Latimer. The tiny restaurant and inn is about 70 miles from Glasgow, where in November heads of state, including President Biden, thousands of diplomats and a flood of environmental activists like Greta Thunberg gathered for COP26, the United Nations global climate conference.

Ms. Brunton’s halibut heads may not seem like much of a hedge against the catastrophic effects of fossil fuel and methane gas emissions, but a group of cooks and diners here say that putting sustainable Scottish seafood on the plate is at least one tangible (and delicious) move toward a better planet. The shift is away from fin and shellfish whose populations are threatened by climate change or harvesting practices.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Op-ed: Five myths about certified sustainable aquaculture

November 24, 2021 — Declining fisheries and pressures on marine ecosystems around the world have increasingly driven the demand for alternative, more-sustainable sources of seafood. In response, aquaculture has taken off.

Over the past few decades, aquaculture practices have markedly improved. Today’s most-reputable aquaculture operations are specifically designed to curb overfishing, protect wild fish populations and the surrounding natural environment, and produce nutritious foods. Likewise, organizations throughout the seafood supply chain are going to great lengths to ensure that seafood can be traced back to certified sources and is properly handled to deliver healthy, nutritious products to consumers.

Read the full opinion piece at SeafoodSource

Satellite Monitoring of Fishing Fleets: A Definitive Answer To Consumer Concerns About Sustainable Seafood.

November 5, 2021 — The following was released by Friend of the Sea:

Friend of the Sea, the leading international certification of sustainable seafood and Omega3, has developed its own enhanced platform based on satellite technology to monitor the over 2.000 Friend of the Sea approved fishing vessels.

The Friend of the Sea Satellite Monitoring Program (SMP) is part of a monitoring enhancement program, which includes among the others, deployment of CCTVs onboard, drones and unannounced augmented reality audit. These new technologies will eliminate the risk of non-compliance and further reassure consumers about the reliability of the Friend of the Sea certification.

By means of the SMP, vessels are monitored continuously 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. Satellite monitoring allows for verification of compliance with regulations related to fishing season; authorized fishing areas; transshipment at sea and Social Accountability.

“Consumers and retailers looking for a certification carrying out not only annual onsite inspections, but also full-time monitoring of fishing activities, can now rely on Friend of the Sea for a safer sustainable choice” explains Paolo Bray, Founder and Director of Friend of the Sea. 

“Satellite monitoring is an exclusivity of Friend of the Sea, making it the first and only certification monitoring each moment of the fishing activity, to protect the Oceans from unsustainable fishing. Our aim is to make sure that all industrial vessels approved Friend of the Sea will, by the end of 2023 have CCTVs on board to allow Friend of the Sea verification of compliance with issues related to bycatch, fishing methods, endangered species, fish welfare and social accountability. New technologies make Friend of the Sea the most reliable certification in the seafood market”.

World’s largest seafood companies ramp up commitment to sustainable seafood movement

October 27, 2021 — During its annual CEO meeting, SeaBOS companies reaffirmed commitments to leading the way on improving the sustainability of seafood throughout the supply chain.

SeaBOS companies represent over 10 percent of the world’s seafood production and have more than 600 subsidiary companies. SeaBOS members include 10 of the largest seafood companies in the world: Maruha Nichiro Corporation, Nissui, Thai Union, Mowi, Dongwon Industries, Cermaq, Cargill Aqua Nutrition, Nutreco/Skretting, CP Foods, and Kyokuyo.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Aramark partners with GMRI to up New England seafood sourcing

October 5, 2021 — Major U.S. hospitality supplier Aramark is committing to increase local seafood sourcing in New England via a partnership with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI).

Coinciding with the start of National Seafood Month, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.-based Aramark said in a press release that all of its higher education, healthcare, and business dining accounts in New England will pursue several local sustainable sourcing goals over the next three years.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource