Saving Seafood

Japan’s seafood sector holds breath through advances and setbacks on Fukushima radiation

March 8, 2019 — On 13 February, a robot arm successfully picked up pebble-sized pieces of radioactive fuel at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant. The plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), sent a remote-controlled probe to the bottom of the plant’s Number 2 reactor. It grasped five small pieces of debris from the fuel rods and lifted them a couple of inches.

The robot did not actually remove the fuel debris. This was just a test to see if it could be moved. The company plans to actually remove some fuel debris as a sample by March 2020. Robots have already been used to remotely observe the inside of the reactor. The purpose of the latest test was to see whether the fragile material would crumble when picked up. Actually removing the melted fuel is considered the most difficult part of the clean-up operation.

This marks a step forward in the clean-up, but setbacks continue and lingering problems remain. Just as the Japanese government was making a new push to ease import restrictions in Taiwan and Hong Kong, radioactive cesium above the legal limit was detected in a fish caught off Fukushima. And though scientists are gaining a better understanding of how radioactivity forms hotspots, a new release of stored radioactive cooling water appears unavoidable.

More than seven years after the accident, fear of radiation now poses a greater obstacle to the economic recovery of the region’s seafood industry than any actual physical damage. Several countries have put in place bans on Fukushima’s seafood as a preventative measure.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

New index ranks China as most vulnerable to IUU

February 11, 2019 — A new index ranking vulnerability to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU) by country has listed China as having the highest IUU potential.

The index, created by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, ranks countries on a number of metrics, with a higher score meaning a higher likelihood that a country’s policies are contributing to IUU fishing. The metrics have four main categories – coastal, flag, port, and general – which include subcategories like the size of the country’s exclusive economic zone, or the number of distant-water vessels under regional fishery management organizations (RFMO).

China was by far the worst-ranked country, with a total “IUU score” of 3.93 out of 5. China ranked the worst possible on a number of categories, including the number of vessels on the IUU list and the number of distant-water vessels that are under multiple RFMOs.

China also scored poorly in terms of its number of fishing ports, and how those ports allow foreign vessels and imports.

According to the initiative that started the index, it’s intended to be a tool to better understand illegal fishing worldwide.

“The IUU Fishing Index has been designed to meet the need for a detailed analysis of fishery countries’ vulnerability, exposure and responses to IUU fishing,” the organization stated in a release. “It fills a key gap by analyzing and evaluating, state by state, the global implications of IUU fishing, thereby helping policymakers identify where interventions are most needed.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Bumble Bee, FCF partner on albacore improvement projects

January 17, 2019 — Bumble Bee Foods and Taiwanese trader Fong Chun Formosa Fishery Company (FCF) are to partner with Ocean Outcomes on an initiative to improve fishing practices of the albacore longline tuna fisheries in the Indian Ocean and Western and Central Pacific Ocean, from which Bumble Bee sources.

“As we procure a significant amount of albacore tuna annually to meet demand for our products, we are in a unique position to help ensure the long term sustainability of longline albacore fisheries,” said Mike Kraft, vice president for sustainability at Bumble Bee.

“All of that tuna comes from healthy stocks. This initiative will launch two fishery improvement projects (FIPs) to help ensure those stocks remain healthy, while working to close identified gaps between current fishery operations and other MSC [Marine Stewardship Council] principles.”

A positive transformation of tuna management and tuna fishing practices is gaining momentum, especially in the purse seine sector — but not all harvesting sectors are as far along, the firms said.

Recent catch sector engagement initiatives – such as the Global FIP Alliance for Sustainable Tuna (GFAST) – have made progress in addressing the challenges of international management of tuna fisheries, but there is clearly an opportunity to increase participation from Northeast Asian longline fleets, they added.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

High seas fisheries play limited role in feeding the world

August 14, 2018 — A recent study undertaken by a team of fisheries and social scientists found that fishing fleets operating outside of national waters contributed to less than 3 per cent of the world’s seafood supply.

Scientists from Dalhousie University, New York University and National Geographic paired a global database of marine catches developed by researchers at the University of British Colombia with a seafood trade database maintained by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. They analysed the data, considering the amount of fish and marine invertebrates produced by marine capture fisheries and comparing it to those produced by freshwater fisheries and aquaculture.

The team found that a much lower volume of seafood was produced by the high seas fisheries, with most of the catch destined for upscale EU, US and Asian markets. China and Taiwan account for one-third of the total high seas catch.

Lead author Laurenne Schiller, PhD student at Dalhousie University said: “I think many people have the misconception that because the area is so large, the high seas must be contributing a massive supply of food to the world, but that’s just not the case. Only a handful of countries are fishing in the high seas and the fish they catch are not feeding those most in need”.

The findings of this study are against the common misconception that high seas fisheries are important for food security. Less than 40 species are targeted by fisheries in the high seas, and only one species, the Antarctic toothfish, is exclusively caught in this are of the ocean. Marketed as Chilean sea bass, this fish can easily sell for over $50 per kilogram.

Read the full story at New Food

Rich and Poor Divide: Which Nations Benefit From Global Fishing?

August 6, 2018 —With food security and equity growing concerns in global fisheries – and one-third of commercial fish stocks being exploited at unsustainable levels, according to the United Nations – researchers have been tapping new data to get a better grasp of exactly who fishes where and how much they catch.

A paper published this week in the journal Science Advances found that rich nations are catching the lion’s share of the ocean’s fish, even in the waters of lower-income countries. The estimates feed into a bigger debate over how the wealth of the seas could be distributed fairly and sustainably.

In their research, the authors analyzed global fishing activity data to conclude that 97 percent of industrial fishing they were able to track in international waters – the high seas – is conducted by vessels flying the flag of high- and upper-middle-income nations. The vast majority was from five nations: China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Spain. And even within the territorial waters of developing countries, 78 percent of industrial fishing was done by wealthier nations, the scientists found. Overall, industrial fishing vessels, defined by the study as those at least 24m long (80ft), accounted for about three-fourths of global catch of wild fish from the sea, the authors estimated.

“We suspected before we started that we would see something like this, but quantifying it with numbers moves the conversation forward and allows people to start asking questions about where their countries’ fish is going,” said Douglas McCauley, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative. McCauley led the study with Caroline Jablonicky, a scientist at the Initiative and the university’s Marine Science Institute.

Read the full story at Oceans Deeply

Large-scale commercial fishing covers more than half of the oceans, study finds

February 23, 2018 — WASHINGTON — Scientists tag sharks to see where they roam in the high seas, but until now they couldn’t track the seas’ biggest eater: Humans. By using ships’ own emergency beacons, researchers got the first comprehensive snapshot of industrial fishing’s impacts around the globe. And it’s huge — bigger than scientists thought, according to a new study.

Large-scale commercial fishing covers more than 55 percent of the oceans with the world’s fishing fleet traveling more than 285 million miles a year — three times the distance between Earth and the sun, according to research in Thursday’s journal Science.

Five countries — China, Spain, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea — were responsible for 85 percent of high seas fishing.

“The most mind-blowing thing is just how global an enterprise this is,” said study co-author Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada. “It’s more like factories that are mass producing product for a global market and less like hunters that are stalking individual prey.”

China dominates global fishing. Of the 40 million hours that large ships fished in 2016, 17 million hours were by boats under a Chinese flag, according to another study co-author, Stanford marine biologist Barbara Block.

The fishing patterns were gleaned from 22 billion automated ship safety signals beamed to satellites. Before this, scientists had to rely on a sampling of ships’ logs and observations, which were spotty.

Ships are obeying no-fishing zones and times, although they hover at the edges of marine-protected areas. Fishing tends to drop on holidays including Christmas, New Year’s and the Lunar New Year, researchers found.

“The maps of global fishing in this report are sobering,” Douglas McCauley, a University of California, Santa Barbara marine biologist who wasn’t part of the study, said in an email.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at CBS News

 

WCPFC members agree to increase bigeye limits

December 11, 2017 — Members of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission concluded a five-day conference in Manilla, The Philippines, earlier this week by increasing catch limits on tropical tunas. It’s a move at least one conservation group fears could threaten the bigeye stock.

Beginning next year, Japan will be able to catch up to 18,265 metric tons of bigeye tuna. South Korea was allotted a nearly 14,000-metric-ton limit, while Taiwan will be able to harvest nearly 10,500 metric tons. China received a limit of more than 8,200 metric tons, in addition to a one-time transfer of 500 metric tons from Japan in 2018. Indonesia received a provisional allotment of nearly 5,900 metric tons, and the United States, which won the right to use its Pacific territories to increase its limit, can catch more than 3,500 metric tons.

Those limits were set after the commission’s scientific committee concluded that the bigeye stock “appears” not to suffer from overfishing.

Amanda Nickson, who is the director of international fisheries for The Pew Charitable Trusts, called the decision to increase the limits by 10 percent disappointing. The commission’s decisions mean the bigeye stock have a greater than 20 percent chance of falling below its accepted biomass standards over the next 30 years.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

WCPFC members agree to increase bigeye limits

December 8, 2017 — Members of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission concluded a five-day conference in Manilla, The Philippines, earlier this week by increasing catch limits on tropical tunas. It’s a move at least one conservation group fears could threaten the bigeye stock.

Beginning next year, Japan will be able to catch up to 18,265 metric tons of bigeye tuna. South Korea was allotted a nearly 14,000-metric-ton limit, while Taiwan will be able to harvest nearly 10,500 metric tons. China received a limit of more than 8,200 metric tons, in addition to a one-time transfer of 500 metric tons from Japan in 2018. Indonesia received a provisional allotment of nearly 5,900 metric tons, and the United States, which won the right to use its Pacific territories to increase its limit, can catch more than 3,500 metric tons.

Those limits were set after the commission’s scientific committee concluded that the bigeye stock “appears” not to suffer from overfishing.

Amanda Nickson, who is the director of international fisheries for The Pew Charitable Trusts, called the decision to increase the limits by 10 percent disappointing. The commission’s decisions mean the bigeye stock have a greater than 20 percent chance of falling below its accepted biomass standards over the next 30 years.

Read the full story at Seafood Source 

 

NOAA: Determination that bluefin aren’t ‘endangered’ unlikely to affect quota setting

August 15, 2017 — US regulators’ recent decision to reject a petition from environmental groups to list Pacific bluefin tuna as an endangered species is unlikely to affect quota levels, which are set by international bodies.

“I don’t envision this domestic Endangered Species Act determination directly implicating the international management of this species,” Chris Yates, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s west coast assistant regional administrator for protected resources said, in response to a question from Undercurrent News.

The US government doesn’t directly determine bluefin fishing rules in the Pacific, having ceded that authority by treaty to Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), of which major bluefin catchers Japan, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan are also members. The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) also manages bluefin stocks in those areas of the ocean.

IATTC, which is under strong pressure from environmental groups to conserve declining bluefin stocks, recently failed to agree to new measures at a meeting earlier this month in Mexico City. But members have agreed to revisit the issue at a future meeting in Busan, South Korea.

NOAA assessment

After a recent review of the stock, NOAA scientists struck a mostly positive tone about the stock’s prospects to recover.

Yates, and Matthew Craig, who recently chaired a NOAA review into the health of bluefin stocks, said that there are roughly 1.6 million individual bluefin in the North Pacific Ocean, with 140,000 bluefin being of reproductive age and size.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Tilapia has a terrible reputation. Does it deserve it?

October 24th, 2016 — When it comes to fish, no species brings out the haters like tilapia.

Read up on it, and you’ll find tilapia described with words like “muddy” and “earthy”; there are entire forum threads devoted to its inferiority. This very newspaper, back in 2007, called it “the fish that chefs love to hate.”

Should we really be so hard on this fast-growing freshwater fish?

In the world of food, there aren’t too many propositions that get universal agreement, but here’s one: Our oceans are overfished. If we’re going to continue to eat fish, and to feed it to the people scheduled to join us on this planet in the coming years, we have to farm it. And if we’re going to farm fish, an adaptable, hardy fish like tilapia is an excellent candidate.

Yet a combination of rumors and credible reports works against it. Perhaps you’ve heard that tilapia are raised in cesspools and live on poop? Even the USDA says there is — or, at least, used to be — some truth in that. The agency’s 2009 report on Chinese imports notes that “Fish are often raised in ponds where they feed on waste from poultry and livestock.”

Before we meet that fact with a chorus of “ewww,” it’s worth noting that turning feces into fish would be the agricultural equivalent of spinning straw into gold. Although there are important safety concerns in that kind of system, if you can manage those risks, you’ve got one of the most sustainable foods going. It’s a downright Rumplestiltskinnian miracle, and we should root for it, not against it.

The question is whether that still happens. To find out, I went to the source: Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, which rates seafood choices based on whether they have been responsibly fished or farmed. Seafood Watch lists tilapia from nine different sources. Four (from Peru, Canada, Ecuador and the United States) are rated “Best Choices,” another four (from China, Taiwan, Mexico and Indonesia) are “Good Alternatives,” and only one (from Colombia) is rated “Avoid.” I asked Ryan Bigelow, the Seafood Watch program’s engagement manager, to give me a rundown on the sustainability issues.

Read the full story at The Washington Post