Saving Seafood

US fishmeal producers left exposed by China’s 25% tariff blow

August 16, 2018 — US fishmeal producers — including the US’ largest fishmeal producer Omega Protein — are “certainly in some trouble” after China announced last week it would impose 25% tariffs on imports from the country, said a fishmeal industry analyst.

Jean-Francois Mittaine, an analyst with 30 years’ experience in the sector, told Undercurrent News Omega Protein and others in the sector will struggle to find new markets as Chinese importers turn to alternative sources. This will hit both the menhaden fisheries of the Gulf of Mexico and the pollock fishmeal industry of Alaska.

“For the Americans it is a problem,” said Mittaine. “I don’t see what they’re going to do with their fishmeal.”

Last Wednesday, China’s Ministry of Commerce said it would impose an additional tariff on imports of US fishmeal of 25% (HS code 23012010). The ingredient used in animal and fish feed was among 333 US goods worth $16 billion in annual trade targeted.

The Chinese counter-move will take effect immediately after the US imposes tariffs on the same amount of Chinese goods on Aug 23.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Alaska seafood industry braces for China tariff pain

August 15, 2018 — Alaska fishermen are used to coping with fickle weather and wild ocean waves. Now they face a new challenge: the United States’ trade war with China, which buys $1 billion in Alaskan fish annually, making it the state’s top seafood export market.

Beijing, in response to the Trump administration’s move to implement extra levies on Chinese goods, last month imposed a 25 percent tariff on Pacific Northwest seafood, including Alaskan fish, in a tit-for-tat that has engulfed the world’s two largest countries in a trade war.

The results could be “devastating” to Alaska’s seafood industry, the state’s biggest private-sector employer, said Frances Leach, executive director of United Fishermen of Alaska, the state’s largest commercial fishing trade group.

“This isn’t an easily replaced market,” she said. If the tariff war continues, she said, “What’s going to happen is China is just going to stop buying Alaska fish.”

For Alaska’s seafood industry, the timing could not be worse. The state has worked for years to attract the Chinese market, and just two months ago, Governor Bill Walker led a week-long trade mission to China in which the seafood industry was heavily represented.

Read the full story at Reuters

Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute prepares to protest Trump’s seafood tariffs

August 10, 2018 — The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute will push back against a steep seafood tariff suggested by the Trump Administration.

In a board meeting Thursday morning, ASMI executive director Alexa Tonkovich said the organization is preparing a draft letter to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative about the importance of Alaska seafood.

ASMI’s action comes as the USTR considers a proposal to levy a 10 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports. Since that proposal was announced in early July, the USTR has announced that the tariff could be increased to 25 percent.

Among the items on the tariff list is Alaska seafood sent to China for processing.

“We believe there is value in ASMI as an apolitical industry representative (speaking up),” Tonkovich said, and the board agreed to consider the draft.

“I know that other industry groups are kind of looking for ASMI to take the lead because of their connection with (the National Fisheries Institute) and their representation of the Alaska industry,” said board member Tom Enlow, who works for the seafood company Unisea.

“We better do it, definitely,” said board chairman Jack Schultheis of Kwik’ Pak Fisheries.

ASMI is the joint marketing arm for fisheries across Alaska and is funded by a small tax on catches as well as federal grants and state assistance. This year, the Alaska Legislature approved a budget of less than $21 million for the agency.

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

Fishing industry gears up for a fight over China tariffs

August 10, 2018 — A national fishing industry group is using local workers to put human faces on the plight that the commercial fishing sector faces amid the trade fight with China.

The National Fisheries Institute just released a series of videos featuring New Englanders — a processing plant manager in Boston, a Quincy seafood shop owner, a supplier to Maine lobstermen — extolling the virtues of free trade. Institute spokesman Gavin Gibbons says the group started featuring people in the Northeast because of the balance of import and export work that happens here. You can’t treat fish like steel, he says. Commercial fishermen, for the most part, face strict federal quotas. There’s simply no way to ramp up domestic production if it becomes tough to import seafood.

Gibbons’ group fears imports will become much more challenging if the Trump administration follows through on plans to impose tariffs of up to 25 percent on seafood imports from China. An NFI lobbyist will testify before the International Trade Commission on Aug. 20 to argue against them. (NFI represents all corners of the industry: fishermen, retailers, wholesalers.)

The US has plunged headlong into a tit-for-tat fight. China has already imposed a 25 percent tariff on US seafood exports, much to the chagrin of the lobstermen who had found a burgeoning new foreign market in that country.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

U.S. Seafood Industry Vulnerable to Tariffs Aimed at China

August 9, 2018 — The next round of U.S. tariffs aimed at Chinese imports could wind up hurting a major product that initially comes from America: fish.

Proposed 10% duties by the Trump administration last month on $200 billion worth of imports from China included dozens of varieties of fish, from tilapia to tuna. The proposed tariffs, which could increase to 25%, are set to be decided in September by trade representatives.

An estimated $900 million worth of fish and seafood on that list is first caught in the U.S., sent to China for processing into items like fish sticks and fillets, and then imported by U.S. companies to sell to American consumers.

“The value added is in another country, but essentially it’s an American-raised product,” Joseph Glauber, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said of goods like fish sourced in the U.S. that are processed overseas and re-imported. He said the proposed tariffs could cut profits or boost prices throughout seafood supply chains, from fishermen to consumers.

The practice of sending fish to China to be breaded, seasoned, portioned or packaged has grown in the past two decades, according to U.S. fishing groups. Domestic seafood-processing plants have faced high costs and labor shortages, while cheaper facilities have sprung up in China to support its extensive domestic fish-farming industry.

That has helped make China the top source of seafood to the U.S., with the 1.3 billion pounds sent to the U.S. last year double that of second-ranked India, according to market-research firm Urner Barry.

The exposure of U.S. seafood to tariffs aimed at another country highlights how intertwined global supply chains have become. Many pink salmon, for example, are caught by commercial fishermen in southeast Alaska. The fish are transported to processing plants to be headed, gutted and frozen, before being loaded into shipping containers bound for China. Once there, they are thawed, deboned, smoked, filleted or turned into salmon burgers for sale world-wide, including to the U.S.

More than half of Alaskan seafood sent to China is processed and then re-exported, said Garrett Evridge, an economist with McDowell Group, an Alaskan research and consulting firm. The percentage can be as high as 95% for fish like sole, he said. The fishing industry, one of the largest private-sector employers in Alaska, provides about 60,000 jobs, he said, and Alaskan seafood makes up 60% of the nation’s catch.

Some Gulf Coast seafood producers had lobbied for the latest round of tariffs to include fish. In a letter to the Trump administration in May, the Southern Shrimp Alliance trade group said that Chinese-farmed fish tend to be raised with antibiotics, and imports unfairly compete with the group’s members.

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal

CALIFORNIA: Threat of El Niño has Pacific squid fleet on edge

August 7, 2018 –All eyes and ears were on water temperatures and foreign trade tariffs as seiners hit their strides in the West Coast squid season. Cooler ocean temperatures last fall fostered hopes that the environmental pendulum had begun swinging in favor of squid production. But as the summer of 2018 ensued, the threat that El Niño conditions may be returning set fishermen and processors on edge.

“We’re watching the inklings of an El Niño,” said Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, in Buellton. “It’s an interesting season. It started well, and it’s still going… better than when we were in the throes of El Nino.”

In late June, Oregon had posted healthy landings, and Pleschner-Steele said harvest numbers had begun picking up in California. The commercial squid season runs from April 1 to March 31 of the following year, and seiners fish on a quota of 118,000 short tons. Pleschner-Steele says the fleet hasn’t caught the quota in recent years, given oceanic conditions and other factors, and that the set quota is an optimal harvest number.

As of June 28, the seiners had landed 9,931 tons of squid.

On July 3, Pleschner-Steele said it was unlikely the fleet would catch the quota this year. The pending shortage in the harvest might be a good thing, in terms of curbing volumes headed to troubled markets in China.

The recent trade fracas between China and the United States predicated a stiff tariff on U.S. squid products shipped to China, one of the West Coast industry’s primary markets.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Florida Lobster Fishermen Fear Trade War Amid Irma Recovery

August 7, 2018 –Just as they prepare for a crucial harvest in the wake of Hurricane Irma, lobster fishermen in the Florida Keys fear a trade war with China could undermine storm recovery in the island chain.

Lobsters are among the seafood and other U.S. goods hit by Chinese tariffs in early July, after the Trump administration put tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods.

Florida’s nearly eight-month commercial spiny lobster fishing season opens Monday. Keys fishermen had hoped the harvest would help them recoup losses from last September’s hurricane, which made landfall in the Keys with 130-mph (210-kph) winds.

But the industry has come to depend on Chinese exports over the last decade, and fishermen worry tariffs that could raise prices by 25 percent will send the Chinese market looking for lobster in another country’s waters.

“Coming into this year, we were hoping for better prices because of the loss of traps, gear and revenue,” said Ernie Piton, president of the Florida Keys Commercial Fishermen’s Association and a lobster fisherman.

“Hopefully the tariffs will get figured out because you can’t run your boat and not make money, especially after a hurricane year when you’ve lost so much,” Piton said in a recent interview outside his Key Largo home, where he docks his boat, “Risky Business II.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

NFI Expands “Seafood, See Jobs” Trade Education Campaign

August 7, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS –After rebranding its AboutSeafood.com website late last week to support the stories of American seafood workers, the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) has announced that they have now expanded their content offerings.

The “Seafood, See Jobs” campaign “tells individual stories of the American seafood workforce to illustrate that both importers and exporters fear the harmful effect of the trade policies the U.S. Government is imposing via tariffs on seafood.” The campaign initially launched with three “Featured Videos” and four “Faces of Seafood Jobs” videos on the AboutSeafood.com home page. Just a day after the launch NFI has added an additional two videos to their “Featured Videos” section and one more video to their “Faces of Seafood Jobs” section. The organization plans on updating the site weekly with new videos and content.

NFI hopes to portray the message that “seafood trade is not a simple matter of import vs. domestic.”

“To understand the negative impact these tariffs will have on American workers you have to go see them, you have to talk to them, you have to hear their concerns,” NFI president John Connelly said in a press release. “We’re brining these stories to policy makers so they understand; this is not a theoretical, economic chess game. These tariffs have the potential to do a lot of harm to the seafood community and that community’s jobs are right here in the U.S.”

Visit AboutSeafood.com to learn more. Or visit SeafoodSeeJobs.com to go directly to the campaign videos.

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

No tariff bailout for fishermen

August 6, 2018 — We wrote recently about the Trump administration’s plan to send $12 billion in emergency aid to American farmers to combat the ills of our current trade war with China (and just about the rest of mankind) and of subsequent political efforts to extend the plan to other industries, such as commercial fishing.

Those efforts have fallen on deaf ears, with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer slapping a hasty kibosh on the notion that anyone else is getting bailed out. Now we may know why.

According to a new U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis, providing additional bailout funds to other industries impacted by the trade war would would bring the full price tag for U.S. taxpayers to about $39 million.

“The chamber’s analysis shows that on top of the $12 billion that could be doled out to farmers as early as this fall, another $27 billion would be needed to help other sectors such as fishermen, cotton and fabric manufacturers and makers of steel and aluminum,” according to a story in The Hill.

The chamber – not exactly a left-leaning crowd – proceeded to whack away at the Trump tariffs as if they were a row of pinatas.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Trump leans in on SNAP work requirements

August 3, 2018 — President Donald Trump on Thursday jumped into the farm bill debate once again — on Twitter, of course — in an effort to tip the scales toward House Republicans ahead of conference negotiations.

“When the House and Senate meet on the very important Farm Bill – we love our farmers – hopefully they will be able to leave the WORK REQUIREMENTS FOR FOOD STAMPS PROVISION that the House approved,” the president wrote on Thursday afternoon.

The U.S. seafood industry is starting an education campaign to convince Trump and other policymakers that American workers would be hurt, not helped, by his proposed new tariffs on China. The National Fisheries Institute, which represents the seafood industry, has rebranded its AboutSeafood.com website to tell the stories of American seafood workers threatened both by the proposed tariffs, as well as the retaliatory tariffs that China has already imposed in response to U.S. duties on more than $34 billion worth of Chinese goods.

“To understand the negative impact these tariffs will have on American workers, you have to go see them, you have to talk to them, you have to hear their concerns,” National Fisheries Institute President John Connelly said in a statement. “We’re bringing those stories to policymakers so they understand; this is not a theoretical, economic chess game. These tariffs have the potential to do a lot of harm to the seafood community and that community’s jobs are right here in the U.S.”

Political opposition: Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) both raised concerns about the impact of China’s retaliatory duties on their states’ lobster exports during a hearing last week with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

Their complaints were echoed by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who told Lighthizer China’s actions have “clearly rattled my state.” The increased duty affects about 40 percent of the state’s salmon exports and 54 percent of its cod exports that went there last year, she said.

Read the full story at Politico