Saving Seafood

‘Weaponized’ McDowell Report on Value of Shore Processing Opening Gun in Fight Over Cod Allocations

June 15, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The newly released McDowell Report on the economic impacts of shore-based processing was requested by the processors to support their position on the cod issue at the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council.

The results of the analysis demonstrate the inshore seafood sector is the primary source of economic activity in the BSAI region and a critical source of income for the region’s communities and residents. It further illustrates the importance of a diverse portfolio of species and products in sustaining the industry’s important regional and statewide economic impacts,” according to the study.

In 2016, inshore processing paid $41 million in wages to 1,230 of the region’s residents, and over $22 million in fish and property taxes to six communities, including Unalaska, Akutan, Adak, Atka, King Cove, Saint Paul, and the Aleutians East Borough, according to the report.

Although the report has just been released, a 7-page executive summary of the weaponized document was published in February,  and distributed at an Unalaska City Council meeting by Trident Seafoods’ Chief Legal Officer Joe Plesha.  That meeting has been called a ‘side show’, with the main show now being the council meetings themselves.

The NPFMC took its first formal look at various proposals last week and is expected to spend the next two years considering a range of alternatives from the various sectors of the groundfish industry, according to Unalaska Mayor Frank Kelty, who attended the meeting in Kodiak.

The issue is based around whether the increased use of motherships to purchase cod at sea is destabilizing to the shore-side sector.  The shore-side sector wants to retain their traditional share of the cod quota in the Bering Sea.  However, in the past two years the volume of cod purchased directly from vessels by catcher-processors in the Amendment 80 fleet has increased.

The issue came to a head when the Pacific Seafood Processors blocked a congressional waiver for F/V America’s Finest owner, Fishermen’s Finest.  America’s Finest was determined by the Coast Guard to be in violation of the Jones Act because it used more than the allowable amount of foreign steel. The processors wanted any waiver to come with a prohibition on catcher processors purchasing cod as motherships.

Representatives of the Amendment 80 fleet said such a prohibition would cripple their business plans.

As a result of this opposition, Congress has twice failed to grant a waiver to America’s Finest, and the vessel is now up for sale, at a substantial loss.

The current controversy harkens back to the inshore/offshore fights over pollock between shore plants and factory trawlers in the 1990s. Those bitter allocation battles were ended by the U.S. Congress with the passage of the American Fisheries Act, which permanently divided the resource.

An acrimonious debate is again taking shape.

Frank Kelty, mayor of Unalaska and a vocal supporter of the shore-plants, was upset when Fishermen’s Finest expressed opposition to state sanctioned local fish taxes.  Kelty also faced a recall election in Unalaska, which he survived.  Now Kelty has called remarks about him by Fisherman’s Finest’s Seattle publicist, Paul Queary, “threatening”.

Although tempers can get hot, the arduous council decision making process has just started.  Like recreational halibut, bycatch management in the Gulf of Alaska trawl fishery, bycatch affecting halibut and salmon, and the proverbial inshore / offshore fight, these issues all have real economic consequences on both sides.

The job before the council will also be one of maintaining the status quo while working out the options to resolve the conflict.  Toward that end, the one decision the council made was to separate the issue of Adak’s set aside cod quota from the broader issue of mothership purchases.  The council will treat the two independently.

This year processing in Adak was sufficient to reach the threshold to use most of the set aside quota, but still there was controversy when other vessels steamed out to legitimately fish cod trips in the Western Aleutians and deliver back to Dutch Harbor.

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

Trident works to bring wild Alaska seafood direct to Chinese consumers

May 30, 2018 — There’s a lot of Alaska-born seafood in China. Walk into any McDonald’s and pick up a fish sandwich and it’s all wild Alaska pollock.

Trident Seafoods has been selling fish in China for 20 years.

Still, the average Chinese consumer probably doesn’t recognize Trident’s three-pronged logo. That’s because they’ve been selling seafood primarily as a commodity in China, not in stores and markets.

But that might change soon. The company sent a team with Alaska Gov. Bill Walker’s trade mission to China and that team is working on a new strategy.

Trident isn’t new to China. They’ve got operations in the port cities of Dalian, Qingdao and Weihai.

What’s new is the way they want to promote and sell their fish here.

Jeff Welbourn is Senior Director of the Chinese Business Office for Trident Seafoods. On a bus trip across Beijing, Welbourn talks strategy for getting their products into some new markets.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

 

Trident settles with EPA on Clean Water Act violations

March 7, 2018 — Two federal agencies have reached a settlement with Trident Seafoods over Clean Water Act violations at Sand Point and Wrangell involving discharges of fish waste.

The agreement, announced on March 2, calls for Trident to remove nearly three and a half acres of waste from the seafloor near its Sand Point plant and limits on how much seafood waste is discharged from its Wrangell plant.

Trident also will pay a $297,000 civil penalty and do a comprehensive audit of the company’s system for monitoring environmental compliance, under the agreement reached with the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Justice.

The Seattle-based processor has operated a fish meal plant at Sand Point since 1996 to help limit how much fish waste is discharged into marine waters.

Yet after decades of processing, the historic waste pile exceeds the one-acre limit, and continues to impair the health of the seafloor, EPA officials said. Unauthorized discharges of seafood processing waste lead to large seafood waste piles that contain bones, shells and other organic materials that accumulate on the seafloor. Those waste piles create anoxic, or oxygen-depleted conditions that result in unsuitable habitat for fish and other living organisms.

Read the full story at the Cordova Times

 

Alaska: Bering Sea cod conflict brewing between on and offshore buyers

December 21, 2017 — “Cod Alley” is getting crowded, and some fishermen want to limit the boats in the narrow congested fishing area in the Bering Sea.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council is looking at changes, including restricting flatfish factory trawlers from buying cod offshore.

The Pacific Seafood Processors Association is pushing for restrictions on factory trawlers to protect its members’ shore plants in Unalaska, Akutan, King Cove and Sand Point.

According to the PSPA’s Nicole Kimball, seven factory trawlers bought cod from 17 catcher boats in 2017, up from just one factory trawler that traditionally participated in prior years. The Amendment 80 factory trawlers act as motherships, processing but not catching the Pacific cod.

“The share delivered to motherships increased from 3.3 percent in 2016 to 12.7 percent in 2017, while shoreside processors had a reciprocal decline. This is a meaningful shift. At this point it is open-ended, and there is nothing to prevent future growth in this activity,” Kimball testified at the council’s December meeting in Anchorage.

Local government representatives shared the shoreplants’ concerns, citing a loss of tax revenues needed for schools and other services. On a smaller scale, it’s reminiscent of the inshore-offshore battle in the pollock fishery about 20 years ago.

“This is a big deal,” said Unalaska Mayor Frank Kelty. “It looks like we’ve got trouble coming down the road again.”

Cod is Unalaska’s second-most important product, behind pollock, he said.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

 

Industry’s challenge to seafood import monitoring program rejected

August 29, 2017 — A legal challenge to the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) – a set of regulations requiring increased traceability for seafood imports – was rejected on Monday, 28 August.

The lawsuit was filed earlier this year by the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) and a large group of U.S. seafood companies, including Trident Seafoods, Fortune Fish and Gourmet, Handy Seafood, and Alfa International Seafood. The industry representatives argued that the program violated federal law and that their businesses would be harmed as a result of its implementation.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against the plaintiffs, finding that the Commerce Department’s implementation of the program was not done inappropriately. Specifically, Mehta found that SIMP was issued under rules allowed under the Magnuson-Stevens Act and Administrative Procedure Act, and that the department properly completed a regulatory flexibility analysis to determine SIMP’s impact on small businesses.

“The court finds that the rule’s issuance did not run afoul of the MSA, and the current Secretary of Commerce validly ratified the rule, thereby curing any alleged constitutional defect in the rule’s promulgation,” Mehta wrote.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

The Man Who Got Americans to Eat Trash Fish Is Now a Billionaire

July 19, 2017 — Chuck Bundrant was a college freshman with $80 in his pocket when he drove halfway across the country to Seattle to earn a few bucks fishing. The year was 1961.

He hasn’t stopped fishing since.

And today, Bundrant, the founder and majority owner of Trident Seafoods, is worth at least $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth is due to a fair measure of pluck. Back in the early 1980s, he persuaded Americans to eat pollock, then considered a trash fish, at fast-food restaurants and, to this day, Trident ships it — along with salmon and cod — to chains including Costco and Safeway.

Along the way, Bundrant cultivated politicians who would pass legislation that aided Trident’s business by keeping foreign fisheries at bay. These days, Trident also is benefiting from health-conscious consumers gravitating to seafood.

The Bloomberg index calculates that Bundrant owns 51 percent of privately-held Trident, which had $2.4 billion in revenue last year, based on information compiled from trade groups. It’s valued by the Bloomberg index at about $2.1 billion, using comparisons to five publicly traded peer companies, including Clearwater Seafoods Inc. and Oceana Group Ltd. Trident operates about 16 processing plants and 41 fishing vessels — and remains defiantly independent.

“We don’t answer to investment bankers like some other seafood companies,’’ the company writes on its website. “We only answer to our customers, our fishermen, and our employees.”

Read the full story at Bloomberg

Success of Alaska Pollock Fishery is focus of SeaWeb Seafood Summit Panel

SEATTLE (Saving Seafood) — June 7, 2017 — The success of the industrial pollock fishery in the Eastern Bering Sea, which generally harvests in excess of one million metric tons each year, was the focus of a panel at the SeaWeb Seafood Summit on Tuesday. The panel, “Moving Beyond Fishery Certification: Using Collaboration, Technology and Innovation to Further Improve Sustainability” was moderated by Tim Fitzgerald of the Environmental Defense Fund. Panelists were Allen Kimball of Trident Seafoods, Richard Draves of American Seafoods, and Karl Bratvold of Starbound LLC. Trident Seafoods is a large, vertically integrated company, which processes Alaska pollock at shoreside facilities. Vessels owned by Starbound and American Seafoods harvest and process Alaska pollock at sea.

Panelists discussed the development of the Alaska pollock fishery: from before extended jurisdiction through the period of transition to a fully domestic fishery, to the years before rationalization when catcher-processors and catcher vessels competed in an Olympic-style race for fish, to the advent of an effective and efficient enterprise with the establishment of catch shares under the American Fisheries Act (AFA). Under the AFA, quota share is permanently allocated between the at sea and shoreside processing sectors, and among cooperatives (groups of fishing companies) within each sector. AFA provisions encourage cooperation and collaboration within and between sectors and cooperatives, which has brought about many improvements.

Examples of successful collaboration and cooperation include avoidance of salmon bycatch, which is facilitated by comprehensive observer coverage, daily electronic communication of catch and bycatch information that is shared across the fishery, and binding agreements that require vessels to relocate to avoid bycatch or suffer substantive financial penalties. Similarly, collaboration on development of selective gear, development of gear with reduced drag, and other shared innovations have been effective in reducing bycatch and greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing operating efficiency. All of the panelists highlighted their commitment to science-based management, their support for federal government science, and the extent to which they collectively fund scientific research. They also spoke about the importance and value associated with Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification.

Additionally, the panelists emphasized the extent to which rationalization through catch shares has improved the harvesting and processing processes, as well as increased safety and operational efficiency.

This session told the story of Alaska pollock and illustrated the benefits of a well crafted and well implemented catch share program, as well as MSC certification. Other fisheries can learn from this experience, but it’s important to note that this is not a “one size fits all” solution that is immediately applicable in all types and scales of fisheries.