Saving Seafood

Thai Union commits to sustainable tuna, targets 75 percent by 2020

December 14, 2016 — Thai Union Group PCL has announced its intention to ensure 100 percent of its branded tuna is sustainably sourced, with a commitment of achieving a minimum of 75 percent by 2020.

The pledge will apply to all of the seafood company’s tuna brands sold around the world, including Chicken of the Sea and Genova in the North American market, John West in Northern Europe and the Middle East, Mareblu in Italy, Petit Navire in France and SEALECT in Thailand.

Each of these brands will publically report on a regular basis on their progress against the 2020 commitment, the company said.

As part of its new tuna strategy, Thai Union will invest USD 90 million (EUR 84.8 million) in initiatives aimed at increasing the supply of sustainable tuna, including establishing 11 new fishery improvement projects (FIPs) around the world.

“Tuna is the most readily available source of protein for millions of people around the world, and at least one billion depend on seafood for nourishment or employment. As a leader in the seafood industry, Thai Union has a responsibility to protect tuna stocks for the good of the world,” said Thiraphong Chansiri, CEO of Thai Union Group. “Our substantial investment will transform tuna sourcing for the entire industry and demonstrates our strong commitment to the sustainability of our oceans.”

Thai Union defines sustainably sourced tuna as tuna from fisheries that are either already certified according to the standards of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) or are involved in a FIP that is working towards achieving standards required for MSC certification.

“Currently only 11 tuna fisheries globally are MSC-certified, supplying just 14 percent of globally landed tuna. Our commitment and strategy will have a positive impact on the entire industry by significantly increasing the supply of sustainable tuna available to the seafood processors, retailers and, ultimately, consumers,” said Darian McBain, global director for sustainable development at Thai Union.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Growth in global fish production slows, aquaculture increases

December 8th, 2016 — Growth in global fish production is expected to slow slightly this year, driven primarily by lower catches of major wild species such as Alaska pollock and anchoveta. Production solely from aquaculture continues to increase at a steady rate with a further 5 percent increase in total volume expected in 2016. Driven by higher incomes and urbanization, global consumption of fish is growing at a faster rate than global population, meaning that per capita consumption is rising each year by approximately 1 percent. In 2016, expected per capita consumption is 20.5 kg per year, compared with 20.3 kg in 2015 and 17.6 kg a decade ago in 2006. Another important figure is the proportion of fish produced by the aquaculture sector for human consumption, forecast to reach 53 percent this year, a trend that is only going up in the foreseeable future.

The total value of world trade in seafood products is expected to bounce back this year after a drop in 2015, to US$140 billion, representing a 4.4 percent increase, although this is still well below the 2014 total of US$148.4 billion. This return to growth in value terms is partly due to a stabilization of the US dollar after a sharp increase versus multiple currencies in 2015, but it is also a consequence of improved prices for a number of highly traded seafood commodities. Salmon prices, in particular, have been reaching extreme peaks in 2016, while tuna prices have also risen after a period of sustained lows. Supply constraints are part of the reason for the price gains, but demand growth is also a contributing factor.

Read the full story at Aquafeed.com

U.S. Tuna Treaty Brings No Special Benefits For American Samoa Industry

December 7, 2016 — PAGO PAGO, American Samoa — While the new six-year South Pacific Tuna Treaty does not appear to provide any special recognition or benefits to the American Samoa’s tuna industry, Commerce Department Director Keniseli Lafaele says the Treaty is a way forward and the territory hopes to find opportunities under the Treaty that will benefit American Samoa.

Lafaele is also hopeful that the incoming administration of US President-elect Donald Trump will concentrate more on finding ways for the locally based US flag boats to compete in the global tuna industry.

Signed Dec. 3 (Saturday) during a ceremony in Nadi, Fiji, the new Treaty is valid through 2022 and is between the US and 16 Pacific Island countries. It allows the US purse seiner fleet to fish in waters of these Pacific countries. The Treaty was approved in “principle” during another round of negotiations held in Auckland, New Zealand in June this year.

Signing of the new Treaty came two days before the start Monday in Fiji of the week-long Western and Central Pacific Fishery Committee meeting in Nadi, for which American Samoa has a delegation that is part of the U.S. delegation.

Leading the local delegation is Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources director Dr. Ruth Matagi-Tofiga, who told Samoa News that signing of the new Treaty “is indeed an exciting occasion, being that it took 7 years to sign the Treaty with amendments.”

And the Treaty is “important for American Samoa because it sets operational terms and conditions for the U.S. tuna purse seine fleet to fish in waters under the jurisdiction of the Pacific Island Parties, which cover a wide swath of the Western and Central Pacific Ocean,” Matagi-Tofiga said via email from Nadi, over the weekend responding to Samoa News inquiries.

She points out that the U.S. purse seine fleet “operates under the highest commercial standard and subject to strict U.S. enforcement authorities… that curtails illegal and unregulated fishing.”

Read the full story at the Pacific Islands Report

Mercury Levels in Gulf of Maine Tuna on the Decline

December 5th, 2016 — There’s some good news for sushi lovers. A new report finds that over an 8-year period, mercury levels in Gulf of Maine tuna declined 2 percent a year — a decline that parallels reductions in mercury pollution from Midwest coal-fired power plants.

Two years ago, Dr. Nicholas Fisher, a professor of marine sciences at Stony Brook University in New York, had a bit of luck — he found out that a colleague had established a collection of 1,300 western Atlantic bluefin taken from the Gulf of Maine between 2004 and 2012.

“They were frozen, wasn’t the entire fish, just about a pound from each fish or so. And then my colleagues and I in New York dissected out muscle tissue from each sample and analyzed it to determine the mercury content of each fish,” he says.

And as they created a timeline for mercury content for each year, taking into account the age and size of each fish sampled, a clear picture emerged.

“There was a fairly steady decline for all ages of fish, and the decline rate was approximately 2 percent per year, which doesn’t sound all that dramatic, but over 10 years it’s about 20 percent. Over two decades its about 40 percent,” Fisher says.

Read the full story at Maine Public Radio 

Retailers, suppliers call on Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission for emergency tuna management

November 29, 2016 — European and American tuna suppliers and retailers have called for new interim rules governing the sustainable fishing of Western and Central Pacific tuna stocks.

The group says the interim rules are needed “as quickly as possible”, due to the failure to reach a comprehensive regulatory settlement agreed by country-members of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), which “allows unsustainable fishing to continue”.

Interim targets should be in place within the next 12 months, read the letter addressed to the WCPFC – which will meet next week in Fiji — with targets including limit and reference points for all target tuna stocks and key by-catch species where these are not currently in place.

Signatories to the letter, including retail giants Target, WM Morrison Supermarkets and Aldi Sud, note that finding a comprehensive fisheries management system is a “time-consuming and complex undertaking”.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Tuna’s Declining Mercury Contamination Linked to U.S. Shift Away from Coal

November 23, 2016 — Levels of highly toxic mercury contamination in Atlantic bluefin tuna are rapidly declining, according to a new study. That trend does not affect recommended limits on consumption of canned tuna, which comes mainly from other tuna species. Nor does it reflect trends in other ocean basins. But it does represent a major break in the long-standing, scary connection between tuna and mercury, a source of public concern since 1970, when a chemistry professor in New York City found excess levels of mercury in a can of tuna and spurred a nationwide recall. Tuna consumption continues to be the source of about 40 percent of the mercury contamination in the American diet. And mercury exposure from all sources remains an important issue, because it causes cognitive impairment in an estimated 300,000 to 600,000 babies born in this country each year.

The new study, published online on November 10 by Environmental Science & Technology, links the decline directly to reduced mercury emissions in North America. Most of that reduction has occurred because of the marketplace shift by power plants and industry away from coal, the major source of mercury emissions. Pollution control requirements imposed by the federal government have also cut mercury emissions.

Progress on both counts could, however, reverse, with President-elect Donald Trump promising a comeback for the U.S. coal industry, in part by clearing away such regulations.

For the new study, a team of a half-dozen researchers analyzed tissue samples from nearly 1,300 Atlantic bluefin tuna taken by commercial fisheries, mostly in the Gulf of Maine, between 2004 and 2012. They found that levels of mercury concentration dropped by more than 2 percent per year, for a total decline of 19 percent over just nine years.

Read the full story at Scientific American

The latest weapon in the fight against illegal fishing? Artificial intelligence

November 21, 2016 — Facial recognition software is most commonly known as a tool to help police identify a suspected criminal by using machine learning algorithms to analyze his or her face against a database of thousands or millions of other faces. The larger the database, with a greater variety of facial features, the smarter and more successful the software becomes – effectively learning from its mistakes to improve its accuracy.

Now, this type of artificial intelligence is starting to be used in fighting a specific but pervasive type of crime – illegal fishing. Rather than picking out faces, the software tracks the movement of fishing boats to root out illegal behavior. And soon, using a twist on facial recognition, it may be able to recognize when a boat’s haul includes endangered and protected fish.

The latest effort to use artificial intelligence to fight illegal fishing is coming from Virginia-based The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which launched a contest on Kaggle – a crowdsourcing site based in San Francisco that uses competitions to advance data science –earlier this week. TNC hopes the winning team will write software to identify specific species of fish. The program will run on cameras, called electronic monitors, which are installed on fishing boats and used for documenting the catch. The software will put a marker at each point in the video when a protected fish is hauled in. Inspectors, who currently spend up to six hours manually reviewing a single 10-hour fishing day, will then be able to go directly to those moments and check a fishing crew’s subsequent actions to determine whether they handled the bycatch legally – by making best efforts to return it to the sea unharmed.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Update to ISSF Participating Company Compliance Report Shows Improvement Across All Measures

November 21, 2016 — The following was released by the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation:

WASHINGTON — The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) has released its Update to ISSF Conservation Measures & Commitments Compliance Report, which shows a conformance rate of 95.6 percent by 25 ISSF participating companies as of October 31, 2016, across all 20 measures then in effect. ISSF Participating Companies account for about 75% of the global canned tuna market.

The November 2016 Update is based on audits conducted June 2016–October 2016 on measures where some companies had “minor” or “major” nonconformance. Improvements noted since the June 2016 ISSF Conservation Measures & Commitment Compliance Report was published include:

  • 14 companies were found to be fully compliant with all 20 measures.
  • 19 companies were fully compliant in 17 or more conservation measures.
  • “Minor” non-conformance with measures dropped from 11.6% to 4.4%.
  • All 6 “major” non-conformances have been corrected, resulting in the first 0% “major” non-conformance rate since the report has been published.

The ISSF Conservation Measures & Commitments Compliance Report is published annually to track ISSF participating companies’ progress in conforming with ISSF conservation measures like these:

In addition to these summary reports, third-party independent auditor MRAG Americas issues individual company reports that document in detail each company’s compliance with conservation measures. This year, for the first time since ISSF started tracking and reporting company compliance in 2013—and in response to requests for deeper information—ISSF now publishes the individual company compliance reports on its website.

“That many of the tuna industry’s key players are conforming to science-based conservation measures, opening their books to independent auditors, and reporting their findings publicly, would be accomplishment enough,” said ISSF Board Member Dr. Bill Fox, Vice President, Fisheries, WWF-US. “But efforts to improve participating company conformance within the audit year—increasing the conformance rate by seven points in just five months—raises the bar for the industry and the market as a whole. And it represents continuous improvement in action.”

ISSF continually expands and refines its science-based conservation measures, which now number more than 25. New measures passed by the ISSF Board of Directors in October 2016—some taking effect in 2016, and others in 2017 or later—cover non-entangling FADs, product traceability, and fishing capacity management.

More Information about ISSF Conservation Measures & Compliance

For long-term tuna sustainability, a growing number of tuna companies worldwide are choosing to participate with ISSF, follow responsible fishing practices, and implement science-based conservation measures. From bycatch mitigation to product traceability, ISSF participating companies have committed to conforming to a set of conservation measures and other commitments designed to drive positive change—and to do so transparently through third-party audits.

“We recognize that transparency underpins all of the initiatives we tackle, and all of the collaborative efforts we undertake,” said ISSF President Susan Jackson. “Transparency reinforces the understanding that we are not only committed to making a difference, but to clearly demonstrate ongoing improvement in meeting that commitment.”

As part of its commitment to transparency and accountability, ISSF engages third-party auditor MRAG Americas to audit ISSF Participating Companies—assessing their compliance with ISSF’s Conservation Measures and Commitments. MRAG Americas conducts independent auditing based on a rigorous audit protocol.

Australia rejects yellowfin tuna TAC increase

November 16, 2016 — The Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) Commission said it did not support an increase in the total allowable catch (TAC) increase of yellowfin tuna proposed at a recent meeting.

The proposal, from the Tropical Tuna Management Advisory Committee (TTMAC), would have hiked the total allowable catch (TAC) over-catch allowance, enabling commercial fishermen to bring in yellowfin tuna above the current limits during the remainder of the 2016-17 season.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MASSACHUSETTS: Herring trawlers just offshore anger Cape fishermen

November 16, 2016 — ORLEANS, Mass. — They were visible from shore for most of Tuesday, seven vessels of between 140 to 170 feet in length, four miles off Nauset Beach.

Some worked in tandem, towing a huge net between them, scooping up mackerel or herring right on the Cape’s doorstep and making local fishermen like Bruce Peters angry.

“They suck up all the herring and mackerel, the forage fish we need for the cod, tuna, stripers, the whales, what we need for the food chain,” said Peters, a longtime commercial cod and groundfish fisherman, who now runs a charter boat business and fishes commercially for tuna. “We need a 50-mile buffer zone to keep these guys offshore.”

Buffer zones that prohibit the herring fleet from fishing within anywhere from 6 to 50 miles from shore are part of a new amendment to the herring fishery management plan that will be outlined at the New England Fishery Management Council meeting Thursday in Newport, Rhode Island, and voted on at the January meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The council — a representative body of fishermen, industry representatives, environmental organizations and state and federal fishery officials — draws up plans to sustainably manage fish and shellfish stocks in federal waters. They received 238 pages of comment, much of it in support of requiring the herring fleet to fish farther from shore.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times