Saving Seafood

UN head declares ‘ocean emergency’ as global leaders gather in Lisbon

June 28, 2022 — The UN secretary general has declared that the world is in the middle of an “ocean emergency”, and urged governments to do more to restore ocean health.

Speaking at the opening of the UN ocean conference in Lisbon, Portugal, attended by global leaders and heads of state from 20 countries, António Guterres said: “Sadly, we have taken the ocean for granted and today we face what I would call an ocean emergency. We must turn the tide.”

Guterres said the “egoism” of some nations was hampering efforts to agree a long-awaited treaty to protect the world’s oceans.

In March, UN member states were criticised by scientists and environmentalists for failing to agree on a blueprint for protecting the high seas against exploitation. Of the 64% of the high seas that lie beyond territorial limits, only 1.2% is currently protected.

Read the full story at The Guardian

Biden aims at China in new illegal fishing policy framework

June 27, 2022 — The Biden administration is stepping up efforts to combat illegal fishing by China, ordering federal agencies to better coordinate among themselves as well as with foreign partners in a bid to promote sustainable exploitation of the world’s oceans.

On Monday, the White House released its first ever National Security memo on illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, or IUU, to coincide with the start of a United Nations Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

Nearly 11% of total U.S. seafood imports in 2019 worth $2.4 billion came from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission, a federal agency.

While China isn’t named in the lengthy policy framework, language in it left little doubt where it was aimed. The memo is bound to irritate Beijing at a time of growing geopolitical competition between the two countries. China is a dominant seafood processor and through state loans and fuel subsidies has built the world’s largest distant water fishing fleet, with thousands of floating fish factories spread across Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Specifically, the memo directs 21 federal departments and agencies to better share information, coordinate enforcement actions such as sanctions and visa restrictions and promote best practices among international allies.

Read the full story at The Washington Post 

FAO’s Manuel Barange calls for countries to make “blue transformation” a strategic priority

June 21, 2022 — Seafood plays a vital part in global food security and nutrition, yet only half of the countries with a nutrition strategy identify fish consumption as a key objective in their public policies, Manuel Barange, the director of the Fisheries and Aquaculture Division of the Food, and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) said in his opening keynote address at the Blue Food Innovation Summit in London, U.K. on 14 June, 2022.

In his address, “Realizing the full potential of the blue food economy,” Barange said there are around 32,000 different species of fish in the world’s lakes, rivers, and oceans, “forming part of a valuable ecosystem. The biomass of fish is twelve times that of humans,” he said, making them a readily available source of food for the entire planet, especially impoverished, remote areas of the world.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

NOAA Fisheries is Leading the United Nations in Advancing Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management

June 2, 2022 — Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management are key to addressing the many different challenges we are currently facing, such as climate change, and balancing the needs of nature and society for a more sustainable future.

At a United Nations conference in May, NOAA Fisheries discussed Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management with other interested nations. The event highlighted the importance of an ecosystem approach on a global stage.

Adopting ecosystem approaches to fisheries management allows countries to address the many problems the globe is facing, such as climate change, and create a more sustainable future for our ocean.

“For the United Nations to prioritize discussing Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management is not trivial. It is indicative of how important the topic has become around the world,” said Jason Link, Senior Scientist for Ecosystems at NOAA Fisheries.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

 

Debate sparked over use of EU funds for clean-fuel conversion, response to Ukraine crisis

April 28, 2022 — European Association of Fish Producers Organizations President Esben Sverdrup Jensen has called for the revision of parts of the European Union’s Common Fishery Policy to simplify the transition of the E.U.’s fishing fleet to using cleaner fuels.

With the price of conventional fuels soaring in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, Sverdrup Jensen said the E.U. should relax limits on boat capacity “because vessels that use alternative fuels like ammonium require fuel tanks twice as big as those using current fuels.”

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Japan, Russia settle salmon quota amid tensions over Ukraine

April 23, 2022 — Japan and Russia have reached an agreement over Tokyo’s annual catch quota for Russian-born salmon and trout, the Japanese Fisheries Agency said Saturday, despite delays and chilled relations between the two sides amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The agreement on Japan’s quota for the popular fish in waters near disputed islands north of Hokkaido is a relief for Japanese fishermen who were worried about the prospects amid worsening ties between the two governments.

Japan and Russia concluded talks Friday, setting a catch quota of 2,050 tons for salmon and trout this year in Japan’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, the fisheries agency said in a statement. The quota is unchanged from last year, and Japan will pay 200-300 million yen ($1.56-2.34 million) in fees — depending on the actual catch — to Russia.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

 

The information age is starting to transform fishing worldwide

April 14, 2022 — People in the world’s developed nations live in a post-industrial era, working mainly in service or knowledge industries. Manufacturers increasingly rely on sensors, robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning to replace human labor or make it more efficient. Farmers can monitor crop health via satellite and apply pesticides and fertilizers with drones.

Commercial fishing, one of the oldest industries in the world, is a stark exception. Industrial fishing, with factory ships and deep-sea trawlers that land thousands of tons of fish at a time, are still the dominant hunting mode in much of the world.

Fishing with data

Changes in behavior, technology and policy are occurring throughout the fishing industry. Here are some examples:

  • Global Fishing Watch, an international nonprofit, monitors and creates open-access visualizations of global fishing activity on the internet with a 72-hour delay. This transparency breakthrough has led to the arrest and conviction of owners and captains of boats fishing illegally.
  • The Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability, an international business-to-business initiative, creates voluntary industry standards for seafood traceability. These standards are designed to help harmonize various systems that track seafood through the supply chain, so they all collect the same key information and rely on the same data sources. This information lets buyers know where their seafood comes from and whether it was produced sustainably.
  • Fishing boats in New Bedford, Massachusetts – the top U.S. fishing port, based on total catch value – are rigged with sensors to develop a Marine Data Bank that will give fishermen data on ocean temperature, salinity and oxygen levels. Linking this data to actual stock behavior and catch levels is expected to help fishermen target certain species and avoid unintentional bycatch.

The ocean’s restorative power

There is no shortage of gloomy information about how overfishing, along with other stresses like climate change, is affecting the world’s oceans. Nonetheless, I believe it bears emphasizing that over 78% of current marine fish landings come from biologically sustainable stocks, according to the United Nations. And overharvested fisheries often can rebound with smart management.

For example, the U.S. east coast scallop fishery, which was essentially defunct in the mid-1990s, is now a sustainable US$570 million a year industry.

Read the full story at The Conversation

Seafood biz braces for losses of jobs, fish due to sanctions

March 31, 2022 — The worldwide seafood industry is steeling itself for price hikes, supply disruptions and potential job losses as new rounds of economic sanctions on Russia make key species such as cod and crab harder to come by.

The latest round of U.S. attempts to punish Russia for the invasion of Ukraine includes bans on imports of seafood, alcohol and diamonds. The U.S. is also stripping “most favored nation status” from Russia. Nations around the world are taking similar steps.

Russia is one of the largest producers of seafood in the world, and was the fifth-largest producer of wild-caught fish, according to a 2020 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Russia is not one of the biggest exporters of seafood to the U.S., but it’s a world leader in exports of cod (the preference for fish and chips in the U.S.). It’s also a major supplier of crabs and Alaska pollock, widely used in fast-food sandwiches and processed products like fish sticks.

The impact is likely to be felt globally, as well as in places with working waterfronts. One of those is Maine, where more than $50 million in seafood products from Russia passed through Portland in 2021, according to federal statistics.

Read the full story at AP News

‘Marine conservation talks must include human rights’: Q&A with biologist Vivienne Solís Rivera

March 29, 2022 — Human rights, such as those of small-scale fishers, must be included in the global conservation goal to protect 30% of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030, say environmentalists, otherwise this proposed conservation target will fail and the livelihood of Indigenous people and local communities (IPLCs) around the world will be jeopardized.

This is the urgent message in a new open letter directed at policymakers gathered in Geneva this month to finalize the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which will be presented at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CDB) conference, COP15, in China this April.

The open letter – created by the IPLC marine conservation organization Blue Ventures and signed by fishers, farmers, conservationists, environmentalists, human rights advocates and scientists around the world – refers explicitly to Target 3 of the framework, also known as 30×30. This target has been lauded internationally as an ambitious goal to protect 30% of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030, as the world faces a biodiversity crisis and mass species extinction.

But authors of the open letter point out that simply creating more reserve areas without IPLC inclusion is a flawed strategy. Too often, protected areas lead to displacements of IPLCs in the name of nature conservation.

Read the full story at Mongabay

The U.N. Treaty That Could Be the Oceans’ Last Great Hope

March 11, 2022 — United Nations member states have tried for years to reach a global agreement that would protect marine life on the high seas—those parts of the world’s oceans that fall beyond the jurisdiction of any individual country.

The endeavor is seen as hugely important for protecting the world’s biodiversity and limiting the impact of climate change. While existing laws and treaties address marine and maritime activities within countries’ jurisdiction, very little extends to the high seas, which include about 95 percent of the world’s oceans in terms of volume.

Member states began discussing the issue in 2004, with delegates meeting every two years. By 2020, the parties appeared to be close to striking a deal, but the outbreak of COVID-19 that year put the talks on ice.

Read the full story and listen to the audio at Foreign Policy