Saving Seafood

National Fisherman: Tax to Grind

November 2, 2018 — Everyone is talking tariffs. First it was anticipation, and now we’re in reality check, keeping an eye on the long-term consequences.

My first instinct with the tariffs was to gather information and watch what happens. There’s no denying our federal government is in fickle hands. The tariffs could have been canceled as easily and swiftly as they were declared. So wait and see seemed the best course of action.

Of course, I’m not a fisherman, processor or retailer. Wait and see is a luxury for me. And now it’s also a luxury for the purveyors of many itemized seafood products that have been granted dispensation from the tariffs.

As the deadline inched closer this summer, fisheries with decent lobbying power began to appeal to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to get a pass for their product — meaning the United States would not add a tariff to those products being sold into Chinese markets (most of which are already taxed as exports). In the case of U.S. seafood products being processed in China and reimported to the U.S. market, the government also granted a waiver on Chinese import taxes for some products.

The result was good for many stakeholders — they got the pass they need to stay competitive. But fisheries that don’t have access to Capitol Hill are left out there alone to bear the brunt of the tariffs on their own. They are now the guinea pigs for the whole industry.

Read the full editorial at National Fisherman

 

US distributor plans to hike invasive catfish sales

October 4, 2018 — Congressional Seafood Company, which already sells invasive blue catfish to Whole Foods Market and other major buyers, is aiming to significantly grow sales of the fish in the state of Maryland.

Around four years ago, Jessup, Maryland-based Congressional began selling blue catfish, an invasive species in the Chesapeake Bay, the Potomac River, and other waterways. Blue catfish feeds on many native species, including blue crabs, rockfish, and mussels.

“I started reading about this environmental crisis because of the explosion of the fish in the tributaries, and knew we had to try to sell it,” Congressional founder and executive vice president Tim Sughrue, told SeafoodSource. “However, one of the hardest thing I’ve had to do … is create a market for a fish that has never been sold before.”

Blue catfish has a great flavor and it tastes similar to snapper to rockfish, Sughrue said. However, its meat yield is 25 percent on average, versus around 65 percent for mahi and 70 percent for tuna.

After contacting several restaurant and retailer chains, Congressional got its “first big break” in 2014, when Clyde’s Restaurant Group, based in Washington D.C., agreed to menu blue catfish regularly, according to Sughrue.

In 2015, Congressional got another break when Whole Foods Market’s mid-Atlantic region came on board.

“I had been meeting with Whole Foods for a while, but it wasn’t until blue catfish was rated ‘green’ by Monterey Bay Aquarium’s SeafoodWatch program, that they said they could sell it,” Sughrue said. “That allowed us to gain a market for it.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

The Chesapeake Bay hasn’t been this healthy in 33 years, scientists say

June 18, 2018 — For the first time in the 33 years that scientists have assessed the health of the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary showed improvement in every region, a likely sign that a massive federal cleanup plan is working.

The bay’s most important species — blue crabs and striped bass, which support commercial and recreational fisheries, and anchovies, the foundation of its food chain — earned top scores in a report card released Friday. Bright green underwater grasses — which help protect young fish before they venture into the Atlantic Ocean — are now thriving, even in some places where such vegetation had disappeared.

In sharp contrast to the days when the bay was so beleaguered that every meaningful species experienced sharp population declines, officials and scientists from the District, Maryland and Virginia announced Friday that it is in the midst of a full and remarkable recovery. As if to underscore the progress, their backdrop along the District’s southwest waterfront was a brilliantly sunny morning and a picturesque view of the Anacostia River, which feeds into the Chesapeake.

The news comes at a time when hundreds of bottle-nosed dolphins have been seen frolicking in the bay, including a large pod off Maryland’s Ragged Point last month. On Tuesday, two great white sharks were hooked by scientists in Virginia. The number of fish-hunting osprey is also on the rise.

The bay’s overall grade is a C, because some areas, such as the Patuxent, Patapsco and York rivers, are bouncing back from near-failure. The category of water clarity faltered, falling to an F from last year’s D. But the James River area and the lower stem of the bay closer to the Atlantic both earned grades of at least B-, their highest ever, and shored up the overall score.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

Chesapeake crab caper results in felony charges

January 23, 2018 — More than three years after federal fish fraud investigators were tipped off that a Virginian seafood company was selling foreign crabmeat labeled as more expensive domestic crabmeat, federal prosecutors filed felony charges against Casey’s Seafood owner, James R. Casey, 74, of Poquoson, Va.

At the time of the tip in 2014, The Baltimore Sun had begun following special agents tracking crab fraud among other kinds of seafood fraud.

The Sun found that, despite increased concerns about such fraud, the number of enforcement cases brought by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency had plummeted after the agency began cutting the “special agents” who investigate fish fraud in 2010.

As the world’s seafood resources decline, substituting other species of seafood for rarer and more expensive ones has become a lucrative business as well as a growing concern for governments and health officials.

Jack Brooks, co-owner of J.M. Clayton Seafood in Cambridge, described how easy it is to commit fraud with crabmeat in a 2014 letter he wrote to the federal task force establishing the new rules to mitigate seafood fraud. It happens, he wrote, when “unscrupulous domestic companies, seeing a quick and profitable opportunity” simply put imported crabmeat into a domestic container.

Brooks, who processes crab, added that there is “no or very limited enforcement” of such fraud, which can net businesses an extra $4 to $9 per pound. That leaves domestic competitors with higher costs and puts seafood-related jobs in jeopardy.

During their investigation, NOAA agents sent eight containers of Casey’s Seafood crabmeat bought at stores in Delaware and Virginia to a laboratory in College Park for DNA testing. The results confirmed the tip: seven of the eight Casey’s containers labeled as “Product of the USA” contained swimming crab found only outside U.S. waters, according to court documents.

Read the full story at the Baltimore Sun

 

Sean Horgan: House bill gives fishermen glimmer of hope

December 18, 2017 — From a literary standpoint, there really isn’t much to say about the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. The plot is murky, the characters non-existent and the writing so dense and boring that you’d swear it was written by some Beltway wonks.

Oh wait, it was. Perhaps the movie will be better. Or even the re-authorized version.

Following five years of stultifying futility, Congress finally seems on the threshold of formally re-authorizing the law that governs the management of our nation’s federal fisheries.

Last Wednesday, the House Natural Resources Committee voted H.R. 200 (or if you’re not into the whole brevity thing, the Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act) out of committee, setting the stage for a vote by the full House and, somewhere down the road, a clash with the Senate over whatever bill comes from the upper chamber.

But for now, the House bill has given commercial fishermen at least a glimmer of hope that their cries have carried from the wilderness and now are resonating in the halls of Congress.

The key word in all of this is flexibility.

Read the full column at the Gloucester Times

Trump shrinks two huge national monuments in Utah, drawing praise and protests

December 4, 2017 — SALT LAKE CITY — President Trump on Monday drastically scaled back two national monuments established in Utah by his Democratic predecessors, the largest reduction of public lands protection in U.S. history.

Trump’s move to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by more than 1.1 million acres and more than 800,000 acres, respectively, immediately sparked an outpouring of praise from conservative lawmakers as well as activists’ protests outside the White House and in Utah. It also plunges the Trump administration into uncharted legal territory since no president has sought to modify monuments established under the 1906 Antiquities Act in more than half a century.

His decision removes about 85 percent of the designation of Bears Ears and nearly 46 percent of that for Grand Staircase-Escalante, land that potentially could now be leased for energy exploration or opened for specific activities such as motorized vehicle use.

Trump told a rally in Salt Lake City that he came to “reverse federal overreach” and took dramatic action “because some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They’re wrong.”

“They don’t know your land, and truly, they don’t care for your land like you do,” he added. “But from now on, that won’t matter.”

Conservatives have long sought to curb a president’s unilateral power to safeguard federal lands and waters under the law, a practice that both Democrats and Republicans have pursued since it was enacted under Theodore Roosevelt. The issue has been a particular flash point in the West, where some local residents feel the federal government already imposes too many restrictions on development and others, including tribal officials, feel greater protections of ancient sites are needed.

Even before Trump made the announcement as part of a day trip to the state, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Craig Uden was hailing the resized designations. While grazing has continued on both monuments, as well as on others, Uden said ranchers could not have greater input into how they are managed.

“We are grateful that today’s action will allow ranchers to resume their role as responsible stewards of the land and drivers of rural economies,” he said.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

MASSACHUSETTS: Mayor Mitchell testifies in front of Congress on Magnuson-Stevens

September 27, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Mayor Jon Mitchell traveled to the nation’s capital Tuesday to speak on potential improvements to the Magnuson-Steven Act, which governs marine fishery management in the United States.

He spoke to the Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans regarding one key theme: flexibility.

“What New Bedford has to say about commercial fishing carries weight in the halls of Congress,” Mitchell said. “We are the biggest commercial fishing port in the country. We should have a seat at the table when Congress goes about reforming our nation’s fisheries laws.”

Mitchell was invited to testify by Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop who visited New Bedford last year. Though invited by the Republicans to speak in front of Congress, the Democratic mayor pitched bi-partisan ideas in the reauthorization of the act.

“What’s really interesting is there isn’t a great deal of difference between the Democratic and Republican reauthorization bills,” Mitchell said. “I testified as much.”

While in Washington, D.C., he also met with Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, to discuss tax reform in cities as well as infrastructure. Away from fishing, he also met with Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who co-sponsored the DREAM Act aimed at helping resurrect DACA.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Fishing rule reforms debated on Capitol Hill

September 27, 2017 — How large of a role should the federal government have in regulating fishing fleets?

Republicans and Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources discussed this question Tuesday in Washington, D.C., as part of renewed efforts to reauthorize and potentially amend a 40-year-old law that works to prevent overfishing and provide aid to fishing fleets.

Committee member and California 2nd District Rep. Jared Huffman said after the hearing Tuesday that Democrats and Republicans have many agreements when it comes to fishery regulations and management.

However, he said previous attempts in recent years to amend and reauthorize the law have stalled because of “poison pill” riders that would exempt fisheries from conservation policies such as the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Protection Act.

“Instead of making meaningful improvements to our most important fisheries statute, this process has focused on weakening fundamental environmental protections in place of making meaningful improvements to our important fisheries management framework,” Huffman (D-San Rafael) said in his opening statement at the committee hearing. “This partisan process does a disservice to hardworking fishermen across the country including those in my district.”

Members from both sides of the aisle were in agreement that the law — known as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 — has worked to prevent overfishing and replenish overfished stocks as was intended upon its passage.

Read the full story at the Eureka Times-Standard

Subcommittee to Review Bills to Modernize Federal Fisheries Management

September 19, 2017 — The following was released by the House Committee on Natural Resources:

Washington, D.C. – On Tuesday, September 26, 2017 at 10:00 AM in 1334 Longworth House Office Building, the Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans will hold a legislative hearing on the following bills:

  • H.R. 200 (Rep. Don Young), To amend the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to provide flexibility for fishery managers and stability for fishermen, and for other purposes.
  • H.R. 2023 (Rep. Garret Graves), To modernize recreational fisheries management “Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act of 2017”
  • H.R. 3588 (Rep. Garret Graves), To amend the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to provide for management of red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, and for other purposes. “RED SNAPPER Act”
  • Discussion Draft of H.R. ____  (Rep. Jared Huffman), To amend and reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and for other purposes.
WHAT: Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans Legislative Hearing on 4 Bills
WHEN: Tuesday, September 26
10:00 AM
WHERE: 1334 Longworth House Office Building

Visit the Committee Calendar for additional information once it is made available. The meeting is open to the public and a video feed will stream live at House Committee on Natural Resources.

Panel Reviews Legislation to Increase Access to Outdoor Sporting Opportunities on Federal Lands

September 12, 2017 — WASHINGTON — The following was released by the House Committee on Natural Resources:

Today, the Subcommittee on Federal Lands held a legislative hearing on H.R. 3668, the “Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act of 2017” or “SHARE Act.” The bill increases opportunities for hunters, anglers and shooters, eliminates red tape impeding outdoor sporting activities, and protects Second Amendment Rights.

“Outdoor sporting activities, including hunting, fishing and recreational shooting, aredeeply engrained in the fabric of America’s culture and heritage. Values of personal responsibility, resource management and conservation and outdoor recreation instilled by these activities are passed down from generation to generation and play a significant role in the lives of millions of Americans,” Subcommittee Chairman Tom McClintock (R-CA) said.

Outdoor sporting activities are a major economic driver in the United States. According to the Outdoor Industry Association, sportsmen and women annually generate 7.6 million American jobs, $65.3 billion in federal tax revenues and a combined $59.2 billion in state and local taxes.

Despite the significant economic benefits of outdoor sporting activities, unnecessary bureaucratic roadblocks inhibit access to these activities on federal lands.

“Among the most commonly cited reasons by Americans who have given up on these recreational pursuits on public lands are access issues,” McClintock argued.

The “SHARE Act” includes multiple provisions that improve access and opportunities for outdoor recreation and sporting activities on federal lands, including requiring the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to be “open until closed” for recreational hunting, fishing and shooting.

“As a nation, we must encourage all Americans, and in particular young people and urban residents, to increase their participation in wildlife-oriented recreation, including hunting, shooting and fishing,” Anna Seidman, Director of Government Affairs for the Safari Club International, said. “[The ‘SHARE Act’] removes statutory and regulatory obstacles that inhibit federal agencies from providing access and opportunities [for sportsmen and women].”

The “SHARE Act” also increases safety and hearing protection for sportsmen and women by removing onerous requirements associated with purchasing hearing protection equipment.

“No reason exists why one should be forced to damage one’s hearing to hunt, target shoot, or exercise one’s second Amendment rights,” Stephen Halbrook, an attorney who specializes in Second Amendment issues, stated.

The bill prevents firearm mufflers from being regulated under the 1934 National Firearms Act, which requires a $200 transfer tax fee. It also ends the requirement that law-abiding gun owners go through a secondary, outmoded federal background check and continues to treat mufflers as firearms subject to extensive regulations under the Gun Control Act.

“[The ‘SHARE Act’] would protect law enforcement interests while at the same time allowing law-abiding gun owners to protect their health better and to reduce noise pollution,” Halbrook added.

Christopher Sharon, CEO of Hope for the Warriors, added that firearm mufflers are vital for veterans’ enjoyment of the outdoors, pointing to the prevalence of hearing loss for those who have trained and served in our military.

“Preserving what remains of our heroes’ hearing, while still giving them the opportunities to live a full life is our goal,” Sharon stated.

Click here to view full witness testimony.

Click here for more information on the “SHARE Act.”