SEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton — August 22, 2014 — The Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers (ABSC) have called on President Obama to immediately initiate an import ban on Russian seafood products to the United States. This ban is in retaliation for the recently announced ban on seafood imports into Russia from the US and the EU.
"Mr. Putin has demonstrated that he is more than willing to flex Russian economic muscle to achieve its foreign policy objectives. It’s time for the US to follow suit and flex some muscles of its own," said the group.
The Bering Sea Crabbers have long sought to call attention to the impact of Russian imports, particularly illegal imports, on the crab market in the U.S.
In testimony in prior years from the WWF on IUU fishing, they said “since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 there has been an explosion of IUU crab fishing within Russia’s exclusive economic zone. At some point along the trade route, IUU crab is laundered to appear as if it is of legal origin. Misdeclaring quantities, mislabeling products, creating false documentation, and bribing individuals are known techniques for laundering illegal crab.”
Although some of this illegal crab activity has been reduced, no one on either side of the Pacific claims it is eliminated, because overfishing quota is a common result of corruption.
The McDowell Group has estimated that Russia exported 195 million pounds of crab in 2013, but that official Russian harvest data for the same year shows a legal harvest of 96.1 million pounds.
This suggests that 40% of the crab on the world market is IUU crab, which although large, is down from what is was several years ago, when the amount of illegal crab was double or triple the legal volumes.
The Alaska Bering Sea crabbers believe a significant amount of that crab will find its way onto the plate of US consumers. These unwitting consumers have little, if any knowledge, that by eating unspecified king crab they may be supporting this illegal activity. In addition to the harm to consumers, American crab fishermen in Alaska also feel the “pinch,” through lower prices than they otherwise might get.
Wall Street Journal writer Jim Carlton reported on this issue in a 2013 article entitled Alaskan Crabbers Get Pinched by Poachers. In the article Mr. Carlton quotes a NOAA spokesperson whose agency “estimates that illicit Russian crab has cost US fishermen-‐many of them in Alaska-‐ $560 million since 2000.”
"The continuation of this illegal activity begs the question: Why is the US market still open to Russian crab given what we know already?", say the crabbers.
"While we urge the Obama Administration to address this issue in the short term by initiating an immediate import ban on Russian crab into the US market, we do so with the understanding that a trade ban is simply a short term “fix” to a much larger issue."
We feel the most effective way to deal with the issue of illegal Russian crab imports to the US would be to include whole cooked crab and cooked crab sections under the list of products subject to Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) requirements. As it stands currently cooked crab products are excluded from COOL. This makes it nearly impossible for the US consumer to differentiate between Russian and US product, not to mention differentiate between legal and illegal Russian product. By including cooked crab under the COOL requirement US consumers will, for the first time, have the necessary information at their disposal to make an informed seafood purchase."
Read the release from the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers here
This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.