Saving Seafood

Economic Impact

Northern Wind’s $12m plant expansion makes room for more scallops, other products

December 19, 2019 — Northern Wind is already one of the three largest processors, distributors and direct offloaders of fresh and frozen scallops in North America, but its recently announced $12 million plant expansion in New Bedford, Massachusetts, promises to also make it an even larger player in both the scallop and overall seafood space, CEO George Kouri tells Undercurrent News.

The 32-year-old company revealed this week that it is in the process of completing construction on what will be a 38,000 square foot processing facility with a 21,600 square foot freezer capable of holding up to 5.5m pounds of seafood. That’s 11 times the company’s previous freezer holding capacity.

The new freezer is already up and running, and the rest of the facility could be ready to roll shortly after New Year’s Day, Kouri said.

Northern Wind, which opened some 32 years ago, is already processing some 18m lbs of scallops annually, buying all of the scallops produced by some 70 vessels with which the company has 30+ year agreements. Though imports account for between 25% and 30% of annual scallop sales.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

2025 global salmon growth forecasts overestimated, new paper argues

December 17, 2019 — Global salmon growth forecasts to 2025 could be overestimated by 6 to 8 percent, according to a new briefing paper from financial think tank Planet Tracker. The culprit is global warming, the paper argues.

In “Salmon Feels the Heat,” researchers analysed reported fish losses attributed to recurring environmental shocks over the past nine years, as reported by the 10 largest publicly listed salmon producers in Norway, Chile, and the United Kingdom. They found that the aggregated production and earnings losses relative to forecast production reached 5 percent for the period between 2010 to 2019.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

US has only one offshore wind energy farm, but a $70 billion market is on the way

December 16, 2019 — Just three years ago five giant wind turbines in the waters off Block Island, Rhode Island, started spinning 30 MW of electricity to that tiny community of about a thousand residents. While it remains the only offshore wind farm in the U.S., that’s about to dramatically change.

According to the Department of Energy, offshore wind has the potential to generate more than 2,000 GW of capacity per year, nearly double the nation’s current electricity use. Even if only 1% of that potential is captured, nearly 6.5 million homes could be powered by offshore wind energy within the next decade.

Today states along the Eastern Seaboard, from Maine to Virginia, are poised to join a renewable-energy revolution that will not only provide clean, green electricity but also create tens of thousands of jobs, revitalize distressed port cities and spur economic growth in dozens of coastal communities.

“We are in an incredible growth period,” said Laura Morton, a senior director at the American Wind Energy Association in Washington, D.C. She cited a recent white paper from the Special Initiative for Offshore Wind that projects a $70 billion business pipeline in the U.S. by 2030.

Read the full story at CNBC

United States and China reach agreement to deescalate trade war

December 13, 2019 — The United States and China announced an agreement in which China will make structural reforms to its trading policies and strengthen its intellectual property protections in exchange for a reduction of current and proposed U.S. tariffs.

The U.S. will cancel its plan to implement another round of tariff increases later this month, and will reduce its 15 percent tariffs to 7.5 percent on USD 120 billion (EUR 107.9 billion) worth of Chinese goods. It will leave in place 25 percent tariffs on an additional USD 250 billion (EUR 224.8 billion) of Chinese imports, however, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). The USTR did not identify which goods would see reduced tariffs.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Maine lobsters head for distant new market

December 12, 2019 — The changing climate and a seemingly unending round of trade wars are putting the squeeze on Maine’s lobster industry.

As the Gulf of Maine warms at a rapid pace, the lobster population seems to be shifting its location. At the same time, increased Chinese tariffs on lobster, imposed in retaliation for U.S. tariffs on an array of imports from China, have cut Maine exports into that lucrative market sharply.

Demand for lobster hasn’t disappeared in China, but most of it is now being filled by Canadian dealers, frequently shipping lobsters imported from Maine.

To help fishermen combat these pressures and diversify the New England seafood industry, Food Export USA–Northeast recently organized a three-day trade mission to Dubai for several Maine lobster dealers.

Traveling to the city, one of the United Arab Emirates on the shore of the Persian Gulf, said Tim Hamilton, executive director, Food Export USA-Northeast, were representatives from Greenhead Lobster Co. in Stonington, Maine Coast Lobster in York and Ready Seafood in Portland.

Also on the trip were representatives of Island Creek Oysters, a Massachusetts-based oyster grower.

“One way to counter what’s happening in the world today is to diversify export markets for all Northeast U.S. seafood products,” Hamilton said. “Our programs, services and promotional activities around the world can help suppliers do that.”

Dubai and countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) represent a potentially rich export market opportunity for Northeast U.S. seafood suppliers. In 2018, U.S. seafood exports to six GCC countries (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia) amounted to $14.4 million, while total U.S. food and agricultural exports to that market comprised $3.3 billion, so U.S. seafood exports are only about a half a percent of total U.S. food exports.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

New England fishermen losing jobs due to climate fluctuations

December 11, 2019 — For decades the biggest threat to the industry has been overfishing, but it is no longer the only threat. According to new research at the University of Delaware, fluctuations in the climate have already cost some New England fishermen their jobs.

UD’s Kimberly Oremus, assistant professor of marine policy, makes the direct link, for the first time, between large-scale climate variability and fishing job losses in a study published Dec. 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By correlating the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) — New England’s dominant climate signal — with labor numbers, Oremus determined that New England’s coastal counties have, on average, lost 16% of their fishing jobs due to climate variation from 1996 to 2017.

This specific effect of climate is distinct from the overall job losses and gains caused by other factors, such as changes in market demand, regulatory changes to curb overfishing, and broader economic trends. Currently, 34,000 commercial marine fishermen are employed in New England’s industry.

“As we see more warm winters off the New England coast, historic fisheries decline and fewer fishermen stay in business,” Oremus said. “This has important implications for fisheries management in New England, which employs 20% of U.S. commercial harvesters.”

Read the full story at Science Daily

Global salmon production set to rise 6.5% in 2019, the highest increase since 2014

December 6, 2019 — Global production of farmed Atlantic salmon is expected to rise by around 6.5% this year, to approximately 2.6 million metric tons, which would be the highest year-on-year increase since 2014.

This was pointed out by a new report produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The bullish scenario could be offset, however, by a mounting challenge with sea lice in Chile, the report predicted.

For 2020, the FAO foresees Atlantic salmon supply to grow around 4–5% year-on-year, but it noted that the ability of the Chilean industry to bring the biological situation under control will be an important consideration.

In the longer-term, the inherent growth limitations of traditional open net-pen aquaculture will continue to drive the development of alternative regions and methods for salmon production, the FAO said.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Retailers, brands refusing to pay more for slavery-free seafood

December 5, 2019 — Few buyers of seafood from Thailand are building the cost of social and environmental compliance into the prices they’re paying, undermining efforts to keep slavery and other labor abuse issues out of the supply chain, according to a new report from Praxis Labs, funded by the non-governmental organizations Humanity United and the Freedom Fund.

The report, “Tracking Progress: Assessing Business Responses to Forced Labour and Human Trafficking in the Thai Seafood Industry,” investigated how industry responded to the exposure of labor and human rights abuses in the Thai seafood sector, which were exposed in the past five years by The Associated Press and The Guardian.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Dubai in the market for New England shellfish

December 5, 2019 — With Europe and China effectively off-limits because of trade tariffs, the New England lobster industry and other components of the region’s shellfish industry are on the prowl for new markets.

How does the emirate of Dubai sound?

In September, the nonprofit Food Export – Northeast, in collaboration with the foreign agricultural service office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, organized a three-day trade mission to Dubai to allow Northeast American lobster and oyster suppliers to meet with Persian Gulf seafood buyers.

“The bottom line, obviously, is we’re trying to diversify markets,” said Tim Hamilton, executive director of Food Export – Northeast. “The industry has relied so much on first Europe and now China. Both of those have met with challenges recently. We haven’t done that much with seafood in that part of the world and we thought we’d take a group there and learn more about the market and generate some interest among the industry there.”

Hamilton said Dubai — one of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates — and the other countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia) represent a potentially lucrative integrated new market for American lobsters, oysters and other shellfish.

“The Middle East has money and they don’t produce food,” Hamilton said. “So there’s an understanding and a predisposition for eating foods from elsewhere.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

How Finance Can Help Protect the World’s Ocean Resources

December 4, 2019 — Can finance contribute to seafood sustainability? This is an increasingly relevant question given the projected growth of seafood demand and the magnitude of social and environmental issues associated with its production.

Since the 1960s, aquaculture has been the world’s fastest-growing food sector. Rates of fish consumption have been increasing twice as rapidly as population growth, and fish has become one of the most traded food commodities.

Today, more than 90 percent of the world’s fisheries are either overexploited or fully exploited, and the sector is plagued with unsustainable practices, ranging from illegal fishing and habitat destruction to overuse of antibiotics and forced labour.

Making sure that seafood is both socially and environmentally sustainable has therefore become a key concern for governments, academics and civil society organisations.

In a recent article published in the journal Science Advances, my colleagues and I explored what role finance could play in promoting a sustainable seafood industry and where leverage points may lie to redirect capital towards better practices.

Read the full story at The Maritime Executive