Economic Impact

July 22, 2013 — It's not the kind of publicity lobster marketers necessarily would have wanted. During a June 7 airing of the radio show Boston Public Radio, hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagen spent a good 10 minutes chuckling over the fact that a Walgreens store in Boston was selling live lobsters. The pairing of a drug store and live lobster was just too unappetizing for them, and they compared it to a Wisconsin taxidermist shop that sells cheese.

"Are you OK buying a live pound-and-a-halfer next to a display of foot powder?" Braude asked. Eagen wondered if you had to fess up to party guests about buying the lobster at a drug store. Boston Magazine also ran a tongue-in-cheek blogpost about the Walgreens lobster. Before the end of the month, Walgreens pulled the lobster from its Boston store, but it continues to sell live lobster in three locations in Portland and Ellsworth, according to a Walgreens spokesman.

It may be an odd way for a drug store to branch out, but it's emblematic of the crossroads where the Maine lobster brand finds itself. Lobster landings are up, way up, from historic figures. Maine lobstermen caught 123.3 million pounds of lobster during the 2012 season, which represents a 15% increase from 2011 and an 88% increase from landings two decades ago, according to Maine Department of Marine Resources figures. The glut in the market has driven prices down to the lowest lobstermen have seen in 18 years. Meanwhile, warm water temperatures have caused lobsters to shed their shells much earlier than usual, meaning lobstermen have been catching soft-shelled lobsters, which don't ship well, before tourists arrive to eat them. There's a need to move a lot of lobster through the marketplace without devolving the lobster brand into a commodity, says Marianne LaCroix, acting executive director of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council.

"The challenge is that we have a premium brand product and there's a lot of it in the marketplace," LaCroix says.

Lobster industry stakeholders agree that the future of lobster marketing will have to include an approach that expands the marketplace for Maine lobster while still maintaining its cache among culinary circles. That market expansion has taken on an improvisatory feel in the last couple of years, as lobstermen and lobster dealers have had to scramble to unload their swelled landings. In 2012, it was common to see lobstermen alongside the road selling their lobsters for $2.99 a pound from the back of pickup trucks. Coastal communities organized cash mobs to buy lobster at break-even prices from local lobstermen. Chain restaurants, from Panera to McDonald's to Papa Gino's, all began offering the now ubiquitous lobster roll. While there is some value in exposing more palettes to the taste of lobster and it was vital to find a market for all that extra lobster, there is a downside to marketing it in mass quantities, says Emily Lane, vice president of sales at the Calendar Islands Maine Lobster Co.

Craig Idlebrook, a writer based in Massachusetts, can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.

Read the full story at Mainebiz 

 

 

July 19, 2013 — As fishing areas close in the face of dwindling stocks, we look at what the hopes are among fishing folks for the future. In some areas — such as lobsters, scallops and striped bass — there are success stories that can be looked at to determine what is going right. But other areas of the sea are closed, and some wonder if they will stay that way.

Eric Hess is a groundfisherman. He’s been fishing off the Cape for species like haddock and cod for nearly 30 years. But these days he says it's very hard in his sector to catch enough fish to meet the cost of fishing. He says boats are dropping out and looking to other opportunities—the Georges Bank fixed gear sector, of which he is a member, is roughly the same size it was five years ago, but most fishermen are not going after historically popular species. Some are switching to sea scalloping, and others are going after more abundant, lesser known species like monkfish, dogfish, and skate. 

Right now there isn't much of a local market for these species, but they are in demand overseas. The British love dogfish fried up in fish and chips, and the French like skate wings with capers and brown butter. Local fishermen hope Cape Codders will also come to appreciate these fish.

Read the full story and listen to the audio at NPR affiliate WCAI 

 

REEDVILLE, Va. — July 16, 2013 — Omega Protein Corporation recently christened two new vessels at its Reedville, Virginia facility.

The two vessels, named the F/V Rappahannock and the F/V Fleeton are state of the art menhaden fishing vessels and are the first new vessels christened by the company in over 20 years. Omega Protein is a nutritional product company and an integrated producer of omega-3 fish oil and specialty protein products.

Read the full story from World Fishing & Aquaculture

EASTON, Md., — July 16, 2013 — The Fiscal Year 2014 Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations Bill was recently passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee and includes a provision to allow Maryland's seafood industry to stagger its seasonal, foreign workers on H-2B visas to support harvests during peak seasons.

"It is imperative to the seafood industry that there is staggered crossings," Karen Oertel, owner of W.H. Harris Seafood and Harris Crab House in Kent Narrows said.

Jack Brooks, of the Cambridge-based J.M. Clayton Company and president of the board of directors of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, said due to the nature of the H-2B visa program, which resets for the fiscal year every October 1, the crabbing industry in Maryland had problem getting seasonal foreign workers because most of the visas, which cap at 66,000 a year, were already granted before the crabbing industry's time of need, which is in April.

He said companies in the crabbing industry that utilize foreign workers, under the old method, had to get all their H-2B workers in within the first 30 days of their time of need, but that created a "particularly terrible hardship" on the industry, partly because of its harvest variability, especially when there are winters as cold as there have been and crab harvest peaks later in the season.

Read the full story at the Star Democrat

 

July 7, 2013 — Seattle author Kevin Bailey’s “Billion-Dollar Fish” chronicles the race among fishermen from different countries to exploit the immense stocks of pollock in the North Pacific.

Alaska pollock is the stuff of fish sticks, fish oil and artificial crab. It is a lowly fish, not emblematic of Native American culture or particularly prized by chefs. But it amounts to 40 percent of the U.S. commercial fish catch, and feeds a billion-dollar industry based in Seattle.

In “Billion Dollar Fish,” the story of the pollock boom of the 1980s and 1990s is told by Kevin Bailey, who for three decades was a fisheries scientist at Seattle’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Bailey has written dozens of scientific papers about pollock. The penalty for the reader is that in his chapter on biology he delves into the science more deeply than some will want to go. But he knows his fish, and comes at the topic neither in the pocket of the industry nor its environmental critics.

Much of his book is a business story. In economic terms, pollock is a latecomer, a species known for decades before Americans figured out how to exploit it. The fishing grounds in the Bering Sea are remote and dangerous, and per pound the fish is far less valuable than crab or salmon.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times 

 

July 10, 2013 — Wild salmon harvests were reaching toward 39 million fish by the second week of July, with harvests slowed in the Copper River and Bristol Bay, and retail prices remaining steady as salmon harvests elsewhere statewide continued to increase.

At Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, whole fresh Copper River king salmon were still prices at $25.99 a pound and whole fresh Copper River sockeyes at $54.95 per fish.

Fresh Copper River king salmon fillets were fetching $39.99 a pound at Pike Place, and fresh Copper River sockeye fillets $20.99 a pound.

In the Copper River district drift fishery, the preliminary commercial harvest reported by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game on July 9 stood at 1.5 million fish, including 9,000 kings, 11,000 chum, 1,000 silver, 12,000 pink and 1,443,000 red salmon.

In Bristol Bay, where the total run was edging toward 19 million fish, the cumulative harvest was 13,240,759 fish.

The 20-year average for the sockeye salmon commercial catch in Bristol Bay is 25,360,300, according to data provided by Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The biggest run for the 20-year period from 1992 through 2012 was 40,462,292 fish in 1993, and the poorest run was 10,035,582 fish in 1998. In 2012, the harvest in Bristol Bay came to 20,578,212 fish, ADFG records show.

The statewide harvest meanwhile, reached 38,804,000 salmon of all species, including 197,000 king, 7,825,000 chum, 97,000 silver, 9,666,000 pink and 21,019,000 sockeye.

Read the full story at The Cordoba Times 

 

July 12, 2013 — A proposal to open portions of at least two areas previously closed to fishing in the waters off Cape Cod and Nantucket, with tight restrictions, would hold no benefit for Gloucester’s fishermen casting nets from smaller vessels and little for the few working larger off-shore boats, fishermen and others said Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Wednesday its plan to open parts of some areas that have been closed to groundfishing for nearly 20 years, but added, to fishermen’s dismay, that the federal organization will require everyone who fishes there to shell out payment to carry a NOAA observer on board.

“The area they want us to fish does absolutely no good to the Gloucester and New England fleet,” Gloucester-based fisherman Richard Burgess said Thursday. “It’s not going to help anybody.”

Burgess operates a handful of 45-foot boats that, simply put, would not take the multi-day trip out to the areas NOAA is proposing opening, parts of Areas I and II within Georges Bank and the Nantucket Light Ship area.

The multi-day fishing trip required to reach the areas would mean a crew paying a NOAA observer $600 per day in hopes of returning with a heavy load of the stock. NOAA funds the observers now required to ride along on about a quarter of the fishing trips out of Gloucester, but NOAA spokeswoman Maggie Mooney-Seus said the federal administration could not find enough wiggle room in their budget to pay the observers on these proposed trips.

“The small boats, when we can fish, we’re only stocking about $600 a day anyway, and to pay an observer would just be absurd,” Burgess said.

Burgess proposed instead that NOAA ought to open the Western Maine Gulf Closure, an area with groundfish and little risk of a bycatch of Gulf of Maine cod — a quota that NOAA cut by 78 percent beginning of the new fishing year that began May 1.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

 

July 10, 2013 —  Low prices, lack of processing facilities, and the risk of losing the family tradition of lobstering were among the topics discussed at length Tuesday afternoon as harvesters met with the state’s marine resources commissioner.

“Let fishing families be fishing families,” said longtime lobsterman Richard Alley of Addison.

He said the state should allow lobstermen, when they retire, to transfer their quota of lobster tags to their children.

Patrick Keliher, commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said he understood the sentiment but that each time such a law has been proposed, it has been determined to be unconstitutional since the ability to harvest public resources can’t be passed down in that way.

About 55 people attended the first of a series of four meetings that Keliher plans to have along the coast to hear from lobstermen about the state of their industry. The session was held at Oceanside High School East in Rockland.

The issue of low prices was a dominant theme as the commissioner acknowledged there has been an erosion of prices since 2008. Over the same time period, the catch has doubled to 124 million pounds last year, resulting in supply outpacing demand.

The Maritime Provinces of Canada have an inventory of 20 million pounds of live lobsters, a huge amount, the commissioner said.

David Cousens, president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said harvesters cannot withstand continued low prices for their hard-shell lobsters. He said the state needs to work with Canada on dealing with supply-and-demand issues.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

 

July 4, 2013 — There is good news for consumers, but bad for struggling lobstermen: Prices for the delicacy are cheap again this season, and could stay that way.

Massachusetts lobstermen were paid about $3.74 per pound last week, just four cents more than a year ago, when prices hit a record low. That means supermarket prices of $6.99 to $9.99 a pound, depending on size.

Get used to the bargains, the experts say, because climate change, in the form of warmer oceans, and fewer predators are likely to mean a plentiful lobster supply for years to come. On top of that, looser regulations on the crustacean’s predators — cod, halibut, and hake — are creating bigger lobster populations.

“You’re seeing this explosion in catches,” said Rick Wahle, a professor at Darling Marine Center at the University of Maine. “You remove those large fish from the population, and lobsters outgrow their predators faster than they used to, and it allows them to exploit habitats they didn’t used to.”

When lobsters shed their shells — a process known as molting — it signals the start of the US lobster season. New England lobsters typically begin molting around July 4, but global warming is making them molt earlier. Last season, lobsters shed their shells at the end of May, kicking off the American season before the Canadian season had ended. The result: a record low for lobster prices because of the overabundant supply.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

 

July 5, 2013 — Lobster season appears to be back to normal this year. And normal is good.

From lobstermen to dealers to processors, the industry is relieved to see a return to routine lobster harvesting after last year, when a glut in the market produced the lowest wholesale prices in a generation and triggered protests against Canadian processors who imported lower-priced Maine lobster.

"During the last three or four days, volume has been picking up. It's more typical of a regular season," said Kyle Murdock, president and chief executive of processor Sea Hag Seafood Inc. in Tenants Harbor. "Last year was very early. It's a good thing that it's more normal this year. Last year's glut definitely put us in a hairy position."

Last year, Maine lobstermen hauled a record 123 million pounds of lobster, up 18 percent from the year before. The total value of the catch, however, dropped 1.1 percent to $331 million. The average price per pound was $2.69, down from $3.19 a pound in 2011, according to the state's Department of Marine Resources.

Shedders, or softshell lobster, have begun appearing in southern Maine and the midcoast regions and are expected to appear Down East in the coming weeks, lobstermen and dealers said.

John Ready, who co-owns Ready Seafood in Portland, said that having shedders appear more slowly along different parts of the coast — rather than all at once throughout the entire coast — helps the industry more efficiently absorb the harvest over time instead of having to handle it all at once, which results in a crash in prices.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald