Economic Impact

CUXHAVEN, Germany — April 22, 2013 — This small city on the North Sea is more than 3,000 miles from New Bedford, but for Whaling City officials trying to build local tourism while luring a new industry to town, the similarities between the two places twinkle with promise.

A bleary-eyed New Bedford trade delegation stumbled off the bus Sunday morning in Cuxhaven, a longtime seaside escape and former fishing hub in northern Germany that has received millions of public dollars from the European Union and state of Lower Saxony to create port infrastructure for the offshore wind industry.

The group, which includes city and state officials, business leaders and professionals involved with workforce development, is visiting Germany as part of a weeklong fact-finding mission focused on offshore wind.

After a sightseeing tour of Cuxhaven on Sunday, New Bedford officials said they were as impressed by the offshore activity as with the seemingly harmonious coexistence of industrial facilities with about eight miles of popular beachfront, including areas of protected environmental lands.

"What I found very interesting was how seemingly well-integrated it is," said Mayor Jon Mitchell, who will sign a "Sister City" agreement with Cuxhaven officials tonight.

"They've been able to accommodate recreation, fishing, cargo and offshore wind very well."

Cuxhaven, which sits on the North Sea at the mouth of the Elbe River, developed more than 100 years ago as a beach town and many of its historic buildings date to the turn-of-the-century, when it served as a base for the Imperial Navy.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

 

April 18, 2013 — As of Thursday night, both sides of Boylston Street from Clarendon to Hereford are sealed off, and the MBTA Green Line trolley station in Copley Square is as well.

Legal Sea Foods closed down not one but two restaurants in a matter of seconds Monday, at the Prudential Center and Copley Place, after the bombs went off, leaving thousands of dollars of unpaid-for and un-served food to be thrown out when staff could return a day later to what became a floor-to-ceiling sterilizing job.

"It’s a lot of uneaten food on plates, cellphones, sunglasses, people who just got up and took off," Legal president Roger Berkowitz said. The company is pushing to get the Pru and Copley restaurants reopened by 5 p.m. Friday.

"Getting back up will be cathartic. It will get back to a semblance of normalcy," Berkowitz said, adding, "In retrospect, yes, you know we did lose business over the course of the last x number of days. But that's sort of a secondary issue. Obviously you look at the bigger picture as Bostonians and business people and residents here … It doesn't mean you stop living your life, it doesn't mean you stop doing the things you like to do. It just means you have to be more aware of everything around you."

Read the full story and watch the video at NECN

 

 

April 18, 2013 — In 2012, the U.S. Coast Guard passed a law directly affecting Local 400 members working as fisherman at Omega Protein. It required all engineers on vessels to have a license to operate them by 2014. Local 400 stepped in to keep our members working, forging a partnership with management and the Seafarers’ Union to ensure all affected members have the appropriate licenses.

“Thanks to the great relationship the Local 400 leadership has with Omega Protein and the Seafarers union our chief and second engineers were able to get their licenses at no expense,” said Hurston Harcum, chief shop steward at Omega Protein.

Omega Protein is funding the course work for all 14 of the chief and second engineers to get licensed. The engineers have been attending the U.S. Coast Guard approved courses at the Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education located in Piney Point, Md.

Read the full story from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union

 

 

 

April 17, 2013 — A few weeks ago, second-generation commercial fisherman B.G. Brown almost gave up. He had learned how much fish he can legally catch in the coming year. The numbers were shockingly low.

“I was ready to throw in the towel,” Brown told a crowd of about 40 local business people, political leaders, concerned community members, and fellow fishermen that gathered last week to discuss the uncertain future of Gloucester’s historic industry.

There is consensus in the city that serious trouble is looming. During the past several years, economic and environmental concerns about overfishing have pushed federal regulators to steadily tighten annual catch limits. Last fall, the US Commerce Department declared an economic disaster in the Northeast groundfish fishery area.

In response to these challenges, local activist and former city councilor Valerie Nelson organized last week’s forum to examine the pressures facing the fishing industry and begin to explore both immediate and long-term solutions.

Almost everyone who spoke agreed that regulators should loosen the quota cuts for the coming year. If the current catch limits stand, the industry could be harmed irreparably, several speakers said.

“The only thing that’s going to make me survive May 1 — and it’s just around the corner — is if I get more fish,” said Gloucester fisherman Joseph Orlando.

In January, The New England Fishery Management Council, which oversees commercial fishing in the region, cut the quota for Gulf of Maine cod by 77 percent for the next three fishing years, beginning May 1. The limits on other species, including haddock and yellowtail flounder, also will be dropped significantly.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

 

 

April 15, 2013 — Elvers, the spaghetti-thin transparent juvenile American eels, may be the most sought-after commercial marine species in Maine right now, but they are not the first to rocket to prominence due to demand in the Far East.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was sea urchins. The round, spiny, baseball-sized creatures are treasured in Japan and neighboring countries for their roe, which is considered a seafood delicacy. But in the late 1980s local stocks in the western Pacific Ocean began to wane. That’s when Asian seafood dealers discovered that Maine had plenty.

Landings for Maine urchins, long considered a nuisance by lobstermen, soared at a time when few restrictions on urchin harvesting were in place. In less than 10 years, the statewide volume of urchin landings exploded from 1.4 million pounds to more than 41 million pounds.

The boom, however, turned into a bust. The annual value of Maine’s urchin landings went from $236,000 in 1987 to more than $35 million in 1995, but declined quickly again in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Last year, when the average annual price was $2.63 per pound, urchin fishermen statewide earned less than $5 million for their catch and, for the first time since 1987, caught less than 2 million pounds.

Now that a spike in Asian demand for eels has elvers fetching top dollar — around $2,000 per pound this spring, as opposed to $185 per pound three years ago — some are wondering if Maine’s elver fishery will go the way of the urchins.

But others who had a front row seat to the urchin gold rush of the late 1980s and early 1990s say the regulatory situation with elvers is very different. Unlike the urchin fishery, American eels make up a multistate fishery and so are regulated by federal law. And unlike urchins, strict conservation measures for elvers had been in place for many years before the price exploded.

Bill Sutter, a Wiscasset resident who has dragged for urchins since the 1960s, said Thursday that federal regulators likely will impose tighter restrictions on American eel harvests before catches start declining. Annual catches of elvers in Maine increased from 3,100 pounds in 2010 to 19,000 in 2012.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

 

 

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — April 12, 2013 — The season officially ends at 11:59 p.m. Friday, although boats for the most part stopped fishing weeks ago because of a lack of shrimp in the Gulf of Maine.

This year's harvest will go down as the smallest since 1978, when the fishery was shut down altogether.

Through Wednesday, boats from Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts had netted and trapped about 662,000 pounds, with Maine fishermen accounting for about 80 percent of the catch.

By comparison, last year's harvest came in at 5.3 million pounds. The 2011 catch topped 13 million pounds.

Read the full article from the Associated Press at the San Francisco Chronicle

 

 

MARSHFIELD, Mass. — April 9, 2013 — In the days since U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren visited Marshfield to listen to concerns of local fishermen, apprehension remains in the community about the industry’s future.

During the senator’s April 2 visit, the room at Haddad’s Ocean Café overflowed with approximately 40 representatives of the industry from Marshfield and Scituate. Many were owners of local commercial boats.

“I am interested in learning what we can do to make Washington less harmful for you,” Warren said to the fishermen. “I want to be the best possible partner to you.”

After telling the room she hoped to learn about the issues concerning local fishing businesses she said,   “I am worried about the future. I know these towns will survive. There are other economic pieces to these towns. But they won’t survive, as we’ve known them. I want to get this right; I want to spend the time listening.”

Many in attendance expressed gratitude for the support of Warren and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R- Alaska) for their sponsorship of a fishermen’s relief fund. But Frank Mirarchi, a Scituate fisherman for over 50 years, said due to recent catch reductions, there would not be enough fish to keep fishermen in business.

“We desperately need to keep enough fish in the system for our programs to sustain themselves,” he said.  He added that at Roche Bros. supermarket, which tries to keep locally sourced fish, only one item in the case was from the local community.

Read the full story from the Marshfield Mariner

 

 

April 8, 2013 — There’s something in the air in the United States’ highest value fishing port, and it’s inspiring companies like Northern Wind, Marlees Seafood and Pier Fish to look beyond their traditionally commodity-driven businesses in search of bigger retail deals.

What’s pushing the change? It certainly isn’t that those commodities don’t make much money – in fact, New Bedford’s historic “Whaling City” port had the highest value catch of any US port for the 12^th straight year in 2011, with $369 million in seafood sales, according to the US National Marine Fisheries Service.

But these suppliers told Undercurrent News they are seeing opportunities to do more with their operations.

Not only is Marlees transforming itself from a 90% scallop supplier into a full-service seafood company with 65% of its offerings in other items; Pier Fish Company is also broadening its horizons with a new-found focus on value added products; and Northern Wind seems to have seen the same opportunities in the marketplace as its competitors.

Northern Wind, which started out as a scalloper in 1987, has long since expanded into other categories and is in the process of expanding its marketing efforts and building a new processing plant, which will span 25,000 to 35,000 square feet when finished.

“Between our market research and the concepts we have, we feel there are opportunities in both foodservice and retail for product offering expansion,” newly-hired chief operating officer George Kouri told Undercurrent.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

April 5, 2013 — NEW YORK — Think Wall Street trading is brutal? Head up to the grittiest part of the South Bronx, where cutthroat deals are made in the dead of night on a massive concrete floor that reeks of fish guts.

The New Fulton Fish Market is the nation's largest seafood market, and second in the world to Tokyo's. Here, in a refrigerated building the size of six football fields, fishmongers are frenetically filleting, selling and packaging seafood — 200 million pounds a year worth close to $1 billion by some estimates. It is headed for restaurant tables, stores and mouths across America.

Glistening under the fluorescent lights is just about every sea creature. Most come in by truck, but about half are flown in from the ends of the Earth: Arctic char from Iceland; mahi-mahi from Ecuador; hamachi from Japan; branzino from Greece; salmon from Scotland; cockles from New Zealand.

Experienced buyers negotiate prices in seconds, judging quality on a look, a touch, a smell and often a raw taste.

"You know right away if fish is fresh. It's like looking into a woman's eyes — you know what's there," says Roberto Nunez, a 44-year-old Peruvian immigrant who started out as a dishwasher and has been the buyer for more than a decade for celebrity restaurateurs Lidia Bastianich, her son, Joe Bastianich, and their partner, Mario Batali.

Five nights a week, Nunez shows up at 1 a.m. to purchase as much as $15,000 worth of seafood, enough to meet the demands of 10 restaurants. What's available on any given night depends on a variety of often unpredictable factors, such as severe weather that keeps fishing fleets in port or a spotty catch in an overfished ocean.

"This is not like ordering tomatoes or potatoes," Nunez says. "Seafood is wild."

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Wall Street Journal

 

 

April 3, 2013 — This study was released by NOAA fisheries.

Nearly 1.6 million passengers fished aboard for-hire recreational fishing vessels during 2011 in the Northeast United States (ME – NC). While the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) regularly collects detailed catch, effort, and expenditure information from anglers fishing aboard for-hire vessels, no data are collected about the business structure and costs of the marine for-hire fishing industry operating in the Northeast. This study is intended to fill that gap.

Voluntary mail, telephone, and in-person surveys were designed to collect information on annual costs, returns, business structure, effort, demographics, and attitudinal data from for-hire vessel owners in the Northeast from January 2011 through July 2011. Surveys were completed by 295 vessel owners who provided data on 332 distinct for-hire vessels in the Northeast.

Survey results show that the overall financial condition of marine recreational for-hire fishing businesses in the Northeast is mixed. Assets exceed liabilities by over four times for the average charter and head boat, and over 90% of charter and head boat owners carry insurance coverage. This implies that a rather strong financial for-hire fishing fleet exists in the Northeast. The results also reveal that the average charter boat produced only a little over $5.1 thousand in net income in 2010 and that over half of the charter boats in the Northeast actually incurred higher expenses than revenues in 2010. In contrast, the average head boat generated over $95.1 thousand in net income in 2010 although median net income per head boat was lower at $50.1 thousand.

In addition to providing a detailed overview of the operating structure of the "average" Northeast for-hire head boat and charter boat, we constructed an input-output model to estimate the economic activity that for-hire businesses contribute to the Northeast's economy as measured by total employment, labor income, and sales. Model results show that in 2010 the for-hire industry earned $140.3 million in revenue, generated $50.4 million in income to owners, hired captains, crew/mates, and office staff, and employed over 3,200 individuals. The multiplier effects of this activity were substantial. An additional $193.7 million in sales, $66.5 million in income, and 1,290 jobs in other businesses in the Northeast were supported by the for-hire industry through indirect and induced transactions. Service businesses (real estate, food services, marinas, repair shops, etc.), wholesale and retail trade businesses (sporting goods stores, bait shops, gas stations, etc.), and manufacturing businesses (fishing gear manufactures, fuel refineries, commercial fishermen [bait], etc.) were the enterprises most reliant on the for-hire fleet. Over 700 service sector jobs, 360 wholesale and retail trade jobs, and 63 manufacturing jobs were dependent upon the for-hire fleet in the Northeast in 2010. In total, an estimated 4,500 jobs, in the overall Northeast regional economy, were supported by the active for-hire fleet in 2010.

For more information:

Visit the NOAA publication website

Read the NOAA study