Economic Impact

Boston officials have approved plans for a $70 million seafood processing plant in the city’s marine industrial park.

American Seafood Exchange has been designated to build a 350,000-square-foot facility on city-owned property. It would employ up to 1,500 people and include cold storage and packing operations designed to get seafood to consumers in the shortest time possible.

“This is going to revolutionize the fishing industry in Boston,’’ Mayor Thomas M. Menino said yesterday. “It will reestablish the city as a fully operational seafood port for the 21st century.’’

Read the complete story from The Boston Globe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOAA is starting to get it in its head that the recreational fishing community is a financial force that can keep this nation on the right track to recovery.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is surveying saltwater anglers across the nation to update and improve estimates of the overall economic contributions of saltwater recreational fishing to the U.S. economy.

"The money that millions of recreational anglers spend on fishing trips each year produces tens of thousands of jobs and billions in sales revenue," said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D, under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator.

Read the complete story from The New York Post.

 

 

 

 

Expressing concern that the commodification of New England's groundfishery has accelerated economic inequality, Sen. John Kerry has urged the U.S. Commerce Department to acknowledge the policy has been a "disaster" — as alleged by elected federal and state officials. The catch share trading figures — scrubbed from the NOAA Fisheries website — documented that a sector of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen's Association, given a preferable allocation from the mainstream commercial fleets in Gloucester, New Bedford, and elsewhere, had leased out nearly 2 million pounds of allocation.

The alleged profiteering by the Cape Cod fishermen's association is at the core of a federal lawsuit by commercial fishing interests and the cities of Gloucester and New Bedford, which is scheduled for a hearing next week in the Boston courtroom of a U.S. District Court judge.

Kerry also reiterated in his letter to Locke his request and that of Gov. Deval Patrick and Reps. John Tierney and Barney Frank for the secretary to use his emergency powers to raise catch limits, cited by Giacalone and many others as the cause of the fisheries "collapse."

Finally, Kerry urged Locke to remove restrictions on the appeal of fishermen from vindictive law enforcement actions which scandalized NOAA over the past two years following a decade of complaints and a series of reports from the Commerce Department inspector general.

Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Omega Protein reported that 2010 was one of its most profitable years ever with a net income of $18.3 million, compared to a net loss of $6.2 million the previous year, the company announced Friday, March 4, 2011.

The company operates a menhaden fishing fleet and processing facility at Moss Point.

“The fundamentals behind our base business continue to remain very attractive,” said Joe von Rosenberg, chief executive officer. “We are bullish about the demand for our products long term. The world’s growing population is becoming more interested in good nutrition and that means awareness of and long-term demand for fish protein and omega-3 fatty are on the rise.”

Von Rosenberg said the average revenue per ton of product was greater than $1,000 for the  first time ever.

“In fact, 2010 proved to be one of the most profitable years in Omega Protein’s history,” he said. “Had the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico not occurred, the results would have been more dramatic because we would have had more product to sell during 2010.”

Read the complete story from Mississippi Press.

 

 

 

 

 

Late last month in the Bronx, one of the city's oldest and largest seafood wholesalers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The problems of M. Slavin & Sons Ltd. and its 80-year-old patriarch, Herb Slavin, could affect far more than creditors and its 105 workers, who fillet fish, drive delivery trucks and handle sales at its headquarters in the New Fulton Fish Market.

The century-old firm is the largest tenant of the Hunts Point market and the fourth in as many months to have hit a financial wall. The three previous casualties are gone for good, leaving the sprawling facility, which is run as a cooperative, with a 30% vacancy rate. Some of the 30 or so remaining tenants fear that Slavin's misfortune could drag them down, as they would have to pick up its share of the rent.

“If Slavin goes out, that will be a big hurt,” says Joseph Sciabarra, owner of Mt. Sinai Fish Inc. “They pay rent on 15% of the building.”

Business at the 400,000-square-foot market, which accounts for 5% of U.S. seafood sales, has been shrinking. According to Local 359, which represents the vast majority of the workers at New Fulton Fish, more than 50 vendors employing 500 people moved to Hunts Point; the union has just 350 members there today.

Read the complete story from Crain's New York.

 

 

 

 

 

BOWDOIN – Maine's long-standing groundfish industry is at an all-time low. This once-vibrant industry, which used to land more than 50 million pounds of fish annually and bring millions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the state, is now a tiny vestige of itself. If you think this is due to overfishing, you'd be right. If you think that overfishing still exists and fish stocks are in terrible shape, you'd be wrong — tremendously wrong.

As of this year, all species managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service, including the ones harvested in New England waters, are being harvested sustainably. That's right — overfishing is no longer occurring. What's more, several stocks are at levels well above fully recovered. Yet Maine, in the face of all this recovery, has seen its landings shrink. Where did these landings go?

By my estimate, 60 percent of the fish currently landed in Gloucester, Mass., comes from Maine boats. As much as 40 percent of Boston's landings also comes from vessels that used to call one of Maine's ports home. Why?

The fishing industry's return is still possible, but the clock is running out. Most of the boats still think of themselves as "Maine boats." Two years from now, they will probably give up on Maine and move everything, including their families, out of state. Once that happens the remaining infrastructure will disappear, and chances are so will the processing plants that today must bring in a large portion of the fish they use by truck.

Luckily, there is a good chance we can turn this around.

Allowing Maine groundfish boats to land lobsters is a long shot. But perhaps Maine lobstermen could see their way to allowing a winter season for offshore landings as long as those lobsters met Maine size restrictions and fishermen adhered to the federal 500-count limit.

Read the complete story from The Maine Sunday Telegram.

 

 

 

 

 

NOAA is again surveying saltwater anglers across the nation to update and improve estimates of the overall economic contributions of saltwater recreational fishing to the U.S. economy.

“The money that millions of recreational anglers spend on fishing trips each year produces tens of thousands of jobs and billions in sales revenue,” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D, under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “This year’s survey is a chance for saltwater anglers to help NOAA get an updated, accurate picture of how recreational fishing translates into economic vitality and jobs for Americans.”

NOAA and the saltwater angling community need timely economic data to help evaluate the economic importance of recreational fishing activities. The data give a more accurate look at the economic effects of fishing regulations and changes in the ecosystem caused by natural or manmade events. The information gathered in the survey will contribute to more informed decisions on a variety of recreational fishing issues.

Economists from NOAA’s Fisheries Service throughout the country as well as regional and state partners are assisting with the 2011 survey. Once the economic data are collected, they will be analyzed and released as a NOAA report. The most recent economic study in 2009 showed that anglers’ expenditures generated $59 billion in sales and supported more than 385,000 jobs.

Read the complete story from NOAA News.

 

 

 

 

 

The document shredding undertaken by the then-national director of law enforcement for federal fisheries — previously described by officials as a routine cleanup of paperwork — included evidence related to an investigation of law enforcement practices then underway by the Inspector General's office, according to an internal memo from the investigating officer.

And the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been aware for 10 months of the Inspector General's finding that the effort was designed to conceal evidence from the IG's probe, according to documents obtained by the Times.

Commerce Department Inspector General Todd Zinser wrote to NOAA chief administrator Jane Lubchenco on April 2, 2010, that the document-shredding in October 2010 involved the destruction of "75-80 percent of the files in the office of Dale J. Jones Jr.," then the director of NOAA law enforcement.

The IG wrote that "the shredding implicates that it was done to conceal information from the (inspector general)."

According to Zinser's report, "about six of law enforcement headquarters' 40 employees" contributed files for shredding.

"Such office-wide shredding was not a routine function for the Office of Law Enforcement; rather, the director and deputy director (Mark Spurrier) told us this was the first such an exercise in their 10-plus years with OLE," Zinser wrote.

Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the surface, U.S. Sen. Scott Brown's proposed Fishery Impact Statement Honesty (FISH) Act, filed earlier this month, targets desperately needed changes in the accountability and oversight of the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

But it was refreshing to hear that, on his visit to Gloucester's Cape Pond Ice and Gloucester Seafood Display Auction last weekend, Brown openly referred to the measure as a "jobs bill."

With the latest credible showing significant rebuilding of New England's fish stocks — and retired top NOAA scientist Steve Murawski noting that statistics confirm there is no longer any "overfishing" — there is simply no excuse for the catch share management shift and tight allocations that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hides behind, carrying out its economic dirty work for Lubchenco's beloved Environmental Defense Fund.

And by standing behind Lubchenco and rejecting lawmakers pleas for relief, Secretary Gary Locke has put his Department of Commerce in a position of killing U.S. jobs and waterfront businesses, while our seafood import deficit grows even worse.

Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

LONDON – The Economist, the influential international news weekly published from London has published a news brief on the troubles facing New England fishermen.

New Bedford has always looked to the sea. In "Moby-Dick", Herman Melville wrote that "nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they?…from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans." The "Whaling City" still relies on sea creatures. New Bedford is the nation's principal fishing port in terms of landed value. From the top floor of its whaling museum, Scott Lang, New Bedford's mayor, points out the ice-house which produces ice for fish storage, the tanks that hold boat fuel, the fish houses where fish are cleaned. He also notes the many boats, two and three deep along the docks. Seeing so many boats in dock would usually indicate a storm is coming, Mr Lang says. Now, it's an indicator of a regulatory tempest.

Read the story in The Economist.