International & Trade

November 14, 2014 — The Indonesian government will initiate a seafood trade forum for local fishermen and businesses in the fisheries and maritime sector to help them prepare to compete in the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) that will come into effect in December next year, a minister has said.

Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti said that she guaranteed that the seafood trade forum would be established before the end of this year as one of her breakthrough policies as a member of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s Cabinet.

She further said the seafood trade forum was aimed at connecting Indonesian fishermen and business people in the fisheries and maritime sector with those from other countries.

“This forum will not only involve fishermen and business players, but also several experts in other sectors, such as marketing. We need marketing experts because the AEC will create an open and integrated market in this region [Southeast Asia],” Susi told The Jakarta Post in an interview at her office on Wednesday.

As the first step to establish the forum, the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry was currently recording all businesses involved in the fisheries and maritime sector across the archipelago and listing them in a directory, said Susi, the former president director of fisheries export company PT ASI Pudjiastuti Marine Products, which was established in 1996.

Read the full story from The Jakarta Post

SEAFOODNEWS.COM By John Sackton and Peggy Parker — November 13, 2014 — Seafood buyers and suppliers are coming together over something called GSSI – and if it is successful, sustainability will become a norm in the seafood industry; not an arena for brand competition.

Such an outcome would go a long way towards normalizing long term sustainability for wild caught fisheries, and establish that sustainability, like food safety and sanitation, is a given for seafood buyers, not something to be negotiated separately for each purchase.
 
GSSI stands for Global Seafood Sustainability Initiative. It is modeled on a successful global retail program called GFSI – the Global Food Safety Initiative.
 
The initial draft of the GSSI standards, released for public comments in June, attracted a lot of industry and FAO comments regarding whether the draft was sufficiently focused on the core mission of providing a benchmark for sustainability certification that would reduce market confusion.  In particular, the FAO and may industry commenters focused on the fact that GSSI was considering a multi-tiered system based on rankings, rather than a simple pass / fail system to certify meeting FAO standards on sustainability.  They argued this approach undermined the basic reason a global initiative was undertaken.
 
The GSSI Steering Board will meet on December 10-11, 2014 in Amsterdam to address these and other concerns identified through the public comment process.
 
To understand the issues, it is helpful to compare the GSSI to the Global Food Safety Initiative, on which it is based.  (We apologize for all the acronyms. GFSI is Food Safetey. GSSI is fish.)
 
GFSI explains itself: “During the 90s, there were a series of high-profile international food safety crises including BSE, dioxin and listeria. Within the food industry there was a growing audit fatigue as retailers and brand manufacturers audited factories against their countless in-house standards, each developed in isolation and with no consideration of convergence. The results showed no consistency. Consumer and food industry confidence was low.
 
The CEOs of the world’s food retailers agreed to take collaborative action. In May 2000, the Global Food Safety Initiative, a non-profit foundation, was founded.
 
GFSI specifies requirements for food safety management schemes to meet its standards, as specified in their guidance document. Schemes that meet the standard are all equally compliant. GFSI also brings together global food safety experts to expand and update standards as needed. Finally, GFSI stimulates multi-stakeholder projects for collaboration on common issues, such as building out food safety capacity.
 
GFSI has been very effective in reducing audit costs and simplifying and standardizing food safety certification requirements.
 
GFSI is also very clear about what they do not do. They specifically do not
 
– Make policy for retailers, manufacturers or food safety scheme owners
– Undertake any accreditation or certification activities
– Own any food safety schemes or standards
– Undertake training
– Have any involvement outside the scope of food safety, such as animal welfare, the environment or ethical sourcing
 
For seafood, a number of major retailers, manufacturers and foodservice companies, including Delhaize, Kroger, Loblaw, Metro AG, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Royal Ahold, WM Morrisons, and foodservice companies including Darden, Sodexo, and producers and manufacturers like American Seafoods, Bumblebee, Espersen, Gorton’s, High Liner Foods, Iglo, Lyons Seafood, Marine Harvest, Pacific Seafood, Slade-Gortons and Trident among others have come together for a similar purpose.
 
The companies have formed a strategic alliance to “bring clarity and transparency to the issue of the sustainability of seafood worldwide. ”
 
The benefits will be to first, reduce the duplication and redundancy and cost of seafood sustainability certifications, and second to reduce consumer confusion about seafood sustainability brought about by the number of competing standards all claiming to represent a certification for sustainable seafood.
 
The GSSI standard will measure conformity with seafood sustainability indicators based on the FAO Guidelines for ecolabeling fish and fish products from wild capture marine, inland and aquaculture production.
 
Although no NGO’s are funding partners of the GSSI initiative, the New England Aquarium, and WWF and the Von Thunen Institute are affiliated partners.
 
However, the NGO representatives have been very active in working groups developing criteria for the benchmark.
 
For example, in the three working groups on Process, Wild Fisheries, and Aquaculture, NGO representatives made up about 40% of the membership in each group.
 
Right away a major problem emerged. The initial idea of GSSI was to provide a pass-fail standard, so that each sustainable certification scheme that met the FAO criteria was identified, and was to be considered equally effective as the other schemes. This is what was behind the goal of simplification.
 
But that approach undermined the NGO business model, and was fiercely opposed. Instead, the NGOs demanded a ranking, where each sustainability scheme would be ranked or scored based on not just whether they met the FAO criteria, but on how much they exceeded it, on how much they incorporated other goals beyond the FAO consensus, and on how they conformed to a particular concept of governance that would disqualify most national schemes or government certifications.
 
Why the ranking demand? Because the NGO community is now the beneficiary of approximately $500 million annually spent by donors and foundations to support marine sustainability. There is fierce competition for this money among NGOs, and they must differentiate themselves from each other to secure the most funding.
 
At the same time, there is intense competition among the NGOs to sign up industry partners, in particular retailers, whom they promise brand protection in exchange for a paid partnership.
 
WWF for example is paid hundreds of thousands to potentially millions of dollars by retail and foodservice partners to provide advice and guidance on sustainability. If a global standard emerged, the monetary value of the WWF partnership would diminish substantially.
 
So the NGO solution was to incorporate their desire for ranking within the draft GFSI guidelines, or threaten to not cooperate.
 
The initial draft of the GSSI benchmarking tool included a number of tiers or ranking measures that would preserve the NGO business model.
 
That met with fierce resistance from many industry commenters, and from the FAO, which saw the complexity of ecolabeling schemes as a direct threat to seafood trade from less developed countries.
 
Less than a month after the new tiered version of GSSI was released, FAO sent a strongly worded letter to the GSSI Board.
 
“We have some concerns about additions and modification to indicators above and beyond those derived from the [FAO] Guidelines to produce the GSSI baseline, ” wrote Lahsen Ababouch, Director of the Fisheries an Aquaculture Policy and Economics Division, which created the series of FAO documents that represent the FAO responsible fisheries standards and their eco-labeling guidelines.
 
The “additions” would be Tiers 2 and 3, which go beyond FAO’s international standards and enter the world of “aspirational” goals. Those goals are fine for and if they are relevant to a specific fishery, market, or customer base, but they are impossible to apply as an international standard.
 
“Another concern… is the potential for the GSSI benchmarking tool, given the proposed application rules, to block new certification schemes and developing country exporters from access to their traditional markets. ”
 
The letter encouraged the GSSI Steering Board to be “inclusive” by not exclusively favoring only “large existing certification schemes and well-advanced operations. ”
 
For example, some countries, such as Thailand, are committed to establishing a national certification scheme that would measure Thai fisheries and aquaculture against FAO guidelines. Under the original GSSI initiative, it would be a welcome development if the Thai national scheme was assessed and found to meet the FAO standards. In that case, fisheries and aquaculture certified as compliant by Thailand would be recognized in the international market as meeting the Global Sustainability Standard.
 
Subsequently if buyers wanted to use other criteria, such as labor law enforcement, by catch reduction, or traceability of fishmeal, they would be free to do so, just not have these more unique and buyer specific requirements enshrined in an international standard.
 
The current draft of the GSSI standard would preclude a national standard in Thailand for example, from every being certified as meeting FAO sustianable seafood and aquaculture guidelines.
 
At the heart of the FAO’s concern is the fact that certification schemes for sustainable fisheries have so far focused on developed nations that are large seafood producers, and virtually ignored established fisheries from developing nations.
 
If the GSSI were to adopt a tiered approach to sustainability, rather than a simple “pass/fail”, developing nations with established and sustainable fisheries would likely be shut out of the market. This goes against the FAO mission of expanding markets and increasing food security around the world.
 
“FAO member States from regions outside those that are engaged by GSSI will be critical of these new higher ‘standards’, of their interpretation as ‘benchmarks’ and ultimately, of the ‘codification’ of non-binding aspirational guidelines that were not intended to be used as standards, ” wrote George Clement, CEO of Deepwater Group, representing New Zealand’s fishing industry.
 
Two examples he gives of aspirational guidelines that were never intended to be standards would be bycatch and data collection/management. The FAO addresses these important issues head-on and in detail, but stops short of imposing international measurable standards.
 
The many FAO documents on precautionary approaches, reference points for fisheries management, and technical issues intentionally describe these approaches as guidelines, not standards. There are too many variables for FAO to issue a document providing a “single prescription of optimal management in the case of a given fishery” as they state in the introductory note to the FAO Fisheries Management Guidelines.
 
Clement describes the potential of “some markets accepting only Tier 3 standards for certification schemes” thus creating “difficulties for future FAO engagement with GSSI, along with engagement by many fisheries management agencies and certified fisheries. ”
 
Ultimately, Clements says the three-tiered path may be self-sabotaging.
 
“It is highly likely that the implementation of three-tiered ‘benchmarking’ system for seafood standards and certification schemes could result in more of the very confusion the GSSI scheme was initially proposed to overcome, with seafood suppliers and customers having no clear and certain understanding of the comparability between fisheries/aquaculture certification schemes in the market, ” he wrote.
 
These comments were echoed by the comments of the Association of Sustianable Fisheries, a group that represents many of the major fisheries currently certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, and which advocates within the MSC process for the needs of these fisheries.
 
Writing for the Association, Christina Burrage, chair,  "Unfortunately we find that the current GSSI requirements for fishery certification standards no longer looks like a benchmarking tool that provides this common ground, but has grown into something which resembles a full-blown certification standard in itself, i.e. something which essentially attempts to measure the performance of the fisheries, rather than the certification scheme. This seems to have happened through the inclusion of  requirements that go far beyond FAO guidelines and current global best practice and science."
 
"We recognise [these requirements] as aspirations of environmental NGOs. Many of these aspirations were also tabled in the just finished review of the MSC standard, but not carried into the standard because they were considered impractical at the current level of scientific understanding by the experts on the MSCs Technical Advisory Board."
 
At a recent meeting in New Orleans, Grimur Valdimarsson, who was involved with the initial GFSI effort, said the key to their success was their agreement to only base the standard on the internationally accepted Codex Alimentarius, and reject all efforts to add addiitonal range and scope to the project. He stressed the importance of building the certification tool against those sustainability principles that have broad and widespread acceptance, as indicated by their incorporation in FAO documents representing negotiated language of 191 countries.
 
At the December meeting of the steering board, it is expected the Board will address the significant number of comments opposed to the initial draft's three tiered system and hopefully a simpler, more robust draft tool will emerge that is more closely aligned with the GFSI.

This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

November 12, 2014 — The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) annual meeting is being held November 10-17, 2014 in Genoa, Italy.

The United States is going to ICCAT with the goal of reaching agreement on science-based management measures for shared stocks and applying a precautionary approach where appropriate, while preserving commercial and recreational fishing opportunities for U.S. fishermen.

At the 2014 ICCAT meeting, the United States will be working to:

– Adopt a two-year catch limit for western Atlantic bluefin tuna that is in line with the science advice and supports the goals of the rebuilding program by avoiding overfishing and allowing continued stock growth.

– Ensure that management of the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishery including monitoring and control measures designed to deter IUU fishing supports stock recovery and long-term sustainability, and is consistent with scientific advice.

– Require that all sharks be landed with their fins naturally attached, and that precautionary and science-based management measures be adopted for sharks caught in ICCAT fisheries.

– Strengthen the science underlying ICCAT management through an enhanced dialogue between scientists and managers, improved statistical data collection, and support for research initiatives needed to reduce uncertainties in stock assessments.

– Continue to strengthen ICCAT's compliance review process and take meaningful actions in response to non-compliance.

– Enhance monitoring of ICCAT fisheries and combat IUU fishing by increasing the minimum rate of polling for vessel monitoring systems, improving the process for cross-listing IUU vessels from different oceans, establishing programs to assist developing state implementation of port inspection responsibilities, and ensuring full and timely implementation of ICCAT’s electronic bluefin tuna catch documentation system.

– Further efforts to amend the ICCAT Convention so that it is in line with modern fisheries management instruments on issues such as the precautionary and ecosystem approaches to fisheries management and clarify the Commission’s management authority for sharks.

Read the Opening Statement of the United States to the 19th Special Meeting of ICCAT

Read the story from NOAA

November 14, 2014 — Technology giant Google has taken the battle against illegal fishing online, with the company unveiling a tool in Australia on Friday that harnesses satellite data to track thousands of boats in real time.

A prototype interactive tool, which was developed in conjunction with environmental activists SkyTruth and marine advocacy group Oceana, was unveiled at the once-a-decade World Parks Congress in Sydney.

The tool is the latest salvo from environmentalists against illegal fishing, which is currently estimated by the Global Ocean Commission to cost the world economy up to US $23.5 billion (roughly Rs. 1,44,725 crores) a year.

"While many of the environmental trends in the ocean can be sobering, the combination of cloud computing and massive data is enabling new tools to visualise, understand and potentially reverse these trends," Brian Sullivan of Google's Earth Outreach and Oceans section said.

The tool uses data points from the Automatic Identification System network, which picks up GPS broadcasts of a vessel's location to map movements.

The prototype has tracked just over 3,000 fishing vessels, with a public tool set to be released down the track.

Read the full story from Agence France-Presse here

November 13, 2014 — Illicit fishing goes on every day at an industrial scale. But large commercial fishers are about to get a new set of overseers: conservationists—and soon the general public—armed with space-based reconnaissance of the global fleet.

Crews on big fishing boats deploy an impressive arsenal of technology—from advanced sonars to GPS navigation and mapping systems—as they chase down prey and trawl the seabed. These tools are so effective that roughly a third of the world’s fisheries are now overharvested, and more than three-quarters of the stocks that remain have hit their sustainable limits, according to the FAO. For some species, most of the catch is unreported, unregulated, or flat-out illegal.

But now environmentalists are using sophisticated technology of their own to peel away that cloak of invisibility. With satellite data from SpaceQuest and financial and engineering support from Google, two environmental activist groups have built the first global surveillance system that can track large fishing vessels anywhere in the world.
A prototype of the system, called Global Fishing Watch, was unveiled today at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney. The tool makes use of Google’s mapping software and servers to display the tracks followed in 2012 and 2013 by some 25,000 ships that were either registered as large commercial fishers or were moving in ways that strongly suggest fishing activity.

The project was led by Oceana, a marine conservation advocacy group, and the software was developed by SkyTruth, a small non-profit that specializes in using remote sensing technologies to map environmentally sensitive activities such as fracking and flaring from oil and gas fields. Although the system currently displays voyages from nearly a year ago, “the plan is that we will build out a public release version that will have near-real-time data,” said Jackie Savitz, Oceana’s VP for U.S. oceans. “Then you’ll actually be able to see someone out there fishing within hours to days,” fast enough to act on the information if the fishing is happening illegally, such as in a marine protected area.

Read the full story at Wired

November 13, 2014 — In piranha-infested waters, fishermen go in search of the pirarucu, which can grow as long as seven feet and weigh more than 400 pounds, placing them in the ranks of freshwater megafish like the Giant Pangasius (often called the dog-eating catfish) and the Mekong giant catfish, both found in the distant Mekong River basin.

As the howler monkeys roared near this outpost in the far reaches of the Amazon rain forest, Valdenor da Silva grasped his harpoon and guided his canoe through the dazzling floodplain mosaic of lakes and channels in a quest for his prey.

“The river giants are plentiful this year,” said Mr. da Silva, 44, a father of eight who puts food on his family’s table by hunting down the pirarucu, one of the world’s largest freshwater fish. Flashing a smile, the fisherman, standing 5 feet 7 and weighing 160 pounds, added, “Every pirarucu I’ve harpooned this season is bigger than I am.”

In piranha-infested waters, fishermen go in search of the pirarucu, which can grow as long as seven feet and weigh more than 400 pounds, placing them in the ranks of freshwater megafish like the Giant Pangasius (often called the dog-eating catfish) and the Mekong giant catfish, both found in the distant Mekong River basin.

With overfishing and habitat degradation threatening such Goliaths in different parts of the world, riverbank dwellers and biologists in the Amazon are working together to save the pirarucu (pronounced pee-rah-roo-KOO) by prohibiting outsiders from catching the fish and overhauling their own methods of pursuing it.

Read the full story from The New York Times

 

November 12, 2014 — Cepesca and Oceana have called upon the 49 Contracting Parties to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) to close legal loopholes that still allow some fleets to carry out illegal finning of sharks.

The organisations want the Contacting Parties to adopt a measure requiring all sharks to be landed with their fins still naturally attached – as Spanish surface longliners have been doing since July 2013. Contracting Parties to ICCAT are meeting in Genoa, Italy, from 10-17 November, to decide upon fisheries management measures for highly migratory species.

Read the full story from World Fishing & Aquaculture

 

November 11, 2014 — Sending a Conservative peer to represent Scottish fishermen at EU talks is a "slap in the face" for Scotland, the country's fisheries minister has said.

Richard Lochhead argued that he should have been allowed to stand in for UK Environment Secretary Liz Truss, who is unable to attend the meeting.

But the UK government has instead drafted in Lord de Mauley.

Two-thirds of the UK's fishing industry is based in Scotland.

Monday's talks in the Belgian capital are to focus on quotas for deep sea stocks, which disproportionately affect Scottish trawlers.

'Bit of a snub'

Speaking from Brussels, Mr Lochhead told BBC Scotland the UK government had agreed in 2010 that, when circumstances were appropriate, Scotland could lead at European fishing talks when the subjects up for discussion were primarily Scottish.

He added: "Yet here we are in a situation today where the UK secretary of state is in Brussels but she thinks she has got other things she wants to do other than attending the council.

"So she has drafted in Rupert Ponsonby, the seventh Baron de Mauley, from the House of Lords to represent the UK even although I am here. I think that is a bit of a snub for Scotland and a slap in the face.

"I have now got to sit down with Lord de Mauley and brief him in what's important for Scotland, explain to him the background, the circumstances. I have to hope he'll take that on board as he leads these talks."

Read the full story from BBC News

 

November 10, 2014 — State agencies and big-name traders are joining forces to restore the confidence of food importers in Europe, battered by allegations of human rights abuse and trafficking problems in the Thai seafood industry.

A delegation consisting of high-ranking officials from the Labour Ministry, Agriculture Ministry, Foreign Ministry and Fisheries Department visited Paris in late October during the Salon International de l'Agroalimentaire (SIAL), one of the world's biggest food and beverage events.

The delegation decided to visit the SIAL after British broadsheet the Guardian published a report accusing the Thai shrimp fishing industry of relying on forced labour.

Charoen Pokphand Food was mentioned in the report as allegedly using slavery in its business.

Read the full story from the Bangkok Post

 

November 10, 2014 — Israel on Monday allowed Gaza fishermen to export their catch to the West Bank for the first time since 2007.

The shipment of more than 730 kilograms of fish marked a symbolic easing of a longstanding Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip. Israel, which imposed the blockade along with Egypt to isolate Hamas after it seized power in Gaza, agreed to loosen the restrictions after a 50-day war against the Islamic militant group over the summer.

Adel Attallah, of the Palestinian Agriculture Ministry, said the shipment was meant to "test the Israeli intentions."

Read the full story from the New Jersey Herald