International & Trade

June 11, 2014 — A report in the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday alleging problems with the use of slave labor in Thailand’s shrimp supply chain—and the sale of those shrimp by major U.S. and U.K. retailers–could put further pressure on the U.S. State Department to drop Thailand from Tier 2 to the lowest-level Tier 3 status in its coming Trafficking in Persons Report.

But would Tier 3 status, which could result in the U.S. downgrading Thailand’s trading status, have any impact on Thailand’s shrimp industry, or on consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere who have become accustomed to inexpensive shrimp? “You may get some of the more conscientious buyers who will drop Thai suppliers…but for the ones who don’t care about their image or reputation I assume Tier 3 status won’t have a huge impact,” said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

Both Human Rights Watch, which backs Tier 3 status for Thailand, and the National Fisheries Institute, the major trade association for the U.S. seafood industry, say a boycott of Thai shrimp in the U.S. or elsewhere would be counterproductive. Both organizations say it is better to engage the Thai government and seafood sector to continue making improvements to reduce the numbers of slave laborers and to further clean up the supply lines. “Responsible seafood importers are engaged on this issue and have a unique ability to drive change,” NFI said. “A boycott would undercut those efforts.” Human Rights Watch says labor brokers that supply these slave laborers to Thai fishing vessels and shrimp processing plants need to be cut out of the system.

Read the full story at the Wall Street Journal

AKOL, CAMBODIA — June 9, 2014 — As the sun rises on Tonle Sap Lake, fishermen head out from floating villages like this one, past half-submerged mangroves and flooded shrub land, to check their nets, much as they have for centuries.

Every year, the lake yields about 300,000 tons of fish, making it one of the world’s most productive freshwater ecosystems. That and the floods that pulse through it in monsoon season, swelling it to as much as five times its dry-season size, have earned the lake the nickname “Cambodia’s beating heart.”

But the Tonle Sap is in trouble — from overfishing to feed a fast-growing population, from the cutting of mangrove forests that shelter young fish, from hydroelectric dams upstream, and from the dry seasons that are expected to grow hotter and longer with climate change.

Keo Mao, a 42-year-old fisherman from Akol, says he hopes his five children can find a way out of the life that has sustained his family for generations. “The lake now is not really so good,” he said. “There are too many people.”

Now an international team of researchers has joined local fishermen in an ambitious project to save the Tonle Sap. The scientists are building an intricate computer model that aims to track the vast array of connections between human activity and natural systems as they change over time. Begun in 2012, the model will take several years to complete, while threats to the Tonle Sap continue to mount.

But the hope is to peer into the lake’s future to predict how different developmental, economic and regulatory choices may ripple through this interconnected and fast-changing ecosystem, and to plan a sustainable way forward.

Charting a Changing Cambodia

Henri Mouhot, the 19th-century French explorer who crossed the Tonle Sap on his way to Angkor Wat, said the lake resembled a violin lying diagonally across Cambodia. At its neck, a tributary flows southeast to the Mekong River. On the laptop of Roel Boumans, an ecologist who helped develop the modeling project, the lake and its flood plain are divided into 16 watersheds that he fills with shades of green, yellow and brown, based on vegetation and land-use data from satellite images.

“The model tells us stories,” he said, “and it tests the stories we, as scientists, tell about the how different parts of the system work.”

Read the full story and watch the video from The New York Times

NEW YORK, N.Y. (IBNS) — June 10, 2014 — The United Nations agricultural agency announced on Monday that it is partnering with Norway to build an advanced research vessel as part of efforts to avert the effects of climate change and other threats to the world's fish stocks, as calls were heard for urgent action to address those threats at an international forum in Rome.

The new USD 80 million research vessel Dr Fridtjof Nansen will host seven laboratories to collect data on marine ecosystems, climate change and pollution to help countries develop sustainable fisheries management, according to a press release by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
 
At the same time, FAO’s Director-General opened the Committee on Fisheries in Rome by stressing the importance of fisheries to the world’s food security and nutrition and sounding an alarm on the threats those resources face.
 
Fisheries and aquaculture make a “central contribution to food security and nutrition,” Jose Graziano da Silva said, adding that that sustainable development in the world's island and coastal states was especially dependent on the “vitality of oceans and fish stocks.”

Read the full story from India Blooms

June 10, 2014 — The Pew Charitable Trusts Ending Illegal Fishing Project praised the European Commission today for officially warning the Philippines and Papua New Guinea for their failure to sufficiently fight fisheries crimes.

The Commission’s warning, known as a ‘yellow card’, means that if the two countries continue to perform poorly in the effort to end illegal, unreported, and unregulated, or IUU, fishing they will be banned from importing seafood into the European Union and face other sanctions.

Illegal and unreported fishing accounts for 1-in-5 wild-caught marine fish, a haul worth up to EUR 17 billion (US$23.5 billion) per year.

EU standards for good performance in the fight against IUU fishing require that countries effectively monitor their fishing fleets, punish the owners of vessels found guilty of illegal fishing and maintain or develop robust national fisheries laws.

Pew applauded the Commission’s decision, which brings to five the number of countries on the yellow list. Curacao, Ghana, and South Korea made the list in 2013 and could be red-listed if they do not improve their practices.

Read the full story from FishUpdate

June 10, 2014 — Slaves forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers, the Guardian can reveal.

A six-month investigation has established that large numbers of men bought and sold like animals and held against their will on fishing boats off Thailand are integral to the production of prawns (commonly called shrimp in the US) sold in leading supermarkets around the world, including the top four global retailers: Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco.

The investigation found that the world's largest prawn farmer, the Thailand-based Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods, buys fishmeal, which it feeds to its farmed prawns, from some suppliers that own, operate or buy from fishing boats manned with slaves.

Men who have managed to escape from boats supplying CP Foods and other companies like it told the Guardian of horrific conditions, including 20-hour shifts, regular beatings, torture and execution-style killings. Some were at sea for years; some were regularly offered methamphetamines to keep them going. Some had seen fellow slaves murdered in front of them.

Fifteen migrant workers from Burma and Cambodia also told how they had been enslaved. They said they had paid brokers to help them find work in Thailand in factories or on building sites. But they had been sold instead to boat captains, sometimes for as little as £250.

"I thought I was going to die," said Vuthy, a former monk from Cambodia who was sold from captain to captain. "They kept me chained up, they didn't care about me or give me any food … They sold us like animals, but we are not animals – we are human beings."

Another trafficking victim said he had seen as many as 20 fellow slaves killed in front of him, one of whom was tied, limb by limb, to the bows of four boats and pulled apart at sea.

"We'd get beaten even if we worked hard," said another. "All the Burmese, [even] on all the other boats, were trafficked. There were so many of us [slaves] it would be impossible to count them all."

Read the full story at The Guardian

June 2, 2014 — The Spanish government issued a sharp message to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) after the country’s fishing fleets reported having completed their 2,540 metric ton quota in under 48 hours — a record time.

The fishing revealed abundant stocks, Balfego’s general director Juan Serrano told Undercurrent News on Friday. The company, one of Europe’s largest bluefin tuna catchers, has had to purchase stocks from third party fleets to meet its clients’ needs.

“We expect to continue seeing swarms of tuna crossing the Mediterranean until late in June,” said Serrano, speaking from Barcelona.

“The state of the species’ stock is great, as the record, historic time in which quotas have been fished shows.”

Balfego, based in Catalonia, posted €32.4 million in sales last year, slightly lower than 2012′s €35.4m, but almost doubled net profits to €0.74m.

Serrano said the company has bought an additional 450t of catches from the Basque fleet and another 100t from Andalusian longliners to meet its customers’ needs.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News 

June 4, 2014 — A decree has been issued by the Portuguese government, which bans all deep-sea fishing in an area spanning 2,280,000 square kilometres, to promote sustainable fisheries and the conservation of deep-sea ecosystems

Longlining is the exception, which is authorised under certain conditions.

Oceana has applauded this decision, and is calling for a ban on trawling across the entire EU fleet and internationally.

Read the full story from World Fishing & Aquaculture

June 3, 2014 — The lobster fishery in Nova Scotia has come to a standstill, and some P.E.I. fishermen have been told to tie up their boats.

In Nova Scotia, lobster pounds and plants are at near capacity. P.E.I. fishermen have been put on quotas or told not to fish at all.

Fishermen in the those provinces are hearing different reasons for the tie-up. Nova Scotia fishermen have been told there is too much lobster, and no one is buying until later this week, forcing them to hold off on fishing during the short spring season.

P.E.I. fishermen are being told there is a shortage of labour in the processing plants.

In Pictou County and on P.E.I., the season opened in early May and will end in another 30 days.

Ronnie Heighton, who fishes out of Cape John, N.S., just found out Monday that his buyer is shutting him down.

"We were blindsided. Never seen this coming at all," he said.

"We've only got two months. We're not like sou' west Nova Scotia where they have six months to fish. We only have two months here and every day we lose is quite substantial to our overall yearly income."

Heighton says the shutdown this week will cost him about $4,000.

Read the full story at CBC News

SEAFOODNEWS.COM — June 4, 2014 — A bacterium causing an epidemic among catfish farms in the southeastern United States is closely related to organisms found in diseased grass carp in China, according to researchers at Auburn University in Alabama and three other institutions.

The study, published this week in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, suggests that the virulent U.S. fish epidemic emerged from an Asian source.

Since 2009, catfish farming in Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas has been seriously impacted by an emerging strain of Aeromonas hydrophila, which causes Aeromonas septicemia in catfish. A serious infection that can cause death in as little as 12 hours, Aeromonas septicemia's clinical signs include skin lesions and blood loss.

Normally A. hydrophila, which can be found in both fresh and brackish water, only affects fish that are stressed or injured. But the newer strain has affected even apparently healthy fish with no obvious signs of duress, says senior study author Mark Liles, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Auburn. When initial tests of the diseased fish showed A. hydrophila was responsible, says Liles, scientists "didn't believe it at first, because the signs didn't match the more typical opportunistic infections in stressed fish that we associate with A. hydrophila." To date, disease outbreaks have been responsible for an estimated loss of more than $12 million in catfish aquaculture operations in the southeastern United States, he says.

Liles and colleagues studied the molecular epidemiology of the epidemic-causing A. hydrophila to try to trace its evolution. They compared samples of the bacteria to 264 known Aeromonas strains in an international database. Only one virulent strain came close to matching the one sampled from Alabama: ZC1, isolated from a diseased grass carp in China's Guangdong Province. ZC1 was isolated from fish that had experienced an epidemic outbreak atypical of Aeromonas infections.

Researchers also identified a less aggressive related A. hydrophila strain called S04-690, taken in 2004 from a diseased catfish in a commercial aquaculture pond in Mississippi. That strain caused a serious Aeromonas septicemia outbreak that killed thousands of catfish but did not result in an epidemic on neighboring farms.

Next, the scientists evaluated the evolutionary relationships of additional Chinese carp bacteria samples from epidemics in the Hubei Province in China. This revealed that all of the Chinese carp bacteria samples, including ZC1, group together with the recent U.S. epidemic samples of bacteria in catfish, suggesting that a common ancestor is responsible for the virulent A. hydrophila strains causing fish disease in both China and the United States. S04-690, from the Mississippi fish, also was found to be in the same group, related to both the U.S. catfish and Asian carp bacteria. However, it was genetically distinct from the other two strains. By contrast, A. hydrophila strains that do not cause epidemics are more heterogeneous.

Additional experiments found that isolated bacteria from diseased catfish in America and diseased carp in China shared alternate forms of 10 key 'housekeeping' genes required for basic cellular function.

It's not clear how the bacterium was introduced in America, Liles says. It could be from importing Asian carp to America for aquatic weed control, or from transporting ornamental fish or contaminated processed seafood products from Asia. The spread of disease among farms also is not fully understood but could result from birds that move from pond to pond eating catfish, or from harvesting equipment that may be insufficiently sanitized between uses.

Liles and other researchers are investigating means to control the spread of illness, including developing vaccines against the bacteria, and using medicated feed and/or probiotics. Meanwhile, he says, U.S. farmed catfish are safe to eat and pose no disease threat to humans due to strict standards regarding harvesting and processing of sick animals.

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

June 2, 2014 — Mayor Carolyn Kirk is poised to head for Japan on a two-week trip that will spotlight new fisheries science opportunities, renew old ties to a company once rooted in Gloucester — and put City Council President Paul McGeary in City Hall’s corner office while the mayor is away.

Kirk is set to leave on June 9, embarking on a largely economic mission to The Land of the Rising Sun. The trip is being funded by a Japanese bank and the Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute, an organization established last summer and based at Rowe Square off Main Street.

According to GMGI’s co-founder, Gregory Verdine, the institute is counting fish like nobody else. The organization is working to sequence fish DNA to see if fish species and counts are mixing, an effort that will “bring an entirely new science to counting fish,” Verdine says.

GMGI is also tracking fish by the bacteria they leave behind, which gives another new aspect to fish counting by linking specific bacteria with fish.

”GMGI’s promise is to bring modern science to the problem of counting fishwe can bring modern science to the problem of counting fish,” Verdine said.

Verdine, also a Harvard University professor and entrepreneur, is leading the excursion to Japan.

The itinerary is packed to the gills, starting off by discussing sciences between a global pharmaceutical company and GMGI. The trip also includes a visit to the world’s largest fish market, collaborating on sustainable fishing practices, industry innovation, a tour of a state-of-the-art fish processing center and an aquaculture facility.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times