International & Trade

GENEVA, Dec 1 (Reuters) – Marine scientists warned the World Trade Organisation on Tuesday that the world’s seas were in peril and called for a new WTO deal to discourage over-fishing.

"The health of the world’s oceans is hanging in the balance," they said in a letter to WTO chief Pascal Lamy, citing World Bank estimates that $50 billion a year is lost globally to poor fisheries governance and over-exploitation.

Subsidies of the fishing sector are an often-overlooked target of the WTO’s Doha Round, which would slash government aid programmes for nearly all farmed and manufactured goods.

As part of that global accord, which has met some resistance from nearly all the WTO’s 153 members, countries are seeking ways to reduce incentives to use polluting fuel and deplete vulnerable fish stocks.

Read the complete story from Reuters at ForexYard.

The international marine conservation organisation, Oceana, has sent the European Commission a study analyzing the failures in management of the total allowable catch (TAC) system. The EC will table this Friday 16 October its proposal on 2010 TACs and quotas and Oceana advises that these factors be taken into consideration before blaming the TAC system for the failure in current fisheries policy.

Various sectors are promoting the idea of substituting the TAC system with one based exclusively on fishing effort control (e.g. assigning each vessel a number of days to fish) when the reformed Common Fisheries Policy enters into force in 2013.

 

According to the Oceana analysis, 78% of the scientific recommendations for catch quotas have been ignored over the past 20 years, and catch recommendations have been greatly exceeded. The European Commission itself warns that, in 2009 alone, adopted TACs exceeded the sustainable volume of catches by 48%. The lack of regulation and control is such that in some stocks real extraction of biomass is up to five times higher than the initially agreed TAC.

 

With this analysis, Oceana denounces the lack of rigour in some initiatives focused on eliminating a key element in fisheries policy: the establishment of catch limits.

Read the complete story at Fish News EU.

Enjoy serving shrimp, oysters or crabs during your holiday meals? Then you should pay heed to the big climate-change meeting opening next Monday in Copenhagen. What nations decide there could determine if our ocean will continue providing tasty shellfish — or instead become part of a perilous chemistry experiment that could ravage valuable fisheries and coral reefs.

The problem, strange as it may seem, is that the ocean is doing a wonderful job of slowing down global warming. Every day, it removes nearly 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — the main warming gas — from the atmosphere. That’s nearly twice what U.S. power plants, cars and factories spew daily into the sky. So we owe the ocean a big thanks for putting a brake on climate change and giving us time to find solutions.

Unfortunately, that help comes at a steep price. When carbon dioxide in the air mixes with seawater, a chemical reaction creates a compound called carbonic acid. In the ocean, however, “acidification” is bad news for shellfish and corals. That’s because as acidification increases — and it is increasing rapidly — the process locks up the carbonate molecules these creatures need to build their shells and stony skeletons.

Read the complete story at The Providence Journal.

NOAA Fisheries signed an agreement in November with the European Commission to ensure that US seafood exports to the European Union, valued at more than $1 billion, will not be disrupted by a new EC regulation designed to block illegal fish imports.

The following is a release on the agreement from NOAA Fisheries: A new U.S. catch document, designed to attest to the legality of US fisheries products, will be required in addition to the health certificates, which already accompany all seafood exports. The NOAA Fisheries Seafood Inspection Program will issue the catch document for fish harvested on or after Jan. 1, 2010.

Europe is the number one destination for US seafood exports.

In 2008, the European Commission adopted this regulation establishing the requirement that all seafood imports be accompanied by a catch certificate that attests to the legality of the catch for fisheries products harvested on or after Jan. 1, 2010.

The EC’s intention is to prevent illegal, unreported, and/or unregulated fisheries products from being imported into EC member countries, which are currently estimated at $1.1 billion in value.

NOAA Fisheries recognizes the tremendous negative impact IUU fishing has on global fisheries and has been in close consultation with our European counterparts to develop an agreement on US compliance with the regulation. Illegal fishing depletes fish stocks and hurts the economies of nations and the livelihoods of people who depend on sustainable fishing.

The US agreement with the EC represents a significant achievement for NOAA in terms of preserving foreign markets, maintaining sustainable fisheries, and increasing the competitiveness of US seafood exports.

GENEVA, Oct 29 (Reuters) – Proposals to rescue collapsing fish stocks by restricting fisheries subsidies are under threat because of the lack of progress in global trade talks, environmental campaigners said on Thursday.

The talks on fisheries subsidies are part of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round to reform global commerce rules, which is showing few signs of movement despite an intensive work programme agreed by negotiators for the final months of 2009.

"We’re very concerned," said Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist at Oceana, a U.S.-based group that campaigns to protect the world’s oceans.

"We’re in a sense hostage to the broader negotiation," he told Reuters while in Geneva to lobby trade negotiators whose talks this week have been focused on fisheries subsidies.

Read the complete story at Reuters.

Oceana, an international ocean conservation group, will launch a new six-figure advertising campaign on December 1, designed to influence policy makers arriving in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 15), December 7 -18, 2009.

The advertising campaign will highlight the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 350 parts per million (ppm) to avert a mass extinction of corals and likely declines in the countless marine species that depend upon them, this century.

To protect popular food species, such as oysters and lobster, and the economies that depend upon them, we will need to reach the goal of 350 ppm.  The new advertising campaign includes three executions of a design based on the message: ‘The Price of Lobster in 2050: 350 parts per million.’ It will also include two additional variations: ‘The Price of Oysters’ and ‘The Price of a Dive Vacation,’ also following the 350 parts per million theme.

Read the complete story at Oceana.

Because the changing chemistry of the ocean threatens all marine life, Oceana has invested in an advertising campaign to highlight the most urgent goal:  reducing CO2 emissions to achieve atmospheric levels of 350 parts per million (ppm) or less as soon as possible.

The three advertisements that Oceana will display in Copenhagen, Denmark, throughout the entire United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting, are depicted here: (See them at Oceana.)

SEAFOOD.COM NEWS [BANR JAPAN REPORTS] Hokkaido – Nov 23, 2009 – Hokkaido cod fishermen troubled with massive occurrence of spiny dogfish in longlining.

Cod fishermen have been unable to catch the targeted cod as many spiny dogfish are hooked in longline fishing in areas off Esan, Hakodate, western Hokkaido, since late in October.

Fishermen are truly troubled as the prices of dogfish are less than one tenth of those of Pacific cod.

Spiny dogfish, a species of Squalidae, has a body length of 50cm to 1.5 m. It is distributed in the area of 50-200 meter sea depth near Hokkaido and Tohoku, northern region of the main island.

According to the fisheries cooperative at Esan, dogfish started migrating to the fishing ground since around spring this year, showing sharp increase around late October.

The catch of dogfish in October soared 2.5 times from a year ago to 74.6 tons while cod catch plunged 66% to 12.4 tons.

Local fishermen say that cod do not come to longlines because dogfish eat up the baits before longlines reach the sea depth of about 200 meters. ‘All we find in the fishing grounds are dogfish,’ complains a 67-year-old fisherman.

As for the reason of the sudden increase in spiny dogfish, the Hokkaido fishery laboratory at Hakodate analyzes that the changes in warm sea currents at the Tsugaru Strait (separating Hokkaido and the main island) affected the state of the stock.

Pacific cod are priced at Y 500-800 per kilo at the Hakodate wholesale fish market, while dogfish is traded at Y10-30 per kilo after removing skins and viscera.

(Summarized from the Hokkaido Shimbun)

 

John Sackton, Editor And Publisher

Seafood.com News 1-781-861-1441

Email comments to jsackton@seafood.com

Rome, Italy – 11/23/2009 – The Pew Environment Group today welcomed an announcement by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization that the new treaty to address illegal fishing is open for signature and called on governments to ratify and implement this treaty.

Officially known as the Agreement of Port State Measures to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing, the treaty specifies minimum standards for inspection and provides port States with the obligation to prohibit entry to illegal fishing vessels. 
 
“Governments must immediately start to crack down on illegal fishing and refuse port entry to those responsible,” said Stefan Flothmann, director of International Ocean Governance at the Pew Environment Group. “Ratifying and implementing the treaty is critical to end illegal fishing.”

Read the complete story from The PEW Charitable Trusts.

Norway has closed 100 of its fjords to salmon farming to protect its wild stock, John Mulcahy, chairman of Save the Swilly (Ireland) told a packed audience following the screening of Farmed Salmon Exposed: The Global Reach of the Norwegian Salmon Farming Industry in Buswells Hotel, Dublin.

The 23-minute documentary lifts the lid on the problems caused by open net cage salmon farms worldwide and reveals the pervasive nature of the issues plaguing salmon aquaculture today. As part of a Global Week of Action, premieres took place in Edinburgh, Dundonnell and Oban in Scotland; Santiago in Chile; Washington; Vancouver; and Oslo and Bergen in Norway. Further screenings in Orkney, Shetland, Arran, London, Las Vegas, Santa Cruz, Puerto Varas, Ancud and Vancouver Island are planned.

The film features ghillie Brian Fraser from Scotland; John Mulcahy; Orri Vigfusson from North Atlantic Salmon Fund in Iceland; Alexandra Morton and Dr Daniel Pauly from British Columbia; Dr Matthias Gorny from Oceana in Chile as well as Sven Helge Pedersen, King Harald and Vegard Heggem in Norway.

Read the complete story at Irish Times.