Opinion

July 30, 2013 — The seafood industry needs something new to get people’s attention. Linda Cornish, SNP executive director, said that people know seafood is healthful, but the intimidation factor in terms of preparation keeps it the least-consumed protein in the United States.

After six years covering stories for the seafood industry and monitoring what is written in the mainstream media, I’ve realized the majority of the coverage centers around the health benefits or scares related to seafood consumption. Typical topics are that pregnant woman should eat more seafood or avoid it, seafood helps prevent dementia, omega-3 fatty acid benefits and so on.

The latest report is about seafood consumption lowering anxiety levels in pregnant women. That, combined with Mike Urch’s column on SS last week about how the seafood industry needs to do a better job of explaining to consumers why seafood is healthy to increase consumption, got me thinking that the seafood industry needs something new to get people’s attention. That message may be delivered by the recently launched Seafood Nutrition Partnership (SNP), which was formed to address seafood deficiency in Americans’ diets and build awareness of the protein’s health and nutritional benefits.

Linda Cornish, SNP executive director, said that people know seafood is healthful, but the intimidation factor in terms of preparation keeps it the least-consumed protein in the United States.

Read the full opinion piece at Seafood Source

July 27, 2013 — As director of the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute in Juneau, I'm here to say there could be no more appropriate namesake for a federal fisheries research facility than the late Sen. Ted Stevens. His Senate record (from 1968 to 2009) leaves no doubt that Stevens' vision and tenacity are largely responsible for the laws and government institutions that secure the economic, environmental and cultural future of our nation's oceans.

Let us never forget the bad old days of 1968 when foreign fishing fleets overexploited marine resources on the high seas right up to three miles off the coast of the U.S. Many people worked diligently in the post-WWII era to make international agreements to reduce the effects of high-seas fishing. Yet, by 1968, most waters off Alaska were still wide open to the fish-killing foreign fleets.

Those fleets stalked Alaska's salmon, fishing an estimated 10,000 kilometers of gill net in the western Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands. One of the darkest periods for salmon occurred in 1973, when the mighty Bristol Bay sockeye return was just 2.4 million fish, including an inshore catch of only 761,000. In Bristol Bay today, a sockeye catch of about 15 million, like this year, is considered small. In 1973 it was clearly time to do something, but what could be done without international agreements?

Stevens had the clarity of vision to identify a unilateral 200-mile fishing limit as the means to control the foreign fishing fleets. He first introduced a bill in 1971. Although initially unsuccessful, in 1975 Stevens teamed with Washington Sen. Warren Magnuson to pass the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, now the Magnuson-Stevens Act, in 1976.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Jul 29, 2013 — Two events this month show the tensions facing Portland's working waterfront. The first was good news — the second development was not so good.

The first was good news: the announcement that Shucks Maine Lobster was leasing 19,000 square feet of space at the Maine State Pier for lobster processing. The expanding business is expected to invest more than $1 million on renovations and equipment and bring nine full-time jobs and 60 part-time ones to the waterfront. Along with Ready Seafood, a lobster shipping company, which will also lease space on the pier, Portland will build on its role as a hub for the lobster fishery.

The second development was not so good. The owners of the old Cumberland Cold Storage building on Commercial Street, now the headquarters of the Pierce Atwood law firm, announced that they have not been able to find marine tenants to lease space that is reserved for them by zoning. The building's owners got permission from the Planning Board to rent the space to other kinds of businesses.

Coming so closely together, the two developments illustrate the tough choices the city will have to make if Portland is going to preserve its working waterfront. There is still demand for space near the water for seafood processing, as the Shucks deal shows. But there may not be enough to justify the zoning restrictions last revised in 2010. As this conversation moves forward, the city should not forget its commitment to a robust working waterfront. This is a vital part of Portland's heritage, and the jobs these businesses provide won't come back if they are forced out. Preservation may involve public investment that promotes infrastructure upgrades that rents alone can't support.

Read the full opinion piece at the Portland Press Herald

July 26, 2013 — As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

I had spent much of my life writing music for commercials, film and television and knew little about the world of philanthropy as practiced by the very wealthy until what I call the big bang happened in 2006. That year, my father, Warren Buffett, made good on his commitment to give nearly all of his accumulated wealth back to society. In addition to making several large donations, he added generously to the three foundations that my parents had created years earlier, one for each of their children to run.

Early on in our philanthropic journey, my wife and I became aware of something I started to call Philanthropic Colonialism. I noticed that a donor had the urge to “save the day” in some fashion. People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem. Whether it involved farming methods, education practices, job training or business development, over and over I would hear people discuss transplanting what worked in one setting directly into another with little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.

Often the results of our decisions had unintended consequences; distributing condoms to stop the spread of AIDS in a brothel area ended up creating a higher price for unprotected sex.

But now I think something even more damaging is going on.

Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. There are plenty of statistics that tell us that inequality is continually rising. At the same time, according to the Urban Institute, the nonprofit sector has been steadily growing. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed.

Read the full opinion piece at the New York Times

July 26, 2013 — I asked someone, well, where will we get our seafood? I was told China, Argentina, places like that. I don’t know about you, but I am not interested in eating shrimp from overseas. Tim Hergenrader, who proposed this petition, is from Nebraska and is an artist in New Bern. Gosh, an artist from the western part of the USA suggesting to change the laws of commercial fishing in North Carolina.

If you care about your local seafood and if you are like me depending on the commercial fishermen to bring you the wonderful bounty of our local waters, then help the commercial fishermen. We can no longer sit back and wait to see what happens.

I am not a commercial fisherman. I am not a member of any recreational fisherman organization. I purchase a recreational fishing license every year but have not put a hook and sinker in the water for over two years. I do eat seafood. I eat crabs, fish, oysters, clams, shrimp and I depend on someone else to catch all the seafood that I eat. Sometimes, a recreational fishermen will share his catch but most of the time; I purchase seafood that has been caught or harvested by a commercial fisherman.

On Tuesday July 30, at 12:30 p.m. there will be joint meeting of the Finfish, Habitat and Water Quality, Shellfish/Crustacean and Sea Turtle Advisory Committees at New Bern Riverfront Convention Center. This meeting is crucial to the commercial fishermen and to the seafood consumer in North Carolina. A petition that was presented to the Marine Fisheries Commission by Tim Hergenrader, who lives in New Bern, has asked the commission to reclassify waters and adopt a rule that makes and I quote from the NC Fisheries website, “The petition asks the Marine Fisheries Commission to adopt a rule that makes North Carolina’s internal coastal waters permanent secondary nursery areas, unless they are currently designated as primary nursery areas or special secondary nursery areas. The petition states the primary effect of the proposed rule would be to halt shrimp trawling in North Carolina inshore waters.”

What this means is that shrimpers and crabbers will no longer be able to trawl in the local rivers, Neuse, Pamlico, Cape Fear nor the Sounds, Core, Pamlico, Bogue, all the waters from the Virginia state line to the South Carolina state line. This petition states that all trawling for crabs and shrimp should be caught in the Atlantic Ocean.

I asked someone, well, where will we get our seafood? I was told China, Argentina, places like that. I don’t know about you, but I am not interested in eating shrimp from overseas. Tim Hergenrader, who proposed this petition, is from Nebraska and is an artist in New Bern. Gosh, an artist from the western part of the USA suggesting to change the laws of commercial fishing in North Carolina.

There is a long time battle that has been going on between these two fishing groups. Who is right and who is wrong? Who has the most money and power and who depends on the law to be fair? As I write, I have a vision of a boxing ring … and in the right corner, heavy weight boxer “Mr. Recreation Fisherman weighing in at 225 pounds and in the left corner, light weight Mr. Commercial Fisherman weighing in at 135 pounds.” Cheering on the heavyweight are the Recreation Fishing organizations with their lobbyist, boat manufactures, boat dealers and money and cheering on the Light Weight is, well folks like me who enjoy seafood and think nothing about how and what the commercial fisherman deals with to catch the seafood that I eat. So I am writing this story so that just the average person who loves seafood can maybe understand what is happening to our commercial fishermen here in North Carolina.

Read the full opinion piece at the New Bern, North Carolina Sun Journal

July 25, 2013 — The approach of Ted Stevens Day in Alaska on Saturday brings back many memories from a lifetime working in fisheries. When Stevens was appointed to a Senate seat in 1968, I was working on my bachelor’s degree in biology. Today, I am writing as director at the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute. In looking back at Ted Stevens’ legislative career, I was reminded of how dramatically it had affected me and everyone else involved in U.S. fisheries.

Never was there a more appropriate namesake for a federal fisheries research facility than Ted Stevens. The legislative record leaves no doubt that Ted Stevens’ vision and tenacity are largely responsible for the laws and government institutions that presently secure the economic, environmental and cultural benefits of our nation’s oceans for all future generations.

Let us never forget that the future of living marine resources off the coasts of the U.S. was far from secure when Ted Stevens first became a member of the U.S. Senate. Beginning in the post World War II era, an army of diplomats, legislators and scientists worked diligently to forge international agreements to control and reduce impacts of high seas fishing.

Nonetheless, most waters off Alaska in 1968 were still wide-open killing fields where the fishing was mostly done by foreign fleets.

Foreign fleets stalked Alaska’s salmon, fishing an estimated 10,000 kilometers of gill net in the western Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands. One of the darkest periods for Alaska’s salmon occurred in 1973, when the often mighty Bristol Bay sockeye salmon return was reduced to a total of just 2.4 million fish, including an inshore catch of only 761,000. In the Bristol Bay of today, a sockeye salmon catch in the neighborhood of 15 million, like this year, is considered small. In 1973, it was clearly time to do something, but what could be done without the international agreements so many had been seeking?

Sen. Stevens had the clarity of vision to identify a unilateral 200-mile fishing limit as the means to control foreign fishing fleets off the coasts of the U.S., introducing S46, a bill to extend jurisdiction from three to 200 miles in 1971. Although S46 was unsuccessful, in 1975 Sen. Stevens got the support from Sen. Warren Magnuson, of Washington state, who co-sponsored the Fishery Conservation and Management Act enacted by Congress in 1976. Sen. Stevens introduced the motion that renamed the bill the Magnuson Act. Today, it is known as the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

Phil Mundy is director of Auke Bay Laboratories, which is headquartered in the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute in Juneau and is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service. The lab has served Alaska and the nation from Juneau since 1958 as a division of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Mundy has worked as a fisheries scientist for a variety of other public and private entities. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

Read the full opinion piece at the Daily News Miner 

July 17, 2013 — Despite the strides made in the 10 years since the Pew Oceans Commission issued its report, challenges remain. Coastal development continues, largely unchecked, and wetlands and marshes continue to shrink. That exposes more than half of the Americans who live along the coasts to the physical and economic damage caused by increasingly high-intensity storms such as Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy.

Although my work has been in Washington, D.C., my home and heart have always been along the beautiful coastline of the Monterey Peninsula in California. It's a place where I first developed my dedication to public service. And it inspired what would become a lifelong effort to promote responsible stewardship of our oceans.

Healthy oceans benefit all Americans, whether they live on our nation's coasts or in the heartland. That's why I eagerly agreed in the mid-2000s to help lead the Pew Ocean Commission, a special effort to bring together leading voices from around the United States to examine the health of our oceans through the lens of science, not partisan politics.

Ten years ago, the commission released its findings, the nation's first comprehensive report on the state of America's marine environment in more than 40 years. Because of leadership from both sides of the aisle in Congress and from Democratic and Republican administrations alike, we've made remarkable progress over the past decade since the release of that report to address many of the problems it identified. But, there's still much work to be done.

Our oceans are a tremendous economic engine, providing jobs for millions of Americans, directly and indirectly, and a source of food and recreation for countless more. Yet, for much of U.S. history, the health of America's oceans has been taken for granted, assuming its bounty was limitless and capacity to absorb waste without end. This is far from the truth.

The situation the commission found in 2001 was grim. Many of our nation's commercial fisheries were being depleted and fishing families and communities were hurting. More than 60% of our coastal rivers and bays were degraded by nutrient runoff from farmland, cities and suburbs. Government policies and practices, a patchwork of inadequate laws and regulations at various levels, in many cases made matters worse. Our nation needed a wake-up call.

Read the full opinion piece from former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta at CNN

July 23, 2013 — Maybe if the seafood industry could present a united advertising campaign, misinformation and negative news (I still shudder when I think of a conversation I had with an acquaintance after the BP oil spill) can be combated faster and easier and good news can have a broader reach in mainstream media.

When SeafoodSource first launched, I was in charge of writing a bimonthly column called Media Watch, which explored mainstream media coverage of seafood industry related topics.

In order to find out what seafood industry stories the mainstream media was fancying, I set up Google alerts to be notified whenever keywords like “seafood,” “aquaculture” and “fishery” were popping up in the news outside industry sources.

A lot of what the media likes to report on when it comes to seafood has to do with health — benefits or scares. Pregnant woman should eat more seafood, seafood helps prevent dementia, omega-3s, and on and on and on. It got to be that even I had seafood-is-good-for-you and mercury-isn’t-as-big-of-a-deal-as-it-seems (or is it?) fatigue and started glazing over the research studies and avoided mentioning their coverage in Media Watch.

In the past couple weeks though, a new report — about seafood consumption lowering anxiety levels in pregnant women — keeps showing up in the Google alerts I still get every morning. That, combined with Mike Urch’s column on SS yesterday about how the seafood industry needs to do a better job of explaining to consumers why seafood is healthy to increase consumption, got me thinking.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource.com

July 23, 2013 — In a sensible attempt at compromise with beleaguered fishermen, the New England Fisheries Management Council and the fisheries division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently proposed to reopen selected areas of New England waters that have been closed to the groundfish industry since the mid-1990s.

The plan would take effect later this year. It is worth a try.

The industry is reeling from deep cuts to cod and yellowtail flounder quotas, and fishing towns have been pleading for permission to do whatever fishing is possible. To remedy that distress without hurting the region’s fisheries, the agencies say that, by late summer or in the fall, they may allow fishing of haddock, monkfish, skate, and certain other fish stocks that don’t appear to be in danger.

Read the full opinion piece at The Boston Globe