Saving Seafood

The next food revolution: fish farming?

October 25, 2015 — Sanggou Bay looks like a place where the pointillism movement has been unleashed on an ocean canvas. All across the harbor on China’s northeastern coast, thousands of tiny buoys – appearing as black dots – stretch across the briny landscape in unending rows and swirling patterns. They are broken only by small boats hauling an armada of rafts through the murky waters.

For centuries, Chinese fishermen have harvested this section of the Yellow Sea for its flounder, herring, and other species. Today the area is again producing a seafood bounty, though not from the end of a fisherman’s rod or the bottom of a trawler’s net. Instead, the maze of buoys marks thousands of underwater pens or polyurethane ropes that hold oysters, scallops, abalone, Japanese flounder, mussels, sea cucumbers, kelp, and garish orange sea squirts. They are all part of one of the world’s biggest and most productive aquaculture fields. Sanggou Bay is a seafood buffet on a colossal scale.

The buoys here extend for miles out to the horizon, offering, on an aluminum-gray day, the only clue to where the ocean stops and the sky begins. Hundreds of migrant workers – many from as far away as Myanmar (Burma) – pilot the fishing boats zigzagging around the floats, shuttling fish to shore, checking the lines for mussels and oysters, and voyaging farther out to sea to harvest seaweed.

Read the full story at The Christian Science Monitor

 

 

MAINE: Lobster season proves successful

October 20, 2015 — Maine’s 2015 lobster season is experiencing a boom this year, which according to biologists, stems from factors such as careful fishery management, dropping populations of predators like cod fish, and warming temperatures in the Gulf of Maine.

Experts in the field also point to the fact that lobstering is regulated by a number of federal laws, and that Maine fisheries and governments cooperate with the help of the University of Maine Lobster Institute.

In addition, lobstermen also take an active part in conservation by marking egg-bearing female lobsters, Smithonian.com reported.

Another factor benefitting the industry has been the growth in supply. Exports of the state’s lobsters to China grew from almost nothing five years ago to around 2.7 million pounds last year, with South Korea and Hong Kong showing similarly large increases, according to WISERTrade, which tracks exports.

Read the full story at FIS World News

 

 

China Is Turning Its Fish Breeding Grounds Into Smartphone Factories

October 21, 2015 — A sixth of the globe’s fish catch comes from waters off China’s coasts. Yet the nation’s industrial push is imperiling that 15 million-ton annual haul. Fully 60 percent of the China’s wetlands have been paved over for development projects—and much of what’s left is under threat of more of the same.

That’s the conclusion of a jarring new report (hat tip to the New York Times) by the US-based Paulson Institute, the Chinese State Forestry Administration, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Coastal wetlands are the breeding and feeding grounds for fish, migratory birds, and other creatures. They also buffer coastal cities from the sea’s caprices by absorbing energy from storm-roiled waves—an increasingly important function as climate change proceeds apace. Over the last half century, the report found, China has developed more than half of the coastal wetlands in its temperate northern regions and nearly three-quarters of the mangrove forests and 80 percent of coral reefs along its southern coast. Losses accelerated between 2003 and 2013—in that time frame alone, China’s total coastal wetlands shrank by about 23 percent.

Read the full story at Mother Jones

 

Maine’s Lobster Boom Continues, Feeding Expanding Market

October 17, 2015 — As Maine’s 2015 lobster season heads for the homestretch, the iconic New England fishery continues to show surprising signs of strength while it feeds a growing market.

Mainers appear to be pulling large numbers of lobsters from the waters off their shores, continuing a long winning streak.

Marine experts point to a few likely factors behind the boom: careful fishery management; dropping populations of predators, such as cod fish; and warming temperatures in the Gulf of Maine.

Meanwhile, strong demand for lobster is surfacing in an array of places, from China, whose residents have a growing taste for lobster, to McDonald’s Corp. , which offered a fast-food lobster roll sold in New England this summer. Prices for the clawed crustaceans are up from last year, according to market experts and people connected to Maine’s fishing industry.

In 2014, lobstermen harvested about 124.4 million pounds of lobster from the water fetching an average of $3.70 a pound, according to the state’s Department of Marine Resources. The total catch was shy of an all-time record set in 2013, though the average price rose nearly 28%.

Read the full story and watch the video from The Wall Street Journal

Maine trade groups head to China

October 16, 2015 — The state of Maine, whose biggest exports to China are seafood, especially lobsters, and wood, is sending a trade delegation headed by its governor to China at the end of this month in search of deals for the state’s services industry.

Governor Paul LePage, the Maine International Trade Center (MITC), and the US Commercial Service will be joined by a delegation of about two dozen people from the food, environmental and educational sectors on a week-long trip to East Asia from Oct 24 to Oct 31, where they will visit Shanghai. Then those in the seafood sector will head to Qingdao on China’s east coast for a fishery tradeshow.

China is Maine’s second-largest export market after Canada. Last year’s those exports totaled $183, down from the $247 million in 2012, the last time the state went on a trade mission to the country. As of August 2015, the state’s exports to China totaled $141 million.

Wood products, which include wood pulp-related goods and paper goods, make up the majority of Maine’s exports to China, followed by seafood.

Read the full story from China Daily

Could Eating Fish Help Ward Off Depression?

September 10, 2015 — Can eating a lot of fish boost your mood? Maybe, say Chinese researchers.

Overall, the researchers found that people who consumed the most fish lowered their risk of depression by 17 percent compared to those who ate the least.

“Studies we reviewed indicated that high fish consumption can reduce the incidence of depression, which may indicate a potential causal relationship between fish consumption and depression,” said lead researcher Fang Li, of the department of epidemiology and health statistics at the Medical College of Qingdao University in China.

But this association was only statistically significant for studies done in Europe, the researchers said. They didn’t find the same benefit when they looked at studies done in North America, Asia, Australia or South America. The researchers don’t know why the association was only significant for fish consumption in Europe.

The study was also only able to show an association between eating fish and the risk for depression, not that eating fish causes a lower risk for depression, Li said.

Read the full story from U.S. News & World Report

One reason you’re shelling out more for lobster? China

August 6, 2015 — CHINA — Prices for lobster meat have hit record highs in the U.S. this year thanks to surging demand from China and environmental factors such as the unseasonably cold winter. This comes two years after prices for the tasty shellfish hit a 20-year low because of a supply glut.

In recent years, China, which consumes 35 percent of the world’s seafood, has taken an increasingly larger bite out of the lobster market, where it is considered both a delicacy and symbol of good luck because of its red color. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shellfish exports rose 8 percent in fiscal year 2014 and 20 percent of them went to China.

“China is a huge factor,” said John Sackton, editor and publisher of the trade news site SeafoodNews.com, in an email to CBS MoneyWatch. “They have become a year-round consumer of live and frozen lobster. They are a permanent factor in the market now.”

According to market research firm Urner Barry, wholesale prices for lobster meat, which is mainly sold to food service customers, are about $22.50 per pound, up more than 30 percent from a year earlier. According the company, prices haven’t been this high in decades and are at unprecedented levels.

Read the full story at CBS News 

 

In Quirky Hong Kong Voting System, Fishermen Play Key Role

July 23, 2015 — Since China took control of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997, the city’s billionaires have played a leading role in hewing the Asian financial center to Beijing’s priorities. So too have a dwindling band of fishermen and farmers.

The desire of China’s communist leaders to enlist the tycoons’ cooperation is understandable given the influence they have through their control of large swathes of the semiautonomous Chinese city’s economy. Chinese President Xi Jinping last year summoned a group of them for an emergency meeting as political tensions in Hong Kong mounted.

Less known outside Hong Kong, however, is the political role of fishermen and farmers, remnant industries in Hong Kong that form a large slice of the 1,200-member committee that selects the southern Chinese city’s pro-Beijing leader. They also have their own representative in the territory’s legislature.

Fishing and farming make up less than 1 percent of Hong Kong’s $274 billion economy but command 60 votes in the leadership committee, far more than groups or industries with much greater economic or social significance.

Their outsized role is a source of discontent in a city that was rocked by pro-democracy protests over the past year as many Hong Kongers chafed against a rising tide of mainland Chinese influence.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

 

Despite maritime security tension, US and China to cooperate on combating illegal fishing

June 24, 2015 — The U.S. and China said Wednesday they are stepping up cooperation on preserving the ocean and combating illegal fishing despite their differences on maritime security.

Secretary of State John Kerry said that indicates the two nations are “working hard to address differences and to find the areas of commonality.”

The two governments discussed ocean policy on the final day Wednesday of high-level talks on security and the economy. The leaders of the Chinese delegation met later Wednesday at the White House with President Barack Obama, who will host China’s President Xi Jinping in the fall.

This week’s talks are a prelude to Xi’s visit, his first to the U.S. since 2013. Despite growing tensions over cybertheft and China’s island-building in the disputed South China Sea, the U.S. and China are stressing how they can work together on less contentious issues, such as climate change.

State Councilor Yang Jiechi said they have “broad common interests in global maritime governance” and that they could jointly build a “peaceful and tranquil” marine environment.

Read the full story from the Associated Press here