Saving Seafood

Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Trains 15,000 Shrimp and Tilapia Farmers Asia, South Pacific

March 7, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership wrapped up a major aquaculture training program in Indonesia, Thailand, and China that instructed thousands of shrimp and tilapia farmers with modern training designed to improve the industry in these regions.

Organizers initially expected the project to attract 12,500 farmers. But by the December 31, 2016 finishing date, more than 15,000 farmers in all three countries had participated in the training.

“This project has exceeded expectations because of the hard work of many committed partners to deliver improvements based on a detailed, local understanding of what farmers want,” said Anton Immink, SFP’s Aquaculture Director. “We recognize there is still a long way to go for many of these farmers, but we encourage others to actively engage in the improvements needed.”

The program, funded with the support of Walmart Foundation and IDH – the Sustainable Trade Initiative – has led to improvements in environmental and disease management across shrimp and tilapia farms in all three countries.

Ir. Rizal, head of the aquaculture unit of the Provincial Office of Marine and Fishery Affairs in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province, said, “This training helped us improve the knowledge of traditional farmers in West Kalimantan to practice better farming. With better farming we hope that farmers can improve their shrimp and fish harvest.”

Training topics included: Better aquaculture practices; better post-harvest practices; better business management; group formation and management; value of zonal management; Code of Good Practice in Aquaculture; ecological farming, health management, and market outlook.

Sally Ananya, Director of The Food School, one of the partners in Thailand, said “The focus on smaller-scale producers and the specific inclusion of women in the training has been particularly valuable, as the contribution of these groups is often overlooked in projects aiming at improvements in shrimp farming.”

For some farmers, including Chareon Yongstar of Thailand, the training served as an eye-opener.

“I have learned so many practical best practices that I can apply at my farms,” he said. “But more importantly, the experience has raised more questions and made me realize how much more I don’t know. I hope there is a continuation of this program.”

SFP will continue to work closely with the international buyers to understand how these producers fit into existing supplies or how some of them can continue the improvements they have started to become part of the international supply chain.

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

FDA, EPA Release Final Fish Consumption Advice

January 24, 2017 — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have issued final advice regarding fish consumption, with the aim of helping pregnant women and those of childbearing years, along with breastfeeding mothers and parents of young children, make better choices about healthy and safe-to-eat fish, including shellfish.

To simplify the selection process, the agencies have created a reference chart (pictured) that sorts 62 types of fish into three categories: “Best choices” (two to three weekly servings recommended), “Good choices” (one weekly serving), and “Fish to Avoid.” According to FDA and EPA, “Best Choices” fish make up almost 90 percent of fish consumed in the United States.

An FDA analysis of fish consumption data discovered that half of pregnant women surveyed ate fewer than 2 ounces a week, much less than the recommended amount. Because the nutritional advantages of fish consumption are key to healthy development during pregnancy and early childhood, the agencies are advising two to three weekly servings of lower-mercury fish for pregnant women and women who may become pregnant, or 8 to 12 ounces. However, since all fish contain at least traces of mercury, which can be harmful to the brain and nervous system after prolonged exposure, the maximum level of consumption recommended in the final advice is still the previously recommended weekly level of 12 ounces, consistent with the current Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

For adults, a usual serving is 4 ounces of fish, measured before cooking, while serving sizes for children should be smaller and adjusted by age and total calorie needs. The agencies recommend that children eat fish once or twice weekly, chosen from a variety of species.

Read the full story at the Progressive Grocer

Tough times for tilapia persist due to oversupply, low prices

January 19, 2017 — Tilapia producers faced a tough year in 2016, with an oversupply of product and the lowest prices seen since 2011.

A panel of premium finfish experts speaking at this year’s National Fisheries Institute’s Global Seafood Market Conference in San Francisco, California, debated tilapia’s latest challenges, including a softening in demand related to a lack of species promotion. Such hurdles have prompted many fresh tilapia producers to gravitate toward frozen product offerings, and tilapia producers in Ecuador have started to veer in the direction of shrimp production, which has become more lucrative in the region recently.

“2016 has been a challenging year for anyone producing tilapia,” the panel surmised. “A little too much fish in the market.”

Despite these difficulties, the outlook for tilapia heading into 2017 and 2018 is positive, the panel said. Honduras continues to dominate tilapia production, even with a devastating El Nino drought to contend with, and is expected to maintain its reign in the sector. Meanwhile, Colombia will look to capitalize on its new free trade agreements and Brazil has growing potential to transform into a major tilapia exporter to the United States, the panel agreed. However, given the volatility of tilapia, it may still be a while yet before Brazil reaches its potential as a tilapia exporter, the panel concurred.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Tilapia has a terrible reputation. Does it deserve it?

October 24th, 2016 — When it comes to fish, no species brings out the haters like tilapia.

Read up on it, and you’ll find tilapia described with words like “muddy” and “earthy”; there are entire forum threads devoted to its inferiority. This very newspaper, back in 2007, called it “the fish that chefs love to hate.”

Should we really be so hard on this fast-growing freshwater fish?

In the world of food, there aren’t too many propositions that get universal agreement, but here’s one: Our oceans are overfished. If we’re going to continue to eat fish, and to feed it to the people scheduled to join us on this planet in the coming years, we have to farm it. And if we’re going to farm fish, an adaptable, hardy fish like tilapia is an excellent candidate.

Yet a combination of rumors and credible reports works against it. Perhaps you’ve heard that tilapia are raised in cesspools and live on poop? Even the USDA says there is — or, at least, used to be — some truth in that. The agency’s 2009 report on Chinese imports notes that “Fish are often raised in ponds where they feed on waste from poultry and livestock.”

Before we meet that fact with a chorus of “ewww,” it’s worth noting that turning feces into fish would be the agricultural equivalent of spinning straw into gold. Although there are important safety concerns in that kind of system, if you can manage those risks, you’ve got one of the most sustainable foods going. It’s a downright Rumplestiltskinnian miracle, and we should root for it, not against it.

The question is whether that still happens. To find out, I went to the source: Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, which rates seafood choices based on whether they have been responsibly fished or farmed. Seafood Watch lists tilapia from nine different sources. Four (from Peru, Canada, Ecuador and the United States) are rated “Best Choices,” another four (from China, Taiwan, Mexico and Indonesia) are “Good Alternatives,” and only one (from Colombia) is rated “Avoid.” I asked Ryan Bigelow, the Seafood Watch program’s engagement manager, to give me a rundown on the sustainability issues.

Read the full story at The Washington Post 

Fish Fraud: Something Fishy Is Happening With the Labeling of Seafood

August 24, 2016 — These days, choosing fish isn’t easy, whether you’re buying it at the grocery store or ordering it at a restaurant. You want to select seafood that’s fresh, reasonably priced, high in omega-3 fatty acids and low in mercury. After all, fish is one of the healthiest foods on the planet – it’s a lean source of protein that’s good for your heart and mind, experts note – which is why the updated U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines encourage Americans to eat fish or seafood at least twice a week. It’s a tricky balancing act, though, because at the same time, consumers are frequently warned about the potential risks of contaminants like mercury, which tends to build up especially in large predatory fish.

Here’s a shopping shocker that makes the issue even more complicated: You may not be getting the fish you’re paying for at retail outlets or in restaurants. In an investigation from 2010 to 2012, Oceana, an international organization dedicated to ocean conservation, examined more than 1,200 fish samples from 64 restaurants, sushi venues and stores in 21 states throughout the U.S. and found that mislabeling occurred in 59 percent of the 46 fish types that were tested; in particular, less desirable, less expensive or more readily available fish were often swapped for grouper, cod and snapper. Holy mackerel!

Among the most common examples of fish fraud the Oceana study found: Tilapia is frequently substituted for red snapper; pangasius (Asian catfish) is being sold as Alaskan or Pacific cod or grouper; Antarctic toothfish is being swapped for sea bass; farmed Atlantic salmon is standing in for wild, king and sockeye salmon; and escolar is being sold as white tuna, according to the report. In South Florida, king mackerel – a fish that’s on the Food and Drug Administration’s “do not eat” list for sensitive groups such as women of reproductive age and young children because it’s high in mercury – was being sold as grouper, and in New York City, tilefish – which is also on the “do not eat” list for sensitive people – was being sold as halibut and red snapper.

“It’s all based on economics,” notes Roger Clemens, a professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Southern California and past president of the Institute of Food Technologists. “Many of the fish that are substituted are less expensive, so the restaurant or retailer profits from the deception.”

Read the full story at the US News & World Report

ALASKA: Sea Share steadily expands donations of fish to the needy

July 18, 2016 — The decades long “bycatch to food banks” program has grown far beyond its Alaska origins.

Today, only 10 percent of the fish going to hunger-relief programs is bycatch — primarily halibut and salmon taken accidentally in other fisheries. The remainder is first-run products donated to Sea Share, the nation’s only nonprofit that donates fish through a network of fishermen, processors, packagers and transporters.

Sea Share began in 1993 when Bering Sea fishermen pushed to be allowed to send fish taken as bycatch to food banks — instead of tossing them back, as required by law.

“Back then, that was the only thing that we were set up to do, and we are the only entity authorized to retain such fish. It became a rallying point for a lot of stakeholders, and from that beginning we’ve expanded to the Gulf of Alaska, and grown to 28 states and over 200 million fish meals a year,” said Jim Harmon, Sea Share director.

Some seafood companies commit a portion of their sales or donate products to Sea Share. Vessels in the At-sea Processors Association have donated 250,000 pounds of whitefish each year for 15 years, which are turned into breaded portions. Sea Share’s roster also has grown to include tilapia, shrimp, cod, tuna and other seafood products.

Over the years, Sea Share has ramped up donations in Alaska, where halibut portions from Kodiak fisheries are used locally, in Kenai as well as being flown to Nome and Kotzebue, courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard. A new freezer container has been stationed at the Alaska Peninsula port of Dillingham, holding 8,500 pounds of fish, and several more are being added to hubs in Western Alaska, Harmon said.

“I think we’ll probably do 250,000 pounds in the state this year,” he added.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News

Why You Should Be Worried About Fish Fraud

June 13, 2016 –Fish has been heralded as one of the healthiest foods on the planet, loaded with those highly beneficial omega-3 fatty acids.

But there is one important thing to consider before you make fish a staple in your diet – seafood fraud.

This type of fraud includes any illegal activity that misrepresents seafood being sold, which is shockingly easy. More than 90 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported, and the government inspects less than 1 percent of that specifically for fraud, according to Oceana, one of the largest international ocean conservation and advocacy organizations.

Using DNA testing, Oceana conducted a two-year investigation of seafood fraud from 2010 to 2012 and found that one-third of seafood is mislabeled, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

Additionally, 44 percent of all the grocery stores, restaurants and sushi venues the organization investigated sold mislabeled seafood. It’s difficult to pinpoint, however, at what stage in the supply chain these fraudulent activities occur, as the Oceana study notes.

Read the full story at attn.com

SEA TO TABLE: Fixing a Broken System

June 9, 2016 — The US exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the ocean is the world’s largest, and American fishery management is the world’s best. Yet more than 90% of all seafood consumed in the US is imported, and more than 75% is one of only four species: shrimp (mostly farmed in Asia), salmon (mostly farmed in Chile), tuna (almost all canned), and whitefish (mostly tilapia farmed under the most dubious conditions).

Wild fishing is the last true hunting on earth. Seafood is universally considered the healthiest protein. With the waters surrounding America’s traditional wild fishing communities blessed with dozens of abundant, sustainable, healthy and delicious species, why don’t Americans accept the incredible gifts bestowed on them?.

Americans are accustomed to cheap protein. Corn, soy and wheat are government subsidized and provide artificially low cost feed to industrial meat production. That means cheap meat for consumers, but at a frightening cost to the environment, small farmers, animal welfare, and human health.

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a worldwide scourge, and last year’s AP investigative report shone a light on rampant seafood slavery. Harvesting fish illegally without any labor cost is an excellent business model for cheap imported seafood.

Meanwhile traditional American fishing communities have struggled under the stringent but essential US fisheries management policies that have brought our fisheries back from the brink to the rebuilt status of today. We owe it ourselves to reward domestic fishermen for their gallant efforts.

Read the full opinion piece at the Huffington Post

Sara Rademaker is letting little eels get big in Maine

May 31, 2016 — SOUTH BRISTOL, Maine — “They are like little torpedoes,” Sara Rademaker says, looking down at a tank full of year-old eels in a feeding frenzy.

Her tone is fond, almost as if the eels wiggling in and out of a submerged laundry basket were a basket of lively kittens, but this is all business. Rademaker is doing what no one has tried to do in Maine before – grow out elvers to eels for the commercial food market.

Rademaker is a young woman, but has 12 years of farming and aquaculture experience. A graduate of Auburn University in Alabama, she’s worked with subsistence farmers in Uganda as part of a U.S. AID project and farmed tilapia in Ghana. She’s taught middle school students how to farm tilapia and lettuces.

Three years ago she began studying European and Asian systems for growing elvers into eels in contained areas, asking herself the question, why not here in Maine, the biggest source of American baby glass eels in the country?

Although she’s just starting her third year developing her eel aquaculture system, she’s gearing up to bring her first eels to market this summer, with plans to tap into the local sushi market to begin with.

“She’s already so far ahead of anyone else in the state,” says Dana Morse, a UMaine Cooperative Extension associate professor and researcher based at the Darling Marine Center. “It’s impressive.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

A farm deep inside a Brooklyn warehouse may lead the way to large-scale urban agriculture

April 11, 2016 — Here’s one way to grow food in an urban environment: Raise a school of tilapia in a tank. Filter out the nitrogen-rich waste, and let naturally occurring bacteria transform it from ammonia into nitrate. Run that naturally derived fertilizer beneath the roots of greens, herbs and peppers. Let the veggies flourish beneath LED lights. Harvest the vegetables. Later, harvest the fish. Cook and serve.

Known as aquaponics, this complicated but efficient ecosystem is the latest attempt at making agriculture commercially viable in New York City—even though it has a spotty history, a not-quite-proven track record and plenty of skeptics.

“We do aquaponics for the quality of produce it yields,” said Jason Green, CEO and co-founder of Edenworks, an emerging commercial aquaponics company in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that recently secured a commitment to supply baby greens and microgreens to Whole Foods Market stores in New York City later this year. “Our innovation is that we can do aquaponics cost-effectively, scalably and repeatedly.”

Though the premise of mimicking a natural system in a closed environment is ancient, Green says that new technologies including proprietary software, a complex plumbing system and cost-efficient LED lighting, plus a soaring demand for local food, will make fish-fed farms viable on a large scale, even in inner cities. A 2010 report from the New York City Council cited $600 million in unmet demand for regionally grown produce.

“Consumers are very interested in knowing the provenance of their food, and companies are responding to that by setting up systems to produce food in cities,” explained Nevin Cohen, an associate professor of urban food policy at the CUNY School of Public Health.

See the full story at Crain’s New York