 News Summary: February 3, 2012 Top Story: Julie Packard of Monterey Bay repudiates Mike's Sutton's attack on Alaska and Global Trust In a very surprising development Julie Packard personally put out a statement repudiating the remarks her vice president, Michael Sutton, made slamming Alaska and Global trust. Mike was clearly furious that anyone would think other certification schemes might be accepted alongside the MSC. The Aquarium is supposedly considering just such issues. The larger question - which we address in our video - is the damage that MSC's negative campaign to discredit Alaska might cause. It will hurt the entire global seafood sustainability movement. This is not about NGO's. It is about how retail partners can fulfill their corporate responsibilities on sustainable purchasing, and the MSC by its behavior is threatening to harm all seafood sellers, their own partners included. In other news, there was an undercurrent at the New England Fisheries Council meeting that yes, something did happen to the Gulf of Maine cod stock between 2008 and 2011, despite the problems shown with the survey. There are two schools of thought - one that inshore boats gamed the days at sea system, and took multiple trips with high discards, far overshooting expectations, and another that large boats with cod quota came into the Gulf of Maine and displaced small vessels. In our opinion, the first issue likely had a larger impact on the stock, since the trawlers were still limited by their allocations. In some company news, Mike Carroll, formerly with the New England Aquarium and Ahold, has joined Global Trust as stakeholder liaison. Also Jack Kilgore, president of Rich's Consumer brands division, has been promoted to co-leader of their North American operations, along with Ray Burke. The N. Pacific council, meeting in Seattle, is wrestling with changing the prohibited species bycatch numbers in the Gulf of Alaska to reduce halibut bycatch. This is a tricky problem, as the council has not given the Gulf trawl fisheries the same tools other Alaskan fisheries have used to manage bycatch, such as the ability to enforce avoidance of hotspots and have real time monitoring. These tools require a share system so there is not the fear if one boat leaves an area that another will come in. Canada has a glaring weakness in its fisheries management: The Fisheries Minister has autocratic power to overrule science based recommendations. Such a governance weakness makes Canada less well positioned than its major peers to adopt FAO standards requiring science based decisions on fisheries management rather than political decisions. This failure was highlighted by a national science panel that spent two years on the need to overhaul the 1868 Fisheries Act, under which the minister operates. Finally, a number of Gloucester fishermen have written a letter to the Gloucester Times complaining about its unfair treatment of the Gloucester Permit bank and its executive director, Vito Giacalone. They say they always knew the terms of the agreement meant Gloucester did not keep all the LNG offset money - but the Times made it appear as if this fact was somehow a sellout. Have a good weekend. John Sackton, Editor And Publisher , Lexington, Massachusetts Seafood.com News 1-781-861-1441 Email comments to jsackton@seafood.com Subscription info: Seafood.com is a subscription service, published by Seafood.com and Urner Barry. Urner Barry's COMTELL subscribers receive Seafood.com news as part of their subscription package. Other companies and individuals need to subscribe to read our stories. If you or your company has not signed up yet, please consider doing so. 2012 Subscription prices for Seafood.com News are $24 monthly for a single user, $41 for 2-5 users, and $59 for 6-20 users. For questions about subscriptions or passwords, please Urner Barry at 1-800-932-0617, or subscribe on-line with a credit card by clicking the subscribe button. Subscribe Here.  Printer-Friendly Page
|