Enjoy Seafood Guilt Free.

Overfishing is severely depleting wild ocean fish stocks and threatening the $158 billion commercial fishing industry. The number of fish caught annually is declining, with a recent study projecting that the world's commercially harvested fish populations could collapse by 2048. -CNN Money.com

If you feel guilty every time you order some seafood, it’s totally understandable. Based upon what you read and hear in the media about overfishing, it seems like we’re about to be fighting over the last fish in the sea. Did you know there’s even a web site dedicated to discussing the sad state of the world’s fisheries? “Overfishing – A Global Disaster,” is the lead banner on the site www.overfishing.org.

Grand generalizations don’t even begin to tell the whole story.

But commercial fishing is a big, global business and as such, grand generalizations don’t even begin to tell the whole story. While it’s true that global seafood catches may be declining slightly, there are many fisheries, some quite large, that are very well managed and sustainable. Let’s look close to home. The biggest food fishery in the world is the one for Alaska pollock, which is fished on both sides of the North Pacific (when you order a fish sandwich from a fast food restaurant, that’s Alaska pollock between the breading). The fishery on the U.S. side of the Bering Sea, typically yields about 2.5 billion pounds of Alaska pollock a year in a fishery that has been certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. But even in a sustainable fishery, populations and catches, can fluctuate wildly.

Fisheries managers are also getting smarter, which is good news for seafood lovers.

In the case of Alaska pollock, the U.S. catch has declined about 660 million pounds since just last year – and that’s a whole lot of fish sandwiches. Scientists attribute the decline to poor survival of young pollock due to unfavorable ocean conditions over the past five years. After 2010 they expect stocks to rebound. On the other side of the Bering Sea, though, Russian pollock quotas are up almost 1 million metric tons to about 6 billion pounds.

Don’t feel too badly for U.S. pollock fishermen, though. There are plenty of other fish in the Bering Sea to catch. Fisheries managers place an “ecosystem” cap in the Bering Sea of about 4.5 billion pounds. That means there are a number of unexploited fish stocks that pollock fishermen can go after. There are more than 1 million pounds of flounder, for example, that could be harvested, say biologists.

There are more fisheries all the time that are being certified as sustainable by the MSC. Currently, Alaska pollock, Alaska salmon, Pacific halibut and sablefish (black cod), Bering Sea cod, West Coast albacore and Oregon shrimp are all MSC certified.

Fisheries managers are also getting smarter, which is good news for seafood lovers. Even off the Northeast coast of the U.S., where a number of once important fisheries like cod remain severely depressed, there is some good news. Sea scallop catches, for example, have been at or near record highs for more than five years. The reason? Managers figured out that if they close areas where fishermen can fish from year to year, they can allow scallop stocks in those closed areas to fully recover before they are fished again. As a result, fishermen are always fishing in areas that are loaded with scallops.

There are more fisheries all the time that are being certified as sustainable by the MSC. Currently, Alaska pollock, Alaska salmon, Pacific halibut and sablefish (black cod), Bering Sea cod, West Coast albacore and Oregon shrimp are all MSC certified.

So while it’s true that there are a lot of fisheries around the world that are no doubt overfished, it’s worth keeping in mind that there are also a lot of fisheries that produce fish you can enjoy guilt free. And rest assured that at SIMPLY SEAFOOD^® we are committed to sourcing our seafood from sustainable sources.

All the Best,

Peter Redmayne
President
Simply Seafood^®