Vietnam Lifts Costly Quarantine Procedures on Imported Seafood Bound for Processing and Re-Export  The Vietnamese government has reversed a policy that required immediate quarantine and inspection of imported seafood items before they could be cleared to the market. Vietnam's seafood exporters lobbied hard against the policy that was set up over the summer since it created a costly and time consuming process for importers to get their shipments into the country. The policy mostly hurt Vietnam's shrimp and seafood processors that were dependent on imported raw materials to process for reexport orders. Yesterday the ADF&G released their harvest forecast of 43 million pink salmon for Southeast Alaska in 2017. This year, results ranked 6th out of the 20 years of data, indicating a higher abundance of juvenile pink salmon. That result helps to correct what ADF&G called a “forecast error”, and in this case, added 5 million fish to the forecast writes Peggy Parker. “Perhaps the largest potential source of uncertainty regarding the 2017 pink salmon return is the anomalously warm sea surface temperatures that have persisted throughout the Gulf of Alaska since fall 2013,” said Andy Piston and Steve Heinl, co-authors of the forecast and management biologists from ADF&G’s Ketchikan office. In other news, the $20 million investment from China's e-commerce giant Alibaba into Gfresh's online seafood sales platform is expected to bode well for British Columbia's fresh Dungeness crab, oyster and other seafood exports. Gfresh claims it already owns 70 percent of the market for BC's Dungeness crabs in Shanghai. The portal said it has sold $268 million in seafood — from markets such as Canada and Australia — in the last two years. Gfresh now expects to double its market access in China with its investment funds. Meanwhile, Russia expects more pollock production and the return of pacific sardine processing to drive growth in its fishing industry over the next several years. Fishery officials expect the pollock industry to double its earnings under the production expansion. As for sardine, this will be the first time in 25 years that Russia will produce the fish since the stocks were depleted during the Soviet era. Russian estimates peg the current sardine stock at around 600,000 metric tons. Finally, a record two million chum salmon returned to the Fraser River. At the same time, the Johnstone Strait haul reached 1.3 million fish. This is some atypically good news for the Fraser River salmon industry that has been plagued by a record low abundance of sockeye salmon.