Performance Food Group Buys Assets to Orlando-Based Distributor Bar Harbor Seafood  Performance Food Group (PGF) has purchased the assets to major Florida-based seafood distributor Bar Harbor Seafood. According to the deal, Bar Harbor’s current president and founder Jeff Hazell will retain his title. The company will also keep its name and will be roped into PFG’s Specialty Company cluster. Bar Harbor is a $73 million seafood distributor with headquarters in Orlando. The company operates out of a 41,000 square foot facility and employs 150. “Bar Seafood is a highly regarded organization dedicated to delivering a full range of live, fresh and frozen seafood items with a reputation for high-quality products and great service,” said Jim Hope, PFG’s Executive Vice President of Operations. “This acquisition will enable Performance Foodservice to expand its seafood offerings and strengthen its focus on independent street business and especially customers in the Florida market.” A new study says marine “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico are responsible for causing price spikes for large-sized, wild caught Gulf brown shrimp. According to Martin D. Smith, a professor at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, this study provides the first, long-sought evidence linking Gulf hypoxia to economic impacts. “Many studies have documented the ecological impacts of hypoxia, but establishing a clear causal link to economic losses in affected fisheries has been elusive. Our study does this by showing how seasonal hypoxia off the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts drives monthly fluctuations in market prices in the Gulf brown shrimp fishery,” Smith said. In other news, the longstanding tension between Canada and the US regarding best ways to manage a shared resource was brought into sharper relief this year at the annual meeting of the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) in Victoria, B.C, writes Peggy Parker. In the end, catch limits were agreed to, Canada again received 58 percent more than the Blueline and 41 percent higher than the Spawning Potential Ratio since the stock assessment numbers are good in Canada. But it’s not the assessment in area 2B that the IPHC’s science team and the U.S. Commissioners worry about. It’s what the increased intensity of fishing in 2B could be doing to the rest of the coastwide stock. Meanwhile, the Department of Commerce said that exported shrimp would continue to be dumped on the US market if it lifted duty rates on Vietnamese shippers. That was Commerce’s conclusion in its second five-year sunset review of the antidumping duty order on certain frozen shrimp exports from Vietnamese suppliers. “As a result of our analysis, the Department finds that revocation of the AD order would be likely to lead to continuation or recurrence of dumping,” Commerce said in the January 30 edition of the Federal Register. Finally, we run a letter to the editor from Shannon Carrol, Fisheries Policy Director for the Alaska Marine Conservation Council that is critical of John Sackton's column about the NPFMC's decision to table without further action all options for the Gulf of Alaska groundfish rationalization during their December meeting. "[John Sackton] compares the Gulf of Alaska groundfish fishery to the groundfish fishery in New England, and claims that the Council decision will take the Gulf down the same downward path followed by New England. Yet, the case of the New England groundfish fishery is entirely inapposite to that of the Gulf of Alaska," Carrol says in the letter.