Top Story: Remarkably Stable Groundfish Outlook from Groundfish Forum in Rome 

News Summary:  At the annual groundfish forum, held this year in Rome, the global estimates of production for 2015 are remarkably stable. Overall there will be a slight decrease in cod stocks of less than 1%, and a correspondingly small increase in pollock harvests. For the total whitefish sector, production will reach 11.4 million metric tons, of which 62% is wild caught, and 38% is farmed. The forum also discussed the impact of Russian seafood trade sanctions. 

The Pacific Whiting fishery has been suddenly closed, with more than 21,000 tons of whiting still uncaught. The reason was a sudden catch of dark blotch rockfish by the mothership fleet, which put the fishery over their bycatch limit. All whiting sectors - shoreside, mothership, and catcher-processor, have also reached their chinook by-catch limit. A biological consultation is taking place today in Seattle, and NMFS will determine if it can shift bycatch allocation from another fishery. 

The rejections of Indian shrimp for antibiotic residue in the EU recently are evidence of a continuing problem, writes India’s Food and Beverage News. A recent European monitoring report said that in pre-tests prior to export the failure rate is 10%, which is far too high, and suggests farmers are fearful of a disease problem. Ironically, antibiotics are thought to make EMS worse, as they disrupt the bacteria that potentially outcompete vibrio. 

Vietnam has proposed some major revisions for Pangasius exports with a new law, which will come into force on Jan. 1, 2015. One of the requirements is that moisture content not exceed 83%, well below most specs for US importers. If enforced it could lead to substantially higher costs for Vietnamese packers, who would pass that on to their customers. 

We also take a deep dive into the reasons why Vietnam shrimp exporters got slammed with higher duties than India or Thailand. Since the Dept. of Commerce lost the battle over “zeroing”, they have been trying to find other ways of not acknowledging the average sales price of an exporter, but only counting specific instances when a sale is below the US calculated target price. With Vietnam, they applied ‘differential pricing’ in a way that lets them recreate the impacts of zeroing. This method also will likely be challenged at the WTO, but it will take time. 

Finally, get prepared to hear more about IUU king crab. The Bering Sea Crabbers are gearing up for a major push to highlight IUU crab, and the WWF released a report today on the issue. WWF acknowledges that the incidence of IUU crab has fallen substantially, but only has well known historical cases that tie this crab to the US. In the market, the new locus of IUU crab is China, where there are now live crab offloads from Russia that are coming into the Chinese market. Unless I am proven wrong, my opinion is that with the seizure of King crab from Harbor Seafood in 2012, and the recent publicity, US importers have been trying extremely hard to avoid any counterfeit crab, and so it is hard to see this as a major problem today in the US, although historically it was a huge problem. We will cover the WWF report in more detail tomorrow.

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.

2014 Subscription prices for Seafood.com News are $26 monthly for a single user, $43 for 2-5 users, and $62 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.