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‘Just Say Nyet’ Campaign Aims To Get Congress To Ban Seafood From Russia

‘Just Say Nyet’ Campaign Aims To Get Congress To Ban Seafood From Russia

By Marianne Levine, Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — U.S. economic sanctions against Russia over Ukraine may wind up helping the Alaskan fishing industry.

At least that’s the hope of those promoting “Just Say Nyet,” a petition intended to get Congress to ban Russian seafood imports.

Organizers cite Russia’s possible involvement in the downing of a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet over Ukraine on July 17, and Russian support for Syrian President Bashar Assad in his country’s civil war as reasons to boycott Russian seafood.

The Just Say Nyet website features a photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin holding a giant pike. Kremlin aides have said he caught the freshwater fish in a lake in Siberia, not the Gulf of Alaska.

The Obama administration and the European Union have added sanctions against Moscow for its interference in Ukraine, imposing four rounds of travel bans and asset freezes since March against individuals, banks, oil companies, arms suppliers, and other institutions. Fish have yet to make the list.

The U.S. imported $327 million worth of fish, crab, and other seafood from Russia in 2013, less than 2 percent of total U.S. fishery imports, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It just seemed so logical that we ought to do this ‘Nyet to Putin’ kind of thing and try to hit the (Russian) fishing industry not only to hurt them, but to also help our fisheries,” said George J. Hochbrueckner, a former Democratic member of Congress from New York, who is the campaign spokesman.

The website asks consumers to contact U.S. fish processing and frozen food companies to say they will purchase only U.S. fish.

At least one company on the list, SeaPak Shrimp and Seafood Co., says it’s a mistake. Dwight Gram, a spokesman for SeaPak and its parent company, Rich Products, a privately held, multinational food products corporation based in Buffalo, N.Y., said neither SeaPak nor Rich imported fish from Russia.

Gram said Rich’s corporate office had asked Hochbrueckner to remove its name from the website.

The campaign is the latest of several proposed anti-Russia boycotts that have sprung up since the crisis in Ukraine erupted in the spring. They are hampered by the relative paucity of U.S. trade with Russia.

Critics have urged consumers to boycott Lukoil, the Russian oil giant that operates more than 500 gas stations in the northeast United States. Protests were staged in the spring in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

Some critics also have urged viewers to boycott RT, a Moscow English-language channel that the State Department has called a propaganda outlet for the Russian government. Few Americans watch it anyway.

Photo: wobbitz via Flickr

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Changing Sea Chemistry Will Hit Alaska Communities Hard, Study Says

Changing Sea Chemistry Will Hit Alaska Communities Hard, Study Says

By Sandi Doughton, The Seattle Times

SEATTLE — Oyster growers in the Pacific Northwest have already been stung by changes in ocean chemistry linked to greenhouse-gas emissions.

Now, a new study led by Seattle researchers finds communities in Southwest and Southeast Alaska that rely on the sea for food and jobs are also likely to be hit hard over the coming decades.
The analysis, published this week in the journal Progress in Oceanography, is among the first to examine the potential social and economic impacts of ocean acidification — sometimes called global warming’s twin.

Just as carbon dioxide from power plants, factories, and cars diffuses into the atmosphere, the gas is also absorbed by the world’s oceans. As a result, scientists say the average pH of seawater has become slightly lower, or more acidic, since the start of the industrial era.

That effect is expected to intensify in the future — and some places are more vulnerable than others.

The Alaskan waters that yield much of the U.S. commercial-seafood catch are near the top of that list, said lead author Jeremy Mathis, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab in Seattle.

Carbon dioxide dissolves more readily in cold water, and the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska are already naturally CO2-rich.

“It doesn’t have that far to go before it reaches this critical threshold where the water can become corrosive,” Mathis said.

That’s what scientists say occurred along the Washington and Oregon coasts beginning in the mid-2000s. Naturally low pH levels dropped even further, killing oyster larvae in hatcheries that drew water from the Pacific.

The industry solved the problem by closing intake valves when pH is low, but some companies also shifted operations to Hawaii.

Many Alaskan communities, where people live off the seafood they catch, don’t enjoy that flexibility, Mathis said. If crab or salmon populations crash, people will see their main source of protein, and economic well being, diminish.

In identifying the most vulnerable communities, the researchers examined incomes, educational levels, educational opportunities, and job diversity.

They also looked at which seafood species dominate local economies and diets, and how those species are likely to be affected by changing ocean chemistry.

Red king crab, for example, appear to be very sensitive to small changes in acidity that can make it harder to build shells. In laboratory tests, larvae died at a high rate when exposed to pH levels that now occur some times of the year in the Bering Sea.

By 2100, those conditions are expected to be common. “The waters of the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean will be corrosive to shellfish throughout the year,” Mathis said.

Salmon are less sensitive to pH, but are still at risk because of possible effects on their food. Tiny creatures called pteropods, which are eaten by a wide range of fish, are already being harmed by water corrosive to their shells along the West Coast and other places.

Many of these problems were detailed last year in a series of stories by The Seattle Times.

Drawing on existing studies of the impacts of changing pH on marine creatures, the researchers used computer models to estimate potential impacts on harvests by the year 2100. In some places, like Dillingham on Bristol Bay, they found some catches could drop by as much as 70 percent.

But Tuesday’s study contains few numbers, and no estimates of potential economic impacts. That’s because there are so many unknowns, said co-author Steve Colt, professor of economics at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

“We just don’t know enough about all the links in the chain, starting with the ocean chemistry and going through the various levels of the food chain and even getting from potential changes in fish abundance and distribution to the economic impact to communities,” he said.

Instead, the researchers calculated a relative risk index. Communities most at risk are colored red on a map — and are concentrated in the southeast and southwest portions of the state.

For example, Petersburg, an island community in Southeast Alaska where many Washington-based fishing boats operate, ranks high in the red category because it is so dependent on seafood and has few other job opportunities.

Even without hard figures, the study is one of the first attempts to bridge the gap between scientific research on ocean acidification and its potential impacts to people, said Scott Doney, chairman of the Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

“This brings it home to the level of talking to community leaders, political leaders and business leaders in Alaska to say here are the areas we think are the most vulnerable,” said Doney, who was not involved in the project.

Photo: Svadilfari via Flickr

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Advocacy Group Calls For Clearer Seafood Consumption Guidelines

Advocacy Group Calls For Clearer Seafood Consumption Guidelines

LOS ANGELES — The advice to eat more seafood for a healthy heart might be familiar, but when consumers get to the fish counter, there are confusing questions galore: Which types have the most of those good fatty acids? Which are high in mercury? Which are better for the environment?

The Environmental Working Group, in a report out this week, says the federal government is not doing a good enough job at answering those questions for consumers, especially when it comes to advice covering children and pregnant women.

“You can’t just tell people to double or triple their consumption” without clear information about what to eat, Sonya Lunder, one of the authors of the report, said by phone Tuesday.

People who follow the federal government’s advice could consume too much mercury or too few omega-3 fatty acids, the fats that are good for the heart, the report concludes.

The federal dietary guidelines for Americans, which offer consumption advice and affect programs such as school lunches, were last issued in January 2011 and called for increased consumption of seafood. Other federal agencies also have guidance about seafood.

Federal agencies are considering 2015 guidelines, and the Environmental Protection Agency is modernizing its seafood guidelines.
The Environmental Working Group has several recommendations, including:

It would like to see “portion-based guidelines for people who face various levels of risk, such as pregnant women, children and adults with cardiac disease.” And it would like to see fish choices highlighted that are high in omega-3 fatty acids, low in mercury and sustainably produced, as well as “moderate mercury species” that might pose problems for some people.

The EPA should lower its “safe” mercury level, the report said. That recommendation is based on evidence that “suggests that mercury does more potent damage to the developing brain than previously thought.”

Lunder said the federal government should be more explicit about what to eat and not.

Dietary guidelines suggest 8 or more ounces a week of a variety of species of seafood, less for young children. Average consumption is about 3.5 ounces a week.

Federal officials tell pregnant women to eat a variety of seafood, and to avoid tilefish, shark, swordfish and king mackerel, and to limit albacore tuna to 6 ounces per week because of the mercury content of those fish.

But the Environmental Working Group report said pregnant women who complied with the dietary guidelines to double seafood consumption “could run the risk of consuming harmful amounts of mercury.”

A second issue is getting more omega-3 fatty acids into people’s diets. “Most of the commonly eaten species such as shrimp and catfish are very low in beneficial omega-3 fats,” the report said. That doesn’t mean those fish are bad to eat, Lunder said. “You should eat these fish. You can eat these fish, but don’t count on these for your fish fats.”

Eight of the 10 species that are 90 percent of the U.S. seafood market — including shrimp, catfish, clams and tilapia — have very little of the two omega-3 fatty acids found in some other seafood. To get the recommended 1,750 milligrams of omega-3s weekly, a person would have to eat 20 to 100 servings of those eight species, according to the Environmental Working Group’s calculations.

“Among popular seafood species, salmon stands out as an excellent choice,” the report said, adding that 4 to 8 ounces a week can provide the recommended fatty acids. Some kinds of farmed salmon pose environmental problems, and wild is preferable, the report said. Other good choices include anchovies, sardines, farmed trout and mussels.

And tuna. Americans eat more than 400 million pounds of canned tuna a year — second only to shrimp. It’s easily available and affordable. But tunas differ in their amounts of mercury (less in light or skipjack) and their healthful fats (more in albacore). Federal advisories have told pregnant women and children to limit consumption, but the report said those limits needed to be lower.

Depending on your weight, age and pregnancy status, eating tuna one or two or three times a month for many people is fine, Lunder said.
A joint project of several universities called Seafood Health Facts has an online consumption guide (seafoodhealthfacts.org) that takes into account various habits and conditions.

General advice can be difficult, said Christina DeWitt, director of the experiment station in Astoria, Ore., for the Oregon State University department of food science and technology — one of the schools involved in the Seafood Health Facts project.

“The guidelines depend on the amount people are eating. For the majority of Americans, most people are not eating two to three seafood meals per week. So when you start warning people about eating certain types of fish, they go to the default and avoid all fish,” she said.
Emphasizing variety also helps to mitigate any problems, she said.

The working group report notes that the “ultimate solution” is for the world to reduce mercury pollution. Lunder said that any effects of the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan were not part of the working group’s analysis.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons