Shrimpers see green in new eco-label
By Winston Ross
NEWPORT — The Oregon shrimp fleet hasn’t always been the most environmentally sensitive.
For decades, boats dragged giant nets across the ocean floor, scooping up their targeted product, plus all sorts of other inhabitants of the deep. Much of the so-called bycatch was thrown back overboard dead or injured.
In the 1990s, after federal regulators cracked down on the shrimp fishery, the fleet added grates to its equipment that allowed only shrimp and smaller fish into the net. That substantially reduced unintended catch and sped up the amount of time it took to clear a net, improving the fleet’s efficiency and the freshness of the bottom-dwelling crustaceans that were served up to customers.
The new method also made it possible for the fishery to recently earn a designation that shrimpers hope will help pull the fleet out of a yearslong slump: the Oregon shrimp fishery is now certified as “sustainable” by the Marine Stewardship Council, an international nonprofit with headquarters in London.
Worldwide, many industries are racing to have themselves certified as green, eco-friendly, sustainable or otherwise treading lightly on the planet. Businesses figure they can charge a premium to worried consumers who want to minimize damage to nature.
The certification means Oregon shrimp will soon be stamped with the council’s logo and, hopefully, fetch a higher price.
Already, said Brad Pettinger, administrator of the Oregon Trawl Association, he’s fielded calls from interested retailers in England, Germany and the Netherlands looking for council-certified product. Wal-Mart has pledged to stock only certified seafood in all of its stores by 2011, which puts Oregon shrimp — the only MSC-certified shrimp fishery in the world — in a nice position.
“It’s really bigger news than people understand,” Pettinger said. “But the word is getting out.”
The UK-based council, a non-profit agency funded with grants, donations and licensing fees for use of its logo, uses standards from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to determine which fisheries are sustainable, said Brad Ack, the council’s regional director for the Americas. The council contracts with several third-party groups to process a fishery’s application, said Ack.
The council examines several factors, he said: the stock’s sustainability and whether it’s oversfished; the impacts on other ecosystems, including bycatch and habitat impacts from fishing gear; and the management system in place to make sure that the fishery will remain sustainable over time. Once certified, the fisheries undergo an annual audit, and must apply for a new council certificate every five years.
The benefit to the 26 fisheries now certified by the council is market access, Ack said. Increasingly, retailers who want to ensure that their customers are buying sustainable fish, are requiring council certification to buy any product.
Ted Gibson, chairman of the Oregon Trawl commission, hopes that will increase demand for Oregon shrimp, allowing Oregon shrimpers to set themselves apart from the giant Canadian companies that own most of the worldwide market share now.
With its high volume, the Canadian shrimp fleet is able to undersell the Oregon shrimp fleet, Gibson said.
That has depressed prices that Oregon shrimp fishermen have received in recent years, said Pettinger. In 2001, the average price paid to fishermen for Oregon shrimp dropped to 27 cents per pound, due to a glut of imports from Canada. Oregon shrimp fishermen earned an average of 47 cents a pound last season, the highest since 1999. The Oregon fleet landed 20 million pounds of shrimp, for a total value of the fishery of $9.5 million. Oregon’s most lucrative fishery, Dungeness crab, is worth about $50 million a year.
“The shrimp fishery at times has been the biggest fishery in Oregon,” Pettinger said.
A weak dollar should ramp up demand for the product, Pettinger said, and might help offset a 20 percent tariff that Europe has imposed on shrimp imports since the 1980s.
“I’m hoping it leads to a higher price,” said Newport shrimper Jeff Boardman. “Our scores (on the council’s test) were higher than any other fishery in the world.”
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