Jason Holland

It’s often said that commercial fishing is the most dangerous profession in the world, but what rarely gets a mention is just how stressful being a fisherman is.

While the super-inflated price of fuel, amid the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East, is certain to impact the profitability of all fishing operations around the world, it’s the impending onset of new, tougher regulations – based upon the overhaul of the EU’s much-maligned Common

Sustainability means many different things to many different people. Even when narrowed to just the question of what is sustainable seafood, there are umpteen definitions in wide circulation.

The problem with this, apart from sustainability being a word that no one seems entirely comfortable using (it’s still all too often verbally delivered with flexing index and middle fingers denoting inverted commas), is it has become more and more

The Seafood Summit in Vancouver, British Columbia, concluded on Wednesday with a specially recorded video address from His Royal Highness Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, in which he heaped high praise on seafood leaders for their pursuit of greater industry sustainability and announced that he had tasked one of his charities to look at ways in which it could help drive the movement forward.

The heir to the English throne last year launched

Farmed seafood bearing the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) eco-label should be launched into consumer markets this year, but there’s a huge amount of ground that needs to be covered in order to achieve this goal, the organization announced on Wednesday.

Co-founded in 2009 by the World Wide Fund (WWF) and the Dutch Sustainable Trade Initiative, the non-profit ASC organization is now poised to launch into its implementation phase, which

China is widely considered the elephant in the room as far as the sustainable seafood movement is concerned. However, the country’s fast-growing wealth and demand for premium-grade fish is putting its own USD 16 billion (EUR 11.6 billion) seafood industry on a much more responsible footing, learned delegates at this week’s Seafood Summit in Vancouver, British Columbia.

As the world’s single largest seafood exporting nation for at least the

Marine experts issued a rallying call on the first day of the SeaWeb’s International Seafood Summit 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia, urging the global seafood industry and all other ocean stakeholders to avoid a defeatist attitude with ocean acidification and to instead pile pressure on scientists to provide solid data and advice on the potentially catastrophic problem, which could then be used to create concrete solutions.

Ocean

Despite the best intentions of regulations designed to prevent illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing, there’s a growing feeling that the practice won’t be completely wiped out until seafood consumers are outraged to the point of demanding wholesale change.

Few people would disagree with EU Fisheries Minister Maria Damanaki’s assessment that there are plenty of positives to be taken from the first year of the EU regulations

Generally speaking, the Mediterranean’s sea bass- and sea bream-farming industry was a lame duck throughout much of the so-called “noughties,” operating in a commercial environment dictated to by depressed demand and regular price slumps.

Many producers closed last decade, and some of the more pessimistic industry observers suggested that the industry would collapse, especially once the true magnitude of Greece’s economic frailty was made

International foodservice distribution company Bidvest has acquired 100 percent of the share capital of UK-based foodservice supplier Seafood Holdings Ltd.

While the cost of the purchase has not been disclosed, the figure is believed to be between GBP 45 million (EUR 52.9 million, USD 69.3 million) and GBP 50 million (EUR 58.8 million, USD 77 million).

Bidvest, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in South Africa, has annual global sales in

November has been a month of milestones for the Marine Stewardship Council. One week ago, the London-based NGO announced that peeled, frozen shrimp sold by UK retailer J. Sainsbury had become the 7,000th product to bear its eco-label; this was then followed a few days later with the certification of the 100th fishery (Ocean Trawler Barents Sea cod and haddock).

Certainly, over the 10 years that MSC has been in operation it’s made an important