The crisis in Japan was on just about everyone’s mind at the International Boston Seafood Show on Sunday, including Ray Riutta, executive director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI).
“Our concern is with the people,” Riutta said from ASMI’s booth. “The market is secondary.”
Riutta said there are Japanese companies with subsidiaries in Alaska that still haven’t been able to account for all of their employees.
Riutta added that it’s still too early to assess the impact of the 11 March earthquake and tsunami on the U.S. seafood market, let alone the global seafood market. “It would be silly to try,” he said. “There are still so many unknowns.”
ASMI has set up what Riutta called an “incident command system” to centralize communication internally within Alaska. The purpose is to ensure the correct information is delivered to Alaska’s seafood community, from fishermen to processors to buyers.
Japan has long been the state’s largest seafood export market, followed by China, Korea, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada.
