The Nova Scotia Seafood Alliance is working to fill a shipping container of donated seafood to send as a gift for Ukraine.
The trade group is leading an effort to get local Canadian companies to donate sums of seafood for the initiative, which will give roughly 35,000 pounds of Nova Scotia seafood to Ukraine for the government to use as it sees fit.
Nova Scotia Seafood Alliance Board President Osborne Burke told SeafoodSource he came up with the idea after hearing presentation from Liliana Zhylina, the trade commissioner for the Embassy of Canada in Ukraine at Seafood Expo Global in Barcelona, Spain. Burke said Zhylina’s presentation came amid those of several other European trade commissioners, putting things into perspective.
“They all talked about consumers, consumption, the challenges their various countries are facing on inflation and interest rates,” Burke said of the other countries' commissioners. “That was their big worry, and here she was under attack from Russia.”
The challenges of high inflation, he said, seemed insignificant to having “a war in your backyard.”
“If they had to face what she had to face, and her family and countrymen, it’d be a different story,” Burke said.
At the alliance’s latest board meeting, he said he floated the idea of donating a container of seafood to the country to help with its food needs.
Burke said he has been corresponding with Zhylina since that time, and has only just begun to sort out the logistics of a donation.
“But there’s every intent to do it, and I think it’s a nice gesture to be able to,” he said.
Burke said he doesn’t need every member of the alliance to contribute – the Nova Scotia Seafood Alliance represents 150 companies in the province – but that he is looking for a few to add to the planned donations of the Victoria Co-operative Fisheries. Burke is the general manager of the co-op, a fisher-owned company located in Cape Breton.
“We will contribute one third of the container, if not a little bit more, of some type of seafood product,” he said. “We’ll work out the logistics, and she’ll [Zhylina] get involved with a company in Ukraine we can work with.”
Burke said he’ll make sure that some form of donation makes its way to Ukraine.
“Why not try and help out our neighbors? They’re not that far away, we’re in the global seafood business,” he said.
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