http://www.nofishing.net/
http://www.fishinghurts.com
Showing posts with label issue: fishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label issue: fishing. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Could we be the generation that runs out of fish? The process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction
Could we be the generation that runs out of fish?
The process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction
Johann Hari
j.hari@independent.co.uk
Friday, 5 June 2009
In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news – where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek – the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost. An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest – unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.
The story begins in the sleepy Canadian resort of Newfoundland. It was the global capital of cod, a fishing town where the scaly creatures of the sea were so abundant they could be caught with your hands. But in the 1980s, something strange happened. The catches started to wane. The fish grew smaller. And then, in 1991, they disappeared.
It turned out the cod had been hoovered out of the sea at such a rapid rate that they couldn't reproduce themselves. But the postscript is spookier still. The Canadian government banned any attempts at fishing there, on the assumption that the few remaining fish would slowly repopulate the waters. But 15 years on, they haven't. The population was so destroyed that it could never recover.
Please read the full article: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-could-we-be-the-generation-that-runs-out-of-fish-1697247.html
The process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction
Johann Hari
j.hari@independent.co.uk
Friday, 5 June 2009
In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news – where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek – the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost. An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest – unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.
The story begins in the sleepy Canadian resort of Newfoundland. It was the global capital of cod, a fishing town where the scaly creatures of the sea were so abundant they could be caught with your hands. But in the 1980s, something strange happened. The catches started to wane. The fish grew smaller. And then, in 1991, they disappeared.
It turned out the cod had been hoovered out of the sea at such a rapid rate that they couldn't reproduce themselves. But the postscript is spookier still. The Canadian government banned any attempts at fishing there, on the assumption that the few remaining fish would slowly repopulate the waters. But 15 years on, they haven't. The population was so destroyed that it could never recover.
Please read the full article: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-could-we-be-the-generation-that-runs-out-of-fish-1697247.html
‘The End of the Line’ is a compelling indictment of industrial fishing
‘The End of the Line’ is a compelling indictment of industrial fishing
by Sara Barz
8 Jun 2009
If scientists are correct, 2048 will be a terrible year for sushi restaurants. And diners selling tuna melts, too.
End of the Line movieThe End of the Line isn’t going to make you feel so good about hitting the neighborhood sushi bar.In fact, if I had any money to invest in a seafood venture, Carl Safina’s suggestion to “consider the jellyfishburger” may be the best advice. By mid-century, jellyfish may be the only “fish” left to catch.
Though it lacks the starpower of a certain former vice president, The End of the Line does for the fish what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for the climate: scare the pants off the viewer. The documentary deftly makes the case that industrial exploitation of the world’s fish stocks will result in the end of seafood by 2048, if not sooner, and that some species may already be in collapse.
Accompanied by many graphs, interviews with prominent marine scientists, and scenes of gruesome fishing practices, Charles Clover, a British journalist and narrator of this film, says that he first became aware of the dangers of overfishing when he mistakenly stepped into a meeting at The Hague in the early 1990s. “They said that trawling is like plowing a field seven times a year,” he said. “As a farmer’s son, I know that you can’t possibly plow a field that often and expect it to produce.”
To read the full article: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-06-08-end-of-the-line-movie-fishing/
by Sara Barz
8 Jun 2009
If scientists are correct, 2048 will be a terrible year for sushi restaurants. And diners selling tuna melts, too.
End of the Line movieThe End of the Line isn’t going to make you feel so good about hitting the neighborhood sushi bar.In fact, if I had any money to invest in a seafood venture, Carl Safina’s suggestion to “consider the jellyfishburger” may be the best advice. By mid-century, jellyfish may be the only “fish” left to catch.
Though it lacks the starpower of a certain former vice president, The End of the Line does for the fish what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for the climate: scare the pants off the viewer. The documentary deftly makes the case that industrial exploitation of the world’s fish stocks will result in the end of seafood by 2048, if not sooner, and that some species may already be in collapse.
Accompanied by many graphs, interviews with prominent marine scientists, and scenes of gruesome fishing practices, Charles Clover, a British journalist and narrator of this film, says that he first became aware of the dangers of overfishing when he mistakenly stepped into a meeting at The Hague in the early 1990s. “They said that trawling is like plowing a field seven times a year,” he said. “As a farmer’s son, I know that you can’t possibly plow a field that often and expect it to produce.”
To read the full article: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-06-08-end-of-the-line-movie-fishing/
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Pharmaceuticals found in fish across U.S.
Pharmaceuticals found in fish across U.S.
Residue of allergy, cholesterol, other meds were in fish near 5 major cities
The Associated Press
Wed., March. 25, 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29877241/from/ET/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29877241/from/ET/print/1/displaymode/1098/
Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants serving five major U.S. cities had residues of pharmaceuticals in them, including medicines used to treat high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression, researchers reported Wednesday.
Findings from this first nationwide study of human drugs in fish tissue have prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to significantly expand similar ongoing research to more than 150 different locations.
"The average person hopefully will see this type of a study and see the importance of us thinking about water that we use every day, where does it come from, where does it go to? We need to understand this is a limited resource and we need to learn a lot more about our impacts on it," said study co-author Bryan Brooks, a Baylor University researcher and professor who has published more than a dozen studies related to pharmaceuticals in the environment.
A person would have to eat hundreds of thousands of fish dinners to get even a single therapeutic dose, Brooks said. But researchers including Brooks have found that even extremely diluted concentrations of pharmaceutical residues can harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species because of their constant exposure to contaminated water.
Brooks and his colleague Kevin Chambliss tested fish caught in rivers where wastewater treatment plants release treated sewage in Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Orlando, Fla. For comparison, they also tested fish from New Mexico's pristine Gila River Wilderness Area, an area isolated from human sources of pollution.
Earlier research has confirmed that fish absorb medicines because the rivers they live in are contaminated with traces of drugs that are not removed in sewage treatment plants. Much of the contamination comes from the unmetabolized residues of pharmaceuticals that people have taken and excreted; unused medications dumped down the drain also contribute to the problem.
The researchers, whose work was funded by a $150,000 EPA grant, tested fish for 24 different pharmaceuticals, as well as 12 chemicals found in personal care products.
Traces of meds found at all sites tested
They found trace concentrations of seven drugs and two soap scent chemicals in fish at all five of the urban river sites. The amounts varied, but some of the fish had combinations of many of the compounds in their livers.
The researchers didn't detect anything in the reference fish caught in rural New Mexico.
In an ongoing investigation, The Associated Press has reported trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals have been detected in drinking water provided to at least 46 million Americans.
The EPA has called for additional studies about the impact on humans of long-term consumption of minute amounts of medicines in their drinking water, especially in unknown combinations. Limited laboratory studies have shown that human cells failed to grow or took unusual shapes when exposed to combinations of some pharmaceuticals found in drinking water.
"This pilot study is one important way that EPA is increasing its scientific knowledge about the occurrence of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in the environment," said EPA spokeswoman Suzanne Rudzinski. She said the completed and expanded EPA sampling for pharmaceuticals and other compounds in fish and surface water is part of the agency's National Rivers and Stream Assessment.
Residue of allergy, cholesterol, other meds were in fish near 5 major cities
The Associated Press
Wed., March. 25, 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29877241/from/ET/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29877241/from/ET/print/1/displaymode/1098/
Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants serving five major U.S. cities had residues of pharmaceuticals in them, including medicines used to treat high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression, researchers reported Wednesday.
Findings from this first nationwide study of human drugs in fish tissue have prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to significantly expand similar ongoing research to more than 150 different locations.
"The average person hopefully will see this type of a study and see the importance of us thinking about water that we use every day, where does it come from, where does it go to? We need to understand this is a limited resource and we need to learn a lot more about our impacts on it," said study co-author Bryan Brooks, a Baylor University researcher and professor who has published more than a dozen studies related to pharmaceuticals in the environment.
A person would have to eat hundreds of thousands of fish dinners to get even a single therapeutic dose, Brooks said. But researchers including Brooks have found that even extremely diluted concentrations of pharmaceutical residues can harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species because of their constant exposure to contaminated water.
Brooks and his colleague Kevin Chambliss tested fish caught in rivers where wastewater treatment plants release treated sewage in Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Orlando, Fla. For comparison, they also tested fish from New Mexico's pristine Gila River Wilderness Area, an area isolated from human sources of pollution.
Earlier research has confirmed that fish absorb medicines because the rivers they live in are contaminated with traces of drugs that are not removed in sewage treatment plants. Much of the contamination comes from the unmetabolized residues of pharmaceuticals that people have taken and excreted; unused medications dumped down the drain also contribute to the problem.
The researchers, whose work was funded by a $150,000 EPA grant, tested fish for 24 different pharmaceuticals, as well as 12 chemicals found in personal care products.
Traces of meds found at all sites tested
They found trace concentrations of seven drugs and two soap scent chemicals in fish at all five of the urban river sites. The amounts varied, but some of the fish had combinations of many of the compounds in their livers.
The researchers didn't detect anything in the reference fish caught in rural New Mexico.
In an ongoing investigation, The Associated Press has reported trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals have been detected in drinking water provided to at least 46 million Americans.
The EPA has called for additional studies about the impact on humans of long-term consumption of minute amounts of medicines in their drinking water, especially in unknown combinations. Limited laboratory studies have shown that human cells failed to grow or took unusual shapes when exposed to combinations of some pharmaceuticals found in drinking water.
"This pilot study is one important way that EPA is increasing its scientific knowledge about the occurrence of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in the environment," said EPA spokeswoman Suzanne Rudzinski. She said the completed and expanded EPA sampling for pharmaceuticals and other compounds in fish and surface water is part of the agency's National Rivers and Stream Assessment.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
The Death of Fish Sticks: the Pangasius
THE DEATH OF FISH STICKS
Will Success Kill the Pangasius?
By Barbara Hardinghaus
03/18/2009
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-613246,00.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,613246,00.html#ref=nlint
The Pangasius, or striped catfish, began taking the European fish market by storm a few years ago. It satisfied a voracious appetite for inexpensive white fish. But its success may become its downfall.
Manuela Wendland looks through her round glasses at the many different kinds of fish in the fresh food counter. The saleswoman sees whole fish, half fish and fish fillets, all of them arranged on ice and surrounded by lettuce leaves.
Wendland wears a wide, blue apron and a hood over her ash-blond hair. These days, she says, she is seeing more and more Pangasius, a fresh-water species also known as the striped catfish.
It arrives frozen, Wendland says, and has practically no bones; it's mild-tasting and a good fish for kids. She picks up a piece and places it on a scale in a Hamburg supermarket. It weighs 198 grams (7 ounces) and costs €1.96 ($2.50).
The Pangasius made its first appearance in the fresh food counter three years ago. It was a new fish, a crisis fish that had been slated to fill the gap created by overfishing. Every year, the average German eats 16 kilograms (35 pounds) of fish, or about 50 percent more than in 1970. Varieties like cod, ocean perch and spiny dogfish are becoming scarce.
Nowadays, the customers standing in front of Wendland's counter know not to buy cod, wild salmon, ocean perch, tuna or North Sea plaice. According to a recent study by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), 77 percent of edible fish populations have been fished to the limit or beyond. Even pollack, an inexpensive, white fish commonly used in fish sticks, is become harder to find.
The People's Fish
But customers want inexpensive white fish with low fat content, and the Pangasius has all the beneficial characteristics a fish variety needs for the wealthy world to buy it. It is the new people's fish -- born in Vietnam and bred to suit the tastes of people around the world. It could become the fish of the future -- if it weren't for the fact that mankind is producing the Pangasius to death.
The white and healthy filets of Pangasius in Manuela Wendland's counter are more than just fish filets. They represent a small slice of the global economy. Wendland wraps the Pangasius filet in paper, puts it in a bag, staples the price tag to the bag and says: "This fish swims in the Mekong." In fact, three million tons of Pangasius swim in the Mekong, almost 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) away from Wendland's fish stand, where they live in ponds the size of football fields or in cages in the water beneath houses.
This year, Vietnam will export 1.5 million tons of Pangasius filets to the rest of the world, including 143,000 tons to Germany alone. It arrives by ship in the northern ports of Bremerhaven or Hamburg, where it is loaded onto trucks bound for wholesale markets, from which it eventually reaches places like Wendland's or the frozen food sections of many other German supermarket chains as both filets and fish sticks.
Relative to 2006, 22 percent more Pangasius was shipped to Germany in 2007. And if importers have their way, the volume will continue to grow. But, if what the fishermen farming the fish halfway around the world say is true, there might not be as much Pangasius next year.
The Middle Man
One of the importers with a sense of what is happening to the Pangasius is Ulf Blaes. He is standing in a large building on the Mekong River with 1,500 women wearing numbers, white aprons, hoods and masks over their mouths. They look like doctors dissecting fish on long operating tables. "As a wholesaler," says Blaes, "you have to have Pangasius in your product line."
Blaes, a 49-year-old German businessman, runs the Food Company. He works as a middleman in the global food market whose job entails traveling around the world to transform the wishes of customers into demand and then convert the demand into supply. He buys fish from around the globe, including plaice from the world's oceans, zander from Kazakhstan, tuna, barramundi, swordfish and Pangasius from Vietnam.
Blaes mixes himself among the women to get a closer look at their work. Like them, he is wearing an apron, a hood and rubber boots. He travels to Vietnam six times a year to inspect the fish he is buying and the way they are farmed. Each trip involves flying from Germany to Ho Chi Minh City, driving six hours south in his dark Mercedes through small villages and on narrow roads, then taking a ferry across the enormous Mekong River to a fish farm owned by the Ntaco Corporation.
The fishermen arrive in their small boats to meet with Blaes behind the factory. They bring him fish in large tubs with water splashing from the top. The Pangasius industry is now responsible for the livelihoods of 5 million people. Workers in 34 plants can turn the fish into packaged fillets in two hours. The packages are then loaded into containers and shipped to 107 countries.
Blaes is the tallest person in the building and his head sticks out high above those of the Vietnamese workers. He wears canvas tennis shoes. Beneath his work coat, you can see his jeans, his untucked shirt and his Blackberry in his pocket. He uses the device often, reading and typing messages or making calls. His Blackberry connects him from here -- Long Xuyen, a city in the southern Vietnamese province of An Giang -- to the rest of the world. He also uses it to set prices and help him broker trades between the Mekong and the global community of consumers.
An example of the types of messages Blaes types into his Blackberry is: "Color: premium white or light pink. 120 to 230 grams. Five to no more than 10 percent protective glaze." The world wants a fish that is as standardized as a meat patty in a fast food restaurant. This is Blaes's goal -- and, on some days, his problem.
A fish is not an uncomplicated creature. It lives in a body of water that sometimes receives a lot of rain, and sometimes almost no rain at all. Sometimes there is a lot of oxygen in the water, and sometimes not much. Sometimes the fish does well, and sometimes it doesn't.
Global appetite and declining fish populations have made Pangasius a farmed species. But, for centuries, it remained a wild fish that traveled upstream to search for food along the riverbed.
As the fish grew and became more powerful, it reached lengths of up to 1.5 meters (five feet) and weights of up to 45 kilograms (100 pounds). When it was 3 or 4-years-old, it would leave the river's main tributary. The females would deposit their egg sacks and the males their sperm on tree roots in remote, flooded fields. Then, the fish would return to the Mekong and drift back downriver from Cambodia to Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Each year, 20-30 million fish would migrate into the delta region, where they were greeted by fishermen standing ready on the banks to catch the fish with fishing rods, nets and baskets.
French biologists were first to think about bringing the Pangasius onto the world market. They wanted to find out whether the fish could be cultivated, which entailed raising, feeding and breeding it. They wanted to intervene in the slow-moving course of nature.
The biologists built wooden cages, dug deep ponds and developed two species of the fish exclusively for farming purposes. The first was the Basa.
But the scientists soon realized that the Basa grew too slowly. It took an entire year before it weighed the two kilograms (4.4 pounds) it needed to go on the market, and it was also too fatty.
The Crisis of Falling Fish Prices
The second species they developed was the Tra, which spent most of its time swimming along the bottom of the river. But the Tra was a fast grower and only needed six months to reach the right weight. What's more, it also had little fat, was not susceptible to very many diseases, had white meat and was robust. By feeding the fish a mixture of rice bran and insects, the scientists coaxed it to the surface. This was the beginning of modern aquaculture in Vietnam and a new age, one in which an edible fish, the Pangasius, was added to the country's existing exports of coffee, cacao, pepper and crude oil.
Most of the fish went to the United States, that is, until American corn farmers -- who had themselves started farming Pangasius in flooded fields -- began protesting that Vietnamese producers were dumping their fish onto the market. Then, five years ago, the Pangasius-farming industry in the US successfully lobbied for legislation that slapped a 650 percent duty on Pangasius from Vietnam.
This made the American corn farmers happy, but now the Vietnamese fishermen needed a new market for their fish. They eventually found it halfway around the world and began exporting most of their fish to Russia, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. In 2001, Vietnam exported 300,000 tons of fillets. Seven years later, that number had jumped to 2.1 million tons.
'Constantly Going Uphill'
The Pangasius transformed the Mekong Delta into a proud region -- and made many fishermen rich. It became a source of affluence and attracted farmers, craftsmen and laborers to the region, including Ky Anh, a businessman. "In the past," he says, "things were constantly going uphill with the fish."
While men work nearby, sawing wood on a Sunday morning, Anh sits at a table with a calculator. A sign on the side of the driveway, which leads down to the bank of the Mekong, reads: "Sawmill, Buying and Selling, Round Logs as Construction Material."
Anh pushes up his visor and sets out a tray of red lemonade and ice. His wife is sitting on a bench, her lips painted a bright red. They own a big car and a big house. Anh can't say whether the wood or the fish has been more profitable. "At first," he says, "I just provided the fishermen with wood for cages. Then I started farming myself."
Houses on stilts stand above the water at the point where the edge of the sawmill reaches the riverbank. Beneath these houses are cages full of fish, which grow so quickly that they have to be removed from the enclosures after only eight weeks. At this point, they are six months old and weigh about one kilogram (2.2 pounds), which makes their filets the perfect size: between 120 and 230 grams (four-to-eight ounces).
If the fish are not removed from the cages at this point, they will continue to grow until they reach a size at which no one wants them anymore -- not the local factory and certainly not brokers like Blaes.
'The Crisis'
"We are hoping for a good price," says Ky Anh.
The price early last year was 12,000 dong (€0.50; $0.65) per kilogram. By June, the price had gone up to 14,000 dong, but it was still too low. And, in November, it fell to 13,000 dong. The only problem, Anh says, is that farming Pangasius costs him 15,000 dong a kilogram.
In the past, he says, he could sometimes get 17,000 dong or even 18,000 Dong a kilogram. That was when the fish was still a success story, "before the crisis," as Anh says.
If you ask Anh where the crisis comes from, he doesn't know -- at least not exactly. He shrugs his shoulders and speculates that the problem might have something to do with inflation or the financial crisis. But one thing he is sure of is that part of the problem can be attributed to the cost of feed.
In the past, when the fishermen sold their catch at the local market in Chau Doc, they knew what drove prices up and down. But now that they produce for the world market, things have become too complex. For instance, the exchange rate is unsteady, and the dong has lost value against the dollar.
In the evening, when darkness descends over the Mekong, Anh returns to his big house and sits down in front his computer to look up prices online. The price of soybeans, the main type of feed for the fish, is up. The beans -- which are produced in the United States, Brazil, Argentina and China -- are a rich source of protein. But that's not a problem exclusive to the Pangasius farmed in Vietnam -- it also applies to other animals around the world, including the cattle used to produce the meat that goes into hamburgers sold at fast food restaurants. Likewise, the fact that soybeans are also used to make biodiesel is also driving prices up.
Each fish has to be fed for four months, and feed makes up 3,000 dong of the total per-kilogram cost. When the fish are six-months-old, the farmers are suddenly faced with the need to get rid of them as quickly as possible -- and at any price.
The Farmers Respond
On Sundays, while Anh goes to work early, the other fish farmers attend a 5 a.m. mass at Pastor Khoa's church, a white building near the river. The men wear light-colored shirts, and the women colorful dresses. Together, they sing, pray and ask for favors under a banner that reads: "Dear God, please answer my prayers."
Anh goes to Pastor Khoa's white church, too, but he does it in the afternoon. There, he prays and asks God for favors. "If things remain this bad," says Anh, "I too will have to shut down my business."
And now that the price of Pangasius has dropped by 3,000 dong per fish, a third of the fishermen in the countryside have given up.
But Anh and 800 other fishermen have kept at it. To protect themselves against the vagaries of the world market, they formed the An Giang Fisheries Association, a professional association of fish farmers and factory owners. The association offered courses, such as "Techniques for Egg Incubation," "Standards and Norms," "Protection against Disease without Antibiotics." The members knew that there were problems a few years ago, and they wanted to make their Pangasius even better and more profitable.
But none of this did any good because higher feed costs forced the fishermen to cut their fish populations in half. Nowadays, the An Giang Fisheries Association is bracing itself against world markets in an effort to safeguard Pangasius revenues.
From Feast to Famine
Le Chi Binh is the chairman of the An Giang Fisheries Association. Today, he is sitting in his office several kilometers downriver from the factory where Ulf Blaes, the German businessman, is inspecting fillets. If the association's plan to safeguard revenues doesn't succeed, Binh says, the fish that brought prosperity to the delta could quickly turn into a big problem for Mekong fishermen.
Smoking a cigarette, Binh looks out the window at the river. "Now we are trying to prevent a situation in which there will soon not be enough fish," he says. In other words, where there was once a surplus, there might soon be a shortage.
First the fishermen could disappear, he says, followed by the factory owners and, finally, by the fish.
Can Pangasius Survive?
"We have asked for help," Binh adds, referring to the association's request for donations in the summer and the petition it submitted to the government. The association wants the government to reduce interest rates. However, since Vietnam is a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which prohibits subsidies, this might be a difficult proposition. It also wants the government to order the banks to approve new loans to factory owners and fish farmers that they can use to buy new fish stocks.
In fact, at the moment, sales are so poor that, if they don't get these loans, the farmers and factory owners cannot continue to operate. The government, says Binh, should set a minimum price for the fish, adding that the association has proposed 14,200 dong each. He also points out that, at this price, the fishermen would still be losing money -- but at least it would be a start.
The High Price of Cheap
In recent years, as profits rose, the fishermen built themselves big red-brick houses on Tan Loc Island. Those who couldn't afford to live on the island referred to it as "Trillion-Dong Village." Today, the fishermen have become targets of ridicule because many are now -- unsuccessfully -- trying to sell their houses.
Ironically, the Mekong fishermen who had started out breeding a good variety of fish for consumers around the world now find themselves in the middle of the real-estate crisis.
Binh, who is also a former district secretary for the Communist Party, longs for the security that socialist Vietnam once offered the fishermen in the form of fixed prices -- but without the poverty. And Blaes, the fish broker, wants to force prices down even further so that he can buy cheap, good fish for customers in Germany and take advantage of the market. In addition to being at opposite ends of the market for Pangasius, Blaes and Binh represent two different worldviews.
Blaes says that he pays the factory $3.30 (€2.58) a kilogram. He also pays the laboratories that test the fish, duties and sea freight, which together costs him another €0.25 ($0.20) per kilo. He pays a lot for the fish, says Blaes, so that the world can eat inexpensive fish.
Blaes has put away his Blackberry and is now walking along the worktables, watching the Vietnamese women cut the fish into bite-size pieces for Germany's fish eaters.
He watches the still-living fish drop onto a conveyor belt and then onto the first table, where workers slice first into the gills, then along the spine. A third slice produces one fillet, a fourth the second. Then he walks past long tables where the women are cleaning the fish, removing the skin, the fat and their innards. The fillets are then tossed into small baskets, sorted by size and quality, and screened for red spots and blood. After inspection, the fish pieces are frozen on giant trays at minus 22 degrees Celsius (minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit) -- fillets next to fillets, white on white -- and packed into cardboard boxes, which are taken to the refrigeration building where they are stacked in storage rooms.
"We are scheduled to deliver 25 containers to Bremerhaven at the middle of the month," says Blaes, adding that he sends 3,500 tons a year to Germany. "Pangasius is inexpensive, too inexpensive for air freight," he says.
"At the moment, there is still enough fish," says Binh.
Michael Schulz arrives in Ho Chi Minh City on the same day Blaes is flying back to Germany. He is standing in the lobby of his hotel, showered and ready to go. He is about to head out to the countryside where, as he says, he wants to put his ear to the rail.
Schulz is from the western German city of Dortmund, where he is the head of HMF Food Production, a negotiator for Aldi, the discount supermarket chain and king of cheap food products.
"You look to see what's happening on the world market, and that's how we discovered Pangasius," Schulz says quickly, almost stumbling over his words. "It's certainly an attractive fish, especially when it comes to retail pricing."
For a long time, Schulz says, the fish was not consistent enough for a German discounter. "We need a stabile product," he says, "and that also applies to price." In other words, his company is looking for a fish that looks and tastes the same -- and costs the same -- 365 days a year. "We have this type of product now, an honest product," he says, referring to Pangasius and the fact that it is raised in water with no additives. It has no agents that make it absorb more water. It's all natural. It meets Greenpeace standards. And it comes in 500-gram (a little more than one pound) bags. "It's a beautiful bag," says Schulz.
Aldi's Aldi-South division has already tested Pangasius in some of its stores, "and customers want it," says Schulz. The fish, he says, is now ready -- ready for discounters, for Aldi and for the world. In that world, the borders are no longer an issue; but protection has vanished, too.
There is no longer any protection for fishermen like Ky Anh, who used to get eight cents for 100 grams of Pangasius. Today he earns six cents per 100 grams, which isn't enough to make farming the fish worth his while. Six cents for 100 grams. This is too little to guarantee the survival of the Pangasius, a species once lauded as the fish of the future.
But this is only one way of looking at the world. Another view is part of Michael Schulz's calculations.
If all goes according to plan, in 2009, Aldi will begin selling 500-gram bags of Pangasius in all of its German stores. Each bag will contain three to five fillets, which, with a 5 percent water content, comes to 475 grams of fish. A bag will cost €3.49 ($4.47), says Schulz.
That comes to retail price of 74 cents per 100 grams, or 25 cents less than the price of Pangasius at Manuela Wendland's fresh food counter.
Will Success Kill the Pangasius?
By Barbara Hardinghaus
03/18/2009
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-613246,00.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,613246,00.html#ref=nlint
The Pangasius, or striped catfish, began taking the European fish market by storm a few years ago. It satisfied a voracious appetite for inexpensive white fish. But its success may become its downfall.
Manuela Wendland looks through her round glasses at the many different kinds of fish in the fresh food counter. The saleswoman sees whole fish, half fish and fish fillets, all of them arranged on ice and surrounded by lettuce leaves.
Wendland wears a wide, blue apron and a hood over her ash-blond hair. These days, she says, she is seeing more and more Pangasius, a fresh-water species also known as the striped catfish.
It arrives frozen, Wendland says, and has practically no bones; it's mild-tasting and a good fish for kids. She picks up a piece and places it on a scale in a Hamburg supermarket. It weighs 198 grams (7 ounces) and costs €1.96 ($2.50).
The Pangasius made its first appearance in the fresh food counter three years ago. It was a new fish, a crisis fish that had been slated to fill the gap created by overfishing. Every year, the average German eats 16 kilograms (35 pounds) of fish, or about 50 percent more than in 1970. Varieties like cod, ocean perch and spiny dogfish are becoming scarce.
Nowadays, the customers standing in front of Wendland's counter know not to buy cod, wild salmon, ocean perch, tuna or North Sea plaice. According to a recent study by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), 77 percent of edible fish populations have been fished to the limit or beyond. Even pollack, an inexpensive, white fish commonly used in fish sticks, is become harder to find.
The People's Fish
But customers want inexpensive white fish with low fat content, and the Pangasius has all the beneficial characteristics a fish variety needs for the wealthy world to buy it. It is the new people's fish -- born in Vietnam and bred to suit the tastes of people around the world. It could become the fish of the future -- if it weren't for the fact that mankind is producing the Pangasius to death.
The white and healthy filets of Pangasius in Manuela Wendland's counter are more than just fish filets. They represent a small slice of the global economy. Wendland wraps the Pangasius filet in paper, puts it in a bag, staples the price tag to the bag and says: "This fish swims in the Mekong." In fact, three million tons of Pangasius swim in the Mekong, almost 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) away from Wendland's fish stand, where they live in ponds the size of football fields or in cages in the water beneath houses.
This year, Vietnam will export 1.5 million tons of Pangasius filets to the rest of the world, including 143,000 tons to Germany alone. It arrives by ship in the northern ports of Bremerhaven or Hamburg, where it is loaded onto trucks bound for wholesale markets, from which it eventually reaches places like Wendland's or the frozen food sections of many other German supermarket chains as both filets and fish sticks.
Relative to 2006, 22 percent more Pangasius was shipped to Germany in 2007. And if importers have their way, the volume will continue to grow. But, if what the fishermen farming the fish halfway around the world say is true, there might not be as much Pangasius next year.
The Middle Man
One of the importers with a sense of what is happening to the Pangasius is Ulf Blaes. He is standing in a large building on the Mekong River with 1,500 women wearing numbers, white aprons, hoods and masks over their mouths. They look like doctors dissecting fish on long operating tables. "As a wholesaler," says Blaes, "you have to have Pangasius in your product line."
Blaes, a 49-year-old German businessman, runs the Food Company. He works as a middleman in the global food market whose job entails traveling around the world to transform the wishes of customers into demand and then convert the demand into supply. He buys fish from around the globe, including plaice from the world's oceans, zander from Kazakhstan, tuna, barramundi, swordfish and Pangasius from Vietnam.
Blaes mixes himself among the women to get a closer look at their work. Like them, he is wearing an apron, a hood and rubber boots. He travels to Vietnam six times a year to inspect the fish he is buying and the way they are farmed. Each trip involves flying from Germany to Ho Chi Minh City, driving six hours south in his dark Mercedes through small villages and on narrow roads, then taking a ferry across the enormous Mekong River to a fish farm owned by the Ntaco Corporation.
The fishermen arrive in their small boats to meet with Blaes behind the factory. They bring him fish in large tubs with water splashing from the top. The Pangasius industry is now responsible for the livelihoods of 5 million people. Workers in 34 plants can turn the fish into packaged fillets in two hours. The packages are then loaded into containers and shipped to 107 countries.
Blaes is the tallest person in the building and his head sticks out high above those of the Vietnamese workers. He wears canvas tennis shoes. Beneath his work coat, you can see his jeans, his untucked shirt and his Blackberry in his pocket. He uses the device often, reading and typing messages or making calls. His Blackberry connects him from here -- Long Xuyen, a city in the southern Vietnamese province of An Giang -- to the rest of the world. He also uses it to set prices and help him broker trades between the Mekong and the global community of consumers.
An example of the types of messages Blaes types into his Blackberry is: "Color: premium white or light pink. 120 to 230 grams. Five to no more than 10 percent protective glaze." The world wants a fish that is as standardized as a meat patty in a fast food restaurant. This is Blaes's goal -- and, on some days, his problem.
A fish is not an uncomplicated creature. It lives in a body of water that sometimes receives a lot of rain, and sometimes almost no rain at all. Sometimes there is a lot of oxygen in the water, and sometimes not much. Sometimes the fish does well, and sometimes it doesn't.
Global appetite and declining fish populations have made Pangasius a farmed species. But, for centuries, it remained a wild fish that traveled upstream to search for food along the riverbed.
As the fish grew and became more powerful, it reached lengths of up to 1.5 meters (five feet) and weights of up to 45 kilograms (100 pounds). When it was 3 or 4-years-old, it would leave the river's main tributary. The females would deposit their egg sacks and the males their sperm on tree roots in remote, flooded fields. Then, the fish would return to the Mekong and drift back downriver from Cambodia to Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Each year, 20-30 million fish would migrate into the delta region, where they were greeted by fishermen standing ready on the banks to catch the fish with fishing rods, nets and baskets.
French biologists were first to think about bringing the Pangasius onto the world market. They wanted to find out whether the fish could be cultivated, which entailed raising, feeding and breeding it. They wanted to intervene in the slow-moving course of nature.
The biologists built wooden cages, dug deep ponds and developed two species of the fish exclusively for farming purposes. The first was the Basa.
But the scientists soon realized that the Basa grew too slowly. It took an entire year before it weighed the two kilograms (4.4 pounds) it needed to go on the market, and it was also too fatty.
The Crisis of Falling Fish Prices
The second species they developed was the Tra, which spent most of its time swimming along the bottom of the river. But the Tra was a fast grower and only needed six months to reach the right weight. What's more, it also had little fat, was not susceptible to very many diseases, had white meat and was robust. By feeding the fish a mixture of rice bran and insects, the scientists coaxed it to the surface. This was the beginning of modern aquaculture in Vietnam and a new age, one in which an edible fish, the Pangasius, was added to the country's existing exports of coffee, cacao, pepper and crude oil.
Most of the fish went to the United States, that is, until American corn farmers -- who had themselves started farming Pangasius in flooded fields -- began protesting that Vietnamese producers were dumping their fish onto the market. Then, five years ago, the Pangasius-farming industry in the US successfully lobbied for legislation that slapped a 650 percent duty on Pangasius from Vietnam.
This made the American corn farmers happy, but now the Vietnamese fishermen needed a new market for their fish. They eventually found it halfway around the world and began exporting most of their fish to Russia, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. In 2001, Vietnam exported 300,000 tons of fillets. Seven years later, that number had jumped to 2.1 million tons.
'Constantly Going Uphill'
The Pangasius transformed the Mekong Delta into a proud region -- and made many fishermen rich. It became a source of affluence and attracted farmers, craftsmen and laborers to the region, including Ky Anh, a businessman. "In the past," he says, "things were constantly going uphill with the fish."
While men work nearby, sawing wood on a Sunday morning, Anh sits at a table with a calculator. A sign on the side of the driveway, which leads down to the bank of the Mekong, reads: "Sawmill, Buying and Selling, Round Logs as Construction Material."
Anh pushes up his visor and sets out a tray of red lemonade and ice. His wife is sitting on a bench, her lips painted a bright red. They own a big car and a big house. Anh can't say whether the wood or the fish has been more profitable. "At first," he says, "I just provided the fishermen with wood for cages. Then I started farming myself."
Houses on stilts stand above the water at the point where the edge of the sawmill reaches the riverbank. Beneath these houses are cages full of fish, which grow so quickly that they have to be removed from the enclosures after only eight weeks. At this point, they are six months old and weigh about one kilogram (2.2 pounds), which makes their filets the perfect size: between 120 and 230 grams (four-to-eight ounces).
If the fish are not removed from the cages at this point, they will continue to grow until they reach a size at which no one wants them anymore -- not the local factory and certainly not brokers like Blaes.
'The Crisis'
"We are hoping for a good price," says Ky Anh.
The price early last year was 12,000 dong (€0.50; $0.65) per kilogram. By June, the price had gone up to 14,000 dong, but it was still too low. And, in November, it fell to 13,000 dong. The only problem, Anh says, is that farming Pangasius costs him 15,000 dong a kilogram.
In the past, he says, he could sometimes get 17,000 dong or even 18,000 Dong a kilogram. That was when the fish was still a success story, "before the crisis," as Anh says.
If you ask Anh where the crisis comes from, he doesn't know -- at least not exactly. He shrugs his shoulders and speculates that the problem might have something to do with inflation or the financial crisis. But one thing he is sure of is that part of the problem can be attributed to the cost of feed.
In the past, when the fishermen sold their catch at the local market in Chau Doc, they knew what drove prices up and down. But now that they produce for the world market, things have become too complex. For instance, the exchange rate is unsteady, and the dong has lost value against the dollar.
In the evening, when darkness descends over the Mekong, Anh returns to his big house and sits down in front his computer to look up prices online. The price of soybeans, the main type of feed for the fish, is up. The beans -- which are produced in the United States, Brazil, Argentina and China -- are a rich source of protein. But that's not a problem exclusive to the Pangasius farmed in Vietnam -- it also applies to other animals around the world, including the cattle used to produce the meat that goes into hamburgers sold at fast food restaurants. Likewise, the fact that soybeans are also used to make biodiesel is also driving prices up.
Each fish has to be fed for four months, and feed makes up 3,000 dong of the total per-kilogram cost. When the fish are six-months-old, the farmers are suddenly faced with the need to get rid of them as quickly as possible -- and at any price.
The Farmers Respond
On Sundays, while Anh goes to work early, the other fish farmers attend a 5 a.m. mass at Pastor Khoa's church, a white building near the river. The men wear light-colored shirts, and the women colorful dresses. Together, they sing, pray and ask for favors under a banner that reads: "Dear God, please answer my prayers."
Anh goes to Pastor Khoa's white church, too, but he does it in the afternoon. There, he prays and asks God for favors. "If things remain this bad," says Anh, "I too will have to shut down my business."
And now that the price of Pangasius has dropped by 3,000 dong per fish, a third of the fishermen in the countryside have given up.
But Anh and 800 other fishermen have kept at it. To protect themselves against the vagaries of the world market, they formed the An Giang Fisheries Association, a professional association of fish farmers and factory owners. The association offered courses, such as "Techniques for Egg Incubation," "Standards and Norms," "Protection against Disease without Antibiotics." The members knew that there were problems a few years ago, and they wanted to make their Pangasius even better and more profitable.
But none of this did any good because higher feed costs forced the fishermen to cut their fish populations in half. Nowadays, the An Giang Fisheries Association is bracing itself against world markets in an effort to safeguard Pangasius revenues.
From Feast to Famine
Le Chi Binh is the chairman of the An Giang Fisheries Association. Today, he is sitting in his office several kilometers downriver from the factory where Ulf Blaes, the German businessman, is inspecting fillets. If the association's plan to safeguard revenues doesn't succeed, Binh says, the fish that brought prosperity to the delta could quickly turn into a big problem for Mekong fishermen.
Smoking a cigarette, Binh looks out the window at the river. "Now we are trying to prevent a situation in which there will soon not be enough fish," he says. In other words, where there was once a surplus, there might soon be a shortage.
First the fishermen could disappear, he says, followed by the factory owners and, finally, by the fish.
Can Pangasius Survive?
"We have asked for help," Binh adds, referring to the association's request for donations in the summer and the petition it submitted to the government. The association wants the government to reduce interest rates. However, since Vietnam is a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which prohibits subsidies, this might be a difficult proposition. It also wants the government to order the banks to approve new loans to factory owners and fish farmers that they can use to buy new fish stocks.
In fact, at the moment, sales are so poor that, if they don't get these loans, the farmers and factory owners cannot continue to operate. The government, says Binh, should set a minimum price for the fish, adding that the association has proposed 14,200 dong each. He also points out that, at this price, the fishermen would still be losing money -- but at least it would be a start.
The High Price of Cheap
In recent years, as profits rose, the fishermen built themselves big red-brick houses on Tan Loc Island. Those who couldn't afford to live on the island referred to it as "Trillion-Dong Village." Today, the fishermen have become targets of ridicule because many are now -- unsuccessfully -- trying to sell their houses.
Ironically, the Mekong fishermen who had started out breeding a good variety of fish for consumers around the world now find themselves in the middle of the real-estate crisis.
Binh, who is also a former district secretary for the Communist Party, longs for the security that socialist Vietnam once offered the fishermen in the form of fixed prices -- but without the poverty. And Blaes, the fish broker, wants to force prices down even further so that he can buy cheap, good fish for customers in Germany and take advantage of the market. In addition to being at opposite ends of the market for Pangasius, Blaes and Binh represent two different worldviews.
Blaes says that he pays the factory $3.30 (€2.58) a kilogram. He also pays the laboratories that test the fish, duties and sea freight, which together costs him another €0.25 ($0.20) per kilo. He pays a lot for the fish, says Blaes, so that the world can eat inexpensive fish.
Blaes has put away his Blackberry and is now walking along the worktables, watching the Vietnamese women cut the fish into bite-size pieces for Germany's fish eaters.
He watches the still-living fish drop onto a conveyor belt and then onto the first table, where workers slice first into the gills, then along the spine. A third slice produces one fillet, a fourth the second. Then he walks past long tables where the women are cleaning the fish, removing the skin, the fat and their innards. The fillets are then tossed into small baskets, sorted by size and quality, and screened for red spots and blood. After inspection, the fish pieces are frozen on giant trays at minus 22 degrees Celsius (minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit) -- fillets next to fillets, white on white -- and packed into cardboard boxes, which are taken to the refrigeration building where they are stacked in storage rooms.
"We are scheduled to deliver 25 containers to Bremerhaven at the middle of the month," says Blaes, adding that he sends 3,500 tons a year to Germany. "Pangasius is inexpensive, too inexpensive for air freight," he says.
"At the moment, there is still enough fish," says Binh.
Michael Schulz arrives in Ho Chi Minh City on the same day Blaes is flying back to Germany. He is standing in the lobby of his hotel, showered and ready to go. He is about to head out to the countryside where, as he says, he wants to put his ear to the rail.
Schulz is from the western German city of Dortmund, where he is the head of HMF Food Production, a negotiator for Aldi, the discount supermarket chain and king of cheap food products.
"You look to see what's happening on the world market, and that's how we discovered Pangasius," Schulz says quickly, almost stumbling over his words. "It's certainly an attractive fish, especially when it comes to retail pricing."
For a long time, Schulz says, the fish was not consistent enough for a German discounter. "We need a stabile product," he says, "and that also applies to price." In other words, his company is looking for a fish that looks and tastes the same -- and costs the same -- 365 days a year. "We have this type of product now, an honest product," he says, referring to Pangasius and the fact that it is raised in water with no additives. It has no agents that make it absorb more water. It's all natural. It meets Greenpeace standards. And it comes in 500-gram (a little more than one pound) bags. "It's a beautiful bag," says Schulz.
Aldi's Aldi-South division has already tested Pangasius in some of its stores, "and customers want it," says Schulz. The fish, he says, is now ready -- ready for discounters, for Aldi and for the world. In that world, the borders are no longer an issue; but protection has vanished, too.
There is no longer any protection for fishermen like Ky Anh, who used to get eight cents for 100 grams of Pangasius. Today he earns six cents per 100 grams, which isn't enough to make farming the fish worth his while. Six cents for 100 grams. This is too little to guarantee the survival of the Pangasius, a species once lauded as the fish of the future.
But this is only one way of looking at the world. Another view is part of Michael Schulz's calculations.
If all goes according to plan, in 2009, Aldi will begin selling 500-gram bags of Pangasius in all of its German stores. Each bag will contain three to five fillets, which, with a 5 percent water content, comes to 475 grams of fish. A bag will cost €3.49 ($4.47), says Schulz.
That comes to retail price of 74 cents per 100 grams, or 25 cents less than the price of Pangasius at Manuela Wendland's fresh food counter.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Fall Fish Count in Delta is Dismal
Fall fish count in Delta is dismal
By Matt Weiser
mweiser@sacbee.com
(916) 321-1264
Friday, Jan. 23, 2009 | Page 6B
http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/1567091.html
[Read comments:
http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/1567091.html#Comments_Container ]
Delta fish continue to hover at the brink of extinction, and conditions could worsen for the estuary and the economy unless winter gets a lot wetter, according to a new state survey.
Native Delta smelt, a threatened fish, is at its lowest point in 42 years of record-keeping. Two nonnative fish, the American shad and threadfin shad, also set record lows.
The findings were in the state Department of Fish and Game's latest fall population survey of Delta fish species, which concluded in December.
Three other species showed slight gains over 2007, but remain well below historical averages: the native longfin smelt and Sacramento splittail, and the nonnative striped bass. Even though the survey found no splittails last fall, and just one in 2007, officials say the fish isn't often found in the areas netted and that some previous counts likewise have not detected them.
"When the uncommon ones like Delta smelt and the common ones like threadfin shad both take a nosedive, there's something really wrong," said Bruce Herbold, a biologist who monitors the Delta for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "We're really seeing a massive change."
The health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is of concern because it is a freshwater source for two-thirds of California's population and millions of acres of farmland.
Last year, Delta water diversions were slashed about 30 percent to protect fish, bringing a hit of at least $300 million to the economy, according to an estimate by the state Department of Water Resources.
It could get worse this year.
In December, DWR warned water contractors they might get only 15 percent of average Delta water deliveries due to the ongoing drought.
On Wednesday, a DWR planning committee reported the delivery forecast may shrink further, perhaps as low as 5 percent to 9 percent of average.
It is rare to see that forecast shrink mid-winter. It usually grows as storms deepen the Sierra Nevada snowpack.
But as DWR Deputy Director Ralph Torres noted, California has seen little precipitation since December, and needs a deluge to refill reservoirs.
The report was obtained by The Bee prior to its official release. Torres said a new delivery forecast has not been made, but he confirmed it will likely be less than 15 percent.
"Originally we had planned on doing that (new forecast) by Feb. 15," Torres said. "But we may move that date up, because we don't think any precipitation between now and then is going to change anything."
The water content of the statewide snowpack stood at 57 percent of normal on Thursday. Oroville Reservoir, the main supply for the State Water Project, has nearly reached a record low level.
The report suggests California's water supply is on a path to match the two worst droughts in state history: 1923-24 and 1976-77.
Could things get that bad?
"It's probably a scenario we have to consider," Torres said.
This could worsen conditions for struggling Delta fish species, and for water quality.
Biologists warn that the Delta is in the midst of a human-caused shift – to a different kind of aquatic habitat, one that holds risks for human and environmental health.
The estuary is changing, they say, into a warmer and more stagnant water body where toxic algae blooms are common. Seasonal shifts in temperature and salinity that once defined and cleansed the estuary are disappearing.
Causes are many, experts say, including urban and agricultural pollution and the introduction of thousands of foreign wildlife species. The Delta has also been managed for decades as a freshwater delivery tool serving the world's eighth-largest economy, ahead of the needs of wildlife and water quality.
"You put them together and you get what I'm calling a train wreck," said Bill Bennett, a UC Davis fisheries ecologist and and Delta smelt expert.
By Matt Weiser
mweiser@sacbee.com
(916) 321-1264
Friday, Jan. 23, 2009 | Page 6B
http://www.sacbee.com/
[Read comments:
http://www.sacbee.com/
Delta fish continue to hover at the brink of extinction, and conditions could worsen for the estuary and the economy unless winter gets a lot wetter, according to a new state survey.
Native Delta smelt, a threatened fish, is at its lowest point in 42 years of record-keeping. Two nonnative fish, the American shad and threadfin shad, also set record lows.
The findings were in the state Department of Fish and Game's latest fall population survey of Delta fish species, which concluded in December.
Three other species showed slight gains over 2007, but remain well below historical averages: the native longfin smelt and Sacramento splittail, and the nonnative striped bass. Even though the survey found no splittails last fall, and just one in 2007, officials say the fish isn't often found in the areas netted and that some previous counts likewise have not detected them.
"When the uncommon ones like Delta smelt and the common ones like threadfin shad both take a nosedive, there's something really wrong," said Bruce Herbold, a biologist who monitors the Delta for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "We're really seeing a massive change."
The health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is of concern because it is a freshwater source for two-thirds of California's population and millions of acres of farmland.
Last year, Delta water diversions were slashed about 30 percent to protect fish, bringing a hit of at least $300 million to the economy, according to an estimate by the state Department of Water Resources.
It could get worse this year.
In December, DWR warned water contractors they might get only 15 percent of average Delta water deliveries due to the ongoing drought.
On Wednesday, a DWR planning committee reported the delivery forecast may shrink further, perhaps as low as 5 percent to 9 percent of average.
It is rare to see that forecast shrink mid-winter. It usually grows as storms deepen the Sierra Nevada snowpack.
But as DWR Deputy Director Ralph Torres noted, California has seen little precipitation since December, and needs a deluge to refill reservoirs.
The report was obtained by The Bee prior to its official release. Torres said a new delivery forecast has not been made, but he confirmed it will likely be less than 15 percent.
"Originally we had planned on doing that (new forecast) by Feb. 15," Torres said. "But we may move that date up, because we don't think any precipitation between now and then is going to change anything."
The water content of the statewide snowpack stood at 57 percent of normal on Thursday. Oroville Reservoir, the main supply for the State Water Project, has nearly reached a record low level.
The report suggests California's water supply is on a path to match the two worst droughts in state history: 1923-24 and 1976-77.
Could things get that bad?
"It's probably a scenario we have to consider," Torres said.
This could worsen conditions for struggling Delta fish species, and for water quality.
Biologists warn that the Delta is in the midst of a human-caused shift – to a different kind of aquatic habitat, one that holds risks for human and environmental health.
The estuary is changing, they say, into a warmer and more stagnant water body where toxic algae blooms are common. Seasonal shifts in temperature and salinity that once defined and cleansed the estuary are disappearing.
Causes are many, experts say, including urban and agricultural pollution and the introduction of thousands of foreign wildlife species. The Delta has also been managed for decades as a freshwater delivery tool serving the world's eighth-largest economy, ahead of the needs of wildlife and water quality.
"You put them together and you get what I'm calling a train wreck," said Bill Bennett, a UC Davis fisheries ecologist and and Delta smelt expert.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Why Mercury Tuna is Still Legal
Why Mercury Tuna Is Still Legal
The Bush FDA helped industry suppress the bad news about mercury. Still want fish for dinner?
Stephanie Mencimer
September 02, 2008
Source: motherjones.com
First, Deborah Landvik-Fellner's hair started falling out. Then her speech began to slur and her memory grew unreliable. Her heart started fluttering, and her hands shook. One day she walked out of the supermarket and woke up surrounded by a crowd of people. She'd collapsed in the parking lot for no apparent reason. Landvik-Fellner, then 45, went to one doctor, then another, and another. None could figure out what was wrong. Finally, in 2004, after five years of weird symptoms, her husband Mike saw a TV show about a man who was poisoning his business partner with mercury, a potent toxin that can damage the heart, nervous system, and kidneys. The business partner's symptoms—shaky hands, staggering gait—reminded Mike of his wife's. On a lark, he suggested that she have her blood tested. When the results came back, they were both stunned: 48 parts per billion of mercury, nearly 10 times what the Environmental Protection Agency says is safe.
A few Google searches later, the Fellners, who own an auto shop in Rockaway, New Jersey, had solved Deborah's health mystery. For some 12 years, she'd been eating a can of albacore tuna every day, because it was one of the few foods that didn't exacerbate her Crohn's disease. (Her family, of Norwegian extraction, consumed a lot of fish anyway. "We'd think nothing of putting a piece of cod on a piece of flatbread for breakfast.") She'd never realized that most tuna sold in the United States is contaminated with the toxic heavy metal—some up to double the epa's safety benchmark.
Landvik-Fellner stopped eating tuna, and within about a year, her symptoms began to subside. But by now she was angry, and confused. If eating tuna could make your hair fall out, shouldn't the label tell you so? In 2006, she filed a lawsuit against Tri-Union Seafoods, parent company of Chicken of the Sea, alleging that the company had violated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act by failing to disclose that its product contained mercury.
"Toxic tort" cases are notoriously hard to win, and Landvik-Fellner faced long odds against the deep-pocketed industry. That much she knew. What she didn't anticipate was that her biggest obstacle would turn out to be the US Food and Drug Administration—the very agency responsible for protecting the public from mercury in the first place.
tuna is big business. Americans eat nearly three pounds of canned tuna per capita every year, making it the nation's second most popular seafood (behind shrimp). The government promotes it via school lunch programs, wic (the federal food program for poor women and children), and even in the fda and US Department of Agriculture dietary recommendations. It's a staple of low-carb diets. Bodybuilders binge on it. Low in fat, high in protein, canned tuna contains lots of omega-3 fatty acids that are thought to protect against heart disease and boost brain development early in life. Some tuna cans come stamped with the American Heart Association seal of approval.
But thanks to emissions from power plants and garbage incinerators, tuna also absorbs significant amounts of methylmercury, a form of mercury that concentrates in the fatty tissues of big fish and humans. Fatal in high doses, mercury at lower levels has been linked to heart disease in older men and developmental problems in babies. Tuna is not the highest-mercury fish we eat—that honor belongs to swordfish and tilefish—but it is by far the most widely consumed. "Tuna is the largest source of mercury in the diet because people eat so much of it," says Edward Groth, a scientist who has written a report on mercury in fish for the environmental groups Oceana and Mercury Policy Project.
None of this is news to federal regulators. In 1970, a New York chemistry professor tested a can of tuna in his pantry and discovered that it contained significantly more mercury than what the fda then considered safe. After running tests of its own, the agency recalled nearly 1 million cans of tuna. It also issued an "action level" under which fish with more than 0.5 parts per million (ppm) of methylmercury could be pulled from the market.
An action level is not a regulation. It doesn't require anyone to do anything. Even so, the fishing industry found the new benchmark so intolerable that it sued the fda. In 1979, drawing mostly on a National Marine Fisheries Service assessment that relaxing the guideline would "provide economic benefit" to industry, the fda doubled the level to 1 ppm, making it twice as high as what the epa (which issues mercury advisories for anglers) and the European Union consider safe. The action level in China is 0.3 ppm—more than three times more stringent than the fda's. (Tuna often exceeds even the weak US standard: In 2006, for instance, the group Defenders of Wildlife tested cans of tuna straight out of grocery stores and found that 1 in 20, particularly those imported from Latin America, had mercury above the fda action level and could, in theory, be pulled from the shelves.)
After its initial burst of activity in the 1970s, the fda seemed to lose interest in tuna. In the 1990s, it even stopped its occasional tests of store-bought fish. But after years of criticism from environmental groups and scientists, it drafted an advisory in 2000 that warned pregnant women about mercury. The original draft listed canned tuna as a high-mercury product. But then, fda officials met privately with representatives of the country's three largest tuna companies (Bumble Bee, Tri-Union, and StarKist), the US Tuna Foundation, and the National Food Processors Association.
The companies were very worried. The Tuna Foundation had warned the agency in private meetings that including canned tuna in the mercury advisory could cause sales to plummet nearly 25 percent, and that seafood producers "would face the distinct possibility of numerous class action lawsuits." fda focus groups also suggested that tuna consumption would fall. Sure enough, the final advisory—released after President Bush had taken office—didn't include canned tuna.
When the fda failed to come through on tougher regulations, some states stepped up with more stringent warnings. Washington, for example, warns that children under six should eat no more than half a can of albacore a week. Scientists, doctors, and environmental groups also continued to urge the fda to adopt more stringent federal warnings based on the epa's reference dose for safe mercury exposure.
In 2003, the fda did revise the mercury advisory for several kinds of fish, but again it bent the science to accommodate the industry's interests. Clark Carrington, an fda official, told the agency's Food Advisory Committee that in drawing up three categories for fish—high, medium, and low mercury—agency staffers had crafted the boundaries so that canned light tuna would end up in the low mercury group "in order to keep the market share at a reasonable level." (Canned light represents some 75 percent of the US tuna market; the rest is albacore, or white tuna, which tends to be higher in mercury.)
The new fda advisory warned pregnant and nursing women to eat no more than 6 ounces of albacore, and no more than 12 ounces of chunk light tuna, per week. The fda recommended following the same guidelines for children, with the vague suggestion that they eat "smaller portions." A 44-pound preschooler who follows the fda guideline would consume four times the mercury the epa considers safe.
The fda relayed its advisory mostly through brochures in doctors' offices, never requiring warnings in stores or on tuna cans. Still, the industry has blamed the advisory for a 10 percent drop in sales within a year, and it's worked hard to mute the message. In 2005, the tuna companies launched a $25 million campaign to counteract the fda's advisory, with full-page newspaper ads touting the brain-building benefits of omega-3 fatty acids ("Tuna: A Smart Catch") and reassuring women that "No government study has ever found unsafe levels of mercury in women or young children who eat canned tuna." (True, but none has ever looked.) David Burney, then the executive director of the US Tuna Foundation, told the New York Times in 2005 that his wife ate a can of albacore tuna almost every day while pregnant, and that his nine-year-old triplets ate several cans of albacore a week.
The US Tuna Foundation (which recently merged with the National Fisheries Institute) also enlisted spokespeople such as celebrity pediatrician Dr. Lillian Beard, who earned $6,000 a month for two days of work promoting canned tuna, plus $10,000 to serve on a nutrition advisory council for six months. In October 2004, Beard wrote a column in Pediatric News that suggested giving children "a little warm milk or tuna fish before bedtime" to help make them sleepy. She made no mention of her industry ties.
The US Tuna Foundation also underwrote science to help make its case, in one instance picking up nearly the entire $500,000 cost of a 2005 Harvard Center for Risk Analysis study and using the results to suggest that Americans weren't eating enough fish. The Center for Consumer Freedom, a nonprofit founded by the tobacco industry to fight restaurant smoking bans, similarly rose in tuna's defense, creating a website, FishScam.com, that claims the fda standards are actually overcautious.
Meanwhile, reporters who have written about mercury in tuna have found themselves in hot water with the industry. The National Fisheries Institute and the US Tuna Foundation have waged aggressive and public attacks on people like Marian Burros at the New York Times (who earlier this year published a story warning of mercury in sushi tuna) and Larry Wheeler at USA Today. When I contacted the Fisheries Institute, its spokesman, Gavin Gibbons, first grilled me about whether this story had been prompted by an environmental group (it wasn't) and then warned that all our conversations would be recorded and the transcripts posted on the organization's website, along with any correspondence. In response to my specific questions, Gibbons emailed that linking high blood mercury levels to any kind of symptoms "is an unproven assertion that flies in the face of independent and proven scientific knowledge about canned tuna and all seafood's proven benefits...It is irresponsible to perpetuate anecdotal tales of high seafood consumption causing health concerns when those types of stories contradict published science showing the health benefits of eating fish at least twice per week."
luke lindley is one of the people Gibbons says it would be irresponsible to write about. As an undergrad at Stanford, the now-24-year-old medical student was "deeply immersed" in bodybuilding, so he ate "tuna for breakfast, tuna for lunch, tuna for dinner" for years. In 2003, he began having trouble with his memory. His hair fell out and he suffered gastrointestinal problems so severe he ended up taking a year off med school. Finally—after seeing a news report on mercury in tuna—he asked his doctor to test a sample of his hair. According to another doctor who reviewed the records, it had mercury levels higher than in any patient the doctor had ever seen. "I thought I was eating a low-fat, healthy diet," says Lindley. "As it turned out, I was ingesting enough mercury to make my hair fall out."
Dr. Jane Hightower has made something of a cottage industry out of treating fish consumers suffering from elevated mercury levels. In 2003 the San Francisco physician published a paper in Environmental Health Perspectives after surveying her entire patient load and testing more than 100 people whose questionnaires suggested they consumed a lot of fish. The majority had blood mercury levels well above what the epa considers safe. One was a 10-year-old named Matthew Davis who suffered serious neurological problems his doctors suspected were from the three to six ounces of canned albacore he ate daily. His fingers curled involuntarily, and his hands shook when he tried to write. The problems mostly resolved after he quit eating tuna.
Dr. Michael Gochfeld, a professor in environmental and occupational health sciences at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, says that mercury poisoning from fish is probably underreported because doctors don't know to look for it. His clinic at the medical school, he says, has been seeing more cases—at least half a dozen a year. People come in complaining of slurred speech, clumsiness, and vision problems. "It is usually related to fish," he says.
Yet, like the tuna industry, the fda says there's nothing to worry about. "There are no confirmed cases of adverse effects from methylmercury in commercial fish in the United States," says Stephanie Kwisnek, an fda spokeswoman. "There are infrequent anecdotal reports in the media that are virtually impossible to confirm. The fda does not track them on any kind of a formal basis."
deborah landvik-fellner's Chicken of the Sea lawsuit should have been fairly straightforward. That she ate a lot of canned tuna is indisputable, as is the fact that she had steeply elevated levels of mercury in her blood. Whether mercury caused all of her symptoms, whether Tri-Union ought to be held responsible for the effects of what they call her "abnormal consumption," even the definition of "abnormal," are the kind of disputed facts usually left to a jury. But so far, Landvik-Fellner hasn't come anywhere near a jury—in good part because the Bush fda has worked to protect industry from claims like hers.
In the Landvik-Fellner case, Tri-Union has used an increasingly popular legal strategy, arguing that her claim was "preempted" by federal law. The argument goes like this: If a product is regulated by the federal government, however weakly, consumers shouldn't be allowed to sue—and states should be prohibited from passing regulations or issuing health and safety warnings more stringent than the feds'.
But Tri-Union went one step further. It argued that Landvik-Fellner's case was preempted because the fda had refused to require warning labels on tuna—in other words, when the feds fail to regulate a product, that, too, can preempt state law. It was an argument familiar to top officials at the fda. In fact, Daniel Troy, the agency's chief counsel from 2001 to 2004, was a lawyer who'd spent most of his career in the private sector suing the fda on behalf of drug and food companies. Troy, who was a leading proponent of the preemption doctrine, essentially ran the agency for more than a year before President Bush appointed Lester Crawford, a former vice president of the National Food Processors Association, as fda commissioner. During his tenure, Troy invited big companies to bring him cases in which the agency could help defeat anti-industry lawsuits using the preemption argument. One of those cases involved a suit by the California attorney general's office seeking to force tuna companies to disclose their product's mercury content on the label. A lawyer representing the companies suggested to Troy that a letter from Crawford might help the industry's preemption argument. The lawyer helpfully enclosed a lengthy memo outlining the points the commissioner should include.
In August 2005, a letter precisely hitting all of the tuna lawyer's points arrived on the desk of California attorney general Bill Lockyer. Tuna companies quickly introduced it in court. Barely a month later, Crawford resigned from the fda in connection with criminal charges that he'd misreported his ownership of stock in fda-regulated companies.
But his letter lived on in the courts: In the California case, a lengthy trial featuring various industry spokespeople—including pediatrician Beard, who was paid $5,000 to testify that if people got worried about mercury in tuna, they might eat more junk food—ended with the judge citing Crawford's letter as a key factor in ruling for the tuna companies. And the letter made another appearance in Landvik-Fellner's case: Tri-Union's lawyers have brought it up as evidence that her lawsuit is preempted by federal regulations. After a year of legal wrangling, in January 2007 a US District Court judge agreed with the industry—and once again the ruling cited what the judge called Crawford's "persuasive" letter.
Fellner appealed the case to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, and on August 19, just after this story was published in our print edition, the court handed down a remarkable decision in her favor. A three-judge panel agreed with her arguments that a letter from the FDA commissioner written at the behest of the tuna company's lawyers was not the sort of federal action that could trump the state law. The court also scoffed at the notion that the FDA's advisory on mercury in fish qualified as a federal regulation, which requires formal proceedings, public criticism, and other serious vetting. "[W]e fail to see how an educational campaign might preempt Fellner's lawsuit," the panel wrote.
In fact, the court found that the New Jersey laws that Fellner sued under complemented, rather than conflicted with, the federal guidelines on mercury. And in a conclusion that is no doubt giving the tuna industry fits, the court noted that contrary to the industry's pleas, it would be fairly simple to come up with a warning label that would comply with both the FDA and New Jersey law. That last point may have implications beyond Fellner's case.
The original Proposition 65 litigation in California, brought by the state attorney general to force the tuna companies to put warning labels on tuna cans, is currently on appeal in the California state courts. Oral arguments haven't been scheduled yet, but lawyers in the attorney general's office have already alerted the appellate court of the decision in the Fellner case. The California courts don't have to follow the federal ones, but they usually give them quite a bit of deference. If the California courts do align with the 3rd Circuit, they could open the door to states requiring warning labels about mercury on tuna cans. Fellner, for her part, is thrilled with the outcome. "People are feeding their children tuna fish. There are still a lot of people out there who don't know," she says.
Stephanie Mencimer is a reporter at the Mother Jones Washington, DC, Bureau.
The Bush FDA helped industry suppress the bad news about mercury. Still want fish for dinner?
Stephanie Mencimer
September 02, 2008
Source: motherjones.com
First, Deborah Landvik-Fellner's hair started falling out. Then her speech began to slur and her memory grew unreliable. Her heart started fluttering, and her hands shook. One day she walked out of the supermarket and woke up surrounded by a crowd of people. She'd collapsed in the parking lot for no apparent reason. Landvik-Fellner, then 45, went to one doctor, then another, and another. None could figure out what was wrong. Finally, in 2004, after five years of weird symptoms, her husband Mike saw a TV show about a man who was poisoning his business partner with mercury, a potent toxin that can damage the heart, nervous system, and kidneys. The business partner's symptoms—shaky hands, staggering gait—reminded Mike of his wife's. On a lark, he suggested that she have her blood tested. When the results came back, they were both stunned: 48 parts per billion of mercury, nearly 10 times what the Environmental Protection Agency says is safe.
A few Google searches later, the Fellners, who own an auto shop in Rockaway, New Jersey, had solved Deborah's health mystery. For some 12 years, she'd been eating a can of albacore tuna every day, because it was one of the few foods that didn't exacerbate her Crohn's disease. (Her family, of Norwegian extraction, consumed a lot of fish anyway. "We'd think nothing of putting a piece of cod on a piece of flatbread for breakfast.") She'd never realized that most tuna sold in the United States is contaminated with the toxic heavy metal—some up to double the epa's safety benchmark.
Landvik-Fellner stopped eating tuna, and within about a year, her symptoms began to subside. But by now she was angry, and confused. If eating tuna could make your hair fall out, shouldn't the label tell you so? In 2006, she filed a lawsuit against Tri-Union Seafoods, parent company of Chicken of the Sea, alleging that the company had violated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act by failing to disclose that its product contained mercury.
"Toxic tort" cases are notoriously hard to win, and Landvik-Fellner faced long odds against the deep-pocketed industry. That much she knew. What she didn't anticipate was that her biggest obstacle would turn out to be the US Food and Drug Administration—the very agency responsible for protecting the public from mercury in the first place.
tuna is big business. Americans eat nearly three pounds of canned tuna per capita every year, making it the nation's second most popular seafood (behind shrimp). The government promotes it via school lunch programs, wic (the federal food program for poor women and children), and even in the fda and US Department of Agriculture dietary recommendations. It's a staple of low-carb diets. Bodybuilders binge on it. Low in fat, high in protein, canned tuna contains lots of omega-3 fatty acids that are thought to protect against heart disease and boost brain development early in life. Some tuna cans come stamped with the American Heart Association seal of approval.
But thanks to emissions from power plants and garbage incinerators, tuna also absorbs significant amounts of methylmercury, a form of mercury that concentrates in the fatty tissues of big fish and humans. Fatal in high doses, mercury at lower levels has been linked to heart disease in older men and developmental problems in babies. Tuna is not the highest-mercury fish we eat—that honor belongs to swordfish and tilefish—but it is by far the most widely consumed. "Tuna is the largest source of mercury in the diet because people eat so much of it," says Edward Groth, a scientist who has written a report on mercury in fish for the environmental groups Oceana and Mercury Policy Project.
None of this is news to federal regulators. In 1970, a New York chemistry professor tested a can of tuna in his pantry and discovered that it contained significantly more mercury than what the fda then considered safe. After running tests of its own, the agency recalled nearly 1 million cans of tuna. It also issued an "action level" under which fish with more than 0.5 parts per million (ppm) of methylmercury could be pulled from the market.
An action level is not a regulation. It doesn't require anyone to do anything. Even so, the fishing industry found the new benchmark so intolerable that it sued the fda. In 1979, drawing mostly on a National Marine Fisheries Service assessment that relaxing the guideline would "provide economic benefit" to industry, the fda doubled the level to 1 ppm, making it twice as high as what the epa (which issues mercury advisories for anglers) and the European Union consider safe. The action level in China is 0.3 ppm—more than three times more stringent than the fda's. (Tuna often exceeds even the weak US standard: In 2006, for instance, the group Defenders of Wildlife tested cans of tuna straight out of grocery stores and found that 1 in 20, particularly those imported from Latin America, had mercury above the fda action level and could, in theory, be pulled from the shelves.)
After its initial burst of activity in the 1970s, the fda seemed to lose interest in tuna. In the 1990s, it even stopped its occasional tests of store-bought fish. But after years of criticism from environmental groups and scientists, it drafted an advisory in 2000 that warned pregnant women about mercury. The original draft listed canned tuna as a high-mercury product. But then, fda officials met privately with representatives of the country's three largest tuna companies (Bumble Bee, Tri-Union, and StarKist), the US Tuna Foundation, and the National Food Processors Association.
The companies were very worried. The Tuna Foundation had warned the agency in private meetings that including canned tuna in the mercury advisory could cause sales to plummet nearly 25 percent, and that seafood producers "would face the distinct possibility of numerous class action lawsuits." fda focus groups also suggested that tuna consumption would fall. Sure enough, the final advisory—released after President Bush had taken office—didn't include canned tuna.
When the fda failed to come through on tougher regulations, some states stepped up with more stringent warnings. Washington, for example, warns that children under six should eat no more than half a can of albacore a week. Scientists, doctors, and environmental groups also continued to urge the fda to adopt more stringent federal warnings based on the epa's reference dose for safe mercury exposure.
In 2003, the fda did revise the mercury advisory for several kinds of fish, but again it bent the science to accommodate the industry's interests. Clark Carrington, an fda official, told the agency's Food Advisory Committee that in drawing up three categories for fish—high, medium, and low mercury—agency staffers had crafted the boundaries so that canned light tuna would end up in the low mercury group "in order to keep the market share at a reasonable level." (Canned light represents some 75 percent of the US tuna market; the rest is albacore, or white tuna, which tends to be higher in mercury.)
The new fda advisory warned pregnant and nursing women to eat no more than 6 ounces of albacore, and no more than 12 ounces of chunk light tuna, per week. The fda recommended following the same guidelines for children, with the vague suggestion that they eat "smaller portions." A 44-pound preschooler who follows the fda guideline would consume four times the mercury the epa considers safe.
The fda relayed its advisory mostly through brochures in doctors' offices, never requiring warnings in stores or on tuna cans. Still, the industry has blamed the advisory for a 10 percent drop in sales within a year, and it's worked hard to mute the message. In 2005, the tuna companies launched a $25 million campaign to counteract the fda's advisory, with full-page newspaper ads touting the brain-building benefits of omega-3 fatty acids ("Tuna: A Smart Catch") and reassuring women that "No government study has ever found unsafe levels of mercury in women or young children who eat canned tuna." (True, but none has ever looked.) David Burney, then the executive director of the US Tuna Foundation, told the New York Times in 2005 that his wife ate a can of albacore tuna almost every day while pregnant, and that his nine-year-old triplets ate several cans of albacore a week.
The US Tuna Foundation (which recently merged with the National Fisheries Institute) also enlisted spokespeople such as celebrity pediatrician Dr. Lillian Beard, who earned $6,000 a month for two days of work promoting canned tuna, plus $10,000 to serve on a nutrition advisory council for six months. In October 2004, Beard wrote a column in Pediatric News that suggested giving children "a little warm milk or tuna fish before bedtime" to help make them sleepy. She made no mention of her industry ties.
The US Tuna Foundation also underwrote science to help make its case, in one instance picking up nearly the entire $500,000 cost of a 2005 Harvard Center for Risk Analysis study and using the results to suggest that Americans weren't eating enough fish. The Center for Consumer Freedom, a nonprofit founded by the tobacco industry to fight restaurant smoking bans, similarly rose in tuna's defense, creating a website, FishScam.com, that claims the fda standards are actually overcautious.
Meanwhile, reporters who have written about mercury in tuna have found themselves in hot water with the industry. The National Fisheries Institute and the US Tuna Foundation have waged aggressive and public attacks on people like Marian Burros at the New York Times (who earlier this year published a story warning of mercury in sushi tuna) and Larry Wheeler at USA Today. When I contacted the Fisheries Institute, its spokesman, Gavin Gibbons, first grilled me about whether this story had been prompted by an environmental group (it wasn't) and then warned that all our conversations would be recorded and the transcripts posted on the organization's website, along with any correspondence. In response to my specific questions, Gibbons emailed that linking high blood mercury levels to any kind of symptoms "is an unproven assertion that flies in the face of independent and proven scientific knowledge about canned tuna and all seafood's proven benefits...It is irresponsible to perpetuate anecdotal tales of high seafood consumption causing health concerns when those types of stories contradict published science showing the health benefits of eating fish at least twice per week."
luke lindley is one of the people Gibbons says it would be irresponsible to write about. As an undergrad at Stanford, the now-24-year-old medical student was "deeply immersed" in bodybuilding, so he ate "tuna for breakfast, tuna for lunch, tuna for dinner" for years. In 2003, he began having trouble with his memory. His hair fell out and he suffered gastrointestinal problems so severe he ended up taking a year off med school. Finally—after seeing a news report on mercury in tuna—he asked his doctor to test a sample of his hair. According to another doctor who reviewed the records, it had mercury levels higher than in any patient the doctor had ever seen. "I thought I was eating a low-fat, healthy diet," says Lindley. "As it turned out, I was ingesting enough mercury to make my hair fall out."
Dr. Jane Hightower has made something of a cottage industry out of treating fish consumers suffering from elevated mercury levels. In 2003 the San Francisco physician published a paper in Environmental Health Perspectives after surveying her entire patient load and testing more than 100 people whose questionnaires suggested they consumed a lot of fish. The majority had blood mercury levels well above what the epa considers safe. One was a 10-year-old named Matthew Davis who suffered serious neurological problems his doctors suspected were from the three to six ounces of canned albacore he ate daily. His fingers curled involuntarily, and his hands shook when he tried to write. The problems mostly resolved after he quit eating tuna.
Dr. Michael Gochfeld, a professor in environmental and occupational health sciences at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, says that mercury poisoning from fish is probably underreported because doctors don't know to look for it. His clinic at the medical school, he says, has been seeing more cases—at least half a dozen a year. People come in complaining of slurred speech, clumsiness, and vision problems. "It is usually related to fish," he says.
Yet, like the tuna industry, the fda says there's nothing to worry about. "There are no confirmed cases of adverse effects from methylmercury in commercial fish in the United States," says Stephanie Kwisnek, an fda spokeswoman. "There are infrequent anecdotal reports in the media that are virtually impossible to confirm. The fda does not track them on any kind of a formal basis."
deborah landvik-fellner's Chicken of the Sea lawsuit should have been fairly straightforward. That she ate a lot of canned tuna is indisputable, as is the fact that she had steeply elevated levels of mercury in her blood. Whether mercury caused all of her symptoms, whether Tri-Union ought to be held responsible for the effects of what they call her "abnormal consumption," even the definition of "abnormal," are the kind of disputed facts usually left to a jury. But so far, Landvik-Fellner hasn't come anywhere near a jury—in good part because the Bush fda has worked to protect industry from claims like hers.
In the Landvik-Fellner case, Tri-Union has used an increasingly popular legal strategy, arguing that her claim was "preempted" by federal law. The argument goes like this: If a product is regulated by the federal government, however weakly, consumers shouldn't be allowed to sue—and states should be prohibited from passing regulations or issuing health and safety warnings more stringent than the feds'.
But Tri-Union went one step further. It argued that Landvik-Fellner's case was preempted because the fda had refused to require warning labels on tuna—in other words, when the feds fail to regulate a product, that, too, can preempt state law. It was an argument familiar to top officials at the fda. In fact, Daniel Troy, the agency's chief counsel from 2001 to 2004, was a lawyer who'd spent most of his career in the private sector suing the fda on behalf of drug and food companies. Troy, who was a leading proponent of the preemption doctrine, essentially ran the agency for more than a year before President Bush appointed Lester Crawford, a former vice president of the National Food Processors Association, as fda commissioner. During his tenure, Troy invited big companies to bring him cases in which the agency could help defeat anti-industry lawsuits using the preemption argument. One of those cases involved a suit by the California attorney general's office seeking to force tuna companies to disclose their product's mercury content on the label. A lawyer representing the companies suggested to Troy that a letter from Crawford might help the industry's preemption argument. The lawyer helpfully enclosed a lengthy memo outlining the points the commissioner should include.
In August 2005, a letter precisely hitting all of the tuna lawyer's points arrived on the desk of California attorney general Bill Lockyer. Tuna companies quickly introduced it in court. Barely a month later, Crawford resigned from the fda in connection with criminal charges that he'd misreported his ownership of stock in fda-regulated companies.
But his letter lived on in the courts: In the California case, a lengthy trial featuring various industry spokespeople—including pediatrician Beard, who was paid $5,000 to testify that if people got worried about mercury in tuna, they might eat more junk food—ended with the judge citing Crawford's letter as a key factor in ruling for the tuna companies. And the letter made another appearance in Landvik-Fellner's case: Tri-Union's lawyers have brought it up as evidence that her lawsuit is preempted by federal regulations. After a year of legal wrangling, in January 2007 a US District Court judge agreed with the industry—and once again the ruling cited what the judge called Crawford's "persuasive" letter.
Fellner appealed the case to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, and on August 19, just after this story was published in our print edition, the court handed down a remarkable decision in her favor. A three-judge panel agreed with her arguments that a letter from the FDA commissioner written at the behest of the tuna company's lawyers was not the sort of federal action that could trump the state law. The court also scoffed at the notion that the FDA's advisory on mercury in fish qualified as a federal regulation, which requires formal proceedings, public criticism, and other serious vetting. "[W]e fail to see how an educational campaign might preempt Fellner's lawsuit," the panel wrote.
In fact, the court found that the New Jersey laws that Fellner sued under complemented, rather than conflicted with, the federal guidelines on mercury. And in a conclusion that is no doubt giving the tuna industry fits, the court noted that contrary to the industry's pleas, it would be fairly simple to come up with a warning label that would comply with both the FDA and New Jersey law. That last point may have implications beyond Fellner's case.
The original Proposition 65 litigation in California, brought by the state attorney general to force the tuna companies to put warning labels on tuna cans, is currently on appeal in the California state courts. Oral arguments haven't been scheduled yet, but lawyers in the attorney general's office have already alerted the appellate court of the decision in the Fellner case. The California courts don't have to follow the federal ones, but they usually give them quite a bit of deference. If the California courts do align with the 3rd Circuit, they could open the door to states requiring warning labels about mercury on tuna cans. Fellner, for her part, is thrilled with the outcome. "People are feeding their children tuna fish. There are still a lot of people out there who don't know," she says.
Stephanie Mencimer is a reporter at the Mother Jones Washington, DC, Bureau.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Thousands of Sea Turtles Dead in Baja
Source: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/10/thousands_of_se.php
3,000 sea turtles have washed up dead on the shores of Baja, California in the last five years according to a report published by UC Santa Cruz last week. More below the fold.
The UC Santa Cruz report concluded that the North Pacific loggerhead turtles washing up in Baja are dying due to fishing activity. Turtles are accidentally caught in nets, hooks and other fishing gear. The Baja turtles are experiencing the highest stranding rates related to fishery activity in the world.
The North Pacific loggerhead travels 7,000 miles from Japan to Baja's Big Sur to feed for as many as thirty years before returning to Japan. In the past 10 years, the number of female turtles nesting in Japan has dropped by fifty to eighty percent.
Local fishermen are working with the Mexican government to protect the turtles. Together they plan to create a refuge for them in a designated "hot spot" area where most are harmed.
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