SeaFood Business

MAY 2014

SeaFood Business is the global trusted authority for seafood buyers and sellers. We are the seafood industry's leading trade magazine with more than 30 years of experience. Our coverage is based on the "business" of buying and selling seafood.

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Point of View Man-made climate change: The ultimate threat to sustainable fsheries unifying acknowledgement will humanity be able to work as one to create the needed solutions to this ultimate and overriding threat to the sustainability of our current and future fsheries. David Glaubke is director of sustainability initiatives for Sea Port Products Corp. in Kirkland, Wash. Glaubke's career spans over 30 years participating in the distribution, production, marketing and aquaculture sectors of the seafood industry. BY DAVID GLAUBKE T he United Nations In- tergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) comprised of Nobel Prize-winning scientists re- cently reported that ocean warming and acidifcation due to climate change have the potential to devastate the current productive capacities of our oceans. Never before has the U.N. put out such a strongly worded warning concerning such risks. Climate change caused by CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels is the ultimate threat to the long-term sustainability of our fsheries. In light of this IPCC report, it is fnally time for the worldwide seafood in- dustry, governments, NGOs and all fossil fuel energy com- panies to unequivocally ac- knowledge that this threat is real. All the current eforts to manage fsheries for sustain- ability will be for naught and seem very narrow-minded if we cannot uniformly ac- knowledge this fact. As part of this acknowl- edgement process, we should not ignore the yearly world- wide occurrences of more than 400 marine dead zones caused by agricultural run- ofs containing synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, which are dependent upon fossil fuels for their production. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and the burning of fossil fu- els have successfully worked together to enable our world population to rapidly ex- pand. In short, our world population sprung forth from our ability to utilize fossil fuels and to create syn- thetic nitrogen for the fertil- ization of our crops. No other two technological advancements in the course of human history have been more fundamental in making it possible for our world popu- lation to have exploded from less than 2 billion in 1930 to more than 7 billion in 2014! Today more than 50 percent of the nitrogen in the muscle tissues of every single person on Earth comes from synthet- ically produced nitrogen. Tis fact is anything but trivial: Without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, half of everyone's family would not be living to- day. Unfortunately, these two monumental technological achievements have also pro- duced the negative unintend- ed consequences that threaten our oceans and fsheries. Some examples of these unintended negative con- sequences: Ocean acidifca- tion has impeded the proper development of commercial shellfsh larvae and certain calciferous plankton species throughout the world; more than 400 marine dead zones around the globe are killing massive quantities of ocean life very year; and rising ocean temperatures are causing cer- tain fsheries to shift to cooler waters or to simply disappear as exemplifed by some of our North Atlantic cod stocks. Examples of highly likely future negative consequences IPCC highlighted: Increased ocean acidifcation will dis- rupt the entire marine food chain; higher sea levels and temperatures will cause the redistribution of fsheries and plankton toward the poles and drive important tropical fsheries to extinction. So, what should we do? Now is the time for the entire seafood industry, NGOs, the oil, gas and coal industries and all of the governments of the world to immediately and unequivocally acknowledge that the risks associated with man-made climate change are real. Only after this U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE SEAFOOD INSPECTION PROGRAM Your global inspection solution! Third Party Verifications HACCP Imports/Exports Inspections/Grading Certifications Laboratory Services Training Consultations & System Development Call Kimberly Young (800) 422-2750 1315 East West Highway Silver Spring, MD 20910 Phone: (301) 427-8300 Fax: (301) 713-1081 Visit us online at www.seafoodbusiness.com May 2014 SeaFood Business 5 "Climate change … is the ultimate threat to the long-term sustainability of our fisheries." 5_POV_may.indd 5 4/16/14 8:43 AM

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