Aubrey Church holds up her favorite fish, a scup, which is a plentiful, local fish she wishes people would eat more of.
By Doreen Leggett
Josh Stoll is steeped in fisheries research and policy and has often heard how the United States imports 90 percent of its seafood.
“Everyone from my mother to members of Congress have referenced that statistic,” said Stoll, an assistant professor in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine. “If you always talk about the problem, there is not really space to imagine something different.”
So, he, and other researchers, Tolulope Oyikeke and Sahir Advani, are giving people that space. The trio recently published a treatise, “Seafood independence is within reach: a multi-scale assessment of seafood self-reliance in the United States,” in the journal Ocean Sustainability.
Using 50 years of consumption and production data, 1970 to 2021, the study shows that although the U.S. is the second largest importer of seafood in the world, we don’t need to import at all: 6.1 billion pounds of the total seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported. The nation produced 8.4 billion pounds in 2020.
We could meet the nation’s seafood appetite with the domestic harvest.
The caveat? Big changes need to be made before we can do so.
“Achieving greater seafood independence would require shifts in consumer behavior, investments in infrastructure and continual adaptation in the face of climate change,” Stoll said.
Aubrey Church, policy director at Fishermen’s Alliance, believes change is possible.
She said the COVID pandemic made people realize the importance of bolstering local and regional domestic seafood systems and many fishermen were fortunate enough to sell directly from Cape docks, parking lots and piers.
“When you support and eat local, you are reducing your carbon footprint and reducing the distance in the supply chain. You’re also making an important connection and relationship with the fishermen who are supplying delicious local seafood,” she said.
Although more people were open to eating more seafood, infrastructure and policy sometimes quashed those opportunities. For example, one reason why it is difficult for fishermen who own smaller businesses to get permits to sell seafood is because regulators are worried about harming the larger export market. Another is that states like Maine will sometimes neglect the smaller ticket items, booms and ice machines for instance, needed for local fishermen while subsidizing enormous cold storage facilities.
“Our current reliance on imports didn’t come out of nowhere,” Stoll said. “We have invested hugely, there is a lot of value in that, but there are a lot of problems too.”
One example involves a crustacean beloved in Maine and Massachusetts.
Stoll said he and his team looked back through decades of news articles that mentioned lobsters in Maine, 7,000 times in one newspaper in 25 years.
They noticed that when there were shocks in the system, people rely on local relationships and buy from who they know. But once the crisis begins to mitigate, the solution government entities often reach for is outside the local supply chain. Stoll said investments are made in trade missions and ways to send more lobster overseas, instead of capitalizing on domestic demand.
Researchers note that over the last 30 years there have been three well-documented disruptions in the lobster fishery that have been widely described as crises. These critical moments were not triggered by declines in domestic lobster abundance, but by sudden price drops in the global seafood economy.
Lobsters are a big part of this region’s edible ethos, but fish such as skate and dogfish are not. The market for them is overseas. One reason is because that is where the United States made marketing investments. It is much easier to buy skate in France, though they are landed by the thousands in Chatham. Icelandic cod is prevalent on the Cape.
The situation is similar in Maine.
“I have a hard time getting access to local seafood. That’s nuts,” Stoll said, even though he is knowledgeable about availability and knows fishermen. It is much harder for the average consumer.
“If we are serious about getting over this seafood deficit that we have, we need to support small-scale community-based fisheries,” he said.
Currently much of the infrastructure promotes global trade, making access to locally sourced seafood challenging.
“If you build superhighways and you have no off-ramps it is hard to get off,” he noted.
Investments in working waterfront access, cold storage and processing, and distribution networks to serve local and regional markets would help bridge the divide, he said.
Stoll’s interest in and respect for commercial fisheries colors his personal and professional life. In 2011 he founded Local Catch Network, a national group that brings together fishermen, researchers and consumers committed to providing local, low-impact, sustainable seafood directly from harvesters.
The group promotes a Seafood Finder that helps people connect with local sources of lobsters, scallops, crab, and other seafood, “from boat to fork.”
Local Catch and Stoll have worked to make sure the United States Department of Agriculture funds the seafood industry, trying to expand on beef, chicken and pork. Stoll’s research analyzed grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 2017 to 2023 and found that seafood-related grants made up 0.5 percent of the total.
“So little of federal money is focused on seafood,” he said. “I think that is problematic.”
Until Stoll’s study was published there hadn’t been any focus on whether domestic seafood could meet the country’s dietary needs. The study showed that different parts of the country have varying success.
Among seven defined regions, only North Pacific (Alaska), New England, and Western Pacific (Hawaii) experienced increased or stable production volume in the last two decades, while other regions exhibited a downward trend.
New England’s highest Regional Self Reliance score was 175 in 1982 but has declined to 36 because of increasing regulations on the industry. For shellfish the number increases to 105. Regional self-reliance is a function of blue food production, species yield, human population and consumption.
Those numbers don’t incorporate potential, such as species whose quota isn’t met (green crabs for example) or the species that fishermen don’t bring in because there is no market for them.
Church said there is still a lot of work that needs to be done besides general seafood marketing to consumers.
“We need to incentivize people to incorporate a diversity of seafood into their diets, including whole fish, or what would be considered traditional bait fish such as scup, which is delicious,” she said.
Church added consumers are picky about the seafood and reach for the familiar. With shifting markets and climate change the fish our parents and grandparents ate are not being landed in high amounts anymore.
“It is imperative that we start to eat a diversity of seafood within our ecosystem, to support fishermen and coastal communities by boosting local demand for the types of species they are catching,” she said. The Fishermen’s Alliance holds events, such as Meet the Fleet, to introduce Cape Codders to fish landed down the street that rarely makes it to their plates.
Stoll said transforming the food system is going to require people to make changes, instead of repeating statistics.
“Let’s talk about the problem and maybe discuss it imaginatively,” he said. “I would like people to read this paper and see a role to play.”