Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Beef prices at 28-year high:  An opportunity for increasing U.S. seafood consumption?
Recently the USDA announced that beef prices (adjusted for inflation) are at the highest levels since 1987.  This is a wonderful opportunity for the U.S. per capita consumption of seafood to advance.  U.S. seafood consumption has declined each year since 2006 and now may be the perfect opportunity to reverse this trend!   

Actions we can all initiate and support to take advantage of this opportunity:

·         Champion competitively priced seafood products

·         Champion consistent quality and consumer friendly value added products

·         Strongly promote the essential nutritional aspects that are unique to seafood

·         Push seafood as the most environmentally sustainable animal protein in the world


With historically high beef prices and near record price levels for pork and chicken, the seafood industry has a great opportunity to gain more recognition as the healthiest and most environmentally sustainable animal protein on the planet.  There may be no better time than now to promote the U.S. consumption of seafood!

Please share your ideas how we can all work together to advance the U.S. per capita consumption of seafood.     

Sincerely, Dave Glaubke

Director of Sustainability Issues

Monday, April 7, 2014


A New Era of Ubiquitous High-Tech Sensors Will Transform Sustainable Seafood Practices and Policies

We already have an enormous number of sensors in our homes, cars, cities, rural areas, oceans, and even high overhead in satellites that measure a myriad of factors such as temperature, pressure, light, sound, chemical composition, movement, radiation, and even gravity!  However, we are now entering a new era where sensors will have much more advanced capabilities, be smaller and cheaper, and be deployed everywhere.  This brave new world will be forever filled with billions and billions of sensors that will monitor and collect vast amounts of data about every aspect of our lives from our personal health to changes in our natural environment. 

While this new era of ubiquitous sensors will have both negative and positive ramifications, it will certainly be overwhelmingly positive for the advancement of sustainable seafood production.  The old adage that you cannot improve something if you cannot measure it, certainly holds true for all aspects of our seafood sustainability goals and aspirations.  This highly advanced sensor-filled world will transform current sustainable seafood practices and policies as we struggle to confront the rapidly occurring man-made changes of global warming, ocean acidification, and aquatic eutrophication that so severely impact both wild fisheries and aquaculture.  

In this new era, these sensors will produce huge quantities of data as they monitor not only fishery and aquaculture biomasses, but also their surrounding environmental parameters.   These specifically targeted sensor data will have unprecedented utility because spatial, temporal, compositional, and behavioral measurements will have a never before seen degree of accuracy and relevancy.   This flow of data will be in real-time, as this sensor-filled world will be connected instantaneously by the “internet of things” (IoT).  Just as amazing as this, there will be the computer power and data methods available to analyze this vast number of measurements to discover never before seen correlations between fisheries, their environment, and the demand parameters placed upon fisheries and aquaculture for our sustenance.  Armed with these new enhanced real-time data, fishery and aquaculture practices and policies will become much more responsive and predictive in nature. 

Technologically advanced real-time optical, sonic, and GPS sensors will monitor all the lifecycle stages of fishery biomasses and farmed seafood.  In addition, real-time monitoring of fishing vessels’ catch compositions, quantities, locations, discards, and habitat and endangered species impacts will become the norm and will greatly reduce the need for onboard observers.  Sensor use in aquaculture will become affordable and instrumental in advancing best practices to maximize input efficiencies, animal health, and to reduce effluents and other negative environmental impacts.

These new era sensors will become smaller and more robust.  They will routinely be hitching rides on the bodies of wild and farmed fish, ocean currents, fishing gear, pond surfaces, and on many yet unimagined substrates.  Miniature lens-less cameras, sonic, and other sensors will be better able to map the oceans’ plankton abundance in real-time.  This will provide insights into how man-made changes in the biogeochemical and geophysical parameters of Earth affect this foundational link in the marine food chain.  These insights will help transform sustainable seafood practices and policies to embrace a much more holistic perspective.  This will help bring to light the absolute need to confront the growing problems of global warming, ocean acidification, and aquatic eutrophication in order to protect the future of both wild fisheries and aquaculture.
    
This new era of ubiquitous sensors will help broaden our current concept of individual ecosystem approaches to fisheries and aquaculture management to an even more enhanced holistic perspective based on the entire biosphere approach.  Nothing helps explains this broader concept better than to simply observe how the two biogeochemical cycles of carbon and nitrogen have been thrown off-kilter by our massive production of CO2, by the burning of fossil fuels, and by our massive production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.  These two human activities are unfortunately increasing global warming, ocean acidification and aquatic eutrophication.  However, the burning of fossil fuels and the production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers have been absolutely monumental in the course of human history because they have made it possible for over 7 billion of us to be alive today (2 billion of us in 1930).  These two transformative technological accomplishments have also allowed us to enjoy never before seen high levels of wellbeing.  In this coming sensor-filled world, high-tech sensors will be monitoring all the critical points along the carbon and nitrogen recycling pathways.  By doing so, they will detect changes in a vast variety of variables such as ocean pH and eutrophication levels in real-time. These highly advanced and cost effective sensors will further help usher in this more holistic concept of the biosphere approach to sustainable and responsible seafood production.

Massive amounts of sensor data will also be collected in real-time from the geophysical processes of weather, ocean circulation, volcanos, seismology, rising sea levels (due to global warming), and from multiple points along the global hydrologic cycle.    These additional data will further help drive acceptance of the holistic concept that Earth’s biogeochemical and geophysical processes, that humans can indeed throw off-kilter, are the ultimate determinants of the future of sustainable seafood production.

This coming new era of high-tech ubiquitous sensors will help foster the creation of tools and policies that will aggressively work to correct, mitigate, and prevent the negative man-made consequences of global warming, ocean acidification, and aquatic dead zones that so severely impact our wild fisheries and aquaculture. The negative impacts of CO2 emissions and eutrophication are recent phenomena created by humanity’s technological ingenuity.  This very same technological inventiveness will also provide the solutions to these problems and sensors will play a defining role as we boldly confront the negative consequences of our own success as the world’s most dominant species.

One last prediction concerning personal wearable sensors:  In this coming new era, advanced personal health sensors will tell us when our omega 3 and selenium levels are low and then immediately locate and direct us to the nearest restaurant for some sustainable seafood!  This will be yet another overwhelmingly positive ramification in this soon to arrive brave new world of ubiquitous sensors.