Coalition looks to shore up U.S. seafood marketing

The U.S. maintains a $9.36 billion trade deficit in seafood, according to government reports for 2009, the last full year of published figures by the US Commerce Department.

If there is a silver lining behind the figures — they show exports of only $3.74 billion against imports of $13.10 million, the largest portion from China — it is that the constraints of U.S. output derive largely from intense conservation efforts here in U.S. waters.

Those have made the U.S. the global leader in fisheries management policies that foster sustainable stocks, as federal fisheries administrator Eric Schwaab asserted in multiple appearances during this week's International Boston Seafood Show.

But a dedicated fund for marketing domestic seafood products that Congress ordered drawn from the hundreds of millions of dollars collected in import tariffs on fish products has never materialized.

And the geography of fishing, in regions around three sides of the nation in a 10,000 mile necklace from Maine to the Alaska — plus the fragmentation of the industry into gear, boat, target stock, wild and aqua-cultured sectors in fresh and saltwater — have all but ensured until now that the industry spoke more like beer line than a choir, putting marketers at a distinct disadvantage.

It was a lesson that then-Gloucester Mayor John Bell learned in 2004, when, on a whim and without a nickel for marketing, he sought to whip up some attention for Gloucester and New England's iconic fish and posted on the city's Web site the claim that cod was "the other white meat."

Within six days, the National Pork Board, backed by a $51 million marketing budget, had registered a legal objection on behalf of its trademark. And the expropriation of the phrase that has helped sustain the $13 billion pork industry had been expunged — after the gambit generated a flurry or attention.

"Their lawyer called our lawyer," Bell explained.

While political and legal battles rage in Congress and the federal courts to halt or slow the Obama administration's determination to convert weakened fishing industry sectors into commodities markets, a nationwide coalition of seafood processors, including Massachusetts and New England interests, has established a unified program for a dependable national Seafood Marketing Fund.

"We're on a shoestring budget," said Beth Casoni of the Massachusetts Lobstermen's Association, which represents a roughly $40 million industry sector, a 10th the size of Maine's. "Any funds from the seafood marketing coalition would help."

"I do think that it needs to be done," said Monte Rome, owner of Intershell, the Gloucester-based niche market distributor of shellfood product, including the exporting of monkfish livers to Japan.

The coalition is based in Alaska where a prototype program for salmon, mixing state and industry contributions totaling $116 million over five years, proved its worth, according to the business plan of the National Seafood Marketing Coalition. The coalition has a $100 million a year goal, and used the three-day seafood show to network within the industry and potential political allies — including Sen. John Kerry and Rep. Barney Frank.

Kerry is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which finds itself with political leverage since President Obama's decision to nominate Commerce Secretary Gary Locke as the next ambassador to China, the dominant exporter of seafood to the U.S.

Frank and Sen. Scott Brown have separately suggested that the short-term circumstances are ideal for hard bargaining with the administration, whose fisheries policies are seen by many as tailored by anti-fishing activists in a coalition of environmental organizations and foundations.

Foundations have spent more than $400 million in recent years to influence federal fisheries policies, according to data published last month by industry analyst Nils Stolpe.

The most immediate challenge facing the industry is the green mantra that buying domestic caught wild seafood is ethically dubious, based on widely disputed claims of ecologically destructive gear and supposedly vanishing species — a claim that runs contrary to NOAA's own statistics on fish stocks.

Yet green-generated fears are just the beginning of the marketing challenge.

Others include price — even in Gloucester and New Bedford supermarkets, where imported frozen products dominate the display cases. On a recent day, frozen cod from Russia was selling at about one third the price of day-boat landed fresh cod the Market Basket at Gloucester Crossing.

"Cod fish is a great concern," said Rome.

Underpriced imports bedevil U.S. telapia farmers in the heartland in the same way.

These unifying problems are a driver in the effort to forge a single voice to promote for U.S. seafood products.

At this early stage, the National Seafood Marketing Coalition has close to 60 members across the range of businesses, groups, ports, even counties and industry sectors in all regions.

The coalition proposes to segment into regions with representative governing boards.

The goal is a $100 million marketing budget, derived from sources to be determined. That would give the seafood industry rough parity with the beef industry, which collectively raises $1 for every head of cattle taken for marketing purposes.

But the fishing industry's first choice, according to the pro forma for the program floated at the seafood show in Boston this week, is a designated revenue stream out of the seafood product import tariff revenues.

That idea was first hatched in 1954 by then-U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy, who described a Saltonstall-Kennedy Fishery Fund "to "to aid research and market development in the fishing industry" through a bill filed with his colleague, Sen. Leverett Saltonstall.

President Eisenhower signed the act that July 1, but tariff revenues have not been steered into fisheries marketing for several years, records show.

Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.

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