Thanks to a first-in-the-Gulf of Mexico designation, Louisiana blue crabs might appear more readily in restaurants and grocery stores across the globe. The designation of blue crab as a “certified sustainable fishery’’ might also fetch the state’s 3,000 blue crab commercial fishers more money by further differentiating their product.
View full sizeIn 2010, a fisherman pulls a good size male blue crab off his net in Slidell.
Louisiana’s blue crab fishery typically comprises nearly 30 percent of the annual U.S. blue crab catch with an average of about 40 million pounds. The Pontchartrain and Terrebonne basins provide the highest portion of these landings, followed closely by Barataria and the Atchafalaya-Teche-Vermilion area.
Louisiana blue crab is the third crab fishery in the United States, and the fourth worldwide, to receive the Marine Stewardship Council’s sustainable certification. Domestically, Louisiana blue crab now joins the Atlantic deep sea crab and the Oregon Dungeness crab fisheries in the program.
Although the council's review focused mainly on pre-BP oil spill statistics, the assessment did point out that "laboratory experiments, testing the effects of various contaminants on blue crabs at different life stages, indicate that, under controlled conditions, blue crab juveniles were extremely tolerant to long-term petroleum aromatic hydrocarbon exposure."
The Marine Stewardship Council is a London-based nonprofit organization formed in 1997 that awards certified fisheries a distinctive MSC-promoted blue ecolabel, a well-recognized logo worldwide that tells consumers that the particular seafood meets the organization’s standards for sustainable, well-managed fisheries. MSC standards meet seafood sustainability requirements as set by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance, and the World Trade Organization.
A few improvements
While the Louisiana blue crab fishery met the MSC standards, there were a few areas where the fishery must improve during its five-year certification period.
For instance, the state must address what it would do if blue crab fishing limits are reached. Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries has said it will create a Blue Crab Fishery Management Plan to address that. House Bill 528, referred to the state Committee on Natural Resources and Environment last week, will give the state Wildlife and Fisheries Commission the authorization to close the crab season if needed “to maintain crabs in sufficient quantities for future harvest.”
The state also must provide more details about bycatch, so Wildlife and Fisheries will design and implement a program to collect information on discarded and retained species from the blue crab fishery.
The Louisiana Crab Task Force asked for the certification and spent $70,800 on the required third-party assessment, which was done by Scientific Certification Systems Inc. of California. The blue crab fishery’s post-oil spill health and numbers are still being examined through the federal Natural Resource Damage Assessment process. Harvest data for 2011 is not yet available. Nonetheless, crab biologists and Louisiana crabbers said that the species generally appears healthy so far and that landing numbers last year appear about average.
Tulane ecologist Caz Taylor, who made national news describing distinctive orange oil droplets found in crabs after the spill, said last week that while “we haven’t figured out what the orange droplets are,” so far there is no indication that it has affected the crab population. Julie Anderson, a Louisiana State University biologist, said her studies of extremely high concentrations of dispersants on blue crabs showed no mortality and no immediate harm.
A mostly normal season
And Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory who is working in the NRDA process, said that if there was any effect on the crab population from the oil spill that it probably would be quite small compared to the changes in the Gulf crab population over time from global climate changes that have raised salinity levels and led to increased predation of the species.
Gary Bauer, who owns Pontchartrain Blue Crab Inc. of Slidell and is chairman of the Crab Task Force, said last year’s crab season was “normal or slightly below normal.’’
Bauer expects the certification to help Louisiana crabbers sell their product.
“Especially in California, Oregon, Washington state and New York, many restaurants out there are claiming 100 percent sustainability on their menus, and so our certification will now allow us to access those markets,” he said. “And it’s not just restaurants, it’s grocery chains.”
In 1999, Whole Foods was one of the first American companies to support and participate in sustainable fishery programs, but now many other large chains are joining in. For instance, Wal-Mart now requires currently uncertified fisheries to develop work plans to achieve MSC certication, or equivalent standards.Safeway and Target also have vowed sustainable seafood by 2015.
Europe, meanwhile, has led the charge on the sustainable seafood movement, with the European Union pushing ecolabelling along with the United Nations. A majority of European grocery stores will sell only such seafood.
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Benjamin Alexander-Bloch can be reached at bbloch@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3321.
