US Salmon Sent to China For Filleting

[otohara]

Pacific salmon swim as far as 2,000 miles to lay their eggs in rivers up and down the Northwest. Once caught, some make a longer journey: 8,000 miles round-trip to China.

Facing growing imports of low-cost seafood, fish processors in the Northwest, including Seattle-based Trident Seafoods, are sending part of their catch of Alaskan salmon or Dungeness crab to China to be filleted or de-shelled before returning to U.S. tables.

"There are 36 pin bones in a salmon and the best way to remove them is by hand," says Charles Bundrant, founder of Trident, which ships about 30 million pounds of its 1.2 billion-pound annual harvest to China for processing. "Something that would cost us $1 per pound labor here, they get it done for 20 cents in China."

Trident and other companies that use Chinese labor say it is a way to protect a Northwest industry under threat from farmed seafood produced by nations such as China, Thailand, Vietnam and Chile.

Imports accounted for 78 percent of the 4.7 billion pounds of seafood Americans consumed last year, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Alaska and Washington have each lost about one-fifth of their processing jobs over the past decade. In Washington, average monthly employment in the industry fell to 6,434 in 2004 from 8,668 in 1994, says Rick Lockhart, a state economist. Alaska's employment dropped to 8,500 last year from 10,400 in 1995, according to the Web site of the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
The industry's big fish


Three of the top four seafood suppliers in the U.S. are privately owned companies based on the West Coast, according to SeaFood Business magazine's 2004 sales rankings.

1. Trident Seafoods (Seattle) $800 million

2. Red Chamber Group (Vernon, Calif.) $793 million

3. (tie) Pacific Seafood Group (Clackamas, Ore.) $700 million

ConAgra's Louis Kemp unit (Omaha, Neb.) $700 million

Source: SeaFood Business

"It's a dying industry in the U.S.," says Tony Neves, senior vice president of Vernon, Calif.-based Red Chamber, the second-biggest U.S. seafood company. "It's a sad reality, but it's a fact."

Clackamas, Ore.-based Pacific Seafood Group, the third-biggest U.S. seafood company, started a trial six months ago to process Dungeness crabs in Qingdao, China. The crab, found from the Aleutian Islands off Alaska to south of San Francisco, is named after the town in Washington where it was first harvested commercially.

Crab shakers in Qingdao get $100 to $150 a month to extract meat from crab shells with pincers — one-tenth what it might cost in the U.S., says John Lin, who oversees new-product development at Pacific's headquarters.

"Because labor is so much more affordable, they can spend more time to take the crab meat out" in China, Lin says. "There's a higher recovery rate."http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002384544_uschinafish16.html

[grannie4peace]

1. that sucks!

[NYC_SKP]

2. Same has been proposed to USDA for chickens.

What's worse is when consumers aren't aware of this because it's not on the label.

I'm totally against it, it's wasteful of fuel used to do the shipping, so not environmentally sound.

But worse, it gives away jobs that could be given to us.

I hate this shit.

[otohara]

18. Outsourcing R Us

We're #1, we're #1.

Opening ourselves to a whole host of unthinkable possibilities - like the quote from Tommy Thompson about terror attacks through our food supply. Wouldn't take much to off millions of us through food, even the stuff we grow ourselves.

We're doomed!

[MineralMan]

3. That blows!

n/t

[fortyfeetunder]

4. Makes me wonder if they get flavor enhanced?

Extra protein in the form of melamine?
Guess I will be buying my fish whole and get the butcher to fillet it when I want it.

[loudsue]

20. I wonder the same thing. Plus, how about the transportation costs

added into all of that? There should be a "wasted-energy-tax" on shipping something out of the country just to keep from having to pay actual living wages to real people so that they can afford to buy the fish.

THIS is where so much of our energy goes, and our greenhouse gasses. We just don't need to keep doing this kind of shit, or at least taxes should be placed on the goods so transported, so that the environmental and job impact costs can be accounted for.

Corporations have gotten so fucking out of hand.

[shanti]

5. this part

"Crab shakers in Qingdao get $100 to $150 a month to extract meat from crab shells with pincers — one-tenth what it might cost in the U.S., says John Lin, who oversees new-product development at Pacific's headquarters."

ok, so 10 times 100/150 = 1000/1500 a month here in the u.s. isn't that, ummm, minimum wage?? the bottom line for greedy american corporations is they won't even pay minimum wage?

:grr: :mad:

[dysfunctional press]

21. it's cheaper than slavery.

keeping slaves would probably cost more than $100-$150 per month apiece.

[DesertFlower]

6. now we can't even filet our own fish?

[otohara]

16. Shit We Can't Even Grow Our Own Hair

U.S. Demand for Human Hair Grows, Used in Wigs, Pizza

FLORIDA CITY, Fla. — Walking into the small Florida City warehouse, Blair Blacker pauses to survey the towering pyramid of canvas bundles, each about the size of a punching bag, that contain the stock-in-trade of his business: human hair.

About 15 tons of it on a recent day, imported from China, neatly pressed into mats and ready to ship to farmers and nursery growers who swear by the horticultural benefits of Blacker's hairy wares.

"If you had told me when I was flying combat helicopters in Vietnam that one day I'd be sitting on 30,000 pounds of human hair," said Blacker, a retired Army colonel-turned-entrepreneur, "I'd have said you were crazy."

The mats stored in southern Miami-Dade County are part of a world marketplace for human hair. Uses range from the obvious, such as false eyelashes and wigs, to the more obscure: it's a common raw-material source for l-cysteine, an amino acid frequently used in baked goods such as pizza dough and bagels.http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,320571,00.html

[csziggy]

24. We are eating human hair?! Ick!

"t's a common raw-material source for l-cysteine, an amino acid frequently used in baked goods such as pizza dough and bagels."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,320571,00.html

I think I will make my own pizzas from scratch from now on. And bagels may stay off my menu unless I can learn to make them!

[DesertFlower]

7. i'd rather pay more for

the fish and have it done here.

[Owl]

8. Same here.

What the hell has happened to us?

[DesertFlower]

9. i don't know.

i just told hubby about it. other countries pay more for food and clothes. we could too and keep the jobs here.

[Selatius]

13. Low pay coupled with a consumer-driven culture led to this outcome.

Our pay has not kept up with rising prices, and we're constantly being bombarded with messages to consume. We are over-leveraged in terms of debt, and we have lost our ability to manufacture the things we need, and we have lost our class identity and constantly divide ourselves along social wedge issues rather than see common cause.

[NashVegas]

28. Safe to Say the Savings Aren't Getting Passed Onto Consumers

Not by much, anyway. A bag of Florida shrimp is about $10, a bag of Vietnamse, about $7.

[Bigmack]

10. I catch a LOT of salmon and crab....

and when I serve it, the pin bones are still in, and the crab is still in the shell.

We don't need to have that shit done for us.

If my guests bitch about the shells or bones (my family knows better), I take note and don't annoy them with crab or salmon again.

[dkofos]

11. They never tell you the cost of transporting the product 8000 miles

to save $.80 a pound in labor costs.

[Selatius]

12. Exactly how much money is spent on shipping the damn fish to China and then back again???

[aejlaw]

22. Cheap labor?

I guess the cheaper labor makes it profitable for the Pacific Seafood Group to ship the fish back and forth.

I wonder what the price on those fish would be, if the costs of removing the green house gasses caused by all that extra shipping were added in?

Maybe a better question might be who is going to buy those fish once they get back here and we've all lost our jobs to out sourcing? :shrug:

[n2doc]

26. exactly why carbon taxes are needed

Tax this useless transportation to death. Saves jobs here, less damage to the environment, and I'll bet the cost doesn't change noticeably. I'll bet they are really doing it to avoid paying health care and having to deal with waste disposal costs.

[HamdenRice]

27. Unfortunately, corporations calculate "marginal costs" like this--->

If you think about how much it would cost you or I to ship a hundred pounds of fish to China in a box with Fedex, it would be a lot of money -- especially considering the fish has to be flown because it has a short shelf life.

But these food shippers have made arrangements with airlines. There is a huge amount of passenger air travel to China, and often there is spare cargo room. The difference between the cost of a 747 fully loaded with passengers and a cargo hold 95% full, and the same thing plus 100 pounds of fish, is basically near zero. That's called "marginal cost," because it only measures the cost of the last additional thing, in this case, pounds of cargo. Airlines can charge trivial amounts to make up the 5% cargo capacity. That's how cheap stuff gets flown around the world.

On the other hand, if the airline added up the cost of operating the airplane and divided it equally between the weight of every passenger and every pound of cargo, the cost would be prohibitive.

That's why, as someone wrote upthread, we need a carbon tax.

[Blue_In_AK]

14. This is really terrible.

Thankfully, we take all our personal salmon right from the river to the freezer, but not everyone can be so lucky. I had no idea that the processing was being handled overseas until I watched Bill Moyers last night. It makes no sense to me -- whatever money is saved in labor costs it seems would be lost to fuel costs. Am I missing something?

[EFerrari]

15. The other night I saw a documentary about the Karuk people here in CA

whose lands were never ceded by treaty.

The Karuk live by, with, and from the Klamath river. One young man talked easily to the interviewer as he was filleting salmon, and then preparing it to be smoked. He was so skillful, I bet he could have done it in his sleep. Young, too. Maybe late 20s.

Reading this story makes me very, very sad.

[BrklynLiberal]

17. Michael Pollan was talking about this last night on Bill Moyers' show.

Bill Moyers was amazed that it was STILL cheaper than having it done in the US.
Pollan said that gives you an idea of how cheap labor is in China.

[Owl]

19. Damn it.

[bertman]

23. Simple solution: buy local from local fishmongers who get whole fish and can filet them

for you if you desire. Same with chickens. Buy local at your farmers' market. Or buy from a food coop or Whole Foods who offer anti-biotic, hormone-free meat.

It will cost you more to buy local but at least you know your money is going to benefit local families and not some too-big-to-fail mega corporation that could give a shit about American workers.

It is astonishing to me to hear the people I know who are lower working class or upper poverty class who think they are getting a bargain by buying cheap crap at WalMart. Even when I explain to them how they are subsidizing shitty pay and non-existent benefits in addition to no health care, they still grin and say something stupid like "Yeah, but I can git it a lot cheaper there."

Dumbed down to be the perfect consumer. Sometimes it seems hopeless.

Edited to say thanks for the excellent post.

[ColbertWatcher]

25. "It's a dying industry in the U.S." Gee, I wonder why. k+r, n/t

[lonestarnot]

29. Face card this industry! Fuckers!