Friday, March 9, 2012

The big show

The place to be this weekend is Boston.

The International Boston Seafood Show, running Sunday through Tuesday, is a giant exhibition — one that many in Alaska's fishing industry find well worth the transcontinental flight.

It's a must event for seafood marketers and dealmakers.

No surprise, then, to find the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute among the show's exhibitors, right there with the Alabama Seafood Marketing Commission, the U.S. Catfish Institute, the Norwegian Seafood Council and many others.

Top Alaska seafood processors such as Trident, Icicle, Peter Pan and Ocean Beauty will be there, too, along with competitors like salmon farming giant Marine Harvest.

The show also features a slate of panel discussions.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, will deliver opening remarks for a panel on "Seafood Jobs in America."

Another panel will feature aquaculture consultant John Forster. You might recall he once wrote a rather ominous report for the state of Alaska on halibut farming.

The show website offers this description of Forster's planned talk:

Through a collaborative effort among academia, officials, farmers and financiers, Chile's salmon aquaculture industry has made a strong recovery from the impacts of a major disease outbreak. Forster will describe how lessons learned there can be proactively applied in other regions.

Sounds interesting. Too bad Deckboss will be stuck here in the Anchorage snow.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Alabama mystery seafood, Catfish goo Institute, Norwegian salmon mush pushers, uhhhh.... yum-yum, coming to a Walmart near you.

Anonymous said...

Joe Kyle will be missed. For years he went there on the tit and it produced nothing for his clients. Happy, happy.

Anonymous said...

@ Anonymous, Aquaculture is the logical next step in our progressive efforts to feed the growing world's population. There are simply too few fish and too many people to feed. Wild resources are being depleted at such rates as are borderline criminal. I grew up in the Alaska Salmon Industry and can speak to the depletion of natural fisheries in that area as a direct result of overfishing, with confidence. We as humans should be reprimanded for our actions and do everything in our power to limit the destructive nature of our harvesting techniques. Never before has such a need for aquaculture been so overlooked by those in power. PLEASE write your senators, leave Wild Fisheries in Alaska to our future generations, rather than destroying it for immediate profit. We should be ashamed of our actions, and promote aquaculture immediately to reduce the effects of overfishing worldwide.