KNOW YOUR FISHER
Local seafood networks thriving during COVID-19
Joel and Melissa Collier had just finished harvesting scallops for the season when the pandemic hit and global seafood markets crashed.
As Melissa recalls in an episode of Social Fishtancing, a podcast focusing on how fishers in Canada and the United States have been affected by the pandemic, scrambling to find buyers for their scallops during the early days of COVID-19 was “terrifying.”
Sequestering their catch indefinitely in cold storage would come at a cost to the Courtenay, B.C. family; letting it go to waste was unimaginable. “That’s a fisherman’s nightmare,” she said. “I would have rather left it in the water than put it to waste any day.”
After struggling to find new ways to sell their seafood, the Colliers partnered with Skipper Otto, a community-supported fishery based in Vancouver. Through its share-based model, their scallop business is now performing better than it did pre-pandemic.
Many may be aware of community-supported agriculture (CSA), a “know-your-farmer” subscription system connecting producers with consumers. But community-supported fisheries — built on direct relationships between harvesters and customers — have been operating on the fringes. Until the pandemic happened.
While the global seafood system wavered during the first six months of the pandemic, local alternatives such as community-supported fisheries experienced unprecedented growth, according to a new study led by the University of Maine and the University of Guelph, and published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
“I have been working with fishing communities for the last decade, thinking about alternative and community-based approaches to seafood distribution. It always felt a little bit like a niche thing, and then COVID-19 happened,” says lead researcher Joshua Stoll, professor of marine policy at the University of Maine. “The entire world started to question the resilience and viability of our global food systems. And suddenly everyone was thinking about local food.”
Philip Loring, holder of the Arrell Chair in Food, Policy and Society at the University of Guelph, saw the study as an opportunity to do formal research on the areas he and fellow study co-authors Hannah Harrison and Emily De Sousa had been exploring while producing their Social Fishtancing podcast. The alternative seafood network sector is small but growing, he says, with more than 500 operators in Canada and the U.S.
The spotlight may have been on toilet paper shortages in the early days of the pandemic, but supply of fish and seafood was also disrupted. Prior to COVID-19, Loring says, Canadian fisheries were oriented around export. Consumption, on the other hand, centred on imports and people ate most of their seafood at restaurants. During rounds of restaurant shutdowns, an important market closed for small-scale fisheries, which were simultaneously affected by a dwindling export market.
But Canadians’ interest in seafood didn’t wane when restaurants closed their doors. “The rapid change in demand, that all of a sudden people were searching (online), indicates that Canadians are actually more interested in seafood than the market has been giving them credit for,” says Loring.
Drawing on direct relationships and building on core values, the study found, alternative seafood networks were able to adapt quickly to this increased demand, and local fishers were able to continue selling their catch. Their findings highlight the resilience of alternative seafood networks, the researchers say, but also the importance of diversity in food systems.
Alternative seafood networks were primed to fill the void left by faltering global seafood systems in large part because they were accustomed to connecting with consumers outside of the mainstream, Loring explains. Some of them already had experience with social media and direct marketing, and had established relationships they could draw on.
“Because you’re talking about operators who are already trying to innovate and do things differently, they have this culture of a willingness to do things differently,” says Loring.
Stoll attributes this ability to adapt primarily to relationships: between harvesters and the consumers who pre-purchase their catch; between network operators and fishers, and the processors who cut the fish.
“If you’re building a business model on relationships rather than transactions, then you have these closer lines of communication, you have trust from community, you have a desire for people to invest in you and the work that you’re doing,” says Stoll.
These relationships extended to the research itself, which was co-authored by representatives of 12 seafood companies in Canada and the U.S., including Melissa Collier, co-owner of West Coast Wild Scallops, and Sonia Strobel, cofounder and CEO of Skipper Otto.
Strobel says their community-supported fishery has “absolutely thrived” over the past year. Skipper Otto has seen a 125 per cent increase in members since 2019 (2,800 to 6,300 at time of writing) and a 52 per cent increase in fishing families (21 in 2019 to 32 in 2020). She sees personal interactions as being central to their success.
“Fishing families came to us and said that their other buyers were dropping their price by twothirds of what it was the previous year because of the pandemic. But we were able to keep our prices the same as they ever had been. So there’s that connection, that loyalty,” says Strobel. “And we had members writing letters to fishing families. Literally hundreds of letters to say, ‘Thank you. What you’re doing is meaningful.’”
In Canada and the U.S., some of the first alternative seafood networks emerged after the global financial crisis of 2008, says Stoll. With short supply chains, transparent harvesting methods and clearly articulated values, these alternative models are in stark contrast to the industrial seafood industry — its lengthy, shadowy supply chains, issues with human rights abuses and confusion around the veracity of sustainability labels.
“In some ways, these systems are a response to globalization, to the opaqueness, to these bad narratives and these bad issues that are happening in the broader seafood system. And saying, ‘Well actually, here’s an alternative way for you to access your seafood,’” says Stoll. “You know the harvester, you know how they’re operating, you know what fisheries they’re participating in.”
Share-based approaches are reciprocal, Loring adds. Because members are buying shares upfront, they’re making an investment in the fisher at the start of their season, which results in economic certainty and stability. In exchange, members benefit from access to local, ethically sourced food.
“The fisheries that we’re working with, they value these high-quality connections with people in their communities. They value these high-quality relationships with the people who work on their boats. And they value and maintain really high-quality relationships with the environment and the fisheries themselves,” says Loring.
With all of the challenges people have faced during the pandemic, the strength of alternative seafood networks is a “bright spot,” says Stoll.
“It speaks to the resilience and the ingenuity and the creativity of a lot of these small-scale operators. And it has provided a way for people to connect … during a time when we haven’t been able to have many social connections,” he laughs. “I was talking to a fisherman a few months ago. He described his involvement in direct marketing as psychological nourishment: ‘This is so important for me. I get to see people who are thankful for what I’m doing. And that is the value.’”