N.L. scratches decades-old rule preventing direct sale of local fish

The Newfoundland and Labrador government announced changes this week to provincial regulations that now allow chefs and consumers to purchase seafood directly from local fish harvesters, eliminating a decades-old prohibition and injecting new life in the fisheries.

The changes to regulations under the Fish Inspection Act and Food Premises Act mean that seafood fishers in the province can now sell finfish, live crustaceans, squid, seal meat, and scallop meat to chefs and individuals directly from their wharves or fishing establishment. Under the new regulations, restaurants can acquire a $50 a year buyer’s licence that allows them to purchase up to 300 pounds per species each week directly from fish harvesters. There are no limits on fish sold to individuals for personal consumption.

“We recognize that there has been an appetite for change to a decades-old policy that amounted to a blanket prohibition on the direct sale of fish throughout the province,” Vaughn Granter, the province’s fisheries minister, said during Tuesday’s announcement. “We have listened to the call for change and acted to implement a new policy that we believe is fair and balances the interests of various stakeholders in the industry.”

The move seems like an obvious one for a province known for both its fishery and forging a post-cod future built in part on tourism. But yesterday’s announcement came five years after a government-commissioned report by Eric Dunne Consulting Initiatives recommended the change in regulations and after a lot of discussion between multiple affected parties, including the restaurant industry, the tourism industry, seafood producers, fish processors, unions and government officials.

The inability for locals and chefs to purchase directly from the people catching seafood was a significant topic of discussion when the Terroir Symposium, a gathering of chefs and foodies, held an event in St. John’s in May.

At one symposium panel, Ned Bell, executive chef at Four Seasons in Vancouver and founder of Chefs For Oceans, said his major takeaway from the event was that a chef like him, working in Newfoundland and Labrador, couldn’t walk down to the wharf and purchase seafood to serve in his restaurant. Chefs are willing to pay a premium for that kind of product, Bell said, and customers will pay a premium to eat it.

“That seems to be a huge hole in the system,” he said at the time.

The announcement is a welcome one that accounts for the province’s current realities without breaking down a system that long existed to protect fish harvesters, Nancy Brace, executive director of the Restaurant Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, tells Yahoo Canada News.

“When you put the rules in the context of what they were put in place for at the time they were put in place, they weren’t weird,” Brace says about the regulations that kept Newfoundlanders and Labradorians from purchasing whole seafood directly from fish harvesters.

The rules existed to ensure fishermen received a fair price for their product, but as the province’s restaurant and tourism industries have grown they also prevented chefs from taking full advantage of the seafood just off shore.

At the same time, the inability to purchase directly from fish harvesters may have hampered seafood consumption in a province where the word “fish” was once synonymous with the cod that was placed under moratorium in the early 1990s. Fishing is still big business — Newfoundland and Labrador exported $765.5 million worth of seafood in 2012, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada. But the vast majority of what is caught is exported frozen.

The province’s fish harvesters and growing aquaculture industry are now working to brand the province’s seafood and make it easier for locals and tourists alike to seek out lobster, halibut, mussels and other species caught or farmed in the nearby North Atlantic. For example, a tagging initiative on Newfoundland and Labrador lobster allows consumers to learn exactly which fish harvester caught their meal, and where it came out of the ocean. Newfoundland and Labrador fisheries have also sought out sustainability regulations for their seafood products, like MSC certification for wild Atlantic prawns and organic certification for farmed blue mussels.

But on top of how the move fits into the government’s new approach to local fisheries, it also could increase food security in the province. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians living in communities without a local fish retailer should now have new options for purchasing fresh, locally caught seafood, Granter said during the announcement.

“Individuals in these areas will now be allowed to purchase directly from harvesters,” he said.

And while Brace understands the concerns of fish retailers about lost sales, she says that the amount of fish this will affect is ultimately a small fraction of the tens of thousands of pounds caught here every year.

“When it all comes out in the wash, in actual fact it may help their businesses,” she says, “If more fish is more available more people will be eating fish and will be looking for fish when maybe now they’re not.”