 Albacore, the American Tuna |
 Natalie Webster has lived with the ups and downs of the tuna fishery all her life. Her father and grandfather skippered tuna boats that delivered to canneries in San Diego, which in those days was dubbed "The Tuna Capital of the World." By the time she married tuna fisherman Jack Webster, the bloom was quickly coming off the rose of San Diego's tuna industry, as cannery after cannery was forced to shut down, sunk by a rising tide of cheap imported canned tuna.
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With the canneries gone by the early 1980s, the fortunes of the West Coast albacore fleet depended largely on the needs of offshore canneries, whose need for fish varied greatly from year to year, as did the price the fishermen would get. "We never knew what price we would get until we returned to the dock, often after a month or more at sea," Natalie recalls, noting that in some years boats lost money and the fleet gradually started to shrink.
Things got worse about 10 years ago, when a flood of bad publicity about mercury in tuna cast a pall over canned tuna sales. Never mind that the small, young albacore fished off the West Coast were low in mercury. That story wasn't getting out and by 2006 albacore fishermen were getting as low as $.60 a pound. So the Websters and a group of other West Coast albacore boats decided to join forces to ensure their fishery had a future. "We knew we had to create a future for the next generation of fishermen," says Jack. "We didn't want our pole-and-troll fishery to go the way of so many other West Coast fisheries."
The answer to sustaining both the fishermen and the fishery was the American Albacore Fishing Association (AAFA), which was formed by eight albacore boats in 2004. One of the first items on AAFA's agenda was relatively straightforward: Get the fishery certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. Since both the pole fishery, which uses live bait, and the troll fishery, which relies on jigs, catch one fish at a time with no bycatch, the AAFA fishery was certified in both the North and South Pacific, becoming the first tuna fishery in the word to get MSC certification. (In recent years, the high price of fuel has greatly reduced the number of West Coast boats that make the annual trek to the South Pacific to fish albacore each winter.)
A somewhat more challenging task was to get a group of independent-minded fishermen to agree to work together so AAFA could serve as a marketing association that worked with buyers and negotiated a fleet-wide price before the season started. "Fishermen are very competitive, so we had to convince them that if they trusted each other and stood together shoulder-to-shoulder they could accomplish so much more," say Natalie, one of AAFA's co-founders and its Director of Operations.
So far, so good. Last summer, AAFA boats, which catch about half the albacore off the West Coast, got $1 a pound for their fish as growing demand, both domestically and from European retailers looking for MSC-certified tuna, has opened up new markets. AAFA has also worked hard at getting the story out that their relatively small, niche fishery, which produces annual landings of about 13,000 metric tons, produces a high quality fish that is worth a premium price. Given that albacore prices are probably headed higher again this summer, they seem to be getting the message across.
"We now have 70 boats in AAFA," says Natalie. "By working together, our fishermen have shown they can have an impact on their business in both a higher price per pound and by creating a sustainable future for their pole-and-troll fishery and their fishing families." While AAFA does not process fish itself, AAFA boats sell fish to many processors who offer MSC-certified frozen and canned albacore. In addition, some AAFA boats process and sell their own catch.
Click here to view AAFA's product on FishChoice.com and look for several other albacore products on FishChoice that come from AAFA fisheries.