Why Aquaculture Has Reasons for Optimism Coming out of the Pandemic

Hundreds of aquaculturists descended upon Portland, Maine, last week for the Northeast Aquaculture Conference & Exhibition – and for most of them it was long overdue.

“It’s sort of like getting the band back together again,” said Michael Rubino of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as he surveyed the crowd during his welcome address. “It feels great.”

The popular biennial conference was last held in 2019. The 2021 event had to be scrapped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was later rescheduled for January 2022 but had to be postponed again to April as the Omicron variant swept through the United States.

It sold out, nonetheless.

The difficulties faced by event organizers over the last couple of years are emblematic of what the U.S. aquaculture industry endured over the same period.

“2020 was a year that turned everything upside down,” said Rubino, NOAA’s senior advisor for seafood strategy. “You know the story. Everything shut down. Restaurants, trade, shipping. We had trouble finding labor. It was a rough time.”

But Rubino thinks the forced downtime gave everyone involved in seafood production a rare opportunity to step back and take a broad, objective look at the industry.

“COVID also forced us to think about all of these systemic issues in U.S. seafood,” he said. “The whole infrastructure along the seafood value chain is old, from boats to processing. All that needs reinvestment, so COVID is really prompting a rethinking in the seafood industry about reshoring, globalization, where supplies are coming from, what are the options.”

Silver linings

According to Rubino, three “silver linings” emerged in the wake of the pandemic:

• The development of new markets such as dockside sales, farmers markets and direct delivery.
• Seafood buyers becoming more concerned with sustainability, buying local and understanding where their seafood comes from.
• Customers taking note of the hardworking people who help put seafood on the table or in stores.

All of those could prove a boon to the U.S. aquaculture industry.

“We have a very good story to tell coming out of COVID,” he said. “Because of local and regional [production]. Because there’s a great people story in aquaculture. So that provides a lot of optimism.”

Meanwhile, federal regulators used the pandemic time to hunker down and work on a long overdue update to the National Aquaculture Development Plan – the first since 1983.

“You can be skeptical about plans and strategies that go sit on shelves and never happen,” said Rubino. “But the idea is that these are actually what drive budgets, what drive priorities, what are driving staffing levels. They also depend on your feedback, input and support, so you do have to go to your members of Congress, your state legislatures, your neighbors and others and say ‘This is an important activity. This is important to the country, this is important to nutrition, it’s important to jobs and it’s important to the environment.’”

It was a message NACE attendees were happy to hear – especially in person with their industry colleagues and friends sitting beside them.