By Tina Comeau
NovaNewsNow.com
Working groups aimed at finding ways to improve the lobster industry in Atlantic Canada will be sinking their claws into their task starting in January.
The working groups will explore the issues of quality grading, shore price setting and branding and promotion. The aim is for the groups to wrap up their work in April, after which time an implementation strategy will be presented to the industry as a whole.
Geoff Irvine, the executive director of the Lobster Council of Canada, foresees some pilot projects first coming out of the work carried out by these groups.
“Maybe an LFA (lobster fishing area) and a bunch of buyers in Nova Scotia decide to try a different way of setting the shore price,” he suggests as an example.
As the season off southwestern Nova Scotia got underway fishermen were fetching a price of $3.25 for their catches.
Prices were a concern heading into the season but there have been other issues as well.
With soft-shelled lobster and mortality issues also affecting the industry somewhat this fall, Irvine says an in-depth look at the quality grading issue is not only timely, but necessary.
He says the industry can’t afford – both literally and figuratively – to be impacted by concerns of low lobster quality.
“Certainly what has happened this fall in southwest Nova Scotia shows us the necessity to figure out quality grading because that impacts that whole industry,” Irvine says, since concerns over poor quality can give an industry a poor reputation.
These working groups set to start their tasks have come about as a result of the release a year ago of a comprehensive examination of the Atlantic lobster industry, which said the woes the industry has been coping with runs deeper than any downturn in the global economy. That report, commission by the Lobster Council of Canada, points to a billion-dollar industry that is disorganized and structured to under perform. These are problems that have always existed, but in more profitable times for the industry no one paid much attention to them. The study warns that the industry cannot carry on with the status quo. And while there is little the Atlantic lobster industry can do about global recessions and currency exchange rates, there is plenty it can do when it comes to marketability and marketing said Gardner Pinfold, the report’s author.
Irvine says since the release of the report it has always been the lobster council’s intention to structure working groups to examine the key areas identified in the report. But, he says, it has taken this long to secure the funding needed.
Five working groups are being struck. Two groups, made up of 40 people, will act as bookends to the process – first getting to work in January and then again at the end of the process, likely in April. Representation on these working groups will include 16 harvesters (which includes aboriginal representation), eight people from live shipping and eight from the processing side of the industry. Rounding out the groups are representatives from DFO and science, the provinces and some brokers.
“In the middle of those two big groups will be three real action focus groups of 15 people,” says Irvine, saying these groups will be made up of experts from within the industry, but also experts in the category fields being explored. For instance, in the seafood branding working group will be some people who have an expertise in branding that may not even be seafood orientated. Pete Luckett, a fruit and vegetable entrepreneur who has enjoyed massive success in the Maritimes with his Pete’s Frootique’s specialty grocery stores, is an example of someone outside of the industry who is being called upon for his insight and knowledge.
In the shore price setting working group, Irvine says, there will be people from the Magdalen Islands and Newfoundland who have been successful in implementing minimum price systems.
“They can speak to how it works and how it doesn’t work,” says Irvine.
He says the key to all of the work that lies ahead will be bringing it back to the industry through town hall meetings, online sources and the media.
“We will have to see how ready the industry is to change and to embrace some of these things,” he said.
