Fisheries hamstrung 

 By 'fresh' market 



Fresh-frozen seafood may someday 

 offer inland consumers good seafood 

 more consistently. It may also help 

 relieve some of the commercial fishing 

 industry's toughest problems. 



Gluts, scarcities and market fluctua- 

 tions have long plagued the industry, 

 especially here in North Carolina, 

 where most of the seafoods are sold 

 whole and unprocessed. 



Sam Thomas, a Sea Grant seafood 

 specialist at the NCSU Seafood 

 Laboratory in Morehead City, says 

 that, for now, seafood prices in the 

 state are governed by the fresh 

 market. Because unfrozen seafood is so 

 difficult to handle, store and transport, 

 distribution is very limited. Often, 

 grocers will save space for only the 

 most familiar species. To get assured 

 supplies at the right times, dealers pay 

 top prices. But when a glut comes, per- 

 fectly good fish are sometimes dumped 

 overboard for want of a buyer. Other 

 times, scarcities among the popular 

 species leave fishermen with nothing to 

 fish for. 



"If you're a fisherman, you may 

 come to the dock one day and get fifty 

 cents a pound for trout," Thomas says. 

 "The next day, you may get twenty. If 

 we had a good market for frozen 

 seafood, the processor could look at a 

 more stable price at his end, and from 

 that, he could probably offer a more 

 stable price to a fisherman." 



Thomas spends much of his time ad- 

 vising seafood processors on how to 

 modernize their plants and improve ef- 

 ficiency and sanitation. He and the Sea 

 Grant marine advisory agents he 

 works with see many very edible 

 species of fish going begging, while 

 fishermen struggle to stay afloat. 



They say a good market for fresh- 

 frozen seafoods might enable the in- 

 dustry to put more variety into the 

 grocer's meat case. 



But Thomas admits the industry 

 has a lot of work to do first. There are 

 few modern commercial freezers in the 

 state, and channels for marketing 

 frozen seafoods don't exist here yet. 



"For the most part, we could offer a 

 better seafood shipment frozen than 

 we can fresh," Thomas says. "It's just 

 going to take a lot of effort to get peo- 

 ple to change their way of doing 

 things." 



Racing to beat the clock 



Time is fresh seafood's enemy, from the minute the 

 catch is made. At the fish house (below), 

 seafood is quickly weighed and packed in ice. 

 Many fish arrive whole at markets, 

 where they're often sold 

 wrapped in newspapers (right). 



Design by Neil Caudle 



