Maryland Seafood Company Promotes Size Regs on Asian Crabs

Male Asian Blue Crab - Portunus pelagicus

Rules aim to preserve Asian blue crabs

A Salisbury-based seafood company's partnership in a project to preserve crabs in Asian waters should guarantee quality crab-meat on every plate in America.

Handy International, born in Crisfield as the John T. Handy Co. more than a century ago, is partnering with a dozen other U.S. importers of crabmeat from Indonesia and the Philippines in a crab sustainability initiative designed to end the harvesting of undersized blue swimming crabs.

The importers don't want what happened to the blue crab population off and near Crisfield in the Chesapeake Bay to happen in southeast Asian waters, said Brendan Sweeny, director of operations at Handy.

The initiative is a sore reminder that importers no longer claim that the Somerset County waterman's hamlet of Crisfield as "The Crab Capital of the World."

"The Chesapeake Bay region is well known for its crab and is the birthplace of the swimming crab meat industry in the United States," said Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the NFI Crab Council. "Producers surrounding the Chesapeake Bay and other coastal regions continue to supply crab products to customers around the world."

But over the past 20 years, these crab products became so popular with consumers that the regional supply could not keep up with demand, Gibbons said. So a new industry was pioneered in the early 1990s around the blue swimming crab resource in Southeast Asia.

The importers who make up the membership of the Crab Council of the National Fisheries Institute have begun, July 1 to enforce a self-imposed restriction on the minimum catch size for crabs harvested in the Asian countries -- primary import markets for council members...

I'm still trying to figure out if this is an honest attempt to protect the Asian Blue Crab from over exploitation (would that they had been that proactive for the Blue Crab in the bay), or if this is an attempt to manipulate the market to get higher prices.  If its the former, the size is set too small.  The size limit in the US is 5 inches, and the limit is clearly not sufficient in itself to prevent overfishing.  The proposed number in Asia is a little over 3 inches (8 cm).  Given the poor enforcement in Asia, and the fact that China is a significant market for the crabs, it's unlikely to have the desired fisheries effects.