With crab season on the line, seafood producers' association digs in its heels on price

The trade association representing Newfoundland and Labrador's seafood processors says each day fishermen keep their boats tied up in the hopes of getting a better crab price is only making an already dire season worse.

Jeff Loder, executive director of the Association of Seafood Producers said Monday the crab market has softened in the past few weeks, and the group will not negotiate a new price with fishermen.

"The market has collapsed. Prices need to reflect that," he said. 

Loder said each day the industry is delayed — with fishermen in the Maritimes and Quebec already out on the water — the worse it is for everyone.

"Snow crab is not selling. There's a glut in inventory," said Loder, speaking for the first time since the provincial price-setting panel set a minimum price of $2.20 Cdn per pound for harvesters, who responded with protests and say they can't afford to fish for that price.

"Every single day that we are not fishing, we are compounding the complexities and the difficulties associated with the snow crab fishery."

The market system encourages competition, he said, and as the market works its way through the inventory, prices should rise.

"That competition will happen, and prices will go up, and there will be incremental and differential payments if the market does go up," he said, adding other provinces' fisheries are the ones getting their product to buyers.

Newfoundland and Labrador producers are at the point where they are considering what will happen if the snow crab fishery doesn't begin immediately, said Loder.

"We cannot employ people and we cannot pay wages when we do not have product coming into plants," he said.

Loder said processors employ roughly 5,000 people in processing plants.

"We need raw material to get those plants going, and to have any chance to compete with our competitors in Atlantic Canada, who are all fishing in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and P.E.I. at $2.25 a pound," he said.

The $2.20 price was set when the market price was $5.75 US — about $7.79 Cdn. It has since dropped to $4.80 US (about $6.50 Cdn). Loder also noted it takes just over 1½ pounds of raw crab to produce one pound of market-value processed crab — so a pound of processed crab actually costs producers $3.38 Cdn per pound. 

Fish, Food & Allied Workers president Greg Pretty wasn't buying the association's warning that the season is slipping away.