Unalaska, AK – American fisheries regulators say they were aware that a seafood-carrying ship that recently stopped in Dutch Harbor had been blacklisted in Europe for illegal fishing, but allowed the vessel to pick up its legal cargo of Alaska pollock there anyway. The tramper Polestar is still in the Moroccan port of Agadir, where it was detained on May 24 at the request of European authorities. In Unalaska, KIAL's Charles Homans reports.

[Clarification, 6/8/07: An official at the National Marine Fisheries Service called KIAL to say she felt the text introduction to this story was misleading, and didn't adequately convey NMFS' and the Coast Guard's reasons for not detaining the Polestar during its stop in Dutch Harbor, namely that the federal government has yet to determine what exact authority they have to do so. On reviewing how KIAL presented the story, we agree that while the story itself was accurate on this point, the introduction was unclear. Posted below is the full text of the story.]

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A $9 million shipment of Alaskan seafood is tied up at a dock in North Africa right now. It was supposed to be delivered to Germany a month ago, but instead it's in limbo, along with the reputation of Alaska pollock as a sustainable seafood.

All that pollock was onboard the Polestar, a tramper vessel owned by Seatrade, which has become a big headache for a lot of people. The Polestar was loaded with pollock from Trident Seafoods in Dutch Harbor earlier this spring, and while that fish was legal, the ship was not it had been placed on a blacklist of vessels involved in illegal fishing after it was caught red-handed by the Icelandic Coast Guard in the North Atlantic last fall. Rebecca Lent, the director of international affairs for the National Marine Fisheries Service, says the Polestar case has become a priority for her agency.

"We are working this particular case literally night and day," Lent says. "We have our embassies overseas working on this, we've got the Department of State working on this one particular case, we are doing our best to ensure the U.S. legal product is taken off the illegal boat and sent to its original destination."

NMFS is negotiating to get the pollock shipment back to Europe onboard a different ship. The pollock carries the sustainability label of the Marine Stewardship Council. That label is one of the main selling points of Alaskan seafood in Europe, and the fact that pollock with the MSC label found its way onto a ship involved in illegal fishing threatens to tarnish its reputation.

MSC International Policy Director Rich Lincoln says the Polestar incident points to possible gaps in his organization's certification process. While the beginning and the end of the fish's journey from the deep sea to the dinner table are carefully vetted for sustainability, the vast middle of the process--how the fish gets from point A to point B--is not. Lincoln says that the next time he meets with the contractors who certify fisheries for MSC, the Polestar case will be on the agenda.

"We'll definitely be talking about this specific case study to make sure that they're asking the questions real specifically about, are there special risks in the shipment process?" he says "Are there potential risks in the storage process? We certainly wouldn't want the program to support vessels that are involved in this kind of operation."

Trident executives won't weigh in on the incident, and Seatrade hasn't returned calls for comment. Rebecca Lent with NMFS says that when the Polestar first arrived in Dutch Harbor, her agency knew the ship was on the blacklist of an international organization that oversees fishing issues in waters off of Western Europe. Because the United States isn't a member of that group, the U.S. Coast Guard inspected the ship in Dutch Harbor but didn't stop it. Lent says the agency wasn't aware of any business the Polestar was involved in at the time, so it didn't notify Trident of the ship's blacklisted status in Europe.

By the time the Polestar finally left Alaska for Germany, the ship had also been blacklisted by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization, a similar group of which the United States is a member, but NMFS still didn't stop the vessel. Lent says that's because the agency's enforcement abilities in these cases are unclear right now--while NMFS was given greater powers under the reauthorized Magnuson Stevens Act, most of them are still tied up in federal rulemaking.

"In the United States we have a due process," she says. "We have to conduct a thorough economic analysis, public review, public hearings, and that's going to take some time. In the meantime, the best we can do is to warn our people in our industry to stay away from these boats, to not do business with them, and I'm certain the news has gotten around about this unfortunate incident."

The North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission, which first blacklisted the Polestar, will be meeting next week to discuss the fate of the ship. The environmental organization Greenpeace, which has been closely following the case, is calling for the Polestar to be scrapped, as a message to others involved in illegal fishing.