Tom Seaman, editorial director of Undercurrent News, brings you a roundup of the main stories from the previous week

Last week, Undercurrent was reporting live from two major industry events, one focused on Ecuador shrimp and the other on the global whitefish sector. 

During the Groundfish Forum, held this year in the US Pacific Northwest city of Seattle, Washington, Einar Gustafsson, the executive advisor and incoming CEO of American Seafoods Group (ASG), gave Undercurrent an exclusive interview. 

ASG has engaged a Nordic naval architect to design a "next-generation" pollock and Pacific hake factory trawler while also looking at upstream acquisitions. The company has also just re-financed its debt, giving it the strong balance sheet needed to embark on these expansion programs. 

The global supply of wild-caught whitefish is set to fall slightly in 2023 to 6.921 million metric tons, according to the Groundfish Forum forecast. Among the notable findings: pollock catches are expected to tick up slightly by 0.3% as a projected rise in US landings offsets a coming decline in Russian output. 

A possible increase in the US pollock quota was a talking point during the forum. Not all the numbers are in, the data hasn't been fully analyzed and the models aren't yet complete, but it's looking more and more like the assessment used to determine 2022 catch levels for pollock in the Eastern Bering Sea underestimated the true size of the biomass [...]