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Crab fishers in Newfoundland and Labrador are sick and tired of being pinched — not by crabs, but by what they feel are unfair industry pricing practices.
What happened: Crab fishing season officially began in Newfoundland last weekend, but fishers who are members of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers Union (FFAW) are staying on dry land, protesting a crab pricing system they feel makes it impossible to earn a living.
- The floor price that fishers have to sell crabs to processors is set at $2.60 per pound for this season. For comparison, the current retail price for a pound of crab in Ottawa and Montréal ranges from $15 to $24.
Catch-up: Last year, crabby crab fishers refused to fish for nearly six weeks over pricing. That strike was ultimately deemed illegal, and the FFAW must pay processors for losses, but it did force the provincial price-setting panel to change the formula for how it sets prices.
So what’s the matter? Well, the price-setting panel ended up choosing a formula different from the one the fishers preferred. The FFAW argues that this new formula still heavily favours processors over fishers, and one critic estimates fishers will lose out on $30 million because of it.
- The executive director of the Association of Seafood Producers has called this “misinformation” and said prices should rise to $3 per pound by the season’s end.
Why it matters: Snow crab is one of Canada’s biggest seafood exports and is growing even more popular. Canada exported a record-shattering ~53,000 metric tonnes of crabs to the U.S. alone last year — a ~56% increase from the annual average between 2018 and 2022.
Bottom line: A prolonged strike could hamper this hot streak as FFAW claims that Newfoundland’s snow crab fishery isn’t just the largest in Canada, it’s the largest in the world.—QH