Northern catch a bargain-basement feast for China's New Year revellers

The topsy-turbot world of fishonomics

By Arthur Johnson

As the general manager of a struggling fish processing plant in the Cumberland Strait community of Pangnirtung, Don Cunningham already has more than his fair share of problems and headaches.

Cunningham's days, nights and weekends are consumed with the baffling logistics of turbot quotas, global transportation and consumption patterns and the challenges of recruiting and motivating people to turn tonnes of fish into flash-frozen fillets.

But now he has veered off in what sounds like a direction far removed from the cold reality of fish fillets.

"I want to start a breakfast program," declares Cunningham.

The 65-year-old Nova Scotian has no intention of taking on the care and feeding of Pang's school children.

Rather, he wants to make sure his own workers get enough to eat.

"Some of these people come to work hungry," he explains. And that makes it hard, if not impossible, for them to spend eight hours a day slicing skin and bone fragments from otherwise perfect fillets .

One solution might be to just give the fish away to hungry people in Pang. The problem is, turbot, which is caught in deep waters, has never been part of the traditional diet in Nunavut.

"We do sell turbot at a discount at the plant," he says. "But if we put out 20 pounds of fillets it takes about two weeks before they're all sold."

Welcome to the topsy-turbot world of Nunavut fishonomics, where workers with empty bellies pretty up fillets so they're fit to be served to well-fed people in Europe and the United States.

But wait – it gets even more confusing.

Forget almost everything you thought you knew about fish. The journey of hundreds of tonnes of turbot from Cumberland Sound and Davis Strait to Europe, the United States and Asia is enough to make locavores despair.

And the paltry returns for enormous quantities of fine fish and hard work should be the cause of a lot of soul searching among thoughtful people everywhere.

Every kid who has ever dipped a line into a lake or stream knows this for certain: when it comes to catching fish, bigger is better.

That's true – except when it comes to northern turbot. Then big fish are, if not worthless, worth very little, because North American and European diners don't like them at all.

They prefer their turbot in neat, portion-sized fillets – the kind that come from fish weighing a few pounds at most.

Unfortunately, four out of five turbot landed by large trawlers in northern waters are big fish. They weigh up to 12 pounds, far too large to be turned into those neat little portions in Don Cunningham's processing plant.

So what happens to 80 per cent of 400 tonnes of turbot delivered every year to the plant?

Until very recently (last month, in fact) these big turbot represented little more than an inconvenient storage problem for Cunningham.

The entire 400 tonnes of fish is gutted and headed aboard the trawlers, and then delivered frozen to the plant. Smaller turbot are run through a state-of-the art filleting machine and then cleaned up with knives by his crew of up to 25 workers.

The big, unwanted fish, he said, just clogged up the plant's freezers until they could be air freighted to a broker in Montreal. The broker paid $1.50 a pound for these whole fish, and air freight cost the plant $1 a pound.

Aside from the inconvenience, the plant could do no better than break even on four-fifths of its fish.

From Montreal, the fish were sent by rail car to Vancouver, where they were shipped to Asia. Fully 25 per cent of these big turbot are consumed at Chinese New Year feasts.

Cunningham says that some further processing is done in China. Typically, the turbot is cut into steaks. But labour costs in China are so low, he says, that it just wouldn't pay to have the work on the big fish done in Pang.

Things are looking up a bit. Cunningham, who has only been running the plant for a year, struck a deal that saw the first trawler load of large turbot unloaded in Nuuk, Greenland, from where they'll travel by ship direct to Asia. That saves $1 a fish in air freight costs.

Last week, Cunningham was in Iqaluit pitching for a much bigger share of turbot quota for his company, Pangnirtung Fisheries Ltd., and its partner, Cumberland Sound Fisheries Ltd.

If his application to the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board is successful, he hopes to be able to keep his plant running about 10 months of the year, instead of just six with the existing quota.

It will still mean that by far the largest portion of the plant's quota is sold at rock-bottom prices to the fish-loving Chinese, but it could help Cunningham ensure that his workers don't go hungry.

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