Processing Change

Live Lobster, which plans to operate in Prospect Harbor (part of Gouldsboro) as Lobster Web LLC, last week inched closer to its goal of converting the former Stinson Seafood sardine cannery into a lobster processing plant when local selectmen cautiously agreed to endorse a grant for $400,000 in federal CDBG funds (see BDN story).
Antonio Bussone, president of Live Lobster, was not at the March 24 meeting because he was attending the International Boston Seafood Show, a woman said at the selectmen's meeting. Bussone has attended several such meetings in Gouldsboro, which reflects the importance the lobster processing plant would have to the company, which currently does not have any processing capacity.
According to the woman, Canadians at the seafood show indicated they are not happy that more lobster processing plants are popping up on the Maine coast. Besides Prospect Harbor, Maine's lobster processing capacity is getting significant boosts with a new proposed facility in St. George, with a change in state laws that had restricted processing, and with a (resulting) new product at Linda Bean's company in Rockland that is being sold at Walmart.  
I don't know if the woman's claims about Canadian processors being unhappy with these developments is true or not, but it stands to reason that they would be. Canadian processors have consistently converted more than half of Maine's annual lobster landings into a "product of Canada." Some Maine officials have said that as much as 70 percent of Maine lobster ends up going to Canada for processing.
Maine lobstermen caught an estimated 93 million pounds of lobster last year. Seventy percent of that would be 65 million pounds. There's no way Maine's new processing capacity will absorb that much, but many would say the number of lobster processing jobs created in Maine is more important than the amount or percentage of lobsters shipped to Canada.