The last sardine cannery in the United States, located in Prospect Harbour, is shutting down this week. (Photo: Stock File/FIS)

Last US sardine cannery folds

The country’s last sardine cannery is officially shutting down on Friday. Bumble Bee Foods announced the closure on Wednesday following drastic government cuts to the amount of herring fishers can now catch in the North-eastern US coast in an effort to curb overfishing.

Bumble Bee has owned the Stinson Seafood plant located in Maine’s Prospect Harbour since 2004. The cannery is closing down after over 100 years of operations.

"This is it. We don't have any more," plant manager Peter Colson said, The Associated Press reports. "It's not easy seeing this go."

It is expected that 128 workers — some of whom have worked there all their lives -- will be left out of a job. They will receive severance pay and the company will provide them with job placement counselling, reports Examiner.com.

Stinson is the last of 400 sardine canneries that have marked the state’s landscape since the late 1800s. Back in the 1950s, Maine’s sardine industry sustained almost 6,000 jobs.

“It’s devastating, for lack of a better term,” opined Dana Rice, the town’s first selectman. “It’s like somebody died.”

Bumble Bee had announced it would close down the Prospect Harbour cannery in February.

“Really, I’ve been expecting this, although the demise of the industry has been painfully slow,” said Ronnie Peabody, who runs the Maine Coast Sardine History Museum in Jonesport. “But it’s hard to think that soon there will be no such thing as a Maine sardine anymore. The industry is no longer dying; it’s dead.”

Still, some locals say the cause is not a drop in the amount of fish that can be caught, but corporations’ attempt at a monopoly and their opting to manufacture products for less capital and under fewer regulations in Canada.

Related articles:

- Country's last sardine cannery closes
- Quota cuts for Atlantic herring

By Natalia Real
[email protected]
www.seafood.media

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