Pacific Seafood Hopes to Ship More Live Crab to China Using Cathay Pacific's Direct Flight from PDX  Pacific Seafoods hopes it can take advantage of new direct flights from Portland to China. Starting this November Cathay Pacific Airways will add two flights per week from Portland to China. The new Portland service would operate as part of a Hong Kong - Anchorage - Los Angeles - Portland - Anchorage - Hong Kong route every Thursday and Saturday. Cathay Pacific's newest and biggest freighter, a Boeing 747-8F, will make the route. Pacific, which already ships live Dungeness crab to Chinese markets via SeaTac, said the direct route from Portland should help the company expand its market share in China. "We realize that the service is currently slated for Hong Kong. We also have sales there," Pacific Seafood Group International Section Manager Larz Malony said in a letter to the Port of Portland Monday. "We hope that we will be able to take advantage of this new service and its success will also allow expansion into some Chinese airports." North Carolina's commercial blue catfish producers say the USDA's Catfish Inspection program is running up production costs and threatening the viability of the fishery. The state's top producer, Murray L. Nixon Fishery said the USDA's new processing requirements essentially require the operator to build a new plant to meet compliance. The company said added costs to the industry could cripple local market interest in blue catfish, which could see commercial interest in the fish cease altogether. In other news, Canada's sockeye catch estimates from the Skeena River predict a total return of 1.4 million fish for 2016. The figure is down from a projection of almost 3 million fish on June 30. So far, fishery scientists have not come up with an explanation for the lower-than-expected run. Meanwhile, Maruha North America Group's subsidiary Seacon America added a line of pasteurized, all-natural blue crab meat from Mexico. Seacon will sell the Callinectes product sourced from the Sea of Cortez under THE CRAB brand. "Seacon’s THE CRAB is the same high-quality crab chefs from the Mid-Atlantic, the Carolinas, Texas, New Orleans and other Gulf States have always sought for their dishes," said Sherri Chambers, Foodservice Division Manager for Seacon. Finally, Ireland's Ocean Harvest Technology wants to break into the US pig market by selling antibiotic-free feed produced from seaweed. The company, which has already successfully trialed the seaweed feed on Canadian pigs, wants to capitalize on the US swine industry's move away from antibiotics in its production process.