Among the New Year’s many unappreciated gifts to the seafood industry and ultimately to every industry reliant upon nature’s resources is the $2.5 million PEW-funded study by U.S. academics claiming high contaminant levels of PCBs in farmed salmon. That well-planned and funded assault on the global seafood trade has European nations eyeing the credibility of the United States research community with the same anger and derision portrayed in the 1958 novel, “The Ugly American” authored by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer. Imperious, incompetent, arrogant, and erroneous are reflective of the invectives being hurled at the so-called “U.S. study.” Eastern...