This article about squid just amazed me:
The long journey of 'local' seafood to your plate - Los Angeles Times:
90% of the 230 million pounds of the squid caught off the coast of California are frozen, shipped to Asia, processed, refrozen, and sent back to the US for consumption. It seems crazy to ship them 12000 miles round trip only to save a little on labor. The labor to clean and prepare the squid seems almost trivial and not terribly labor intensive. I can envision a lot of automation that could be employed to do the processing with very little labor.
Squid processing would probably be considered a "manufacturing" job and would be good, steady employment. It also seems that processing could be done a lot closer in Mexico with relatively inexpensive labor.
I have the feeling that the US lost the leadership because the fishing industry got lazy, didn't reinvest and let the foreign competition take over. I would bet that the foreign companies have relatively modern shipboard pre- processing, and fairly modern processing in their native countries too.
I also fault our California Coastal Commission -- I'm sure it would be extremely difficult to build a new processing plant somewhere along the California coastline.
