The Bering Sea is now the most productive fishery in North America. More than one-third of the United State’s commercial catch come from these waters . Among the species sought by the fishing fleets of the North Pacific are yellowfin, sole, herring, halibut and ocean perch. But the most cherished target is pollock, the tofu of fish. Pollock, craved by the Japanese for surimi, turns up in American markets as fish sandwiches at Burger King and McDonalds and as imitation crab in the fish freezers at Safeway.
New research from the University of Halifax in Nova Scotia predicting that the world’s oceans will be largely depleted of fish by 2048.
The report quoted lead scientist Dr. Boris Worm as saying: “This isn’t predicted to happen. It’s happening now.”
The SS Gijon is registered to the Seattle-based American Seafoods Corporation, a subsidiary of Resource Group International, a Norwegian conglomerate. The ship is a floating factory, longer and wider than a football field. The $40 million trawler can process 80 tons of fish mass a day, turning sole into fish meal and pollock into surimi. The catch is stored in huge freezers, where it can linger for months.
The incursion of the big factory trawlers into the icy waters of the North Pacific began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 2000, there were 45 factory trawlers operating in the Bering Sea fishery. The big ships are powered by super-charged diesel engines fed by massive fuel tanks that permit the trawlers to remain at sea for months without returning to home ports to refuel or off-load their catch.
Using sophisticated sonar and electronic tracking devices, factory trawlers like the SS Gijon can swiftly zero in on new spawning grounds and fish them to near extinction. This is called pulse trawling. A particularly outrageous example of this genocidal method occurred in the 1980s in the Shelikoff Strait off the Aleutian Islands, when a newly discovered pollock stock was relentlessly fished to the point of collapse. According to a report on factory trawlers by Greenpeace, in less than a decade the Shelikof pollock fishery had declined from an estimated biomass of 3 million tons in 1981 to less than 300 thousand tons in 1988.
The arrival of the industrialized super-trawlers spelled an almost immediate cultural and economic disaster for the communities of coastal Alaska. For decades the flourishing Alaskan fishing industry had been characterized by independent ship owners and small processing plants, sprinkled down the coast in towns like Kodiak, Cordova and Ketchikan.
In the 1970s, nearly 80 percent of the Alaskan pollock catch was made by small operators. Now the situation is almost entirely reversed. More than 70 percent of the Pollock in Alaskan waters is taken by factory trawlers and dozens of independent boat owners have gone bankrupt. But it’s the shore-based factories, making value-added fish products, that have been hit the hardest by the new generation of trawlers. The canneries, surimi plants and frozen fish processing factories provided year-round high wage jobs, an important stabilizing force for rural Alaska’s predominantly season economy. Today many of those plants and jobs are gone, replaced by the factory trawlers, which increasingly tend to employ Mexican and Vietnamese laborers at sweatshop pay rates.
Many of the Artic-Alaska Company’s ships unload their catch not in Seattle, but in Shanghai, China, where Tyson purchased a fish factory in 1994 from the Chinese government. The deal was brokered with the help of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and was back by federal government insurance and loan guarantees from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). In fact, the growth of the American factory trawler fleet was heavily underwritten by the US treasury, thanks to effective inside work by the congressional delegation from Washington state. Tyson’s company alone swept up more than $65 million in low-interest loans to fun the construction of 10 factory trawlers. In total, the Seattle-based factory trawler fleet raked in more than $200 million in so-called Fisheries Obligation Guarantees and other federal subsidies.
Every since the factory trawlers began flocking to the Alaskan waters the pollock season has closed earlier than planned. In the late 1970s, the pollock fishing season regularly ran for 10 months. In 1994, it closed after 70 days. It’s not surprising. The annual harvest capacity of the trawler fleet may well be greater than the entire Pollock population of the Bering Sea. An internal assessment by executives at the American Seafood Company: “the catching capacity of vessels operating in the Bering Sea fishery appears to be double or triple the annual quota.” And these were quotas that most marine biologists considered to be dangerously inflated.
A report by the National Research Council warns: “It seems extremely unlikely that the productivity of the Bering Sea ecosystem can sustain current rates of human exploitation, as well as the large populations of all marine mammals and bird species that existed before human exploitation—especially modern exploitation—began.”
The National Marine Fisheries Service, which, curiously enough, is under the purview of the Commerce Department. Instead of viewing marine ecosystems as vibrant, diverse and inter-connected environments, NMFS attempts to manage ocean fish stocks through a species-by-species approach. This benefits the bottom lines of the fishing fleets, but flies in the face of current ecological thinking. By focusing only on the commercial fish stocks, NMFS ignores the toll industrial fishing methods exact on non-target species and on the marine habitat itself.
The Magnuson Act, passed in 1976 to protect American off-shore fishing grounds from growing incursions by foreign fishing fleets, extended the federal government’s jurisdiction over fish matters from 3 miles to 200 miles off the US coastline. In reality, it was simple economic protectionism. The Magnuson Act established regional fish management councils to determine fishing seasons and allocate catch quotas. These councils, which soon came to be dominated by fishing industry lobbyists, were expressly exempted from federal conflict-of-interest laws, allowing the fish and food industry to protect and increase their self-interest.
From here
New research from the University of Halifax in Nova Scotia predicting that the world’s oceans will be largely depleted of fish by 2048.
The report quoted lead scientist Dr. Boris Worm as saying: “This isn’t predicted to happen. It’s happening now.”
The SS Gijon is registered to the Seattle-based American Seafoods Corporation, a subsidiary of Resource Group International, a Norwegian conglomerate. The ship is a floating factory, longer and wider than a football field. The $40 million trawler can process 80 tons of fish mass a day, turning sole into fish meal and pollock into surimi. The catch is stored in huge freezers, where it can linger for months.
The incursion of the big factory trawlers into the icy waters of the North Pacific began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 2000, there were 45 factory trawlers operating in the Bering Sea fishery. The big ships are powered by super-charged diesel engines fed by massive fuel tanks that permit the trawlers to remain at sea for months without returning to home ports to refuel or off-load their catch.
Using sophisticated sonar and electronic tracking devices, factory trawlers like the SS Gijon can swiftly zero in on new spawning grounds and fish them to near extinction. This is called pulse trawling. A particularly outrageous example of this genocidal method occurred in the 1980s in the Shelikoff Strait off the Aleutian Islands, when a newly discovered pollock stock was relentlessly fished to the point of collapse. According to a report on factory trawlers by Greenpeace, in less than a decade the Shelikof pollock fishery had declined from an estimated biomass of 3 million tons in 1981 to less than 300 thousand tons in 1988.
The arrival of the industrialized super-trawlers spelled an almost immediate cultural and economic disaster for the communities of coastal Alaska. For decades the flourishing Alaskan fishing industry had been characterized by independent ship owners and small processing plants, sprinkled down the coast in towns like Kodiak, Cordova and Ketchikan.
In the 1970s, nearly 80 percent of the Alaskan pollock catch was made by small operators. Now the situation is almost entirely reversed. More than 70 percent of the Pollock in Alaskan waters is taken by factory trawlers and dozens of independent boat owners have gone bankrupt. But it’s the shore-based factories, making value-added fish products, that have been hit the hardest by the new generation of trawlers. The canneries, surimi plants and frozen fish processing factories provided year-round high wage jobs, an important stabilizing force for rural Alaska’s predominantly season economy. Today many of those plants and jobs are gone, replaced by the factory trawlers, which increasingly tend to employ Mexican and Vietnamese laborers at sweatshop pay rates.
Many of the Artic-Alaska Company’s ships unload their catch not in Seattle, but in Shanghai, China, where Tyson purchased a fish factory in 1994 from the Chinese government. The deal was brokered with the help of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and was back by federal government insurance and loan guarantees from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). In fact, the growth of the American factory trawler fleet was heavily underwritten by the US treasury, thanks to effective inside work by the congressional delegation from Washington state. Tyson’s company alone swept up more than $65 million in low-interest loans to fun the construction of 10 factory trawlers. In total, the Seattle-based factory trawler fleet raked in more than $200 million in so-called Fisheries Obligation Guarantees and other federal subsidies.
Every since the factory trawlers began flocking to the Alaskan waters the pollock season has closed earlier than planned. In the late 1970s, the pollock fishing season regularly ran for 10 months. In 1994, it closed after 70 days. It’s not surprising. The annual harvest capacity of the trawler fleet may well be greater than the entire Pollock population of the Bering Sea. An internal assessment by executives at the American Seafood Company: “the catching capacity of vessels operating in the Bering Sea fishery appears to be double or triple the annual quota.” And these were quotas that most marine biologists considered to be dangerously inflated.
A report by the National Research Council warns: “It seems extremely unlikely that the productivity of the Bering Sea ecosystem can sustain current rates of human exploitation, as well as the large populations of all marine mammals and bird species that existed before human exploitation—especially modern exploitation—began.”
The National Marine Fisheries Service, which, curiously enough, is under the purview of the Commerce Department. Instead of viewing marine ecosystems as vibrant, diverse and inter-connected environments, NMFS attempts to manage ocean fish stocks through a species-by-species approach. This benefits the bottom lines of the fishing fleets, but flies in the face of current ecological thinking. By focusing only on the commercial fish stocks, NMFS ignores the toll industrial fishing methods exact on non-target species and on the marine habitat itself.
The Magnuson Act, passed in 1976 to protect American off-shore fishing grounds from growing incursions by foreign fishing fleets, extended the federal government’s jurisdiction over fish matters from 3 miles to 200 miles off the US coastline. In reality, it was simple economic protectionism. The Magnuson Act established regional fish management councils to determine fishing seasons and allocate catch quotas. These councils, which soon came to be dominated by fishing industry lobbyists, were expressly exempted from federal conflict-of-interest laws, allowing the fish and food industry to protect and increase their self-interest.
From here
No comments:
Post a Comment