Michael Conathan, CAP’s Director of Oceans Policy, explores the implications of the remarkable chart — of fish brought to market in the United States — above in this cross-post.
A strong case can be made that fishing is America’s oldest profession. Europeans were using parts of what is now Atlantic Canada as seasonal fish camps as far back as the early 15th century””even before Columbus confused the Caribbean for the shores of India.
Many fisheries scientists were sure there was no way humans could make a dent in the seemingly endless abundance of fish in the ocean as late as the middle of the 20th century. But our fishing industries were already well on their way to proving them wrong. It now seems that the problems facing our fisheries are as plentiful as cod once were on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and throughout the Gulf of Maine.
We now live in a world where overfishing is far too prevalent. To stem this tide, regulators impose tighter and tighter restrictions on fishermen,* in the face of fundamental disagreements among harvesters, regulators, and conservationists about how many is too many.
Fisheries scientist John Shepherd is often quoted saying, “Counting fish is like counting trees, except they are invisible and they keep moving.” Eric Schwaab, the current administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS, likes to tack on this critical addendum: “and they eat each other.” Given these ecological realities one can understand why fisheries science””which creates the stock assessments that in turn lead to catch limits””is often controversial.
Data on the health of commercial fisheries are difficult to come by. That goes double for recreational fisheries. After all, is it easier to track 100 fishermen catching 10,000 pounds of fish each or a million fishermen catching 10 pounds of fish each?
One of the goals of the 2006 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, or MSA, was to pave the way for improving our fisheries science. The reauthorization required fishery managers to impose specific annual catch limits in every fishery, among other changes.
Of course, these reductions in harvest levels hit fisheries and affiliated shoreside industries in the wallet. In the 10 years leading up to the 1996 passage of the Sustainable Fisheries Act, which imposed firm timelines for rebuilding fish populations, the average value of all fish brought to market in the United States was $5.74 billion (adjusted for inflation to 2009 dollars). From 2000 through 2009, the average annual value was $4.21 billion.
Few people””including fishermen””will argue that the harvest levels of the late 1980s and early ’90s were sustainable. They were not. But these economic losses can be particularly difficult to swallow when the fishermen who are on the water day in and day out see fish populations beginning to rebound from years of decline. But scientists can’t make snap decisions based on anecdotal observations. They have to compile and crunch the numbers, then send their findings to other scientists for peer review to determine with any degree of confidence whether regulations are working.
This dynamic leads to a vicious cycle:
1) Scientists produce new stock assessments based on inherently flawed but technically best available data that suggest overfishing has occurred in the past.
2) Managers impose regulations setting lower catch limits for fishermen.
3) Fishermen resist the lower catch limits because the scientists’ stock assessments are based on two- to three-year-old data, claim that things have been looking up in the interim, and demand new stock assessments.
4) Go to point 1.
And yet fishermen acknowledge the need for long-term fish stock sustainability. Their livelihoods, their communities, and their history depend on it. No fish, no fishing. Simple. There is a tremendous amount at stake. Schwaab pointed out at a hearing this week before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, that our fisheries support more than 1.9 million jobs and generate $163 billion in sales impacts.
Something must be done. But what? Some groups, including NMFS, have begun touting a cap-and-trade style management system known as “catch shares” as a cure for the industry’s ills. Under this system the total amount of fish available is divided and doled out to fishermen by percentages based on their catch histories, providing an ownership incentive to protect the long-term health of the resource.
Such a framework, though, often comes with more questions than answers. And in fact the House of Representatives passed an amendment to its recent spending bill for fiscal year 2011, filed by Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), that would prevent any federal funding from being used to develop new catch share programs.
Congress is well aware that every job matters as the country struggles to emerge from the ongoing recession. Likewise, every cod has inherent value in the water as fish populations struggle to rebuild after years of excessive exploitation. Finding the balance between ecological and economic sustainability””the value of a cod left in the sea relative to the value of a cod filet on a plate””will be critical to the future of our nation’s coastal communities and environment.
The world’s fishing industries are awakening from a season of gluttony to face the hangover””like the blowout excess of Mardi Gras morphing into the austerity of Lent. We are at a crossroads. A hair of the dog descent back into the cycle of debauchery will no doubt lead to ruin.
This column will endeavor to help fishery managers, industry members, and environmental advocates engage in a desperate search for two aspirin and a tall glass of cold water that will dull the pain of payback and put America’s oldest industry back on a path to a healthy, vibrant future.
– Michael Conathan, Director of Oceans Policy at American Progress, in a CAP and Science Progress cross-post.
* It has been the author’s experience that women in the commercial fishing industry tend to chafe at use of the gender-neutral term “fishers” and prefer to be referred to as “fishermen.” We will use that term throughout this series to refer to all who engage in commercial fishing activities regardless of gender.
Related Posts:
- Scientists: The Marine Stewardship Council “is failing to protect the environment and needs radical reform”
- Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century”
- A looming oxygen crisis and its impact on our oceans
- A conversation with Paul Greenberg about his new book Four Fish
- Nature Stunner: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton”
- What’s in a name? For the slimehead and toothfish, the extreme makeover leads to rampant overfishing
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I feel sorry for all the millions of millions of people who have to eat the fish from the pacific, east/north atlantic, gulf of mexico …
I love eating fish and algae but since the Deepwater disaster i check twice what i buy, and even then i have my doubts about the sources. This is just on top of the food stress, so people can not choose what they going to eat. They will eat everything they can get, no matter how contaminated or engineered it is.
Trying to solve overfishing and manage stocks gives us the same set of problems we face with Climate Change. This is a global problem which can only be solved globaly. Since most of the nusery areas for the commerical fish stocks are being degraded and impacted by both pollution and rising water temps which are a direct result of Co2 increases how do you solve fishery problems without solving the Climate Change problem, you can’t. If overfishing were the only problem it would still take all countries with fishing fleets using the same rules for catch to solve it but that is not the biggest problem our oceans face. The base of the food web in the worlds oceans is at great risk for collapse. We do need to regulate catch numbers but really that is the least of the problems our oceans face.
This is very informative, but one key issue was not addressed: habitat. Ocean bottom trawling is decimating the food chain all over the world. Ag runoff is creating coastal dead zones. Logging devastates salmon and steelhead spawning beds through siltation and thermal pollution.
Fisheries management organizations have been far too passive in discussing policies that can both nourish and restore the ocean food chain. Fishing limits are fine, but legally binding restrictions on habitat destruction need to be part of the package.
The graphic should get a label saying that it’s for the U.S.
[JR: Yes, thanks.]
Stock balance is yet another problem that is not and perhaps can not be addressed. Fisherman have a huge investment in equipment and overhead costs. When one fisheries is limited and thus protected fisherman are forced look toward another, not exploited, to make ends meet. This new stock is perhaps the food stock of the limited fisheries that has exploded because of the over fishing of the higher value predator fisheries. Production jumps and new markets are opened with the obvious overfishing of that new catch but simultaneously depleting the very food stock needed to rebuild the original high value fisheries.
Enter fish farming. Now a new market is opened for a third fisheries that the original “high value” fish would not eat, (geographic location? edibility?) but once ground up and processed into pellets make fine food for the prime fish, and yet another food web in a third location is disrupted. And so it goes…
It would appear that the situation in Europe is worse and very much worse in Asia. Have we reached the point where half of the fish eaten come from fish farms?
Tony O’Brien asks @ 5: “Have we reached the point where half of the fish eaten come from fish farms?”
Even if all the fish eaten came from fish farms it would still be devastating to the Ocean Ecosystem. Fish farms concentrate populations thus breeding diseases and parasites. Also, as mentioned above, the food to feed the fish is often low value fish stocks but still ecologically necessary for a functioning aquatic ecosystem.
I have read about a kind of fish farming called integrated aquaculture used in parts of Asia its a very old way, where the number of fish raised is small and things like mussuls, seaweed and other filter feeders are used to clean-up the pens but they only raise plant eaters. The big Corps that run fish farms like the ones in Alaska are in it for the big profit raising salmon and kobia which are meat eaters and are feed on wild catch which will not save wild stocks, although that is their stated purpose if you go to their web site.
Some interesting information on our oceans and fisheries in this presentation by Dr Jeremy Jackson, June 2010.
Brave New Ocean
( skip in to about 12:30 for the start of Dr. Jackson’s lecture)
Fish scarcity limits the natural sources of dietary Vitamin D. This is important for those of us living north of the 39th parallel (39th parallel runs through Virginia) who thus don’t get enough sunlight on our own in winter, or those of us who spend a lot of time indoors, even in summer. Vitamin D deficiency has again become a public health issue.
As we run low on fish, the alternatives seem a bit skimpy. Farmed fish are not reliable sources of vitamin D content. Artificial vitamin D-3 is made from various sources, allegedly ranging from sheep lanolin to a vegetarian mix of mushroom and rice products.
I’m inclined to believe that human occupation north of the 39th parallel has historically been fish-diet-dependent, because of our need for vitamin D.
The discussion of a northern migration due to climate change might take need for vitamin D into account.
The graph shows that, in 2010, 3.4 thousand metric tons (or 3.4 million kilograms) of landed fish had a value of $4 billion. That’s more than $1000 per kilogram. I don’t have time to read the rest of the post; I’m going fishing. I suspect that Mr Conathan, having explored the implications of the remarkable chart, is doing the same.
The killer blow to fisheries will be ocean transformation. Acidification will undermine the food chain as plankton become unable to lay down their calcium carbonate shells. Oceanic stratification and disruptions to global oceanic circulation will worsen the anoxic ‘dead-zones’ problem. Pollution will exacerbate these problems and the risks for consumers of heavy metal and other toxicity. Jellyfish are replacing fish in many areas, as the warmer oceans suit them, larger fish that preyed on them disappear and as they, in turn, decimate the populations of smaller, immature, fish.
In Australia marine reserves have been proposed, as the science shows, well-nigh irrefutably, that they operate as nurseries for fish, which migrate out into fishing zones, replenishing the populations. Naturally these reserves have provoked a ferocious reaction from the Dunning Kruger element that is on the march in this country as we lurch towards an imbecile version of bunyip fascism. These reserves have been vociferously opposed by commercial and recreational fishers, with their own pseudo-science, but it’s pretty poor. Mostly they just shout and strut and fret and threaten political revenge, what amounts in this country these days to debate and the thought process. The Murdoch pathocracy is there, as ever, fomenting discord and promoting greedy imbecility, so not much has been achieved and that little is threatened with ‘roll-back’ by the ‘I fish and I vote’ numbskulls.