The ongoing, intense fight over a new fishing regulation regime has never been solely about conservation.
It is also about economics — specifically the economic health of fishing communities such as Gloucester.
And it's good to see one of the biggest of the "Big Greens" show perhaps an increased awareness of that when it comes to implementing a new federal fishing regulatory policy that threatens to carve out a dire economic impact for local fishing fleets throughout New England and elsewhere.
The Pew Environment Group, a $5 billion philanthropy, clearly still believes in keeping tight restrictions on fishing in the name of preserving the resource. And it still supports the concept of "catch shares," the system of fisheries management based on fishermen's actual catch, as opposed to the current effort controls that limit fishermen days at seas and access to various fishing grounds.
But, last week, Pew signaled that it does not support the blanket implementation of catch shares.
Lee Crockett, director of Pew's federal fisheries policy, urged the Obama administration — and thus National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco, a former Pew Fellow — "go slow" on catch shares, and not to make it, "the default management system."
"(The idea that) one size fits all is inappropriate and ignores local variability," he said. And he's right — especially in New England, where the New England Fishery Management Council — in a now-embarrassing rush to judgment pushed by Lubchenco, NOAA and its National Marine Fisheries Service — approved switching to catch shares beginning in 2010, despite not having nearly enough information to make the change.
But left unspoken in last week's teleconference was another truth that Pew officials may be starting to grasp — the "commodification" of fishing through catch shares and individual fishermen's cooperatives is likely to bring in outside, corporate investor-owners who are not interested in a way of life or a local economy. They are interested only in profit — and that's not being lost on those raising more and more understandable red flags regarding catch shares' economic impact.
There is nothing intrinsically evil about profit; every fisherman who heads out of the harbor is hoping to make a profit, and every processing plant on shore is hoping to do the same. But these are small, independent businesses that go back not just generations, but centuries. And the prospect of these fishermen and related small businesses being gobbled up by Wall Street corporate giants — perhaps doing for the seafood industry and independent fishing boats what agri-business has done for the family farm — has become a growing part of the catch shares debate.
Despite having much of its funding rooted in big business — notably Sun Oil Co., or Sunoco — Pew thankfully does not align itself with corporate profiteering. And it's doubtful it wants to be portrayed as an advocate for setting the fishing industry up for an inevitable — even orchestrated — corporate takeover, shamefully facilitated by our own federal government.
Indeed, David Festa, a vice president of another Big Green, the Environmental Defense Fund, told an investors' conference last April that catch shares could produce commodity profits in the range of 400 percent. Not surprisingly, he didn't make that pitch to fishermen — and the topic of corporate buyouts of independent fishermen's catch shares, part of the catch-share system's track record even then, was never even raised at the pivotal New England Council meeting that blindly put the new system in place in June.
All of this stands as evidence the catch share system is not ready for its intended start date of May 2010.
Its catch limits and allocations are based on admittedly flawed statistics. Its rules are creating chaos. And all of this cries out to regulators and our federal legislators that the implementation of the new regime must be delayed for at least a year.
Pew's urging to "go slow" admittedly doesn't go that far. But it at least shows this big-league environmental recognizes that there are other issues to consider than alleged "overfishing."
NOAA and NMFS should at least heed Pew's call to "go slow" — and recognize it as yet another call, from perhaps a surprising source, that this mad and maddening rush into catch shares simply must be put on hold.
