The Fuel Crisis

(from the August, 2008 issue of National Fisherman)

First off, I was made aware that people reading my last column could have been left with the impression that I felt state officials were unduly influenced by Wallop-Breaux considerations in their roles as management council members. Since the late 70s I have known, and respected, many state directors and their designees. They have been conscientious to a fault and I didn’t mean to question this. I should have explained that it isn’t them I am concerned about, it’s the system. As evidenced by the federal/states supported “get out there and fish” programs, Wallop-Breaux funding creates an insidious institutional bias.

Moving on, I had the occasion to sit through part of a regional council meeting a few weeks back and was really pleased to hear a motion made that would allow participants in a fishery to land two trip limits in a single day while, of course, being charged for two days at sea to keep everything “conservation neutral.” This was an effort to make fishing a little – or perhaps a lot – more energy efficient, a reflection of the price of diesel fuel, at the time hovering around $4 a gallon.

Surprise doesn’t quite cover my reaction when I heard the NMFS officials in attendance shoot the idea down. They didn’t take a “that’s an interesting concept, let’s see how we can get it to work” attitude. They dismissed it out of hand, indicating that it was administratively impossible.

Being intrigued with the idea, as well as the official reaction by the federal agency in charge, I decided to find out what the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the other agency in charge of domestic food production, was doing to help its clients cope. After a half an hour of phone frustration I finally got to a very pleasant lady in the Department’s Press Office who, after a puzzled silence, told me that the USDA was doing nothing. More surprise!

By this time it was $4.50 a gallon diesel and the USDA wasn’t even considering how to help the farmers deal with it. I wasn’t focused on subsidies or anything like that, simply ways to let farmers farm more efficiently, yet there was nothing.

C’mon, folks. We’re all in this fuel mess together. Running to and from the fishing grounds represents a major use of diesel fuel. In many fisheries it undoubtedly represents the greatest use of fuel. How about bending the regulations to allow fishermen to maximize their landings per gallon of fuel burned?

If a fisherman can catch and land twice as many fish in a trip, and if he can still be held to the same level of annual landings, why shouldn’t we let him? It’s not going to have any negative impact on the resource, in fact it might well cut down on regulatory discards, and it would help significantly in keeping more boats in business and more fishermen working. Isn’t that a very large part of what fisheries management is – or should be – all about?

What about other regulatory adjustments to allow greater fishing efficiency. In commercial fishing, “efficiency” has been transformed into a four-letter word by the antis, but particularly when it comes to maximizing pounds landed per gallon burned, is it really?

If the “conservation neutrality” can be maintained, why shouldn’t fishermen be allowed to fish more gear, to land more fish on each trip, to transfer catch at sea or to do anything else to get around the inefficiencies that our managers have been using to control fishing for decades? The regulations could be modified to allow this, and they could be effectively enforced. All it would take would be a decision by the powers-that-be in Silver Springs to do it, and then the necessary administrative follow-up to get it done. If the mechanisms don’t exist to streamline what have become extremely onerous administrative requirements during an emergency of this proportion, then let’s go to Congress and get them created.

Fishing regulations aren’t, or shouldn’t be, carved in stone. If, in spite of growing growling to the contrary, NMFS is really interested in helping the fishermen rather than getting rid of as many of them as possible, if the so-called “conservationists” are as committed to a viable, sustainable commercial fishing industry as they claim to be, and if Congress is truly supportive, we can make fishing as fuel efficient as possible at no cost to the resource and at great savings to the fishermen. It’s time, or past time, that we do just that.  

Nils E. Stolpe