Towards a rational oceans policy

(from the November, 2005 issue of National Fisherman)

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that in 2002 the world production of pork was 95 million tons, poultry was 72 million tons, beef was 60 million tons and goat was 11 million tons.

You don’t have to be an agricultural expert to know that neither a corn field nor a heavily grazed pasture bears much resemblance to virgin grassland or forest. If you’ve driven across North America, you know that you can go for miles without seeing much more than wheat, corn or soybean fields. And if you’ve flown cross country and spent any time looking out the window, for much of the flight the most noticeable feature had to be a seemingly endless progression of cultivated fields.

Of course, this agricultural development isn’t limited to North America. According to the FAO, about a fourth of the world’s land area is devoted to either growing livestock feed or for grazing. Humankind’s insatiable appetite for calories has drastically altered the terrestrial ecosystems of all but one of our continents.

No one is insisting that we should be producing all of this livestock, using all of this land, without any impact on the environment.

The production of fish and seafood surpasses that of any other animal protein. In 2002 it was just over 100 million metric tons (a level that it’s hovered around for years).

Yet, while accepting a world that has been radically altered by agriculture, some so-called environmentalists insist that in the act of producing a greater tonnage of protein than cattle ranchers or poultry farmers do, commercial fishermen should be prevented from having any effect on the ocean environment. They actually preach that, for whatever reasons happen to be in vogue at the moment, the oceans should remain pristine and free from fishing’s impacts.

According to them, fishing gear and techniques that have any impact on the ocean ecosystem are unacceptable. Going back almost a  decade, they were bolstering their arguments by comparing the size of nets to Boeing 747 airliners. Then they segued into gear “bulldozing” or “clear cutting” areas of ocean bottom the size of continental land masses (see http://www.fishingnj.org/quotes.htm about 2/3 down the page). Most recently, it has been the destruction of “luxurious forests” of deep water corals (see http://www.fishingnj.org/quotes.htm), supposed critical areas that few if any in the environmental community had paid any attention to up until the time when fishing gear was implicated in their supposed destruction.

It’s perfectly obvious that we aren’t going to have any agricultural production without impacting the terrestrial environment; in fact, it’s memorialized in America the Beautiful, with fruited plains and amber waves. No agricultural impacts equal no agriculture.

So, should we be expected to fish – at least at any meaningful level of production – while having no impacts on the ocean environment? Any rational analysis would suggest we shouldn’t, but since when have the anti-fishing forces been interested in rationality?

The very act of harvesting fish causes change. While a stock can be fished sustainably with 20% or 30% or more of the biomass being removed every year, that removal will have an impact.

Then there are the impacts of fishing gear. Dragging a net or a dredge across it is definitely going to alter the bottom, and anything that alters the bottom is anathema to these “environmentalists.” Or is it? When creating artificial reefs, natural bottom is covered with thousands of tons of surplus weaponry, decommissioned ships, construction rubble and obsolete subway cars. When was the last time one of the conspicuously anti-commercial fishing organizations demanded that the natural bottom be protected from burial by megatons of societal refuse? (I have to acknowledge here Clean Ocean Action’s valiant attempts to keep the waters in the New York Bight from being used as a convenient junk yard.) It seems like some alterations are ok.

It should go without saying, but the bottom impacts fishing gear as much as the gear impacts the bottom. More “wear and tear” on the bottom means more wear and tear on the gear, and that means higher operating costs. Gear researchers and fishermen have been working on nets and dredges that fish “lighter” for years, but today’s $3 a gallon fuel makes improvements in this area imperative.

Unless fishing effort shifts back to primitive and inefficient technologies, harvesting the fish and shellfish  that are found on or near the bottom is going to have an impact on that bottom. We can, and we are, working constantly  to reduce that impact, but we’re not going to get away from it without regressing to hand harvesting methods in use centuries ago. With the world’s population at seven billion and rising, this isn’t going to happen. Isn’t it time we started working towards a public policy that accepts this while still protecting the areas that need to be protected?

Nils E. Stolpe