Here's just two of Nils' exposes from his latest posting:
And on the subject of who’s doing and who’s not doing real research to better determine the status of our managed stocks – The Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and the University of Southern Mississippi, operating under a five year National Science Foundation grant and with industry partners currently including Garden State Seafood Association, the National Fisheries Institute Clam Committee, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Atlantic Capes Fisheries, Inc., LaMonica Fine Foods, Lunds Fisheries Inc., the National Fisheries Institute Scientific Monitoring Committee, Surfside Seafood Products, and L.D. Amory and Company of Hampton, started the Science Center for Marine Fisheries, or SCeMFiS in March of this year.
Eric Powell, the Center’s Director, says that it is “unique in being the only federal-industry partnership that permits the fishing industry to retain a leadership role in designing the science program. This assures that sustainable fisheries will remain a focus of project design and that the science products will directly address the issues faced by the fishing industry.”
Roger Mann, who is the Director at VIMS, said that research at SCeMFiS “will use peer-reviewed science to help improve sampling methods for fisheries surveys, enhance population-dynamics models, develop new approaches to reducing discard, reveal geographic and biological variations in stock structure and dynamics, among many other benefits.”
Compare the design and operation (and source of funding) of SCeMFiS to the above listed “research” initiatives that it’s hard to think were designed, bought and paid for with anything other than a particular goal in mind – the overly restrictive control then the closure of a fishery based on no new science and in spite of the fact that the existing management process has given every assurance that the fishery is being managed properly and sustainably. How would you rather our fisheries – or any of our natural resource dependent industries – be managed?
For more on the SCeMFiS see the VIMS March 27 press release
Sleeping with the enemy? – Many of us in the domestic fish and seafood business were taken by surprise by an announcement that Diversified Communications, the corporate owner of National Fisherman magazine, Pacific Marine Expo and the Seafood Source website, had partnered with Pew SeaWeb to produce a series of annual seafood sustainability “summits.”
If you haven’t been associated with fisheries issues for very long, or if you have been trying to ignore what’s being done to domestic seafood producers – those are the people who are on the wrong side of those “we are importing over 90% of our domestically consumed seafood” numbers – SeaWeb was one of the first organizations to “declare war” on US fishermen.
In a column for Commercial Fisheries News in April of 2001 I wrote: One of the more active efforts to influence public opinion on fisheries is spearheaded by SeaWeb. On its web site, SeaWeb describes itself as a "project designed to raise awareness of the world ocean and the life within it." Its primary funder is the Pew Charitable Trusts. Early in its existence, SeaWeb commissioned a public opinion survey to determine which ocean issues would best "engage the public interest.”
The introduction to the results of the survey, which was conducted for SeaWeb by the Mellman Group, stated "Americans believe the ocean's problems stem from many sources, but oil companies are seen as a prime culprit: In fact, 81% of Americans believe that oil spills are a very serious problem. This is followed by chemical runoff from large corporate farms (75% very serious), improperly treated water from towns near the coast (69%), contaminated seafood (65%), and trash, oil, and chemical runoff from streets (65%)." Overfishing evidently wasn't considered "a very serious problem" and was lumped in with "the loss of critical species" to make the cut as a "meaningful indicator" of trouble.
But in an article on the poll in SeaWeb's November 1996 monthly update, the only specific threat to the oceans mentioned was overfishing. Along with three paragraphs of vague generalities was this statement: "71% (of respondents) agree that overfishing is threatening the health and stability of the marine environment." Nothing about oil spills, runoff, contaminated seafood, or any of the other "problems" identified in the survey, only overfishing. Is this engaging or is it redirecting the public interest?”
There seemed to be much more redirecting than engaging (remember that back then the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound, AK was still fresh in peoples’ minds).
Continuing in the same column:
In January 1998, SeaWeb announced the "Give Swordfish A Break" campaign, centered on a domestic consumer boycott of swordfish. In a 1998 article in the St. Petersburg Times (FL), titled "En Garde for Swordfish," reporter Bill Duryea detailed the SeaWeb strategy behind the "Give Swordfish A Break" campaign. "The first thing (Sea-Web Executive Director) Vikki Spruill did when she went looking for a fish to save did not have to do with fish at all," Duryea wrote.
Having decided that the most effective way to "engage the public interest" in ocean problems was through the food on their plate, Spruill, Duryea wrote, "needed a certain kind of fish. A poster fish, if you will. Shrimp and salmon rank at the top of the most popular seafoods, but half of the shrimp and salmon sold in the United States are farm-raised, tempering their status as overfished. Besides, shrimp lack a certain weightiness. 'We wanted something majestic,' said Spruill. Number 3 on the popularity list, according to Spruill, was swordfish, whose firm-fleshed steaks had become a mainstay of fashionable restaurants across the country."
It wasn’t about the swordfish. In fact, according to Mr. Duryea it wasn’t about any fish at all. It was nothing more than a hook (sorry!) to capture the public’s interest. Regardless of that, the US swordfish fishermen – who had been engaged in an ongoing and successful program to rebuild swordfish which predated Pew SeaWeb’s discovery of swordfish by years - paid dearly for this national “don’t eat swordfish” campaign which was underwritten with Pew dollars.
A quick examination of its website showed that SeaWeb has branched out quite a bit since its “formative years,” but those years have left their impressions on some of us with long memories (or reasonably organized archives). Diversified Communications will be putting together an advisory board for these joint sustainability summits. Who is appointed to this advisory board, and the connections of those appointees to the independent domestic seafood industry (i.e. not married to the jaundiced Pew view of domestic fisheries by virtue of direct or indirect funding) should have a tremendous impact on how this DivCom/Pew SeaWeb venture is viewed by the fishing industry.
We’ll be watching.
http://www.aifrb.org/