There’s something distinctly unsettling that the CGBD, an organization that USAID established has as an objective the implementation of the recommendations of the Pew Oceans Commission and the National Oceans Commission.
I just came by some information on an organization called the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity (CGBD). In the words of its Executive Director, Michael Fischer (in an interview on this past January 27th buried in the Convention on Biological Diversity website at http://www.cbd.int/doc/fin/submission/fin-cgbd-en.pdf), “the CGBD was founded in 1987 by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and several U.S. private foundations. We are currently a unique association, small by design, of 55 funders engaged in environmental grantmaking.” He added “they (USAID) provided seed funding to establish the association, and they continue to provide membership support… About half a dozen of their staff members regularly attend our meetings.” Among the CGBD’s 55 funders are the Pew, Rockefeller, Munson, Surdna and Packard foundations. It’s hardly news to most readers here, but for the uninitiated, these foundations have collectively pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into anti-fishing campaigns of various types in the United States.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, the federal agency that started it, is a participating member of the CGBD and is providing administrative support to it. According to its website, it is involved in supporting “long-term and equitable economic growth and advances U.S. foreign policy objectives.” It does this by “supporting economic growth, agriculture and trade; global health; and democracy, conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance.” In essence, it provides foreign aid to other countries while receiving overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary of State. Apparently a strong part of its Environment program is preserving and protecting biological diversity and the CGBD is one of the tools it uses to do this.
Part of the CGBD is the Marine Conservation Group, with the mission of saving “the global oceans and the biodiversity contained therein by strengthening marine conservation grantmaking and providing a vehicle for information sharing, dialogue, strategy development and collaboration among funders” (http://stage.cgbd.org/visitors/aboutcgbd/workinggroups/marineconservation/).
We’re fine up until this point. If the USAID, a federal bureaucracy paid for with our tax dollars, has decided that U.S.foreign policy goals and objectives can be supported by spending taxpayer bucks abroad on biological diversity, who am I to argue against it? If one of the ways it spends those bucks is through establishing, supporting and participating in the CGBD, ditto.
However, as in so many other dealings between our appointed officials in Washington, the increasingly influential multi-billion dollar NGO sub-government and the huge foundations that support it, there’s a snake in that woodpile.
On the CGBD website among the objectives listed (link above) is one to “ensure funder coordination and collaboration on long-term strategies to implement the recommendations of the Pew Oceans Commission and the National Oceans Commission.” The Pew Charitable Trusts website states “the Pew Oceans Commission released a host of recommendations in 2003 to guide the way in which the federal government will successfully manage America’s marine environment.” The “National Oceans Commission” (actually the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy) addressed reforms it felt were needed for governance of waters over which the U.S. has jurisdiction, oceans (out to the 200 mile limit of the Exclusive Economic Zone), coasts and the great lakes.
There’s something distinctly unsettling about the fact that the CGBD, an organization that USAID (with no apparent domestic authority or mission) established and is still participating in and supporting, has as an objective the implementation of the recommendations of the Pew Oceans Commission and the National Oceans Commission. These recommendations deal only with policies and issues in U.S. waters. Why this USAID connection? Unsettling as well is the fact that USAID is partnering with several of the foundations which have demonstrated a frightening ability and willingness to influence national fisheries policies to the detriment of the domestic commercial fishermen and commercial fishing industry.
But most unsettling is the question of how far U.S. foreign policy might be advanced through the trading away of a significant portion of our own fishing industry’s ability to supply our domestic seafood markets. Funding by several of the foundations partnering with USAID for over 20 years through the CGBD is in large part responsible for the fact that the U.S. is now importing in the neighborhood of 80% the seafood that we consume. In 2008 our fishery product imports were a record $14.2 billion. Needless to say, minus the regulatory morass that these USAID “partner” foundations has created, domestic commercial fishermen would be supplying far more than their current 20% of the domestic market (I’ll refer you again to my FishNet on chronic underfishing, http://www.fishnet-usa.com/chronic_underfishing.htm, which describes a situation which is far from limited to New England and the New England groundfish flee).
Is it paranoid to even remotely consider that our domestic fisheries policies might be linked to the U.S. State Department’s foreign assistance programs? Just consider that fifteen or twenty years ago the suggestion that federal fisheries management – and ocean governance – would largely be in the hands of minions of the same foundations in the CGBD, and that the commercial fishing industry was being effectively dealt out of the fisheries management process would have been considered equally paranoid. And consider as well how many foreign policy concessions could be “bought” with $14 billion in U.S. market opportunities today and who knows how much in the future. As an added bonus, this would be advancing the anti-fishing agendas of a passel of increasingly influential ENGOs. Far fetched? Of course, but we’re living in some mighty strange and trying times, and our government’s increasingly and overly stringent “management” of our fisheries and the concomitant destruction of the people, businesses and communities that depend on them demonstrably aren’t a requirement for fully recovered stocks.
In his interview, Mr. Fischer acknowledged that “we call ourselves a back-office think-tank and collaboration hub for leading environmental funders. Emphasis on the ‘back office;’ hence our opaque name.” I can see why.