This public campaign, by deliberately failing to highlight any of the efforts being made to address bycatch issues, is truly Orwellian, and designed to deliberately misinform the public and with other NGO’s to stampede a discussion that ultimately will hurt food production and further diminish the ability to harvest from the sea. In my heart I believe that is the overarching objective.
SEAFOOD.COM NEWS — March 20, 2014 — Oceana has released a report on the nine dirties US fisheries in terms of bycatch to great media fanfare. "Anything can be bycatch,” said Dominique Cano-Stocco, campaign director at Oceana. “Whether it’s the thousands of sea turtles that are caught to bring you shrimp or the millions of pounds of cod and halibut that are thrown overboard after fishermen have reached their quota, bycatch is a waste of our ocean’s resources. Bycatch also represents a real economic loss when one fisherman trashes another fisherman’s catch.”
“Hundreds of thousands of dolphins, whales, sharks, sea birds, sea turtles and fish needlessly die each year as a result of indiscriminate fishing gear,” said Amanda Keledjian, report author and marine scientist at Oceana. “It’s no wonder that bycatch is such a significant problem, with trawls as wide as football fields, longlines extending up to 50 miles with thousands of baited hooks and gillnets up to two miles long. The good news is that there are solutions – bycatch is avoidable.”
This is not the language of scientists seeking to lower bycatch. It is a call to arms to shut down fisheries.
Bycatch issues in fisheries are not new. US fishery managers have spent huge amounts of time addressing bycatch.
For example, one of the key functions of fisheries observers is to accurately record and document bycatch, so that impacts on stock are understood and included in fishery management decisions.
Other times, bycatch is an inevitable consequence of management decisions. For example, in Alaska prohibited species means that in some cases bycatch cannot be retained by the vessel that catches it. In a creative and positive attempt to address this problem, SeaShare and much of the catch processor fleet got NMFS and the State of Alaska to allow vessels to retain some prohibited species and donate them to food banks rather than discard them.
Again, almost every fishery will have some form of bycatch. Some fisheries have a more substantive bycatch issue than others.
Longline bycatch has been drastically reduced through use of circle hooks and through major mitigation measures to prevent sea bird interactions with longline bait.
But Oceana does not mention any of this. Instead they call out nine US fisheries and make the media hypnotic claim that these are the ‘dirtiest’ fisheries.
They include:
Southeast Snapper-Grouper Longline Fishery
California Set Gillnet Fishery
Southeast Shrimp Trawl Fishery
California Drift Gillnet Fishery
Gulf of Alaska Flatfish Trawl Fishery
Northeast Bottom Trawl
Mid-Atlantic Bottom Trawl Fishery
Atlantic Highly Migratory Species Longline Fishery
New England and Mid-Atlantic Gillnet Fishery
Taken together, these nine fisheries represent a significant share of all US fisheries, and for the most part occur on stocks that are healthy and conservatively managed.
So what is behind this campaign against ‘dirty’ fisheries. Instead of working with fisheries managers to further reduce bycatch in these fisheries, Oceana is beginning a public relations campaign to frighten people away from the idea that they are eating sustainable seafood.
At the Boston Seafood Show we had the opportunity to meet with some of the senior Marine Stewardship Council executives at the show, and we discussed the issues that are most prominent in the five year review of MSC standards that is now taking place.
There is considerable conflict within the MSC community over whether standards need to be tightened or changed in two areas: benthic habitat and bycatch.
Although the new standards for MSC will not be finalized for another 18 months, the discussion of changing the standard to require a different level of bycatch or approach to bycatch is very much on the table.
Oceana’s campaign plays into this. The effort is to make bycatch (which is not a new issue and has been at the center of fisheries management decisions for years), a new area of concern for those who support sustainable fisheries.
This call on bycatch, Oceana hopes, will be taken up by other NGO’s in a way that creates a problem, rather than solves one.
This release on the dirtiest fisheries is all over the media. My wife came up to me this morning with the Boston Globe saying 'did you see this article that New England has one of the nation's dirtiest fisheries?'
I had to explain that no trawl fishery in New England was possible without bycatch, because some of the fish harvested are going to be too small. The important thing was to know how much of this fish was being taken, whether it had an impact on the health of that stock of fish, and whether the impacts of discards and bycatch were taken into account by fisheries managers.
In New England, the answer to all of the above is yes. But how will that ever get into the media as a counterweight to Oceana’s campaign.
So there is a basic script here: NGO’s take an existing management problem and make it seem insurmountable and destructive. The public buys in to the idea that something terrible is happening in fisheries, not knowing at all about the decades long efforts of fishery managers to control bycatch. The NGO’s then pressure retailers to say they must stop using fisheries that are the ‘dirtiest’ in the US.
Then the MSC is pressured by both retailers and NGO’s to change its standards on bycatch to address the perception that sustainable fisheries cannot operate with this level of bycatch.
Meanwhile, the work of NOAA, fishery scientists, and the expense of fisheries observers and the meticulous attention to recording bycatch and discards is thrown out the window.
The end result is both the retailers and consumers are happy to get Russian fish, certified by the MSC, with a five year plan to improve their bycatch problem, thinking how good they are for buying more sustainable fish.
I feel almost like we are entering George Orwell’s 1984 where the slogans of the Ministry of Truth were ‘War is Peace’, ‘Freedom is Slavery’, and ‘Ignorance is Strength. ’
This public campaign, by deliberately failing to highlight any of the efforts being made to address bycatch issues, is truly Orwellian, and designed to deliberately misinform the public and with other NGO’s to stampede a discussion that ultimately will hurt food production and further diminish the ability to harvest from the sea. In my heart I believe that is the overarching objective.
The full Oceana report is available here.
This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.