December 5, 2014 — Retailers are about to be hit with two major campaigns by NGO’s urging them to revise their seafood purchasing. The tuna campaign is a legitimate response to a real failure of basic fishery management. The salmon campaign is not.
SEAFOODNEWS.COM (News Analysis) — Don’t buy tuna. Don’t buy salmon.
Retailers are about to be hit with two major campaigns by NGO’s urging them to revise their seafood purchasing. The tuna campaign is a legitimate response to a real failure of basic fishery management.
The salmon campaign is not. It is an end run around a scientific and regulatory process that is actively engaged with the issue, but the NGO’s are unwilling to allow the regulatory process to play out.
First tuna.
As we suggested may happen yesterday, the Western and Central Pacific regional fisheries management body failed to take any action to reduce fishing pressure on bigeye tuna.
Their management area accounts for 60% of global tuna catches, and the science shows bigeye stocks are both overfished and experiencing overfishing. Current bigeye stocks may be around 16% of their target level.
The cause of the overfishing is that the preferred purse seine fishing method for other tunas, using Fish Aggregating Devices, has a high rate of bycatch of juvenile bigeye. This is now impacting the entire stock, including fish caught by longliners.
The US, Pacific Island nations, and many NGO’s including the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation representing the tuna canners, all urged the WCPFC to take action to reduce fishing pressure on bigeye, either through expanding closed seasons or setting enforceable harvest limits.
Yet nothing happened. The WCPFC is a multinational body where decisions are only reached when all the nations involved agree. As a result, opposition by China and Taiwan, protecting their distant water tuna fleets, scuttled any chance for an agreement.
This is one of the clearest possible cases where market intervention by NGO’s and changes by buyers is justified. Many of the major tuna canners that sell skipjack and yellowfin heavily participate in this fishery. Buyers will have to develop means to hold them accountable, or take steps to reduce sales of canned tuna. The ISSF could help by identifying the fleets and nations that are most recalcitrant, and imposing voluntary agreements not to purchase tuna from these fleets.
The science of tuna stocks is very clear, and the management system has publicly been an abject failure.
What about salmon?
But another campaign is gathering steam, particularly in the US, where the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership is convening meetings with retail buyers to urge them not to purchase salmon from Prince William Sound in Alaska.
The reason for this campaign is the claim, by many in the NGO community including SFP, the Marine Stewardship Council, and Monterey Bay Aquarium, that the production from salmon hatcheries is interfering and possibly weakening wild salmon stocks.
Is this true? Salmon hatcheries are a technology that has been in use for over 150 years. One of the first mandates of the 19th century US bureau of fisheries – the precursor to the National Marine Fisheries Service- was a widespread program to encourage hatchery production of fish species from lobsters and cod to salmon.
The original purpose of hatcheries was often to replace a wild population that had been lost due to habitat destruction and dams. In some cases, the hatchery production was the only thing that saved particular salmon runs from extinction.
However, the idea of replacing a wild run with hatchery fish was no longer consistent with goals of the endangered species act, and other national conservation goals.
As a result, 15 years ago Congress established the hatchery scientific working group to look at West Coast hatcheries in Washington and Oregon, and determine best practices and reforms needed in hatchery management.
The latest report of this group can be found here (hatcheryreform.us). It makes a series of recommendations for hatchery management to preserve and enhance wild stocks, while at the same time boosting salmon harvest levels through hatchery augmentation.
This work did not cover Alaska, which has its own history of salmon hatchery management. The fisheries most dependent on hatcheries are in Prince William Sound, where some hatchery runs have replaced wild runs in particular creeks and rivers.
This is not an issue in an of itself. When a farmer clears a field to grow crops, he destroys one habitat in order to create another. I don’t think any NGO can argue to retailers that changes in habitat for food production should be universally condemned. Rather the question is whether the scope and nature of these changes are sustainble.
The ongoing and permanent sustainability of wild salmon populations is a real concern for everyone including salmon harvesters and processors and retailers.
For that reason, as the scientific understanding of hatchery impacts has changed, the State of Alaska through the ADF&G started a $5 million dollar project to look at the impact of Prince William Sound hatcheries on wild salmon stocks. The five year project is now in its second year.
When SFP first identified hatcheries as an issue they wanted to bring before retailers, they went to the State of Alaska and suggested they be hired for a fisheries improvement program. The state refused, saying there was no need to hire SFP to do what it was doing already as part of its ongoing management responsibility.
SFP is now unwilling to recognize that the State of Alaska is taking steps to address the impact of hatcheries, because they are not a paid part of that project.
So this brings us back to the issue of these two campaigns.
On Hatcheries, there is clear concern that a true sustainability and conservation issue may exist. But the federal and state governments have been spending millions of dollars studying the issue, revising hatchery practices, and moving towards best management practices for hatcheries within the context of current scientific understanding. There is anything but a lack of action.
In contrast to the situation with bigeye tuna, the responsible managers are throwing everything they have at the issue, and there is an established public regulatory and scientific review process that is underway.
In our view, the contrast could not be more clear: The tuna issue is a genuine failure of managers to apply even basic conservation principles, and a market led reaction is an important tool to force governments to adopt the needed conservation measures.
In salmon, there is a huge effort already underway, funded with millions of dollars, to examine the very issues around hatcheries that SFP, the NGO’s, and all of us interested in preserving wild salmon care about.
Why would the SFP be organizing meetings at this point to urge buyers to boycott salmon from Prince William Sound? There is not an emergency. These practices have been ongoing for many years, and a two or three year timeline for changes is not unreasonable. SFP says that due to the precautionary principle, there should be no further increases in hatchery capacity. But this is just part of a larger question – how to manage interaction with wild stocks – that is currently being addressed.
The unreasonable part of the campaign is the 'my way or the highway' approach. Retailers who care about long term outcomes should recognize this campaign for the self-serving business it is. We hope they urge SFP in these meetings to not stand outside, but to be willing to participate in the public regulatory and scientific process, and submit to the same give and take that all other government, academic scientists and regulators agree to.
We all know there may be changes needed in hatchery management. Since that process of recognizing and responding to this is well underway, why does a boycott make any sense, except to those who benefit by promoting it?
Nearly 20 years after the original founding of the Marine Stewardship Council, it is time for retailers to develop some sophistication about ‘fisheries emergencies’, and ask just when an emergency is so severe they must boycott a product, rather than urge all parties to continue with their ongoing management and review processes.
This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.