In 2008 the New England fleet caught just 43,000 of the 172,000 metric ton total allowable catch. If fishermen matter to policymakers, why wasn’t there a crash program to figure out how they could catch and sell some of the 130,000 metric tons of groundfish that went uncaught and unsold last year?
Peter Shelley, Vice President of the Conservation Law Foundation in Rockland, Maine, sent a letter to the editor of the Gloucester Daily Times published on the Fourth of July that was critical of the thorough and ongoing commercial fishing coverage the paper has been providing. In it he raised the specter of a conspiracy regarding fisheries management and a pending upheaval in the way New England groundfish will be managed.
He ended his letter with the question “isn’t it time to put the conspiracy theories away?” Of course Mr. Shelley wasn’t claiming that a conspiracy is actually ongoing behind the massive shift in management philosophy in our nation’s oldest fishery, he was suggesting that the Times was supporting (or proposing) the idea that a conspiracy actually existed when it didn’t.
Now why would he do that? Obviously, that’s something that’s impossible for me to even speculate about. But I have a pretty good idea of what the effects of his suggestion were on those who read it. To the general public, conspiracy theories are automatically associated with wild-eyed fanatics, black helicopters, grassy knolls and Roswell, New Mexico. Whether he intended to or not, Mr. Shelley was putting reporter Richard Gaines, the editorial staff of the Times and the fishermen up and down our coasts — who know that things aren’t right in many of our commercial fisheries — in that same category, aluminum foil hats and all.
Need I mention that Mr. Shelley and the Conservation Law Foundation have benefited from the Pew Charitable Trust’s largess since he was awarded a Pew fellowship back in 1996.
According to Merriam-Webster, a conspiracy theory is “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.”
Now we’ve definitely got an “event or set of circumstances” going on in fisheries management and ocean governance in the U.S., and the New England groundfish fishery is at the epicenter. It’s a fact that a number of people with high level, long term relationships with the multibillion dollar Pew Charitable Trusts, established with Sun Oil megabucks and apparently still largely under the control of the family of founder Joseph Pew, have been chosen for leadership roles in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This is the federal agency that is responsible for just about everything non-military in the world’s oceans that involves the U.S. government and the U.S. people. But this is hardly a secret, and “secret” is the operative word in defining a conspiracy. That cat’s much too far out of the bag – and has been for much too long – for it to be considered anything but common knowledge by anyone who’s interested. And so is the fact that Pew has funded to the tune of many tens of millions of dollars much of the current campaign to reform our commercial fisheries and to convince legislators, media and the public that such reform is urgently needed.
Nor is it a secret that those Pew-connected officials at NMFS/NOAA are convinced that the solution to our supposedly overwhelming fisheries problems, beginning with the New England groundfish fishery, lies in privatizing those fisheries, as are their colleagues in the foundation-funded Environmental Non-government Organization (ENGO) world. In fact it is so far from a secret that at a high level investment conference in Los Angeles earlier this year, representatives of one of these ENGOs, the Environmental Defense Fund, were touting fisheries quotas as a good place for the attendees (largely representatives of charitable foundations) to put their bucks. No secret there; in fact an audio transcript of the seminar session is available on the web.
And, as the ongoing investigation by the Department of Commerce’s own Inspector General’s office into NOAA/NMFS enforcement activities in New England indicates, it isn’t any secret that things might be rotten not just in Denmark. Just to put icing on the cake, NOAA/NMFS was apparently hand feeding information about pending legal actions in Gloucester, Massachusetts to specific members of the media even before notifying the people who were supposed to be on the receiving end of those actions. It’s hard to see that as anything other than an attempt by a government agency to manipulate press coverage, favoring particular reporters and papers over others in an effort to influence what the public sees and when. There is such a taint there that a federal judge has demanded an explanation from NOAA/NMFS.
None of this is secret, In fact, in much of the fishing industry it’s common knowledge. That makes it kind of difficult to credit Mr. Shelley’s claim that the people at the Times, or anyone else, are pushing the idea of a conspiracy.
But all of this is minor compared to the fact that in a recent publication NOAA/NMFS revealed that in 2008 the New England fleet caught just 43,000 metric tons of of groundfish out of a target TAC (total allowable catch) of 172,000 tons (Northeast Preliminary Fisheries Statistics, July, 2009, NMFS/NEFSC). The participants in a fishery which supposedly is and has been in an overfishing crisis, at least according to NOAA/NMFS and the foundation-funded “conservationist” organizations including Mr. Shelley’s Conservation Law Foundation, were allowed to catch only 25% of the fish that were available to be caught. This crisis, supposedly incapable of being addressed via conventional fisheries management tools, is being claimed as justification for a switch to a management regime that may have a cataclysmic impact on New England’s fisheries; a type of management demonstrated to be effective in only a 121 of 11,135 fisheries worldwide. ("Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?", Costello et al., Science 19 September 2008: Vol. 321. no. 5896, p. 1679)
To suggest that “catch shares” have been a proven management method in the real world (as opposed to the computer programs of the theoreticians who are now in control, that’s the one with real fish, real fishermen, real boats and real salt water) and to implement them because of that strains credulity a lot more than the average government action does. Yet here we go. And why? To save the fish and the fishermen from overfishing in a fishery in which only a quarter of the fish that could be are actually being caught.
If fishermen really make a difference to those who are influencing or formulating government fisheries policy, why wasn’t there a crash program at NOAA/NMFS, perhaps utilizing some of those tens of millions of dollars that the people at Pew spend so eagerly on pushing their agenda, to figure out how all of those fishermen with time on their hands and boats at their docks could catch and sell some of that 130,000 metric tons of groundfish that went uncaught and unsold last year? If the harvest of groundfish could be doubled or trebled sustainably, why isn’t doing so getting as much attention from the managers – and from the “conservationists” who have been claiming they are on the side of both the fish and the fishermen – as is reducing the fleet size and totally disrupting the lives of so many people who depend on such an important fishery?
Could it be that Mr. Shelley wasn’t far off base in raising the specter of a conspiracy after all?