Fishing Rights and Wrongs: Congress Must Catch an Over-Efficient Industry

In April, 1976, the United States passed a controversial law claiming jurisdiction over all marine harvests within 200 miles of its coasts. By the time the law took effect a year later, Canada, Mexico and a host of other coastal nations had followed the U.S. lead in declaring their own 200-mile fishery jurisdictions. The actions altered forever--or at least for the current generation--the rules of a coastal nation’s rights to resources within its contiguous waters.

In 12 years the 200-mile fishing act has changed the U.S. fishing scene beyond recognition--for good and, some say, bad.

Congress must now reauthorize the 1976 act. No one doubts that this will occur, but the changes deemed necessary have led to hot lobbying within the fishing industry. During the next weeks appropriate committees of Congress-- Merchant Marine in the House and Commerce in the Senate--will carry multiple amendments to the floors of both bodies. Too many interests are involved to expect easy passage.

Last March an incident drove home the need for new rules. A fleet of large, Seattle-based U.S. fishing ships that process their catch on board was headed to the great Alaskan fishing grounds in the Bering Sea, more than 2,000 miles away. They stopped about halfway off Kodiak, Alaska, to gather some extra fish. For two weeks, deck crews gleefully filled their nets to bursting while teams below processed the catch.

Unfortunately, with a dogged efficiency that free-enterprise Americans might have admired in another activity, the ships scooped up Kodiak’s entire annual quota of pollock--a fish harvested in large quantities for paste, filets and meal. This left the remote island’s shore plants without the pollock they needed to remain in full operation for the rest of the year, and left smaller Kodiak fishing boats without the fish projected for their nets throughout the autumn. It meant the loss of 2,000 jobs.

The big Seattle ships then compounded the outrage. They stripped the females of their roe--for which the Japanese pay inflated prices--and dumped carcasses, from which they harvested nothing, over the side. The greedy action not only wasted 60,000 tons of fish that shore plants could have converted to food and meal, but it covered the sea floor with rotting fish that plugged the nets of local fishermen trying for other species after the outsiders had gone.

The American processor-trawler fleet of about 50 ships barely existed six years ago. Their numbers now grow with success, and the fleet has become overcapitalized. Worse, about 50 more large trawler-processor ships are under construction, waiting to compete in a year or two. Yet the existing fleet must already catch more fish than scientists deem safe for conservation of the stocks, in order to meet huge payrolls and boat mortgages.

None of this could have happened in U.S. fishing 15 years ago, when virtually all U.S. and Canadian fishermen on the east and west coasts of North America were being wiped out by foreign fishing fleets. Back then several countries, led by Japan and the Soviet Union, had taken advantage of high-seas freedom to send fleets of efficient large catcher-processor ships to the prime fishing coasts of the world.

In waters off the United States, such ships--dwarfing the boats and gear of local fishermen--scraped the grounds within sight of shore, from Gloucester and Long Island to Fort Bragg, Coos Bay and Kodiak. Canadians saw similar exploitation. American inshore fishermen, many of whom followed in the steps of fathers and grandfathers, turned into a dying breed. Worse, to pragmatic politicians, none of the foreign catch contributed a nickel to the domestic economy.

Then in 1976 Congress passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, since named the Magnuson Act after its chief sponsor, the late Sen. Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.). The act provides that U.S. fishermen can harvest all the sea creatures of the U.S. 200-mile waters, within scientifically established quotas, that they prove able to catch. These areas off the United States coasts, with their richly productive continental shelves, happen to contain approximately 20% of the world’s entire natural seafood supply.

During the early years of the Magnuson Act, foreign nations were able to catch negotiated quotas of American fish. In the past two years the foreign quotas have been drawn down, virtually to zero as Americans have proved able to do all the catching and processing themselves.

No one in the fishing business really expected that to happen so fast. But the new American taste for fish as a healthy protein alternative to beef, combined with high world prices for fish (particularly Japanese yen prices) and ready foreign capital to augment dollars (particularly from Japan and Norway) have made fishing attractive to the bold and the ambitious as well as to those Americans who have always wanted to fish for a living. Suddenly there are no longer enough fish to go around, even among Americans.

By Oct. 1, 1989, Congress was supposed to have reauthorized the Magnuson Act. But this self-imposed deadline--the start of the new fiscal year--is going to be missed by several weeks, perhaps months, as more than 60 proposed changes run the gauntlet. Among the plethora of amendments that the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee reported out on Oct. 5 are provisions to improve the effectiveness of enforcement, to make certain any foreign allocations will benefit U.S. interests, to speed passage through the bureaucracy of emergency actions--and, through international pressure, to curb the use of miles-long gill nets on the high seas. One amendment affecting fishermen on both coasts would place tuna, a migratory species hitherto exempted from management under the act, under the same controls as more stationary species.

Many of the amendments center around conservation, which opens a conflict between two prime tenets of the original act: to develop an American fishing industry from the great resource available, and to conserve the resource for the benefit of the nation. Ironically, despite the word “conservation” in the name of the act, the provisions for development have been the ones employed most effectively.

Most responsible people in the fishing industry now declare that conservation should receive the highest priority under the Magnuson Act. Yet they do not necessarily agree on who should do the conserving. As a congressional staff person noted: “One man’s conservation is another man’s allocation.”

The roe-stripping incident off Alaska last spring was bad enough, but the pressures that big boats feel to generate income on investment appear to be growing worse.

Paul Fuchs, mayor of Dutch Harbor (the Alaskan seaport closest to the Bering Sea fishing grounds), has had ample opportunity to observe what is happening. The big U.S. ships catch vastly more than their quotas, Fuchs says, and get away with it because nobody is there to watch them. They work grounds unnecessarily where their nets take great quantities of such by-catch as crab and halibut--which by law they cannot keep--as well as fish too small for the processing machinery.

A volunteer witness at a recent fishery council meeting in Anchorage supported Fuchs’ contention. The man, who testified that he had worked as a crewmen on one of the ships, said he saw more fish wasted, thrown back dead, than he saw processed. Fuchs termed it “rape and piracy,” a haunting reminder of the accusations leveled 15 years ago against foreign fleets.

The only solution to such overfishing appears to be an expensive, on-board observer program.

During a visit to Japan last fall, I heard an impassioned five-hour lecture on wasteful American overfishing from the owners of a Japanese fishing company forced to retrench after the loss of U.S. quotas off Alaska. Shun-Ichi Kanai, president of Kanai Fisheries Co. Ltd., a thin, bald man in his 70s, spoke emotionally as he leaned across the conference table, although the interpreter’s translation smoothed the words:

“I just want to express you’re overdoing it. Since you’re a free country, even a barber can take as many fish as he wants. But the American resource belongs in a big term to the world.” Ironic words from the people Americans once felt were destroying the fish resources of the nation, whose actions helped precipitate the Magnuson Act.

For American fishermen, in fact, the very success of the Magnuson Act has shifted the problem from one based on deprivation to one based on opportunity.