Industry’s Feeding Frenzy Perils Richest U.S. Fishery : Resources: A showdown looms over practices some fear could turn North Pacific into a barren region.

How about this for a controversial perspective: The greatest environmental disaster in Alaska history was not the wreck of the Exxon Valdez but the mismanagement and waste of the state’s bountiful fishing resources?

That’s the view of maverick Gov. Walter J. Hickel, himself no stranger to argument.

The surprising thing is that when he made the observation in his 1992 state-of-the-state message to Alaskans, few people scoffed. By the dozens, they nodded their heads in somber agreement.

“It’s a disaster,” Hickel says in an interview, in his speeches and in his press releases.

Heads nod.

“The rape of the North Pacific Fisheries--300 million pounds of edible fish are caught and discarded overboard--dead--every year. . . . The mismanagement of the North Pacific pushes the fishermen to this destructive kind of fishing. If it’s allowed to go unchecked, pretty soon we’ll have a barren ocean floor . . . a lifeless desert.”

What a shocking turn that would be.

For today, over the horizon in the cold greenish waters of the Gulf of Alaska and north in the vast, stormy Bering Sea is America’s greatest seafood larder--an estimated 36 billion pounds of bottom-dwelling cod, sole, flounder, perch, mackerel, turbot and, most of all, the humble walleye pollock.

And here in the ports of Kodiak and Dutch Harbor, and in Seattle to the south, is a fleet mighty enough to fish it clean in short order, every wriggling gill and fin and filet of it.

In between fish and fishermen stands an industry-dominated regulatory process that is creaky at best, and rife with economic self-interest conflicts at worst, and a public that knows next to nothing and is given virtually no voice over one of its most precious and healthy food resources.

This is Alaska’s “ground fish” fishery, the prosaic food-on-the-fin industry of breaded fish filets and surimi paste, which is transformed into imitation crab and other processed fish products. The ocean bottom is the realm of ordinary, low-rent fishes, which by their sheer tonnage of protein represent the largest seafood harvest in a state that provides about 60% of America’s domestically landed catch.

During the last decade, this has been America’s fastest growing fishery. And with it has come many of today’s most alarming concerns about environmental depletion, waste, excessive fishing competition and government management at cross-purposes.

In 1979-80, fishermen harvested about 100,000 metric tons of pollock and other common ground fishes off Alaska, towing deep-water trawl nets. The dockside value of these fish at 5 cents a pound was about $1 million. Ten years later, the catch approached two million metric tons with a value of $2 billion. By 1990, one out of every three pounds of fish landed in all the U.S. was Alaskan pollock.

But this same decade has seen disturbing trends in fish-dependent animal life around the Gulf and Bering Sea.

The huge, fish-eating Steller sea lions of the region have declined by two-thirds. In 1990, the federal government declared the sea lions a threatened species. Among sea birds, both kitiwakes and murres are in decline.

Greenpeace lost a court suit to restrict pollock fishing until an environmental assessment is made to see if the decline of the sea lions can be attributed to the rise in ground fishing. The case is now on appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Meanwhile, the pollock, which has been at very high levels, is in decline in at least some places in Alaska. At the same time, a fishing fleet that has expanded many-fold in size and technology--with financial encouragement from the federal government--is itself economically threatened by that age-old bane of the seaman, too many boats, not enough fish.

A showdown is brewing.

“The agencies of regulation are set up under the Department of Commerce to exploit the resources to the maximum yield--that’s economic yield,” says Greenpeace Northwest fisheries coordinator Penny Pagels. “What’s bad is that we’re looking at fish only for yield, we don’t look at the relationship between species . . . . Now, we’re left to manage the decline, and that’s reactionary.”

Only on an issue like fishing could opposites such as pro-development Hickel and pro-conservation Pagels agree: The state of commercial fishing in Alaska is wretched.

To understand today, it is necessary to know how we got here.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, deep-water fishing off Alaska was the province of foreign fishing fleets. These fleets heavily overfished some species, like Pacific Ocean perch, but left others like the pollock in reasonably healthy condition. Then, in 1976, the United States joined other nations in extending territorial claims from three miles offshore to 200. As part of that, Congress passed legislation designed to Americanize the nation’s fisheries.

By 1992, that has been accomplished, more or less. The foreign fleets are gone, although plenty of foreign capital and manpower remain in the boats and processing plants.

What Congress did not envision, however, is how over-successful it would be in promoting a domestic fishing capacity in the North Pacific.

In the early 1980s, by way of illustration, the U.S. fleet of huge factory trawlers in the North Pacific numbered just a dozen. Today the fleet numbers almost 70, thanks in part to $300 million in government-backed loans. The total would not be notable if it were not for the mind-boggling capacity of these all-out deep-sea harvesters.

These ships--boats is too modest a word--range in length from 104 feet to 376 feet, almost as big as a Navy man o’ war. They drop huge nets off their sterns, dragging them along the bottom or just above it for a couple of hours or so, drawing up somewhere from 25 tons to 240 tons of fish in a single tow. They could catch more but no net has yet been built to hold such weight. The fish are then mechanically processed on board by a crew that can number up to 70 while the net is dropped again. When the fishing is good, the trawlers can crisscross through schools of pollock and pull them up like this for 16-hour days, three to six weeks straight.

To put this in perspective, an old-fashioned New England skipper would celebrate a trawl catch of 5,000 pounds of fish.

And the Seattle-based factory trawlers are not alone in mining the riches of the North Pacific ground fish. Many boats from the Alaska crab fleet have been converted to trawlers after the boom in Alaska’s king crab fishery went bust in the mid 1980s as the populations of the succulent kings nose-dived. Along the coast of Alaska, some 20 shore-side processing plants have been erected to compete for the bounty of the ground fish, about 80% of which is exported to Asia in the form of surimi paste. The paste is then reprocessed into imitation crab and any number of other processed fish products.

The inevitable result: What was a limitless resource just a few years ago is too small today. Or put another way, there are plenty of fish but too many fishermen.

Overseeing the resource is the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, one of eight such regional councils in the nation. In Alaska, the fishing industry now holds seven seats on the council and the government four. Consumers and environmentalists are relegated to the sidelines, and mostly they do not seem to care.

“Fishing looks at itself as a way of life, not an industry. If the consumer would only put pressure on fishermen, they would start to behave like a food industry that cares about consumers. But the American consumer is a world-class ignoramus when it comes to fish,” complains William Aron, director of the federal government’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center.

All the fault is not the consumer’s, however. No other large American enterprise exists so clannishly apart from the public while solely dependent on a publicly-owned resource. Unlike oil leases or grazing permits or timber sales on public lands, America’s fish resources are given away free of charge. Just for the taking.

Over recent years, more and more Americans wanted their chance at high-seas adventure and quick riches, so the fleet of fishing vessels grew. The fisherman-dominated council responded by shortening the season, not by limiting how many boats can fish. The year-round pollock season now lasts only 5 1/2 months, and is getting shorter all the time.

The 15-year-old policy that shaped the expansion of the American North Pacific fishery was to distribute the greatest number of fish to the greatest number of fishermen--an expediency that resulted in dangerous inefficiencies and conflicts that will surely test the capacity of industry regulators to untangle.

With hindsight, it’s easy to see that effects of a shrinking fishing season and growing fishing fleet capacity are many and almost all bad.

Waste is enormous. The processing machines on factory trawlers cannot handle pollock that are too small. If each boat was assigned a quota of pollock, a boat that ran into schools dense with undersized fish might sail away without worry of wasting time and move elsewhere rather than net and kill millions of pounds of unusable pollock. But when the quota is assigned to the fleet, individual boats are competing against each other and they scramble as fast and hard as they can, no matter what gets wasted.

“The way it is, a captain says, ‘I don’t care if I can only keep half of the (trawl net) tow, at least I can keep half. So he keeps on fishing,’ ” explains Bruce Buls, spokesman for the American Factory Trawlers Assn.

The math is unpleasant: A net load of 100 metric tons of fish, half of which are undersized, means 110,200 pounds of immature pollock thrown back, dead and wasted. And that is just a single tow of the trawl net. Tomorrow’s catch is being killed and heaved over the side for the sake of today.

Even when they keep a fish, the trawlers end up throwing back 85% of the body weight as waste.

When the giant nets scoop up other fish, such as premium halibut, this is called by-catch. And the council’s rules specify that these out-of-season fish must be tossed back. Up to 90% of them are dead or mutilated.

Because of this by-catch and other wastage associated with the high pressure placed on fishermen to work in dramatically shortened seasons, an estimated 20 million pounds of halibut is killed and allowed to rot each year in Alaska waters as a matter of policy. That compares to just 70 million pounds brought to market. Wastage of other species is also appallingly large.

The toll on fishermen is also high. They are finding it harder and harder to make their boat payments each season, notwithstanding federal loan guarantees. Safety is sacrificed. A big factory trawler sank in the Bering Sea in 1990 and nine perished. Some said the pressures of time and money doomed the boat. Alaska ranked 50th among the states in worker safety in a recent AFL-CIO study.

No wonder the governor and Greenpeace and many fishermen say the whole system is nuts.

Some have suggested it’s merely a question of which will go bankrupt first--the fishing fleet or the North Pacific marine environment.

This month, after two years of anguished deliberation, the council took a first step to try to contain the mess. It voted to institute a temporary moratorium against new boats entering the offshore fisheries for the next three years. Presumably, this will prevent things from becoming worse in the short run, although it will do little to make them better.

But tougher questions await the council.

Overfishing is the gravest danger.

To date, the council has stayed within the advisory limits recommended by government scientists and established strict annual catch quotas based on preserving the long-term health of the fish populations. Some council officials say that record should put the public at ease, even if fishing management is otherwise messy.

Regulators also note that a vocal element of the Alaska fishing industry has a long and indisputable record of conservation.

Doubters say, just wait.

The problem is that the North Pacific holds only so many fish, and no more.

In the listing of 1992 catch quotas, the council could not identify a single ground fish species that was on the increase in Alaska. Six species were said to be stable, three decreasing and the status of five species was unknown. It is the nature of fish populations to oscillate according to fishing pressure and the complicated algebra of food, temperature, prey and other conditions deep in the sea.

But if fishable stocks are decreasing and the fishing capacity significantly overabundant, can trouble be far behind?

Trouble, in fact, now spills across the desk tops of the fisheries managers and across the chart tables of the fishermen.

Lawlessness is rampant. Large foreign trawlers sit in a 50,000-square-mile patch of the Bering Sea outside the territorial limits of the U.S. and Russia, an area fishermen call the “doughnut hole.” Here, foreign boats have been seen darting into U.S. and Russian waters to poach pollock, perhaps in Gargantuan quantities.

In the domestic fleet, story after story is told of skippers who fish out of season, with unlawful and destructive gear, who shoot sea mammals such as killer whales and seals, and who roam the sea without regard to anything except trying to pull ends together and make them meet in a fierce world of hyper-competition.

Where do such stories come from? Mostly from fishermen themselves.

The Coast Guard usually maintains just two, sometimes three, cutters on station for the entire region, which Alaskans note, has more coastline than all the other states combined. This would be something like California trying to enforce the highway speed limit with just two or three police cruisers.

In a single springtime raid this year, federal and state officials served warrants on 13 trawlers, and they were investigating 27 others for illegal harvesting. Three of the boats were found to contain 2.5 million pounds of contraband cod.

“We don’t know what’s going on beyond the immediate in-shore area at the present time,” complains Alaska Fish and Game Commissioner Carl Rosier.

Dean Adams, skipper of the longline schooner Quest and a third-generation fisherman, says the government-sanctioned free-for-all nature of fishing in the 1980s and 1990s has distorted long-held values.

“The way things have evolved, we’re forced to use slash and burn techniques on the fisheries. That’s the way they are set up.”

In past times, Adams noted, a fishermen could grow old, if not necessarily wealthy, on the sea. Today, the demands to work 16 hours or more--many times around the clock--to get the most out of the foreshortened seasons has driven all but the young, reckless and brawny off the water.

And the rules of fishing that are not flouted in the ocean are usually challenged in the hearing rooms, usually by all sides.

In the Bering Sea, the fishery council has set a catch ceiling of two million metric tons of ground fish annually. That means the combined take of all bottom-dwelling species, excluding halibut, cannot exceed that limit. This is the council’s way of saying that ground fish species are ecologically interrelated and that too much of the ocean’s biomass should not be harvested at once.

Greenpeace, the only national conservationist group to devote significant energy to the North Pacific fishery, has questioned the scientific basis for the cap, suggesting it may be too high. And, fisheries experts from the group say that some quotas of individual species are also unjustifiably high considering the obvious decline of the seals and sea birds.

Fishermen, such as those on the factory trawlers, think the two-million-ton cap is arbitrarily low. They say they are due a higher limit unless scientists can show some hard evidence why they should not get it. In 1990 alone, fishermen sought quotas for various ground fish that were twice as high as the council said was prudent.

When these kinds of disagreements appear, the lessons from elsewhere around the nation and the history of American fishery management does not bode well for the fish resources of Alaska.

Whether in New England or the Gulf Coast or the West Coast of the Lower 48, fishing regulators simply have been unable to withstand the pressure of fishermen to overfish. In a report this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that of America’s important fish stocks 25% were fully utilized and 28% overfished. Only 13% were under-utilized. The remaining 34% could not be categorized for lack of credible science.

Of those species that are overfished, scientists say that many would take up to a decade to recover if all fishing stopped.

It is especially unsettling that the most troubled regional fishery is New England’s, where the scientific data underscoring the problem is most complete.

In Alaska, until now, there have been plenty of fish to go around, and when there were not--as when the king crab all but disappeared in the mid 1980s--there was always something else to fish for.

But this will not remain so forever, and when the crunch comes, America has only the word of the fishermen themselves and government fishery regulators that history will not repeat itself and that the sea will not be overfished in the name of today’s jobs, families and votes.

Many experts remain uneasy. Paul Brouha is the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based American Fisheries Society, the professional association of fishery biologists. These scientists believe the fishery needs more than just promises.

“Elsewhere in the U.S., the majority, if not virtually all, of the important fish stocks are overfished or clearly on the way to that condition,” Brouha says. “North Pacific fisheries ultimately will suffer the same depletion unless there are changes in the way the resource is managed.”

Times researcher Doug Conner assisted with this story.

Hooks, Lines and Sinkers

Commercial fishermen use a wide array of nets, lures and traps. The methods shown here are not in proportion to one another:

Crabbing: A baited steel cage is dropped to the bottom and tethered to a buoy. Crabs enter trap through one-way doors.

Catch: Crabs

Crabbing depths vary, from 180 to 360 feet.

Trolling: A lure or bait is dragged behind a moving boat. Some boats bristle with many lines set at different depths.

Catch: Salmon

Fishing depths vary, from 70 to 270 feet.

Gill net: Shaped like long volleyball nets, they are stretched underwater to snare fish. The net’s holes are just large enough to trap fish around the gills as they swim through.

Catch: Salmon, herring

In Alaska, net depth is about 20 feet.

Purse seiners (pronounced saners): As the boat travels in a circle, a long net is dropped deep into the water. The net balloons out and circles the fish. The net is pulled closed at the bottom, trapping the fish inside. Skiffs are used to keep the net from tangling.

Catch: Salmon, herring

Nets hang down to 80-130 feet.

Longlining: A line as long as 2,000 feet is tied with a series of baited hooks and strung across the bottom. The bottom of the line is usually anchored, and a buoy marks the end.

Catch: Halibut, black cod

Hooks laid from 50-500 feet.

Trawling: A cone-shaped net is dragged behind the boat. Many nets use heavy boards to keep the the net mouth open and chains to keep the end of the net down.

Catch: Cod, pollock, sole

In Alaska, 1,200 feet is a standard depth, though they go as deep as one mile.

Sources: Port of Seattle, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Alaska Department of Fish and Game