What Happened to California’s Seafood? : THERE WAS GOLD IN THEM THERE SEAS WHEN OUT STATE’S FISHING CATCH LED THE NATION. THE GOLD RUSH IS OVER

The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty.

--John Steinbeck, “Cannery Row”

*

There is no cannery on Cannery Row today. And most of the California seafood is in the tanks around the bend in the Monterey Aquarium. Any crab sold in the theme-park-like restaurants is likely to come from Alaska, the shrimp from Mexico. The situation is the same in the state’s other working harbors too.

The sardine catch that built Monterey disappeared 50 years ago. And the California tuna fleet and its massive canneries that replaced the state’s sardine business? Gone to places like Puerto Rico and American Somoa--a particularly sad turn of events, considering that canned tuna was invented in California in 1907.

The days when Southern Californians regularly ate abalone steaks the size of a dinner plate are now the stuff of nostalgia--and M.F.K. Fisher memoirs.

The nation’s most spectacularcoast is running out of seafood.

Once, the catch from California waters was the nation’s richest. In 1945, the state’s seafood landings were 1.15 billion pounds, or twice as much as any other state.

Landings in 1993 (the last year for which such data is available) were 313 million pounds, a 73% decline since the 1940s.

The state’s century-long boom is now a bust, and the decline continues today. The number of commercial fishing boats in California was 5,136 in 1993-’94, a reduction of 16% from the previous 12 months, and a 38% decline from the previous 10 years. Commercial fishermen in the state numbered 10,580 in 1993-’94, a decrease of 13% from 1992-’93, and a 32% decrease from 1983-’84. The state’s most recent harvest is dwarfed by Alaska and Louisiana, and trails Virginia and Washington as well.

Some place the blame on the gold-rush mentality that lived on until recently in the California seafood industry. “There are no stop signs at sea” is a familiar phrase to the state’s fishermen. And why not? Until recently, it seemed that there was no end to the abundance. When one prized catch was fished down, the fleet would move on to the next until it too was unprofitable and elusive. The practice was called “fishing hard.”

Today, of the 10 major species commercially landed in California, nine are in decline, some precipitously so. And California’s three leading catches--sea urchin, mackerel and squid--are primarily exported, not even consumed to any great degree by Californians. Sea urchins are sold to Japan, squid is frozen for shipment to Spain and mackerel is canned for sale in Europe or used in pet food. None of the three are among the top 10 species consumed in the United States, according to the National Fisheries Institute, a trade association.

*

One of the bleakest assessments comes from the industry itself: “Today’s California seafood resources are in jeopardy,” a recent annual report from the California Seafood Council says, “as the pressures of a growing society put greater demands on the ocean and its protein resources.”

“Am I concerned? Yeah, I am,” says Jim Caito, vice president of Caito Fisheries Inc., in Fort Bragg, a family-owned corporation dating to the 1890s. “I hope we can stabilize it. Some [species] have come back; the Chinook salmon stocks are up this year. But why is all this happening? I don’t know.”

The trade magazines, normally cheerleaders of the industry’s every move, are facing reality. One, Seafood Leader, states, “We do such a terrible job of managing our own fisheries.”

J. David Ptak, general manager of Chesapeake Fish Co. in San Diego, one of the state’s largest processors and wholesalers and former president of the California Seafood Council, estimates that his family-owned company carries only 10% of its product volume from California waters.

“We used to just sit here and wait for the local fishermen to show up,” he says. “Now we don’t even rely on California [fishery] resources, but we did at one time.”

So are California fishermen the equivalent of the 19th-Century Great Plains hunters whose greed virtually wiped out the American buffalo herds and their own livelihoods? Or are they victims whose plight is the result of a complex mixture of urban development, environmental restrictions, dramatic weather shifts, low-cost international competition and the political muscle of the sports fishing constituency?

Industry representatives prefer to embrace the theory that warming ocean temperatures, represented by El Nin~o, are responsible for the dramatic landing declines. Several important species--mackerel, rockfish, sardines--migrated to colder northern waters, according to the premise. Overfishing is reluctantly and infrequently mentioned as a contributing factor.

The passage in 1990 of Proposition 132, a measure backed by environmentalists and sport fishing enthusiasts, effectively closed coastal waters to gill-net fishing, a method that allowed fishermen to net big catches at a relatively low cost. The ban, in effect since 1992, extends three miles out to sea. As a result, say industry proponents, an enormous amount of locally caught fish was taken off consumers’ plates and left to the domain of recreational boat owners.

In addition, the seafood industry has been battered by critics who contend that only a marginal investment has been made in ensuring that safe and wholesome fishery products reach consumers.

The seafood industry has also globalized during the past decade, presenting keen competition for domestic sources. Virtually any country with jet service sells seafood. A fish landed off Costa Rica, for instance, can be iced, packed and air-freighted to Los Angeles within 10 hours. However, the world catch is also declining after reaching a peak in 1989, according to United Nations statistics.

Certainly contributing to the decline is the degradation of the coastal environment brought on by encroaching real estate development in California and elsewhere. Runoff from sewage treatment, pesticides and industrial pollutants has created “dead seas” out of areas such as Santa Monica Bay, Puget Sound and Boston Harbor. One trade magazine refers to it as the “continuing destruction of fish habitat.”

But some say the declining numbers don’t tell the whole story.

According to Jim Glock, of the Pacific Fishery Management Council in Portland, Ore., whenever boats begin harvesting a virgin population of fish (or one that was lightly fished in the past), there is an eventual decline in landings. However, with proper management, he says, “the population comes into balance with the amount of predation.”

“Sure, fishermen fish hard the first years a certain species is targeted,” says Wes Silverton, regional economist for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Long Beach. “We have problems that we are working on.”

Overfishing occurs when a fish population cannot reproduce fast enough to sustain itself in the face of intensive harvests and becomes threatened or endangered.

“The fishing-down process shows a decline and that should eventually stabilize,” Glock says. “We have stocks that are declining, and in some cases we don’t know much about those species. In other cases, corrective action was taken. A lot of the harvest reduction you are seeing is because of [government] fishing restrictions.”

Several state and federal agencies assess the conditions of the various seafood species off California, including the state’s Fish and Game Department, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service and the quasi-governmental Pacific Fishery Management Council.

*

The process is far from exact. A state or federal employee must go to the landing sites and estimate the number and species being caught. Fishermen also supply catch data. And surveys are taken at sea, where small-mesh nets are used to determine the status of a particular fishery in terms of size, numbers and age of the fish schooling together.

“We don’t have nearly the information we would like,” Glock says. “There are a lot of species that we don’t have individual counts for.”

If officials determine that a particular fish population is being dangerously depleted, then restrictions, or outright bans, can be placed on its harvest. The catch of numerous California species are regulated this way, including abalone, ling cod, Pacific herring, rockfish, ocean perch, sablefish, salmon, sardines, sturgeon, thresher shark and others.

Mariga Vojkovich, a senior biologist with California’s Department of Fish and Game, says that, in a sense, all commercial species are under at least some kind of protection.

“All fish are regulated in some fashion with restrictions on the type of gear that can be used, permanent area closures, size limits, catch maximums and seasonal closures,” she says. “When it is difficult to determine how many [fish] exist in the region, then we attempt to regulate in other ways.”

Only in recent years has the fishing industry banded together to reverse the tide. In 1991, California Seafood Council was established in Santa Barbara with mandatory assessments on various segments of the industry.

Among other things, the council is chartered to promote the state’s dwindling catch with the media and consumers. Yet, the modern food supply has made promotion a difficult task as the supply of fish is increasingly globalized. Seafood is rarely labeled by country of origin in supermarkets. This means market employees, let alone consumers, find it difficult to support California fishery products even if they are aware of the state’s campaign.

Further complicating the effort--one that has proved so successful with the state’s other agricultural commodities--is that the three leading species are not readily consumed by Californians.

“The [council’s promotions] do not go into canned mackerel or sea urchin,” Ptak says. “They have taken what pains they can to promote fish that Californians do eat: swordfish, rockfish and shark.”

The future for the California seafood industry?

California has avoided the disaster that hit the Georges Bank off of New England in 1994, when the federal management council that regulates commercial fishing in the Northeastern United States ordered an emergency closure for three areas there. New England’s prized stocks of cod, haddock and flounder have been decimated after years of overfishing, and a complete ban on fishing there is probable this year.

One bright spot for the state fishery management is the return of the California king salmon. The species was under tight regulation for the past 15 years, but fish were so plentiful this season that prices for kings dropped at dockside, according to Pacific Fishing magazine. However, state officials are quick to point out that one reason for more healthy king stocks is that the commercial fleet is down more than 60% from its historic levels.

“We are learning to manage this rapidly renewable resource. It is fragile,” says Ptak of Chesapeake. “On paper, it looks like we are going backward. But Fish and Game is taking dramatic, restrictive steps to ensure the future. . . . So, in reality we are going forward because corrective efforts are being made; more fish are being left in the ocean and that will, in turn, make even more fish.”