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By Jeffrey St. Clair excerpted from his book: Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green To Me The Gijon cuts through the slate-colored swells, trailing a white V in the waters of the Bering Sea. The trawler lowers its giant pelagic net from the stern of the ship, and it unfurls into the dark waters below. The net, thousands of yards of lightweight nylon mesh, sweeps in a lethal curtain across the depths. Hours later, the nets are cranked up to the piercing whine of straining engines. Inside: more than 400 tons of fish, crabs, and squid. A few Stallar’s sea lions and fur seals, indiscriminately snared while foraging for salmon, are also part of the haul. The sea lions and seals are not spared. Indeed, more than forty percent of the haul is considered worthless by-catch and will simply be ground up and spewed in bloody torrents of saturated chum from the bilges of the ship back out into the sea. Some 550 million pounds of marine life are wasted in this way in the North Pacific every year. The Bering Sea is now the most productive fishery in the North America. More than one-third of the United States’ commercial catch comes from these cold waters near the top of the world. Among the species sought by the fishing fleets of the North Pacific are yellowfin, sole, herring, halibut, and perch. But the most cherished target is pollock, the tofu of fish. Pollock, crabbed by the Japanese for surimi, turns up in American markets as fish sandwiches at Burger King and McDonalds and as imitation crab in the fish freezers at Safeway. The Gijon is registered to the Seattle-based American Seafoods Corporation, a subsidiary of Resource Group International, a Norwegian conglomerate. The ship is a floating factory, longer and wider than a football field, The $40 million trawler can process 80 tons of fish product a day, turning yellow fin sole into fish meal and pollock into surimi. The catch is stored in huge freezers, where it can stay preserved for months. Resource Group International’s primary competitor in the lucrative pollock fishing grounds of the North Pacific is the Arctic-Alaska Fisheries Company, another Seattle-based firm. Artic-Alaska was acquired in 1992 by Don Tyson, the chicken mogul and Clinton patron from Springdale, Arkansas. Since then Tyson has bought up three other Alaska seafood operations and is fending off anti-trust investigations by the Federal Trade Commission. The incursion of the big factory ships into the waters of the North Pacific began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There are now 45 of the factory trawlers operating the Bering Sea fishery. The fuel tanks permit the ships to remain at sea for months without returning to home ports to refuel or off-load their catch. Often the processed surimi is simply off-loaded at sea to smaller ships owned by Japanese fish merchants. The long range of the factory ships allows them to operate in several distant fisheries in one season and evade the catch quotas that saddle smaller operators. The arrival of the industrialized super-trawlers spell almost immediate cultural and economic disaster for the communities of coastal Alaska. For decades the flourishing Alaskan fishing industry had been characterized by independent ship owners and small processing plants, sprinkled down the coast in towns like Kodiac, Cordova and Ketchikan. In the 1970’s, nearly 80 percent of the Alaskan pollock catch was made by small operators. Now the situation is almost entirely reversed. More than 70 percent of the pollock in Alaskan waters is taken by the factory trawlers and dozens of independent boat owners have gone bankrupt. But it’s the shore-based factories, making value-added fish products, that have been hit the hardest by the new generation of trawlers. The canneries, surimi plants and frozen fish processing factories provided year-round high wage jobs, an important stabilizing force for rural Alaska’s predominantly seasonal economy. Today many of those plants and jobs are gone, replaced by the factory trawlers, which increasingly tend to employ Mexican and Vietnamese laborers at sweatshop rates. Many of the Arctic-Alaska Company’s ships now unload their catch not in Seattle, but in Shanghai, China, where Tyson purchased a fish factory in 1994 from the Chinese government. The deal was brokered with the help of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and was backed by government insurance and loan guarantees from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. In fact, the growth of the American factory trawler fleet was heavily underwritten by the US treasury, thanks to effective inside work by the congressional delegation from Washington state. Tyson’s company alone received more than $65 million low-interest loans to fund the construction of 10 factory trawlers. In total, the Seattle-based factory trawler fleet has received $200 million in so-called Fisheries Obligation Guarantees and other federal subsidies. The economic dislocation brought about by the invasion of the trawlers into southeast Alaska is grimly paralleled by an ecological catastrophe in the waters of the Bering Sea and North Pacific. Again most of the blame can be laid on the industrial behemoths. Using sophisticated sonar and electronic tracking devices, factory trawlers like the Gijon can quickly locate new spawning grounds and fish them to extinction. This is called pulse trawling. An outrageous example of this practice occurred in the 1980s in the Shelikof Straight off the Aleutian Islands, when a newly discovered pollock stock was relentlessly fished to the point of collapse. According to a report on factory trawlers by Greenpeace, in less than a decade the Shelikof pollock fishery had declined from an estimated biomass of 3 million tons in 1981 to less than 300 thousand tons in 1988. Each year since the factory trawlers have flocked to the Alaska waters the pollock season has closed earlier than planned. In the late 1970s, the pollock fishing season regularly ran for 10 months. In 1994, it closed after 70 days. It’s not surprising. The annual harvest capacity of the trawler fleet may be greater than the entire pollock population of the Bering Sea. The ramifications of this rather dire situation were contemplated in an internal assessment by executives with American Seafood Company, “the catching capacity of vessels operating the in the Bering Sea pollock fishery appears to be double or triple the annual quota.” And these were quotas that most marine biologists believed to be dangerously inflated. It’s not just the commercial fish species, such as pollock and sole that are being depleted. Crab, halibut and arrowtooth flounder are also in trouble. The consequences extend even to fish-eating seabirds, such as puffins, thick-billed murres and black-legged kittiwakes, and marine mammals, such as the Stellar’s sea lion and fur seals. For example, pollock accounts for nearly 70 percent of the rare sea lion’s diet. A recent report by the National Research Council warns, “It seems extremely unlikely that the productivity of the Bering Sea ecosystem can sustain current rates of human exploitation as well as the large populations of all marine mammal and bird species that existed before human exploitation – especially modern exploitation-began.” Amid collapsing fisheries and factory-farmed salmon, how to choose sustainable seafood Posted by Lou Bendrick (Guest Contributor) at 9:40 AM on 14 Aug 2008 Read more about: Checkout Line | food | aquaculture | fishing | advic Tools: print | email | + digg | + del.icio.us | + reddit | + stumbleupon In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night. Hello Grist, The food worry that keeps me up at night is how best to buy fish. Should I buy "wild caught," with the world's fishing fleets using giant nets that scoop up all sorts of sea wildlife in one fell swoop, drowning the fish they wanted to collect along with many varieties that they will just dump back in the water dead? Or "farm raised," with the many antibiotics that are required to keep the fish alive in close quarters, other injections, the waste that is often times released (either on purpose or accidentally) into the waterways, polluting them so the wild fish and other wildlife do not survive? Any advice on which is better would be appreciated. Thank you for starting a column just focusing on food, as this is a big issue for sustainability. Karen Bograd Raleigh, N.C. Dear Karen: The next time you are up at night fretting, please know that you are in good company! At about 3 a.m., you are likely to find me staring at the ceiling, worrying about upcoming presidential elections, my sump pump, or if I'm getting enough fatty acids -- and how the heck acids can be fatty in the first place. (Tell me honestly now: Does this acid make me look fatty?) In all seriousness, questions around eating fish are a legitimate source of angst. Read the rest of the answer here at Grist.org. |
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