Making Seafood Sustainable: American Experiences in Global Perspective

Preface

PREFACE Born in 1944, I remember clearly the excitement and relief that ran through members of my family on a cold, winter evening in 1952. Then a young boy growing up in a pre-Starbucks Seattle, I was delighted that my father, who pioneered in the development of Alaska’s king-crab fishery as the captain of the Deep Sea, a combined catcher-processing vessel, was home for several weeks. That night he received a telephone call from a friend, who was the master of another fishing boat that had also just returned to Seattle from Alaskan seas. He told my father that water had entered one of his ship’s cold-storage holds, partially flooding it and encasing the halibut there in ice. My father could have one of the fish, if he would come down to the vessel and chip it out. Times were tough, and my father was happy to do so. In the early morning, helped by a friend, he brought home a frozen 150-pound halibut. Fortunately, my family had a horizontal freezer large enough to receive the fish. For weeks, along with other family members, I ate halibut prepared in every conceivable manner—boiled, baked, fried, poached, broiled, and creamed. We also ate king crabs, for which a market was just being developed, from my father’s vessel, until we could hardly face another dish of them. Meat was a rare treat, indeed, in those years. However, members of my family were unusual in their dining habits. At the time, seafood such as king crabs and halibut did not reach the tables of most Americans, especially if they lived in inland cities. In many parts of the United States, seafood consisted of canned salmon and canned tuna fish. Processing seafood by freezing was in its infancy.1 Fresh fish was sold in grocery stores and restaurants mainly in coastal cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. Today, technological advances, such as jet airplanes and new freezing techniques, have made it possible for processors and distributors to offer people throughout the United States and in other nations a wide variety of seafood. Fresh, wild salmon from Alaska nestle next to frozen, farm-raised tilapia from China in grocers’ counters across America. Blackford_MakingSeafoodSustainable_FM.indd 9 10/25/11 8:10 AM x Preface My book explains how this transformation occurred. To do so, I explore the interactions among fishers, executives of seafood-processing firms, governmental officials, scientists, and environmentalists in formulating policies that created the food chains connecting boats to consumers.2 (Food chains consist of the many links involved in moving food from farms, ranches, and the seas to consumers. Thus, seafood chains are made up of fishers, processors , wholesalers, and retailers, along with the railroads, trucks, and airplanes used to move seafood from place to place.) In establishing seafood chains, Americans set up governmental regulatory regimes over about the past forty years designed to end over-fishing in their nation’s waters, most successfully in Alaskan seas. (Regulatory regimes are composed of laws and rules, along with the government agencies which implement them.) Americans were trying to ensure steady flows of raw seafood through their food chains.3 Though many variables, from rising water temperatures to changes in marketing methods, have shaped the modern seafood industry in the United States and abroad, evolving governmental policies have been at the heart of the alterations. My book is, at its core, about governmental regulation of business and its ramifications. State and federal government oversight was the chosen path to make fishing sustainable. My study reveals that regulatory regimes for seafood have changed dramatically over the past four decades. My work analyzes especially how, during the past generation, new regulations and their implementation have created sustainable fishing for many types of seafood in the Northeast Pacific, a marked contrast to over-fishing, which has continued to devastate many of the world’s commercial fisheries, including some in American waters, such as the New England cod fishery. Congressional legislation has been crucial to this process. Passed in 1976, the Fishery Conservation and Management Act sought to protect American fishers from the onslaughts of their foreign counterparts by excluding foreigners from fishing within 200 miles of the American shores.4 That same legislation made possible sustainable fishing by requiring that fishers harvest no more fish than could be replaced by natural reproduction each year. Leading seafood types of the Northeast Pacific—including salmon, king crab, and...