Making Seafood Sustainable: American Experiences in Global Perspective

Introduction

INTRODUCTION In 1981, Alaska’s king crab catch collapsed, plummeting by about 80 percent. The harvest in that year came to 28 million pounds, much less than the 130 million pounds in 1980. Spike Walker, a leading fisher, rightly wrote about crabbing in 1981 as “scratchy (poor) fishing.”1 A bittersweet joke soon made the rounds in bars in Kodiak, Alaska: as a result of the crash in catches, Seattle banks owned so many repossessed crab boats that their officers would offer a free vessel to anyone opening a new account.2 Alaska’s king crab slump mirrored the collapse of the harvests of many types of wild seafood around the globe. In spring 2007, the introduction to three National Geographic essays about global fishing warned, “The oceans are in deep blue trouble. From the northernmost reaches of the Greenland Sea to the swirl of the Antarctic Circle, we are gutting our seas of fish. Since 1900, many species may have declined by nearly 90 percent, and it’s getting worse. Nets scour reefs. Supertrawlers vacuum up shrimp. Nations flout laws.”3 At the time, journalists may have overstated the globe’s overfishing crisis, but not by much. There were legitimate grounds for concern. After increasing more than fourfold between 1950 and 1994, the global wild-fish catch reached a plateau and stagnated over the next decade and a half, despite an intensification of fishing efforts. As numerous scientific reports showed, many individual fish stocks around the world collapsed, creating a genuine global crisis. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) concluded in a detailed report issued in 2008 that “the maximum wild capture potential from the world’s oceans has probably been reached.”4 The loss of wild fish harvests was a serious problem for many people. By 1992, seafood supplied people worldwide with 14.9 percent of their animal protein. That proportion rose to 16 percent in 1996, but declined to 15.5 percent in 2003.5 Studying changes in fishing has, then, worldwide significance for diets and lifestyles. This volume investigates the ramifications of over-fishing for the United Blackford_MakingSeafoodSustainable_TX.indd 1 10/25/11 8:11 AM 2 Introduction States seafood industry by analyzing how fishers, seafood processorsdistributors , retailers, government officials, and others dealt with the looming crisis. I examine the ways they made changes in their business strategies and ok political steps to alleviate their difficulties, in the process making most fishing in Alaskan waters sustainable, the problems with king crabs in Figure 1. A large king crab in the 1950s. Author’s collection. Blackford_MakingSeafoodSustainable_TX.indd 2 10/25/11 8:11 AM Introduction 3 1981 notwithstanding. To that end, and where possible, I look at people taking concrete actions. Individual fishers such as the king crabbers Andy and Johnathan Hillstrand, “highliners” (high producers who caught lots of crabs) operating in the Bering Sea, changed fishing methods on their boat Time Bandit. Likewise, Chuck Bundrant, who headed Trident Seafoods, one of the largest seafood processors in the United States, modified his firm’s strategies and operations. Government officials serving on councils setting fishing rules altered their approaches to regulation. My work thus illuminates important connections among environmental, political, and business changes.6 I show that public policies from the 1970s, resulting from meetings of those in the fishing industry with government officials (and in the early 2000s with environmentalists), largely determined how fish catches were limited and allocated. This book addresses two closely intertwined topics: how interactions between regulatory regimes and fishing methods affected supplies of seafood for Americans and how, in turn, the availability of those supplies influenced the nature of companies and the food chains they control. The shift from openaccess fishing with few limits on harvests to limited-entry fishing, in which catches were restricted in the interest of making them sustainable, fundamentally altered harvesting and processing seafood and, more generally, modified food chains for fish and crabs. The Fishery Conservation and Management Act (FCMA), passed by Congress in 1976, largely ushered in those changes. Many other issues have been related to these topics, including alterations in the work and lives of fishers, and I look at them as well. For instance, I note that fishing in Alaskan waters became safer once limited-entry regimes were established. No one issue or theme has completely dominated fishing and the development of seafood chains in all time periods; but government policies...