Making Seafood Sustainable: American Experiences in Global Perspective by Mansel G. Blackford (review)

Over the past several decades, the fishing industry in the United States has suffered from manmade and natural disasters, pollutants, and over-fishing. What were once thriving businesses along American coasts, such as the cod fisheries off Maine, are now struggling enterprises grappling with ever-decreasing catches. Those who make their livelihood in such endeavors find themselves, as one official stated in the book Making Seafood Sustainable: American Experiences in Global Perspective, “between the rock and the hard place” as resources dwindle. Author Mansel G. Blackford examines the issues of the US seafood industry and its battle to maintain economic viability paired with protective stewardship in his work, Making Seafood Sustainable: American Experiences in Global Perspective. Blackford outlines the historical relationships among conservationists, consumers, and government agencies as the US seafood industry and international companies moved from more local ventures after World War II into large-scale operations through the end of the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.

Drawing upon a wide variety of sources, Blackford makes the case that no perfect solution restores the once-abundant North American fishing grounds or allows each fisher to fill the hold of the boat to capacity on every trip if fish can even be found. Compromises regulated by government agencies across the globe with input from conservation groups that both limit and prohibit catches are required in today’s world to sustain both the fish populations and the employment of those who make their living by catching nature’s bounty on the seas. Consumerism and environmentalism must work hand in hand to safeguard the future of the industry. As Blackford stated, “Only when new regulatory regimes based on catch limits and quotas were put in place and enforced did over-fishing end.” For fishers, processors, and consumers, these regulatory councils were the lifeline to ensure continued economic opportunities and seafood availability for American tables.

Fishery councils created to supervise the seafood industry were vital in regulating, and thus saving, enterprises, according to Blackford. The author particularly examines Alaska fishers and the various species that drive this Pacific Northwest market. For example, Blackford states that salmon was “long the premier fishery” in the region and provided a source of protein that was both relatively cheap and tasty. Tracing the introduction of fish into the diets of World War I soldiers as a method ultimately of introducing new foods to Americans, the author discusses the evolving status of salmon ultimately as a “prestige” fish that in some cases, between the years 2000 and 2010, fetched as much as $38 per pound. These prices were far from the cost of canned salmon that once nourished Americans in the nineteenth century and reached a worldwide market by the 1870s.

The crux of Blackford’s argument, however, is that in order to sustain the salmon fisheries in both the Oregon/Washington area and Alaska, regulations needed to be in place. In just one fishery, the Columbia River, that catch alone once reached 629,000 cases of canned salmon in 1889, but later, the “Pacific Northwest’s salmon catch plummeted by 93 percent between 1980 and 1993.” Blackford clearly outlines the steps taken to thwart the decline of the salmon industry, particularly when Japanese fishers also began harvesting salmon in the Alaskan waters in the post–World War II years. Beginning in 1952 with the creation of the International North Pacific Fisheries Commission (INPFC), and in 1976, with the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, Blackford states that by 1992, in association with the United Nations Convention for the Conservation of Anadromous Stocks in the North Pacific, regulations outlawed salmon fishing on the high seas, thus protecting the salmon. When Alaska became a state in 1959, further rules such as those outlawing fish traps and regulating “openings” for fishing times also went into effect through the Alaska legislature, but still the industry faltered. It was...