Let The Victory Thunder Resound, or How American Monarch Prospers From The American Pollock Industry
Sergei Vakhrin, editor–in–chief, Severnaia Patsifika.
When Greenpeace declared war on supertrawlers, it’s unlikely anyone in the environmental organizations in the USA would ever have imagined the fateful consequences of that war, in which the losers would emerge victorious.
Yes! It’s the losers who are becoming the winners. Namely, that supergiant – behemoth, monster – expelled from the economic zones of Chili and the U.S.A. , ready to gobble up to one and a half thousand tons of fish a day, the most powerful fishing vessel on the planet, capable of independently producing almost one third of the world’s surimi production, yes, American Monarch has found asylum in the economic zone of Russia.
Time to celebrate – their native waters won’t be harmed.
But they miscalculated. On July 22, 1998, American Monarch delivered a crushing blow to Greenpeace USA and brought all the “greens’” efforts to naught. They never would have suspected that on that day the trawling giant set to work in the Russian economic zone of the Bering Sea, fishing for pollock of American origin, that is, spawned on the very shores of Alaska, which the “greens” were supposedly protecting.
But that’s still not all – far from it. In this sector of the Bering Sea, it’s not only a fishery for American pollock, but the fishery itself is competely unlimited. I cite the directive of the President of the Russian Federation Fisheries Committee, V. Korelskii of March 14, 1994 ? 34, called, “Additions to Fishing Regulations for Waters of the Far East.”
The introductory part of this document, when you consider the meaning of these very “additions,” sounds positively blasphemous: “For rational utilization of fisheries resources in accordance with the recommendations of TINRO and VNIRO I DECREE ….” TINRO and VNIRO are the Pacific and All–Russian Fisheries and Oceanographic Institutes. To continue, “I DECREE… in the western Bering Sea zone (east of 174 degrees E. longitude from December through May and east of 176 degrees E. longitude from June through November), pollock fishing is permitted without observance of fishing regulations.”
Why? Well, because in this region, there are too many juvenile, undersize fish, which, according to fishermen and fishing inspectors, at times account for as much as 40 to 60 percent of the catch. Such a fishery is illegal in the Sea of Okhotsk. But according to the specialists, the immature fish in the Bering Sea belong to the American stock – so who cares about them?
Enter the biggest supertrawler in the world American Monarch to give the Russian fleet a helping hand in wiping out all the juvenile American fish.
But that’s still not all. The Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican (although without any active assistance from the “greens”), is pushing hard in the U.S. Congress to pass legislation forbidding any foreign supertrawlers from fishing from U.S. territorial waters. In this way, the large–capacity fleet of the Norwegian fishing company, American Seafoods, the biggest in the U.S., which also happens to own American Monarch, would be reduced by 14 vessels. No doubt this will be a gift to Russia, whose aging fishing and processing fleet is on the verge of complete uselessness and in urgent need of retirement.
But these ships will work where they find themselves, and in American Monarch’s case this happens to be the complete destruction of the American pollock population.
Can this really be true?!
It can! It has happened already and is continuing now!
The Americans are very proud of yet another ecological victory, closing the so–called “donut hole” in the Bering Sea to commercial fishing. For several years now, Polish, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, South Korean supertrawlers no longer conduct a pollock fishery there, because the state of pollock stocks in the open waters of the Bering Sea is sufficiently critical, approximately a third of normal. It would appear that a shining victory was gained – after all, American diplomats successfully shut down fishing in a region which doesn’t fall under the jurisdiction of any state in the world, including the United States itself. But here’s what was supposed to happen and in fact happened further: Polish, Chinese and South Korean large–capacity fishing fleets showed up for the open water pollock fishery in the Sea of Okhotsk, laying waste to those very stocks which belong to the Russian pollock population. And what’s Russia doing to protect its national interests? Russia gives pollock quotas to the Polish, Chinese, and South Korean fishing boats within its own economic zone. So now, from December to May and June to November, that is, year–round as you understand, Polish, Chinese, Korean, and now American supertrawlers as well are successfully demolishing the American population of Bering Sea pollock.
Russian fishermen are presently considering the possibility of declaring the Sea of Okhotsk to be internal Russian waters and excluding the large–capacity fleet from it, foreign vessels first of all. But where will this fleet go from there? I think it would be clear even to a child – they will go to the Bering Sea.
Another thing that’s equally clear is that unless Russian and American Greens join forces and work together, neither side will ever solve even a single one of the numerous problems in the Bering Sea border region alone. Not one! Because a unilateral approach only makes the problem worse.
It would appear that since diplomats from both Russia and the U.S.A. worked on the “donut hole” problem, it could hardly be called a unilateral solution, but the results came to zero all the same.
Yes, came to zero. And for one single reason – this entire venture was initiated by the American side and was carried out according to the American scenario. If the American diplomats had calculated the costs and considered the consequences, they probably would have acted differently. But only one thing was important to them, which was to stop foreign fishing vessels from ravaging the American pollock stocks which feed in the open water zone of the Bering Sea. They weren’t interested in anything beyond that. Russian problems that arose the moment the protocol closing the Bering Sea donut hole to fishing was signed and the foreign commercial fleet promptly shifted to open water in the Sea of Okhotsk were of absolutely no interest to the diplomats, like the “greens” after them. As far back as the Gorbachev–Shevardnadze period, Russian diplomats are famous for their anti–nationalist approach to any and all problems, be they economic or environmental – the hell with the consequences. But in the end, it’s the U.S. that suffers the greatest loss. So why did the specialists fail to foresee this?
The reason is that fisheries affairs are of little concern, not in Russia, nor in the U.S. Both here and there, when high–ranking government bureaucrats hear the words “fishing industry” they are either thinking about dangling a worm from a fishing line in a quiet lagoon of the Moscow River, or hooking a steelhead from the shore of some picturesque babbling stream somewhere in California or Oregon. For the time being it seems impossible for them even to conceptualize what ocean fisheries are, let alone to comprehend and understand the ineffable underwater interconnectedness of all living biodiversity, to foresee and forestall bad decisions, to anticipate the consequences several steps in advance and to establish safeguards against what will surely come to pass in a matter of time. It would have made sense, for example, to reconsider and expand the borders of the economic zones and close up any remaining “donut holes.” The resulting consequences would have been completely different with regard to the American Bering Sea pollock population. But alas … they didn’t consider the consequences, because they can’t even imagine them, given they how vaguely they comprehend cause–effect relationships in ocean fisheries, if at all.
Even activists in the environmental movement who pulled together and supposedly studied a large amount of material about supertrawlers and the damage they have caused to fisheries resources in the U.S.A. failed to look beyond the horizon and see how American Monarch would set about destroying the American pollock with the full force of its capabilities, all the while thanking Greenpeace activists for making it possible.
Thus, while “greens” were celebrating their victory they in fact received a stunning public slap in the face. Such a defeat, it seems to me, as was previously unknown to them. And yet this only the beginning.
But criticism should be constructive. I didn’t take pen in hand to rejoice over the misfortune of others.
Russian and American “greens” will continue to suffer defeats in the Bering Sea in particular and throughout the North Pacific in general as long as they are unable to combine their efforts and work out a unified strategy for shaping public opinion on issues of marine resource conservation in both Russia and the U.S.A. Presently, both groups keep their interests focused solely on their own internal problems. As the saying goes, one’s own shirt is closest to the skin. But fish don’t recognize borders. You can’t corral them into exclusively American or Russian territorial waters. You can’t force them to spawn or feed where they aren’t naturally meant to, although we are constantly trying to interfere in these processes.
Americans are currently having much success in problems of nature conservation in their own country – I was in four states (Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California) and saw with my own eyes what the American environmental community is doing. It is remarkable.
But it is becoming clear that the tendency to treat ecological problems as solely national problems in areas where living resources don’t and cannot have clearly defined boundaries but have partial connections with both Russia and America is to the detriment, not the benefit of nature. Therefore, the question arises of a new, international strategy for nature conservation. But it appears we aren’t ready for it yet. In meeting with many representatives of Pacific coast fishermen and other organizations in the U.S.A., I realized that neither we nor they know practically anything about each other, about our environmental problems and solutions in the U.S.A. and in Russia. And this means that all of us – American and Russian – are simply doomed to keep making the same mistakes.
While those who benefit from the sea’s riches – that very same Dal’moreprodukt which is the Monarch’s present owner, or American Seafoods – have long ago joined forces, long since become international in their effort to grab all they can get now from nature, be it American or Russian, whatever’s convenient.
And for the same reason, the Greens will be doomed time after time to hand over their victories to American Monarch for a long time to come.