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Thanks to the Year of the Ocean which was declared by the United Nations, and to the U.S. National Conference on the World’s Oceans that was held as part of the year’s events, environmentalists in this country have increased their activities, and the mass media have readily picked up on the newfangled idea. At the conference in June 1998, a discussion of the crisis of the world’s oceans’ unexpendable resources, attended by President Clinton, Vice-President Gore, and concerned scientists and environmental defenders, was broadly advertised.
One could hear and read, as reported by many mass media outlets, that commercial fishing is to blame for everything bad that has happened or is happening in the world oceans.
"Overfishing presents the greatest danger for the world oceans," states the San Francisco Chronicle. "Bottom trawling has the same implications for the sea as bulldozers and strip-mining pits for dry land," declares Time magazine. Gannett News Service reports that "the users of the wealth of the world’s oceans observe neither regulations nor fishing seasons nor quotas and are subject to very limited monitoring." According to some environmental zealots, the commercial fisheries have no proper place at all. The overall message was that commercial fisheries are deadly for the Earth.
It makes very little sense, so laughable are these statements for serious fisheries observers, and so one-sided and unbalanced are environmentalists’ activities that are accepted by the public at large – whether they be an animal protection group’s inflating the figures on by-catches in the Pacific fisheries; the Institute of the Earth’s Islands’ neglecting the shrimp fishermen who are trying to restore tortoise abundance in the Gulf of Mexico; or the Sea Web organization’s making absolutely ungrounded statements about the total extermination of the swordfish population in the Northern Atlantic. Misrepresentation and exaggeration of data have become the norm in environmentalists’ statements and printed publications, particularly those of Greenpeace and their supporting media. In January 1993, the U.S. National Council for Protection of Resources (NCPR) and Sea Web slandered the consumption of swordfish products, so as to convince consumers and the leaders of the fishing industry of the necessity to restore swordfish stocks in the Northern Atlantic. But no swordfish stock restoration program has ever been proposed by anybody. Sea Web experts state that the boycott per se was called upon to initiate development of such a program. In June 1998, President Clinton called for the ban of sales and imports into the U.S. of swordfish weighing less than 30 pounds.
NCPR and Sea Web persuaded 140 restaurant chefs and representatives of Caribbean cruises to join the swordfish boycott, maintaining that the action would not cause harm to fishermen in the long run, but would create new jobs in the future. The fishermen responded with a report that a greater number of U.S. longliners left the profession, while their counterparts from other nations stayed put and, what was more, even overstepped their swordfish harvesting quotas.
Representatives of the environmentalists keep saying that each swordfish caught comes with 9 fish of other species in by-catch which are discarded, dead, overboard, while every pound of swordfish ending up on consumers’ tables in 1997 accounted for the same number of pounds of dolphins or sharks perishing at sea. Proceeding from that point, they demand a stop to the "indiscriminate slaughter" and "massive destruction of ecosystems" in the oceans, as well as a 75% reduction in the by-catch level. However, no one seems to have noticed that a whale weighs several tons, while a swordfish averages 55 kilos (121 pounds), nor did they heed the 1996 National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) Survey testifying that 72% of the swordfish by-catch was released back into the sea still alive.
"For every pound of harvested shrimp, about 10 pounds of by-catch are thrown overboard," say the experts of the Institute of the Earth’s Islands, which calls the shrimp fishery one of the most devastating on the globe. NMFS, commercial fishermen and independent observers consider those figures totally groundless. According to data of the Foundation for Fisheries Development in the Gulf of Mexico and the Southern Atlantic, the by-catch to shrimp catch ratio in the Gulf stands at 5:1, and in the Southern Atlantic 4:1, instead of 10:1. Thus, the typical haul of a shrimp trawl may contain 4 to 5 pounds of by-catch per pound of shrimp, in which fish accounts for 80.5%, crustaceans for 16%, and invertebrates 3.5%. Today, given the compulsory fitting of trawling equipment with by-catch limiting gadgets, fish content can be reduced to 44-50%. Besides, if not prohibited by law, shrimp catchers can utilize the best part of their by-catches.
And what is the statement by the U.S. National Parks Service to the effect that "sea urchins stocks are coming to an end" worth, when weighed against sea urchin catches, which have remained steady since 1985, at 21 million pounds a year? The spiny lobster catch in 1996-1997 reached its maximum since 1990 (712,000 pounds) and topped the annual average catch since 1960.
The catches of white perch (áåëûé îêóíü), a relatively new target species, peaked in 1996, exhibiting the highest yields for the last six years (55,000 pounds) and showing an increase of 22% over 1995 figures.
NCPR is deliberately initiating a crisis where it does not belong, calling fishermen "ecoterrorists," while the fishermen themselves, along with the Fisheries Department, are making every effort possible to secure sustainability of the resources through introducing strict fisheries regulation. They are confident in their own future and their children’s. The environmental extremists seem to forget that fishing has always been a family business, passed on from generation to generation, and is likely to remain so in the future. The fishermen would be crazy if they cared nothing for their children’s future livelihood, while earning their own today. In 1996 New England lobster fishers were accused of the deaths of whales entangled in their fishing lines. The federal judge in Massachusetts imposed restrictions on the use of spiny lobster fishing gear. The state appealed this decision, and the case was transferred to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, since the 1970s only two instances of whales mort ally entangled in fishing lines are known, whereas at least 15 whale deaths resulting from collisions with vessels have been reported since 1972. In the state of Maine, more than 300 spiny lobster catchers volunteered to save whales. They would report to all fishermen the sighting locations and migration routes of whales, since whales’ getting caught on fishing lines would sooner cause harm to the fishermen than their own deaths.
In 1996 Greenpeace prepared a report named "Sinking Fast: How Factory Trawlers are Destroying U.S. Fisheries and Marine Ecosystems." The report went on about the wrongful way the U.S. had managed their groundfish resources in the Northern Pacific region. Based on the report, Greenpeace insisted on a ban of factory trawling. Latching onto the Year of the Ocean idea, they attracted the attention of the United Nations. As proof of a precipitating crash of the groundfish stocks in the waters off Alaska, Greenpeace pointed out the decrease in populations of sea lions and sea birds feeding on cod and hake. Meanwhile it is widely known that the Bering Sea fisheries have been regulated most successfully. The recent report by NMFS scientists before the U.S. Congress named not one species bearing any relation to the Bering Sea among the 97 target species listed as overexploited. The exploitation level for the main groundfish species – Alaska pollock – was determined at 20%, which was at least less by one-third than exploitation of a majority of species worldwide. Concerning the factory trawlers, Greenpeace representatives distributed downright twisted data. They stated that the factory trawlers had used nets 3,500 ft. (1060 m.) in circumference at the mouth, capable of catching 400 metric tons per haul, while in reality they do not exceed 1800 ft. and 130 metric tons per haul, respectively. Nobody says that the factory trawlers are small vessels, but to call them "killing machines of a soccer field size" is a screaming exaggeration intended to mislead the public at large. All the activities of Greenpeace, Institute of the Earth’s Islands, Sea Web organization, and many other extremist groups of environmental zealots have been stepped up particularly in conjunction with the Year of the Ocean. These must be countered by the qualified and competent expository work of fisheries experts, from deckhand to scientist, fending off every instant of extremist statements.
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