Is the Fishing Industry Dead?

“Yes,” I was told at a dinner party recently, followed by the typical second line, that “fishermen are the cause” of their own demise.

These assertions were made by someone I know to be far afield from the events and complexities of the fishing industry, so I consider the confident diagnosis to be a sign of the great success of a public relations narrative claiming a disaster in the ocean and blaming fishermen for it.

Really, “dead” is a pretty strong term. Obviously, the fishing industry in Gloucester is showing signs of distress. We look out in the harbor and see old and rusty boats, aging fishermen, more days in port than out fishing, and struggling shoreside processors and support businesses, like the ice company and marine railways.

But the word “dead” is clearly premature. What comes to mind is a medieval deathbed, where “doctors” attach leeches that further weaken the patient, relatives are gathered in an anteroom to divide up the estate while the patient is still breathing, and an assembled crowd outside chants, “The man’s a sinner. Good riddance!”

In our case, the fishing industry may have arrived in crisis in the emergency room, but take note of our “governing elite” of bureaucrats, fisheries economists, and environmentalists at the bedside.

Some give the appearance of actually trying to help, but are really not helping, while others urge sedation and putting our port “out of its misery.”

In the anteroom are the speculative real estate developers who want the waterfront property for hotels and marinas, recreational anglers who want the quota, corporations and investors who want the fish and the profits, and aquaculture, sand and gravel mining, wind, and, in the wings, oil and gas enterprises who want the ocean territory.

And outside the hospital? We’re the neighbors and fellow citizens of Gloucester who idly stand by, feeling no empathy and no responsibility to help, because we’ve been persuaded by the mythology to think that our “greedy” fishermen are the cause of their own problems and undeserving of our time.

There are multiple causes for the crisis in the fishing industry and plenty of blame to go around, with many problems tracing back to unsustainable harvesting pressures on just a few keystone stocks, such as cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder. We seafood customers have played our part in so heavily favoring these stocks and in losing interest in other fish, such as mackerel, whiting, and others.

Water pollution and loss of essential fish habitat, eelgrass beds, whales, and oyster reefs have compromised the productivity of the ocean. Foreign imports have driven prices so far down, local fishermen can’t compete and cover the costs of operation. And fuel prices have risen.

But, centrally, government and the affiliated elite of economists and environmentalists have grotesquely mismanaged the fisheries for several decades. When foreign factory trawlers were thrown out of the 200-mile zone, government, and not fishermen, drove the domestic industry toward larger and larger boats. The government took what was a well-funded Saltonstall-Kennedy (S-K) investment strategy in harvesting, processing, and marketing, including both a federal lab on Emerson Avenue and a U/Mass lab in Hodgkins Cove, and redirected nearly all funds to single-species stock assessments and acquisition of large research vessels, none of which adequately predicted or understood the swings in cod stocks.

When fishermen, particularly from the Northeast Seafood Coalition, urged a “point system” for multiple species harvesting and “ecosystem-based management” in the late 2000s, the federal government, at the urging of conservative foundations, chose the path of privatization and quota “markets” for single-species.

Most people don’t realize it, but in the last five years, the federal government spent over $125 million for the expenses of conversions to Catch Shares and limited access market-based programs. And if S-K funding had been kept in place, that would have been about another $300 million. Just think what $425 million could have accomplished if investments had been made in collaborative science with fishermen, in pilot projects around multi-species harvesting, in fuel-efficient boat design, in seafood hubs and institutional markets for underutilized species, in oyster reef restoration, in resource recovery from seafood waste, and in diversification into seaweeds and invasive species such as green crab.

What fishermen need to do now, hardy and inventive as they are, is get off the sickbed and work with processors, scientists, academics, and progressive environmentalists, and start demanding from government a new era of fisheries management that throws away the “death by their own hands” mythology and that rebuilds a community-based industry to supply us with fresh fish, solid jobs, and a resilient, healthy ocean. And, as citizens of this fishing port, we should reflect on our responsibilities to offer assistance, wherever and whenever we can.

— Valerie Nelson
Gloucester, MA