EDF Exec’s Comments Deride
‘Unskilled’ Fishermen
by Richard Gaines, April 4, 2011
Trying to sell institutional investors on the merits of the Obama administration’s plan to convert the nation’s fisheries into commodity markets capable of yielding windfall profits, an Environmental Defense Fund vice president described the industry before “catch shares” as a human wasteland.
Such a world, David Festa, told investors at the Milken Institute Global Conference in 2009, was governed by ever-greater effort controls limiting the amount of time fishermen are allowed on the water; with constraints on fishing time, comes social decay, he explained.
“That means all you have is itinerant labor that bounces around from job to job,” Festa said. “It’s unskilled, it’s unprofessional, it’s low paid, there’s high drug use, it’s a rough life.”
The Obama administration, which adopted EDF’s catch share mantra and made it U.S. policy, distanced itself Monday from Festa and his opinions.
The audio of the full 75-minute presentation by Festa and other speakers is accessible online; the Times obtained a 24-page transcript of the event, including Festa’s full remarks.
Reaction from Gloucester and New Bedford, the original twin capitals of the East Coast fishing industry — now struggling with economic dislocation associated with the catch shares system imposed last May on the groundfishery — was fierce and angry.
‘Disgraceful’ comments
“I used to have great admiration for the mission of EDF, but more and more I see that this is just another brand of greed thinly disguised as environmentalism,” Mayor Carolyn Kirk said Monday. “And they don’t know the first thing about Gloucester fishermen.”
“Fishermen are not a disposable commodity,” said New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang. He described Festa’s comments as “disgraceful.”
“It shows real lack of appreciation of all the heritage and all sacrifices that have been made in all the port cities,” Lang added. “Those people (EDF) have lost their way and basically see conservation as a way to the money. People in the industry as treated as collateral damage.”
In an e-mail to the Times Monday, Festa said his comments were “a statement about the conditions that can exist when fisheries are not managed in a way that works for fishermen.”
EDF President Fred Krupp agreed
“Regulations have historically been stacked against fishermen,” said Krupp, who heads the $200 million nonprofit that preaches a faith in markets and partners Wall Street investment bankers and energy conglomerates, “EDF works with fishermen to find solutions that will help make fishing a stable, successful livelihood.”
But the Department of Commerce, which has stood by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric’s Administration’s push for catch shares, took steps Monday to keep Festa and his views at arm’s length.
“David Festa does not work for or speak for the administration,” said Shannon Gilson, spokeswoman for Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.
Cities’ lawsuit
Lang and Kirk have made their cities lead plaintiffs in a landmark suit now before a U.S. District Court judge in Boston that challenges the constitutionality and legality of the catch share-based regulatory regimen written to govern the groundfishery.
Lang brings the Mayor’s Oceans and Fisheries Council to Washington D.C.for an educational and informational meeting in the U.S. Capitol today to challenge what he calls “biased rule-making, not based on the best science, which has caused economic harm to fishermen from Maine to North Carolina.”
The arguments expected today are likely to track the complaint in the federal lawsuit, which argued that non-government organizations wielded improper influence on the making of Amendment 16, the groundishery regimen.
Lang has pegged EDF as the lead influence on fisheries policy.
“It looks like EDF thinks it’s moving pork bellies rather than a natural resource,” he said.
Fueling suspicion of EDF’s influence with the administration was a 2005 strategic outline of EDF’s Oceans Program, which was leaked to the Times and identitifed New England as the main theater of operations.
Working ‘from the inside’
In the paper, described previously by EDF officials as a grant solicitation, EDF explained that it intended to “work the regulatory process from the inside” via a seat given to one of its employees on the New England Fishery Management Council and “bring pressure to bear in Washington, D.C.”
There, with Festa, the oceans policy director who has served as policy director for two secretaries of commerce...”Environmental Defense has a strong presence,” EDF told the unidentified prospective donor.
Festa has played a key role in channeling EDF’s faith in catch shares into U.S. policy — an achievement realized when Jane Lubchenco, who had been EDF’s vice chairwoman, was nominated by President Obama and confirmed as NOAA’s chief administrator in March 2009 and put her and EDF’s push for catch shares on the fast track.
Festa and Lubchenco taught a course together at Oregon State University; NOAA regulates America’s fisheries.
Touting returns on investment of 400 percent, raising the value of U.S. fisheries to $15 billion once the fisheries on three coasts were commodified, and with modernized and consolidated with investment capital, Festa in his 2009 presentation compared the process to an asset management takeover.
‘Just like a factory’
“It’s just like a factory, it’s like, making a decent product, but it’s, you know, the workers are undertrained and the equipment is out of date and the marketing plans sucks,” he said.
“So I pull together investors and I buy the factory and I sink a whole bunch of money into it, and, you know, retrain workers and then get paid back on the profits from the other end.”
Festa made his pitch to Milken Institute investors in Los Angeles on April 28, 2009, and referred to an EDP-sponsored policy paper — titled “Oceans of Abundance,” and co-written by Lubchenco — predicting that, without catch shares, the oceans would soon be fished into sterility except for “jellyfish.” That dystopic vision has since been widely derided by mainstream scientists.
Two weeks before Festa’s presentation on the West Coast, Lubchenco appeared at a meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council in Mystic, Conn., where she used the bully pulpit to push for quick final approval of the catch share regimen for the groundfishery.
But while catch shares were to become the administration’s No. 1 fisheries policy, Lubchenco did mention catch shares during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee.
As evidence emerged that catch shares consolidate equity and capacity in fisheries — a central finding in an research paper submitted to the administration by Gov. Deval Patrick — Congress has begun to take notice.
In February, the House voted 259-159 to bar spending on any new catch share programs. The issue has not come up yet in the Senate.
In congressional testimony and a letter to Locke, Sen. John Kerry has decried the observed impact of catch shares — a concentration of catch allocation in the best-capitalized businesses at the expense of the smaller players.
“They want to create a business scheme to extract profits for investors, without working for it, while adding nothing to the industry itself or creating any benefit to the Nation as a whole,” said Gloucester attorney Stephen Ouellette, who led the oral arguments on the federal suit last month,
“They will lower pay for the ‘itinerant labor,’ most of whom are family people, and pocket the difference for themselves,” Ouellette said.
Locke, who has been named by the President to be ambassador to China, agreed to send teams to the major ports of New England based on economic declines traceable to federal fisheries policy.
Kerry, Sen. Scott Brown and Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts as well as Sen. Kay Hagen and Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina are expected to speak at today’s meeting of the mayor’s fisheries meeting.
Kerry chairs the Senate Commerce Committee which must vet Locke’s nomination as ambassador to China.
This story originally appeared in the Gloucester Daily Times.