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Why is Jane Driving The Bus?



The recent public recognition by the New England Fisheries Management Council (NEFMC) of the need to address the negative effects of the new catch shares groundfish management plan is recognition that many say is not nearly enough and hardly in time.

The plan’s effects, family businesses driven out and their fish quota being handed over to well capitalized corporations, were anticipated because, well, they were planned. Fishermen’s calls for recognition of this impending disaster fell on management’s willfully deaf ears.

Consolidation is not a conspiracy theory. Consolidation of ownership is a business plan. The difference between consolidation in the fishing industry and consolidation in manufacturing is that fishing is an extractive industry dependant on a public resource.

The Environmental Defense Fund has had a dual definition of their business plan. To fisheries management it they called it an environmental plan that would end over fishing; to the investors it would begin private ownership of the fish in the sea. Commodification of access to fish would be a gold mine that would never be played out.

There has been a stunning obfuscation of intent on the part of NOAA. They are on the hot seat to come up with anything that passes for an end to over fishing by 2014. A couple of years is not a lot of time to fix such a complex problem when so little of it is understood by those charged with the task.

But 25 years is a lot of time and that’s how long these people have been screwing around withouta hint of a fix. The parallel with recent congressional partisanship over money lies in the fish fight-who gets the fish.

The issue with NOAA chief administrator Jane Lubchenco is focused around this point. Double talk about the enforcement violations on her watch, have been followed by avoidance, evasion, and what can only described as contempt for fishermen and congress.

The fixes offered over the years by fishermen and fisheries scientists have all been shuffled to the side to clear the way for privatization regardless of of the effect on overfishing. The recent actions of the financial industry and its endless appetite for markets to speculate on, lend credence to this charge.

The question is, with congress having authority over NOAA, why is Jane driving the bus?