O P I N I O N

The Onboard Observer Tax, Oil & Widget Money and the Right to Fish

by Mike Crowe

Millions of Americans eat fish regularly, but very few understand the condition of their groundfish resource, the federal regulatory agency that oversees it and, least of all, the politics that influence this multi-billion-dollar renewable resource. The mainstream press doesn’t understand it either and usually accepts whatever federal public relations script they are handed.

Some of the politics is local. A fishing company with four or five boats and a bunch of permits can afford to go to all the council meetings, maybe sit on the council and easily game the system because they simply know so much more than the federal employees sitting at the council table. While this is not fair to the smaller players, it a common political reality in other areas as well.

There is a lot more going on at the regional fisheries management council than the most recent tax on fishermen, which is having to pay onboard observers $710 per trip because the feds say they don’t have the money to cover what they are forcing fishermen to do.

But it is the influence of a larger political reality that has unfolded in a comparatively short time which is driving fishermen out of the industry.

Forces at the federal level influence the reality of federal oversight of the council. Here are a few.

• Exclusive Economic Zone, a concept made public in 1945 by President Truman, the 200-mile line from shore that was finally established in 1982 by UN Convention. It did get the foreign factory fishing ships further from shore in the Gulf of Maine, but it also established coastal state territorial rights over the bottom and the oil underneath. Other uses have emerged that compete for space and highest value with fishing.

• The Hague Line, unsettled for 195 years after the Americans won the Revolutionary War with England. That line is the boundary between the U.S. and Canada in the Gulf of Maine. Interest in a boundary line arose, not over cod, but the awarding of oil drilling leases in the 1960s. Very valuable and therefore difficult to settle, the International Court in the Hague, The Netherlands, established the line two years after the EEZ line in 1984.

• While the EEZ was being debated, the U.S. Congress passed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 1976, resulting in federal oversight through a regional fisheries management council system.

• In the late 1980s, Gloucester native and Massachusetts Congressional Representative Silvio Conte helped a coalition of fishermen and environmentalists get a drilling ban for the Gulf of Maine passed in 1990. Each sitting president had to renew that ban to keep it active and did. George W. Bush chose not to.

Throughout most of these years, the economic policies and influence of privately funded groups has been reshaping Congress, academia and fisheries resource management. Sun Oil Company (Sunoco) founder Joseph Pew left his sons and daughters an endowment now worth $5 billion between 1947 and 1979. Pew Charities spends the interest on a variety of projects, including fisheries management, environmental groups which influence fisheries and academic work that supports its economic goals and philosophy.

• Another source of private money influencing public policy is the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (Intel Corporation). The Moore Foundation has funded the development of a national Ocean Policy. A policy that includes mapping the nation’s ocean floors and zoning them for uses that include gas and oil leasing, fin fish aquaculture, marine transportation, marine protected areas, commercial fishing and recreation.

Critics of allowing tax-free private money to be placed in a private foundation that is spent by the owners to direct public policy over public resources, rather than being sent to the U.S. Treasury, say this smacks of oligarchy. The Pews and the Moores favor market-based economic strategies—privatization of public resources—because they believe private owners manage these things better.

But a public resource is not taken by single action, it is brought down by many cuts over time. For the New England fishing industry the most recent cut is to shift the burden of paying for on board observers, which foundation funded engos lobbied the council for years to get, onto the backs of fishermen who are barely surviving the high cost of privatized fish quota. These are considered free market strategies by the Pews and Moores. Influence government with money to manipulate a resource out of the hands of its rightful owners and take it for free.

Vito Giacalone, a lifelong Gloucester fisherman, again said recently that federal managers were implementing policies designed to drive fishermen out of business. The catch shares system and privatized quota promoted by Pew has made the price of quota higher than the market price after the fish is caught.

That will be corrected when all the fishermen are gone and just a few corporations own, catch, process and export all the quota, said lifelong Gloucester ground fisherman Russell Sherman, not long ago. Sherman went almost directly from his 1972 graduation from Harvard University to the deck of a Gloucester fishing boat. He went for all the reasons most fishermen will cite—independence, the working environment at sea, and the prospect that smart fishing and hard work could make an interesting, exciting and successful business for his family. Sherman participated in the council process for years, but became disillusioned by the inability of fishermen to compete with the influence of groups like Pew. He is on his boat fishing on Georges as this is being written.

Sherman said that after the oil-drilling ban, oil companies decided to counter by buying into environmental groups with contributions to influence policy. The privatizers of the commercial fishery resource have acted similarly, he said. An environmental group, for a price, easily convinces an ill-informed public that commercial fishing has killed the resource and that fishermen must go. But what is really going on is the right of all Americans to fish in their commonly held fishery and their right to comment meaningfully on how it is managed is being lost to privatization and forced permit consolidation.