While doom and gloom makes for great sound bites at rip and read newsrooms across the country, it doesn’t accurately assess the true state of our U.S. fish stocks. Americans today are manipulated into accepting farm-raised foreign species while our nation continues to import species like Chilean Sea Bass which have been mostly decimated by foreign fleets.
In mid July, NOAA Fisheries issued a report about the status of U.S. fisheries showing that American fishermen have been fishing on vastly improved stocks in recent years. According to the report, a full 84% of U.S. fish stocks are not subject to overfishing with the latest assessments noting that “the majority of our nation’s fisheries are at sustainable levels and management measures continue to be implemented to prevent overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks.”
That’s a glass half full.
The NOAA report also prompted quick response from the environmental business community, who successfully had formulated their own analysis of the status of fish stocks prepared for national press coverage in advance of the official government report.
Theirs is the glass half empty.
The sad fact for fishing communities nationwide is that it’s much easier for preservationists to sell their stories to the national publications when using headlines like SEA IS DYING, FISH GOING EXTINCT, WORLD TO END & CHILDREN WILL STARVE. News editors love these kinds of leads because they’re intriguing, startling and in the end they sell papers. It’s the old journalism adage that ‘Dog Bites Man’ is just not as appealing above the fold as ‘Man Bites Dog.’
While doom and gloom makes for great sound bites at rip and read newsrooms across the country, it doesn’t accurately assess the true state of our U.S. fish stocks. Americans today are being given the treatment – ‘guilt’ treatment to be more specific, being manipulated into accepting the concept of farm-raised foreign species while our nation continues to import species like Chilean Sea Bass which have been mostly decimated by foreign fleets paying no adherence to international catch requirements. While more and more of our seafood harvest is essentially being outsourced to other countries, the American media continues to hammer away at the concept that our coastal fishermen are emptying out our oceans.
Sadly, while corporations like Wal-Mart continue to invest in a cap and trade system of coastal sharecropping known as catch shares and individual fishing quotas, their own customers are being led to believe that fishing is bad. Rather than embracing the notion that any coastal resident can simply head down to the bay or ocean with rod and reel to put food on the family dinner table at night, the radical environmental community and their headline writing propagandists have led mainstream America into believing that fishing is a sin.
Local media outlets will occasionally rip these headlines from the national newswire to pass along to their own readers, as recently occurred when the Connecticut Post reconstituted preservationist rhetoric plastered on the pages at Time Magazine, wondering aloud if “fish farming can fill the void created by what many environmental scientists see as the approaching decimation of saltwater wild fish stocks due to overfishing.” The Connecticut Post went on preach about being a “responsible recreational angler” while promoting a future of “catch and release fishing.”
Had the local editors in Connecticut done some actual research in their own back yard however, they would’ve learned that some of the more popular local fish species are actually experiencing more healthy success in terms of stock rebuilding than in just about anywhere else in the world.
Vitally important to both the recreational and commercial sector alike are black sea bass and scup (porgy), considered healthy, rebuilt species. Summer flounder or fluke, which is currently at a higher recorded biomass than at any other time in the past 30 years of fisheries management history is not overfished, and no overfishing is occurring. In fact, this ever-popular recreational fish stock is currently at 89% of the 132-million-pound biomass goal, on target to be officially considered a rebuilt stock by the 2013 federal deadline.
By relying on the preservationist spin, the Connecticut Post was also fooled into erroneously reporting that “90 percent of large species of fish, like tuna and swordfish, have been all but fished out.” However, according to the latest data from NOAA Fisheries, the North Atlantic swordfish population is now considered fully rebuilt, with biomass estimates currently 5 percent above the target level. It’s important to remember that 10 to 15 years ago, at about the time that many American chefs began a ‘just say no to swordfish’ campaign, there were nearly 1,000 longline permits in the United States, whereas today there are only about 114. The stock is healthy and for good reason.
And despite what the Connecticut Post would have readers believe, the same can be said for many of our local tunas.
Atlantic yellowfin tuna are believed to be near target population levels and is harvested at a sustainable rate; overfishing is not occurring and the stock is not considered overfished. Last assessed in 2007, the Atlantic bigeye stock had declined rapidly in the 1990s, but it stabilized at or below sustainable levels in response to a large reduction in overall harvest. Bigeye, a popular target for the sushi set, had a biomass in 2006 that was said to be 92 percent of the overall target level for consideration of being classified as rebuilt. While it's not a success yet, it's neither plummeting as the preservationist research groups would claim.
Bluefin tuna, of course, have been a huge story, made bigger by the traditional first fish of the season in Japan which sells for $500,000 or more for that one fish. The preservationists love to use that symbolic first tuna as a call to arms, but in actuality, the Western Atlantic bluefin tuna stock is showing two distinct scenarios after the latest 2008 ICCAT assessments, both low and high recruitment. The low recruitment scenario says population estimate is 57 percent of the target level for spawning stock biomass, while high recruitment estimate is less optimistic at only 14 percent. International overfishing is occurring, but the U.S. is responsible for only about 3 percent of global harvest.
Are the fish all going extinct? Real science does not indicate there's any truth to the doomsday claims, yet more and more journalists are buying into the reactionary, agenda-driven rhetoric spewed forth by national academia, all but ignoring the on-water observations of local fishermen and regional assessment experts. Such conservation guilt has seeped into the very fabric of the recreational fishing community, as preservationists who wish to divide our sectors into ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ have found easy marks preaching amongst the catch and release converts. For those who would never bring home a fish for a dinner, it’s easy to point a finger at those who choose to keep enough for the table.
The deep-rooted problem today of course is that showroom environmentalists wish to dictate what goes on our table and to what degree, and they’ve have found all-to-willing accomplices in newsrooms decimated by budget cuts and attrition, with many task saturated editors virtually unable to substantiate the validity of any news leads.
By tapping the vein of American guilt, preservationists have attempted to bleed out our ability to fight with conviction on behalf of a nation’s right to fish. Should those with the most to lose ever unite in efforts to oppose those who wish to reduce fishing participation amongst both commercial and recreational fishermen, perhaps then news reporters of this country would really have something to write about.
About the Author: Jim Hutchinson, Jr. is Managing Director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA), a national, grassroots political action organization that represents recreational fishermen and the recreational fishing industry on marine fisheries issues.