The year 2001 began with the sale of a bluefin tuna for $172,400, the most expensive fish ever sold, and a bad omen for the survival of Atlantic bluefin and other marine wildlife. That sale took place in Tokyo's Tsukiji Market thousands of miles from where the fish was caught. But walk through New York's Fulton Fish Market any morning at 5 a.m. and you'll see the same globalized market frenzy in the form of dead fish on ice: king mackerel, red mullet, tilefish and grunts, whiting and butterfish, parrot fish from the Caribbean, tuna from Vietnam, Australia and Ecuador, New Zealand mussels and clams, all part of a world market demand for anything indigenous to the sea. The urchin caught in California, Maine or Alaska this morning could have its gonads removed and served in a Tokyo night spot by tomorrow evening. A bluefin tuna caught off Louisiana will definitely end up in Tsukiji Market, as will most black cod caught off the West Coast. Creatures once considered useless or inedible like baby eels, skates, urchins, dogfish, and horseshoe crabs all have their markets now.

The global fish trade is also keeping Americans ignorant about what's happening in their own waters. People ordering fish and
chips in Boston may not realize the white fish they're eating is pollack from the Bering Sea instead of overfished New England cod. The blue crab you order in Baltimore may come not from nearby Chesapeake Bay but Indonesia, where the pickers work for $15 a week.

The reality is America's marine wildlife is in decline. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) reports close to half of U.S. fisheries are now depleted and those numbers only reflect the commercial species that the government tracks. The U.S. fisheries boom of the 1980s turned into the bust of the last decade thanks to the wrong kind of politics, money and technology.

How did this come about? It may have started with the 1976 Magnuson Act, which, ironically, was designed to protect U.S. fishermen from foreign factory trawlers. This act created eight regional Fisheries Councils. Unfortunately, these councils were established as the only federal regulatory agencies exempted from conflict-of-interest laws. Commercial fishing interests now dominate them. The result has been policies that favor short-term economic benefit over long-term conservation. The New England Council, for example, ignored fifteen years of scientific warnings that their cod populations were being overfished until emergency closures in the fishing grounds were required to prevent the complete collapse of the stocks.

The Magnuson Act also provided easy federal loans that encouraged fishermen to borrow heavily in order to buy new
boats and expand their catching capacity beyond all reasonable limits Government-backed savings and loans and foreign banks also funded this massive expansion of the fleet, as did the 1986 Reagan investment tax credit that brought corporate lawyers and other outside investors flooding the docks.

On top of this, sophisticated sonar, satellite tracking and other technologies developed for the Navy allowed the fishing fleet to carry out a high-tech war of extermination against targeted species, so that it consumed its biological capital at a faster rate than the fish could reproduce.

A practical solution to America's fisheries crisis has to be at the heart of any attempt to save America's living seas. Now the tab's come due. A practical solution to America's fisheries crisis has to be at the heart of any attempt to save America's living seas. What's required is a public understanding and commitment to turning things around. This could be done using a combination of already available policy tools.

Let's call this solution the BLUE plate special. The BLUE, of course, is a fisheries acronym (the industry's full of them).

The B is for "Buy-backs," a financial commitment by both government and industry to reduce the size of the fishing fleet to a sustainable level.
The L is for "Limited Entry," which means only so many people can be licensed to work in a given fishery or biological complex of fisheries, to prevent them from being overcapitalized again. We cannot allow more people to fish a living resource than its biology and habitat can sustain.

The U in BLUE is for "Undersea Reserves" or what are being called Marine Protected Areas. Biologists suggest 20 percent
of the blue frontier needs to be set aside as no-take zones in order to restore and propagate new populations of fish, crustaceans and other plants and animals. Where undersea reserves already exist studies are finding them highly
effective, with healthy populations of marine wildlife slowly expanding beyond their fluid borders.

Finally, the E: an "End to Conflicts of Interest." Fisheries management must be taken away from people with a direct stake
in killing the resource. At a hearing in Washington on the billion-dollar-a-year pollock fishery's impact on Steller's sea lions, I heard a one-time NMFS scientist give testimony. He'd quit NMFS to help found a factory trawler company and was also vice chair of the Pacific Fishery Council. In the aviation industry, an FAA inspector might quit his or her job to found an airline, but once in that position that airline executive would not be allowed to sit on the National Transportation Safety Board. The flying public wouldn't tolerate it, nor does the law allow it. The same principal of not allowing economic self-interest to oversee the public trust should apply to preserving our living oceans for future generations.

This BLUE plate special program can work, but only if more Americans who say they love our oceans decide to take active responsibility for their stewardship.

Copyright 1999-2000 The Florence Fund