A fantastic must-read feature from Matt Jenkins at High Country News takes us into the last few decades of the crab fishing industry, and the catch-share programs that are now being put in place seeking to prevent those fisheries from collapsing.
With too many boats chasing too few crab, fishermen started going broke. They also -- literally -- started going under. In the scramble to catch as much of the quota as possible, boats frequently sailed into fierce Bering Sea storms, and some never returned. Between 1989 and 2005, 10 crab boats sank in the Sea, taking 51 men with them. Another 34 men were lost overboard or killed.
Let's talk about this below the fold... |
A notable consequence of the new way of doing things, however, has been the effect upon (former) workers in the industry. At least, those who weren't already killed by the old way of doing things...
That free-for-all brought a host of problems, from environmental damage caused by carpet-bombing the ocean floor with crab pots, to bankruptcies and a chilling roster of lost fishermen and boats that sank after they ventured out into fierce storms so they wouldn't get left behind in the race. For years, crab fishing in the Bering Sea was the deadliest job in the country -- more likely to kill you than going on foot patrol in Iraq.
The parallels to the situations of many workers involved in land-based forms of industrial agriculture are really striking here, actually; and raise an interesting question - how can we go about protecting the planet and maintaining sustainable fisheries, while at the same time ensuring that the very same people who brought about these problems to begin with don't gain even more financially at the expense of the workers they've exploited, right along with these natural resources, in the first place?
For each boat that has left the fishery, five to six crew jobs went with it. Mark Fina, the fishery council economist, has estimated that as many as 975 crewmen -- more than half the total who worked in the fishery -- have lost their crabbing jobs since rationalization.
And for those crew members, the exit from the business may not be that graceful. Unlike laid-off auto workers, they receive no severance package.
Don't get me wrong, maintaining healthy fisheries and protecting the planet should always be the first goal above all else. After all, once it collapses there's nothing left there for anybody anyways. It's common sense. But, why are we rewarding the ultimate perpetrators here with what pretty much amounts to officially sanctioned hush money?
The old profits and financial rewards are still out there, only now they're all going to these workers' former employers under a strikingly similar "cap and trade"-like scheme we're now seeing proposed as a similar solution in other industries. This guy sums the problem up perfectly -
"Sure, there were too many boats. But whose fault is that?" says Corey Eisenbarth, another deckhand. "The people that built the boats and over-exploited the fishery are the same guys who got all the money."
Should we really continue to retroactively reward past exploitation by a certain few, in the name of future sustainability? |
