Last week, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) voted unanimously to limit king salmon bycatch in the massive Alaska pollock fishery by 2011, which has already been severely restricted over the past two seasons by quota cuts. The hope is that no more than 60,000 chinooks (or fewer, if bycatch numbers remain high) will find their way into pollock trawlers' nets in the Bering Sea so that the native people in remote western Alaska can continue their subsistence way of life, catching and preserving enough fish to last them through the difficult Arctic winters.
It was no easy decision. While 60,000 fish is less than half of the more than 120,000 kings that were unintentionally scooped up by pollock trawlers in 2007, it's almost twice the limit some villagers pushed for. For them, there's a lot on the line, including a heritage they say traces back 10,000 years. There's even more at stake here.
Bycatch, one of several large-scale fishery impacts, is going to require further scrutiny by influential seafood eco-labels and environmental scorekeepers monitoring the world's seafood supply. A report on Wednesday by the World Wildlife Fund showed the scope of bycatch worldwide is bigger than anyone thought.
The bycatch situation in Alaska is complicated, controversial and emotional. After the NPFMC set its limit, Jon Rowley, a Seattle-based seafood-marketing consultant who promotes Kwik'pak Fisheries and its Yukon salmon, wrote a letter to Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBA) scientists last week imploring them to reconsider the "Best Choice" rating its Seafood Watch program gives U.S. pollock. Rowley wrote, "the effects of the salmon bycatch in the pollock fishery on the Yup'ik Eskimos of the Yukon Delta is nothing short of economic and cultural genocide."
Geoff Shester, senior science manager at MBA, told me yesterday that Alaska pollock's rating was already under review - all ratings are ideally revisited at least every three years - and that Seafood Watch takes many forms of input into consideration. More than 200 individuals from both sides testified at the NPFMC meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, last week.
Low bycatch levels is one of the reasons Seafood Watch rates Alaska pollock highly, but it is not alone in its praise. The Marine Stewardship Council certified Alaska's pollock fisheries as sustainable and all its products - including some of the most affordable seafood options available to schools, hospitals and other institutions - can bear the blue MSC logo. It's a fish that feeds the world affordably and, by these two measures, in a sustainable fashion. Also, Alaska law requires fisheries to uphold the sustained-yield principle.
Cutting-edge science helps the MSC and the MBA make their conclusions, but the programs don't attempt to gauge socio-economic impacts like with the situation in Alaska. This instance illustrates how complex and challenging it is for such programs to determine what is truly sustainable and what is not - not to mention how far their reach should go.
Thank you,
James Wright
Associate Editor
SeaFood Business
April 15, 2009
