California Coast & Ocean

So the common resource is privatized for the benefit of the few, as has happened with federal water?

It’s somewhat like the situation we find ourselves in with some of the big water districts, which have contracts to buy water from the federal government very cheap and now they’re turning around and selling it at a big profit. The water is not going on the land, it’s basically being transferred to urban districts. And groups like Environmental Defense will argue water marketing makes for more efficiency. Well, I don’t think it’s made for more efficiency, I think it’s made for some very wealthy people.

I think a better method for managing our fisheries is through community development, to assure local people [coastal fishing communities] retain an interest and benefits from the fisheries. We’re now looking at how we might develop community-based management for the groundfish fishery, because it’s in the rebuilding stage. It will take a lot of thought, even on how we define community. We need to begin looking at how we can switch over to more community-based fisheries on a sustainable basis . . . probably at lower catch levels than we have now, but where we can develop more value from the fish. We’ve already seen this with squid. With some of what we call the wetfish or forage fish--anchovies, sardines, squid, herring--we need to move from what I’d call industrial-level fishing to a smaller, more artisanal mode. Rather than having those fish ground up for meal, ideally they should be targeted for fresh-fish markets. That will probably require working with chefs and others to create a consumer acceptance.

If kids had sardines or anchovies in their school lunch program they’d be a lot healthier, and probably better-behaved, because these are oily fish with omega-3s which do help with childhood behavior. Moving in those types of directions will be difficult, because right now there’s a big demand for sardines for feeding tuna net-pen “ranches” off Mexico. Absolutely the wrong way to be doing fisheries. Here we are taking fish--sardines, anchovy-- that were food for coastal communities for thousands of years in places like Peru. Now these fish are being taken not for human consumption, but to grind up for fish meal, for either salmon farms or tuna ranches, basically to go into the first-world middle-class or wealthy restaurants--and very inefficiently.

What are tuna net pens?

It started in the last few years, right off Ensenada, and also in Australia, I believe, and a few other places in the world. They’re not rearing the tuna, they’re capturing them and keeping them in feeding pens--they’re called fattening pens; they’re like feed lots. It takes a lot of energy, so your conversion ratio is 20 to 1, for 20 pounds of feed you may get one pound of tuna going to prime sushi bars.

Is this part of the ocean farming that’s now being promoted?

It’s one form. Salmon are more efficient in the conversion of feed than tuna, but their ratio is still three to five to one, and there are all kinds of problems associated with both types of operations. Aquaculture utilizing carnivorous stock hits wild forage fish harder to provide the feed for those operations. I think the best use of the smaller wild fish, particularly the oily fish, is to begin developing them for fresh markets, not to feed aquaculture operations.

As with squid. I remember 30 years ago when squid was bait. The only people who knew [how to prepare it] were some of the Italian fishermen’s wives. But that’s changed. Having it called calamari--nobody knew what that meant--that helped, I think.