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On
April 23 the Fishermen’s Dock Cooperative in Point
Pleasant Beach was the launch pad for an expanded
seafood marketing and promotion program by the New
Jersey Department of Agriculture. I don’t know what
anniversary this marked, but the Department and the
commercial fishing industry in New Jersey have enjoyed
a mutually beneficial relationship that goes back well
over three decades (I’m pretty sure of that time frame
because I started the NJDA fisheries program back in
the late 1970s.)
It
goes without saying, of course, that anyone associated
with New Jersey’s fish and seafood industry is
grateful to NJDA Secretary Charlie Kuperas and the
Department’s dedicated seafood program staff.
Including the harvest of New Jersey’s rich inshore and
offshore waters in the Jersey Fresh program helped to
establish a positive market identity for New Jersey
fish and shellfish. Through expanding that program to
cover issues of sustainability, our ocean-fresh
products will continue to maintain the consumer
acceptability they so richly deserve. From a
not-so-obvious perspective, New Jersey’s seafood
lovers should be equally appreciative. Whether they
get their ocean-fresh seafood “fix” via a seafood
market or one of the 350 restaurants participating in
the Jersey Fresh program, they are the people who
ultimately benefit from the Department’s efforts.
Looking back, it’s really striking to see not how far
we’ve come but how much things have changed.
The Department of Agriculture got seriously into
fisheries shortly after the passage of the federal
Magnuson Act in 1976. This legislation was most
notable for establishing the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ),
in essence giving U.S. citizens exclusive rights to
the living marine resources in the waters from 3 to
200 miles off our coasts (the fish and shellfish in
the waters out to 3 miles were and are managed by the
coastal states).
Back then there was a palpable sense of euphoria
attached to anything dealing with fisheries. After
decades of watching huge foreign vessels
indiscriminately fishing a few miles off our beaches,
we finally had a mechanism to get rid of them. Get rid
of them we did, and seemingly at every level
government organized to replace them with domestic
vessels.
The federal government was first in line with efforts
to help U.S, fishermen develop U.S. fisheries. One of
the main mechanisms for doing this was the
Underutilized Species list. This was a listing of
generally ignored species of fish found in the EEZ in
sufficient quantities to justify significant further
development. At the time, monkfish, dogfish, squid,
Atlantic mackerel and silver and red hake were among
the underutilized fisheries accessible to New Jersey
vessels.
Financial incentives were made available to fishermen,
dock operators and processors to develop these
fisheries. These incentives included loans and grants
for vessels, infrastructure development, processing
equipment and fishing gear. The National Marine
Fisheries Service (NMFS) of the U.S. Department of
Commerce had a large trade show exhibit constructed,
staffed and sent to various international food shows
promoting U.S. fishery products and focusing on the
underutilized species. Booths in the exhibit were made
available to states, industry organizations and
businesses to promote their products internationally.
The New Jersey Department of Agriculture in company
with the New Jersey Department of Commerce
participated in a number of these shows and laid a
great deal of the groundwork that got a number of New
Jersey companies successfully into seafood exporting.
Working together, we were mostly successful. In fact,
some would argue that we were too successful, many of
the fisheries that were considered underutilized
thirty or so years ago are now fully utilized. (but
with a world population approaching seven billion far
too rapidly, can there be any justification for any
fishery – or any other protein source – not being
fully utilized?)
Since then, the National Marine Fisheries Service has
made the transformation from being the strongest
proponent of the domestic commercial fishing industry
to what most fishermen would today consider their
greatest enemy. Then, if it meant more boats, more
fishermen, more efficiency, more harvest and more
revenues, it was considered a good thing in
Washington, DC, and the federal fisheries agency was
right there, with wallet open, supporting it. Today,
if it doesn’t involve fewer boats, fewer fishermen,
lessened efficiency and ever-decreasing harvests and
revenues, it seems as if the federal government
embodied in NMFS is going to be automatically dead set
against it. And it seems that this is the NMFS
position regardless of any other factors (as a timely
aside, I haven’t come across anything indicating that
the feds have devoted any attention at all to
modifying their regulations to allow fishermen to cope
more efficiently with sky rocketing fuel prices.)
And this is in large part due to a situation that the
federal government through NMFS is in the greatest
part responsible for. NMFS paid for the boats, paid
for the hardware, paid for developing the markets and
lured the fishermen into what are now supposed to be
overcapitalized fisheries.
But throughout this still continuing saga, the New
Jersey Department of Agriculture has been there,
supporting New Jersey’s fishermen, promoting the fish
and the shellfish they harvest, and letting the
consumers know that. Like Jersey tomatoes and Jersey
corn and Jersey peaches, Jersey seafood is the cream
of the crop. For that, Secretary Kuperas – and his
predecessors Art Brown and Phil Alampi – have earned
the gratitude of New Jersey’s fish and seafood
industry and, I hope, New Jersey’s discerning
consumers. We could only hope that the U.S. Department
of Agriculture at some point in the not-to-distant
future takes a page from the NJDA book and starts to
consider what it can do to support the national
seafood industry. It’s obvious that we have a friend
in the Administration in Trenton. At this point it’s
hard to see the National Marine Fisheries Service in
anything approaching that role in Washington. |
