All the Boats on the Ocean

How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing

Carmel Finley

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226443409
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Most current fishing practices are neither economically nor biologically sustainable. Every year, the world spends $80 billion buying fish that cost $105 billion to catch, even as heavy fishing places growing pressure on stocks that are already struggling with warmer, more acidic oceans. How have we developed an industry that is so wasteful, and why has it been so difficult to alter the trajectory toward species extinction?In this transnational, interdisciplinary history, Carmel Finley answers these questions and more as she explores how government subsidies propelled the expansion of fishing from a coastal, in-shore activity into a global industry. While nation states struggling for ocean supremacy have long used fishing as an imperial strategy, the Cold War brought a new emphasis: fishing became a means for nations to make distinct territorial claims. A network of trade policies and tariffs allowed cod from Iceland and tuna canned in Japan into the American market, destabilizing fisheries in New England and Southern California. With the subsequent establishment of tuna canneries in American Samoa and Puerto Rico, Japanese and American tuna boats moved from the Pacific into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans after bluefin. At the same time, government subsidies in nations such as Spain and the Soviet Union fueled fishery expansion on an industrial scale, with the Soviet fleet utterly depleting the stock of rosefish (or Pacific ocean perch) and other groundfish from British Columbia to California. This massive global explosion in fishing power led nations to expand their territorial limits in the 1970s, forever changing the seas.Looking across politics, economics, and biology, All the Boats on the Ocean casts a wide net to reveal how the subsidy-driven expansion of fisheries in the Pacific during the Cold War led to the growth of fisheries science and the creation of international fisheries management. Nevertheless, the seas are far from calm: in a world where this technologically advanced industry has enabled nations to colonize the oceans, fish literally have no place left to hide, and the future of the seas and their fish stocks is uncertain.

CHAPTER ONE

The Fishing Empires of the Pacific: The Americans, the Japanese, and the Soviets

The tuna business is largely concentrated in Southern California. That industry, which always shows surface indications of bursting apart violently from internecine squabble, is capable of uniting almost instantly to give the most ruthless competition, in either the production, processing, or marketing field, to an outsider trying to come into the tuna business. . . . A newcomer to the business, without deep roots of fisheries know-how, can confidently expect to be crucified before he gets his feet under him.

—Wilbert Chapman, 19491

Nick Bez always said he didn’t talk to President Harry Truman about the world’s biggest fishing boat, but nobody believed him. After all, there was the photograph: Truman holding up a salmon that he did not catch, Washington Governor Monrad Wallgren in a sports shirt and a happy grin, the Secret Service agent in the sunglasses, and a man identified as a Seattle chef lounging on the bow of the rowboat. It is impossible to believe that Bez, in his suit, tie, and fedora, was along merely to row the boat. He was one of Washington’s richest men, the owner of gold mines, salmon canneries, and the first airline to fly into Alaska. He had deep roots in Washington’s Democratic Party and was on Wallgren’s advisory committee on progress and industry. It was June of 1945.

Two days after the President left town, Washington Senator Warren Magnuson announced that the Defense Plant Corporation would make a $2 million loan to a new company, the Pacific Exploration Company. Nick Bez would be in charge and the new company would expand American fishing deep into the Pacific. A 423-foot World War I freighter would be converted into the world’s largest fishing boat, the Pacific Explorer. It would stake an American claim on the rich Pacific fisheries developed by the Japanese: king crab and bottomfish from the waters off Alaska, and high-seas tunas in the new American possessions, the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline Islands, deep in the equatorial Pacific.

Fig. 1.1. When President Harry Truman went fishing in Puget Sound in June of 1945, millionaire fisherman and aviation pioneer Nick Bez rowed the boat.

“Tomorrow the Marianas,” wrote Pacific Fisherman magazine.2 No one was quite sure where the Marianas actually were, but as Magnuson said, the voyages would allow the Americans to claim expanded fishing grounds, laying a foundation for President Truman at some later date to extend the “three-mile limit to the edge of the shelf and prohibit fishing by other nationalities,” the Seattle Post Intelligencer reported.3

Unspoken was that the “other nationalities” were the Japanese, the world’s leading fishing nation. Their government-subsidized cannery ships and their fishing fleets prowled the Pacific until 1939. Four decades earlier, they had decisively defeated Russia, winning access to the salmon-rich waters off the eastern coast of the Asian continent. From the island of Sakhalin and the Kamchatka peninsula, it was a short hop to Alaskan waters. They sent an expedition for king crab in the eastern Bering Sea in 1929, canning crab for export to the U.S. under the Geisha brand. Americans had spent some $27 million during the 1930s buying Japanese-canned crab that had been caught off Bristol Bay, which meant that the crab had, in essence, been American crab.4 By 1933, the Japanese had also developed a full-scale fishery on a medium-sized bright red fish, Sebastes alutus, or rosefish.5

American fishermen watched fretfully until 1936, when the Japanese announced a three-year experimental fishery for salmon. The politically powerful Seattle-based salmon industry pressured the State Department until it asked the Japanese government to withdraw the proposal. Japan did so, but refused to promise that it would not attempt to return to Alaskan waters in the future. Alarmed, the industry formed the Joint Committee for the Protection of the Pacific Fisheries, with Miller Freeman, publisher of Pacific Fisherman, as chairman.6 Throughout the war, Freeman pelted federal officials with letters, warning of Japanese naval officers disguised as fishermen, and the danger the Japanese posed to salmon along the entire West Coast. If the Japanese were allowed to fish off Alaska, they would move on south, all the way to California, destroying the fish as they went.7 Washington’s two senators leaned on federal officials, urging them to expand the three-mile limit to the edge of the continental shelf, so that foreign boats could be prohibited from American waters.

As far as the salmon fishing industry was concerned, Truman did just that two months after his visit to Seattle, when he issued the Truman Proc lamations. There were two of them, one dealing with the jurisdictional problems between the state and federal government over newly discovered offshore oil deposits.

The second proclamation dealt with fishing. It declared that the U.S. had the right to establish conservation zones to protect fish in the high seas contiguous to the United States, where fishing activities were fully developed. If the Americans had developed a fishery, the government had the authority to limit fishing to American boats, in the interests of “conservation.” In terms of international ocean law, the Truman Proclamation was an early and significant development, with a nation-state attempting to enclose a part of the oceans and to prohibit fishing by other nation-states.8 It attempted to reserve the salmon for Americans, but it can also be seen more broadly, as the Americans challenging the Japanese, the world’s dominant fishing nation, and trying to prevent them from returning to fish in Bristol Bay.

Historians have always been puzzled by the proclamation. It is so unimportant that the major historical figures who were involved, including three secretaries of state—Cordell Hull, Edward R. Stettinius, and James Byrnes—had nothing to say about it in their memoirs.9 Scholars are extremely critical of it, calling it an “unmitigated political disaster,” that the State Department would spend three decades trying to undo.10 It flew in the face of other State Department policies of liberalizing economic and financial practices and the elimination of tariffs. The Potsdam Declaration of 1945, which set the terms for the surrender of Germany and Japan, said Japan was to have access to raw materials it had utilized before the war, and that obviously included the right to fish in the international waters off Alaska.11

Regardless of where the proclamation came from, it placed fish at the intersection of colliding domestic and international forces in both countries (fishing is seldom just about fish).12 The Northwest salmon industry wanted Japanese boats banned from the waters where Americans fished. The proclamation did not explicitly ban anybody from fishing in Alaskan waters. But it went way too far for the Southern California tuna industry, which was fishing off Latin America, just as the Japanese had been doing off Alaska. Barely a month after it was issued, Mexico adopted a 200-mile exclusive zone. Argentina followed a year later, in October of 1946. Chile acted in June of 1947 and Peru six weeks later on August 1.13 Iceland acted in 1948 and Costa Rica in 1949. The proclamation was an opportunity for many nations unhappy with foreign boats fishing and whaling in their waters and they quickly took advantage of it.

There is a large body of scholarly work that looks at the Truman Proclamation in terms of the development of international law. Much less examined is its impact on the development of fishing in the Pacific Ocean. The conversation in the row boat marked a resolution by the American government and its fishing industry to stake a claim on the fisheries developed by the Japanese during the 1930s off Alaska, as well as in the eastern tropical Pacific.

The U.S. wanted to expand its presence in the Pacific. The Joint Chiefs of Staff in a 1946 report identified 20 foreign locations where the military wanted air transit rights. The State Department had a list of bases it deemed “essential” or “required” for national security (including Iceland). Admiral Chester W. Nimitz reasoned that “the ultimate security of the United States depends in major part on our ability to control the Pacific Ocean,” and he joined Truman administration officials in supporting American control over the Pacific Islands.14 Not all the bases were built. But policy makers and the public were in agreement that America’s postwar security hinged on control of the island world of Micronesia, especially the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana Islands.15 A line of American fishing boats would help cement the American claim to the islands, and to the vast fish resources of the Pacific Ocean, especially high-seas tunas.

The Soviets were also taking over the Japanese fisheries in its waters, including the canneries and the processing equipment the Japanese had abandoned when they left Sakhalin, the large island some 26 miles north of Hokkaido and east of Russia. If they were to build a submarine base at Sakhalin, the Micronesian Islands were the logical place for a counterattack.16

There was enormous enthusiasm for expanding American fishing into the former Japanese fishing areas. The Americans had fished in Alaskan waters since the 1880s, but only for salmon and halibut. Processing companies were primarily based out of Seattle, but also operated out of Astoria and San Francisco, and they sent their canning crews north for a two-month fishery. Bristol Bay, on the easternmost arm of the Bering Sea, is home of the world’s largest runs of sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka). Dozens of lakes lance through the landscape, creating conditions where sockeye thrive. When the brief season ended, the companies returned to the Lower 48, loaded with silver tin cans of bright red and pink salmon. But the Americans had not attempted to explore any other fish resources in the deeper waters, as the Japanese (and even the Soviets) had done. There had been very little oceanographic exploration by Americans during the 1930s.17 Until the end of the war, there were no research vessels or any funding for deep-sea research.

Investment in the Bristol Bay fisheries was estimated at $98 million, with profits of $3 million annually.18 The 1936 catch was the largest in the history of the industry: a record pack of 8.4 million cases was produced, nearly a million more than the previous record pack of 1934.19 Biologists had argued since 1919 that the salmon were being overfished, but that was obviously nonsense, since the catch kept setting new records as more and more fishermen entered the fishery.20

Congress passed a special appropriation in 1940 to investigate the development of an American king crab fishery in Alaska. The cannery vessel Tondeleyo and three catcher boats found large quantities of king crab, as well as bottomfish.21 Under the leadership of Leroy Christie, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife economist, the voyages of the 113-foot boat provided evidence there was an “outstanding opportunity for a large-scale king crab enterprise in Bering Sea, and probably only a large-scale operation could be successfully conducted there.”22 But the American fishing industry was small and unorganized, incapable of investing in a big new fishery.

The largest domestic fishery was for California sardines. The catch fluctuated wildly, which scientists interpreted to mean the stocks were overfished; the sardine industry also thought this was nonsense, since record catches were still being caught as more boats entered the fishery. New England, where fishing predated settlement, was the second-largest fishery and it was admittedly an industry in trouble.23 Boats were small and old, self-financed, and operating with limited equipment and technology. Canadian fish undercut the market for American fish. A few boats had experimented with freezing their catch, but refrigeration was not widespread, especially in smaller boats.

Fishermen were poor. Fishing was for those who could not find more attractive work on shore, as historian Samuel Morison documented in his 1941 study of the maritime industry in New England.24 It was difficult and dangerous. Fish prices were low and markets were sporadic. Cod was caught by men in small boats, pulling lines by hand, throughout New England and the North Sea, just as they had done for centuries. Some boats were trawling with nets, but the heavy cotton nets were difficult and dangerous to handle at sea.

The coming of war would be the catalyst for enormous changes in the fishing industry throughout the world. Government money would ease the transition between salted, dried, and canned fish, to a world of frozen fish and new fish products, such as fish sticks. Government money would fund research on new technologies to catch and process fish, catching them on a massive scale previously unimaginable. Government money would also shape research and development from a haphazard process into a system of new technologies, efficiently transforming natural resources into wealth.25 Most of all, the government money would ensure the rapid transfer of new technologies, not only to catch, but to process and market fish. All of these actions would have a major impact on fish populations.

With the coming of war in December of 1941, the American fishing industry found itself with a much higher profile. Securing the nation’s food supply was urgent. Americans had been pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Political Roles for Fish Populations
• 1.  The Fishing Empires of the Pacific: The Americans, the Japanese, and the Soviets
• 2.  Islands and War
• 3.  Manifest Destiny and Fishing
• 4.  Tariffs
• 5.  Industrialization
• 6.  Treaties
• 7.  Imperialism
• 8.  Enclosure
• Conclusions: Updating the Best Available Science
• Notes
• Index