Feature story - May 20, 2003
In 1997, Senator Stevens (R-AK) introduced a bill, the American Fisheries Act (AFA), that would have closed U.S. fisheries to any new factory trawlers and begun the phase-out of the entire U.S. factory trawler fleet. The bill faced stiff opposition from Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA) and multinational corporations with fishing operations in the North Pacific.
In an effort to get around the AFA's major provisions, Sen.
Gorton worked to stall the bill and avoid a Committee vote. He
later convened a closed-door meeting with industry representatives
and Congressional staff to come up with a new industry-supported
framework for the bill. In the end, the big winners in the Senate's
political maneuverings are the multi-national corporations who
wanted to continue to use factory trawlers to ravage our oceans in
order to reap a short-term profit. Under the final bill, the marine
environment and our nation's fish stocks are clearly the big
losers.
Essentially, the AFA privatized the
North Pacific groundfish fishery. This action violates a moratorium
on privatizing the nation's fisheries and anti-trust legislation,
but the bill conveniently exempts itself from those restrictions.
Through the AFA, a handful of fishing vessels is specifically
granted, by name, exclusive rights to fish in the Bering
Sea/Aleutian Islands, primarily for pollock. The owners of the
vessels are composed of multinational corporations, based in
Seattle, WA. Although the Federal government sets catch quotas and
maintains observers onboard, the vessels are more or less free to
fish off the coasts of Alaska in their own private playground,
careless of the effects they have on Alaskan communities, ocean
ecosystems and endangered species, including the Steller sea
lion.