Some of you may have heard about the recent lobster advisory committee recommendations to the the DFW (formally DFG) as to what management measures should be used in the future to protect our California Lobster fishery.
The back story on this is that the Chinese who used to have their own spiny lobster fishery are now paying top dollar for our California lobster and as a result our commercials have ramped up their efforts put more traps in the water then ever before, and are taking record amounts of our lobsters, which in turn are being shipped to China for record prices.
It's a classic example of the unintentional effects of Globalization. In the past when the commercials over harvested they would create a glut in the market that would drive the lobster price down. That is no longer the case. The Chinese Market and their demand for Spiny Lobsters has tipped the scale when it comes to the commercial fishery. There is now no incentive for them to conserve the resource because in the short term the more they sell at record prices the more they make and long term the less lobsters there are the more they will be worth.
The Department of Fish and Wildlife's mandated mission is clear. It's their job to manage California fish and wildlife so that we the citizens of California will have access to those resources. That includes current and future access. Our fish and wildlife are considered a Public Resource essentially owned by the citizens of California, so essentially our lobsters are the property citizens of California, and the DFW is supposed to mange them for our benefit.
That's is why the recent recommendations by the Lobster Advisory Committee are so disturbing. Rather then respond to the real issues of the record demand and commercial catch, or the fact that the majority of our lobsters are now being shipped overseas, they instead came up with a series of measures designed to limit public access, by imposing a series of gear and access restrictions on the public recreational lobster fishery instead of the commercial lobster fishery.
This is in direct contradiction with the very principle of the DFW. That it's their Job to manage our public resource and protect our access to that resource which is technically the property of the citizens of California.
So what are the long term implications here. Well take a look at today's news.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/201...-season-on-ice
In Maine they just had to shut down a traditional Shrimp fishery because of a rapid decline in their population numbers in the last decade. The fishery has collapsed, I suppose you could blame it on all kinds of things but this is the first time that fishery's been closed in almost half a century, and the real reason is right there in the article.
".......Spencer Fuller, a manager for Cozy Harbor Seafood, which processes and ships Maine products across the globe, says some shrimping should have been allowed to continue — albeit with much-reduced quotas. "We've been able to establish ourselves in major retailers in Europe," Fuller says. Just three years ago, he explains, Cozy Harbor was shipping thousands of metric tons of Gulf of Maine shrimp, much of it ending up on the shelves of markets in places like the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark...With no more shrimp, Fuller says a crucial toehold in overseas markets will be lost........."
This is the kind of thing that happens when you allow a unlimited commercial catch of a public resource and allow that catch to be shipped overseas to essentially unlimited markets in order to maximize industry profits. There's not enough shrimp in the Gulf of Maine to feed all of Europe, just like there's not enough lobsters in California to feed all of China.
The Australians already know this. They have their own spiny lobster and at one point upwards of 90% of their lobsters were being sold to China. After experiencing a major decrease in both the catch rate and juvenile settlement rate which are both used to measure of lobster population vitality the Australians concluded their lobster population was in jeopardy and installed a strict quota system for their commercials in order to protect their fishery.
The quotas went into effect three years ago, and there have been serious repercussions.
Initially the Chinese fought back. They banned the import of Australian lobsters altogether in order to put pressure on the Australian Government to remove the quotas. When the Australian Government would not back down they removed the ban and imported every Australian Lobster they legally could but at the same time started buying record numbers of California lobsters.
In other words the boom in California Lobster exports is a direct result of Australia trying to protect it's lobster fishery from a collapse due to over fishing that was caused by exporting too many lobsters to China.
The demand for Australian lobsters to ship to China is still so high in Australia that there have been serious problems with the commercials poaching, or exceeding their quotas. It's so bad that they are now prosecuting them, giving them fines of tens of thousands of dollars.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-2...r-fine/4985156
Like I said all you have to do is look at the News to see where this is potentially going to go.
California Lobsters are a California Public Resource. They are our lobsters.
The writing is on the wall if we're willing to look at it.
What we need to do is get the DFW to do it's job and really protect our lobster resource for the people of California.