But cod and other wild fish are something else. The industrial food sector must work around the vagaries of a natural system. Any number of factors, ranging from an overactive oceanic gyre to a ripple in the population of herring prey fish, may throw a wild fishery at least temporarily out of whack. And so in the global wild whitefish market, there are, in effect, two systems running side by side: the human-focused, need-driven system where demand remains constant; and the diverse, disparate natural marine system that varies from year to year as a result of a plethora of uncontrollable variables.
Trying to find a sensible place for industry in this situation requires a population of fish, somewhere in the world, so abundant that a massive, consistent deduction will not cause an implosion of the stock—an implosion that had already occurred on the Grand Banks and Georges Bank. By the late 1990s, when large retailers were looking for a replacement for cod, they were increasingly facing pressure from the environmental community not to repeat the same dynamic that had ruined the cod fisheries. A replacement fish would have to be found that at least had the appearance of sustainability, as determined by some objective source. This need was particularly high for the world’s largest seafood buyer, the English-Dutch corporation Unilever.
Unilever came into being when Lever Brothers, a British soap manufacturer, merged with the Dutch margarine producer Margarine Unie in 1930. Over the years Unilever developed from a retailer into a brand consolidator, and in 1995 it purchased what was perhaps the United States’ best-known seafood brand, Gorton’s of Gloucester. The purchase was made, however, just after the Georges Bank codfish fishery had been closed, and Unilever immediately found itself in the hornet’s nest of a rising ocean-conservation movement. Reacting to fisheries crises in both the United States and Europe, Greenpeace began organizing a campaign against Unilever, threatening a boycott of its seafood products.
But Unilever managed to pull off one of the greatest reversals in the history of the modern-day green movement. Applying market principles to the nonprofit world, it sought out a partnership with another global environmental charity, the World Wildlife Fund, and jointly fashioned a new nonprofit called the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), devoted specifically to the task of identifying sustainable stocks of fish around the world and setting standards for fishing those stocks.
At first MSC limited itself to certifying small fisheries. And indeed this has been a very good and positive thing for small-scale fishing communities and the stocks they fish. But large retailers like Unilever needed a much more populous whitefish. An “industrial” fish that could be caught in large numbers but which could also qualify as being sustainable. It was this need that led them to New Zealand and an ignominious fish called the hoki.
The hoki is a gadiform descended from a fish that ended up in the Southern Hemisphere after the great gadiform radiation tens of millions of years ago. It is a cod-size, silvery-skinned, white-fleshed fish that was as abundant as the Georges Bank cod once were. It had been left relatively untouched until New Zealand fishermen pioneered technology for deepwater-fisheries extraction. It seemed to be exactly what sustainable fish marketers were looking for.
But right from the start, in 2001, the sustainability-certification process for the hoki drew fire. MSC does not directly certify fisheries; rather, the applicant fishery contracts the certification to a third-party certifying body. In the case of the hoki it was a coalition of fishing companies united under the name the Hoki Fishery Management Council that contracted out the certification to the Netherlands-based consulting firm SGS Product and Process Certification (SGS). In the MSC process, the third-party certifier evaluates the fish on a range of different criteria under three main categories: the sustainability of the target fish stock; the environmental impacts of the fishing (including accidental bycatch of seabirds, marine mammals, and other fish and the impact of the fishing techniques on the ocean environment); and finally how well the fishery is overseen and managed. Collectively, the scores of an MSC certification have to add up to eighty points out of a hundred for each of the three principals for a fishery to pass. Those who witnessed the process with the hoki felt that the process was lacking.
“We were involved in the certification process, and we didn’t believe the fishery should be certified,” said Kevin Hackwell, the advocacy manager of a well-established New Zealand conservation organization called the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society. “We objected to the scoring that it got from the certification body. We took it to appeal. This was the first time an appeal had ever happened in an MSC certification process. And we lost that appeal on the basis that while the Objections Panel agreed at the time that the assessment of the fishery did not meet the MSC standard and therefore shouldn’t have been certified, nevertheless it considered by the time the objection had been heard things had changed enough to let it through. We were very frustrated as this decision did not match the MSC’s stated process. Our argument that it had been wrongly certified had been upheld in the objections process, but the fishery nevertheless got certified. The process was a farce.” In an internal e-mail to the head of World Wildlife Fund International, the WWF New Zealand chief executive Jo Breese echoed this sentiment. “At this stage it appears likely that we will not be able to support the cerification process and outcomes,” Breese wrote. “If we are asked by the media we will be forced to publicly criticize the process and possibly the outcomes.”
Shortly thereafter hoki received MSC certification. “All the way through, we were saying that the allowable take was too high,” Hackwell continued, “and sure enough, we were right.” The fishery collapsed and the annual allowable quota dropped from 250,000 tons at the time of the MSC certification to 90,000 tons just a few years later. The hoki was decertified.
In 2005 the hoki fishery began the process of recertification. And once again Forest and Bird found the process troubling. According to Hackwell, in the first round, the hoki was scored by the certification body to be just at the eighty-point certification threshold on two of the three principals of the MSC’s criteria. “But,” Hackwell continued, “after detailed submissions from Forest and Bird and World Wildlife Fund’s New Zealand chapter, several of the indicators had their scores reduced. This reduction would have brought the fishery below the eighty-point threshold. But the certification body lifted the score for several other criteria that had not even been the subject of comment previously. There was no reason given for increasing these scores and coincidentally these increases were just enough to push the fishery past the threshold by two one-thousandths of a point. Both Forest and Bird and WWF New Zealand took an objection against the recertification and in a weird echo of the 2001 objection the Objections Panel acknowledged that they considered the fishery should not have been recertified, but refrained from ruling to this effect.” The hoki fishery was recertified as sustainable and retains its certification to this day.
Across the world, in another hemisphere altogether, the fishery of another abundant community of gadiforms certified by MSC is drawing criticism from environmental organizations, particularly Greenpeace. Alaska pollock are today the largest source of wild whitefish in the world. Nearly 2 billion pounds of the fish came to market in 2009. If you have eaten a fish stick, a Filet-O-Fish sandwich, a California roll, or any other processed white fish, you have eaten Alaska pollock. And, increasingly in Europe, Alaska pollock are being sold as flash-frozen whole fillets, a niche that had once historically been nearly the exclusive domain of cod. The fishery was first certified by MSC in 2005.
But even the huge numbers of Alaska pollock can at times show vulnerability. This year the stock assessment recommended that the harvest be cut in half, and, like the hoki industry before it, the pollock industry has been drawn into a period of recertification with MSC. The At-Sea Processors Association that speaks for the Alaska pollock fishery asserts that these are natural fluctuations in a natural system. This may very well be the case; even in healthy gadiform populations, fluctuations in population density can vary as much as 50 percent year to year. When I mentioned to At-Sea’s director of public relations, Jim Gilmore, that Greenpeace had found the industry’s sustainability qualifications questionable, Gilmore told me, “Greenpeace does not acknowledge that environmental conditions, particularly water temperatures, have a much greater impact on pollock population size than pollock harvests. Nor does Greenpeace note other sources of pollock mortality. One of my favorite ‘gee whiz’ facts in the November 2009 pollock stock-assessment document is that adult pollock are estimated to consume more than two and a half million metric tons of small pollock, or three times more than the 2009 harvest level.” Furthermore, Gilmore asserts, Alaska, unlike New England, has a long history of limiting the number of vessels that can enter the fishery and has historically maintained large areas closed to fishing.
All this is true, and the Alaska pollock industry may indeed be worthy of its sustainable MSC rating. But when listening to the assertions of a major seafood purveyor, it is always important to remember the other “ecology” at play in fisheries—that of the global supermarket. An ecology that must have a constant supply of fish to keep functioning, no matter what natural limitations dictate. People who witnessed the cod collapses of the 1990s see many echoes of the past in the pollock industry. When I asked Ted Ames, the former cod fisherman from Maine who advocates small-scale, artisanal herder-fishermen, what he thought about the behavior of the large companies that hold all the large permits for the pollock fishery in Alaska, he chortled. “An old friend named Fulton Gross summed up this kind of thing in a pretty neat way. ‘Remember one thing,’ he told me. ‘Never get between a fat hog and a trough. He’ll run you over every time.’ ”
Greenpeace, the original campaigner against Unilever, is continuing its pollock and hoki campaigns and has said current allowable pollock catches, already cut nearly in half, should be reduced even further. But just as with the New England cod fishery, the concentration of power into a few dominant hands makes the industry a muscular opponent. Today only two companies, Trident Seafoods and Icicle Seafoods, account for virtually all the Bering Sea pollock inshore processing, and after twenty years of consolidation just five companies own all the fishery’s vessels. As Geoff Shester, the senior science manager of perhaps the most influential list of sustainable seafood, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, told me, “The Alaska pollock industry is just a huge player. Because there is so much money at stake, they have enough political influence to seek exemptions from regulations to protect ecosystems that might otherwise be costly to industry.” In 2006 the pollock fishery was exempted from “Essential Fish Habitat” fishing closures that were instituted to protect the seafloor habitat. The pollock industry puts forth that it is primarily a “mid water trawl” fishery, catching fish far above the sea floor and doing little damage to sensitive ecosystems at the ocean’s bottom. But Shester disagrees. “The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service estimated they [the pollock industry] are operating on the seafloor 44 percent of the time and causing a greater overall impact to the Bering Sea seafloor than all other bottom trawling combined. Furthermore,” Shester continued, “at a time when pollock stocks are at their lowest level in thirty years, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in December of 2009 decided to set the most aggressive quotas allowed by law.”
So can we call the large-scale industrial fishing of pollock a replacement for the already overfished cod? Maybe, or maybe not. Pollock are fast to reproduce and endemically abundant. But an annual harvest of 2 billion pounds of fish is a lot of wildlife to remove from an ecosystem every year. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has downgraded pollock from “best choice” to “good alternative” in their global seafood ratings card. Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Shester maintains, “We continue to recommend pollock as a sustainable choice to consumers and businesses,” and, relative to other whitefish grounds in the world, Alaska pollock is a well-managed fishery. But Shester’s substantial concerns are noteworthy. Greenpeace is more forthcoming, calling for much more drastic cuts in pollock catches. And because no food purveyor wants to be associated with a Greenpeace campaign or the damaging of an ecosystem, there are some murmurs within the food industry about what to do next. Today several major restaurant chains and supermarkets are beginning to look beyond the gadiforms pollock and hoki—back to where both fishing and aquaculture began: fresh water.
N
ot long after my taste test with Mark Kurlansky, I found myself in the company of a Mr. Vo Thanh Khon in the southern Vietnamese city of Can Tho. On a blistering day in May, Mr. Khon led me through the sparkling new industrial park owned by the aquaculture company Bianfishco. Passing by a neatly manicured landscape of pruned palm trees, lower plantings of many varieties, and little magenta nine-o’clock flowers blooming brightly in the interstices, Khon, a short, dapper man in a pressed white shirt and black slacks, stretched out his hand and encouraged me to appreciate my surroundings.
“You are looking at our virtue,” he told me.
We speedboated quickly across the Mekong, the largest river in Southeast Asia, and Khon and I walked over to a perfectly square pond a few yards inland from the riverbank. He gave a signal to a man in a reed hat piloting a small skiff, who then began shoveling yellow, dime-size pellets out the back of the boat. A few dimples appeared on the surface of the water. There was a splash here and there. Then, as if the entire pond were moving to engulf the skiff, the water erupted into a roaring froth, drenching the boatman and even sprinkling those of us standing twenty yards away on shore. Looking into the water now was like watching an M. C. Escher lithograph come to life. The water was boiling with two-foot-long fish, gray on top, white on the bottom, with faces that recalled a sentient but slightly dim-witted minor character in a
Star Wars
sequel, creatures that interlocked and overlapped and wriggled every which way. As I appraised them, along with the brochure of Mr. Khon’s Bianfishco, the corporate motto “Pangasius is our nature!” struck me as more than a little bit ironic. Mr. Khon, however, is not an ironic man, and he smiled broadly at the roaring sound of the feeding frenzy. It was almost literally the sound of money earning interest.