Imagining a Post-Industrial Future for Fishing
Nicholas P. Sullivan
More than 100 cars lined up on Fairhaven, Mass. docks on Easter Sunday to get lobsters and scallops fresh off the boats from SouthCoast Direct Source Seafood, a pandemic special courtesy of Troy Durr and family.
The developed world is a post-industrial world, with the majority of the work force in services or knowledge industries. Even manufacturing is moving post-industrial with the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) — relying on sensors, robots, AI and machine learning to replace human labor or improve its efficiency. In the developed world today, human capital and knowledge capital is as or more important than plants, equipment, investment, and labor.
But this is not the case for commercial fishing, one of the oldest industries in the world. The post-World War II industrialization in commercial fishing led to factory ships and deep-sea trawlers, and that is still the default mode in much of the world. Industrial fishing has led to overfishing, stock depletions, habitat destruction, predator-prey ecosystem disruption, 30–40 percent waste of the primary product — and the devastation of artisanal “pre-industrial” fleets in Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Government subsidies for a handful of nations allow ships to roam and ravage the high seas without interference. Meanwhile, the end product is by and large a commodity that travels around the world like a manufactured part or digital currency rather than fresh produce from the sea. The US, with the largest EEZ in the world, imports 80–90 percent of the fish it eats, as much as 30 percent caught illegally. None of this meshes with the promise of the 4IR to use data as knowledge and a guide to policy.
Somewhat miraculously, the International Union for Conservation of Nature records only 15 extinctions of marine animal species in the past 500-plus years and none in the last 50 years, although many marine species are “data deficient.” That’s good news. The bad news is that marine extinction rates today look similar to the moderate levels of terrestrial extinction observed before the Industrial Revolution, which then increased dramatically. Unless the trajectory changes, we may just be on the verge of a similar period of ocean industrialization that includes not just fishing but exploration of the seabed (McCauley et al).
But, on the bright side, there are hopeful signs in some regions of the world that fishing is becoming less destructive as it edges into a post-industrial mode. One is that since 2000, 45 US stocks that were overfished and shut down have recovered, thanks to rigorous application of the Magnuson-Stevens Act — and most are MSC-certified. In New England and the mid-Atlantic, despite some noteworthy declines in cod and flounder biomass, there are more ground fish than there were 20 or 30 years ago. The Atlantic East Coast scallop industry, essentially defunct in the late 1990s, is now a sustainable $530 million a year industry, thanks to collaboration between fisherman, scientists, Fishery Management Councils, and NOAA that developed a data-based, bed-rotation regime. Lobster is a $630 million industry, albeit threatened by warming Gulf of Maine waters. Fishing boats in New Bedford are rigged with sensors to develop a Marine Data Bank that will give fishermen aggregate data on changing ocean conditions. Aquaculture, mostly shellfish and some salmon, is now a $125 million industry in New England. Branzino — typically imported from Turkey, Greece, Portugal, and Spain — is now being farmed in Waterbury, Connecticut at Ideal Fish’s state-of-the art RAS in an old military-brass factory.
Looking globally, Iceland’s 100 percent utilization initiative, spawned by the Iceland Ocean Cluster, has increased value per pound of fish by 3–4X — and the Ocean Cluster concept has been planted in the US and Norway. Industrial-scale net-pen salmon farming in Norway — largely responsible for the perception in the 1990s that farmed fish were bad for the environment and ocean habitats — has moved to less dense offshore pens or onshore RAS systems that might be more environmentally sustainable. And other farmed fish that eat much lower on the food chain than carnivorous salmon, such as barramundi from Vietnam, are arriving in the US fresh-frozen and prepackaged from Australis Barramundi (see video) — by boat, not plane, which is how fish typically travel. For both the barramundi and branzino, QR codes attest to their provenance.
There are even signs during the Covid-19 crisis of a return to a more pre-industrial fish business, where producers and consumers interact in a kind of Norman Rockwell-esque dock scene. In New Bedford, fishermen on Facebook alert followers when their boats will dock and what catch they will bring to sell direct to consumers. In some cases, long lines of cars wait on the docks to get the freshest possible lobster and scallops from day boats. That’s obviously not a sustainable model, but it does foretell a stronger connection between fisher and consumer, and a more direct transaction — compared to industrial fish processes that now send frozen product to Asia for thawing and processing, which is then frozen and reshipped to the US for distribution to supermarkets nationwide.
Much of the focus on commercial fishing in the last 20-plus years has been on overfishing, and illegal and unreported catches, for good reason. We are worried we are fishing ourselves out of lean protein — and a healthy marine ecosystem. We can’t take our thumb off that side of the scale. But the primary product is only one part of the problem. For fishing to truly enter the post-industrial age a complete remake of food systems is required. And that is only likely to take place if consumer and institutional demand forces cracks in a food system designed in the post-World War II era to keep supermarket shelves full of branded products at all times.
That transition is clearly underway with land-based agriculture, and there are glimmers of hope for such change in the marketing and distribution of fish. In New England, a new kind of intermediary has emerged to deliver fish from dock to retail, restaurant, and consumer. Groups such as Cape Ann Fresh Catch, Local Catch, and Red’s Best show that a more vertically integrated model of production and distribution is feasible. Legal Sea Foods has been doing the restaurant and now the online version of this for a long time. Groups like Eating with the Ecosystem are educating consumers about the value of hitherto unloved species, such as scup, redfish, and dogfish.
Many of these efforts are on the ‘boutique” scale. Only when such initiatives scale and spill into the mainstream will post-industrial fishing have the necessary platform to itself scale. That would make wild, fresh fish a more widely available lean-protein food. And it could radically rejuvenate coastal fishing communities and ocean habitats.
