Western Pacific Fishery Management Council Opposed to Obama MPA Expansion

July 4, 2014   National, Western Pacific

05:55

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2 Responses to Western Pacific Fishery Management Council Opposed to Obama MPA Expansion

  1. DickyG says:
    July 4, 2014 at 12:48 pm

    This administration and its agencies, steered by Pew, do not care about food production or the domestic fishing industry. They care about doing the bidding of their investors.

    What is being done to the Western Pacific fishermen is not unlike what has been done to the fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico, the Southeast Atlantic, the Mid-Atlantic, New England, the West Coast and Alaska.

    And what has been done to the fishermen in all of these areas is a slow (and sometimes not so slow) choking of the local domestic fishing operations. It’s been done through “monuments” as they’re called in the Western Pacific, and Marine “Sanctuaries” and “Protected” Areas as they’re known on the West Coast and in the Northeast.

    It’s also been done through privatization and turning the fish into an own-able and tradable commodity . The now proposed lifting of the vessel specification restrictions and funding options by NOAA will facilitate our very own industrial “vertically integrated” type of fishing corporations that are plaguing the rest of the world’s fishing countries and responsible for more ecological harm than any number of local small boat operation could ever do.

    This industrialization and demise of domestic production has also been done through defensive NOAA science that pays lip service to cooperative research then refuses to accept any data that conflicts with their dire stock assessments and industry devastating regulations.

    It’s little wonder that we have lost 80% of our domestic fishing fleets and that we import what current estimates have at over 90% of our domestically consumed fish, when our fishery regulating agency NOAA sanctions “Wind Farms” on East Coast Squid grounds and then promotes and funds Aquaculture and sanctions seismic blasting on our fishing grounds–which most people understand is to benefit oil and gas exploitation of the Outer Continental Shelf.

    Aside from expanding anti-fishing “monuments” in the Western Pacific, this administration (with the help of some American industrial giants such as Wal-Mart and Monsanto) is pushing through and “fast-tracking” domestically destructive “trade deals” such as the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), which invites more tariff-free imports of Viet Nam’s largely uninspected pond raised shrimp and Pangasius.

    What would benefit the oceans and the people who depend on it for food production and consumption would be to get our national priorities straight.

    All the energy and wealth in the world won’t mean a thing when we have no clean food, air, and water.

    Reply
    • borehead says:
      July 4, 2014 at 2:33 pm

      Its beyond time to reel in the pseudo consolidated NOAA Fisheries that no longer supports US Fishermen, and has been hijacked by the oil funded Pew/EDF soldiers of “conservation”.

      I spent a lot of time listening to the State Departments enviro jerk fest in Washington, the “Our Ocean” Conference, and was astounded at this conservation charade.
      This addition of almost another 3/4 of a million square miles of Obamas, in addition to the Blue President, George HW Bush’s creation of the Western Pacific monument that the Pew nuts keep publicly broadcasting to the ignorant as good conservation policy, will do nothing but drive the price of canned tuna that poor people eat to an affordable levels. Fish at one time was the food of the poor and a reasonably priced protein.
      How the perversion of our government agencies has been allowed to flourish is criminal, and hurts its victims, poor people and those they depend upon, US fishermen, is a disgrace.

      Reply

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