Tag Archives: Walton Family Foundation
Catch Shares Enable Wealthy Landlords to Gobble Up Local Fisheries
A recent investigative report has reignited public discussion over catch shares, a controversial approach to fisheries management that privatizes the rights to fish. The investigation exposed how Blue Harvest Fisheries, owned by a billionaire Dutch family, became the largest holder of commercial fishing rights in New England, benefiting from lax antitrust regulations and pilfering profits from the local fishermen who work under them. As a commercial fisherman in Mississippi, I know these dynamics go well beyond New England. Here in the Gulf of Mexico, private equity firms and other large investors have come in and gobbled up the rights to fish, driving up the cost of fishing access and making it prohibitively expensive for fishermen like me to harvest fish in our own backyards. >click to read< 07:55
Investment pool could help sustain fishing on Washington coast
One of the knottiest problems confronting the Lower Columbia commercial fishing fleet is how to enable the next generation to begin the costly climb into owning their own permits. A new private $2 million investment pool aims to facilitate a “permit bank” — a kind of matchmaking service between willing sellers and qualified buyers who agree to keep their boats anchored in the economy of Ilwaco, Chinook and Nahcotta. >click to read<08:54
Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association gets $100,000 grant
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation announced the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association Dec. 1 as one of seven recipients to receive a grant through the Fisheries Innovation Fund. This funding, $99,882 in total, will continue to drive the organization’s mission of working to identify and foster ways to restore the fisheries of the Gulf of Maine and sustain Maine’s fishing communities for future generations. The Fishermen’s Association received funding to work on a project to develop the Next Generation of Permit Banking and Fishery Trusts.The Fisheries Innovation Fund is an ongoing partnership between NFWF, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Walton Family Foundation. click here to read the story 21:23
Anyone that supports this should be forced to lick the skidmarks out of Fred Krupps Dirty skiveys
Vitter: Gulf Council Considers Red Snapper Allocation Pushed by NY Based Environmental Activist Group. The amendment today is endorsed by the New York based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). EDF has received a $225,959 Fisheries Innovation Fund grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. This grant program is primarily funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Walton Family Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Read more here 22:25
Walton Family Foundation Dumped $91.4 Million Into Greenwashing in 2012: Walmarting the Rivers and Oceans
Walmart has been in the headlines in recent weeks after the retailer announced plans to keep its stores open this Thanksgiving, forcing Walmart employees to cancel many of their holiday plans. Walmart, the country’s largest retailer and employer, makes more than $17 billion in profits annually, so it has a lot of money to dump into “environmental” groups that serve its agenda of privatization of the public trust. The wealth of the Walton family totals over $144.7 billion – equal to that of 42% of Americans. must read [email protected] 17:22
Seafood certification – who’s really on first? Nils Stolpe
“Sustainability certification” has become a watchword of people in the so-called marine conservation community in recent years. However, their interest seems to transcend the determination of the actual sustainability of the methods employed to harvest particular species of finfish and shellfish and to use the certification process and the certifiers to advance either their own particular agendas or perhaps the agendas of those foundations that support them financially. continued here
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is the largest international organization – headquartered in London – providing fish and seafood sustainability certification. It was started in 1996 as a joint effort of the World Wildlife Fund, a transnational ENGO, and Unilever a transnational provider of consumer goods.
David and Lucille Packard Foundation, Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), Monterey Bay Aquarium, National Park Service, NOAA, Obama Victory Fund., Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis, Resources Legacy Foundation, Senator Lisa Murkowski, The Writings of Nils Stolpe, US Department of the Interior, Walmart, Walton Family Foundation, World Wildlife Fund
News analysis: More NOAA appeal talk fails truth test ! (who knew?!) CLF Shyster in Denial.(yeah.that too.)
By Richard Gaines, Heading altered by Bore Head
The lead attorney for the government was not the only one whose statements before the second highest court in the land this week ran contrary to documented evidence.
Justice Department lawyer Joan Pepin, defending the legality of the federal government’s conversion of the Northeast groundfishery into a commodities market, was joined in that realm by her co-counsel, Peter Shelley, an attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation.
Appearing Wednesday in Boston before the First U.S. Court of Appeals, Pepin introduced a claim — contradicted by records and comments from the New England Fishery Management Council — that federal fishery regulators had already put into place a system to prevent industry consolidation that would destabilize the way of life and underlying culture of the ports, Gloucester and New Bedford and beyond from New Hampshire to North Carolina. A check of record and talks with council officials confirmed that’s not the case, as the Times reported Friday.
Following Pepin, Shelley said the New England Fishery Management Council, the arm of the federal fishery regulatory system, had adopted fishery consolidation as its official policy.
But Patricia Fiorelli, spokeswoman for the council — a part-time, 16-member panel charged with researching and writing policies for approval by the federal government — said Friday that “the council does not have a policy supporting consolidation.”
Shelley’s argument to the three-judge panel on Wednesday also condescended to scoff at concerns held and expressed by many plaintiffs — including Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk, former New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang, Congressmen Barney Frank and John Tierney and others — that major environmentally-rooted nonprofits and foundations, including the Walton Family Foundation, which operates as an adjunct to and with endowment from Wal-Mart, had gained improper influence over federal fisheries polices.
“The plaintiffs (believe),” Shelley argued, “(that) some dark force of privatization was at work — nothing could be farther from the truth. This is not Wal-Mart vs. the corner pharmacy.”
Yet the common fear among many plaintiffs that Wal-Mart, through the Walton Family Foundation and in concert with a Wal-Mart corporate partner, the Environmental Defense Fund, has achieved a controlling position in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is grounded in documented fact.
The catch share policy instituted by NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco after her appointment by President Obama and confirmation in 2009 was precisely the policy that was advocated in a policy paper written in 2008 by Lubchenco and a team of scientists and politicians. And The Walton Foundation was lead underwriter for the paper, “Oceans of Abundance,” which warned that overfishing was so depleting the oceans that jellyfish would be masters of the seas by the
middle of this century.
Lubchenco at the time was vice chairwoman of EDF board of directors; the paper has since been widely discredited in both scientific and academic spheres.
One of the appeal plaintiffs’ attorneys, Gloucester fisheries lawyer Stephen Ouellette, alluded to the concern across the industry that the catch share system creates a business model that invites external investment. The worry, he said, is over the future erosion of the local ownership feature that has defined the groundfishery for centuries.
“There is a large political movement seeking to force a catch share system on all the fisheries,” Ouellette said. READ MORE!
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/local/x550068870/News-analysis-More-NOAA-appeal-talk-fails-truth-test
