Four Fish Page 17
“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.
Not 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.
The fish that were in Mr. Khon’s pond are known internationally by their genus name Pangasius and locally as tra. If records from Vietnamese growers and government officials are to be believed, tra may be the most productive food fish on earth. Whereas an acre of codfish net pens will produce about ten thousand pounds of cod in a good year, that same acre in Vietnam will churn out half a million pounds of tra. This incredible tendency toward abundance has made the fish into the fourth most common aquaculture product in the world. From 50 million pounds in 1997, annual production has grown to well over 2.2 billion pounds, a large portion of which goes to Europe. Production is still growing, and no one can quite say where the upper limit will be.
Even so, many suspicions were raised when tra first entered the European marketplace not long after the cod crises reached their peak in the late 1990s. And much of that suspicion emanates from how they were found and why they were first farmed. To illustrate, it’s worth repeating a joke my translator told me while we were motoring across the Mekong.
Question: “How do you tell a farmed fish from a wild fish?”
Answer: “The farmed fish is cross-eyed from staring up at the hole in the outhouse.”
The Pangasius genus, as well as quite a bit of freshwater aquaculture, can in fact trace its relationship with humans back to the privy. Tra were first introduced several hundred years ago into “latrine ponds”—stagnant bodies of water that peasant families maintained adjacent to the Mekong. Pangasius in these ponds fed on . . . well, let’s call it “decaying organic matter.” In addition to managing human waste, an added advantage of these fish was that when they were large enough, they could be sold to one of the many floating markets that line the banks of the Mekong all the way up to the Cambodian border.
This was the state of things for many years while Southeast Asia remained war-torn, isolated, and dependent upon subsistence food production. But beginning in the 1970s, ethnic Vietnamese living on Lake Tonlé Sap in Cambodia began intensively culturing fish in floating cages underneath their houseboats. They tried many different fish at first but through a process of elimination gradually arrived at Pangasius.
“When farmers first collected samples for farming,” Dr. Nguyen Thanh Phuong, dean of the College of Aquaculture and Fisheries at Can Tho University, told me, “they would collect juvenile fish randomly. They didn’t even know what kind of fish they had in their jars. But when the oxygen ran out in the jars, all the fingerlings died. Except the Pangasius.”
There were two species of Pangasius that survived the jar test—Pangasius bocourti, known locally as basa (meaning “three balls,” because when cut lengthwise the flesh has three globes of fat distributed evenly around the spinal column), and Pangasius hypophthalmus, or tra. Initially it was basa that looked as though it would become the fish of choice. It adapted well to a variety of cooking methods and had a higher fat content than tra, which Southeast Asians value more than a dryer, flakier consistency.
But when ethnic Vietnamese began returning to Vietnam from Cambodia after the war between the two countries subsided, they started refining their aquaculture techniques. By the 1990s they gradually realized that tra took better to conditions in Vietnam. Unlike the lake environment in Cambodia, the Mekong Basin in Vietnam floods intensely every year. The entire flow of the Mekong is replaced during flood season, and stranded ponds are created adjacent to the main channel of the river. In these ponds it was found that conditions for raising fish could be better controlled than in the main stem of the Mekong. Pond culture didn’t have the disease problems and the water pH shifts that occasionally killed off fish in the open river. But the more desirable basa needed flowing water to prosper and didn’t do well in the ponds. Tra, on the contrary, seemed to thrive in stagnation. And while basa would die if too many fish were stocked in a pond, tra didn’t mind close quarters at all. The only thing tra would do differently in these high-density environments when oxygen levels in the water dwindled was to occasionally rise to the surface and stick their alien-looking mouths out of the water.
Tra, it turned out, can breathe air.
The idea of using a farmed freshwater fish to substitute for a wild, oceanic gadiform has been something that seafood marketers had been considering for some time. And in Europe, where cod is used in a fairly diverse range of cookery, slipping a slightly different fish into the culinary slot was possible. Sautéed or baked, tra can for not-so-discerning palates seem like cod or at least like Mrs. Kurlansky’s “fish.” But in the more classic American use of cod, battered and deep-fried, tra lack the “mouth feel” of cod. The flesh is slightly oilier, slightly more substantial, more like a bass than a cod. In fact, in the jumbled-up world of seafood import and export, Vietnamese tra occasionally gets labeled as that other Vietnamese catfish species, basa, and is then slotted into the culinary niche where bass should be. Back in Greece, the sea bass farmer Thanasis Frentzos lamented to me one evening that the Vietnamese could potentially cause the death of the Greek sea bass industry. “Sometimes they mean to write ‘basa’ on a crate of Vietnamese fish, and then someone decides to replace the a at the end with another s, and then you have ‘bass.’ ”
But tra are not the only superproductive freshwater fish out there. One class of fish in particular has arisen that is capable of assuming cod’s role as an industrial fish both in texture and in quantity. Whereas the tra’s key to abundance is tolerance for ultrahigh stocking densities, another fish, called the tilapia, has made a name for itself in the abundance arena through its reproductive strategies.
Unlike cod and pollock, which hurl millions of small eggs far and wide (“broadcast spawners,” in fisheries-science parlance), tilapia are of a family of fish called cichlids who have a tendency to be “mouth spawners.” They lay fewer eggs than cod, but females typically gather up those eggs, once fertilized, in their mouths and protect them until they have passed the fragile early-larval stage. As a result the average tilapia produces many more adults in the end than the average cod, and tilapia have an
ability to greatly multiply their numbers exceedingly fast. It is a reproductive strategy suited much better to a twenty-first-century human-dominated world than is the random “trust in nature” approach utilized by cod and other gadiforms.
Tilapia, like tra, saw a gradual buildup in abundance in the second half of the twentieth century, but, as with tra, its initial expansion occurred primarily in the developing world. Most tilapia hail from the Nile but were first spread beyond Africa when the Japanese army blockaded Indonesia during World War II. At the time, Indonesian fish farmers relied on a fish called milkfish for their aquaculture farms, but with the blockade they couldn’t access the milkfish broodstock, which became stranded behind enemy lines. American forces were able to get a few stray tilapia to the Indonesians, and they soon found that tilapia grew nearly twice as fast as milkfish.
After the war, when the Peace Corps was born and the United States Agency for International Development implemented hunger-relief programs in postcolonial countries around the world, tilapia were seen as a solution to the world protein deficit. Not only did they reproduce with great abandon and without any help from humans, they technically required no food whatsoever. Tilapia, like tra in their native state, are filter feeders, able to live solely off elements of human waste, algae, and other microscopic plankton. So with tilapia, poor farmers, whose only resource besides land might be a stagnant patch of muddy water, suddenly had the chance to add protein to their diet with very little effort.
Early Peace Corps volunteers became unabashed tilapia enthusiasts. And when they left the Peace Corps and moved into the for-profit world, they saw an opportunity to turn the fish into a moneymaker. “It was like this miracle fish,” a former Peace Corps worker-turned-tilapia entrepreneur named Mike Picchietti told me recently. “We thought we could make this fish into a major business. But it ended up taking a long, long time.”