Problems and Strategies in the Scientific Management of Fisheries and Marine Mammals: From the Tragedy of the Commons to an Era of Sustainable Development, an international conference sponsored by The Science & Environmental Policy Project, April 12, 1994, at the Washington Court Hotel. The conference included speakers from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, South Africa, and Japan, and was preceded, on April 11, by a scientific workshop held in cooperation with the University of Maryland's Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics. Attendees: 84 from government, business, academia, and the media.

OVERVIEW: The theme of the conference was President Clinton's message to Congress on October 4, 1993, asserting that the United States has a "strong commitment to science-based international solutions to global conservation problems."

Keynote Speaker: U.S. Congressman Wayne T. Gilchrist (D-Maryland) described the depletion of fisheries in the local Chesapeake Bay as a result of pollution, development, and overfishing--all exacerbated by human population growth, and a problem mirrored in other parts of the world.

Panel 1: The Scientific Basis of "Sustainable Yield" from a Fisheries Resource

The success of any management regime depends inter alia on the quality of the underlying science. The most ambitious attempt thus far to create a scientific basis for international marine resource management is the Revised Management Program for whales, designed by the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission after six years of research.

In his October message to Congress, President Clinton said that "the issue at hand is the absence of a credible, agreed management and monitoring regime that would ensure that commercial whaling is kept within a science-based limit." Professor Douglas Butterworth, of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a member of the IWC Scientific Committee, suggested that the Revised Management Plan is just such a regime, analogous to living off the interest of a bank account while conserving the principal. It allows carefully controlled harvests to determine the optimum maintainable productivity of the stocks, while including built-in feedback mechanisms to reduce quotas automatically in the event of depletion. The Revised Management Plan is so risk-averse that if it were applied to other marine resources, it would require an immediate halt not only to aboriginal subsistence hunting of Bowhead whales in Alaska but also to virtually all of the world's fisheries.

Professor Gordon Swartzman of the University of Washington at Seattle was a member of the blue-ribbon panel appointed by the National Marine Fisheries Service to review the Revised Management Plan. The panel searched for flaws in the Plan, he said, but finally concluded that it was so conservative that, under it, commercial whaling of non-endangered species, such as the Minke whale, could be conducted safely.

The panel concluded that adopting the Revised Management Plan at the 1994 meeting of the International Whaling Commission would resolve the issue at hand, the establishment of a science-based international solution to a global conservation problem.

Panel 2: Cultural Factors in the Harvesting of Fish and Marine Mammals

The panel began its discussion by reviewing a December 1991 letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in which the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission stated that its opposition to sustainable commercial whaling is based not on "science alone," but on "moral and ethical grounds." The U.S. State Department admitted in a May 1993 statement to the Iceland government that "scientific analyses now show that some populations of Minke shales are likely to be able to sustain a limited harvest," but that "there is presently no support...among the American public for commercial whaling."

Professor Milton Freeman of the Canadian Circumpolar Institute at the University of Alberta, challenged this assertion. Citing a surprising 1992 Gallop Poll, he showed that over 80 percent of Americans would support a limited harvest from non-endangered species of whales, while less than 10 percent would be opposed. But he also showed that more than 95 percent of respondents thought the global population of Minke whales was less than 100,000. The actual current estimate is as much as one million). Freeman concluded that U.S. opposition to commercial whaling is based not on opposition to the consumptive use of whales but on misinformation about whale populations.

Dr. Margaret Klinowska, of the Animal Welfare and Human-Animal Interactions Group at the University of Cambridge, England, discussed cetacean intelligence. There is no trans-species definition of intelligence, she said; simplistic notions based on absolute brain-mass or brain-to-body-weight ratios are specious. Cetacean brains are structurally more primitive than those of hedgehogs and they score lower than ferrets in learning ability. Attempts to teach dolphins to communicate have succeeded only in producing sequential ordering of responses for reward. Dr. Klinowska concluded that by implying that only intelligent or otherwise "special" animals are worthy of consideration, the myth of cetacean intelligence was counterproductive to animal welfare and conservation.

Benjamin White of Worldwide Animal Rescue, and formerly with the Sea Shepherds, however, spoke against the scientific method, denouncing wildlife management as "dead." He elaborated a spiritual paradigm requiring a "hands-off" rule on the part of humans regarding other species. He suggested that major environmental organizations were more concerned with making money than with conservation. He accused Japan of making capital investments overseas in order to influence Third World nations to cast votes favorable to Japan, but said that the evidence was too well concealed for him to uncover.

Georg Blichfeldt of the High North Alliance, Norway, described the northern Norwegian whaling village where he lives, arguing that Norway's Minke whaling is environmentally a low-impact means of obtaining food relative to the alternatives. He noted that it is necessary to cull some marine mammals in order to optimize the productivity of fisheries, as well as to protect competing marine mammal species. He added that Norway's harpoons compare favorably in terms of humaneness to the means used in hunting animals in the United States. He asked the United States to articulate its "moral and ethical" objections to whaling. If it cannot do so, he concluded, then Americans are mistaking cultural imperialism for moral superiority.

Luncheon Speaker: Eugene Lapointe, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), spoke about the transformation of the conservation movement into a wealthy and powerful establishment. He asked whether organizations that oppose the conservation and propagation through sustainable use of certain animals have a perverse incentive to oppose workable solutions because these problems generate financial contributions.

Panel 3: Management of Owned-in-Common Marine Resources: Economic and Political Considerations in Assigning Harvesting Rights of a Scientifically Determined Quota

Growing population pressures and open access have resulted in overexploitation of ocean fisheries. Traditional U.S. approaches to regulation have not been successful. Some bottom-living fish stocks off both the east and west coasts of North America are estimated to be as much as 90 percent depleted. Canada has declared a moratorium on Cod fishing off Newfoundland, and the state of Washington has imposed a similar moratorium on species of salmon off its coast. In contrast, the Cod fishery in Norway's Lofoten Islands, salmon fisheries in Japan, and many other fisheries throughout the Pacific, have proven efficient in managing stocks at a high and sustainable level of productivity. Each of these success stories involved limiting access to fisheries through local community-based management or some form of individual transferrable quotas (ITQs). The advantages of ITQs were outlined in an excellent paper by a pioneer in marine management, Francis T. Christy, Jr. of Washington, D.C. Further support came from first-rate papers by Dr. Rodney Fujita and Douglas Hopkins of the Environmental Defense Fund and by Rolland Schmitten of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, which were distributed at the conference.

Addressing the issue of allocating harvesting rights, Professor Ivar Strand of the University of Maryland said that economists have been writing for 20 years about the need for market-based mechanisms to limit access to fisheries--mechanisms such as privatization, property rights, or Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs). Now that groundfish stocks on both coasts of the United States are depleted to crisis levels, non-economists are finally starting to discuss the idea seriously.

Professor John G. Sutinen of the University of Rhode Island Department of Resource Economics discussed various mechanisms of enforcement, arguing that the legitimacy of any property or quota system, in the eyes of those who are regulated, determines their willingness to comply voluntarily and police one another.

Richard Gutting of the National Fisheries Institute expressed fears that ITQs could produce an incentive to waste resources, as well as a tendency towards monopolization. Professor Strand responded that many different forms of initial quota allocations have been implemented in the Pacific, but that the initial allocation had no significant effect on the distribution of quotas in future years, nor had waste or monopolization resulted from any existing ITQ system. To alleviate such fears, ITQ auctions could be phased in over a number of years, with an annually declining set-aside of quotas for boat-owners already using the fisheries.

Teresa Platt of the Fishermen's Coalition (San Diego, California), recounted her experiences in running a tuna fishing operation in the eastern tropical Pacific. U.S. fishermen in that region she said, have developed the means of finding schools of large Yellowfin tuna by encircling non-endangered dolphins with nets, then releasing the dolphins. She suggested that any such operation which resulted in zero dolphin mortality should be defined as "dolphin safe." But U.S. tuna canneries adopted a definition of "dolphin safe" tuna as tuna caught without encircling dolphins, whether any of the latter are harmed or not. As a result, tuna fishermen in the eastern tropical Pacific changed from hunting the large tuna that associate with dolphins to catching immature tuna before spawning age, thus depleting the stock and making the fishery unsustainable. And because the definition of "dolphin safe" applies only to the eastern tropical Pacific, it actually intensifies tuna fishing in non-U.S. fisheries where tuna are not as abundant; as a result, dolphin mortality is much higher.

Panel 4: International, Legal, and Trade Aspects of Environmentally-Based Regulation of Fisheries and Whaling

In panel four, Professor Ted L. McDorman of the University of Victoria (British Columbia) Law Faculty, argued that U.S. trade sanction against whaling nations under the Pelly Amendment (to the Fishermen's Protective Act of 1967) would violate U.S. obligations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). He also suggested that the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) was an example of "extra-territoriality," applying U.S. law to foreign jurisdictions, and was therefore illegal.

Dr. Steven Charnovitz of the Competitiveness Policy Council of Washington, D.C., disagreed, suggesting that rather than extra-territoriality, the MMPA was an example of "extra-jurisdictionalty"--the application of U.S. law to trade by U.S. citizens outside U.S. jurisdiction--although he said it could justify sanctions only on marine mammal products, not on fish or other imports.

Joji Morishita, First Secretary at the Japanese Embassy, Washington, D.C., closed the panel by discussing Japan's frustration over the IWC's repeated refusal to allocate a quota to Japan for coastal Minke whaling. He noted with irony that Japan's ITQ-based fisheries are highly productive and sustainable, while U.S. fisheries are depleted to crisis levels, and yet the United States lectures Japan on environmental responsibility regarding whales! He commented that some Japanese believe that deer are messengers of God and should never be hunted, but that they would not seek to use trade sanctions to impose their values on Americans. He questioned whether the U.S. position on whaling is a threat to the continued existence of the IWC, and closed with an appeal for tolerance and truly science-based management as the only sound basis of transcultural consensus.

Closing Remarks: In wrapping up the conference, Richard Frank, former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Commissioner to the International Whaling Commission, returned to the central question of population pressure raised by Congressman Gilchrist, predicting that the coming century would see global food shortages, regardless of how resources are managed, unless population stabilizes.

POSTSCRIPT: From "Whalers Say the Wind Is Turning in Their Favor," page A-4, the New York Times, July 23, 1997.

...Norwegian whalers may be on the verge of international acceptance. With the 1997 season almost over and nary a protester in sight, the whalers have enjoyed their most productive hunt since returning to sea five years ago in defiance of the international ban on commercial whaling.

"A few years ago we were considered barbaric criminals," said Mr. Olavson, 59, whose 70-foot vessel was scuttled at its berth by American protesters in 1992. "But I think the worst of the protest storm has passed. Within three years, we'll be exporting again."

A number of major environmental groups still consider Norway an outlaw, but have curtailed demonstrations here. More to the point, Norway's two largest environmental groups have declared the minke whale hunt sustainable.