Piracy and PoliticsAt the Ports

This week and next we are rolling out feature stories, news, videos and graphics based on our original reporting of the inaugural episode of Food Crimes: The Hunt For Illegal Seafood. This is the first dispatch.

As a chef, fisherman and seafood evangelist, Dave Pasternack is a New York City institution unlike any other. He’s the brains and guts behind the landmark restaurant Esca, a gifted storyteller, and both a stalwart advocate of fishing as a trade and a sharp-eyed critic of fishing as a government-regulated industry. He’s got a James Beard Award, and in 2007 the New York Times knighted him “the Fish Whisperer” — his word on seafood is gospel, according to most anyone who knows anything about seafood.

In many ways, then, it seems strange that Pasternack has found an occasional adversary in the Department of Environmental Conservation, which, along with other underfunded governmental agencies, struggles to contain both the commercial fishing industry and the restaurant industry that drives it.

This, in part, is the story of seafood today: The efforts of the government to regulate Big Fishing and all its known and unknown evils often have the adverse effect of undercutting people for whom the ocean is something more than mere industry. The realities on the docks aren’t always as legislators understand them.

In particular, Pasternack is skeptical of the government’s recent, most high-profile effort, which is to make seafood “traceable” — a strategy by which a fish is tracked from the moment it is caught to the second a consumer buys it.

Pasternack questions whether any agency, political or otherwise, can rein in an industry that even in 2015 still resembles the Wild West: apathetic, inherently corrupt, and too expansive to be effectively policed.

“The traceability thing, if you ask me personally, is a crock of shit,” said Pasternack recently after a lunch service. “Because you could say whatever you wanna say. You know, who are you buying it from? Is he using it as a marketing tool? How do you really know?”

At first glance it could be seen as a cynical evaluation of an industry that provides one of the planet’s primary sources of protein. But there are a lot of people deeply involved in the fishing industry who agree.

The United States imported as much as 90 percent of its fish in 2013, up from 54 percent in 1995, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In fact, the United States has tripled the dollar amount of fish it imports, to more than 5 billion pounds of fish worth $18 billion. Couple these figures with the staggering estimate that between one quarter and one third of all fish sold in the United States is illegal, and you’re an equation or so away from going vegan.

In regulator-speak, this portion of the fish trade is dubbed IUU:
Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated.

IUU fish can include everything from a striped bass that local fishermen offload to friends after they catch more fish than quotas allow to a live lobster that comes in at less than one-eighth of an inch below regulation.

But by far the biggest IUU problem is the many tons of international fish that pass through multiple foreign ports and are intentionally mislabeled to fetch a higher sales price or avoid detection as an overfished commodity. The former is an issue that exists at the species level: It’s likely that haddock filet you bought for dinner isn’t haddock at all.

In 2010, environmental nonprofit group Oceana ordered studies of fish in 14 major metropolitan areas and found that roughly one third of the fish found in restaurants and markets was mislabeled — often as to species. Beth Lowell, senior campaign director for Oceana, has been lobbying government officials to improve the quality of information about where fish is sourced.

“Twenty to 30 billion dollars a year is lost to pirate fishing,” says Lowell. “So this is not just one guy in a boat with a fishing pole without a license. This is a commercial enterprise of illegal fishing around the world, and it’s really decimating the world’s oceans.”

A larger number of American politicians are beginning, gradually, to take a more vocal interest in these problems. In March 2015, the Obama administration announced it would give government agencies more resources to track fish and prosecute people who aren’t providing detailed information on their haul. The total amount remains unknown and is still winding its way through various appropriations channels, but agencies like NOAA would stand to see an increase of only about $3 million annually.

“Our fisheries and our progress are threatened by the twin threats of illegal fishing and seafood fraud,” said Bruce Andrews, deputy secretary of commerce, at Seafood Expo North America when announcing the administration’s plans in March. “The very nature of their black-market fishing hurts the global economy by flooding the market with illegally sourced fish and displacing law-abiding fisherman.”

By fall 2015, in fact, the government will begin to put in place new operational standards for identifying the legality of a fish: who harvested or caught the fish, the name of the vessel, and the type of fishing gear used in the catch. Starting early in 2016, and according to the proposal, seafood restaurants and shops will be required to tell consumers the entire story of a fish’s traceability, according to Lowell. The administration is optimistic that by October 2016 all seafood that arrives in markets will be identifiable as legal fish.

Lowell hopes that within three to five years, when consumers shop for fish, they will be able to get far more information by simply snapping a code with their phone.

It’s probably an understatement to call these goals ambitious, particularly winding as they do directly through the presidential campaign season only now beginning. As expected, the matter is becoming increasingly politicized. It isn’t the work of a single governmental agency, and teamwork isn’t always a popular pastime in election years, if it ever is in Washington.

“I wish I could say there is a simple solution to put a stop to these threats,” said Andrews at the Seafood Expo. “But these issues require long-term collaboration, innovation and investment to solve.”

At the same time, other fishing interests are pushing for the government to raise quotas so they can better compete with international fisheries. Earlier this month, Congress passed a reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, a piece of legislation that regulates the fishing industry within American borders, to address issues of overfishing. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, a Maine restaurant owner who commutes to Washington, D.C., from the 355-person island where she lives in Penobscot Bay, spoke against it because she is concerned that lifting the quota would wipe out tenuous fisheries. She sees firsthand the delicate balance required to both preserve fish and help her neighbors, constituents and restaurant suppliers survive.

Small-scale fishermen have little resources to fight international fishing fleets, and it is unclear whether any of these competing political gestures can make a dent in the major problem of illegal fishing from where they’re sitting. The Obama administration has plenty of other things to do in its final months. Law enforcement doesn’t have the resources to catch a fraction of the fish criminals out there. Restaurant owners with already-tiny profit margins can’t really be bothered.

“Fishing isn’t the same in the United States as it was even 50 or 20 years ago. There is international competition out there,” said Pingree. “It’s much harder to make a living. There’s no question about it.”

Rob Williams is a 50-year-old fisherman whose family has fished out of Eastport, Long Island, for more than a century. With help from his niece Ashley Edington, two fellow fisherman and his intrepid dog Nugget, a recent day beginning at 5 a.m. had only yielded a few bucketfuls of bunker by midday. On his way in he checked on the pots he’d set near his decks to find they’d filled up nicely with long, rotund eels. He still had an afternoon outing ahead to see if the day would be worth the gas they used. This is his work routine six days a week.

Williams is a prime example of traceable fish, from sea to plate. He catches his own fluke, flounder, striped bass and shellfish. His neighbor helps him assemble clams and mussels into tidy netted “splat bags” each weekend. His niece loads the fish into a truck and drives them each weekend to sell at the Seatuck Fish Company stand at farmers’ markets in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

For dozens of years it’s been a living, but now it’s something that Williams says is no longer financially viable. Asked, he couldn’t cite any of the latest efforts by the Obama administration.

“For the fishermen, the little guys like me, it’s tough,” said Williams. “Eventually it will be one company, a few big companies, and they’ll own the fishing fleet and if you want to be a fisherman you’ll work for them.”

As an example, Williams calculated that since fluke fetches no more than $2 a pound, he can barely cover his boat’s fuel bill by catching within the quota. He finds it boggling how international fishermen can keep their costs so low and wonders aloud what international fishing limits are. He says the New York City farmers’ markets have helped keep him fishing as other fishermen he knows have moved to other businesses, like construction.

Williams’s 24-year-old niece Ashley has been clamming with Williams since she was five. She worked for him through high school and college, netting fish and checking eel pots. She helps him when she can, fishing every morning and selling his catch at farmers’ markets every weekend.

But when it came down to choosing her career, she became a merchant mariner and spends half of the year working on container ships. As Edington helped her uncle out on a recent morning untangle nets used to catch bait, she rattled off the benefits she receives for working on container ships, like health insurance, a 401k and vacation time — things her Uncle Rob does without.

“When you’re fishing, if you don’t bring anything on that dock, you don’t get anything,” she said. “So definitely I’m not quitting my day job anytime soon.”

It was just after 3 a.m. when Jeffrey Ray, an agent with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, strode through the parking lot of the Fulton Fish Market. Dressed in khaki pants, a neatly tucked-in polo shirt and a handgun in a belt holster, Ray strode past coughing trucks that lurched in and out of the lot. Even in the dead of night near the waterfront, it felt like he was pushing his way through a noxious shield of odor hanging in the air.

Inside the stadium-size market, Ray methodically powered from stall to stall asking fish vendors about the prevalence of porgy and whiting and rifling through boxes of shimmering fish searching for tags. He jotted down occasional notes, like when he came across a box of wild caught Merluza Negra from Argentina, better known as Chilean sea bass. He left at 5 a.m. with a handful of leads and headed back to New Jersey for a nap and another 10-hour work day digging through paperwork and tracking incoming boats. He estimates that it can take four to five years to catch a fish criminal.

As the nation has become progressively more dependent on other countries to fulfill its appetite for fish, the number of potential fish criminals has grown. Ray estimates that about three quarters of the cases he works involve international fish.

“When you look at the commercial wholesale level, the number of imported fish from other countries is astronomical compared to what it was just 25 years ago,” said Ray.

According to a study by the Marine Policy Journal, only 2 percent of the nation’s fish are currently inspected, and the number of special agents like Ray policing this 2 percent shrunk from 147 in 2010 to just 93 in 2014.

Paul Raymond, a retired NOAA agent and agency president of NOAA’s division within the Federal Law Enforcement Officers’ Association, sees the immediate future as bleak at best, with little help coming from the new regulations. His group published a statement raising concerns that even as the Obama administration proposed these changes, some NOAA executives planned to shut down field offices that would leave gaps as far as 500 miles between offices to regulate fish. He thinks that the proposed $3 million for NOAA is not enough.

“Good idea, but NOAA is not going down the right path,” said Raymond.

Even with vastly limited resources, Agent Ray is not without successes. Over his 25-year career, he has sent more than a half-dozen fish criminals to prison. He has worked local cases and others in conjunction with foreign governments in places like South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, Namibia, Canada and the Ukraine, on everything from overharvested summer flounder on Long Island to advising African countries on how to ban illegal fishing. He is quick to note that in the 15 years since he joined NOAA, his job has benefited from the fact that illegal fishing is treated more like a crime.

“Now we’re focusing on complex crimes,” said Ray. “We’re focusing on criminals that conspire with others to egregiously violate the fisheries regulations.”

With small-time fishermen and law enforcement agents under so much pressure to battle the world of illegal fish from abroad, the burden of trying to serve legal and traceable fish falls largely on chefs and restaurant owners. Jason Weiner, owner of four restaurants in the Hamptons and Manhattan, says it’s not always easy to discern what is the greater evil: local fish that might potentially break regulations, or the big farm-raised commodity stuff that is presumed legitimate if only by virtue of having made it successfully through customs and the 90 agents sorting through it.

Weiner notes that things have improved for fishing because customers are more informed. He remembers working at a prominent restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side restaurant in the 1990s where his colleagues punched out swordfish belly in circles and served it as scallops. He then moved to a restaurant in San Francisco where fishermen brought abalone for cheap through the back door.

Today, Weiner tries to offer customers the most traceable and sustainable fish by working with a group called Dock to Dish, a CSA for fish. He pays fishermen in advance to see what fish they bring in that season.

But he struggles with these decisions. Is it better to accept international fish from a massive fishing boat using questionable practices to catch tuna or a local fisherman who caught a striped bass when it was out of season?

“It’s hard to tell who the villains are sometimes,” said Weiner, debating aloud what he would do if a local fisherman offered him an illegal fish today. “I know this guy…has a respect for the ocean. He has a respect for his craft. I know it’s been line-caught. You know, why shouldn’t I buy it from him? Even though [it] doesn’t necessarily have the plastic tag in its mouth.”

The nuances of the legal fish trade, he says, is a conversation he largely has with himself, as he wonders who beyond chefs, fish professionals, a few politicians and some lobbyists even cares.

He recognizes that customers — no matter how conscious they are about what they eat — have other things on their minds when they sit down to order dinner at a restaurant.

“No one goes out to eat to be educated,” said Weiner. “They go out to eat to have a good time.”

Originally published at www.foodrepublic.com on June 15, 2015.