Oysters...

[Crow Bait]

I found this editorial from the Enterprise interesting...

Fundamental changes suggested for a dying industry
Friday, Feb. 1, 2008

The Maryland Oyster Advisory Committee says that the long-standing system that allows any Maryland waterman to harvest oysters just about anywhere in state waters is obsolete and should be changed.

Instead, watermen should lease oyster bars from the state government in order to be allowed to harvest, the committee says.

There was a time when this call for privatization would have been a radical shift in an important Maryland industry. But the oyster fishery, once a mainstay of the economy of St. Mary’s and other counties ringing the Chesapeake Bay, is so anemic now that it has not raised an enormous outcry.

This is a preliminary proposal; it may not go anywhere. But in earlier decades it never would have been broached. It is now because there are so few watermen still relying on the oyster harvest.

The oyster commission’s interim report says that other large oyster fisheries elsewhere in the world have already been privatized, and calls the traditional system in the Chesapeake ‘‘economically unsustainable.” That’s because the state government has dumped vast sums of money overboard in the form of oyster seed and oyster shells to try to re-establish oyster populations with ever-diminishing results.

The oyster industry is in its current fix because of a combination of pollution, overharvesting and disease. Which of those three bears the most responsibility has long been a matter of debate, but that is becoming as pointless as arguing about who ate the last piece of pie.

It’s not just the idea of privatization that marks a change in thinking about what comes next in managing oyster resources in the Chesapeake and its tributaries. The commission’s preliminary report also talks of restoring the ecological importance of oysters. Some oyster beds would be leased but the majority would be off-limits to harvesting so the oysters could be left to filter nutrients and sediment from bay water.

In colonial times, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources has estimated, oysters could filter all the water in the Chesapeake in a little more than three days. Now it takes more than three years.

It’s unclear if there will be the will to follow through on any of these recommendations.

There may indeed be no point in heavily subsidizing a disappearing industry. If there is reason to believe that sharply limiting the harvest from oyster beds in state waters will lead to purer water that will have an economic benefit to all of Maryland, including those who try to make a living from other fisheries.

But no one really knows if that will work. If disease continues to decimate oyster beds this is just an argument about what to do with a resource that doesn’t really exist anymore.

What is clear is that what we’re doing now does not work.

[Crow Bait]

I'm amazed no-one has any thoughts about this...

Anybody?

[tipsymcgee (Premo)]

I hold a commercial oyster license, and I have often thought something like this would work. Maybe not total privatization, but more sanctuary reefs that would be off-limits for so many years...then coming back for commercial use in staggered years. The problem w/ my idea is that much like this year on the Wicomico River, there was one good bar at the beginning of the year that was planted recently and everyone knew they would be legal size this year. The result was 25-30 boats per day cleaning it up over a month's time. Then it's dead again.

The other problem with privatization is how do you decide the lease? Is it an auction, squatter's rights, whatever. This gets the big seafood companies and local business folks in the equation, outbidding the small commercial man.. Bottom line is they have to do something radical, either along the lines of a buyout, or a moratorium of some type like w/ Rockfish, or more sanctuaries.

[Crow Bait]

It's refreshing to hear a harvester say that radical change is needed. Too often I hear a push for the status quo - and it's clearn that status quo isn't going to bring oysters back, or fix the water quality.

I hope your buddies feel the same way you do...