Sign of the times

The Virginia Marine Resources Commission is close to approving a pile of tough but ultimately essential restrictions and regulations on this season’s crab harvest. The sad fact is these new rules will likely put a good many waterman out of business. Sadder still is that the poor water quality in the Chesapeake Bay necessitates such action.

“Believe me, the commission gets no pleasure out of passing regulations that make things more difficult for watermen,” said Steve Bowman, who heads the marine commission. “But the numbers don’t lie. Things are bad. They’re really bad.”

For example, the average annual harvest in Virginia and Maryland from 1945 to 2006 was 72 million pounds. The harvest in 2007 was expected to be about 40 million pounds, the lowest on record.

Researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science have also documented a 70 percent decline in the abundance of adult crabs since 1991 – a time when the state enacted 22 regulations designed to enhance stocks.

Jack Travelstead, state director of fisheries, said Tuesday that the years of regulation may not have turned the population around, but they probably helped avoid a complete collapse of the species.

Watermen, though, said the experience proved what they have argued for years – that the biggest problem facing crabs is not overfishing, which the commission has tried to regulate. Instead, they argued, crabs are suffering from a combination of environmental degradation – pollution, lost habitat, little oxygen to breathe – along with increasing numbers of natural predators such as striped bass, croakers and blue catfish.

“Water quality is the key,” Kelly Price, an Eastern Shore crabber, told the commission. “Without that, you lose habitat. And without habitat, you’re done.”

Exactly right. Nitrogen, mostly from farm runoff, is the real reason the Bay is suffering. It helps created vast oxygen-depleted dead zones, which in turn, destroys habitat. For that, the watermen are hardly responsible.

You see, Big Poultry is killing the Bay, drowning her in millions of gallons of nitrogen-rich untreated chicken shit from the poorly regulated factory farms on the Eastern Shore. Those farms and their runoff are to blame for the declining health of the Bay and her fisheries. Politicians in Virginia and Maryland long ago sold out the waterman, as well as the oysters and crabs they depend on, to Perdue and Tyson. The poultry companies, having bought themselves protection from regulation, gladly pushed the consequences of their actions onto the folks that lack lobbyists and big campaign dollars. It is unfortunate that the state agencies are forced into screwing the little guys for events beyond their control but they must in order to prevent a total collapse of the fisheries. Until the farms on the Shore are cleaned up, water quality will continue to decline. Simply regulating the harvest will do little to restore the Bay; it is, as the old waterman’s expression goes, “just pissing into the wind”.