Oyster report is in...
Today, the Department of Natural Resources held a media briefing to unveil the Oyster Commission report, as well as new regs for yellow perch and a warning about summer flounder. Oh, and also to tell everyone who didn't already know that Harley Speir -- he of the great name and long agency tenure -- has been promoted to acting fisheries director. Speir, who joked he'd been doing this work for as long as there have been fish in the water, has always been an accessible and easygoing guy, but it's not clear he'll be in the director's chair long, as DNR is launching a national search for both a new director and a new deputy director of fisheries.
Anyway, about the oysters...before the report came out, there had been a lot of talk that it was going to be groundbreaking and would call for an end to the vast amounts of money that have been shoring up the oyster industry for decades. Those programs are better known as "repletion", where the state spread seed and shell around the bay, and "reserves," where millions of oysters were planted in areas where watermen could harvest them. There was also some talk of the "M" word.
But by yesterday, when commission members finally saw a copy of the thing just a day before it was officially released to the press, it was clear that the report wouldn't go that far. But where it did go is in a different direction than two decades of talk on oyster recovery has gone to date -- it acknowledged that ecological and economic benefits are at cross-purposes, and it said we have to move to aquaculture.
It may not sound that dramatic, because the commission hasn't actually recommended doing anything yet. But it's significant in a few key ways:
1. Maryland has long talked about aquaculture -- the means by which nearly every other oyster fishery sustains itself -- but has been slow to act. State officials have enthusiastically helped those entrepreneurs that came to them by helping them navigate the once-byzantine permit system. The problem is that there are not many comers. Fewer than a dozen oyster aquaculutre businesses exist in Maryland. None are run by watermen, who have been cold to the concept.
But, as oyster biologist Mark Luckenbach told me a couple of years ago, aquaculture isn't the future, it's the present. Everywhere there are oysters-Long Island, France, virginia - there is aqauculture, and it is productive and profitable and sustainable. DNR officials indicated to me that it's time the state changes its lease-bottom system to encourage more of this.
2. The committee included some, but not all, of the usual suspects, therefore enteratining fresh ideas.
Though Larry Simns and Russell Dize asked DNR to put another waterman on the committee, the agency declined to do so. So, representing the seafood industry were Ben Parks, a waterman who has been friendly to aquaculture, and Jason Ruth, a seafood processor. And from the science side, they did include Don Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Scieces, but they also had different voices, including Bill Eichbaum, a former Maryland environmental official who has been out of the game for years as a veep for the World Wildlife Fund. New people meant they wouldn't reach the same conclusions they always do, which is, basically, we need to restore oysters for ecological and economic benefits.
3. The report captured the complexities of oyster restoration, pointing out that you can't just institute a moratorium in a vacuum because the oysters are so far gone it wouldn't work. That's not to say the commission won't eventually lean towards one, just that it won't be the answer in and of itself.
So, while they didn't recommend anything groundbreaking yet, it will be worth watching where they go.
I report on the environment and Chesapeake Bay. A native of West Virginia, I have focused mainly on Maryland's environment since moving here in 1983. Along the way, I've crewed aboard a skipjack in the bay, canoed under city streets up the Jones Fall from the Inner Harbor, and gone deep underground in a western Maryland coal mine. Recently, I have been covering the growth and development transforming the landscape. I love seafood, rambles in the country and good stories. I hope to share some here.
Comments
Good reporting - very astute accounting of the oyster situation. However, speaking as one of the very few commercial shellfish aquaculturists in Maryland, I must take issue with your paragraph:
"1. Maryland has long talked about aquaculture -- the means by which nearly every other oyster fishery sustains itself -- but has been slow to act. State officials have enthusiastically helped those entrepreneurs that came to them by helping them navigate the once-byzantine permit system. The problem is that there are not many comers. Fewer than a dozen oyster aquaculutre businesses exist in Maryland. None are run by watermen, who have been cold to the concept."
The reality is, aquaculture has been slow to catch-on in Maryland largely as a result of our antiquated oyster management policies. We've got a system predicated on wild harvest that has literally evolved over centuries... so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise watermen, the processing industry, and even government regulators - have all adapted to conform and, as a consequence, reinforce the "boundaries" of the system they inherited. And the policies themselves were never questioned by the actors themselves, because they had become vested in the system as it existed; it became the very definition of the status quo.
So while it's largely true that "State officials have enthusiastically helped those entrepreneurs that came to them by helping them navigate the once-byzantine permit system", those officials are still hamstrung by regulations that limit their ability to assist the entrepreneur in other critical fashions. By example, it remains ILLEGAL for the State to issue leases for aquaculture in the public waters of Dorchester, Kent, Queen Anne's, Somerset and Talbot counties!!!
So while the agencies are helping applicants navigate the byzantine permit system, other critical impediments remain for aquaculture in Maryland. Unfortunately, many of the most egregious policies (like the example above) are cemented in statute - to undo them will require the Governor to put his signature to an act of the General Assembly... no easy task.
So the report of the Oyster Advisory Commission, which outlined a vision for the future in which shellfish aquaculture will put Maryland in-step with the rest of the world - is a welcome development. However, implementing the vision of the OAC will require unraveling decades/centuries of antiquated laws and regulations which, quite often, effectively quash the development of aquaculture in our State - this will be the HARD work. In this regard, until significant reforms are made to oyster policy, aquaculture will continue to languish in Maryland - but it will NOT be due to any lack of interest from entrepreneurs.
Shellfish aquaculture remains perhaps the best vehicle for oyster restoration: when people learns how they can profit from putting oyster INTO the water and farming them - well, then the private sector will put oysters into the water and farm them. It's defacto oyster restoration; not only does it redirect harvest pressure from wild oysters, but it also PUTS ADDITIONAL OYSTERS IN THE WATER in a self-financed and economically sustainable method (an especially important consideration at a time when Maryland is running billion dollar budgetary deficits).
All that is needed is that government "make room" for this to happen by (1) adopting the vision of the Oyster Advisory Commission, and (2) undertaking the hard work of overhauling a system of statutes and regulations rooted in an earlier time that remain a roadblock to aquaculture in Maryland.
Posted by: TheOysterGuy | January 22, 2008 9:17 PM