Spitting In The Ocean
When do we get to talk straight about Maryland's oyster resource?
Several weeks ago a few dozen watermen protested in Annapolis against changes proposed by the O'Malley administration in how we manage Maryland's oyster resource. While their number was small, they are watermen, so their protest was reported in several area newspapers. Apparently, they are against oyster aquaculture if it means that they get less harvest area. They are also concerned that their more efficient harvest methods will be taken from them.
The watermen's biggest worry seemed to be that the new government regulations might put them out of business. But oyster harvesters have been doing nothing but going out of business for the past 20 years. That is what the commercial harvest statistics show. There was a slight up-tick of harvesters in 2004/5 when the last decent spat set came to market size. But, in general, people have been leaving the oyster fishery because there are not enough oysters left to keep them in business.
Moreover, the oysters that have been available for harvest are there largely due to publicly-funded oyster restoration efforts. An unreported protest item doubtless on the watermen's minds was whether those public funds couldn't be beefed up a bit. Most of them know that there would be nothing to harvest if we simply chose to live with what diseases and everything else have done to Maryland's oyster resource.
The O'Malley administration's plan to protect 24 percent of the better oyster bottom from public harvests is a weak, second-best policy. First-best would be to simply close the fishery to commercial harvests and start a focused stock rebuilding effort. Presumably, political strategists calculated that just closing 24 percent of the bottom would reduce the outcry from watermen by 76 percent. I don't know that math, but I do know that 24 percent is better than nothing. I am surprised that the watermen do not understand how much better 76 percent of Maryland's oyster bottom is than nothing.
If watermen (as we have known them) follow frontiersmen, the village smithy, and itinerant peddlers into the annals of American history, that will be a tragic thing. Especially for those who came along at the end of the party. But the party is clearly over and oyster harvesting will end either when resource managers say so or when there are no more oysters to harvest. As a citizen of the state who votes and pays taxes, I am not sure how it becomes less tragic if we add to the passing of the watermen, the loss of all the oysters.
If it is possible to restore oyster stocks in the Chesapeake Bay, an industry will arise again to harvest them. That industry will look different than the one that we mythologize now. But it seems a safe bet that, if there is a market for them, men will go out and harvest oysters. Hopefully, that future industry will be better regulated than the historical one, but that is all many "ifs" away. The point is, a ten or twenty year hiatus in oyster harvests does not spell disaster for the oyster harvest industry - just for the current harvesters.
How we make right with those current harvesters is an issue for our politicians to sort out. I am not sure why they should get any better protection from the vagaries of economic reality than, say, a private sector economist. But apparently a lot of people feel that they should.