Analytical review of the current state of the Russian fishing industry
1.1. The Great Fishing Empire
In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian fishing industry that succeeded that of the USSR reduced the total fish and seafood harvest by a factor of four; even in the difficult years of the Second World War, the fisheries industry did not suffer such a dramatic decline as it faces today.
Peak of Glory
To be able to comprehend the present situation and foresee the future, one must first understand the past, i.e. assess the roots.
In 1986, the total harvest of fish and seafood by organizations and enterprises of the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries amounted to 11,276,000 tons ("Fisheries industry of Russia", Moscow, 2005, page 262). This was a world record. The Soviet Union, which formerly had lagged only behind Japan in total harvest of marine biological resources, had become a great fishing empire. The larger part of this harvest – 10,027,000 tons, or 9/10 of the total catch – originated from the oceans, and only 1/10, or 1,249,000 tons, came from Russian waters (including the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea).
Until the 1950’s, in both the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire and the early Soviet period, the fishing industry in Russia was based exclusively in Russian waters: fish harvested not far from land, both with active and passive fishing gear, were processed on the coasts; the main products were salted and frozen, as well as canned, fish.
During that period, fish harvested in interior waters, i.e. in rivers and lakes, comprised about 40% of the total catch. In 1950 there were only five target species with a total annual harvest exceeding 100 thousand tons: herring, cod, carp bream, salmonids and marine mammals; the combined catch of these five groups comprised 51% of the total catch.
The turning point in the fisheries industry took place after the Second World War, when fishing enterprises were first supplied with mid-size and large vessels built in Germany, with on board refrigeration capabilities. These were mid-size refrigerator trawlers (so-called freezers) and large refrigerator trawlers, that were designed for long-distance fishing expeditions and could harvest and store oceanic fish far away from the USSR’s coasts.
As a result, the Soviet seagoing fishing fleet increased by a factor of 2.9 by 1960. Such species as sea bass, grouper, sprat and pollock joined the list of target species with harvests exceeding 300 thousand tons (although at that time, pollock was still considered a “technical” fish, as it was used more for production of fish meal than for real consumption, like other gadoid species.)
By 1970, the deep-sea harvest had grown even larger, by a factor of 2.4. The specific structure of target fish, as well as fishing geography, also continued to change; Along with pollock (which was now considered a species “for consumption”), herring, sprat, mackerel, capelin, hake and horse mackerel comprised about 60 percent of the total annual catch. For each individual species, annual harvest figures exceeded 400 thousand tons.
The largest total catch was harvested in 1976. Beginning in 1977-1978, when many countries introduced 200-mile exclusive economic zones, Soviet fisheries lost a number of fishing areas, and only in 1984 hauled in a harvest comparable to those of the mid-1970s. The world record harvest mentioned above was in 1986, totaling 11,276,000 tons of fish and marine products, harvested in both the open ocean and in the inland waters of the USSR.
In the immediate post-war years, the USSR was party to only two or three intergovernmental agreements on fisheries, and a member of only one international organization. However, by the end of its existence in late 1980s, the USSR had signed 64 intergovernmental agreements, and 13 agreements between different agencies concerning various aspects of fisheries management, with 44 different countries, including 8 socialist, 26 developing and 10 capitalist countries. Additionally, the USSR was party to a total of 15 multilateral conventions and agreements, and even initiated some of them. Representative offices of the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries were opened in 24 countries, and joint Soviet-foreign companies, expeditions, and fishing associations, as well as apparatuses for the processing and sale of fish and fish products, operated in 13 states. 14 countries received technical assistance in constructing different fisheries-related facilities, and scientific cooperation was well developed as well. Over 8000 foreigners were educated in the higher institutes and technical colleges of the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries, and a number of them later became leaders of their national fisheries industries. At the same time, more than 800 Soviet specialists worked in over twenty countries at different fisheries-related facilities.
Such expansive development of international economic cooperation allowed the Soviet fishing fleet to carry out science-based commercial fishing along the coasts of 25 foreign states, harvesting 5.5 million tons (52% of a total 10.4 million tons) of fish and sea products in these locations. In addition to this, export, import, and exchange of fish and fish products were conducted with the fishing ministries of these countries, as well as construction, repairs and various supply activities for fishing vessels, exchanges of personnel, and cooperation in production. External trade turnover in all these various activities reached around USD 2 billion per year.
(V.K. Zilanov, Scholar at the International Academy of Ecology and Life Protection Sciences (MANEB), “Secrets of Fisheries Diplomacy”).
However, the process of expanding Soviet fisheries presence on the world’s oceans did not stop, but was on the contrary irreversible, as time would show. The reality was such, that the main aim of that fishing presence was not fishing itself, but simply Soviet PRESENCE on the oceans. This presence was important in zones of particular interest to the Soviet Union, close to this or that continent or country that could provide food supplies and fuel and other support to the naval ships and submarines of the Soviet navy. In other cases, for example during the Cuban missile crisis, it also afforded the opportunity to deliver arms and ammunition, including even strategic missiles. Thus the main purpose was for military and naval operations, rather than the provision of food to the Soviet market. At the same time, there was even a special fixed day each week in the USSR, so-called “fish day” (Wednesday), so that the country had a chance to somehow consume a part of the deep-frozen fish products that were excessively accumulating in the country. Usually such frozen fish were minimally processed, only decapitated and cleaned, and even that was not always the case.
Collapse
There was an EXCESS of poor quality fish, fish of so called “second grade freshness,” in the USSR. People were rather tired and fed up with “fish coercion”, which is likely the reason that all subsequent actions of the Russian government against fishing and fishermen were accepted rather quietly, if not positively, in spite of the fact that these decisions formed the basis for a total collapse of the Russian fishing industry.
Let’s start from the beginning. It was under M. Gorbachev that the Soviet Union, and later Russia under B. Yeltsin, abandoned the idea of global dominance in the oceans and seas. This caused immediate changes in the structure of the seafood harvest: in the early 1990’s there were only four species fished en masse – pollock, Picton herring, sardines and horse mackerel. Currently, pollock is the only of these species that remains from that list, that is still harvested in large volumes. This is because pollock is fished within the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of the Russian Federation, while the other species were caught in EEZ’s of Japan and the coastal states of Africa and South America.
“From 1991 to 2002, the total catch (harvest) of aquatic biological resources dropped from 6.93 million tons a year to 3.29 million tons a year, a decline of 52.5 percent. In the exclusive economic zones of other countries, the total harvest declined by 58.5 percent, and in the open areas of the oceans by 67 percent. Supplies of those species in greatest demand on the global market - such as pollock, cod, some crustaceans, sturgeon, etc., also substantially declined”.
(from the “Concept for Development of Fisheries in the Russian Federation through 2020”).
With very rare exceptions for vessels from Kaliningrad, Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, Russian fishermen are truly absent almost everywhere in the traditional fishing areas, both in the open waters of the world ocean and in the EEZ’s of foreign states; fishing in these areas by Russian vessels has yet to be resumed.
See. diagram
Colours:
Fishing statistics:
violet – total harvest of fish, thousands of tons
red – Fish, from this total, sold on the market for human consumption, thousands of tons
yellow – production of fish products for the market, thousands of tons
light-blue – production of canned fish, millions of cans
blue – production of fish meal, thousands of tons
Also indicated on this graph:
pink – total investments, millions of roubles
dark-blue –Investments, from this total, towards construction and repair work, millions of roubles
In addition, the input of the fishing fleet that operates from Kaliningrad, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk towards the overall annual Russian harvest is not as substantial as it once was. Presently, most of Russia’s fish resources (up to 60%) are concentrated in the Russian Far East within the national exclusive economic zone, or, more specifically, on the continental shelves of only two seas washing up on the shores of Kamchatka – the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea.
In order to understand the entire national fisheries management system in what is considered the coastal zone, including interior waters, territorial seas, continental shelves and the exclusive economic zone (the four essential elements that allow a state to be called a COASTAL state), we have to grasp the history, and assess how the whole fisheries management structure has developed over time. This assessment combines two main components – the regulation of fishing, and the conservation of aquatic biological resources.
Assessing the roots
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| Kamchadal settlement |
The fisheries industry started to develop in the Far East towards the end of 19th century, first along the Amur river, then later on Kamchatka and Sakhalin. Salmon was the main target species. Fishing gear included floating (tangle) nets in the rivers, as well as shore seines and stationary nets at sea. The harvested fish was mostly sold to Japan; only red caviar from the Amur salmon was processed and consumed in Russia. Incidentally, much like today, it was the enormous demand for red caviar that depleted the resources of Amur chum salmon at this very early stage of fisheries industry development; local residents of these areas were ruining chum spawning grounds. This “invasion for caviar,” as a socio-economic phenomenon on Kamchatka and Sakhalin, would only approach a breaking point a century later, when large-scale illegal trafficking of red caviar would develop on these geographically isolated islands and peninsulas. Initially, on both Kamchatka and Sakhalin, the major threat to salmon stocks came from unregulated excessive harvest by foreigners. Almost immediately, as Russia developed its national fisheries industry, undeclared “salmon wars” began with Japan for precious salmon resources. Russia legally owned the Kamchatka and North Sakhalin salmon stocks, while Japan was their major commercial consumer, and thus Japan was trying to impose its own terms and conditions on salmon fishing.
Following the defeat of the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, a peace treaty was signed in 1907 in Portsmouth; this treaty served as the basis for a Russian-Japanese Fisheries Convention that was developed in 1912. It granted Japanese fishermen the right to rent marine fishing areas in the Sea of Okhotsk, Kamchatka, Primorye and Northern Sakhalin (At this time, Southern Sakhalin was part of Japan). Rental costs were determined on the basis of harvest quotas for each site, and thus were directly linked to political competition between Russian and Japan, both of whom were unwilling to give way to each other in any matter; it was under these conditions that the first salmon fishing regulations in Russian waters were developed. In fact, these first fishing regulations in the Far East were rather wise and sound, as they were drafted for diplomats by high-ranking, skilled and knowledgeable experts, including both fish biologists and economists.
Japanese expansion as a catalyst for development of Russian fisheries
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| Sorting fish |
During the early Soviet period, the political and economic influence of Soviet authorities in the Far East was very weak. However, following the example of Russian Empire, in 1928 the Soviet Union signed new Fisheries Convention with Japan, which also allowed for Japanese fishermen to rent fishing sites, and to carry out harvesting and processing of fish on the coasts of the Soviet Far East - essentially on the basis of the same regulations that remained from Tsarist times.
Thus, the tradition of regulating coastal fishing of Pacific salmon by foreigners was maintained (and later, the same approach was applied to Herring fisheries), while a new system was established and introduced for domestic fisheries in the early 1930’s. This new system was irrational, as the main objective was the steady increase of annual fishing totals. This gave rise to conflicts and contradictions.
The Soviet system for protecting fish resources could not operate under these “double standards,” and had to apply the regulations developed under the Fisheries Convention for Japanese fishermen to domestic fishermen as well. This was unquestionably a plus, as salmon resources were not yet so depleted in those first years, when escalating harvests factored into the constant battle to fulfill 5-year plans; depletion happened only later, in the 1950’s with bottom-dwelling commercial fish species all along the Soviet coastline.
Such regulation of foreign and domestic fisheries obviously produced positive results, which can be seen in harvest statistics from those years: at that time, annual catch figures were relatively stable.
Trouble came unexpectedly. In 1944, the Soviet-Japanese Fisheries Convention was terminated. In 1945, Japan acknowledged defeat in the Second World War, and the new Soviet-Japanese Fisheries Convention was no longer considered necessary. But this was not at all the case.
In the beginning of 1950’s, Japan started large-scale marine drift-net fishing for Pacific salmon, first along the Canadian and American coasts. Later, after an American-Canadian-Japanese Fisheries Convention was signed in 1952 which banned large-scale drift-net fishing, Japanese efforts were re-directed to the stocks of Far Eastern salmon. All salmon migration routes towards Kamchatka and Sakhalin spawning grounds were blocked by Japanese drift nets.
In the four subsequent years, while Japanese drift-net fishing fleet was catching up to 250 thousand tons annually, all spawning populations of salmon in the rivers of Kamchatka and Sakhalin were extremely depleted; they were restored only twenty years after 200-mile exclusive economic zones were introduced on the seas.
The Far Eastern coast of the USSR, where people traditionally lived off of salmon fishing and processing, suffered from ecological, and subsequent economic, catastrophe. Salmon could not bypass extensive drift-nets, and very few fish were reaching the spawning grounds. Coastal fisheries enterprises and fish processing factories partially halted work, and switched to harvesting and processing other types of fish.
Soviet Fishing Expansion
In the 1950’s, in order to compensate for the consequences of the ecological and economic collapse of fisheries in the Far East, the Soviet government and the Central Committee of the CPSU made an historic decision to begin development of Soviet oceanic fisheries.
Figure. Areas of Soviet Fishing and Perspective Fishing Areas in Foreign State Zones and on the Open Ocean
The fish, of course, was abundant. It was so abundant, in fact, and so diverse, that in the following twenty years ecological catastrophes took place in intervals of two to five years. However, these did not lead to economic collapses, nor did they affect fishing harvest totals; many fishermen and fish processing plants did not even notice and did not suffer from these ecological disasters, but on the contrary, even received medals and stars of excellence to decorate their uniforms. By the end of the 1950’s, a commercial fishing fleet of mid-size refrigerator trawlers would completely destroy the famous Yavinskaya Cod and Plaice shoal in the Sea of Okhotsk. The Gizhiga herring population was the next to suffer. By the end of the 1960’s, stocks of Olyutorskaya herring, that had been for years considered endless, were totally devastated as well. This was already taking place in the Bering Sea. After that, it was the Aleutian islands’ and Alaska’s turn: sea bass stocks were completely depleted. For three years, the Soviet people enjoyed delicious Pristipoma from Hawaii with their beer – but this fish was also exterminated rather quickly. Later the fleet moved south – and the list of names of devastated fish and seafood stocks flashed by like frames in a cartoon – hake, longfin codling, icefish, krill…
On the other hand, had Soviet fishermen stayed in the Far Eastern seas and harvested the amount they were reporting at that time, we could have just as well abandoned any hope for the future of Russian fishing. We might consider ourselves lucky, that the oceanic fishing fleet rushed to foreign coasts in search of food in that rush to implement the party’s decrees; nobody before (or since then) had harvested fish in such huge amounts in those areas, no regulations on fisheries were in place, and no rules and restrictions were in force at that time. Vessels fished as much as they could carry. The rest was simply thrown overboard. It was like this everywhere, where Soviet fishermen were present, all over the world’s oceans. There was only one minor, though rather symbolic, exception. The nation remembered this only later, when the 200-miles coastal areas were declared exclusive economic zones of coastal states, and for the first time ever our fishing fleet had to return home with holds empty. Nevertheless, the fishing industry had still not collapsed.
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| Annual fish harvests in the USSR (thousand centners) |
Why was there no crash in 1978?
Indeed, Soviet fishermen were operating nearly everywhere and without rules, except along Soviet coasts. It was only here that fisheries regulations, though still rather lax and modest, were used as a counterweight to socialist competition for early and excessive harvests. However these regulations only existed as a means for the USSR itself to limit foreign – again, Japanese - fishing expansion in its territorial waters in the Far East. This fact rescued the entire fishing industry: patrols and fish protection agencies managed to stand up to fishermen, and in doing so, protected fish resources in the Far Eastern seas. Moreover, by 1986, harvests by Soviet fishermen increased again, and even reached their historic maximum.
These rules became even more strictly enforced after 1978, when the USSR expanded its jurisdiction over the 200-mile marine areas adjacent to its coasts.
And in the seas of the Far East – truly native seas - Soviet fishermen experienced, for the first time ever, competition with one another. Representatives from different areas, regions, districts etc., turned into internal competitors. It had not been so obvious, or had even gone completely unnoticed, when they operated somewhere in Peru or on the Antarctic coasts, where nobody assigned them quotas, and that fundamental pillar of dominion, a principle later expressed by Boris Yeltsin, still applied: “Take as much power (resources etc.) as you can consume!”
At this point, the Far Eastern waters, with their limited biological resources (compared to World Ocean), became an area where many different interests collided. Let us remind the reader, that during the years when the oceanic fishing fleet was exploring the World Ocean’s coastal fishing areas, the fundamental fishing economy in the Far East continued to function. It compensated for the losses from salmon depletion with small-size fishing vessels, which had the jurisdiction to go a distance of 50 miles offshore, and regularly brought harvests of bottom-dwelling fish to the coastal fish processing factories. At this time, they caught and processed cod, halibut, plaice, pollock and other fish, according to the official state plans for fishing and for processing.
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| Annual fish harvests in the country (thousand centners) |
Thus, at the end of 1970’s, a sort of competition developed between regions, and between types of fishing (deep-sea versus coastal). As a result, a new form of relationships and fisheries regulations emerged in the USSR: fishing quotas were distributed between the coastal and oceanic fishing units within the regions, and TAC (total allowable catch) limits were distributed accordingly, as the entire commercial oceanic fleet had to concentrate its efforts within the Far East fishing basin.
Naturally, that was a complicated and imposing process; quotas and TAC limits were distributed by the all-USSR commercial institution called “Dalryba” [Far Eastern Fish]. This institution was also directly responsible for implementing fishing plans in its regional subunits, and therefore distribution of quotas and TAC limits had to be done in practical and acceptable ways that were seldom violated, as unjust policies could result in serious consequences for the institution bosses. These limits were lifted only at the end of the fishing season, when the planned harvest figures had to be reached by whatever means an “Olympic system” would permit (that is, a system in which access to resources is granted to all vessels from all regions, and the “strongest” prevail).
“In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the active ocean fishing era began due to the industrialization of fisheries. Numerous Soviet expeditions were sent to different areas of the World Ocean. Far Eastern fisheries science was operating everywhere in the world, at all latitudes, even in the Antarctic. A lot was accomplished then, but the level of scientific research was not so advanced, and was dominated by the task of searching for new fishing areas and new target species. Annual catches were also increasing rapidly: first they reached 1 million tons, then 2 million, and later 3 million tons and beyond. In the mid-1970’s when 200-miles exclusive economic zones were introduced, Soviet fisheries expansion in the World Ocean slowed slightly, as the major fish resources are found in these areas.
The losses in fisheries after introduction of economic zones were the least in the Far East, as only there do we have our own EEZ areas which are extremely rich in biological resources. As a result, the entire fleet concentrated within the national zone, using our own resources more and more completely. It is even possible that God helped us that time. In the 1970’s, the climatic and oceanological conditions necessary for reproduction of many marine species improved substantially. For example, the number of pollock increased three to four times over (and maybe even more), and the numbers of Picton herring increased by a factor of ten to twenty! This phenomenon also contributed to further increases in the total annual catch, which was comprised at that time of 70-80% pollock and Picton herring; the total harvest reached 5 million tons in 1988. This was the historical maximum for all the years of fisheries development at the Far East”.
(V. Shuntov, principal research scientist of TINRO-center, Doctor of Biology, Professor, Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, “Facing the Ocean”).
Crash of the Empire
The fisheries industry began to collapse only after 1991, when the Soviet empire turned to ruins. This was the beginning of the end.
As a result, the vertical power structure and the capitalization of the fisheries came undone; fisheries enterprises, both state and collectively owned, entered an auctioning process, marked by redistribution and subdivision of property, active property sales, embezzlement and further deterioration of fish resources.
At the same time, the principle of TAC limits being distributed among the regions, and then further within each region between different fishing enterprises, remained in action for a rather long time, staving off a total collapse of the industry. The system existed until 2001, when it was replaced by fish auctions.
Interregional quotas were still distributed at meetings of the Far Eastern Basin Scientific-Industrial Council. Within the regions, quotas were allocated to various enterprises based on the decisions of regional executive authorities.
The introduction of fishing auctions in 2001 ruined the existing balance between the regions – beginning at that time, a significant portion of quotas have been sold in Moscow, regardless of the regional identity of the enterprises and companies that bought them.
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| Annual fish harvests in the country (thousand centners) |
In 2003, the government made the decision to legally regulate TAC shares for oceanic fishing enterprises – a part of the shares were allotted based on the fishing results of each enterprise over the preceding four years, while other shares were sold at auction.
Coastal fisheries were at that time considered one of the two independent branches of fisheries (the other being oceanic), and coastal fishing TACs were subtracted from total TAC. On the basis on long-term fishing history, TAC shares were allocated among fishing enterprises in the regions; this was a de facto acknowledgement of a sort of special intra-regional quota for socio-economic development of coastal fisheries, fish processing complexes and relevant infrastructure.
“The Law on Fisheries and on Conservation of Aquatic Biological Resources of the Russian Federation,” adopted in 2006, stated that the main aim of coastal fisheries is to provide fish for further processing and consumption within the country.
However, amendments to this law, passed December 2007, omitted all provisions that had given coastal fisheries special status.
As a result, competition for resources grew even tougher between oceanic fishing enterprises (as a rule, the larger interregional, trans-regional and international businesses) and coastal fishing enterprises (mainly medium and smaller-scale intra-regional companies).
If we take into account, that since 1997 there has been no specialized fish protection agency, and that these functions now fall within the responsibility of border control and military forces, it was unavoidable that this competition for resources of the once-great fishing empire would result in the criminalization of the whole fisheries industry. It has resulted in IUU (illegal, unregulated, and unreported) fishing, destruction of bycatch, and illegal trafficking of the most valuable fish and seafood products from the harvest areas. Such criminalization could cause a complete deterioration of marine biological resources, and a final collapse of the fisheries industry.
Having summarized all experts’ opinions and statistical data, we can agree that by the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the Russian fisheries industry entered a long-term management crisis.
In the next chapter, we will attempt to assess the scale of this catastrophe, and to evaluate the consequences of the first steps towards reforms in Russia, which were aimed at transforming the fisheries industry.
To be continued. |
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