The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch in California claims the mantle of sustainable seafood watchdog. If they red flag an operation, buyers like Disney and Whole Foods won’t touch them, and they’ve set their sights on Maine’s lobster industry.
The California-based Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program is considering which species to add to its “red list,” and North American lobster from both the U.S. and Canadian fisheries is a candidate, as are over a dozen other species fished up and down the East Coast, according to a draft assessment.
Maine’s been sitting pretty in recent years with record potato crops and lobster harvests. But the whiney chaps at Seafood Watch are concerned about some whales they say get tangled in the traps. And any fishing that endangers other marine life is a fast ticket to the red flag and the scorn of the green elite.
My first question was, who benefits if Main Lobster, some of the best and most sought after in the world, were blacklisted, and I don’t know the answer. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the benefactor was on the donor list for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch in California. I know, cynical I may be, but wrong, probably not.
Related: Joke? – Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire are on a Road Trip…
If Whole Foods were to stop buying Maine Lobster because Seafood Watch red-flagged the entire northeast seaboard up to Canada, someone else would be selling a lot of lobster.
Maine raked in 725 million last year, a record. Maybe the same “Global Warming” that caused COIVD is good for lobster?
I don’t even eat the stuff (well, maybe in a nice alfredo over linguine), so I have no claws in this game, but the well-being of Northeastern Fisherman and lobsterman is never too far from my radar because these working-class folks need all the support they can get. The elites love their lobster, but between the government and eco-terrorists, everyone wants to put these guys out of business.
The threat of losing the sustainability rating comes more than a year after the federal government announced a sweeping set of new regulations designed to help reduce the risk to right whales by 98 percent over the next 10 years.
See what I mean, so following the money may lead back to federal grants or contracts. Not unlike the NSBA letter, the Bidenistas asked them to write to their AG so he could then label parents are domestic terrorists. If Seafood Watch has ties to NOAA or fed grants from whatever agency set these new regs, I think we’ll know who is pulling whose strings.
But Maine isn’t panicking yet.
“I think at this point, people know they’re just not a great source of information,” Conniff said about the program. “Choices like this really underscore that.”
Annie Tselikis, executive director of the Maine Lobster Dealers’ Association, agreed and said the change doesn’t pass the straight-face test.
“This sort of feels almost meaningless,” she said. “To take a blanket approach to the entire Eastern Seaboard … it just doesn’t do the real work. Doesn’t get into the nuance, doesn’t look at the data. We know that this fishery is sustainable – we’ve been doing this for years.”
I’m glad they feel that way, and I hope they are correct, but if they get red-flagged to the folks at seafood watch, grasp the consequences. Places like Honduras will be picking up some of that slack, and according to these green weenies, “the lack of safety regulations… has left nearly half of the Miskito Indian lobster divers physically disabled.”
I didn’t dive too deep into that claim, but I would not be surprised if it were true. Most of what so-called environmentalists want to force on Americans is actually worse for people and the planet as less-regulated industries in second and third-world nations pick up the slack.
Why would lobster be any different?
Exit link: Red Lobster doesn’t seem concerned.