NORTH AMERICAN FISH FIGHT AUGUST 1, 1997 TRANSCRIPT

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Canadian fishermen are resorting to extreme measures, frustrated by a four year impasse with the U.S. over how to divide up Pacific salmon. The catch is valued at $300 million annually.

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A RealAudio version of this NewsHour segment is available. Outside Links Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission Pacific Salmon Treaty Ministries of Fisheries An article from the Seattle Times regarding the battle over fishing rights.

ROD MINOTT: At the Port of Prince Rupert on Canada's Northwest coast, the nets of salmon fisherman, Des Nobels, have sat idle for much of this summer. Like other Canadian fishermen here, Nobels says this has been the worst season he's seen in his 15 years of commercial salmon fishing.

DES NOBELS, Canadian Salmon Fisherman: My biggest week here has been just about 300 sockeye. That's it. On average, I've been catching in the neighborhood of around 200 sockeye, which is--it's less than half of what I would have caught say on a regular year or for the cycle of this year. I've made my expenses, and I have made not a dime beyond that, so I'm looking at going into the winter here, after basically 19 days of fishing, with no money in my pocket.

ROD MINOTT: Fishermen blame the poor catch on several things, including Canadian officials who curtailed the amount of fishing that would be allowed this year, a policy meant to conserve shrinking stocks of salmon. But, most of all, the fishermen blame Americans. Canadians allege that thousands of sockeye salmon bound for Canadian rivers this year have ended up in the nets of U.S. fishermen just up the coast from here in Southeast Alaska. Des Nobels calls that alleged over fishing piracy on the high seas.

DES NOBELS: Yes. This is a fish war. This is a salmon war. I don't know how you could portray it otherwise. I'm besieged. My neighbors are besieged, and we're dealing with a siege mentality, which puts you in a war scenario, if that's the term you want to use. This is no longer a dispute. We've been disputing for four years. The dispute is over. The war is on.

ROD MINOTT: Two weeks ago, Nobles and other Canadian fishermen retaliated against the U.S.. Several hundred fishing boats trapped the Alaskan ferry Malaspina in the Port of Prince Rupert. The radio call went out for them to join the blockade.

SPOKESMAN: Come on out, guys. We need your support. Get yourself in the lines here. Show these big boys that we're not putting up with their crap.

ROD MINOTT: At one point, some of the protesters burned an American flag. Tempers flared on both sides.

FISHERMAN: They're pirating our fish. We're not trying to pirate anything. They can have their damned ferry back. Give us our fish back. It's very important to me that that boat stays right there.

ROD MINOTT: Ferry passengers voiced outrage.

FERRY PASSENGER: It would seem to me that it is a borderline terrorist act.

ROD MINOTT: For three days the fishermen defied a Canadian court order to release the U.S. ship. A breakthrough came after a personal plea by Canada's fisheries' minister to end the standoff. Two hours later, the Malaspina was released. But the dispute over Pacific salmon was far from over. Canadian fishermen remain upset at a four-year impasse in talks between the United States and Canada over how to divide up Pacific salmon, a catch valued at $300 million annually.

A pact signed in 1985, known as the Pacific Salmon Treaty, called for equity in sharing the fish, while also conserving diminishing stocks. Each country agreed to limit its catch by negotiating the early quotas, based on estimates of how many salmon originate in each country's rivers, as well as the health of those fish runs. But since 1993, Canada and the U.S. have failed to agree on harvest ceilings, and each has, instead, tried to set its own fishing limits.

This year Canadians accused the United States of netting ½ million sockeye salmon in the waters off Southeast Alaska. Canadians allege that's four times the number agreed to from past treaty negotiations, a claim the U.S. disputes. In total, Canada claims U.S. fishermen have been catching five to six million more salmon a year than they should have been netting. But fisheries expert, Dan Huppert of the University of Washington says merely counting numbers of fish is misleading.

DAN HUPPERT, Salmon Fisheries Expert: The fish being taken have widely different sizes and values. You shouldn't just be adding up numbers of fish and arguing that the numbers should be equal.

ROD MINOTT: Huppert points out one more fact that complicates this debate over fish ownership--salmon migration patterns.

DAN HUPPERT: The fish are intermingled as long as they're in saltwater and there's no way a fisherman can know whether they're catching fish from one nation or the other.

ROD MINOTT: Salmon spawn in freshwater rivers of the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia then swim out to sea and generally head North into international waters. Four or five years later, as adults, they journey back South to spawn in the rivers where they were born. Along the way, the salmon travel through waters of both the U.S. and Canada. Joel Connelly is a Seattle journalist who has covered the U.S.-Canadian fish wars. He says abundant runs of salmon from Canada's Fraser River have made it more difficult to reach a compromise.

JOEL CONNELLY, Seattle Post-Intelligencer: There's a major and fundamental flaw in the treaty. And that is that the salmon runs of the Northwest coastal rivers are declining, so Canadians are able to catch fewer U.S.-bound fish, while, on the other hand, the Fraser has remained a great engine of salmon production, which has allowed Americans to catch more Canadian-bound fish. And that's fundamental disparity, both in the number of fish caught and in the income produced caused the two countries to grow further and further apart.

ROD MINOTT: With no agreement, the political rhetoric remains heated.

PREMIER GLEN CLARK, British Columbia, Canada: This is a question of a foreign power that has been stealing from British Columbia, robbing fish from British Columbia, using our court system to go after Canadian systems.

ROD MINOTT: Even before the ferry blockade, British Columbia Premier Glen Clark bought ads in U.S. newspapers blessing Americans for allegedly over fishing Canadian-bound salmon near Washington State.

PREMIER GLEN CLARK: There is a very good case we made the Americans not receive any of those fish; they're completely British Columbia fish. And so the fact that the Americans now are catching millions of our salmon really is taking food out of the mouths of our fishers. It's also jeopardizing conservation in our province.

ROD MINOTT: But American fishermen have their complaints too. Dave Harsila, a Seattle-based fisherman, says the US commercial catch has been depleted by Canadian over fishing of Coho salmon, bound for rivers in Washington State and Oregon.

DAVE HARSILA, American Salmon Fisherman: I've seen them wage a fish war, and I see the effects that it's had in the state of Washington, very detrimental, so much so that the federal government is considering listing some of our Coho stocks on the endangered species list. They take way too many of our Coho stocks and King stocks. They advertise in their sports fishery for people from down here to come up and fish on the West Coast of Vancouver for the very fish that we are growing.

GOV. GARY LOCKE, Washington: I'm really pleased that Governor Knowles and myself were able to meet with fisheries minister Dave Anderson from Canada.

ROD MINOTT: In recent days both the United States and Canada have scrambled to repair strained relations.

SPOKESMAN: I believe that the three of us today have all reiterated the importance of the treaty.

ROD MINOTT: On Wednesday in Seattle, the governors of Alaska and Washington State met with Canada's fisheries minister. They announced a special summit would be held this fall to help resolve key differences over salmon.

GOV. GARY LOCKE: No one wins in a salmon war because what will ultimately happen is that we'll all be fighting over two salmon in the Pacific Ocean.

ROD MINOTT: Special high level diplomats from both countries have also been appointed to try to jumpstart the stalled treaty talks. But Premier Clark says the only way to settle this dispute for all is by third party binding arbitration, a process the U.S. has already rejected.

PREMIER GLEN CLARK: I mean, really, this is a common property resource that we share. It's in both our countries' interest to conserve the species where we can both benefit from that, not to mention just the fact that we want this species to survive. And so a rational thing to do would be to allow somebody independent, jointly approved by both countries, to come in and make the determination.

ROD MINOTT: Meanwhile, as both sides continue to fight over salmon, fishermen like Des Nobels worry a solution may come too later.

DES NOBELS: It's our lives. It's survival for us. This is no longer a question of we can wait another year. We can't. We cannot wait another year. We could probably hold on this one, but if we end up into another situation next year, that's it for me, despite the fact that I own my vessel, I'm out. I have no choice. I have to make a dollar somewhere else, so I'm out, and so are a great many others. And desperate people do desperate things.

ROD MINOTT: Nobels warns that desperation may lead to more acts of civil disobedience in the escalating war over Pacific salmon.

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