His Personal Crusade
Among those rules and regulations are the protection of female buried crabs, which can have 2–3 million eggs in their egg clusters, (Phillips says fishing them is like “destroying the future of our industry”) and crabs that are smaller than 5 inches, a measure meant to ensure the crabs have passed their breeding potential.
The crab is resilient if the habitat is there. We’ll get there.”
“We need to stay aggressive,” Rhodes says, “but not aggressive-ugly-American. We put pressures on them to move forward. Certainly these are expensive programs, and there is push back because of that and because it requires effort. But we’re putting resources together with that pressure to make some things happen.”
But Phillips is not content with organizing associations that merely make recommendations. There’s also money involved—to be precise, a tax.
“We want the association to support a resource-management tax,” Phillips says. “Each of the crab processors would have to go to the association if they wanted to export a container, and they’d need an export certificate. They’d have to pay a half of 1 percent to the association to get the certificate.”
The revenue from the tax would be used to pay full-time positions within the associations and would fund grants for university research in the region. “We need to know, in order to have the appropriate rules and regulations, exactly how the crab population works and acts,” Rhodes says, explaining that the 5-inch regulation is more or less a guess in terms of a breeding guideline for the species.
“Until we know better what size crabs breed at, how many times they breed before getting to that 5-inch size, we really can’t say what kind of regulations to put in place,” Rhodes says. “All of the biology and ecology research needs to get done.”
And even that step in the process presents its own unusual challenges. While millions of research dollars have been pumped into the universities surrounding the Chesapeake Bay for its exploration, very few resources have been dedicated to the same type of studies in Asia. “In Asia it’s not like the universities have marine programs and boats and are ready to go out,” Rhodes says. “There’s a lot of infrastructure that’s not there and we would need to provide to get the program going.”
In addition to partnering with universities for research opportunities, the organizations are also hoping to begin a college internship program in the near future that would engage the next generation in the issues of sustainability. Beyond that, they’re even developing Good Fishermen and Bad Fishermen coloring books in hopes of reaching children even younger.
“We think the youth and the young people in the schools is an important way to go,” Rhodes says. “So we target the fisherman, but we think we’re going to get more traction with the children’s programs.”
The company’s efforts abroad have also, in part, been applied stateside. In 2009, at the Boston Seafood Show, Rhodes and Phillips gathered about 20 U.S. seafood companies and explained the need for increased research, regulation, and respect for sustainability in Asia. “Virtually everyone in the room signed the pledge that fateful day in Boston a year ago,” Rhodes says, “and that was the beginning of the crab council, now formerly part of the National Fisheries Institute.”
Despite all of their efforts, Rhodes and Phillips say the process to save an entire economy and ecosystem simultaneously is slow-moving at best.
“I had written a nasty-gram to someone in Asia, putting a lot of pressure on them to move forward, and my council members said, ‘Ed you need a tranquilizer. Take a deep breath and rewrite your letter,’” Rhodes says of trying to develop a realistic timeline for the company’s goals. “I was asking, ‘OK, where are we? A three-year timeline? A five-year timeline?’”
While the schedule for the potential regulations and the rejuvenation of the local species is still unknown, both men remain hopeful. “If we can take our experience from the Chesapeake and use that as the canary in the mine shaft, then we can pull this off,” Rhodes says. “The crab is resilient if the habitat is there. We’ll get there.”
Blair Chancey is QSR’s editor.
