Posted on Categories Water, WildlifeTags , , ,

Op-Ed: Politics is killing the salmon industry

Michael Hiltzik, PRESS DEMOCRAT

State and federal policies that favor farms have done far more damage to the fishery than drought.

Snapshots from an environmental and economic disaster:

Kenneth Brown, the owner of Bodega Tackle in Petaluma, reckons he has lost almost $450,000 in the last year.

“I haven’t taken a paycheck in seven or eight months,” he says. He has had to lay off all but one employee, leaving himself, his son and the one remaining worker to run the business.

James Stone, board president of the Nor-Cal Guides & Sportsmen’s Association, says more than 120 guides who serve recreational fishing customers in and around the Sacramento River and San Francisco Bay have all but been put out of business, costing the economy as much as $3.5 million a year.

Sarah Bates, the owner of a commercial fishing boat in San Francisco, has seen 90% of her income washed away. She has watched a commercial fleet capacity of nearly 500 boats reduced nearly to zero.

The circumstance affecting all three is the shutdown of the crucial fall-run salmon fishing in California, which the Pacific Fishery Management Council, a governmental body, recently extended for 2024, the second year in a row.

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/opinion/hiltzik-politics-is-killing-the-salmon-industry/

Posted on Categories Water, WildlifeTags , , , , ,

Op-Ed: Stop efforts to kill salmon and fishing jobs

John McManus, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Today, many Northern California commercial fishermen sit in harbors along our coast worrying about their bills and waiting for another disastrously shortened salmon season to begin. Many businesses that serve the normally robust sport salmon fishery also have suffered because of the delay. River fishing guides have lost half their season as well.

Salmon numbers are predicted to be down from the lingering effects of the last drought and the damaging water allocation decisions that put salmon fishing families last. Meanwhile, San Joaquin Valley congressmen are hard at work tilting the balance of water in California toward valley agricultural barons.

These House members are acting like this is their last, best chance for a huge water grab. There are four separate riders in House budget bills aimed at seizing more Northern water at the expense of salmon and fishing families. None are responding to a crisis in agriculture. The past decade has seen record harvests, revenue and employment for California agriculture.

For salmon, it’s another story. During the past decade, California salmon fishermen have seen the two worst crises in state history. Our fishery was shut down entirely in 2008 and 2009 following record siphoning of Bay-Delta water. The Golden Gate Salmon Association and other fishing groups are seeing a second crisis today as salmon try to fight their way back from the drought.

The Bay-Delta’s salmon runs are the most important south of the Columbia River and the backbone of a $1.4 billion salmon fishing industry that supports 23,000 jobs.

Read more at http://www.pressdemocrat.com/opinion/8549850-181/close-to-home-stop-efforts

Posted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Sustainable LivingTags , , ,

Americans are buying gene-edited food that's not labeled GMO

Craig Giammona and Jack Kaskey, BLOOMBERG NEWS
Products made possible through gene-editing have landed on grocery shelves. Whether they’ll stay there is up to shoppers wary of technological tinkering.
Food companies are now required to label GMOs in Vermont, and debate is raging over a federal standard. But so far, regulators at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have taken a pass on overseeing gene-edited crops. They say cutting DNA from a plant is not the same as adding genes from another organism. So corn injected with outside DNA is classified a genetically modified organism, but canola that can tolerate herbicide because scientists removed a gene is not.
Industry giants like Monsanto Co., DuPont and Dow Chemical Co. have stepped through the regulatory void. They’ve struck licensing deals with smaller companies for gene-editing technology. U.S. farmers harvested 8,000 acres (3,237 hectares) last year of gene-edited canola processed into cooking oil marketed as non-GMO. Looming are U.S. consumers who’ve rejected GMO products despite a preponderance of evidence that they’re safe to grow and eat.
“There’s a feeling among consumers that they want their food as close as possible to what nature intended,” said Carl Jorgenson, director of wellness strategy at Daymon Worldwide, a retail marketing firm. “There’s an overall distrust of Big Food and Big Science.”
Farmers and scientists have manipulated crops for thousands of years. Gene-editing is what proponents call a more precise version of mutation breeding that’s been used since the mid-1900s. Commercial varieties of edibles, including wheat, barley, rice and grapefruit, were created by mutating DNA with chemicals or radiation.
With GMOs, there’s suspicion among consumers. U.S. food companies spent millions fighting labeling requirements, fueling theories that GMOs are unhealthy. And there’s a sense that the benefits of genetically engineered crops have gone mainly to farmers and big agricultural companies that supply seeds and pesticides and not to consumers.
Read more at: Americans Are Buying Gene-Edited Food That’s Not Labeled GMO – Bloomberg