THERE ARE TIMES when I don't feel like playing fair, usually because someone else isn't.
This is one of those times.
Wednesday, the regulatory body that manages many of the Atlantic fish will meet again to discuss how to protect menhaden, and perhaps by extension, the future of striped bass and the Chesapeake Bay.
Everyone who remembers the five-year striped bass moratorium agrees something must be done to protect the small, oily fish that is not eaten by humans but is a major food source for other critters.
Everyone, that is, except the company making a profit by scooping up as many Chesapeake Bay menhaden as it can get. Omega Protein is trying every tactic possible -- divide and conquer, lawyer threats and bad-faith bargaining -- to derail efforts by the Menhaden Management Board of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC).
On the table Wednesday is a proposal to temporarily cap the number of fish caught by the commercial fleet out of Reedville, Va., to give scientists time to determine if overfishing is occurring and if so, the extent of the damage.
The ceiling, proposed at the ASMFC February meeting, is based on the average catch over the past five years. Omega, the Texas company that owns the commercial fleet, could continue fishing at about its current level while scientists do their work. No downtime. No layoffs.
Fair and reasonable, right?
The Ehrlich administration thinks so, as do the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Coastal Conservation Association, the Maryland Saltwater Sportfishermen's Association and Maryland Sens. Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski.
Even Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen's Association and an ASMFC representative, told his fellow commissioners that while it was difficult to "go against fellow fishermen," he concluded: "The only [thing] we can really manage is the fishermen. I've been on the receiving end of that enough to know it's not an easy pill to swallow. But I think the prudent thing for us to do is cap it."
But not Omega, which began sending trawlers out last week -- aided by spotter planes -- bound and determined to net every school it can find before the commercial season ends in October.
Menhaden aren't just any fish. In addition to feeding striped bass and other species, they filter bay water. Half of the menhaden caught each year on the East Coast come from the bay.
Omega scoops them up and grinds them into fertilizers, food additives, animal feed and fish oil that goes into Omega-3 pills. The so-called reduction fishery and processing frenzy makes Reedville the nation's third-largest commercial fishing port, when measured by tonnage of catch.
Every state along the Atlantic, except Virginia, has banned commercial seine purse netting. But a ban ain't worth jack when the biggest loophole is at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.
Profits have been falling at the fish factory, from $12.2 million in 2002 to $5.8 million in 2003 to $3.2 million last year.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Omega executives, who recently spent $20 million on a new plant in Reedville, have decided to start throwing elbows.
For argument's sake, let's say that Omega is right. Commercial fishing isn't depleting the menhaden population. It's warm water or low oxygen or the fact that menhaden don't like Maryland politics. You'd still want to slow commercial harvest until you figured out if you could fix the problem, right? Because what's the sense of fixing it if you don't have any fish left to populate the place when you're done?
But that logic doesn't help Omega's bottom line. To make money, it has to keep catching as many fish as it can, even as that number decreases every year. It has to protect its turf.
To that end, one of Omega's suits met early last month with officials of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in a divide-and-conquer attempt to get them to buy into the company's "conservation initiative."
First, Omega wants a "voluntary" three-year cap of 135 metric tons annually. It arrived at the number by taking catch from 1997 to 2003, throwing out the lowest two years and using the average.
Second, it doesn't want to incur any penalties if its fleet exceeds the ceiling.
Third, the company plans to do an end-run on the regulatory commission and take its case to Congress.
Finally, Omega warned that it would sue the pants off anyone or anything attempting to cap its operation.
Normally, this would be the place in the column where an Omega official would have his say. But as I said, I'm not playing fair.
Luckily, foundation officials refused to negotiate behind the backs of its partners, including Menhaden Matters, an umbrella organization of concerned parties.
What's wrong with Omega's picture? Two things jump out.
The most obvious is that Omega's proposed cap is 40 percent higher than what its trawlers caught in 2004, and more than 20 percent higher than what the management board proposed.
