Rotten (2018–2019): Season 1, Episode 6 - Cod Is Dead - full transcript
As the global fish supply dwindles, the industry faces a crisis on all sides - including crooked moguls, dubious imports and divisive regulations.
Come on, Bud!
[serene music]
There we go.
[motor revs]
[steam hisses]
[Aaron] All right, yeah.
Back her out. Let the bow go.
[narrator] In the last 50 years, we have
doubled the amount of fish we consume.
[man] Globally,
billions of people rely on seafood
as their primary source of protein.
[narrator] But the oceans can't keep up
with so much demand.
Around the world, fish stocks have
plummeted and fisheries are crashing.
People lost out. There was
an industry just completely ravaged.
[man] Those in favor,
signify by raising their hand.
[narrator] In the US, the government
stepped in to stave off a crisis,
but some say they have
only made matters worse.
Catch shares is a failure. It's a scam.
It fucking ruined the industry.
[narrator] And today, 94%
of all the fish Americans eat
comes from foreign countries, much of it
farmed under unknowable conditions.
All the fish,
you have no idea where it's coming from.
[man] Many of it frozen,
once, two, three, four times.
All kinds of additives.
[narrator] Meanwhile, American fishermen
are watching their way of life disappear.
Guys have nothing. It's been taken away.
[narrator] But one seafood mogul
who ignored the rules for 30 years
has made a fortune:
Carlos Rafael.
And through it all, the fish in the ocean
are being turned into a commodity
to be traded like a stock or a bond.
We're aiding and abetting
a massive act of theft
and the public gets nothing in return.
[tense orchestral music]
[ominous music]
[tape recording] My name is Carlos Rafael.
I own a fleet in New Bedford.
I consider myself the biggest player,
right now, of this industry.
I employ at the moment
close to 300 fishermen.
I have invested over $50 million
into this business.
I'm not going down.
I'll be the last one falling.
You can rest assured.
One standing up:
me.
Any of these green boats
are Carlos Rafael's fleet.
All the green and white boats here,
you see,
with the "CR" on the front of them,
belong to Carlos Rafael.
[interviewer] How would you
describe his personality?
He's a fisherman. I'll leave it at that.
[narrator] New Bedford, Massachusetts is
the most valuable fishing port
in the United States.
Fishing here puts one billion dollars
into the economy annually.
For more than 30 years,
a huge chunk of that wealth has passed
through the hands of Carlos Rafael,
also known as the Codfather.
You won't find a fisherman
on the New England docks
who doesn't know the Codfather by name,
or by reputation.
[man] He's a maggot. He's a piece
of mosquito shit, as far as I'm concerned.
You know, he freaking lied to people,
to get where he is.
Is he a good human being? I don't know.
I'm no fan of his.
[narrator] But if Carlos Rafael really is
the monster his critics say he is,
he was created in part
by the global fishing crisis.
In fact, he built his empire
by exploiting that crisis,
and then the very regulations
designed to end it.
The rise and fall of Carlos Rafael is
really the story of a poisoned system.
[seagulls squawk in distance]
Richie Canastra has been doing business
with Carlos Rafael for over 20 years.
-[Canastra] Good morning.
-[worker] Morning.
[narrator] Canastra runs
the Whaling City Seafood Display Auction,
where most of New Bedford's fish
is landed.
Morning, Joe. How are you?
Canastra is Portuguese,
and ironically, canastra is a basket
in which the fishermen bring
their catch to market.
Portuguese immigrants in New Bedford,
they really put New Bedford on the map.
[speaks Portuguese]
[narrator] One of those immigrants
was Carlos Rafael.
And this boat, the Sasha Lee,
is one of the 32 that he owns.
She's been dragging her nets
for a week straight
in southern New England.
Now, she's home to unload her haul
of monkfish and skate wings,
and sell to the highest bidder.
[man] The people of New Bedford
literally have the ocean
running through their veins.
We have been identified as a seafood port
for well over 100 years.
We know that if you throw a rock
into New Bedford Harbor,
that ripple is felt around the world.
[narrator] This fish will work its way
around the globe,
and into everything from high-end entrees,
to frozen fish-sticks, to pet food.
The global seafood industry
is extremely complex.
It's multinational.
[Baker] Fish caught here in New England,
like dogfish,
the belly flaps go to Germany.
Other parts of the fish go to Korea
for the Korean domestic market.
The bluefin tuna that are caught here
are flown in airplanes to Japan,
if they're sushi-grade,
and sold on the Tokyo fish market
a day after they're caught in New England.
You know, we have salmon from Chile
and Norway and Scotland in our markets.
-[fisherman] OK, it's there!
-Yes.
[narrator] The world's fisheries are
more interconnected than ever.
The price of cod from Iceland,
or halibut from Norway,
can have a huge impact on profits
here in New England.
-All set, Joe?
-Alright.
[narrator] One of the biggest global
markets for all that product is the US.
In 2015, Americans devoured
nearly 5 billion pounds of seafood,
spending $96 billion,
and making the US
the world's second-largest
seafood consumer, after China.
[interviewer] What do you like
about this business?
The money!
This room, you get scallops
that came in this morning.
And we have 1,200 pounds...
1,218 pounds of scallops in this one vat.
So, they'll go
for about $13 a pound.
This is $18,000 right here.
It's crazy.
This whole room,
you're looking at half a million dollars.
Just in these three rows.
[narrator] There's always been a fortune
to be made in New England seafood.
The ocean crop that built this business
were bottom-dwelling species
like haddock, flounder, and cod,
known in the trade as "groundfish."
They're mild, sweet, and plentiful.
Perfect for harvesting in huge numbers
and selling to the global market.
A single boatload of this fish
can bring in upwards of $50,000.
But today, many fishermen
are just barely getting by.
When I was a kid, we had a nice place
in the West End, a swimming pool,
and then when the government
came down on it,
we pretty much, you know, lost everything.
My father started out as a long-liner,
catching, like, swordfish.
And they fished that out, you know,
and then there wasn't anything left
so he went scalloping,
and then they fished that out,
and then the regulations started.
It's just been a mess, my whole life.
[soft droning music]
[narrator] For thousands of years,
the world's oceans were a source
of legendary abundance.
There were simply more fish
than humans could ever possibly consume.
Until, one day, there weren't.
[man] From the period
of the late 1960s, early 1970s,
we saw the advent
of very large foreign fishing fleets.
These were fleets which were going
to all parts of the world
and removing vast quantities of fish
from these different ecosystems.
[narrator]
The fishing grounds off New England
were especially attractive to those ships.
Well, they say that back in the day,
you could look out off of the beach
in Point Judith, Rhode Island,
and see the skies lit up by the lights
of the foreign factory boats.
They ended up taking so much herring
out of the water off the New England coast
that they crashed the herring stock.
We saw the collapse of the cod fishery.
The striped bass fishery
at one point collapsed.
[narrator] It was clear to fishermen,
and to politicians who wanted their votes,
that something had to be done.
In 1976, Congress passed the Magnuson Act,
and what that said
was that only American fishermen are
allowed within 200 miles of shore to fish.
[Seth Macinko]
President Ford signed it into law.
It's an overnight sort of revolution.
[narrator] To make sure American fishermen
could exploit the opportunity,
the federal government
offered to help out.
[Macinko] There was a Fishing Vessel
Loan Guarantee Program,
the US government
was helping provide low-cost loans,
and people thought of this as a good thing
from the very beginning
because they wanted
to grow the domestic fleet
to go out and capture
these newly-claimed fishery resources.
[narrator] The fishing life
was the American dream.
[Steve Welch] I was in school at the time,
but I was always getting in trouble, so...
once I got a job on a fishing boat,
I felt proud, I felt happy.
So I ended up fishing
for a couple of years, saving money.
Then I bought my first boat, and then
I improved my business along the way.
I'm really thankful for the opportunity
to start my own business like that.
[narrator] Those small,
owner-operated boats
became more efficient,
and the business more lucrative,
but the fish were being drained
from the sea.
The federal government
had protected the fishing business,
but not the fish.
[Peter Baker] We got to the point
where we had about 1,500 cod boats,
just in New England.
But the fleet grew too big,
and the scientists in the late '80s
and early '90s started warning
that the cod stocks in New England
were headed for a crash.
[narrator] Cod, that mainstay
of New England groundfishing,
was disappearing,
along with plenty of other species
around the world.
The global fishing crisis had arrived.
In the US,
the government stepped in once again,
this time, to save US fishermen
from themselves.
[quiet background chatter]
[man] Call the vote. Those in favor,
signify by raising their hand.
[narrator] Congress put the fate
of the fishing industry
in the hands of eight regional councils.
[man] Motion passes,
17 to zero, to zero.
[narrator] The councils set limits
on how much of each species
fishermen could catch.
You had the scientists on one side
waving the flag, saying,
"There's gonna be a crash.
We need to take action now."
And you had the fishing industry
on the other side, saying,
"I got bills to pay.
I got mortgages to pay.
I need to go make some money now."
And in the middle were the managers,
trying to decide how they were going
to make regulations
that staved off the crash,
but also allowed
as much of the fishing industry
to stay in business as they could.
[narrator] The arguments have raged
for two generations.
I do appreciate the comments
made by industry,
and I've said many times
that our requirement
is to use best available science.
"Best available" is not perfect science,
it's best available.
And it's an elusive truth.
[narrator] The science in this case:
counting the numbers of fish in the sea.
[Jon Hare] Trying to understand how many
of anything there are is difficult.
But with fish, you're dealing
with something underwater
that you can't see directly,
and the areas over which
we're working are vast.
-[interviewer] And they move.
-And they move.
So we use
these scientific sampling designs
to estimate the distribution
of the populations, and the numbers.
But it is a very indirect approach.
[narrator] The agency tasked with that job
is the National Marine Fisheries Service,
a part of the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
For fishermen,
how much they can catch depends
on the results of NOAA's measurements.
Another critical component of assessments
are the information
about the age and growth
of the population.
[narrator] As a fish grows,
a tiny ear bone, called an otolith,
develops distinct layers,
like the rings of a tree.
From those samples, we can estimate
the age of the individual
and then look at age patterns
in the population over time.
And that information is also used
in the assessments.
[motor whirrs]
[narrator] Many fishermen
have a different take.
They think the government scientists
don't know enough about catching fish
to get accurate numbers in their counts,
and that NOAA is underestimating
the number of fish in the ocean.
-Let's do one for cod and three for dogs.
-[woman] OK.
-See, plenty of skates!
-[woman] Plenty.
It's kind of a unique spot
this time of year.
You'll have codfish,
you'll have seabass,
flounders and yellowtails,
all mixed together.
The big gap between everything, right now,
is what we see and what science sees.
And it does not line up.
It's never close.
It's not even within the same ballpark.
[Aaron] Our science is, as a fisherman:
we want to be able to have a future.
There's good reason why people think
that there's something...
grossly wrong with the assessment.
We're buying into this empirical approach
because it's all you got, but it's weak.
[narrator] More than anything,
fishermen wanted their voices heard
in the policymaking.
Most felt like that wasn't happening.
[Steve Welch] I've been going
to meetings since 1994.
Not one meeting
was I ever given anything back.
I was always there negotiating
not to give something up.
We don't have a say anymore. Fishermen
don't have a say, that's the problem.
A lot of the leaders of
the groundfish industry in New England
have really been at war
with the science for decades.
And so you have this mistrust between
the scientists and the fishermen.
But the cod stocks certainly crashed.
I think it would be hard for anybody
to credibly try and deny that.
[narrator] Meanwhile, more and more
foreign fish was flooding into the market,
much of it landed by factory ships
with little regard
for the impact on fish stocks.
And thanks to cheap labor and transport,
elaborate international supply chains
became profitable.
[Welch] They're catching fish
and freezing it onboard,
shipping it to China,
thawing it out, processing it,
chemically treating it, refreezing it,
shipping it back here...
[Scott Lang] And it's being used in many
products and cooked and overcooked...
There's no truth in labeling,
when it comes to foreign fish
coming into the United States.
[narrator] Throughout the 1990s,
NOAA did their best
to rebuild the Atlantic groundfish stocks
by cutting the number of days
fishermen could fish,
and limiting how much
they could bring in on a single trip.
But profit margins
continued to evaporate.
Many smaller operators
simply couldn't stay in business.
They sold off their boats.
[fisherman] The small boat fleet
is in serious trouble right now.
If there isn't something done quickly
we're gonna lose them. Thank you.
You started seeing businesses failing
and fishermen leaving the fishery.
We saw the fleet go from about 1,500 boats
to less than 350 boats.
So we saw about 80% of the fleet
go out of business.
[narrator] The larger operators
saw their opportunity.
Among them was Carlos Rafael:
the Codfather.
One by one, he bought the fishing permits
of the smaller operators
as they left the business,
until he grew to be
the biggest player in the northeast.
He opened up a seafood processing plant.
He began, in this situation,
to develop a vertical integration
regarding his particular business.
[narrator] He also built up
a long rap sheet of convictions,
indictments, and fines,
for everything from tax evasion
to lethal working conditions on his boats.
None of it slowed Carlos down.
Meanwhile, according to NOAA's numbers,
their strategy to save the groundfish
wasn't working.
So NOAA got behind a new plan:
catch shares.
The term "catch shares"
basically means any system
by which an allowable catch,
a quota of fish, is established
and then divided up amongst individuals
or groups of fishermen.
[narrator] Under this proposal,
the government would place a ceiling
on the amount of each species that could
be pulled from the sea each year.
That would be the "total allowable catch."
That total would then be divvied up among
all the active fishermen in New England
as individual quotas.
It sounds logical enough,
but catch shares quickly became
one of the most controversial pieces
of fishing regulation in US history.
We had a problem of overfishing in
the mid-'90s. I'll admit it. I don't care.
Then we jump to catch shares,
and shares is going to save the industry.
It ruined the industry.
[narrator] NOAA didn't come up with
the idea for catch shares on their own.
It was largely the result of years
of advocacy by an influential group:
the Environmental Defense Fund.
EDF was instrumental
in getting DDT banned in 1972,
and ever since,
they've been one of the most effective
environmental groups in the country.
[man] Well, our tagline is
"Finding the ways that work."
So that means a focus
on economic incentives,
on market-based mechanisms.
[narrator] EDF's strategy is
to partner with corporations,
instead of declaring war on them,
and they're known for their pro-business,
free-market philosophy.
With catch shares, they hoped to upend
the fishing industry in order to save it.
[Jake Kritzer] What catch shares
are trying to do is to provide fishermen
with greater security and more flexibility
in how they go about
running their business.
They're also trying to make sure
that all participants are accountable
for working within the regulations.
And if you have those pieces in place,
often you'll find that you can have
a successful fishery.
[narrator] With the kind of catch shares
EDF was proposing,
each fisherman's share or quota
becomes his or her private property.
The fisherman can sell it, lease it,
or buy more of it from whoever is selling.
That's where this becomes
more of a market-based approach.
That there's a leasing market,
that allows quota
to move around fishermen as needed,
so that it's fully utilized
and so that everyone benefits.
[narrator]
The goal was responsible fishing.
But critics say it was really about
privatizing a public resource:
the fish in the sea.
[Seth Macinko] There's different ways
you could do catch shares,
but EDF is the leading spokesgroup
for a fully privatized model.
There's this belief that if you convert
the fishery to private ownership,
the private owners will suddenly be
incentivized to become good stewards,
they will take care of it, and voilà,
we've solved the conservation problem.
[narrator] EDF claims that catch shares
have worked in many regions.
That in Alaska they helped
Bering sea crab rebound,
and in the Gulf of Mexico,
red snapper has seen a comeback.
There is no shortage of stories out there
of fisheries that were
once severely depleted,
that had fleets that were
struggling economically,
that are thriving now.
We've seen it happen and I'm confident
we'll see it happen here.
I don't think I could get up every morning
and do what I do, if I believed otherwise.
[narrator] But to opponents of the system,
privatizing a public resource
is simply not the answer.
[Seth Macinko]
Let's take a look at human history.
Have we ever seen a private owner
abuse the land?
Have we ever seen a private owner
abuse the air?
We see numerous cases around the globe
where people are cheating
on the very privatized system
which was supposed
to turn them all into stewards.
So, I think it falls on its face.
[narrator] EDF insists that catch shares
are not a form of privatization at all.
In the United States,
you cannot privatize the oceans.
Legally, these are public resources.
They are co-owned
by everyone in this country.
So, what we're doing
when we implement a catch share system
is allocating a privilege to earn a living
off of a portion of a public resource,
to professional fishermen.
I think that's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing for the nation,
good for the industry.
[narrator] This issue of privatizing
the fish would lead to a pitched battle
between fishermen,
environmental groups, and regulators
that is still being felt today.
Alright.
Morning, guys. Morning, Dad.
Alright, so tell Delsin and he'll have
that put on the truck with the two bales.
-Alright.
-[man] Alright.
Did they tell you about the pallet
of chain going down?
-Four half-inch barrels.
-Yeah. Alright. Thank you.
[narrator] Tor Bendiksen is
a second-generation fisherman
who now runs
the family fishing supply business.
[Tor] I started fishing at the age of 13
on my father's boat.
That was those first years where they went
from really no major regulation
to actually hard-set regulations.
Brand new trawl, ready to go.
And then they instituted catch shares,
where the intent from EDF, they said,
"This is going to protect small boats."
And we said, "No, no.
It doesn't. Look at Iceland.
It devastated the fishing community
where, all of a sudden, five or six people
in Iceland owned majority of the quota
because they bought it all up."
[melancholy piano music]
This sound from this bird has...
a special place in the mind of Icelanders.
It's called that the bird is "oo-ing."
For me, it's very special to hear this.
It's beautiful.
[birdsong]
[narrator] Arthur Bogason
is a lifelong fisherman
and perhaps Iceland's most vocal opponent
of privatized catch shares.
[Arthur Bogason] In the beginning,
there were 1,043 small boats in Iceland.
Today, we have about
10% of these boats left.
About 10%.
This part of the small boat sector
is out, basically.
[narrator] Like New England,
Iceland saw their cod stocks plummeting.
So the government put in place
a form of catch shares for small boats
15 years before the same strategy
was even suggested in New England.
It happened this way.
The government started to cut down
the quotas for the cod.
This meant that those guys
with small quotas
couldn't see a way of living out of it.
They were simply forced to sell.
They had no other way.
This is my kingdom here.
It's a very small boat, as you can see.
[narrator] Small-boat Icelandic fishermen
went out of business, one by one.
Their quotas were snapped up
by larger operations with plenty of cash.
It was a classic case of consolidation:
the transfer of ownership, and power,
into fewer hands.
At the same time,
according to the economists who helped
create catch shares in Iceland,
the cod population did rebound,
which, to them, means the program worked.
[man] My name is Ragnar Arnason.
I was involved from the very beginning
as an economist,
as a specialist in natural resources,
and with special knowledge
about management of fisheries.
It's been a huge success.
Fish stocks have expanded.
Profitability has gone up greatly,
and is increasing all the time.
The profitability means that capital
has become available for investments.
So economic growth has expanded
on the basis
of this reorganization
of the fishing activity.
We are in Hafnarfjordur Harbor,
which is probably the biggest
small boat harbor in the country.
[in Icelandic] Good afternoon.
How are you?
[in Icelandic] Tell me, is there any news
of the hand line catch?
[in Icelandic] No, but the long-liners
made a good catch yesterday.
OK.
[Arthur] This is all about economics,
making as big profits as possible.
Now, the profit from the fisheries goes
into the pocket of a few,
instead of in the old days,
when we had a much larger number of ships
and companies working on fish.
This has consequences beyond description.
Why do the economists always
leave this out of the equation?
If the science of economics
is not better than that,
that they cannot calculate all the costs,
then they shouldn't bother,
then they should go do something else.
There's some nice cods here.
See this?
There are downsides to the system,
that depend on your perspectives.
It's much more a capitalistic industry,
almost like a factory.
And I think every population
has to decide,
do they want to have higher income
and be more competitive
in the global marketplace,
or do they want
to maintain the old traditions?
What if, when we were still
at the Stone Age level,
that the wheel was going
to change everything,
and therefore we would be better off
without the wheel?
[Arthur] It's a system of privatization.
And it's foolish of people,
trying to talk their way around it.
It is privatization, as clear as it gets.
At some point, this will go too far
and people will start to realize
how wrong this is.
I was once in New England, even,
and there, I gave a speech
and I described exactly what was going on.
And what I hear is that now,
you have the system there.
So they now will taste the same
as we have been tasting here.
[Scott Lang]
The consequences of catch shares,
you would see coming a mile away.
You didn't have to be a genius.
We were against catch shares
from day one: meaning the industry,
meaning the mayors of the port cities...
We felt that it was going
to lead to consolidation.
More and more people would be driven out.
[narrator] There are protections that can
be made as part of a catch shares system
to prevent the kind of consolidation
that happened in Iceland.
One of the ways is by putting in place
an accumulation limit,
by saying, "Any individual fisherman
or fishing cooperative
can only hold so much of the quota."
You limit how much any one entity
can control in the fishery.
[narrator] It was up to
the New England Fisheries Council
to impose limits on consolidation.
Fishermen brought their fight
straight to the Capitol.
But we need to start caring
as much about our fishermen
as we do about our fish!
The days of managing our fisheries
with ideology
need to come to an end, once and for all!
[narrator] But opponents of catch shares
say they were simply outgunned.
EDF has deep pockets:
millions of dollars in donations from
powerful non-profits with corporate ties,
like the Walton Family Foundation,
of Walmart fame,
and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation,
created by the founder of Intel.
They have also had the support
of far-right libertarian groups,
like the Charles Koch Foundation,
who share EDF's free market ideology.
And EDF had access
to the corridors of power.
[Seth Macinko] One of the things that's
fairly well-known within the fishery
is the relationship
between some of the parties
involved in pushing
for privatized catch shares
and NOAA, the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.
[narrator] EDF and its backers were
about to have one of their own
in command of NOAA,
and therefore all federal fisheries.
Doctor Jane Lubchenco has accepted my
nomination as the Administrator of NOAA.
[narrator] Up until her appointment
by President Obama
as the head of NOAA in 2009,
Jane Lubchenco was vice-chair
of the board of trustees at EDF.
In her government role,
Lubchenco was a huge catch shares booster,
and pushed for their implementation
in New England.
She declined to be interviewed
for this documentary.
[Lang] She had a specific agenda
to bring catch shares into New England.
And she did everything she needed to,
to make sure that happened.
[narrator] Catch shares became law
in New England in 2010.
[Baker] There was a big push
to put consolidation limits in place
and to cap the amount
that people could own,
but ultimately, those ideas
didn't make it into the final plan.
[narrator] For boat owners with
a lot of quota or the money to buy it,
catch shares worked out.
Carlos Rafael was one of them.
He snatched up around 25% of all
the groundfish quota in New England,
as his fleet continued
to spread out across the Atlantic.
For nearly everyone else,
it's been a disaster.
[Scott Lang] The effect was as bad,
if not worse, than what was predicted.
There was absolutely no parachute
whatsoever. This was free-fall.
[narrator] The effect of catch shares
was immediately felt
in fishermen's day-to-day work.
[Aaron] We're allowed to catch so much
for the year, you know, of each species.
What we have for the year is what
we used to do in a day, sometimes,
or a two-day trip.
[narrator] And any time
Aaron catches more than his share,
he has to call in to shore and buy
more quota from another fisherman.
[Aaron] This would be about our yearly
limit of codfish, right here in this box.
So anything elsewhere from this box,
we're gonna have to buy the quota.
But it's just crazy when you look at it,
that this is all we're allowed
for the year!
We could literally catch more fish
if we were to go on a charter boat,
and charter it for the day.
A lot of areas, guys-- they're afraid
of catching something
they don't have enough quota for,
so your mental picture of where
you want to fish for the day changes,
because there's a possibility
you might catch something
you don't have enough quota for,
nor have the money to purchase the quota.
To buy fish to go catch it, to me,
is the most backwards thing
I've ever heard of.
[narrator] The ripple effect
of catch shares is felt every day
in every restaurant
and every supermarket in America.
[Scott Lang] All the fish you want,
you have no idea where it's coming from.
The government thought that if you brought
in less fish, there would be more demand.
It would hike the price up
for fresh seafood.
The consumer would desire
fresh American seafood
and want to pay a premium
in order to get that fresh seafood.
What they did not take into account
was that the market was flooded
with foreign seafood,
many of it frozen, once, two, three,
four times, all kinds of additives.
As that fresh cod or that fresh seafood
had less and less demand,
it began losing its shelf space.
[Steve Welch]
Nothing better than fresh fish.
When you start taking all that fish
and consolidating it
into the hands of a few people,
then you lose that connection,
you're going to lose that quality product
that I, and people like myself, bring in.
[narrator] And it's the cheap stuff
from overseas, like tilapia and catfish,
that often takes its place,
much of it farmed
in unsanitary conditions.
In fact, foreign seafood
is rejected by US inspectors
at a higher rate
than any other food product,
and the number one reason is filth.
[Aaron] Now, this thing can be grown
anywhere, in a five-gallon bucket.
That's what people are eating
and what they think good fish is,
when we have an ocean full of fish
right here in this country,
wild caught seafood,
an incredible food source.
This country fishes under some
of the strictest regulations in the world,
and we fish sustainably,
and we fish and follow these rules.
No one cares more about this ocean
than we do.
[ominous music]
[voice over walkie-talkie]
Roger. The Tradition standing by 16-17.
[narrator] As for the fishermen,
they never really escape
the pressures of regulation.
They can be boarded and inspected
by the coast guard without warning.
-How you guys doing?
-Good.
So, IDs for everybody.
Is this everybody, right here?
Yes.
And Nadia's license is expired,
but she has her passport.
And wasn't there a gentleman
that didn't have...
Yeah, my nephew.
If he could come in, and I'll
just get on a piece of paper...
[tense music]
[man] I want these guys safe.
We make sure they have
their flares, their life raft,
their survival suits, stuff like that.
I want them going home to their families.
Their fish, that's another story.
I still want, you know,
the safety of the catch
and whatever they're prescribed
to have on board, obviously.
[narrator]
The coast guard checks everything
from the species of the fish
in the hold...
to the size of the holes in Aaron's net,
to make sure he's not catching fish
that are too small.
-Thanks, guys.
-Take care. Have a good day. Thank you.
-Take care, guys. Thank you.
-[inspector] Good luck.
[Aaron sighs]
[Aaron] Never a dull moment!
With the coast guard coming aboard
my knees were shaking.
You're hoping you've got
every "I" dotted and every "T" crossed.
Even though I know
I had nothing to be worried about,
you still get... the jitters, you know.
[narrator] Daily anxieties
about regulations are one thing,
but for fishermen, the threat
to their livelihood is even worse.
[Tor] This is still
the favorite part of my day.
I love, actually, coming up in my loft,
a lot of times in the afternoon
after the busy morning happens...
just sewing the net together.
When you put each panel together,
that type of net
and shape that you create...
to me, like, it's art.
When catch shares came in,
all of a sudden, people lost out.
There was an industry,
just completely ravaged.
You went from 150 boats here
down to 20-something boats
in a matter of three, four years.
[Steve] Back in the day,
I used to have someone help me do this.
[laughs]
I can't keep someone employed, you know.
It's not worth it anymore.
Part-time help, here and there.
[narrator] Steve Welch has been
a fisherman in Plymouth Harbor
and nearby Scituate,
for over 30 years.
Today, his is the only federally permitted
groundfish boat in the entire harbor.
[Steve] I've lost 85 to 90% of the value
of my business because of catch shares.
It's a scam. It's a joke.
Catch shares turned a public resource
into a commodity.
And... it's the nation's fish.
It's not my fish.
It's not Carlos Rafael's fish.
It's the nation's fish, and catch shares
gave people ownership of it.
[Jake Kritzer] Here in New England,
the groundfish fishery is struggling.
But I think the fishery
would have been much worse off,
had we not adopted
this management approach.
[Steve] EDF,
the brainchild of catch shares?
They...
I don't even know what to say about them.
They're living in a fantasy land.
They're in a world of make-believe.
They sit, have meetings.
They have no idea
how the real world works.
Just look what happened
in New England with Carlos Rafael.
[Macinko] I think we're seeing examples
where the fallacy of the belief
that ownership promotes stewardship
is being exposed.
I mean, if private ownership
suddenly made everyone a steward,
then why do we have
the Carlos Rafael case in New England?
[narrator] It turned out
that Carlos Rafael
was not only cashing in on catch shares,
he was cheating the whole time.
Starting in 2015,
undercover federal agents
secretly recorded Rafael
laying out his whole scheme:
how he simply lied
about the fish he caught,
falsified his government reports,
and smuggled the cash to Portugal
through Boston's Logan Airport.
[Carlos, on tape]
I can get the money through.
I have one of the guys in Boston,
one of those fucking agents,
who's my friend,
and give him the money
before I go through security.
[narrator] He was charged with 23 counts
of misreporting his fish,
along with cash smuggling and tax evasion.
This is quite a storm front.
For this time of year, it's very rare.
That is mean looking.
He's gotten away with a lot.
But because he's so big,
he's found a few loopholes,
and tried to stretch them out.
He just got too greedy.
In Boston Federal Court today,
the man known as the Codfather
admitted to more than
two dozen criminal charges...
[narrator] In March of 2017,
the news was picked up
by all the major local stations:
the Codfather had pleaded guilty.
After years of accumulating power,
Rafael's empire was collapsing,
and suddenly, all that quota
was up for grabs.
Fishermen in New Bedford were most
terrified about what would happen next.
[Canastra] If those boats go,
if the quota is taken away
from Carlos Rafael,
it means that the quota could obviously
leave the port of New Bedford.
[Tor] If Carlos is shut down,
it would put a devastation to the port
of New Bedford and my shop, considerably.
You have the fuel industry,
you have the food industry,
you've got the electronics guys,
you've got the gear guys who build gear.
You've got the welders,
the shipyards that repair the boats.
So it's fucked it up,
the whole entire industry.
That one person, who happens to be
the biggest quota owner
under catch shares in New England
has fucked it up for everybody.
I don't know what's going on now,
but I know it's not good.
They don't know what to do.
[narrator] The crimes of Carlos Rafael
have left New Bedford reeling.
EDF says it was the lack of sufficient
monitoring that allowed him to thrive.
But others say Rafael is a symptom
of something much bigger.
The government put a system together
that led to vertical integration
and consolidation.
[Peter Baker] Was it knowable
that consolidation would continue?
Yes, it was.
The consolidation was predicted and...
it is what it is.
[Jake Kritzer] Our management council
is considering accumulation limits now,
and hopefully they will implement that.
We didn't do that in New England
when the system was first put online,
and I think it was a mistake.
Oh, they're full of shit.
They're full of shit.
They're against consolidation?
EDF? Yeah, right.
Yeah, OK.
Now most of the fleet's gone, maybe we're
at the "magic number" that EDF wants.
They're pushing someone else's agenda
and they're going to keep pushing
because that's why they get paid.
They don't get paid to tell the truth,
They don't care about fishermen and fish.
EDF get money from giant corporations
"trying to make the world a better place."
Maybe they feel guilty because
they're fucking everything up.
[narrator] These days,
it's no longer Carlos Rafael
that poses the biggest threat
in the minds of some small fishermen.
It's a far more powerful
and faceless adversary.
The old thing was, "Let's privatize,
and it will just make these
individual fishers better stewards."
The new thing that has started
very recently is,
"Let's start bringing in Wall Street."
[narrator] EDF and other groups have been
actively encouraging financiers
to invest in local fisheries.
[Seth Macinko]
But we know, what happens,
especially if there's an investor
trying to profit out of the fishery,
they own it and they lease
the fish or the fishing rights
back to the people that actually fish.
So, we are slowly transforming
to this corporate-owned fishery,
and the people we used to call fishermen
are put into what I would call
a sharecropper situation.
I don't see this penciling out and
benefiting the fishing poor of the world.
But this is the new rage.
[narrator] In fact, right here
in New Bedford, from 2015 to 2016,
a multinational private equity firm
spent millions of dollars
buying up scalloping permits and boats.
Some fishermen fear
groundfish will be next.
There are still too many of us. They're
still surprised guys are still around.
So, they've still got
to weed out the fleet,
you know, so it's consolidated
into the hands of a few,
and then you're going to see
the big money come in, like in Alaska.
So, I mean, that's what they want,
and it's worse for the consumer, you know.
[Canastra] This is the net
that industry is using
to count the species.
These are all flounders.
This is a skate.
There goes a cod.
[narrator] Today, fishermen
are starting to work with NOAA
to improve how they count the fish,
with the hope it'll lead
to looser catch limits.
But for now, they're still at the mercy
of the global market.
[Richie Canastra] We stand here in
the United States with strict guidelines
on how we fish, how we process...
It really flaws the system
when other countries
can fish the way they want
or farm-raise the way they want,
without us looking at their regulations
and bringing them
into the US marketplace
with uncertainty.
[piano music]
[seagulls cry]
[narrator] And it's that uncertainty that
clouds the future of American fishermen,
and in turn, our own access
to fresh, wild-caught seafood.
[Seth Macinko] One of the things
that's changing is the traditional pathway
to ownership in the fishing industry.
You start out on a small boat
on the back deck.
You become a skipper first,
then maybe buy in
to part-ownership of that boat,
then maybe buy your first boat.
You keep moving
up the line of boat ownership.
Well, now, with the price of quotas,
that path has been abruptly severed.
[Aaron Williams]
The way I learned to fish,
which is how my dad learned how to fish
from my grandfather,
is kind of out the window.
We don't know what we're doing
12 months from now,
because we don't know
what we're gonna be allowed to do
or what fish we'll be given
to go out and catch.
It makes it very hard
to make life choices, business choices.
To think 20 years down the road...
kind of scares me.
Are these for me or the dogs?
The dogs. The doggies.
[Aaron] You know, I'd love for my child
to be able to do what I did,
and do what my dad did,
and do what my grandfather did.
You want a couple yellows, Dad?
[man] Oh, yeah. Great.
That's the boss, who happens to be my dad!
We need some more understanding from
the people that make these regulations.
That would be my hope:
that people would start listening to us.
I mean, we don't have letters
in back of our names,
but we are PhDs in our field.
[narrator] Today, one-third
of American federal fisheries operate
under some kind of a catch share system.
And while fishermen don't all point
to a single alternative,
most agree there should be concrete limits
on how much quota one person can own.
Meanwhile, EDF and other groups
are leading the charge
to implement privatized catch shares
around the world.
[Seth Macinko] People should be
concerned about this.
We could do these programs another way,
but what we're doing is aiding
and abetting a massive act of theft,
and the public gets nothing in return,
except they're told,
"Oh, but we're sort of saving the fish."
And there's clearly so much more going on
than saving the fish.
There is open discussion
about privatizing not just fisheries,
but privatizing the oceans.
These are alternative visions
of the future.
The future.
That's what's at stake.
[tense music]
[serene music]
There we go.
[motor revs]
[steam hisses]
[Aaron] All right, yeah.
Back her out. Let the bow go.
[narrator] In the last 50 years, we have
doubled the amount of fish we consume.
[man] Globally,
billions of people rely on seafood
as their primary source of protein.
[narrator] But the oceans can't keep up
with so much demand.
Around the world, fish stocks have
plummeted and fisheries are crashing.
People lost out. There was
an industry just completely ravaged.
[man] Those in favor,
signify by raising their hand.
[narrator] In the US, the government
stepped in to stave off a crisis,
but some say they have
only made matters worse.
Catch shares is a failure. It's a scam.
It fucking ruined the industry.
[narrator] And today, 94%
of all the fish Americans eat
comes from foreign countries, much of it
farmed under unknowable conditions.
All the fish,
you have no idea where it's coming from.
[man] Many of it frozen,
once, two, three, four times.
All kinds of additives.
[narrator] Meanwhile, American fishermen
are watching their way of life disappear.
Guys have nothing. It's been taken away.
[narrator] But one seafood mogul
who ignored the rules for 30 years
has made a fortune:
Carlos Rafael.
And through it all, the fish in the ocean
are being turned into a commodity
to be traded like a stock or a bond.
We're aiding and abetting
a massive act of theft
and the public gets nothing in return.
[tense orchestral music]
[ominous music]
[tape recording] My name is Carlos Rafael.
I own a fleet in New Bedford.
I consider myself the biggest player,
right now, of this industry.
I employ at the moment
close to 300 fishermen.
I have invested over $50 million
into this business.
I'm not going down.
I'll be the last one falling.
You can rest assured.
One standing up:
me.
Any of these green boats
are Carlos Rafael's fleet.
All the green and white boats here,
you see,
with the "CR" on the front of them,
belong to Carlos Rafael.
[interviewer] How would you
describe his personality?
He's a fisherman. I'll leave it at that.
[narrator] New Bedford, Massachusetts is
the most valuable fishing port
in the United States.
Fishing here puts one billion dollars
into the economy annually.
For more than 30 years,
a huge chunk of that wealth has passed
through the hands of Carlos Rafael,
also known as the Codfather.
You won't find a fisherman
on the New England docks
who doesn't know the Codfather by name,
or by reputation.
[man] He's a maggot. He's a piece
of mosquito shit, as far as I'm concerned.
You know, he freaking lied to people,
to get where he is.
Is he a good human being? I don't know.
I'm no fan of his.
[narrator] But if Carlos Rafael really is
the monster his critics say he is,
he was created in part
by the global fishing crisis.
In fact, he built his empire
by exploiting that crisis,
and then the very regulations
designed to end it.
The rise and fall of Carlos Rafael is
really the story of a poisoned system.
[seagulls squawk in distance]
Richie Canastra has been doing business
with Carlos Rafael for over 20 years.
-[Canastra] Good morning.
-[worker] Morning.
[narrator] Canastra runs
the Whaling City Seafood Display Auction,
where most of New Bedford's fish
is landed.
Morning, Joe. How are you?
Canastra is Portuguese,
and ironically, canastra is a basket
in which the fishermen bring
their catch to market.
Portuguese immigrants in New Bedford,
they really put New Bedford on the map.
[speaks Portuguese]
[narrator] One of those immigrants
was Carlos Rafael.
And this boat, the Sasha Lee,
is one of the 32 that he owns.
She's been dragging her nets
for a week straight
in southern New England.
Now, she's home to unload her haul
of monkfish and skate wings,
and sell to the highest bidder.
[man] The people of New Bedford
literally have the ocean
running through their veins.
We have been identified as a seafood port
for well over 100 years.
We know that if you throw a rock
into New Bedford Harbor,
that ripple is felt around the world.
[narrator] This fish will work its way
around the globe,
and into everything from high-end entrees,
to frozen fish-sticks, to pet food.
The global seafood industry
is extremely complex.
It's multinational.
[Baker] Fish caught here in New England,
like dogfish,
the belly flaps go to Germany.
Other parts of the fish go to Korea
for the Korean domestic market.
The bluefin tuna that are caught here
are flown in airplanes to Japan,
if they're sushi-grade,
and sold on the Tokyo fish market
a day after they're caught in New England.
You know, we have salmon from Chile
and Norway and Scotland in our markets.
-[fisherman] OK, it's there!
-Yes.
[narrator] The world's fisheries are
more interconnected than ever.
The price of cod from Iceland,
or halibut from Norway,
can have a huge impact on profits
here in New England.
-All set, Joe?
-Alright.
[narrator] One of the biggest global
markets for all that product is the US.
In 2015, Americans devoured
nearly 5 billion pounds of seafood,
spending $96 billion,
and making the US
the world's second-largest
seafood consumer, after China.
[interviewer] What do you like
about this business?
The money!
This room, you get scallops
that came in this morning.
And we have 1,200 pounds...
1,218 pounds of scallops in this one vat.
So, they'll go
for about $13 a pound.
This is $18,000 right here.
It's crazy.
This whole room,
you're looking at half a million dollars.
Just in these three rows.
[narrator] There's always been a fortune
to be made in New England seafood.
The ocean crop that built this business
were bottom-dwelling species
like haddock, flounder, and cod,
known in the trade as "groundfish."
They're mild, sweet, and plentiful.
Perfect for harvesting in huge numbers
and selling to the global market.
A single boatload of this fish
can bring in upwards of $50,000.
But today, many fishermen
are just barely getting by.
When I was a kid, we had a nice place
in the West End, a swimming pool,
and then when the government
came down on it,
we pretty much, you know, lost everything.
My father started out as a long-liner,
catching, like, swordfish.
And they fished that out, you know,
and then there wasn't anything left
so he went scalloping,
and then they fished that out,
and then the regulations started.
It's just been a mess, my whole life.
[soft droning music]
[narrator] For thousands of years,
the world's oceans were a source
of legendary abundance.
There were simply more fish
than humans could ever possibly consume.
Until, one day, there weren't.
[man] From the period
of the late 1960s, early 1970s,
we saw the advent
of very large foreign fishing fleets.
These were fleets which were going
to all parts of the world
and removing vast quantities of fish
from these different ecosystems.
[narrator]
The fishing grounds off New England
were especially attractive to those ships.
Well, they say that back in the day,
you could look out off of the beach
in Point Judith, Rhode Island,
and see the skies lit up by the lights
of the foreign factory boats.
They ended up taking so much herring
out of the water off the New England coast
that they crashed the herring stock.
We saw the collapse of the cod fishery.
The striped bass fishery
at one point collapsed.
[narrator] It was clear to fishermen,
and to politicians who wanted their votes,
that something had to be done.
In 1976, Congress passed the Magnuson Act,
and what that said
was that only American fishermen are
allowed within 200 miles of shore to fish.
[Seth Macinko]
President Ford signed it into law.
It's an overnight sort of revolution.
[narrator] To make sure American fishermen
could exploit the opportunity,
the federal government
offered to help out.
[Macinko] There was a Fishing Vessel
Loan Guarantee Program,
the US government
was helping provide low-cost loans,
and people thought of this as a good thing
from the very beginning
because they wanted
to grow the domestic fleet
to go out and capture
these newly-claimed fishery resources.
[narrator] The fishing life
was the American dream.
[Steve Welch] I was in school at the time,
but I was always getting in trouble, so...
once I got a job on a fishing boat,
I felt proud, I felt happy.
So I ended up fishing
for a couple of years, saving money.
Then I bought my first boat, and then
I improved my business along the way.
I'm really thankful for the opportunity
to start my own business like that.
[narrator] Those small,
owner-operated boats
became more efficient,
and the business more lucrative,
but the fish were being drained
from the sea.
The federal government
had protected the fishing business,
but not the fish.
[Peter Baker] We got to the point
where we had about 1,500 cod boats,
just in New England.
But the fleet grew too big,
and the scientists in the late '80s
and early '90s started warning
that the cod stocks in New England
were headed for a crash.
[narrator] Cod, that mainstay
of New England groundfishing,
was disappearing,
along with plenty of other species
around the world.
The global fishing crisis had arrived.
In the US,
the government stepped in once again,
this time, to save US fishermen
from themselves.
[quiet background chatter]
[man] Call the vote. Those in favor,
signify by raising their hand.
[narrator] Congress put the fate
of the fishing industry
in the hands of eight regional councils.
[man] Motion passes,
17 to zero, to zero.
[narrator] The councils set limits
on how much of each species
fishermen could catch.
You had the scientists on one side
waving the flag, saying,
"There's gonna be a crash.
We need to take action now."
And you had the fishing industry
on the other side, saying,
"I got bills to pay.
I got mortgages to pay.
I need to go make some money now."
And in the middle were the managers,
trying to decide how they were going
to make regulations
that staved off the crash,
but also allowed
as much of the fishing industry
to stay in business as they could.
[narrator] The arguments have raged
for two generations.
I do appreciate the comments
made by industry,
and I've said many times
that our requirement
is to use best available science.
"Best available" is not perfect science,
it's best available.
And it's an elusive truth.
[narrator] The science in this case:
counting the numbers of fish in the sea.
[Jon Hare] Trying to understand how many
of anything there are is difficult.
But with fish, you're dealing
with something underwater
that you can't see directly,
and the areas over which
we're working are vast.
-[interviewer] And they move.
-And they move.
So we use
these scientific sampling designs
to estimate the distribution
of the populations, and the numbers.
But it is a very indirect approach.
[narrator] The agency tasked with that job
is the National Marine Fisheries Service,
a part of the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
For fishermen,
how much they can catch depends
on the results of NOAA's measurements.
Another critical component of assessments
are the information
about the age and growth
of the population.
[narrator] As a fish grows,
a tiny ear bone, called an otolith,
develops distinct layers,
like the rings of a tree.
From those samples, we can estimate
the age of the individual
and then look at age patterns
in the population over time.
And that information is also used
in the assessments.
[motor whirrs]
[narrator] Many fishermen
have a different take.
They think the government scientists
don't know enough about catching fish
to get accurate numbers in their counts,
and that NOAA is underestimating
the number of fish in the ocean.
-Let's do one for cod and three for dogs.
-[woman] OK.
-See, plenty of skates!
-[woman] Plenty.
It's kind of a unique spot
this time of year.
You'll have codfish,
you'll have seabass,
flounders and yellowtails,
all mixed together.
The big gap between everything, right now,
is what we see and what science sees.
And it does not line up.
It's never close.
It's not even within the same ballpark.
[Aaron] Our science is, as a fisherman:
we want to be able to have a future.
There's good reason why people think
that there's something...
grossly wrong with the assessment.
We're buying into this empirical approach
because it's all you got, but it's weak.
[narrator] More than anything,
fishermen wanted their voices heard
in the policymaking.
Most felt like that wasn't happening.
[Steve Welch] I've been going
to meetings since 1994.
Not one meeting
was I ever given anything back.
I was always there negotiating
not to give something up.
We don't have a say anymore. Fishermen
don't have a say, that's the problem.
A lot of the leaders of
the groundfish industry in New England
have really been at war
with the science for decades.
And so you have this mistrust between
the scientists and the fishermen.
But the cod stocks certainly crashed.
I think it would be hard for anybody
to credibly try and deny that.
[narrator] Meanwhile, more and more
foreign fish was flooding into the market,
much of it landed by factory ships
with little regard
for the impact on fish stocks.
And thanks to cheap labor and transport,
elaborate international supply chains
became profitable.
[Welch] They're catching fish
and freezing it onboard,
shipping it to China,
thawing it out, processing it,
chemically treating it, refreezing it,
shipping it back here...
[Scott Lang] And it's being used in many
products and cooked and overcooked...
There's no truth in labeling,
when it comes to foreign fish
coming into the United States.
[narrator] Throughout the 1990s,
NOAA did their best
to rebuild the Atlantic groundfish stocks
by cutting the number of days
fishermen could fish,
and limiting how much
they could bring in on a single trip.
But profit margins
continued to evaporate.
Many smaller operators
simply couldn't stay in business.
They sold off their boats.
[fisherman] The small boat fleet
is in serious trouble right now.
If there isn't something done quickly
we're gonna lose them. Thank you.
You started seeing businesses failing
and fishermen leaving the fishery.
We saw the fleet go from about 1,500 boats
to less than 350 boats.
So we saw about 80% of the fleet
go out of business.
[narrator] The larger operators
saw their opportunity.
Among them was Carlos Rafael:
the Codfather.
One by one, he bought the fishing permits
of the smaller operators
as they left the business,
until he grew to be
the biggest player in the northeast.
He opened up a seafood processing plant.
He began, in this situation,
to develop a vertical integration
regarding his particular business.
[narrator] He also built up
a long rap sheet of convictions,
indictments, and fines,
for everything from tax evasion
to lethal working conditions on his boats.
None of it slowed Carlos down.
Meanwhile, according to NOAA's numbers,
their strategy to save the groundfish
wasn't working.
So NOAA got behind a new plan:
catch shares.
The term "catch shares"
basically means any system
by which an allowable catch,
a quota of fish, is established
and then divided up amongst individuals
or groups of fishermen.
[narrator] Under this proposal,
the government would place a ceiling
on the amount of each species that could
be pulled from the sea each year.
That would be the "total allowable catch."
That total would then be divvied up among
all the active fishermen in New England
as individual quotas.
It sounds logical enough,
but catch shares quickly became
one of the most controversial pieces
of fishing regulation in US history.
We had a problem of overfishing in
the mid-'90s. I'll admit it. I don't care.
Then we jump to catch shares,
and shares is going to save the industry.
It ruined the industry.
[narrator] NOAA didn't come up with
the idea for catch shares on their own.
It was largely the result of years
of advocacy by an influential group:
the Environmental Defense Fund.
EDF was instrumental
in getting DDT banned in 1972,
and ever since,
they've been one of the most effective
environmental groups in the country.
[man] Well, our tagline is
"Finding the ways that work."
So that means a focus
on economic incentives,
on market-based mechanisms.
[narrator] EDF's strategy is
to partner with corporations,
instead of declaring war on them,
and they're known for their pro-business,
free-market philosophy.
With catch shares, they hoped to upend
the fishing industry in order to save it.
[Jake Kritzer] What catch shares
are trying to do is to provide fishermen
with greater security and more flexibility
in how they go about
running their business.
They're also trying to make sure
that all participants are accountable
for working within the regulations.
And if you have those pieces in place,
often you'll find that you can have
a successful fishery.
[narrator] With the kind of catch shares
EDF was proposing,
each fisherman's share or quota
becomes his or her private property.
The fisherman can sell it, lease it,
or buy more of it from whoever is selling.
That's where this becomes
more of a market-based approach.
That there's a leasing market,
that allows quota
to move around fishermen as needed,
so that it's fully utilized
and so that everyone benefits.
[narrator]
The goal was responsible fishing.
But critics say it was really about
privatizing a public resource:
the fish in the sea.
[Seth Macinko] There's different ways
you could do catch shares,
but EDF is the leading spokesgroup
for a fully privatized model.
There's this belief that if you convert
the fishery to private ownership,
the private owners will suddenly be
incentivized to become good stewards,
they will take care of it, and voilà,
we've solved the conservation problem.
[narrator] EDF claims that catch shares
have worked in many regions.
That in Alaska they helped
Bering sea crab rebound,
and in the Gulf of Mexico,
red snapper has seen a comeback.
There is no shortage of stories out there
of fisheries that were
once severely depleted,
that had fleets that were
struggling economically,
that are thriving now.
We've seen it happen and I'm confident
we'll see it happen here.
I don't think I could get up every morning
and do what I do, if I believed otherwise.
[narrator] But to opponents of the system,
privatizing a public resource
is simply not the answer.
[Seth Macinko]
Let's take a look at human history.
Have we ever seen a private owner
abuse the land?
Have we ever seen a private owner
abuse the air?
We see numerous cases around the globe
where people are cheating
on the very privatized system
which was supposed
to turn them all into stewards.
So, I think it falls on its face.
[narrator] EDF insists that catch shares
are not a form of privatization at all.
In the United States,
you cannot privatize the oceans.
Legally, these are public resources.
They are co-owned
by everyone in this country.
So, what we're doing
when we implement a catch share system
is allocating a privilege to earn a living
off of a portion of a public resource,
to professional fishermen.
I think that's a good thing.
I think it's a good thing for the nation,
good for the industry.
[narrator] This issue of privatizing
the fish would lead to a pitched battle
between fishermen,
environmental groups, and regulators
that is still being felt today.
Alright.
Morning, guys. Morning, Dad.
Alright, so tell Delsin and he'll have
that put on the truck with the two bales.
-Alright.
-[man] Alright.
Did they tell you about the pallet
of chain going down?
-Four half-inch barrels.
-Yeah. Alright. Thank you.
[narrator] Tor Bendiksen is
a second-generation fisherman
who now runs
the family fishing supply business.
[Tor] I started fishing at the age of 13
on my father's boat.
That was those first years where they went
from really no major regulation
to actually hard-set regulations.
Brand new trawl, ready to go.
And then they instituted catch shares,
where the intent from EDF, they said,
"This is going to protect small boats."
And we said, "No, no.
It doesn't. Look at Iceland.
It devastated the fishing community
where, all of a sudden, five or six people
in Iceland owned majority of the quota
because they bought it all up."
[melancholy piano music]
This sound from this bird has...
a special place in the mind of Icelanders.
It's called that the bird is "oo-ing."
For me, it's very special to hear this.
It's beautiful.
[birdsong]
[narrator] Arthur Bogason
is a lifelong fisherman
and perhaps Iceland's most vocal opponent
of privatized catch shares.
[Arthur Bogason] In the beginning,
there were 1,043 small boats in Iceland.
Today, we have about
10% of these boats left.
About 10%.
This part of the small boat sector
is out, basically.
[narrator] Like New England,
Iceland saw their cod stocks plummeting.
So the government put in place
a form of catch shares for small boats
15 years before the same strategy
was even suggested in New England.
It happened this way.
The government started to cut down
the quotas for the cod.
This meant that those guys
with small quotas
couldn't see a way of living out of it.
They were simply forced to sell.
They had no other way.
This is my kingdom here.
It's a very small boat, as you can see.
[narrator] Small-boat Icelandic fishermen
went out of business, one by one.
Their quotas were snapped up
by larger operations with plenty of cash.
It was a classic case of consolidation:
the transfer of ownership, and power,
into fewer hands.
At the same time,
according to the economists who helped
create catch shares in Iceland,
the cod population did rebound,
which, to them, means the program worked.
[man] My name is Ragnar Arnason.
I was involved from the very beginning
as an economist,
as a specialist in natural resources,
and with special knowledge
about management of fisheries.
It's been a huge success.
Fish stocks have expanded.
Profitability has gone up greatly,
and is increasing all the time.
The profitability means that capital
has become available for investments.
So economic growth has expanded
on the basis
of this reorganization
of the fishing activity.
We are in Hafnarfjordur Harbor,
which is probably the biggest
small boat harbor in the country.
[in Icelandic] Good afternoon.
How are you?
[in Icelandic] Tell me, is there any news
of the hand line catch?
[in Icelandic] No, but the long-liners
made a good catch yesterday.
OK.
[Arthur] This is all about economics,
making as big profits as possible.
Now, the profit from the fisheries goes
into the pocket of a few,
instead of in the old days,
when we had a much larger number of ships
and companies working on fish.
This has consequences beyond description.
Why do the economists always
leave this out of the equation?
If the science of economics
is not better than that,
that they cannot calculate all the costs,
then they shouldn't bother,
then they should go do something else.
There's some nice cods here.
See this?
There are downsides to the system,
that depend on your perspectives.
It's much more a capitalistic industry,
almost like a factory.
And I think every population
has to decide,
do they want to have higher income
and be more competitive
in the global marketplace,
or do they want
to maintain the old traditions?
What if, when we were still
at the Stone Age level,
that the wheel was going
to change everything,
and therefore we would be better off
without the wheel?
[Arthur] It's a system of privatization.
And it's foolish of people,
trying to talk their way around it.
It is privatization, as clear as it gets.
At some point, this will go too far
and people will start to realize
how wrong this is.
I was once in New England, even,
and there, I gave a speech
and I described exactly what was going on.
And what I hear is that now,
you have the system there.
So they now will taste the same
as we have been tasting here.
[Scott Lang]
The consequences of catch shares,
you would see coming a mile away.
You didn't have to be a genius.
We were against catch shares
from day one: meaning the industry,
meaning the mayors of the port cities...
We felt that it was going
to lead to consolidation.
More and more people would be driven out.
[narrator] There are protections that can
be made as part of a catch shares system
to prevent the kind of consolidation
that happened in Iceland.
One of the ways is by putting in place
an accumulation limit,
by saying, "Any individual fisherman
or fishing cooperative
can only hold so much of the quota."
You limit how much any one entity
can control in the fishery.
[narrator] It was up to
the New England Fisheries Council
to impose limits on consolidation.
Fishermen brought their fight
straight to the Capitol.
But we need to start caring
as much about our fishermen
as we do about our fish!
The days of managing our fisheries
with ideology
need to come to an end, once and for all!
[narrator] But opponents of catch shares
say they were simply outgunned.
EDF has deep pockets:
millions of dollars in donations from
powerful non-profits with corporate ties,
like the Walton Family Foundation,
of Walmart fame,
and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation,
created by the founder of Intel.
They have also had the support
of far-right libertarian groups,
like the Charles Koch Foundation,
who share EDF's free market ideology.
And EDF had access
to the corridors of power.
[Seth Macinko] One of the things that's
fairly well-known within the fishery
is the relationship
between some of the parties
involved in pushing
for privatized catch shares
and NOAA, the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.
[narrator] EDF and its backers were
about to have one of their own
in command of NOAA,
and therefore all federal fisheries.
Doctor Jane Lubchenco has accepted my
nomination as the Administrator of NOAA.
[narrator] Up until her appointment
by President Obama
as the head of NOAA in 2009,
Jane Lubchenco was vice-chair
of the board of trustees at EDF.
In her government role,
Lubchenco was a huge catch shares booster,
and pushed for their implementation
in New England.
She declined to be interviewed
for this documentary.
[Lang] She had a specific agenda
to bring catch shares into New England.
And she did everything she needed to,
to make sure that happened.
[narrator] Catch shares became law
in New England in 2010.
[Baker] There was a big push
to put consolidation limits in place
and to cap the amount
that people could own,
but ultimately, those ideas
didn't make it into the final plan.
[narrator] For boat owners with
a lot of quota or the money to buy it,
catch shares worked out.
Carlos Rafael was one of them.
He snatched up around 25% of all
the groundfish quota in New England,
as his fleet continued
to spread out across the Atlantic.
For nearly everyone else,
it's been a disaster.
[Scott Lang] The effect was as bad,
if not worse, than what was predicted.
There was absolutely no parachute
whatsoever. This was free-fall.
[narrator] The effect of catch shares
was immediately felt
in fishermen's day-to-day work.
[Aaron] We're allowed to catch so much
for the year, you know, of each species.
What we have for the year is what
we used to do in a day, sometimes,
or a two-day trip.
[narrator] And any time
Aaron catches more than his share,
he has to call in to shore and buy
more quota from another fisherman.
[Aaron] This would be about our yearly
limit of codfish, right here in this box.
So anything elsewhere from this box,
we're gonna have to buy the quota.
But it's just crazy when you look at it,
that this is all we're allowed
for the year!
We could literally catch more fish
if we were to go on a charter boat,
and charter it for the day.
A lot of areas, guys-- they're afraid
of catching something
they don't have enough quota for,
so your mental picture of where
you want to fish for the day changes,
because there's a possibility
you might catch something
you don't have enough quota for,
nor have the money to purchase the quota.
To buy fish to go catch it, to me,
is the most backwards thing
I've ever heard of.
[narrator] The ripple effect
of catch shares is felt every day
in every restaurant
and every supermarket in America.
[Scott Lang] All the fish you want,
you have no idea where it's coming from.
The government thought that if you brought
in less fish, there would be more demand.
It would hike the price up
for fresh seafood.
The consumer would desire
fresh American seafood
and want to pay a premium
in order to get that fresh seafood.
What they did not take into account
was that the market was flooded
with foreign seafood,
many of it frozen, once, two, three,
four times, all kinds of additives.
As that fresh cod or that fresh seafood
had less and less demand,
it began losing its shelf space.
[Steve Welch]
Nothing better than fresh fish.
When you start taking all that fish
and consolidating it
into the hands of a few people,
then you lose that connection,
you're going to lose that quality product
that I, and people like myself, bring in.
[narrator] And it's the cheap stuff
from overseas, like tilapia and catfish,
that often takes its place,
much of it farmed
in unsanitary conditions.
In fact, foreign seafood
is rejected by US inspectors
at a higher rate
than any other food product,
and the number one reason is filth.
[Aaron] Now, this thing can be grown
anywhere, in a five-gallon bucket.
That's what people are eating
and what they think good fish is,
when we have an ocean full of fish
right here in this country,
wild caught seafood,
an incredible food source.
This country fishes under some
of the strictest regulations in the world,
and we fish sustainably,
and we fish and follow these rules.
No one cares more about this ocean
than we do.
[ominous music]
[voice over walkie-talkie]
Roger. The Tradition standing by 16-17.
[narrator] As for the fishermen,
they never really escape
the pressures of regulation.
They can be boarded and inspected
by the coast guard without warning.
-How you guys doing?
-Good.
So, IDs for everybody.
Is this everybody, right here?
Yes.
And Nadia's license is expired,
but she has her passport.
And wasn't there a gentleman
that didn't have...
Yeah, my nephew.
If he could come in, and I'll
just get on a piece of paper...
[tense music]
[man] I want these guys safe.
We make sure they have
their flares, their life raft,
their survival suits, stuff like that.
I want them going home to their families.
Their fish, that's another story.
I still want, you know,
the safety of the catch
and whatever they're prescribed
to have on board, obviously.
[narrator]
The coast guard checks everything
from the species of the fish
in the hold...
to the size of the holes in Aaron's net,
to make sure he's not catching fish
that are too small.
-Thanks, guys.
-Take care. Have a good day. Thank you.
-Take care, guys. Thank you.
-[inspector] Good luck.
[Aaron sighs]
[Aaron] Never a dull moment!
With the coast guard coming aboard
my knees were shaking.
You're hoping you've got
every "I" dotted and every "T" crossed.
Even though I know
I had nothing to be worried about,
you still get... the jitters, you know.
[narrator] Daily anxieties
about regulations are one thing,
but for fishermen, the threat
to their livelihood is even worse.
[Tor] This is still
the favorite part of my day.
I love, actually, coming up in my loft,
a lot of times in the afternoon
after the busy morning happens...
just sewing the net together.
When you put each panel together,
that type of net
and shape that you create...
to me, like, it's art.
When catch shares came in,
all of a sudden, people lost out.
There was an industry,
just completely ravaged.
You went from 150 boats here
down to 20-something boats
in a matter of three, four years.
[Steve] Back in the day,
I used to have someone help me do this.
[laughs]
I can't keep someone employed, you know.
It's not worth it anymore.
Part-time help, here and there.
[narrator] Steve Welch has been
a fisherman in Plymouth Harbor
and nearby Scituate,
for over 30 years.
Today, his is the only federally permitted
groundfish boat in the entire harbor.
[Steve] I've lost 85 to 90% of the value
of my business because of catch shares.
It's a scam. It's a joke.
Catch shares turned a public resource
into a commodity.
And... it's the nation's fish.
It's not my fish.
It's not Carlos Rafael's fish.
It's the nation's fish, and catch shares
gave people ownership of it.
[Jake Kritzer] Here in New England,
the groundfish fishery is struggling.
But I think the fishery
would have been much worse off,
had we not adopted
this management approach.
[Steve] EDF,
the brainchild of catch shares?
They...
I don't even know what to say about them.
They're living in a fantasy land.
They're in a world of make-believe.
They sit, have meetings.
They have no idea
how the real world works.
Just look what happened
in New England with Carlos Rafael.
[Macinko] I think we're seeing examples
where the fallacy of the belief
that ownership promotes stewardship
is being exposed.
I mean, if private ownership
suddenly made everyone a steward,
then why do we have
the Carlos Rafael case in New England?
[narrator] It turned out
that Carlos Rafael
was not only cashing in on catch shares,
he was cheating the whole time.
Starting in 2015,
undercover federal agents
secretly recorded Rafael
laying out his whole scheme:
how he simply lied
about the fish he caught,
falsified his government reports,
and smuggled the cash to Portugal
through Boston's Logan Airport.
[Carlos, on tape]
I can get the money through.
I have one of the guys in Boston,
one of those fucking agents,
who's my friend,
and give him the money
before I go through security.
[narrator] He was charged with 23 counts
of misreporting his fish,
along with cash smuggling and tax evasion.
This is quite a storm front.
For this time of year, it's very rare.
That is mean looking.
He's gotten away with a lot.
But because he's so big,
he's found a few loopholes,
and tried to stretch them out.
He just got too greedy.
In Boston Federal Court today,
the man known as the Codfather
admitted to more than
two dozen criminal charges...
[narrator] In March of 2017,
the news was picked up
by all the major local stations:
the Codfather had pleaded guilty.
After years of accumulating power,
Rafael's empire was collapsing,
and suddenly, all that quota
was up for grabs.
Fishermen in New Bedford were most
terrified about what would happen next.
[Canastra] If those boats go,
if the quota is taken away
from Carlos Rafael,
it means that the quota could obviously
leave the port of New Bedford.
[Tor] If Carlos is shut down,
it would put a devastation to the port
of New Bedford and my shop, considerably.
You have the fuel industry,
you have the food industry,
you've got the electronics guys,
you've got the gear guys who build gear.
You've got the welders,
the shipyards that repair the boats.
So it's fucked it up,
the whole entire industry.
That one person, who happens to be
the biggest quota owner
under catch shares in New England
has fucked it up for everybody.
I don't know what's going on now,
but I know it's not good.
They don't know what to do.
[narrator] The crimes of Carlos Rafael
have left New Bedford reeling.
EDF says it was the lack of sufficient
monitoring that allowed him to thrive.
But others say Rafael is a symptom
of something much bigger.
The government put a system together
that led to vertical integration
and consolidation.
[Peter Baker] Was it knowable
that consolidation would continue?
Yes, it was.
The consolidation was predicted and...
it is what it is.
[Jake Kritzer] Our management council
is considering accumulation limits now,
and hopefully they will implement that.
We didn't do that in New England
when the system was first put online,
and I think it was a mistake.
Oh, they're full of shit.
They're full of shit.
They're against consolidation?
EDF? Yeah, right.
Yeah, OK.
Now most of the fleet's gone, maybe we're
at the "magic number" that EDF wants.
They're pushing someone else's agenda
and they're going to keep pushing
because that's why they get paid.
They don't get paid to tell the truth,
They don't care about fishermen and fish.
EDF get money from giant corporations
"trying to make the world a better place."
Maybe they feel guilty because
they're fucking everything up.
[narrator] These days,
it's no longer Carlos Rafael
that poses the biggest threat
in the minds of some small fishermen.
It's a far more powerful
and faceless adversary.
The old thing was, "Let's privatize,
and it will just make these
individual fishers better stewards."
The new thing that has started
very recently is,
"Let's start bringing in Wall Street."
[narrator] EDF and other groups have been
actively encouraging financiers
to invest in local fisheries.
[Seth Macinko]
But we know, what happens,
especially if there's an investor
trying to profit out of the fishery,
they own it and they lease
the fish or the fishing rights
back to the people that actually fish.
So, we are slowly transforming
to this corporate-owned fishery,
and the people we used to call fishermen
are put into what I would call
a sharecropper situation.
I don't see this penciling out and
benefiting the fishing poor of the world.
But this is the new rage.
[narrator] In fact, right here
in New Bedford, from 2015 to 2016,
a multinational private equity firm
spent millions of dollars
buying up scalloping permits and boats.
Some fishermen fear
groundfish will be next.
There are still too many of us. They're
still surprised guys are still around.
So, they've still got
to weed out the fleet,
you know, so it's consolidated
into the hands of a few,
and then you're going to see
the big money come in, like in Alaska.
So, I mean, that's what they want,
and it's worse for the consumer, you know.
[Canastra] This is the net
that industry is using
to count the species.
These are all flounders.
This is a skate.
There goes a cod.
[narrator] Today, fishermen
are starting to work with NOAA
to improve how they count the fish,
with the hope it'll lead
to looser catch limits.
But for now, they're still at the mercy
of the global market.
[Richie Canastra] We stand here in
the United States with strict guidelines
on how we fish, how we process...
It really flaws the system
when other countries
can fish the way they want
or farm-raise the way they want,
without us looking at their regulations
and bringing them
into the US marketplace
with uncertainty.
[piano music]
[seagulls cry]
[narrator] And it's that uncertainty that
clouds the future of American fishermen,
and in turn, our own access
to fresh, wild-caught seafood.
[Seth Macinko] One of the things
that's changing is the traditional pathway
to ownership in the fishing industry.
You start out on a small boat
on the back deck.
You become a skipper first,
then maybe buy in
to part-ownership of that boat,
then maybe buy your first boat.
You keep moving
up the line of boat ownership.
Well, now, with the price of quotas,
that path has been abruptly severed.
[Aaron Williams]
The way I learned to fish,
which is how my dad learned how to fish
from my grandfather,
is kind of out the window.
We don't know what we're doing
12 months from now,
because we don't know
what we're gonna be allowed to do
or what fish we'll be given
to go out and catch.
It makes it very hard
to make life choices, business choices.
To think 20 years down the road...
kind of scares me.
Are these for me or the dogs?
The dogs. The doggies.
[Aaron] You know, I'd love for my child
to be able to do what I did,
and do what my dad did,
and do what my grandfather did.
You want a couple yellows, Dad?
[man] Oh, yeah. Great.
That's the boss, who happens to be my dad!
We need some more understanding from
the people that make these regulations.
That would be my hope:
that people would start listening to us.
I mean, we don't have letters
in back of our names,
but we are PhDs in our field.
[narrator] Today, one-third
of American federal fisheries operate
under some kind of a catch share system.
And while fishermen don't all point
to a single alternative,
most agree there should be concrete limits
on how much quota one person can own.
Meanwhile, EDF and other groups
are leading the charge
to implement privatized catch shares
around the world.
[Seth Macinko] People should be
concerned about this.
We could do these programs another way,
but what we're doing is aiding
and abetting a massive act of theft,
and the public gets nothing in return,
except they're told,
"Oh, but we're sort of saving the fish."
And there's clearly so much more going on
than saving the fish.
There is open discussion
about privatizing not just fisheries,
but privatizing the oceans.
These are alternative visions
of the future.
The future.
That's what's at stake.
[tense music]