Groundfish war heats up in North Pacific.

• Author: Gay, Joel
• Position: Competition in groundfish processing industry

Competition over the substantial groundfish stocks of the North Pacific has always been keen, but mostly confined to the cold gray waters of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, and the boats that fish there. Annual North Pacific harvests have netted nearly $1 billion worth of pollock, cod, sole and other fish.

Now, the boat-to-boat competition over catching the fish is overshadowed by the question of who gets to process them. Civil war has erupted between the two main components of the groundfish processing industry -- shore-based plants in Alaska and at-sea processors based mainly in Seattle. And competition has moved from the open ocean into federal courtrooms and Capitol Hill. By all accounts, Alaska's economic future is tied to the outcome.

This battle between inshore and offshore processors is rooted in a biological dilemma: Fish start spoiling as soon as they leave the water. Drying, salting, smoking and icing boost the shelf life of a fish, but fear of spoilage had kept fishing boats close to port.

That changed in 1954 when an English fishing company launched the Fairtry I, the world's first factory trawler. Not only could it catch fish, this new breed of vessel had equipment aboard for heading, gutting, filleting and freezing. Distance from port no longer mattered. Within a few years, every major fishing nation in the world had a distant-water fleet, and every productive fishing area, no matter how remote, was open territory.

It didn't take long for these enormous ships with their insatiable appetites to strip-mine and clear-cut the world's fish resources. Vessels could fish within 12 miles of American shores, for example, and closer than that when no one was watching.

But the free-for-all ended in 1976 when the United States passed the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act, unilaterally adopting the world's first "exclusive economic zone" (EEZ) and taking complete control over the natural resources within 200 miles of U.S. coasts. Almost overnight the United States became a major power in international fisheries, not because it had a distant-water fleet, but because the North Pacific was among the last bountiful fishing grounds in the world and the United States now controlled it.

Managing the new American fisheries fell to eight councils created from New England through the Gulf of Mexico and from San Diego to the Arctic. Ultimate authority rests with the secretary of commerce, but off Alaska's coast, the North Pacific...