The state can't clean up playing the shell game.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: North Carolina's oyster programs

Four years ago, powerful people from across the state rallied for a lowly mollusk that spends most of its life stuck in one place. Scientists, fishermen and politicians assembled in Wilmington for what they dubbed the North Carolina Oyster Summit. Even Gov. Jim Hunt came.

The consensus: The state's oyster harvest, already at its lowest level since record keeping began at the turn of the century, might disappear if something wasn't done. The causes were evident - over fishing, coastal development and Perkinsus marinus, a microscopic oyster-killing parasite commonly known as dermo - the solutions, much less so.

The General Assembly appoint-ed a 19-member commission to do a year-long study and recommend ways to save the oyster and, with it, the fisherman and shucking houses it supports. It concluded that states like Louisiana and Connecticut were beating North Carolina by encouraging aquaculture in place of wild harvest. In 1995, Louisiana leased 360,000 acres of public water to oyster farmers. North Carolina leased 2,600. More important, though, was the need to clean up the oysters' habitat, the state's estuaries.

But for the most part, the Division of Marine Fisheries has just kept doing what it has done for decades: dumping shells back in the water to create reefs - oysters' favorite place to affix themselves is other oysters and paying fishermen to move oysters from polluted waters to clean ones.

The state spent $800,000 last year to plant shells and $20,000 to $30,000 to move oysters. The 47,000-bushel harvest had a market value of $1.1 million. "For the dollars it returns," says Raymond Graham, a Newport shellfish dealer and fisherman, "they are just throwing the money away."

It shows the stubborn ability of state programs, even those that don't work, to survive. The current programs are a lot cheaper - and much less politically painful - than paying to clean up the pollution. But, points out Manteo Democrat Marc Basnight, president pro tem of the state Senate, "all you attempt to do for oysters will go for naught unless you start cleaning the water."

The programs ignore a fundamental market force: demand. A bushel of North Carolina oysters wholesales for $21. Oysters from the Gulf of Mexico, which are more abundant, can be had for $14. That this state's fishery survives at all is a testament to East Coast chauvinism.

The state has been dumping shells since at least 1915. All the while, oyster harvests have kept falling, from about 1.8...