US Fisheries Policy Backlash: How Corporate Lobbying and Climate Inaction Undermine Coastal Communities Globally
Original framing: “Trump tried to make allies of fishermen. Some are turning on him - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The piece silences women like *Maine’s* *Susan Jakes*, a lobster fisher who co-founded the *Women’s Lobster Cooperative* after being excluded from male-dominated quota systems. A 2020 *FAO report* found that women in fisheries—who make up 47% of the global labor force—earn 20% less and own <5% of boats, yet their knowledge of sustainable practices (e.g., *handline fishing*) is rarely cited in policy. In Alaska, *Yup’ik* women like *Marie Hunt* have led *cultural burning* projects to restore salmon habitats, a practice ignored in mainstream fisheries discourse. The *Black Fishermen’s Association* also highlights racial disparities in access to federal relief funds.
The AP’s framing obscures how Trump’s fisheries policy is not an aberration but the culmination of a *centuries-old pattern*: colonial dispossession (e.g.
, *General Court of Massachusetts’ 1630* ‘fish laws’), corporate capture of commons (e.g., *19th-century* ‘salmon cannery’ monopolies), and climate-induced collapse (e.g., *1992 cod crash*). The ‘allies turning on him’ narrative erases that fishers are *not* Trump’s allies but victims of a system where *NOAA’s 2023 budget* prioritizes military sonar testing over coastal resilience, while *lobbyists for the National Fisheries Institute* spent $12M in 2022 to block climate adaptation funding. The solution lies in *restoring Indigenous stewardship* (e.g., *Haida Gwaii’s* 40% higher biomass in MPAs), *unionizing fishers* (as in *Newfoundland’s* successful strikes), and *global solidarity* (e.g., *Peru’s dynamic zoning*), but these require dismantling the *corporate-media-policy axis* that profits from the illusion of choice. The trickster here is *time*—the delay between ecological collapse and political action, exposed when fishers, like *Coyote*, refuse to play the game any longer.