The Fraser River Salmon Table Society is working toward consensus, said Richard McGuigan, PhD, co-chair of the salmon table (along with Marcel Shepert, Pacific Salmon Treaty) during the meeting in Prince George, BC, Sep 18 07, at the Prince George Native Friendship Centre.
Dr. McGuigan said, “Cooperative Decision Management is the way to achieve consensus,” for the fledgling table society.
By this emerging method interest-based negotiations are conducted through (three) stages and everybody abides by a final consensus. Cooperative Decision Management allows no veto to any party, and is not co-management, which, “has a negative reputation and gives regulators a lot of power,” said co-chair McGuigan.
The salmon table process must respect the ability of First Nations to represent their constituencies, said Doug Kelly, Sto:lo Tribal Council, “especially regarding the inter-tribal treaty process.” The table is open as long as Aboriginal rights and title are respected.
David Moore worked on table planning, “One goal of the salmon table is to create transparency in marketing, ultimately to resolve problems like selling caviar for as low as 11 cents per pound and finding out it fetches $15 a pound in the US food market.”
This transparency is the goal of a Siska First Nation demonstration project, to, “catch, process, and sell their fish harvested from a fish wheel,” with approval of CFIA, BC Food Safety Act, and BC Centre for Disease Control.
Salmon is a commodity from the wild realm, and salmon is still largely misunderstood in terms of behaviour and even physiology
Moore explained, “We have learned colour of the flesh is not determined by how far up the river the fish has gone,” a previous assumption, “rather, maturity is the determinant in quality and colour of the flesh.”
This is interesting because the old view was the farther up the river salmon were caught the less red and more dark the flesh would be (and dark is inedible). Now upstream fishers can join the mainstream market.
“The key is flexibility in marketing,” said Moore to the table society meeting.
He said, “Micro-processing can be done profitably without over-capitalization.” A boondoggle may exist in the changing provincial management of food health via Regional Health Authorities in BC.
The BC government says on the internet, “This structure, introduced in December 2001, modernized a complicated, confusing and expensive health care system by merging the previous 52 health authorities into a streamlined governance and management model.”
Today, said Moore, “these regional health authorities are charged with supplying permits required for the catching processing and selling of fish.”
The commercialization of fresh caught salmon may be advanced through a new process, noted Moore, now including a specific container for storing a fish, a card-board, wax-coat that preserves ice and fish together for the few hours required to get a fish a proper larder.
The problem is, however, a lack of fish to market. Teresa Ryan works in Vancouver as a fish biologist on the Pacific Salmon Commission and a scientist representing coastal First Nations. They were all asking the same question: where have all the fish gone?
A report in the Prince George Free Press said low salmon returns found along the Fraser River this year show nets producing a tenth the expected catch. As a result people are not going fishing.
Obviously this is a major concern in Canada’s North West Pacific where often the First Nations are losing of a way of life. Traditional salmon harvests unite communities but this year nobody goes to the river.
These people are facing a disappearing cultural diet, a staple food for the poor, and a lack of control over problems associated with the loss.
