I just read this post by MitTheMan about the real costs of bottled water. It brought to mind something I had just read recently about the production of seafood for the U.S. market.
Salmon and Dungeness crabs, for instance, are very popular sea foods. Fresh-caught salmon is "better" for the environment than farmed salmon because farm raised seafood tends to pollute oceans and introduce diseases to wild populations as fish farms do, and destroy endangered habitats like shrimp farms are destroying mangrove swamps in Asia.
So fishing boats head out off the Pacific coasts of the Northwest and to the Gulf of Alaska. They return to port with their catch to be marketed in the U.S. and other markets. But he story is not quite as simple as you would think anymore, as quotes from The Seattle Times demonstrate.
Quote:
"It's a dying industry in the U.S.," says Tony Neves, senior vice president of Vernon, Calif.-based Red Chamber, the second-biggest U.S. seafood company. "It's a sad reality, but it's a fact."
Clackamas, Ore.-based Pacific Seafood Group, the third-biggest U.S. seafood company, started a trial six months ago to process Dungeness crabs in Qingdao, China. The crab, found from the Aleutian Islands off Alaska to south of San Francisco, is named after the town in Washington where it was first harvested commercially.
Crab shakers in Qingdao get $100 to $150 a month to extract meat from crab shells with pincers — one-tenth what it might cost in the U.S., says John Lin, who oversees new-product development at Pacific's headquarters.
"Because labor is so much more affordable, they can spend more time to take the crab meat out" in China, Lin says. "There's a higher recovery rate."
What is the real cost in fuel, oceanic pollution, domestic jobs, and other variables compared to paying more for processing it at the domestic ports. Labor is cheaper but who picks up the rest of the costs?
Quote:
Seattle-based Premier Pacific Seafoods spent $10 million last year to build a new facility on its 680-foot Ocean Phoenix fishing vessel to prepare Alaskan pollock for sale to processors in China.
The fish are de-headed and gutted on the ship in the Bering Sea, then frozen and sent to China, says Douglas Forsyth, Premier Pacific's president. Once there, they are boned, skinned and cut into portions of 2 ounces to 6 ounces, he says.
Supermarket chains and nationwide retailers are helping to drive the practice, Forsyth says. "You're dealing with national retail chains that have strict product specifications that are so exacting that they require hand processing," he says.
Even factoring in 20 cents a pound in transportation costs, processing in China is still cheaper for the most labor-intensive fish, says Trident's Bundrant.
The company freezes its salmon within hours of harvest and then ships them to China, where they are thawed to 40 degrees and boned. The journey there and back takes two months, Bundrant says.
Again, what are the total costs to the environment and who pays for them, if not immediately, then later.
I don't believe the companies mentioned are "guilty" of anything. Our whole way of doing business and discounting environmental impacts of many things we do is accountable. There is no easy solution to problems we have already created. There may be no solution that looks ahead to future endeavors that will be acceptable to all parties for fear of losing business and increasing the "bottom line".
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"Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end" Stephen Hawking (quoting Woody Allen) 
"There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower." Richard Feynman
Iraq war and occupation costs
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