The new board is as follows:
President: Burton Patrick, Pittsburgh, PA
Vice-President: Morgan Lidster, Terra Haute, IN
Director-at-Large: Bruce Davidson, Lexington, KY
Secretary/Treasurer: Liz Harris, Madison, Florida
The new board is committed to bringing you current information on the status of the ornamental marine industry. We also want to inform you of reservations that we have in the direction that the industry is taking.
A lot has changed for AMDA during the past two years. We believe that the needs of the independent retailer can only be met if independent retailers are the primary officers in the organization. That has been accomplished. To date all current members of the AMDA board are retailers. Distributors, e-commerce merchants, and service organizations are "not on the same page" as we are. They don’t have the same investment in the community or financial commitments as we do either.
The local fish stores are the businesses that create interest in the aquarium hobby. Their passion for aquatics fuels the interest of new participants. They don’t just stock shelves. They educate. Big box stores with shelf stockers just sell “stuff”. They don't really provide education in the hobby or generate new interest. Shelf stockers do not stimulate the imagination. They just want to sell the stuff that turns and not create new business. In short they feed off what we do. We need to be recognized by distributor and manufacturer alike for what we do.
We encourage our members to be active in education throughout the community and in their everyday face to face conversation with their customers. We also recognize the contribution that local service organizations make to the hobby and encourage their participation in AMDA as well as those of the distributors and manufacturers that are committed to support the independent retailer. In AMDA, as a member, your voice will be heard and we would welcome it.
In order to strengthen our organization we want your input and we want you to be involved in the organization. Please send your views to
[email protected]. This email address will go to all the directors of AMDA. We will publish all pertinent emails and our answers as they come.
We feel that the independent retailer needs representation. At this point in time, the American Marinelife Dealers Association is our only representation. You need to make sure government, manufacturers, and distributors hear your views. AMDA can help. In adding to the complexity of our business, we have other organizational types that want to control us. We will call these groups the self-appointed non-governmental official. The Marine Aquarium Council (MAC) and Reef Protection Institute (RPI) are two of the organizations in the forefront. Their stated mission is to save the reefs, provide sustainable yields, and improve husbandry. These are all commendable missions but in reality after millions have been spent very little has been done on any front and we certainly have not changed the ways of the chain-of-command between the reef and us. We will discuss some of these issues as this newsletter progresses.
The MAC and RPI are attempting to persuade us to follow them blindly under their rules. Currently their track record is dismal and they do not welcome criticism from anyone. If AMDA doesn’t communicate our concerns then who is going to speak for us since most of these organizations and proposed legislation is being focused against the American Retailer? Last year Steve Robinson, president of AMDA, went on a fact finding mission in the Philippines and Bali and found that the use of chemicals to poison fish is still rampant and all the public relations releases to the contrary will not change that. The emphasis is on paperwork even before the fishermen had the proper tools to learn to net catch fish. AMDA donated the first netting of quality they have had for years. Millions have been spent on a program with no improvement in handling and fish quality to speak of and they have accomplished very little except to engender distrust.
The MAMTI proposed legislation is trying to tie the mission of the MAC to Federal Law. MAMTI gives substance to the MAC and we would like to know how a bill in the US Congress has come about to make them boss. The mission is admirable and we support it, but we don’t accept the proposed management and proposed operational suggestions. They don’t make sense.
MAMTI represents legislation that is being introduced into congress and is known as the Marine Aquarium Market Transformation Initiative. This document can be found on the internet at:
www.gefweb.org/Documents/Work_Programs/ wp_Feb04/Bio_-_Regional_-_MAMTI_-_Project_Document.pdf.
The MAMTI proposal is 166 pages of jargon that seems to put the MAC as the controlling factor in importing fish into this country. Part of the proposed legislation would restrict all shipments of fish unless they are MAC certified. In another section of the proposed legislation they ultimately want to include freshwater fish. The web is being woven to allow the middlemen to push their way into jobs of power at our expense. The question now rises as to whether there is a for-profit organization being planned to take over the MAC in the future or are we being groomed to just pay for a top heavy organization of overpaid bureaucrats that do not have to provide accomplishments with their salary.
A copy of this newsletter will be sent to the Department of Agriculture to see what it is about these two groups that is so different that the Federal Fish and Wildlife Inspection Group could not be a part of the solution to the issues of reef degradation from inappropriate fishing techniques. It seems to us they already have the infrastructure to do that.
MAC: Their Activities
For this issue we want to tell you who is involved and what they are doing.
The Marine Aquarium Council was started by a handful of people with an idea. Their political position and stated goal is to save the reefs. Their funding was through grants from various organizations of which the main contributor was the Hewlett-Packard Foundation.
The long-term plan is to have the retailers (us) pay the bill for them to be the middlemen in charge of saving the reef. They are setting themselves up to be the judge and jury of who buys what and who sells what and to whom. Join them or perish in the long term is the veiled threat from people that represent them. It is our belief that this would add an additional level of bureaucracy to incoming fish shipments and so far we don’t see how that will result in any better fish coming into our shops.
Millions have been spent overseas with very little accomplished in the way of improving handling, shipping, and catch procedures. The focus in the United States is to get retailers to join and be certified by the MAC. The concept for certification is to feed the appearance that they are saving the reef problems with little progress being evident in the producing countries. In many cases they imply that the reef destruction is our fault even though our only function is buy the animals that are legally brought into the United States and have little or no say in anything that goes on between the source and our importer/distributors. We consider this to be a major fault of their plan. The problems have to be solved over there first.
It is the position of your AMDA board that the paperwork requirement for certifying fish is overly cumbersome and increases the in your face dogma from know-it-all bureaucrats that don't have to run a business. We believe that their focus of winning over the hobbyist is to force the retailers into submission through public opinion. In reality we don’t have anything to say about what happens in the Philippines or Indonesia. The logical place to begin the process of appropriate fishing techniques is to work with the importers who in turn could work with the authorities in the producing countries.
We believe that the source of production needs to be controlled by the sovereign nations in those areas, and if they need help then they should ask for it. What MAC wants to do is tax the incoming marine organisms to pay their expenses for implementation of their program. We believe this is fundamentally flawed logic. There has to be a better way. Why are we paying for them to use their own resource in a sustainable way?
The certification process for the US retailer has not proven viable at this point. We believe there are two reasons for this. The first problem is that the program is cumbersome and very time consuming and poorly structured. The second is that people, especially business people, are wary of middlemen, politicians, and people that want us to voluntarily give the future of our businesses to the bureaucrats. Abiding by the laws of the land is not our problem. The reality is that very few have joined up. A few stores have signed up as a political move in the hope that it will make good business sense. The ones that are certified are doing a lot of paperwork with very few or no certified fish coming into the country. It isn’t because we are not interested in environmentalism. We find a system that can send a certified fish from the source and have it arrive in the states with one dead fish or two out of a hundred turn into non-certified fish during shipment. If the dealer buys 10 fish and one dies and he has paid for a certified fish his fish are now non certifiable for a few days and can't be co-mingled with certified fish of the same species. There are other challenges with this as well. If more than a low percentage of fish die in transit then the species goes off the able to buy list. One list we saw put 200 species fish on the unable to ship list.
Somehow the governed needs to have a voice in this movement. To date we have been totally ignored. There is not one marine aquarium dealer with a community based store on MAC’s board. They are or have been service people for the most part or people that have never made their livelihood from owning aquarium stores.
We believe that the first focus for the MAC should have been to convince the producing countries to produce fish that are not chemical caught. Then they needed to improve handling procedures at the collection sites. The third thing would be to improve the airline priorities in moving fish from them to us. Once that has been accomplished and better fish are available we can define what has to go on in the US to ensure the best possible treatment for the fish while in our care, but right now it appears that the stores in this country provide the best care of the entire chain of command. Why start here?
The next priority would be to improve the handling at the distributor level in this country and get more cooperation from our domestic airlines. They need to quit handling our fish like a hot potato. And lastly, after everyone sees the benefits of the program and that the organization is there to help the industry get on track rather than just paying "nerdie" pragmatists that are merely high priced help to produce nothing, most retailers would be glad to follow. The result would be stronger fish with better immune systems and less disease.
On our end getting the hobbyist educated to take better care of the fish is absolutely mandatory and will be the focus for the last half of our term. The result will be less fish sold at a higher price to people that won't lose many fish which will further reduce the quantity of fish sold. The industry will change for sure, but it will result in a stronger hobby.
We would like to pose a few questions to the Marine Aquarium Council at this point in time.
1. How many overseas shippers have been certified and how many are left? Where are they? Who and how often are their inspections and when are the inspections made public?
2. How many fish per week are currently being shipped to the US that is certified by MAC and who do they go to?
3. Is it true that many certified fish are going to other countries? If it is true what percentage is being shipped to other countries?
4. How many importer/distributors in this country are certified and can we see their inspection reports and the qualifications of those that are inspecting those facilities? How do we know if certified fish are being co-mingled with non-certified fish?
5. How many US retail stores have been certified and what qualifications do the inspectors have to do this? How many retail stores have been certified in foreign countries? We would especially be interested in those countries receiving certified fish. We have heard that China is one of those countries. Are these fish being shipped to certified dealers?
6. What percentage of the financial burden of administering the program will be funded by US business and to whom does it go?
7. Why isn’t the US Fish and Wildlife Department a part of any of these initiatives since they already know the importing business and are a current legitimate arm of our government and a branch that I think has done a pretty good job and works with people to some extent?
8. Who will fund this program of so-called sustainable yield studies and who will do them? What has been done about sustainable yield programs to date? Are any of the overseas suppliers being charged for the services of the MAC?
9. Why are food fish excluded from the program since in terms of biomass food fish are the greatest amount of animals taken from the reefs? This is a major issue since the number of fish used as both food and aquarium fish is very large. For example all tangs are food fish as well as aquarium fish. Why is it that the program looks as if we are to blame for the destruction of the reefs and absolutely nothing has been done or said about the food gathering segment of the hunter gatherer fish collectors? There are a lot of fish being caught and sold alive to the Asian market. Why should the American consumer and the American retailer pay for these programs out of their pocket. This is more a function of foreign aid policy that should be sorted out between governments.
10. In a face to face conversation with 5 board members at the 2005 MACNA meeting and 3 at the 2004 IMAC, MAC officials told your board members that our concerns would not be taken into consideration and the program is the program and that was it. Our question is, “Why should we place the future of our businesses and the future of the hobby into hands of people that only listen to themselves?”
11. What are the connections between the people in the MAC and the proposed MAMTI legislation? If the proponents of MAMTI are saying there will be a connection there has to be some communications and plans being made.
OK, THATS ENOUGH FOR NOW.
lOOK AT YOU GUYS...ALL IN THE KOOL-AID, DON'T EVEN KNOW THE FLAVOR! :lol:
STEVE
