I sent Howard Latin (president of Ecovitality) an email. This was his response:
I'm not sure you listened to my speech at the MO meeting
but most of the concerns stated in your Resignations
letter and your letter to Paul are responding to a fiction.
The MAC has been set up in a manner that includes
no significant monitoring and enforcement procedures.
They DO NOT WANT TO FIND violations because that
would undermine the credibility of the MAC program and
threaten the livelihoods of the MAC staff, which has become
their foremost concern. That's why they are so hostile to
dissenters.
Since the MAC has no real monitoring, testing, and
enforcement program, the entire certification scheme is
an exercise in "paper" generation that can and will be
manipulated very, very easily. There will be no
decertification for dealers who have a 10% or 20%
or 30% mortality rate, to say nothing of 1%, because
who is going to discover this failure and follow through
on decertification?
If dealers like you report that your mortality rate is
too high, the MAC will say that shows you are
"honest" and they will "work with you" to lower
the mortality rate. The vast majority of dealers
and wholesalers will never report high mortality,
any more than they'd disclose this to consumers,
and as a result they will not be "in violation" of
the MAC standards. Because you are honest,
you are concerned with problems that are really
only fantasies for most people in the industry.
This is an industry that has knowingly been
damaging the environment for decades and
also inducing poor fish collectors to endanger
their lives and health. Very few people besides
yourself are going to have the least reluctance
about modifying the certification "paper" to meet
MAC standards. That will make the MAC look
good, it will make the industry look good, it will
provide a barrier against threats of external
regulation, and it will make money for some
savvy exporters in places like the PI that have
lost market share because everyone knows a
high percentage of their fish are contaminated
or otherwise unreliable. But now they can be
certified by the MAC! The PI people at the
MO meeting were fairly salivating at the prospect.
You want the MAC to be more realistic in imposing
standards that are sensible from the perspectives
of exporters, wholesalers, and dealers. But such
realistic standards would have to be weaker than
the fantasy standards the MAC has issued. Why
should they weaken their standards if they have
no mechanism or plan for monitoring compliance
and enforcing these standards?
I know that no one in the industry cares, but I
am one of the leading environmental law experts
in the U.S., and I've spent nearly 30 years studying
how and why environmental laws and regulations
fail at the implementation stage. That's my specialty.
You can look at my CV at
www.ecovitality.org/halcv.htm
One of the things I've learned is that people who are
serious about creating an effective sustainable use
and conservation program MUST and DO build into
that program a system for monitoring/enforcement
and some powerful incentives for compliance. What
does it tell you that the MAC has completely failed
to meet these criteria?
The MAC was set up to include all the "stakeholders,"
including the "bad guys," and it has not done anything
that would really impinge on the profitability of anyone's
operations except someone who took the MAC standards
seriously. You can usually assess the effectiveness of a
regulatory program, including a self-regulatory program,
by how intense the organized opposition to it becomes.
Real regulations almost always threaten vested interests
and incomes of people who have been making money
through bad practices. These people who have a lot
of money at stake and whose livelihood is being
threatened do whatever they can to minimize the
risks to THEM.
This is not happening here, which reflects the fact that
no one is taking the MAC seriously except you and
maybe a few other idealists. MAC has been having
one lovefest after another for the past two years. Is
there any industry group or person that has been
opposing the MAC standards, other than yourself? If
the MAC were a serious program it would have a lot
more opposition and criticism than it does.
I think the MAC is far worse than you do, because it
has evolved into a deliberately ineffectual organization
more interested in white-washing the industry than in
protecting the environment. The MAC staff, starting
with Paul, have had to make many, many concessions
in order to win the support of nearly everyone in the
industry. Along the way "good" staff people became
"bad" people because looking out for their personal
interests proved more important to them than insisting
on realizing the purposes that the MAC was set up to
accomplish. They could rationalize any kind of
compromise on the ground that they would not be
able to reach a consensus and achieve widescale
participation if they refused to compromise. But
what was left at the end of the standards phase
was the proverbial "paper tiger."
I believe Paul and the others know what they have
done and they are extremely defensive because
they see outside criticism as a threat to public
perceptions of their personal competence and
honesty as well as their incomes. It is NO
ACCIDENT that they have issued unrealistic
and unenforceable standards. After years of
making "compromises" to avoid threatening
aquarium industry interests, the MAC staff
has opted for creating the illusion rather than
the reality of effective self-regulation.
And you seem to be almost the only one who's
buying into this illusion. Your problem is that
you've been taking the MAC standards literally
and have been assuming that the MAC staff
expects them to be followed and honored.
BUT you say they're impossible to meet, which
is almost certainly true. So how could the MAC
staff produce and cling to standards that are
impossible to meet? Paul and the others are
not stupid. My answer is that the MAC as it
developed to protect all "stakeholders" is a
PR institution intending to "cleanse" the
industry, not to cleanse the imported fish.
The MAC was created with noble ideals
and then made so many compromises that
NOW it is a program intended and certain to
fail in terms of its original goals.
If you want to edit and publish these comments
on your web site, that's fine with me as long as
you give me a prior chance to ensure that the
editing hasn't changed the thrust of my skeptical
but realistic comments. In any event, I'd like to
hear what you think of my views.
Regards---Howard Latin
******************************************************************************
*****
Howard A. Latin Professor of Law and Justice Francis
Scholar
Rutgers Law School 123 Washington St., Newark, NJ
07102
PH: 973-353-5535 (O) 212-966-8803 (H) Fax: 212-966-
8803
hlatin@speakeasy.net
latin@andromeda.rutgers.edu
At this point, I emailed him back and received this response:
You know a great deal more than I do about exporting
and importing and selling aquarium fish, but the lack of
realistic MAC standards and absence of any monitoring
and enforcement system is more in my line of work than
yours. It's usually EASY to tell when a regulatory or
self-regulatory scheme has been designed to fail and
to make circumventing its requirements very easy
for the actors whose behavior is supposed to be
controlled by the program.
As bad as the MAC may be, it's still like snow white
in comparison with the International Marinelife Alliance
and the Haribon Foundation of the 1990s. Many people
start NGOs and over time become dependent on grants
and public contributions for their livelihoods, and then
they begin making compromises and looking the other
way and then deliberately lying about their supposed
accomplishments to attract more money.
The IMA, for example, has gotten millions of dollars
in anti-cyanide grants and has publicized their cyanide
testing labs and procedures in the PI for a decade, but
in all that time of testing before they were kicked out of
the PI last year, their testing did not result in a single fish
shipment being impounded, in a single fish exporter losing
his or her license, in a single prosecution against any
aquarium dealer for accepting or exporting cyanide-fish,
or in the rejection of a single fish exported to the USA.
In short, despite their constant PR and claims of great
achievements to attract a succession of large grants,
the IMA accomplished virtually nothing for all this
money EXCEPT helping whitewash the PI industry
at a time when everyone knew that cyanide was
frequently used there. As of 2000, the IMA reported
that cyanide use in the PI was down to 8% according
to their tests--wasn't that wonderful progress?
I am predicting that the MAC will follow the same
course as the IMA of covering up instances of
violations and trying hard not to look for other
violations, and they will feel the need to lie more
and more frequently to keep up the illusion that
the MAC is running a successful program worthy
of further foundation and industry support. If
meeting the MAC standards is impossible, as
you claim, then there should be lots of reported
violations and decertifications. Let's see just
how many there are in practice during the next
two years. And don't hold your breath.
You may not be aware of this but the MAC severely
criticized the IMA testing procedures because the
MAC wanted to have the only "credible" process for
ensuring that fish were not contaminated by cyanide.
The MAC and the IMA were at each others' throats
for at least two years or more. And then a wonderful
thing happened--the MAC and IMA made a deal in
which the IMA would become the official MAC fish
collection training organization for the PI and maybe
Indonesia and other places. In return, the IMA
promised that they would apply the term "certified
cyanide-free fish" only to MAC-certified fish. And
all of a sudden the two NGOs became partners in
raising money and more money to implement the
MAC process. You may wonder what has become
of the MAC's scientific challenges to the validity of
IMA testing? Poof, they haven't been heard from
since this historic mutual-support agreement.
Paul Holthus and Vaughan Pratt of the IMA both get
angry at criticism and try to isolate their critics because
they know that their organizations cannot stand an
independent evaluation by someone who is not
financially or psychologically dependent on their
success. Like most environmental NGOs, the
MAC and IMA have less transparancy and
accountability than Enron had in its heyday.
They only disclose what they want other people
and especially donors to hear, and they do not
allow potential critics any access to any information
about what they're really doing.
Vaughan Pratt has told everyone in IMA not to talk
to me. And my subscription to the MAC on-line
newsletter and other e-materials somehow was
terminated about 18 months ago. I mentioned
this to Paul at the MO meeting last November.
He assured me that it must have been an accident
and that he would put me back on the MAC mailing
list as soon as he returned to Hawaii. But no, he
has not done that and I predict that he never will.
Yes, if you want to, you can also use these comments.
However, I would like to keep track of what responses
they receive, if any, so please let me know when you
intend to post them and what is the list address I
should look at to see the replies.
I'll look at your cyanide-testing thread sometime in
the next couple of weeks. There's surely no rush.
Regards---Howard
Moderator's Note: Ok folks, will someone find me one...JUST ONE...industry reformist who supports MAC??? Please??? And if you can't, why do you think that is???
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