theirs down here.” While there are cur-
rently 22 fishing boats that participate in the market, most aren’t involved every week. Halmay and his urchin, along with sup- pliers of fresh and canned tuna, cod, mackerel, and others, make up the core of participants that show up on a weekly basis. Sell- ing direct has proved to be an economic boon, attracting interest from other fishermen. “Most of the local
catch goes to whole- salers — you put it on the dock, he comes and picks it up, and a week later he pays you. There’s only one guy in town that buys urchin, for example, so I take his price or I don’t,” Halmay says. “We have about half a dozen big wholesalers here in San Diego, and 20 years ago that’s where pretty much all the fish went. Some guys now, like with rockfish, are having better success shipping overseas. But the local price has been stagnant for a long
time...say, a buck seventy-five a pound. When the boats can bring a portion of their catch here and sell it for $3.99 a pound, it’s still cheaper for the con- sumer, and the fisher- men are able to make a better living.” Why not just take
the catch to existing farmers’ markets, espe- cially with so many of them already operating? “Zach [Roach,
another regular mar- ket vendor] and my son started selling off the boat. Then they went to farmers’ markets first and that turned out to be too hard — they’d have to be at different markets six days a week rather than on the boat to sell what they can sell in a day here,” Halmay
continues. “And there are a lot of middlemen who bought fish and take it out [to farm- ers’ markets], but they aren’t fishermen. It’s hard to go and have a booth right next to
a guy claiming to be a fisherman and you know he’s not — he bought those fish from whatever was being dis- carded by the wholesal- ers and took it to the farmers’ markets.”
But beyond the
pure commercial aspect of the market, it’s gained attention from the sci- entific community for getting fishermen to do something conservation- ists have tried for years
to do with limited suc- cess — encourage fish- ing boats to harvest a diverse array of species, rather than target only the highest-priced, often overfished populations. Elly Brown is coor-
R E S E A R C H S T U D I E S
dinator for the San Diego Food System Alliance. The group advocates for food-sys- tem changes through lobbying for and par- ticipating in crafting public policy, offer-
San Diego Reader January 7, 2016 33
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