Thanks to a new Alaskan fishery management program called “crab rationalization,” hundreds of thousands of perfectly good king crab are being tossed back into the ocean after capture, only to die from injuries sustained during handling.

The fact that all but the largest, most flawless crabs are often discarded, is a result of “high grading”; the practice of retaining only those animals free from imperfections such as barnacles or scratched shells. In other words, keeping only those crabs that will fetch the most at market.

Unfortunately, the practice of “high grading” is a direct result of privatization within the crab fishery under “crab rationalization.” In this program, a handful of large, corporate processing companies are guaranteed 90 percent of a fisherman’s catch, meaning that these companies ultimately control when fishermen fish, what they can sell, and how much they can sell for. As a result, fishermen are forced to remain at sea longer in search of flawless crabs that will allow them to meet the quota that has been parceled out to them. And, to add insult to injury, fishermen’s pay has plummeted 50-70 percent since rationalization as a larger portion of profits are now realized by processors and large businesses.

So why are fishermen going to all this trouble?

Well, because local fishermen are no longer in control of their own harvest—a mere three percent of quotas distributed by the government go to skippers—while the other 97 percent are allocated to vessel owners, resulting in a consolidation of control that is detrimental to all but the largest participants in the fishing industry.