When you hear the whistle blowin' eight to the bar
Then you know that fishing heaven’s not very far
Shovel all the coal in
Gotta keep it rollin'
Woo, woo, Catch Shares there you are
(With apologies to the memory and the art of Glenn Miller)

First off, a disclaimer of sorts. I am not an opponent of catch shares, limited access privilege programs, individual transferable quotas, sectors, or any other management tool. However, I am seriously opposed to any management tool being forced on a fishery and the people in it and I am seriously opposed to any management tool being misrepresented to gain industry, public or political support for its imposition.

 Since confirmation, NOAA/NMFS head Jane Lubchenco has used her position in the Obama Administration to force catch shares on US fishermen.

 The claims that New England groundfish fishermen have voluntarily accepted and embraced catch shares, as the system’s proponents have done, cannot pass the straight face test with anyone who was actually following events.

 One of Jane Lubchenco’s first act as the newly appointed head of the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was to travel to New England to announce she was instituting a national policy “encouraging” the use of catch shares as the management technique of choice. New England, of course, is ground zero for ineffectual fisheries management revolving around the Northeast groundfish complex (see Chronic Underfishing at Fish Net USA).

 This was not surprising. Dr. Lubchenco had been on the Board of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), an ENGO that has been working towards the institutionalization of catch shares, and on establishing the financial infrastructure to capitalize on it, for years.

 What has been surprising is the manipulation of our federal fisheries governance system, evident in the recently released NOAA/NMFS budget for Fiscal Year 2011 (available from NOAA). Along with asking for $36.6 million in new money for Catch Shares, Dr. Lubchenco is seeking the transfer of $11.4 million out of Fisheries Research and $6 million – about half of last year’s request - out of Cooperative Research.

 At first glance this seems only a simple matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul – shifting funding from one program area to another. But the fallout is going to be much more significant.

 It all begins with the fact that in recent years what is known as the “precautionary principle” has been zealously applied to fisheries management. What this means is that the less is known about the status of a stock of fish, the more stringently fishing effort is managed on that stock. Simplifying a bit, if a stock assessment is estimated to have a 10% margin of error, it can be managed safely at 90% of the estimate. If it is estimated with a 40% margin, it must be managed at 60% of the estimate. Hence, the worse the data on a fishery is, the more the fishermen have to pay in foregone harvest for the inaccuracy.

 Recreational and commercial fishermen realize this and are constantly striving for better science and better data, which can only be had through better research and corresponding research budgets. Fishermen know that the more that is known about fisheries, the better off they, and the fish, will be.

 Considering the full spectrum of fisheries science, the gold standard – at least from a fisherman’s perspective – is cooperative research. In cooperative research projects, a team of scientists goes to sea on a commercial fishing boat crewed by a commercial fishing crew using commercial fishing gear. They measure, weigh, and count the fish that are caught. I doubt anyone will be surprised that trips crewed by professional fishermen produce higher yields than trips on research vessels with research crews.

 More fish caught means more accurate estimates.  Remember, you can’t catch fish that aren’t there, but it’s fairly easy to not catch those that are.

 (I wrote about cooperative research in 2007 in Improving the best available science. It’s available on the FishNet USA website)   

 I don’t know of any fishery supported with a cooperative research program in which the harvest was reduced because of the data it provided. Cooperative research has been a win-win proposition for the fishermen, for the scientists and for the managers.   

 In fact, cooperative research had been so popular with fishermen that last year’s budget requested -“a net increase of $1,247,000 for a total of $11,455,000 for Cooperative Research to expand and fully implement a nationwide, regionally based cooperative research and management program as directed by the reauthorized Magnuson-Stevens Act.”

 While not as popular with fishermen, and perhaps less accurate, the research carried out by NOAA/NMFS through its recently upgraded fleet of research vessels is just as critical to the fishermen and to the fish. Keeping in mind the mandates of the precautionary approach to fisheries management, the more we know about the status of the fish stocks, the closer we can approach the ideal harvest level.  And that should be in everyone’s interest: fishermen, ENGOs, and NOAA.

 So why the big cuts in the Research and Cooperative Research budgets?

 Consider the fact that Dr. Lubchenco was wed to the almost completely untried concept of catch shares* through EDF before taking over as head of NOAA/NMFS and has continued in that union since she came to NOAA/NMFS. As I’ve written before, her plan to force catch shares on US fisheries will have revolutionary impacts on those fisheries, on the people in them and on the people, businesses and communities that depend on them. And, for many of those people, businesses and communities, those impacts will be devastating (as she put it a little more nicely though perhaps not quite as exactly, the shift to catch shares would result in “fewer jobs, but better jobs.”) Obviously Dr. Lubchenco and her buddies at EDF couldn’t force such a revolutionary change and such economic hardship on millions of fishermen and the people and businesses that depended on them if everything was ok in their fisheries. There’d be no reason to, at least no reason that was acceptable to the public, to Congress or to President Obama’s administration.

 Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that better fisheries research means better fisheries data, nor that better fisheries data almost invariably means better catches for the fishermen. Taking two major Northeast fisheries, monkfish and sea scallops, as examples, a decade or so ago both were facing major cutbacks because the best available science indicated that the stocks weren’t doing well. In both fisheries, at the urging of the fishermen, who generally seem to know better, successful cooperative research programs were established that showed that the stocks weren’t in as bad shape as had been believed. The drastic cutbacks that were planned were avoided and the fisheries, the fishermen in them and the businesses that depend on them have thrived. Without that cooperative research, there would be two additional fisheries appearing to need the salvation offered by Dr. Lubchenco’s Catch Shares revolution.

 How many other fisheries could be brought back from the supposed brink of disaster, a brink enthusiastically manufactured by the ENGOs, by better science? That’s impossible to tell, but as I wrote above, more and better sampling is never going to indicate fewer fish than are actually there, but less and worse sampling definitely will. Couple that with the precautionary principle and you have a recipe for a real disaster. 

Nils Stolpe has written "Another Perspective" since 2005. He is communications director for the Garden State Seafood Association, and has been a consultant to the fishing industry for over two decades.