WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — September 18, 2017 — Attorneys for Carlos Rafael filed a report in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts this evening that concludes that the fish mislabeling and record falsification to which Mr. Rafael entered a guilty plea had a limited impact on the amount of under-reported catch and the quality of stock assessments in the Northeast.
The report was authored by Dr. Brian Rothschild, Dean Emeritus of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology.
According to the report, “the under-reported catch effects on fishermen or stock-assessment quality are de minimus.”
It also concluded that “the Sector IX [under-reported catch] relative to the Sector Fleet catch and allocation was less than 1%” and that “the percent of [under-reported catch] of the Sector Fleet catch and allocation was less than 1%.”
Mr. Rafael pleaded guilty in March to several counts, including fish mislabeling, falsifying federal records, tax evasion, and conspiracy. He is scheduled to be sentenced next week.
The executive summary of the report is included below:
THE EFFECT OF UNDER-REPORTED CATCH (URC) ON THE NEW ENGLAND FISHERY AND STOCK DYNAMICS
B.J. Rothschild
September 18, 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Various sources have asserted that the alleged mislabeling of fish by Carlos Rafael, Sector IX, has created harm by 1) reducing the quantity of fish that non-Sector IX fishermen could catch and 2) diminishing the quality of stock assessments used to “optimally manage the fish stocks. The mislabeled fish have been characterized as under-reported catch (URC). The URC consists of four species of groundfish: yellowtail flounder, cod, sea dabs/American plaice, and witch flounder. The magnitude and year of occurrence of the URC of each species has been determined by the Department of Justice and stipulated by parties. The years concerned are 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.
Our report refutes the assertions of harm. We show that the URC effects on fishermen or stock-assessment quality are de minimus.
We analyzed the magnitude of the URC in relation to published fisheries statistics and stock assessments conducted by NOAA Fisheries (both GARFO and the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, NEFSC) available to the public from the official website and library resources.
We organized our analysis into three approaches: 1) technical issues, 2) data issues, and 3) five perspectives that analyze the URC in relation to the catches and allocations of the Northeast Multispecies Sector Fishery, to the effort of the Northeast Multispecies Sector Fishery, to the catches and allocations of the entire Northeast Multispecies Fishery, to resource wastage through under-fishing and discarding, and to effects on stock assessments.
The first technical issue explores the URC in the context of overfishing/under-fishing in a simplified setting of a multispecies groundfish fishery.
The second technical issue involves a brief discussion on the effects of fishing and how these effects might relate to URC in terms of immediate effects and consequent effects. For example, if 20% of the stock was removed as URC, then the catch per unit of effort (CPUE) would decline immediately by 20%. However, given the complexity of the fishing process it is doubtful whether a change of this magnitude would be observed. This is especially true for stocks out of equilibrium because a return to equilibrium may cause the stock to either increase or decrease.
The first data issue concerns the assembly of fishery statistics by species and year. To evaluate the effect of the yellowtail flounder URC or cod URC we combined catch and assessment statistics from the geographically separate areas used by NOAA Fisheries to manage these species. This was not the case with American plaice URC or witch flounder URC as the management of these species is not split geographically. With respect to annual fishery statistics, NOAA utilizes calendar year in stock assessments and fishing year (May 1 to April 30) in the actual management of the Northeast Multispecies Fishery and its component the Northeast Multispecies Sector Fishery in setting Annual Catch Entitlements (ACEs) or Annual Catch Limits (ACLs) and reporting catch statistics.
The second data issue relates to the quality of NOAA stock assessments. We show that NOAA stock assessments are associated with considerable statistical variability, a conclusion shared by external observers and NOAA expert panels.
The first perspective shows that the Sector IX URC relative to the Sector Fleet catch and allocation was less than 1%.
The second perspective shows that the percent of URC of the Sector Fleet catch on a per species basis is only a few percent.
The third perspective explores how in understanding the harm done by generating URC, it is necessary to go beyond just the magnitude of the URC. For example, if we examine all 16 stock-year categories we find that the Sector IX URC is zero for some years and species; doesn’t cause the Sector IX ACE to be exceeded when added to the Sector IX catch (all yellowtail flounder URC); or does cause the Sector IX ACE to be exceeded when added to the catch. The latter case is the harm generated by Sector IX and it occurred in 2015 for cod, American plaice and witch flounder, and in 2013 and 2014 only for witch flounder. These overages, however, put in context of the total ACE of entire Northeast Groundfish Fishery show that the overages amounted to 1% to 2% and that the actual amounts of ACE overage were several time less than the amount of fish discarded.
The fourth perspective shows that 30-40% of the total Northeast Multispecies Fishery ACE for the URC species is wasted by under-fishing and discarding and puts into perspective the small magnitudes of the URCs.
The fifth perspective examines the effect of the URC on stock assessments by providing a heuristic example. While we could not repeat the NOAA stock assessments per se by adding URC to them, we show that the quantities of URC are so small that it is unlikely that they would have had a significant effect. Our heuristic example utilizes a standard stock assessment technique (virtual population analysis) to evaluate the effect of the URC of witch flounder on estimates of the abundance of the year class of this species most affected by the URC. It shows that adding the URC to NOAA catch-at-age estimates result in a small increase in estimated year class numbers (2%) or biomass (3%). This difference is dwarfed by NOAA stock assessments of the same age group of witch flounder that varied by 27% between the two different assessment models it used in its 2015 stock assessment report.
Lastly, with respect to NOAA stock assessments of the URC species, we point out that the stock assessments of all 20 stocks in the Northeast Multispecies Fishery were under review the week of September 11, 2017. With respect to the URC species, based on deliberations of a NOAA expert panel, all most recent stock assessments have significant flaws affecting the estimation of population sizes and therefore management advice.