Management & Regulation

NOAA Fisheries Service continues the management measures implemented by the April 13, 2009, interim rule (as modified by the July 8, 2009 interim rule), which is scheduled to expire October 27. Specifically, this temporary rule maintains the current interim commercial and recreational management measures intended to reduce overfishing on certain stocks managed by the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan, for the remainder of the 2009 fishing year (i.e., through April 30, 2010).  Read the Federal Register posting.

The agenda has been released for the New England Fisheries Council November Meeting to be held November 17-19, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency in Newport Rhode Island.

With participants expected from as far away as Maryland, plans for a massive fishermen’s protest Friday against federal policies at the regulators’ regional offices got a boost yesterday with the release of a supportive "Dear Colleagues" note from Elinor Ostrom, the new Nobel laureate in economics.

A professor at the University of Indiana, Ostrom said major commitments on campus will keep her from joining the protest, which is informally generating a list of grievances that includes converting common resources into privatized commodities or catch shares in the groundfish and scallop fisheries.

But in an e-mail she said "could be read from me at the event," Ostrom wrote, "I wish I could join you today as you struggle with an important issue for you and your families and for all of us affected by the fisheries of the world."

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

Last week’s two-day seminar on the dynamic potential in transforming the commonly owned resources of the sea into private, tradeable catch shares produced many concerns and worries.

But only one voice was heard against the transformation already underway in New England — and that voice was muted and constrained at that.

Food & Water Watch was the conference contrarian. A Washington-based, non-profit, consumer group, Food & Water Watch has staked out a lonely position in unequivocal opposition to privatizing common wealth and the creation of a limited-access commodities market in fisheries. That’s the expressed top priority of the Obama administration for reinventing fisheries conservation through catch shares, industry management and product availability on the world market.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

The final version of Amendment 16 to the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan is now available from the New England FIsheries Management Council website.

The Notice of Availability was published in the Federal Register on Friday, October 23, 2009 (74 FR 54773). The comment period for this amendment ends December 22, 2009.

Questions should be directed to Tom Nies at the New England FIsheries Management Council, telephone 978-465-0492 ext.19

New England’s 400-year-old commercial fishing industry is about to plunge into a new world of rules intended to give fishermen a sense of ownership and responsibility

As regulators work out the details for the May 1 launch of a new catch-shares system, many in the industry are pushing back. Dividing the catch among fishing boats, the critics say, will speed the decline of the fleet and replace fishing families with corporate investors. 

But some industry leaders, along with state and federal officials, say the backlash against the new quota system is misplaced. The real problem is the same as it’s always been, they argue: too few fish and too many boats.

Read the complete story at Kennebec Journal.

Conversion of the commonly held wealth of the seas into a tradable, private commodity and then dividing the whole into "catch shares" was soft-sold with less than full disclosure to the management of New England’s fisheries this week.

"We are a neutral convener, we take no position on catch shares," proclaimed Amy Schick Kenney, the co-leader of the Fisheries Leadership & Sustainability Forum, at the start of a two-day workshop on catch shares organized by the New England Fishery Management Council at the Mount Washington Hotel Resort.

But if the forum itself — along with Kenney and its co-facilitators — professed neutrality, the moving force behind the forum and a co-sponsor was the Environmental Defense Fund, the global giant ENGO or environmental non-government organization which has been the signature champion of catch shares for many years.

The forum is a joint operation, merging resources of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute of the Environment and the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.

Both institutes have absorbed extensive funding and exhibit ties via officers to the Pew Environment Group and the EDF. The Woods Institute is also the home for the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, which was created in 1998 by Jane Lubchenco, then a rising academic scientist, with monies she received as a Pew fellow.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton – Oct 21, 2009 [News Analysis] – Although unable to personally attend the catch share meeting this week in Bretton Woods due to a prior commitment, the issue at stake: can the system of IFQ’s and catch shares established successfully in Alaska be replicated in New England – is near and dear. For years I have contrasted the experience of Alaska, with a system of hard TAC’s and fishery closures when catch targets or by-catch limits are reached, with the system in New England that for the past 15 years has relied on imprecise attempts to control effort.

In one setting, the industry has thrived, value of the fisheries had dramatically increased, and the degree of Alaskan ownership of vessels has increased.

In the other setting, the value of the industry has plummeted, historic ports are seeing near record low levels of landings, and the management has become one huge fight of industry vs science due to the increasingly absurd contortions being asked of the industry.

Anyone who cares about the New England fisheries knows that change is necessary.

When the Magnuson – Stevens Act was reauthorized in 2006, the big regional fight was over whether the system of hard quotas established on the West coast would become mandatory nationally. Environmental groups strongly supported the provision, while in New England, it was fiercely opposed. New England lost that battle, and now is operating under a legal requirement to meet hard quotas for each species of a 13 species groundfish complex in 19 separate management units.

The magnuson act also provided strong support for ITQ systems, also called catch shares, under which vessels in a fishery are assigned a proportion of the quota based on their fishing history. About 14 years earlier, a moratorium had been placed on catch shares after two experiences with northeast surf clams, and Alaskan halibut and sablefish. Both programs led to major changes in their respective industries. The moratorium was to allow more consideration of the types of changes catch shares brought about.

Subsequently, both the Alaska pollock program, under the American fisheries act, and the crab rationalization program, were enacted by an Act of Congress, due to the moratorium on catch share programs in place. This moratorium was lifted in 2006, giving regional management councils authority to establish catch share systems.

With this as background, the New England management council, under strong pressure from NOAA and the legal requirements of Magnuson, adopted a modified catch share system to come into effect in 2010. The system would not provide individual quotas, but assign vessels to voluntary sectors, which could then pool their quotas, and act like FCMA co-ops, i.e. decide which vessels should fish and when and make payments to members based on their share of history.

One of the biggest problems in New England was that the prior system – days at sea – made no distinction in fishing permits. There are thousands of fishing permits in New England, many of them dormant, and under the old system, each permit had the same right to be allocated days at sea. Quickly a leasing program came into being where active vessels would lease additional days at sea rights from inactive vessels. Yet since the pool was based on the total number of permits, no effective consolidation took place.

The looseness of this system allowed anyone to still enter the fishery, so long as they could find a cheap permit and days at sea to lease from another permit holder. The value of dormant permits was not that great, and they could easily be bought.

Under the catch share allocation, what matters is fishing history, not the existence of the permit itself. Suddenly, boats who have come into the fishery recently find themselves with insufficient history. Those who understood the system bought permits with established history, which were much more valuable than permits with no history. Much of the outcry in New England against catch shares is due to this change in status.

A second problem, exacerbating the transition, is the current state of recovery of fish stocks. In a species complex of 13 species in 19 management stocks, the expectation that all will or can achieve their maximum biological potential at the same time is scientifically impossible. Yet Magnuson allows for no flexibility on this point. The result is that much of the fishing effort in New England is dictated by the weakest species. Under Magnuson, weaker species with stocks that are below the target spawning threshold must be protected and rebuilt.

New England is put in an impossible position: there is no way except perhaps with a 10 or 20 year moratorium on all fishing, that the 13 groundfish species could readjust to their natural proportions – which have not existed on Georges Bank for more than 100 years.

In fact, the idea that New England can go back to some pre-fishing mix of species abundance is absurd. The egg is scrambled. It cannot be reconstituted as an egg. Yet much of the current science and management is still based on control of discrete species with the goal of producing a new egg (the original spawning biomass) – and that ties New England fishermen in knots and makes them think the goals are simply irrational.

The meeting in Bretton Woods this week was really just a workshop to address some of the issues in catch shares. It got a high profile because, first, it was by invitation, and secondly, it had the full support of NOAA which is committed to implementing catch shares as a national fishing strategy.

The meeting addressed some of the design issues in catch shares, and the fundamental problem: there is a trade-off in implementing catch shares.

In order to make existing fleets efficient and profitable, they have to shrink – capacity has to match the stock available for harvest, instead of being two, three or four times greater than needed. Catch shares are principally a market mechanism to make that happen – by allowing consolidation to the degree that the fishery is conducted efficiently, and compensating those who leave the fishery by paying the market value for their shares. This is what allowed the Alaska crab fleet to move rapidly from 280 boats to 80 active boats.

The question is what is lost in a pure market mechanism. Catch share programs have to be implemented so as to not magnify negative consequences. In Alaska, one consequence of the rapid consolidation was an outcry over loss of crew jobs.

How do you preserve the structure of the industry in New England – a mix of smaller inshore and larger boats, a mix of ports all with some landings, and a wide range of specializations on certain types of fish.

A common argument of those against catch shares is that it destroys existing communities, by allowing boats and landings to be bought and concentrated elsewhere. This is not a feature of catch share per se, but of poor design.

At the conference, Wes Erikson, a 4th generation British Columbia fishermen talked about catch shares and impacts on communities. Contrary to some reporting that communities shrunk as a result of the catch share program, he said that communities in British Colombia were ‘negatively impacted by the shrinking of the commercial salmon industry which is not a catch share fishery.’

‘In fact, under catch shares, commercial landings have actually increased in coastal communities and decreased in urban centers. For the most part catch shares have been a positive aspect for the coastal communities that I work and live in’, he said.

Steve Minor, from Alaska, also addressed the community issue. He said ‘Catch Shares in the Bering Sea crab industry have in fact been created positive benefits for crab-dependent communities, because we designed our program with that goal in mind. Crab dependent communities are now guaranteed abut 90% of their historic share of landings based on the delivery requirements we placed on the quota shares themselves.’

There is absolutely no reason why the New England program should not contain a strong community protection component. Ports like Portland, Gloucester, and Boston, should all have consideration under the program so that provisions are made to restrict wholesale transfer of shares away from traditional landing ports.

There is nothing in the current design of a program that would prevent for example, a sector consisting of Maine and Massachusetts boats assigning all of their quota to be landed in one port only.

Once shares are bought and sold, as they will be inevitably in any system, the lack of such protections leaves the fishing infrastructure in New England badly exposed.

The program in Bretton Woods did not solve the probems, but did help to get some of the issues on the table.

The thing that most upsets New England fishermen is that they feel they are being forced to forego legitimate harvests for very unsound scientific reasons. Catch shares don’t determine the level of the catch, but have become a lightning rod for all the issues affecting New England, since they represent a new approach that New England has traditionally resisted.

The most telling fact is that the vessels with real catch history are flocking to the program. Estimates are that holders of 90 to 95% of the catch history for most species have signed on to the sector program. These fishermen represent the ones who have most successfully navigated the management contortions of the past decade. Given the transition that is necessary, it is obvious that some flexibility on management goals would help tremendously.

Such flexibility has often been accepted by NMFS in the past. In the Alaska opilio fishery this year, when rigid adherence to a rebuilding plan would have resulted in a dramatic cut back, or possibly no fishery at all, NMFS adjusted the goal, and allowed a new rebuilding plan to be put in place. As a result, the crab fishery remained viable.

One reason such an adjustment was possible was that all parties – NMFS, The State of Alaska, and the industry, all had demonstrated strong commitments to crab conservation in the past. So the idea of an adjustment never was seen as a ploy to get around scientific reports on stock status, but a way to incorporate such science into the reality of the fishery. Such thinking will have to come to New England if this transition is going to have any chance of success.

John Sackton, Editor And Publisher
Seafood.com News 1-781-861-1441
Email comments to jsackton@seafood.com

There have already been a number of red flags raised about the impending new federal regulatory regime that will hit the commercial fishery in Gloucester and throughout New England.

This conversion of the New England fishery is poorly planned. It is not credible, since it will be based on admittedly bogus statistics. It is confusing. And it has the potential to create chaos within the industry.

Beyond those, yet another flag has been raised at a two-day conference this week held by the New England Marine Fishery Management Council: While the new regime might improve the efficiency and organization of the fishery, as presently structured, it would likely destroy the community and family characteristics of the industry in ports such as Gloucester.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

"We don’t want to see this policy wipe out communities," Monica Medina, an emissary from the federal administrator for fisheries, said. "This policy is not intended to industrialize or change the fundamental nature of the fisheries or the communities. Hopefully, if we can get through the design and implementation, we can get to better times. We don’t want this policy to be harmful. Catch shares", Medina explained, "means potentially harder times ahead before we get to the better times."

For the survivors in a radical catch share rationalization, the prize is a solid income in a stabilized industry with fewer boats.

"There is big divide sometimes between Washington and the rest of the country," Medina said. "New England is never far from our mind. We want to create environment you need. We hope there won’t be bumps in the road, but we know there will be will."

The existing system of ever-more draconian effort controls — such as limiting fishermen’s access areas and days at sea — satisfied almost nobody and left the fleet, already about half the size of a decade ago, working on a handful of days at sea with leasing from dormant permits required for survival.

Tom Ancona, a West Coast fisherman who has been involved in the long conversion of the ground fishery to catch share market principles, reported that the Pacific transition, which has been underway for nearly seven years, was aided by a decision to take 50 percent of the quota of defunct boats, and redistribute it on a per capita basis to give even marginal participants in the privatized system enough capacity to have a chance of surviving. A buyout, however, was cited as an essential element to the seven-year effort of the Pacific Fishery Management Council to bring catch shares to its ground fishery, and has been a long sought salve for the fast-shrinking fleet of boats fishing the Gulf of Maine by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

Monica Medina deflected a direct question about the willingness of the Obama administration to help finance a buyout program that would fuel a radical downsizing of the fleet.

Maggie Raymond, executive director of the Associated Fisheries of Maine, said she believes the conservative allocation made for the onset of catch share sector fishing next summer would ensure widespread failure of the system.

Vito Calomo, a former Gloucester fisherman and now a member of the Massachusetts Fishery Recovery Commission, told Medina any successful program required a level of trust that does not exist today between the industry and its regulators.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.