Management & Regulation

NOAA Fisheries Service announces the latest issue of Sector News, a newsletter that provides updates on groundfish sector development. Read the newsletter in .pdf format here.

SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton (News Analysis) – Nov 4, 2009 – With the imminent release of the Obama Administration’s catch shares task force report for public comment, various groups have been weighing in on the merits, or lack of merits, for catch shares.

Yesterday, the Pew Environmental Group, the favorite bogey man of the Gloucester Times, weighed in with a presentation that should go over well in Gloucester.

The basic message was that catch shares can work, but should be only considered as one tool along with measures such as adjusting the length of the fishing season, refining areas that are opened or closed to fishing, restricting gear to protect fish habitat and limiting catch size.

Above all, Pew argues that no strategy can succeed without scientifically based catch limits, adequately enforced. 

With catch shares, they also call for time-limited allocations, such as ten years, along with opportunities to modify the program over time. Other features they support include ownership caps, and equitable allocations.

Listening to their conference call, I was struck by the fact that most of the issues raised by their panel, which included Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, Paul Parker, one of the founders of the Cape Cod Hook Fishermen’s Association, and now manager of a community based fund trying to purchase fishing permits, Linda Behnken, executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, and a representative from the recreationally focused anti-commercial group Coastal Conservation Association, were all issues that are addressed in creating the existing catch share programs. 

Grader, Parker, and Behnken all have extensive experience with the issues at stake, and strong views on how management measures should be approached in relation to catch shares.

The critical issue is one of restructuring. Behnken said that even with a requirement that halibut quota holders be actively engaged in the fishery, and a ban on selling quotas to corporations unless those corporations were grandfathered in the original allocation, the fleet shrunk by 1/3 shortly after the program started.

Grader said that the consolidation of the fleet on the West Coast, which came about partly due to buy-outs of permits by the nature conservancy, collapsed some of the shoreside support once those permits were removed from the industry. He made the point that the inshore fleets and their service providers such as fuel docks, ice houses etc., are actually an intricate web of economic relationships, and privatizing a portion of that can rip the entire fabric apart. 

All speakers were concerned about the propensity of catch share programs to result in concentrated allocations among a few large holders.

Where the crab rationalization program was discussed, it was mostly based on misinformation. The myth is that the rapid consolidation caused huge job losses. In fact, the jobs were not full time, but seasonal jobs lasting only a few weeks a year. Contrary to what most people believe, the consolidation of the crab fleet has dramatically increased the percentage of Alaskan ownership over the past five years – which flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that many owners are now off the water, living in LA and Las Vegas. 

The upshot was that a lot of the issues raised by the panel are exactly the issues that need to be addressed in designing a good catch allocation program. Behnken also said that catch shares were in fact a good mechanism to compensate those who left the fishery as a result of consolidation. 

Left unsaid among the suspicion over catch shares is how else a hard fisheries quota can be implemented in an economic fashion. Quota problems are not the result of too little fish, they are the result of a mismatch between fishing capacity and a finite resource. When overcapacity exists, economic incentives force overfishing to occur – either through pressure to set quotas that allow overfishing, or through illegal landings. 

Catch shares are the tool that makes adherence to hard quotas possible. That is the basic reason they are being pushed as a primary management tool. The Pew Group has acknowledged this, but wants to make sure the implementation also captures the full suite of fishery needs – from fleet diversity to lack of consolidation to healthy communities, and new entrants coming into the fishery, and also to avoid creating a permanent group of holders of quotas. All of this is great, but the practical issue is ending overfishing – and any effort to hold catch shares to a standard that does not exist anywhere in the real world is actually a way to undermine trust in catch shares.

The panel assembled by PEW is well aware of the trade-offs, and all have different approaches to solving these problems. But the participants who lack experience in the fishery and are coming at this from an academic or ideological perspective need to avoid pie-in-the-sky thinking to constructively contribute to building better US fisheries and fishing communities. 

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

Ahab’s Journal is a blog containing "news about, and of interest to, the Commercial Fishing community on the Outer Banks of North Carolina."  It is published in association with the Outer Banks Sentinel.

Ahab’s Journal has published a sample letter supporting Dr. Brian Rothschild, Dean Emeritus of the School for Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth, for the position of Administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The letter is made available to make it easier for those in the fisheries community, who believe Dr. Rothschild should be appointed, to draft letters to their congressional leaders.

Individuals are encouraged to personalize their letter with their own concerns, if they wish, but if not they are encouraged to use this text in their e-mails, faxes, and letters.

Since the post-9/11 anthrax incidents of 2001, paper mail to Congress is screened for contamination and is therefore delayed.  Accordingly, the fastest way to communicate with members of Congress is via e-mail, the Member’s website, or via fax.

To look up the names, addresses or contact information for your Representatives in the House and Senate, a convenient website providing that information is http://www.congress.org.

Read the sample letter.

NOAA Fisheries Service Issues a Correction to the October 28, 2009, Permit Holder Letter Regarding Changes for Midwater Trawl Vessels Fishing in Groundfish Closed Area I. Read the correction here.

SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton – Nov 3, 2009 – The protests in New England over NMFS rules have not focused on the true economic facts. The New England groundfish fleet is operating at a financial loss, and must take radical steps to recover. Here is a tale of two fisheries: In New England, there were 789 groundfish vessels fishing under the days at sea program in 2008, including vessels who had leased days. The average gross stock per vessel was $80,354, using the catch value averaged over the past five years.

Out of this $80,000, the typical vessel has to pay fuel costs, dock fees, insurance, a captain’s share – generally about 10% of the gross stock, plus a lay share for the crew, which runs 35% to 40% of gross stock after deductions for fuel, groceries etc.

In a nutshell, the average groundfish vessel is dividing about $40,000 to $50,000 between two men and an owner. How can a crew member support a family on $20,000 per year fishing income. It just doesn’t work.

By contrast, the Scallop fleet has 348 active vessels, and the average gross stock per vessel is over $1 million. With a five or six man crew, a captain’s share, and fuel costs and groceries, the scallop fleet is highly profitable. Actually a couple of weeks ago in New Bedford, a Captain got a $50,000 share for a single ten day trip.

The scallop fleet is financially healthy, and with upcoming rules to allow two permits per vessel, the gross stocks could easily rise to $2 million per active vessel fairly quickly.

Into this mix comes catch shares for the New England Groundfish fleet. The very first requirement for a successful program is to make the fleet doing the actual fishing financially viable. That is going to take a huge reduction in vessels.

New England has approached this problem backwards, due to the fierce resistance to hard TAC’s in the multi-species groundfish fishery. In other areas around the country, when the number of boats could harvest the entire TAC in a four or five day period, it was obvious to all that the only avenue to financial stability was to reduce the number of vessels, and to compensate those owners leaving the fishery. This is what happened through the halibut and crab IFQ programs in Alaska.

Because the solution was so obvious, the prospect of consolidation through issuing of catch shares won widespread support.

But in New England, without the hard TAC’s to graphically illustrate over capacity and the huge number of excess vessels, the pressure has been to make all existing vessels whole. This is impossible when the average value of the groundfish landings are around $63 million per year, total. This has led to antagonism towards NMFS when the scientists say that 11 of 19 groundfish stocks still are classified as being overfished with overfishing continuing to occur. Legally, NMFS must further reduce catches – but when you are a fishermen looking at earning maybe $20,000 to $30,000, when 20 years ago the same job would pay $50,000 to $60,000, your back is against the wall.

Having been involved in these fisheries for 30 years, it is obvious to me that the key question is not tweaking stock estimates or modifying arcane rules, although these are very important in a stable system, but in first achieving financial stability.

The New England fisheries can be compared to a patient having a heart attack on the operating table. First the patient must be stabilized – then we can deal with everything else.

As part of this process, we have agreed to participate and co-sponsor a couple of meetings next week in New Bedford and Gloucester where three key figures in the Alaska fishery plan to talk about the issues that made their fisheries financially stable and viable.

Here is a link to the flyer for the meeting.

Over the next year, the transformation of New England fisheries will continue to be one of the most important issues in the industry – getting a lot of attention in Congress, and from the Obama administration, from outside groups and NGO’s and finally, from within New England itself. We hope to continue to highlight the real issues at stake, and the solutions proposed.

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

"There’s quite a few people from New Hampshire here," said Padi Anderson about the 40 commercial fishermen who participated in Friday’s rally in Gloucester, Mass., to protest new federal fishing rules.

Commercial fishermen from Maine to Maryland traveled to Gloucester to make their voices heard outside the National Marine Fisheries Service office located in Blackburn Industrial Park.

The rally featured several speakers, including her husband, Michael Anderson, a commercial fishermen who has fished out of Rye Harbor for 35 years, and Jay Driscoll, another fishermen from Rye.

Read the complete story at Fosters.

After the rally, Patricia Kurkul, the service’s regional administrator invited five protesters into a conference room on NMFS’ ground floor for an ad hoc exchange of ideas; the meeting ended with Kurkul tacitly agreeing with the general bill of particulars but demurring that her job was to administer, not make, rules and laws, and only Congress can redress the grievances, according to conferee Mike Walsh, who owns four draggers based in Boston.

"The meeting didn’t accomplish anything," Walsh said.

Another conferee, Chris Odlin of Scarborough, Maine, who with his wife owns two Boston-based trawlers, walked out mid-meeting.

Bob Vanasse, executive director of an industry public relations organization, said the Magnuson Stevens Act allows NMFS to make exceptions. A bill, the Flexibility in Rebuilding America’s Fisheries Act of 2009, was filed by Congressman Frank Pallone, D-N.J. and sponsored by a number of New Englanders, exists to clarify congressional intent, he said.

Read the complete story at The Newbury Port News.

The following message and letter was transmitted by NOAA advising fishers that there may still be opportunities to join sectors.

If you are interested in shifting from the common pool and joining a sector, there may still be opportunities.  Contact sector organizers to see if any are willing to re-open their rosters. Act quickly, so the sector organizer can submit a revised roster to NOAA Fisheries Service before the November 20th deadline.

Changes to rosters may prompt additional environmental assessment analyses.  If the changes to the rosters are significant (e.g., expanding the sector’s geographic range or gear types), the analyses will take some time, and the regulatory authorization for the added vessels may not be ready by the May 1 start of the fishing year. Roster changes received after November 20 can not be adopted and processed before May 1.

The regulatory processes for authorizing vessels that are already on a sector roster to start the season on May 1 will not be affected by this opportunity to reopen the rosters.

Read the complete Sector Roster notice.

The fact that some local and state political officials will not be lending their in-person support to this morning’s Gloucester rally in support of New England’s and the East Coast’s fishermen may, in some ways, seem disappointing.

After all, one of the key points the fishermen and their allies at today’s demonstration is that the catch shares program — and the general commitment by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, through policy and enforcement by the National Marine Fisheries Service, to drive even more fishermen and their boats out of the business — takes a significant economic toll on communities these pols are sworn to serve.

But even if Mayor Carolyn Kirk and local state lawmakers are wary of endorsing this grass-roots effort, the most important thing is certainly not for them to speak, but to hear the fishermen’s call. And that goes double for federal lawmakers, notably local Congressman John Tierney, Sen. John Kerry and interim U.S. Sen. Paul Kirk, who must now take up the demonstrators’ bullhorn and push legislatively for at least a delay in converting to a catch-share regulatory format, and a demand that NMFS rectify its admitted errors before even a single fishermen’s 2010 catch is wrongly cut back through the agency’s data gathering and processing incompetence.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

Hundreds of fishermen from the Northeast rallied in front of the headquarters of federal fishery managers Friday, demanding changes in the "dysfunctional" management that they say is destroying their industry.

Some fishermen held signs reading "Let Fishermen Fish"; other signs pictured Adolf Hitler with the word "Nazi" replacing the first word in National Marine Fisheries Service.

One group marched toward the New England regional headquarters entrance chanting, "Down with NMFS! Down with NMFS!" while a man roamed the crowd dressed as the grim reaper, with NMFS printed on his scythe.

Speakers addressed the crowd in front of a display of two fishermen at the gallows being hanged by a figure of Jane Lubchenco, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has charge over the fisheries service.

Read the complete story at WBZ 38.