The Environmental Defense Fund has been promoting catch shares as a solution and has studied the over 300 catch share systems in the US and other countries. One of the most common concerns is that catch shares end overfishing at the cost of community values. In New England, “sector’’ catch shares were specifically designed to support small fishing fleets. Additional policies are used elsewhere – that we should adopt here – that further protect smaller ports and small-scale fishermen.
Feds admit plan means loss of jobs
The federal government's next-generation fishery regulatory regimen for New England openly acknowledges that social and economic hardship starting with job losses will be among the first effects.
Only later does the document anticipate economic recovery and a brighter future — as in the classic stages of the medical cleansing with distasteful purgatives.
That's raising questions and concern among fishing industry leaders, and from lawmakers like Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who wonder how the U.S. government can openly push a policy with negative economic impacts for fishing communities like Gloucester.
The New England Fishery Management Council has approved the so-called Amendment 16 catch-share regulatory system to take effect next May 1.
Chicken of the sea? Tuna farming getting a boost
Thousands of tuna, their silver bellies bloated with fat, swim frantically around in netted areas of a small bay in Kumano, Japan, stuffing themselves until they grow twice as heavy as in the wild.
Is this sushi's future? Tuna raised like chickens or cows?
As the world's love affair with raw fish depletes wild tuna populations, long-running efforts to breed the deep-sea fish from egg to adulthood may finally be bearing fruit. Though the challenges are daunting, the potential profits are huge.
By the end of this year, an Australian company says it will begin selling small amounts of southern bluefin tuna hatched in its fishery. A Japanese firm breeding the more prized Pacific bluefin tuna hopes to start sales in 2013 and ship 10,000 fish by 2015.
EDF responds to Lenfest Oceans / Essington study on Catch Shares
A new study (Essington, 2009) supports the results of other studies showing the benefits of catch share management in fisheries (Costello et al., 2008; Heal and Schlenker 2008). The paper looks for a response in biomass, exploitation rate, discards, effort, compliance with catch targets and landings in 15 North American catch share fisheries. The paper did not find that these catch share fisheries, on average, reduced overall landings or that they increased biomass. That seems to be because most of these fisheries were not overfished–so the overall catch would not be expected to go down, and biomass would not be expected to increase, because these were not management goals. To test the hypothesis that catch shares can rebuild depleted populations, it will be important to analyze depleted fisheries, over rebuilding time frames. In this study, only one of the 8 fisheries that had explicit overfishing targets was substantially overfished.
The author used a rigorous methodology to examine these fisheries (before-and-after comparisons were complemented by comparisons within fisheries with non-catch share and catch share sectors, and with a meta-analysis). As more catch shares are implemented and a greater diversity of fisheries under catch shares are studied with such methods, I anticipate that the author’s observation that variance in management metrics is reduced by catch share management will be borne out. This will translate into improved rebuilding of depleted stocks, prevention of overfishing, reduction in bycatch and discard, and even a reduction in the effects of fishing on habitats – if the management targets themselves are robust.
EDF's position on the conservation benefits of catch shares is available here.
Decline Of The Cod Divides A New England Fishing Village
These days, the Cod is pretty much gone from the Cape. Bob Luce, 63, sits on a bench and explains why. Luce, who has an artificial knee from the wear and tear of fishing and knuckles tattooed “love” and “hate” in honor of the Robert Mitchum movie The Night of the Hunter, fondly remembers the days in the 1970s when he could drop hooks to the seafloor 15 miles out and reel in 30 to 50 pound cod. By the 1990s, the Cape Cod fishing grounds were barren. Fishing had gotten too efficient for its own good, says Luce.
In 1980, many fishers began switching from hooks that caught individual fish to nets that snared cod by the gills, whole schools at a time. At the same time, big trawlers began dragging rollers across the rocky seabed to force the bottom-dwelling fish upward into nets, capturing massive amounts of cod and, some critics claim, destroying its preferred habitat. “They caught all the big ones and wiped them out,” says Luce. Now New England is trying to rebuild its cod fishery, opening deep divisions among fishers in places like Chatham.
When cod stocks collapsed in the 1990s, the federal government closed thousands of square miles of fishing grounds and limited fishers’ “days at sea.” The cod population has rebounded, says Steve Murawski, a scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, but to reach historic levels, the total mass of cod still needs to grow eightfold on Georges Bank, east of the cape, and about threefold in the Gulf of Maine.
Fisheries official wants analysis of strained industry relationships
The chairman of the New England Fishery Management Council has asked the U.S. Secretary of Commerce for an independent management consultant's study and analysis of the relationships between the council, the regional executive and the federal fisheries science center at Woods Hole.
While carefully lauding the federal system of regulating fisheries — which has been under fierce attack by multiple niches of the industry and a growing chorus from Congress — John Pappalardo conceded that "our region's bureaucracy is unable to efficiently meet its expanded obligations."
Pappalardo also admitted to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke that "our bureaucracy is often driven by process and protocol rather than by mission and outcome."
He asked Locke — the cog in the bureaucracy between President Obama and Jane Lubchenco, the assistant secretary for oceans and fisheries, who supervises Regional Administrator Patricia Kurkul — to support funding for an "established management consultant" who would review the relationship between the trio of federal agencies responsible for the strained relationship with the industry and make recommendations.
Change urged in fisheries administration
The chairman of the council that advises federal managers on New England fishing regulations has called for a review of the rule-making bureaucracy, calling it “antiquated and ineffective.’’ John Pappalardo of the New England Fishery Management Council made the comment in a letter to US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.
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Scallop industry wants limit to be eased
More than 1,000 members of the East Coast scallop industry have asked the nation’s chief fisheries regulator to restore 6 million pounds to the recent cut in the scallop catch. The industry called the cuts “rapid and unnecessary’’ in a letter delivered Saturday to Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
OPINION: Permit banking holds promise close to shore
Fishermen were faced with a Hobbesian Choice [sic]: join a sector, with little knowledge of how that system might work, in theory or practice, or go it alone in the common pool, with a steep reduction in their days at sea and other restrictions and which will, in three years, also be subject to a total allowable catch (TAC) or quota.
But this brave new world of fisheries management in New England comes with a terrible dilemma for community-based groups fighting to maintain their access to the gulf's fishery resources. On the one hand, sectors are a tool that may allow community-based fleets to stay in the game if enough fish are conserved to rebuild local stocks. But experience from every other fishing region in the world demonstrates that since quota allocations can be bought and sold, TACs result in at least a 25 percent consolidation in the number of boats in a quota-based fishery. It should be no surprise that smaller community-based vessels are those disproportionately squeezed out of a fishery.
New Study Finds Catch Shares Improve Consistency, Not Health, of Fisheries
Catch share programs result in more consistent and predictable fisheries but do not necessarily improve ecological conditions, according to a new study published online this week by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Employed by nations around the world, catch shares – a management system that divides up and allocates percentages, or shares, of the total allowable catch to individual fishermen or fishing groups – have generated controversy as to whether they lead to better environmental stewardship than other fishery management options. The study, funded by the Lenfest Ocean Program, concludes that these programs help to eliminate erratic swings in fishing rates, catch landings and fish population sizes, among other factors, but may not necessarily lead to larger fish populations. This research is the most in-depth and comprehensive study of the ecological impacts of catch share programs in North America.
Publication of this research coincides with the public-comment period for the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) draft catch share policy, which evaluates catch share programs under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the nation’s primary fisheries law. NOAA’s draft policy “encourages the consideration and adoption of catch shares wherever appropriate in fishery management and ecosystem plans and amendments and will support the design, implementation, and monitoring of catch share programs.
NE fishery manager calls for review of rulemakers
The chairman of the council that advises federal managers on New England fishing regulations has called for a review of the rulemaking bureaucracy, calling it "antiquated and ineffective."
John Pappalardo of the New England Fishery Management Council made the request in a letter to U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. The council works with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Northeast Science Center to devise fishing rules.
But Pappalardo wrote the three entities can’t efficiently meet the expanded requirements of the nation’s recently reauthorized fisheries law, the Magnuson Stevens Act. He also said the bureaucracy is driven by "process and protocol," not outcomes.