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
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