The TAC is not being caught and commercial fishermen are frozen out of the selection process for the head of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
What do they really want?
The people running the National Marine Fisheries Service are hell bent on “fixing” the New England groundfish fishery regardless of the impact that their “fix” is going to have on the tens of thousands of people who directly or indirectly depend on it. NMFS’ solution, a variation of catch shares called sectors, is going to make the groundfish fishery easier and cheaper to manage, and it’s unquestionably going to put some people in the commercial fishing industry in a better economic position. At the same time it could also destroy much of the social fabric that holds together New England’s fishing communities while irrevocably altering a way of life that’s become synonymous with the New England character.
But what’s broken? I’ve already pointed out that there are enough groundfish off New England to, if sustainably managed, keep today’s entire groundfish fleet working (see Chronic Underfishing – the Real New England Groundfish Crisis at http://www.fishnet-usa.com/chronic_underfishing.htm). If the groundfish fishermen hadn’t been hobbled by a Machiavellian morass of fishing restrictions, in 2008 they could have harvested most, if not all, of the 170,000 metric tons of groundfish target TAC (that stands for Total Allowable Catch) rather than the 40,000 tons they did land.
If catching the Total Allowable Catch of groundfish had actually been allowed over the last decade, something that might well be considered heresy on Great Republic Drive in Gloucester, there’s not much in the groundfish fishery that would actually need fixing. If it weren’t for foundation-funded “marine conservationists” strangling the groundfish fishery into submission via ecologically unsupportable and economically devastating regulations, how many tons of catchable and sellable groundfish would have been caught in those years? With each pound of groundfish landed generating five bucks or so of economic activity, every 100,000 metric tons of landings means over a billion dollars pumped into the New England economy. That kind of money would do some serious “fixing.”
And what about spiny dogfish? There are about a million tons of them out there, and they’re having a huge negative impact on other species and other fisheries from Cape Hatteras to up past the Hague Line. How many boats, how many fish cutters, how many truckers and how many of every other kind of tradesman or woman that gets a piece of the fish pie could an extra fifty- or a hundred-thousand tons of dogfish support? And what would a significantly reduced dogfish biomass do for all of those competing stocks, including groundfish (see the note below)?
The groundfish stocks definitely aren’t broken. As the folks at NMFS admit, the fish are there. Going by the target TAC, there are enough catchable groundfish to support a fishery as big as it was in the late 1960s or the early 80s. And if the huge biomass of spiny dogfish could be reasonably reduced, there would be even more, and more fluke, and scup, and sea bass, and striped bass, and on and on and on as well. But the 2009 spiny dogfish TAC is under 6,000 metric tons. That’s not going to make a noticeable dent in the dogfish stock, which will thereby continue to make sizeable – and very noticeable – dents in just about every other stock.
But, with their seemingly obsessive focus on implementing the groundfish sector program, Phase I of Dr. Lubchenco’s “catch share revolution,” and with that huge uncaught TAC staring us in the face, it’s awfully difficult not to suspect that the NMFS leadership has turned a blind eye towards anything that would allow more of the allowable groundfish to be caught. And it seems the same blind eye has been turned towards anything – say, for example, reducing the spiny dogfish biomass – that would increase the allowable groundfish catch. If there’s any rational reasoning behind the former other than reducing the perceived need for revolutionizing groundfish management it’s really hard to understand what it might be. It’s not so difficult to see why no one is doing anything serious to increase the TAC. A hundred and thirty thousand tons of uncaught TAC must be hard enough to explain (or to not explain, which has been the case up until now). Could you imagine being a manager and having to explain – or not – even more?
Putting it as succinctly as possible, there are four times more catchable groundfish in New England than are being caught, and if it wasn’t for a huge biomass of spiny dogfish that ratio would be higher. Yet the people at NMFS haven’t made any substantive efforts to allow fishermen to harvest more of the uncaught groundfish TAC or significantly more (in terms of predation on or competition with other species) spiny dogfish. And while not doing all of that, they’ve apparently also botched the job of groundfish record keeping, which to the fishermen is undoubtedly the most critical part of the entire catch shares process.
And last but certainly not least, from the September 10 Gloucester Daily Times, “ignoring the wishes of 109,817 Massachusetts online voters, the federal government has rejected Gloucester’s Man at the Wheel for engraving on the back of a series of U.S. quarters. Chosen in a landslide over hundreds of other sites in Massachusetts in Internet voting this spring, the Gloucester Fishermen’s Memorial and its iconic image of the man at sea was deemed ineligible for the quarter program because it is not federally maintained, according to a Mint spokeswoman” (Feds nix ‘Man at the Wheel’ for state quarter honor by Patrick Anderson).
In addition to the comedy of errors that management of one of our oldest and most important commercial fisheries has become, in addition to commercial fishermen being frozen out of the Obama Administration’s selection process for the leader of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and in addition to commercial fishermen being frozen out of the selection process for the head of the National Marine Fisheries Service, commercial fishermen are now even being denied recognition on the back of a U.S. coin. Kind of makes me wonder what’s coming next, but while I’m wondering I’m strapping on my crash helmet and mapping out my quickest route to the bomb shelter.
Note: According to The Ecosystem Status Report for the Northeast U.S. Continental Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem by the NMFS Ecosystem Assessment Program just published this month, “the direct and indirect effects of species-selective harvesting patterns have also contributed to shifts fish community composition which is now dominated by small pelagic fishes and elasmobranch species (skates and small sharks) of low relative economic value.” Assuming each spiny dogfish consumes 1.5% of its total body weight in prey species daily, every 60 days the total biomass of dogfish off New England will eat an equivalent weight in other species, for a total of 6 million metric tons of spiny dogfish predation a year.