Saving Seafood

‘The government is what created Carlos Rafael’

January 18, 2018 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Bill Straus saw the writing on the wall years ago.

In 2009 — eight years before Carlos Rafael went to prison — the representative of Bristol’s 10th District spoke out during the establishment of the current catch-share system in the Northeast fishery. And even with Rafael behind bars, Straus says the threat of another Codfather emerging is ever present.

“The risk is still there,” Straus said. “And that’s why what comes out of the different remedies is so important.”

NOAA defines catch shares as a portion of catch for a species that is allocated to individual fishermen or groups. Each holder of a catch share must stop fishing when his/her specific share of the quota is reached. It’s often also looked at as quota. Fishermen and organizations can buy and sell quota.

Like any industry, the largest organization buys the smaller entities, whether it’s Disney purchasing Fox, AT&T attempting to acquire Time Warner or Rafael acquiring more quota.

“Catch shares are complicated things; there’s pluses and minuses,” SMAST Professor Dan Georgianna said. “Almost every study of catch shares shows decline in employment.”

Straus echoed that in a letter to the editor published in 2009 and in a conversation with The Standard-Times on Wednesday.

“The system encourages one owner or permit holder to gobble up the permits, and that it really works to that effect in a stressed fishery like New England groundfish,” Straus said. “What Rafael was able to do was approach people who had tiny bits of shares, and say, ‘I’ll just take it off your hands because you can’t afford to be sending your boat off to get that tiny amount.’”

In buying permits from across the Northeast, Rafael became one of the biggest organizations on the East Coast, not only catching the fish but also using Carlos Seafood Inc. as the landing’s dealer, which masked the act of misreporting.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

A Cheerful Story About Environmental Conservation

October 3, 2017 — October is National Seafood Month, and I have a surprise for you. It’s a cheerful story about environmental conservation. I’m serious. Don’t roll your eyes in disbelief and click away to Facebook right now; stay with me. I know the headlines about the environment have been dire recently, particularly when it comes to seafood. But when I learned the story of West Coast groundfish, a true story about people with diverse perspectives banding together and taking action — and the action worked! — I was floored. And moved, because this could become a model of success for fisheries across the globe.

First, a deep dive

In late 1999, West Coast groundfish fishermen were seeing landings plummet drastically, from a 20-year average of about 74,000 tons annually to an estimated 27,000 tons for the year 2000. At the time, the cause of the crash was deemed “undetermined, but probably natural, causes,” but stock assessments between 1999 and 2002 determined that overfishing (fish being caught faster than they could breed) played a part in the crash. The Pacific Fishery Management Council and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) declared 10 species of West Coast groundfish overfished. The environment had suffered as well, with seafloor habitats damaged by certain types of fishing gear.

Groundfish get grounded

When a stock is deemed overfished, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act requires regulators to develop a plan to rebuild the stock in as short a time as possible, while balancing and incorporating the needs of the fishing community.

Historically, fisherfolk and government regulators have had contentious relationships. Complex regulations can make the hard day-to-day work of fishing even harder. And then there are the environmentalists, who frequently have contentious relationships with both parties. But in the face of the West Coast groundfish disaster, something unprecedented occurred: fishermen, regulators, and conservationists sat down and worked together to save West Coast groundfish.

It wasn’t easy, especially for the fishermen. A management plan was put into place that included individual fishing quotas (IFQs) or “catch shares,” which meant that they had to accept drastic cutbacks on the number of fish they could catch, even species that weren’t overfished because of the possibility of bycatch, or catching a non-targeted species while catching a targeted species. The management plan also included area restrictions, seasonal closures, gear restrictions, and a mandate that a federal observer be on every fishing trip to monitor bycatch.

Read the full story at HuffPost

Brad Gentner: It’s time to rethink ‘catch shares’

July 7, 2017 — Catch shares in marine fisheries is a concept unfamiliar to most people, and it is probably completely alien to most hunters and anglers in this country. It is a system of wildlife management that bestows some percentage of a public marine resource, like red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, to private businesses for free, to use and sell for their own profit. It was thought that by giving away ownership rights to individuals, the fishery would consolidate and ultimately become easier to manage. While the same number of fish would be caught, the benefits of funneling access to the resource through fewer entities was thought to remove some of the uncertainty in the industry and thus would be worth the price of privatizing a public resource for free.

While catch shares are still the darling of some fisheries economists, there is a growing backlash against this management tool worldwide for a variety of reasons. At the heart of these complaints is fleet and wealth consolidation, extraction of public wealth for private profit, and failure to capitalize share-cost into production costs.

Within the past two years, two small-scale fisheries organizations, the World Forum of Fisher Peoples and the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers came out in opposition to a large World Bank investment initiative centered around rights-based management. These small-scale fisherfolk organizations oppose “ocean grabbing” because it destroys communities and consolidates the fleet and the fishery wealth in too few hands. In addition to these grassroots resistance efforts, there have been several scholarly articles published that state that the only real guaranteed output from catch shares is capacity reduction through consolidation. And while reducing capacity is the key to reducing overfishing, it is not a sufficient condition to improving biological outcomes. In other words, there is no guarantee that stock will be conserved, but a definite guarantee that the industry will shrink, generally damaging coastal communities.

Beyond the consolidation problem, as we’ve seen in the Gulf red snapper commercial sector, these systems create “quota barons” who pay their harvesters laborer wages in order to increase their profits or lease out their quota to other fishermen or new entrants. First-generation quota holders paid nothing for the public resource, and this failure to capitalize the share value as a cost in the production of fish by quota holders is actually distorting quota markets and changing incentives. When the quota is given away to the first generation of fishers at the inception of a catch share, the subsequent generations of fishermen essentially become fishery sharecroppers forever.

Read the full opinion piece at the Houston Chronicle

MASSACHUSETTS: Did catch shares enable the Codfather’s fishing fraud?

May 1, 2017 — Carlos Rafael’s guilty plea late last month of falsifying fish quotas, conspiracy and tax evasion has prompted renewed criticism of one of the most contentious parts of the New England groundfish fishery’s management system: catch shares.

Rafael, who dubbed himself “The Codfather,” owned one of the largest commercial fishing fleets in the United States, and for some community fishermen in New England, his case represents consolidation run amok. Consolidating fishing permits, they say, also centralizes power, making fraud more likely.

But for environmentalists who support catch shares as a way to reduce overfishing, consolidation isn’t inevitable. They say Rafael’s case highlights the need for better monitoring and fraud protections to prevent the sort of cheating that can plague any fishery management system.

Catch share schemes, in which fishermen are allocated rights to catch a certain amount of fish, operate on the principle that privatizing a resource and giving people a greater stake in its health will lead them to conserve it.

But in New England, catch shares led to fewer fishermen controlling more of the resource, according to Niaz Dorry, the coordinating director of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, a community fishing group. Catch shares boot out smaller fishermen and block new fishermen from the fishery as a wealthy minority amass quota and drive up the price.

“What they really do is create a system that allows a few entities — who are not necessarily people who actually fish — to control almost the entire system,” Dorry told SeafoodSource.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

WAYNE MERSHON: Don’t bite on risky lure of ‘catch shares’

December 6th, 2016 — A wolf in sheep’s clothing: something that seems to be good, but is actually not good at all.

I can’t think of a more appropriate saying to use than “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” to describe the reality of what the Seafood Harvesters of America want to do with our offshore fisheries.

The Post and Courier recently published an article and editorial that bought into the sheep’s clothing side. Year-round fishing and better fisheries data are touted.

Who could be against that?

But there’s a wolf: privatization of our fisheries through a scheme called “catch shares,” where fishermen and corporations are actually given ownership of our fisheries with shares that can be bought or sold like stock on Wall Street.

That’s the real reason for the Seafood Harvesters of America’s existence. They’re working hard to ensure commercial fishermen own our fisheries, and in this case it’s our snapper and grouper, starting with a pilot program that could be considered by the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council and NOAA Fisheries next year.

The term “catch shares” does not appear in the article or editorial, but the innocuous sounding synonym “individual quotas” does. The Seafood Harvesters have been well coached by their public relations team to not use “catch shares” because it will draw intense fire from most commercial and recreational fishermen.

Last year, when the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council sought input on its long-range management plan for the snapper-grouper fishery, 97 percent of the responding stakeholders said they opposed catch shares.

Read the full op-ed at The Post and Courier 

 

How the privatization of our oceans is sinking fishermen

November 28th, 2016 — The town of St. George, off the Bering Sea near Alaska, was long home to some of the most robust pollock fishing in the country. But due to a fishing rights management scheme called “catch shares,” the town has no rights to fish its own waters and regularly watches their former industry literally pass them by.

“Every year, the industry takes about $2 billion in gains out of this fish resource on the Bering Sea,” St. George Mayor Pat Pletnikoff tells Lee van der Voo in “The Fish Market.” “Not one plug nickel sticks to St. George.”

Catch shares work by dividing our oceans just like any other physical property, creating theoretical property lines. Then the rights to fish different species in various sections are awarded to applicants — which could be individuals or companies — based on how much fish they catch over a certain period of time. These rights are given by eight fishery councils throughout the country, which also place restrictions on how much of any species can be fished.

While catch shares are credited with greater species management — the US government found in 2007 that of 230 species of fish, 92 were going quickly extinct due to overfishing — the catch-shares program has virtually privatized our oceans, destroying the livelihoods of many lifelong fishermen and other small businesses in the process.

Read the full story at The New York Post 

How a ‘rogue’ environmental group transformed American fisheries

October 5, 2016 — The following is excerpted from a story written by Ben Raines and originally published on AL.com. Mr. Raines is a 17-year veteran investigative reporter for Al.com specializing in Alabama’s natural systems. He wrote, narrated and coproduced ‘America’s Amazon’, a documentary about the Mobile River Basin. He is a Coast Guard licensed captain and leads tours in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, to barrier islands and other remote spots:

“We always hear from them at the Council meetings,” said Bob Shipp, a former president and longtime member of the Council, which sets regulations for the commercial and recreational fisheries in the Gulf.

“They don’t explain how their groups are linked, but EDF and the fishermen with these non-profits are always on the same page.”

The intimate connection between EDF and the non-profits they helped start was on display on national television this year on the National Geographic TV show “Big Fish, Texas,” which starred Buddy Guindon and his family. On that show, the top EDF official in the Gulf was shown in a private meeting coaching Guindon on what to say moments before he spoke to the Texas Legislature.

“They pay for all of the travel, meals, everything for anyone who goes on one of these trips to Washington or the council meetings. They talk to the fishermen about what to say. And they tell the fishermen to just give them all their receipts and they’d cover everything,” said Wayne Warner, who was a founding member of the Shareholder’s Alliance but quit the first year because he disapproved of the environmental group’s involvement.

One of the nation’s largest environmental groups — bankrolled with $50 million from the heirs to the Walmart fortune — has spent millions of dollars pushing a wholesale change in how the U.S. manages its fisheries, an AL.com investigation reveals.

Critics blame the Environmental Defense Fund effort for hurting fishing communities on every coast, from Kake, Alaska, and Gloucester, Mass., to Bayou La Batre, Alabama.

But catch share systems are also blamed for knocking thousands of fishermen out of the industry, usually because of inequities in how the shares were originally distributed by the government.

In the Gulf of Mexico’s red snapper fishery for instance, some fishermen were granted the right to catch six percent of the annual harvest, worth millions of dollars a year, while others were granted as little as 0.006 percent of the harvest, or a few hundred pounds a year, meaning they could no longer earn a living from fishing.

Because all other fishermen are locked out of the fishery unless they buy or lease catch shares, critics say the system has turned those who were granted the largest portion of the harvest into Sea Lords who lease the right to fish to those who received the least. Many of these lords are able to earn millions of dollars a year without ever leaving the dock, simply by bartering the right to fish. The Sea Lord problem has affected fisheries all over the country, creating haves and have-nots when it comes to the basic right to fish, and forcing hundreds of crews out of the industry.

EDF gained unprecedented access to the levers of power in 2008 when President Obama appointed the vice-chair of EDF’s board – Jane Lubchenco — as the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which manages the nation’s fish stocks. Once in power, Lubchenco, a respected but little known fisheries professor at Oregon State University, enacted a national catch share policy that mirrored EDF’s longtime goals.

As Lubchenco pushed for catch shares from the top, EDF staff members simultaneously organized and funded the creation of several non-profit activist groups made up of small numbers of commercial fishermen on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Critics say the move was intended to create the impression of grass roots support for catch shares that didn’t actually exist.

The leadership of these non-profits often consists of the fishermen who control the largest portion of a given fishery, who are also the folks who benefitted most from the switch to catch shares.

“They work hard to make the public and politicians believe they are representing the majority of charter for hire boats when in reality they represent maybe 200 of 1,300 federally permitted owners,” said Bob Zales, president of the National Association of Charterboat Operators. “Through EDF and their puppet associations such as the Charter Fishermen’s Association, there is much political lobbying and at least yearly, sometimes more often, trips to D.C. to garner support for catch shares in all fisheries, commercial, charter, and private recreational with stamps.” 

“What you are seeing is a conservation group that has gone rogue… What EDF really wants is to privatize the entire resource,” said Daniel Pauly, a professor at the University of British Columbia and one of the world’s preeminent fisheries scientists. Pauly is responsible for developing the concept of keystone species in aquatic food webs and popularizing the notion that the world’s fish stocks are much worse off than most scientists believe. He disputes the EDF position that catch shares improve fisheries. Instead, he said, they cause “economic redistribution.”

“Everywhere you have a catch share, a small group of people end up controlling the fishery. We have in British Columbia, one person controls 50 percent of our fishery. This is what is happening in the Gulf,” Pauly said. “EDF has no business favoring the concentration of capital and ownership, but that is what it is doing.”

Indeed, one of the key benefits of switching to catch shares, according to Lubchenco’s national catch share policy, is “consolidation” of the fleet. In other words, when catch shares are put in place, the number of people in a fishery shrinks, often dramatically, as the larger harvesters buy up shares from the smaller fishing boats.

EDF officials describe such concentration as one of several “unintended consequences.” Others say it created an age of the sea lords and sharecroppers that began in earnest with Lubchenco’s appointment. Lubchenco, who left NOAA in 2013 and resumed her position on the EDF board, did not respond to requests for comment.

Lubchenco met fierce resistance in Massachusetts, when catch shares were enacted for the fisheries in the north Atlantic. John Kerry, then a senator, along with Gov. Deval Patrick and most of the state’s congressional delegation, bitterly opposed the introduction of catch shares, saying they would cost hundreds to thousands of jobs and devastate coastal communities.

“A lot of our fishermen have been put out of business or pushed to the brink,” because of catch shares, Kerry said at the time.

“Normally environmental groups and NGOs are for the little guy, but here, the EDF people are siding with the big guys, the corporate interests that want to own and privatize our fisheries,” Pauly said. “It makes EDF very strange in the world of environmental groups. But then they are being funded by Walmart.”

Pauly said the solution is to require the owner of shares in a fishery to actually captain the boat that is doing the fishing. In most U.S. catch shares, such as the red snapper IFQ, there is no such requirement. In fact, any U.S. citizen is allowed to buy, sell, or trade shares in the fishery, whether he or she has a boat, or has ever been fishing in their life.

Read the full story here

40 years of change: For fishing industry, the spring of 1976 was the start of a new era

June 20, 2016 — The following is excerpted from a story published Saturday by the New Bedford Standard-Times:

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — When you talk about fishing here in New Bedford, you have to start with the whaling era — and the lessons learned.

For decades, the pursuit of whaling chugged along without any dramatic changes. The ships, the equipment, the culture remained essentially the same for years, feeding countless families, lining countless pockets … until the bonanza ran out and the industry collapsed in the early part of the 20th century, never to be revived.

The fishing industry, both local and national, might have fallen into that same trap, but 40 years ago the U.S. government changed the game, adopting the most sweeping changes in the laws governing fisheries that reverberates to this day.

On April 13, 1976, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act was passed and immediately accomplished two major goals.

One, it set into motion a new and unique scheme of regulation to rebuild dwindling fish stocks, a system dramatically different than anything else the government had tried until 1976.

Two, it expelled foreign fishing vessels from fishing inside a 200-mile limit from America’s shoreline.

It isn’t talked about much today, but until 1976 the capacity of the foreign fleet exceeded the Americans, sending huge factory ships into fertile places like Georges Bank to virtually vacuum the fish into the hold and freeze it on the spot, allowing the ships to stay for weeks at a time. “There were West Germans, Poles, Russians, East Germans,” recalled former fisherman James Kendall, now a seafood consultant.

In 1975, the National Marine Fisheries Service reported there were 133 foreign fishing vessels fishing on Georges Bank. The Magnuson-Stevens Act ended that decisively.

Since 1976, much has changed. The unions, which once represented the fishermen and the workers in the fish houses, virtually disappeared from the waterfront. The venerable fish auction at the Wharfinger Building on City Pier 3 is now a museum piece, since the brokers years ago put down their chalkboards and picked up computer screens. Today it has evolved into a computerized display auction elsewhere on the waterfront, with complete transparency and documentation, and bidders located across the nation.

What else has changed?

For lack of a better term, everything.

Where, oh where has our groundfish fleet gone?

At the BASE New Bedford Seafood Display Auction, co-owner Richard Canastra called up data of groundfish sales in recent years that demonstrate a dropoff of more than 30 percent in the last few years alone.

Today there are some days that don’t warrant conducting the auction at all. “Sometimes it’s like a candy store,” he said. “Five pounds of this and three pounds of that.”

Much of the blame for the shrinking of the groundfish fleet, particularly in New Bedford and Gloucester, is laid at the feet of the catch shares and sector management introduced in 2010 by NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco. It dispensed with most of the old days-at-sea  system, which had reduced the annual days at sea to 50, down from around 225, that the boats once had available to them.

The term “sectors” was unfamiliar to the industry when NOAA announced their arrival in 2010. Essentially they are cooperatives, in which individual boats are grouped together along with their catch allocations, and the sector manager manages them as efficiently as he or she can.

This was predicted to cause a consolidation of the industry into the bigger players as the smaller ones weren’t getting enough quota to make it profitable to fish.

For some boat owners, the problem was that the catch shares were determined by the history of the boats but the practice of shack left no paper trail, no formal record, so catch shares were reduced in many cases.

Dr. Brian Rothschild, dean emeritus of the UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology and a critic of NOAA, noted that many boat owners found that they can “own it and lease it out and obtain money in windfall profits” without even going fishing.

Oh, those pesky environmentalists!

It was “not right from the beginning that NOAA has enforced this,” Rothschild said. “On top of that, NOAA enforcement didn’t come from a desire to make good public policy but because it came under the influence of organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund,” he said.

Catch shares and sector management have, however, withstood legal challenges in federal court, because of a legal doctrine named Chevron, in which government institutions are allowed to interpret laws such as Magnuson any way they wish unless the departures from congressional intent are egregious.

Rothschild is among those who believe that sector management under Magnuson has been ignoring key provisions of the act, notably the socio-economic impact evaluation and the instruction to use the best available science. That has largely excluded scientists outside of NOAA itself.

Outside scientists have occasionally run rings around NOAA. For example, SMAST’s Dr. Kevin  Stokesbury’s invention of a camera apparatus to quite literally count the scallops on the seabed individually has revolutionized scallop management, opened the door to a treasure trove of healthy scallops, and made New Bedford the No. 1 fishing port in the nation.

But NOAA now employs its own camera apparatus. It conducts regular surveys of fish populations and that has been a very sore point at times in recent years.

This is a departure from the days before Magnuson, when fishermen were issued permits for various species and were left largely on their own to discover how many fish were in the ocean, which were already dwindling at the time.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

ALASKA: Council convenes in Kodiak with Gulf catch shares in focus

June 2, 2016 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council will meet in Kodiak from June 6-14 to hear a discussion paper that has enraged the trawl industry since late 2015.

Two proposals are engineered to prevent harmful impacts such as the job losses and high cost of entry that have occurred under previous such programs in halibut and crab.

This is an official state position, and the North Pacific council holds a six-member majority of the 11-member body that governs federal Alaska waters.

Gov. Bill Walker’s administration prioritizes coastal communities’ economic prospects during the state’s oil-driven financial calamity. Part of that stance concerns keeping the fishing industry, the state’s largest private employer, in Alaskan fishermen’s hands.

“The greatest challenge facing fishery managers and communities to date has been how to adequately protect communities and working fishermen from the effects of fisheries privatization, notably excessive consolidation and concentration of fishing privileges, crew job loss, rising entry costs, absentee ownership of quota and high leasing fees, and the flight of fishing rights and wealth from fishery dependent communities,” the council’s discussion paper reads. “Collectively, these impacts are altering and in some cases severing the connection between Alaska coastal communities and fisheries.”

For years, the council has mulled over a regulations to install catch shares in the Gulf of Alaska groundfish fisheries. Mainly trawlers go after this fishery, which includes pollock, a midwater fish, and species such as Pacific cod and arrowtooth flounder, which are bottom, or pelagic, fish.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

DICK GRACHEK: Catch Shares

May 4, 2016 — The problem with catch shares is not in their “design”.  The problem with catch shares is in their existence.

Except for a few “winners” perhaps, it’s a problem for all concerned that this flawed and destructive privatization scheme was even considered, no less established as a management approach.

Catch Shares management has proven to be A Bad Idea:  Catch Shares have done nothing to help the fish. Catch Shares have done nothing to help the fishermen and the fishing communities. Catch Shares have done nothing to help the fish consuming public. Catch shares were not put to the referendum vote as statutorily mandated by the MSA. Catch Share Sectors were not “voluntarily” joined by the majority of the fishermen—the common pool was not a viable “option”.  The NOAA/NMFS Individual Transferable Quota initial allocation data base was admittedly flawed and inaccurate. Catch Shares had been “ramrodded” through the council process without due deliberation or adequate planning.

Finally catch Shares or ITQ’s are just a tool like any of the others that have been tried; but this one, as it fails, jeopardizes the entire independent small-boat fishery, their shoreside support businesses, and their iconic and much touted communities which could be lost permanently.

Fleet “consolidation” through ITQ’s and the consequent collapse of shore side support facilities, possible factory ship cartels, (legal under the American Fisheries Act 1998), and the transfer of fishing “rights” into the “wrong” corporate hands, are some of the irreversible consequences of this plan.  And, as is occurring wherever they have been instituted worldwide, catch shares or Individual Transferable Quotas ultimately spell the end for the independent fisherman and their communities and their shoreside support businesses.

Read the full story at the Center for Sustainable Fisheries