Saving Seafood

U.S. Commerce Department Announces Appointments to Regional Fishery Management Councils for 2018

June 27, 2018 — The following was released by NOAA:

The U.S. Commerce Department today announced the appointment of 30 members to the eight regional fishery management councils that partner with NOAA Fisheries to manage ocean fish stocks. Twenty-nine of the new and reappointed council members will serve three-year terms from August 11, 2018 through August 10, 2021. One appointed member is filling an at-large seat recently vacated on the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council and this member will serve through August 10, 2020.

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act established the councils as stewards of the Nation’s fisheries resources through the preparation of fishery management plans for their regions. NOAA Fisheries works closely with the councils through this process and then reviews, approves and implements the plans. Council members represent diverse groups, including commercial and recreational fishing industries, environmental organizations and academia. They are vital to fulfilling the act’s requirements to end overfishing, rebuild fish stocks and manage them sustainably.

Each year, the Secretary of Commerce appoints approximately one-third of the total 72 appointed members to the eight regional councils. The Secretary selects members from nominations submitted by the governors of fishing states, territories and tribal governments.  Council members are appointed to both obligatory (state-specific) and at-large (regional) seats. Council members serve a three-year term and may be reappointed to serve three consecutive terms.

Asterisks preceding a member’s name indicate a reappointment.

New England Council

The New England Council includes members from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. 2018 appointees will fill obligatory seats for Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island and one at-large seat.

Obligatory seats:

*Matthew G. McKenzie (Connecticut)

*Terry A. Alexander (Maine)

*John F. Quinn (Massachusetts)

*Eric E. Reid (Rhode Island)

At-large seat:

*Vincent M. Balzano (Maine)

Mid-Atlantic Council

The Mid-Atlantic Council includes members from the states of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. 2018 appointees will fill obligatory seats for New Jersey and Virginia and two at-large seats.

Obligatory seats:

*Adam C. Nowalsky (New Jersey)

*Peter L. Defur (Virginia)

At-large seats:

*Anthony D. Dilernia (New York)

*Sara E. Winslow (North Carolina)

South Atlantic Council

The South Atlantic Council includes members from Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. 2018 appointees will fill obligatory seats for Florida and Georgia and two at-large seats.

Obligatory seats:

Art L. Sapp (Florida)

Kyle D. Christiansen (Georgia)

At-Large seats:

Arnold “Spud” G. Woodward (Georgia)

*Anna B. Beckwith (North Carolina)

Caribbean Council

The Caribbean Council includes members from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. 2018 appointees will fill an obligatory seat for USVI and one at-large seat.

Obligatory seat:

Edward P. Schuster, Sr. (USVI)

At-Large seat:

Vanessa Ramirez Perez (Puerto Rico)

Gulf Council

The Gulf Council includes members from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. 2018 appointees will fill obligatory seats for Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana and two at-large seats.

Obligatory seats:

Susan E. Boggs (Alabama)

*Juan M. Sanchez (Florida)

Jonathan J. Dugas (Louisiana)

At-large seats:

*Edward W. Swindell, Jr. (Louisiana)

*Dale A. Diaz (Mississippi)

Pacific Council

The Pacific Council includes members from California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The Pacific Council also includes one Tribal seat. 2018 appointees will fill obligatory seats for California and Oregon and two at-large seats. The Tribal seat will be announced at a later date.

Obligatory seats:

Robert E. Dooley (California)

Christa M. Svensson (Oregon)

At-Large seats:

Louis H. Zimm (California)

*Philip A. Anderson (Washington)

North Pacific Council

The North Pacific Council includes members from Alaska and Washington. 2018 appointees will fill obligatory seats for Alaska and Washington.

Obligatory Seats:

John E. Jensen (Alaska)

*Andrew D. Mezirow (Alaska)

*Craig A. Cross (Washington)

Western Pacific Council

The Western Pacific Council includes members from American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. 2018 appointees will fill obligatory seats for Guam and Hawaii. An out-of-cycle appointment is also being made for a vacant at-large seat.

Obligatory seats:

*Michael P. Duenas (Guam)

Edwin N. Watamura (Hawaii)

At-Large seat:

**Michael K. Goto (Hawaii)

(out-of-cycle appointment for current vacancy)

Environmentalists spar with Obama administration over fish catches

April 7, 2016 — WASHINGTON — A proposed federal rule that would give regional councils more say in setting catch limits on fish has sparked rare friction between the Obama administration and environmental groups.

The proposal, years in the making, could take effect this summer. It would provide the eight councils “additional clarity and potential flexibility” to comply with the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act.

Groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Earth Justice say the change could roll back nearly a decade of progress in rescuing once-overfished populations.

Since Congress updated Magnuson-Stevens in 2006, the number of stocks labeled as overfished or subject to overfishing has dropped to the lowest level in 20 years of tracking.

“We would go backwards from what is now a pretty successful rule,” said Lee Crockett, director of U.S. Ocean Conservation for the Pew Charitable Trusts. “This adds more flexibility to what was pretty clear guidelines, and our experience has been that when flexibility is provided to these fishery management councils, it’s not a good thing.”

The councils, which include state officials, environmental activists and industry representatives, determine catch limits on dozens of stocks, including cod off New England, red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico and salmon in the Pacific.

They follow science-driven guidelines — first issued in early 2009 in the waning days of the Bush administration — that are enforced through the “National Standard 1” regulation, which the proposed rule would modify.

Read the full story at USA Today

NILS E. STOLPE: FishNet-USA/Who’s really in charge of U.S. fisheries?

September 14, 2015 — An Oligarchy is defined as “a country, business, etc., that is controlled by a small group of people” 

Ancient City Shrimp is an eight minute YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WepRokGO8d8) produced by the St. Augustine Lighthouse Museum that examines St. Augustine’s past as one of several centers of commercial shrimping in Florida.

Unfortunately – or perhaps tragically is a better fit – Florida’s shrimp fleet is only a shadow of what it once was. One of the reasons for this is the imposition of unrealistic regulations on U.S. shrimpers that has made the fishery much less profitable than it used to be.

The video’s producers don’t really focus on this as one of the reasons for this decline, rather emphasizing the impacts of cheaper – and generally inferior – shrimp from abroad. This is understandable. You can only cover so much ground in a short video. Opening the can of worms that fishery regulation in the Southeast has become is a guarantee of complication and controversy, things which few museums would willingly get involved in.

In spite of a really good job overall I found part of the final narration troubling. Almost at the end (7 minutes and 50 seconds or so in) the narrator in his wrap-up states “while we can’t change federal regulations we can change our purchasing habits. Demand local shrimp(my emphasis added).” He’s on target with the “demand local shrimp” but it’s hard to imagine anything more antithetical to the principles that our country was founded upon than his acceptance of the idea that we can’t, or that we shouldn’t, change federal regulations.

While it seems unlikely, apparently he missed out on any exposure to or consideration of the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

As close to immortal as any words spoken in the last half a millennium, they are from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In a commemoration of the sacrifices of Union soldiers in the battle of Gettysburg, on November 19, 1863, President Lincoln expressed what governance in the United States was all about. To repeat those words, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

It kind of makes you wonder how the documentarians who put together Ancient City Shrimp became convinced that we (the people, I presume, as in the U.S. Citizenry) can’t or shouldn’t change federal regulations. One possibility is that they weren’t aware that Aldous Huxley’s 1984 was a work of fiction. Another would be that they have been exposed to the bottomless morass that federal fisheries management has been turned into.

A history lesson or two

Back in 1976 (this was before the existence of a multi-billion dollar environmental industry so thankfully they weren’t there ti impede the process) the Magnuson-Stevens Act became law. It brought fishing in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone under federal control and established a management regime that would eventually phase out virtually all foreign commercial fishing in U.S. waters.

It was generally agreed that one of the strongest features of the Act was the determination that fishermen were an integral part of the federal fishery management process. This was achieved by mandating that fishermen were voting members on each regional Fishery Management Council.

This was in recognition of a number of factors that the public, or at least the majority of the involved politicians and bureaucrats, have subsequently turned – or been turned – away from. Among these were the relative lack of knowledge of our fisheries and what affects them, the value to fisheries managers of the knowledge that has been accumulated by a multigenerational fishing industry over many years, and the belief in and the commitment of fishermen to the long term sustainability of the fisheries they participate in.

Read the full op-ed at FisheryNation.com

ASMFC Approves Jonah Crab Interstate Fishery Management Plan

August 6, 2015 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC):

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has approved the Interstate Fishery Management Plan (FMP) for Jonah Crab. The FMP implements a suite of measures to manage and monitor the Jonah crab resource for the first time along the U.S. Atlantic coast. The Plan limits participation in the trap fishery to only those vessels and permit holders that already hold an American lobster permit or can prove prior participation in the crab fishery. All others harvesters using non-trap gear must obtain an incidental permit. It also establishes a 4.75” coastwide minimum size and requires the landing of whole crabs except for individuals from New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia who can prove a history of claw landings before the control date of June 2, 2015.

The FMP seeks to cap effort and protect spawning stock biomass in the absence of a range-wide stock assessment.  The Plan was initiated in response to concern about increasing targeted fishing pressure for Jonah crab, which has long been considered a bycatch in the American lobster fishery. Since the early 2000s, growing market demand has increased reported landings by more than six-fold. The vast majority of Jonah crab are harvested by lobstermen using lobster traps.  With the increase in demand for crab, a mixed crustacean fishery has emerged that can target both lobster or crab or both at different times of year based on modifications to the gear and small shifts in the areas in which traps are fished. The mixed nature of the fishery makes it difficult to manage a Jonah crab fishery completely separate from the American lobster fishery without impacting the number of vertical lines and traps in state and federal waters. Furthermore, a lack of universal permitting and reporting requirements makes it difficult to characterize catch and effort to the full extent in order to manage the fishery. In federal waters, the crab resource is not directly regulated but rather is regulated incidentally by the American lobster regulations. Therefore, in the absence of a comprehensive management plan and range-wide stock assessment, increased harvest of Jonah crab may compromise the sustainability of the resource.

The FMP establishes commercial, recreational, and fishery-dependent monitoring measures for the Jonah crab fishery. In addition to the issues of minimum size, permitting, and crab part retention addressed above, the Plan also establishes a non-trap incidental bycatch limit of 200 crabs per calendar day, 500 crabs per trip extending longer than one calendar day and prohibits the retention of egg-bearing females. For fishery-dependent sampling, the plan requires 100% harvester reporting and 100% dealer reporting with port and sea sampling. Jurisdictions that currently require less than 100% harvester reporter are required to, at a minimum, maintain their current programs and extend them to Jonah crab. In the recreational sector, the FMP establishes a possession limit of 50 whole crabs per person per day. Finally, the FMP specifies that states whose commercial landings are less than 1% of the three-year coastwide average may qualify for de minimis status. De minimis states are not required to implement fishery-independent or port/sea sampling.

Since the fishery primarily occurs within federal waters, the Board has recommended that NOAA Fisheries implement the provisions of the Jonah Crab FMP in federal waters, pursuant to the NOAA’s authority under the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act.  The New England Fishery Management Council, which will meet in the fall to set its management planning activities for 2016, will consider whether the development of a Council Jonah Crab FMP will be one of its priorities. Regardless of its decision, the Commission and its federal partners will continue to work closely on Jonah crab management.

The FMP, which will be implemented by June 1, 2016, will be available by the end of August via the Commission’s website, www.asmfc.org, on the American Lobster page under Fishery Management Plans. Upon recommending the FMP’s final approval by the Interstate Fisheries Management Program Policy Board, the American Lobster Management Board agreed to move forward on the development an addendum to identify management measures for crab-only trap fishermen (e.g., trap and landing limits). The Board will discuss the specific measures to be included in the addendum at its next meeting. For more information, please contact Megan Ware, FMP Coordinator, at mware@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.