Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Bristol Bay setnetters get their hands dirty (and sometimes lose a finger) to put salmon on your dinner table

July 27, 2020 — Most Alaskans know that commercial fishing is very important to the economy of our state. A small number of folks understand the ins and outs of a commercial gillnet operation. Fewer still understand what a setnet fishery is.

When one speaks of the gillnet fishery, the picture that comes to mind is one of a picturesque vessel with a long line of glistening white floats strung out behind. That is a semi-accurate depiction.

The setnet fishery bears little resemblance to that picture.

Setnetting is hard, dirty work — at least in Bristol Bay. If you are wearing name-brand raingear, few would recognize it because it would be covered in mud.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Northern Lights: The national seafood nexus

February 6, 2020 — For more than 30 years, Alaska has been the nation’s largest producer of seafood by volume and value. This status continues into a fourth decade, detailed in a recently published report commissioned by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. Focused on the 2017-18 period, the report describes the broad economic impact of the state’s seafood industry on a regional, statewide and national level, in addition to details about global competition, tax revenue generated by the industry, and other special topics.

Over the study period, an estimated 58,700 workers were directly employed annually in the industry with wages totaling $1.7 billion. Approximately 29,400 commercial fishermen participated in Alaska’s fisheries aboard more than 9,000 vessels ranging from small skiffs to large catcher-processors. Trawl, pot, longline, gillnet and seine gear types are the primary harvest methods in Alaska’s fisheries. About 26,000 processing workers were employed across Alaska in 166 shoreside facilities, with other processors active on vessels that harvest and process their catch. About 3,300 individuals worked at salmon hatcheries, managed fisheries, marketed seafood and provided other support services.

In addition to direct employment, additional impacts occur when industry participants purchase goods or services. For example, the welder repairing a gillnet vessel or the truck driver delivering fuel to a processing plant are indirectly supported by the industry. The seafood sector is also credited with impacts associated with local government services supported by seafood-related taxes or purchases in retail stores by processing workers, for example. Including all economic impacts, 37,700 full-time equivalent jobs, $2.1 billion in wages, and $5.6 billion in economic output (a measurement that captures all economic activity) is supported by the industry in Alaska.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

FLORIDA: Nixing nets

February 5, 2020 — The Roaring 90s marked the nation’s longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in modern history. A few milestones from the first half of the decade included the introduction of the Ford Explorer, which sidestepped fuel economy standards and helped ignite America’s ongoing love affair with gas-guzzling SUVs; Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which started the Gulf War that culminated in the early 1991 shock-and-awe Operation Desert Storm; the 1992 election of President Bill Clinton; NAFTA; the 1995 IPO of the unprofitable search engine company Netscape Communications, which helped inflate a five-year investing bubble in dot-coms; Congress’ reversal of the fuel-conserving 55 mph national speed limit that had been in effect since the 1973 Arab oil embargo; the O.J. Simpson Trial; and the nation’s worst act of domestic terrorism up to 1995, when Timothy McVeigh exploded a bomb outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

Commercial fishermen may associate that same period with an unprecedented wave of attacks by environmental groups and sportfishing interests.

The dam broke after 1990 when the United Anglers of California convinced Golden State voters to ban the use of nearshore fishing nets. By the mid-1990s, sportsmen had mobilized in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, and four of the five Gulf Coast states. (Texas had already banned nets in 1988.)

The battle over nets in the Sunshine State was called the Mother of All Fish Fights, and rightly so: Florida’s extensive coastline had supported prodigious fisheries that gave rise to a deeply embedded commercial fishing culture that reached back centuries. By the 1990s, a hundred years of rampant coastal development, explosive population growth and a tsunami of recreational anglers had taken its toll. Still it took a shock-and-awe media campaign and a passel of naïve voters to dislodge the state’s net fishermen.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

CALIFORNIA: Can sustainably caught swordfish make waves on the Central Coast?

December 31, 2018 — Will sustainably-caught swordfish receive a wave of support from Central Coast fishermen, consumers and restaurateurs?

Clean-fishing advocates sure hope so as efforts continue to phase out the use of drift gillnets — the mile-long, 100-foot-wide nets currently used to catch swordfish — which  commonly collect and kill protected species like whales, dolphins, and sea turtles.

On Sept. 28,  Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1017, which requires the state Department of Fish and Wildlife get funding for and enact a transition program that would help fishermen switch to alternative fishing gear.

Under the program, up to $10,000 would be offered for fisheries to turn in their drift gillnet permits, and transition to “clean-fishing” gear.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has until March of 2020 to roll out the drift gillnet “buyout.” However, the department still needs to raise $1 million to trigger the revocation of all drift gillnet permits. The money would have to come from federal funding or private donor sources.

Read the full story at the Monterey Herald

Appeals court blocks another US gov’t effort to overcome Mexico gillnet import ban

November 30, 2018 — The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Wednesday shot down an effort by the US National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and other federal agencies to end a four-month-old ban on the import of Mexican shrimp and other seafood caught in the country with the use of gillnets.

The decision to reject a “stay of the order” request backs a US Court of International Trade (CIT) ruling, issued in July, that was sought by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Center for Biological Diversity and Animal Welfare Institute as part of an effort to protect the endangered vaquita porpoise in the northern Gulf of California from being driven into extinction by pressuring the Mexican government.

Widely decimated by the use of gillnets in pursuit of the totoaba — another endangered fish sought for its swim bladder due to black market demand in China — there are believed to be a little more than a dozen vaquita remaining.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

OREGON: Kitz for the kill: Ousted gov. back to fight gillnets

October 26, 2018 — Oregon’s former Gov. John Kitzhaber apparently loves to hate Columbia River commercial fishing.

In 2012, the Coastal Conservation Association successfully wooed Kitzhaber, convincing him propose that the state ban salmon gillnetters from the main stem of the Columbia River with the hopes that despite years of testing to the contrary, they would miraculously find seine nets to be more selective than gillnets in taking wild salmon (as opposed to hatchery salmon).

Before he resigned from office in 2015 (an investigation led to citations from the Oregon Ethics Commission for using his office for personal gain and failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest), Kitzhaber championed a ban and struck a deal in 2013 with the joint commission that has managed the river with Washington’s fisheries counterparts for 100 years.

In 2017, the Oregon Fish & Wildlife Commission threatened to withdraw from the joint agreement but ultimately compromised to bring the states back into co-management.

Five years after the 2013 agreement, the joint commission is conducting a comprehensive review, and Oregon officials are threatening again to make a (gasp!) data-based decision to allow the use of gillnets on the main stem of the Columbia River.

Enter Kitzhaber: drumming up support for his ill-advised and poorly implemented plan of old with PSAs on gillnetskill.com.

The flip side of the Kitzhaber deal — as is often the case with CCA plans — was to transition the commercial quota to the recreational fleet. The result was a high mortality rate among the fish they had hoped to conserve by reallocating those “protected” fish to the sport sector. Imagine that!

Data gathered over several years indicate that gillnets do not have the effect on fish that advocates of the Kitzhaber plan estimated, or that other types of gear were more selective.

Yet here we are again, dodging the mudslingers in another fish fight. Science is on our side, but the lobbying dollars may not be.

This story originally appeared on National Fisherman, it is republished herewith permission.

OREGON: State compensation for gillnetters trickles down

October 11, 2018 — Money local commercial salmon fishermen will soon receive as compensation after reform policies pushed them off the Columbia River is “not nothing.” But it’s not quite something, either.

“It means a little bit of a paycheck,” said David Quashnick, a gillnetter who has been fishing since he was a teenager and now has two sons who run their own boats. “It’s not enough. I would rather be fishing and not having to worry about free money.”

Clatsop County informed 129 commercial gillnetters in September that they were eligible for a cut of the $500,000 set aside in the state’s Columbia River Transition Fund to compensate them for direct economic losses and reimburse them for gear.

This month, county officials said 124 fishermen had responded and applied for around $460,000 worth of the pot as of last week.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife will give final approval for how the county intends to distribute the funds, but Theresa Dursse, executive assistant and clerk for the Clatsop County Board of Commissioners, said the county hopes to start cutting checks to fishermen soon. Fishermen who applied for compensation for economic losses will receive checks ranging from a mere $56 to the maximum $8,750. Fishermen who applied for reimbursement for gear will receive up to $2,750.

Gillnets, which hang vertically in the water and catch fish by the gills, were phased off the Columbia River main stem after former Gov. John Kitzhaber introduced a harvest reform plan in 2012. The plan, commonly referred to as the Kitzhaber Plan or Columbia River Reform, was pitched as a way to protect wild salmon and steelhead runs by replacing gillnet gear with more selective types of equipment.

The remaining gillnet fishermen were shifted to off-river, or “select areas,” like Youngs Bay.

Read the full story at The Daily Astorian

California assembly passes driftnet ban, bill heads to governor’s desk

September 6, 2018 — A bill that would end the use of drift gillnets for harvesting swordfish and thresher sharks in California now only needs the governor’s signature to become law.

Last week, the California Assembly voted 78-0 to pass SB 1017, which calls for eliminating the controversial nets over a four-year period. The nation’s most populous state is also the only one that still allows the use of the nets to collect swordfish and thresher sharks.

In June, the bill passed the state senate by a 33-0 margin.

Under the bill, the state would create a transition program by 31 March, 2020, to enable driftnet permit holders to use alternative gear. The transition program would include a buyout program created through a public-private partnership. Fishermen must surrender their nets in order to get compensation.

“Finally we have found a way to phase out their use and transition to a more humane alternative – without harming the commercial fishing industry in the process,” said State Senator Ben Allen, the bill’s sponsor. “This is a significant win for our ocean and for the California economy. We look forward to the governor signing it into law.”

According to data from NOAA Fisheries, there are approximately less than 20 active license holders using driftnets in California.

Conservation groups have long opposed the use of the mile-long, nearly invisible nets because they have been known to kill or injure dozens of other marine species, including whales, sea lions, and turtles. According to Oceana, the nets are responsible for killing more dolphins that all other American west coast fisheries.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

California Moves to Ban Mile-Long Fishing Nets Blamed For Killing Whales, Sharks, Dolphins, and Other Sea Life

September 4, 2018 — Environmentalists scored a major victory in Sacramento Thursday after California lawmakers overwhelmingly voted to phase out the use of a controversial type of fishing gear known as drift gillnets: mile-long nets blamed for unintentionally killing thousands of sea creatures, including endangered animals.

Over the past 28 years, drift gillnets have entangled and killed an estimated 4,000 dolphins, 456 whales and 136 sea turtles, according to government data obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization. The federal agency, which regulates the fishing gear, randomly places observers on about 20 percent of all fishing trips that utilize the gear in an effort to document the environmental impact.

California fishermen view the ban as extreme and unnecessary, and believe their livelihood is being unfairly targeted. Without the fishing gear, they fear they won’t be able to continue making a living.

“I don’t know what I’d do,” said Mike Flynn, who has depended on drift gillnets to catch swordfish for the past 40 years. “There’s very few of us left, and we don’t seem to have a chance…we’re being villainized, unjustly.”

Only about 20 fisherman actively use the gear off the California coast; that’s down from 141 active permits at the peak back in 1990, according to NOAA.

Read the full story at NBC Bay Area

To save the world’s rarest marine mammal, conservationists seek ban on Mexican seafood imports

July 12, 2018 — A decade of rescue crusades by conservation groups, hard-core eco-activists and the U.S. Navy have failed to prevent the world’s rarest porpoise from becoming fatally entangled in gill nets set for seafood in Mexico’s northern Gulf of California.

Now, with less than 20 vaquita left in the wild, the prospect of the species’ extinction within two years has prompted a last-ditch effort with significant economic and political consequences for the United States and Mexico.

Conservationists on Tuesday asked an international trade court judge in New York for a preliminary injunction banning imports of an estimated $16 million worth of fish and shrimp harvested with gill nets in an area of the gulf roughly a third the size of Los Angeles County and just three hours south of the border.

U.S. Court of International Trade Judge Gary Katzmann said he would rule within two weeks. His decision may hinge, in part, on whether the costs of implementing an embargo to save the species are greater than the costs of its disappearance.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times