Saving Seafood

East Coast fishermen spar with federal government over cost of at-sea monitors

July 14, 2016 — Every year, the federal government spends millions monitoring New England commercial fishermen to ensure they ply their timeless maritime trade in accordance with the law.

Now, a judge is set to rule on who should foot the bill for the on-board monitors: the government or the fishing boat owners. The East Coast fishermen say sticking them with the bill would be the “death knell” for their  industry and is illegal on the part of the federal government.

Fishermen of important New England food species such as cod and haddock will have to start paying the cost of at-sea monitors soon under new rules. Monitors — third-party workers hired to observe fishermen’s compliance with federal regulations — collect data to help determine future fishing quotas and can cost about $18,000 a year, or $710 per voyage.

The Cause of Action Institute, a legal watchdog representing a group of East Coast fishermen, sued the federal government in December in U.S. District Court in Concord, N.H., seeking to block the transfer of payments from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the fishermen.

“It is unlawful for NOAA to force struggling fishermen to pay for their own at-sea monitors,” said former federal judge Alfred Lechner, the institute’s president and CEO. “The significant costs of these regulations should be the responsibility of the government.”

The lawsuit was filed against the Department of Commerce on behalf of David Goethel, owner and operator of F/V Ellen Diane, a 44-foot trawler based in Hampton, N.H., and Northeast Fishery Sector 13, a nonprofit representing fishermen from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

It called the transfer of payments the “death knell for much of what remains of a once-thriving ground fish industry that has been decimated by burdensome federal overreach.”

“Fishing is my passion and it’s how I’ve made a living, but right now, I’m extremely fearful that I won’t be able to do what I love and provide for my family if I’m forced to pay out of pocket for at-sea monitors,” Goethel said when the suit was filed last December.

Read the full story at Fox News

Exactly where do Maine lobstermen find their catch? Hard to say

July 13, 2016 — It is the state’s largest fishery, bringing in more than $500 million a year and employing tens of thousands of people up and down the supply chain, but there is no map that shows exactly where Maine’s lobstermen trap their catch.

Most of them fish within 3 miles of the coast, and thus do not fill out detailed federal catch reports or have onboard satellite tracking systems that lend themselves to detailed maps of valuable fishing territories.

That suits many lobstermen just fine, because they say their territory changes from year to year and they don’t like the notion of the government tracking where they fish. But that attitude makes life difficult for regulatory agencies responsible for permitting non-fishing activities in the Gulf of Maine, such as wind farms or mining operations.

The lack of detailed, up-to-date maps of lobster fishing grounds is obvious when reviewing the hundreds of maps collected by the Northeast Regional Planning Body, the federal planning body that is overseeing the nation’s regional ocean planning from the Gulf of Maine to Long Island Sound. The council is building a trove of online data, maps and information tracking a wide range of coastal and marine activities, from popular cruise ship routes to protected marine mammal habitats to public beaches and beach restoration projects.

Trying to fill the information gap

The data portal has maps that paint a detailed picture of other fisheries, with current and historical views of the number of fishermen who work any given area for each species of groundfish and how much they are catching in each area. But the information about lobstering is limited to a few lobster biomass maps and management area maps.

The Island Institute, a nonprofit group out of Rockland that represents the interests of Maine’s island and more remote coastal communities, is trying to step up to fill that gap, if not with maps, then with voices from the lobstering industry.

The group has issued a report on the “spatial characterization” of the lobster fishery, which is government-speak for what a map of the lobster industry would look like if such a map existed, said Nick Battista, marine programs director for the institute and part of the team that produced the report.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Sens. Collins, King Applaud Funding to Help Reimburse Maine Fisherman for At-Sea Monitoring Program

June 27, 2016 — WASHINGTON — U.S. Senators Susan Collins and Angus King today welcomed an announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that it will fund an estimated 85 percent of the sea days needed for the At-Sea Monitoring (ASM) Program for the current fishing year. Beginning July 1, groundfish fishermen covered by the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan will be reimbursed for their at-sea monitoring costs through an arrangement with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

“The At-Sea Monitoring Program is an important tool that helps us to responsibly manage Maine’s critical ocean resources,” Senators Collins and King said in a joint statement. “Maine’s hardworking fishermen shouldn’t bear an unfair financial burden in supporting the ASM program. We applaud NOAA for stepping up to help reimburse our fishermen, and will continue to fight for the Maine groundfish industry moving forward.”

Read the full press release at the newsroom of Sen. Collins

In Shift, NOAA Says Fish Fleets Will Be Reimbursed For Monitoring Costs

June 24, 2016 — Deviating from plans that had caused an uproar, federal fishing regulators plan to announce Thursday that some of the fishing industry’s costs for groundfish monitoring will be reimbursed this year.

The at-sea monitoring program places regulators onboard vessels and in March the federal government started shifting the cost for the monitoring onto the fishing industry, according to Northeast Seafood Coalition Executive Director Jackie Odell.

“The fishery’s just not in a profitable place to be taking on this additional burden,” Odell told the News Service. She said, “There are some boats that are going out, but it’s a mixed bag.”

A memo dated Thursday from a National Marine Fisheries Service official sent to congressional offices and obtained by the News Service said the federal regulators anticipate federal funds can cover at-sea monitoring for about 85 percent of the days at sea for the current fishing year. The memo cautioned that the agency does not “expect this situation to recur in future fishing years.”

“Beginning July 1, groundfish fishermen will be reimbursed for their at-sea monitoring costs through an arrangement with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission,” the federal memo stated. “The arrangement will last until funds are expended, and is not expected to cover costs for the entire year or be repeated in the future.”

Read the full story from the State House News Service at WBUR

US offers fishermen help in paying monitors

June 24, 2016 — Over the past year, the region’s groundfishermen have argued that the federal government was jeopardizing their livelihoods by forcing them to pay for a controversial program that requires government-trained monitors to observe their catch.

On Thursday, after months of heated debates with fishermen, officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that they have found money to cover most of the observer costs for the rest of the fishing year.

NOAA officials said that a contractor they hired to place observers aboard fishing vessels failed to do so for about one-third of the total number of days that they were expected to accompany fishermen to sea. As a result, NOAA has enough money to cover an estimated 85 percent of the rest of the so-called at-sea monitoring program.

“That’s an estimate because it depends on how much fishing occurs over the year,” said Samuel D. Rauch, deputy assistant administrator for regulatory programs at NOAA Fisheries.

Groups representing groundfishermen, who have been required since March to pay hundreds of dollars every time an observer accompanies them to sea, have argued that the costs were too much to bear and would put many of them out of business. NOAA estimates it costs $710 every time an observer joins them, though most fishermen have negotiated lower fees.

But many groundfishermen, who catch cod, flounder, and other bottom-dwelling fish, have already been suffering from major quota cuts. NOAA last year, for example, cut the region’s cod quota by 75 percent.

“This will definitely lessen the economic burden on small, family-owned fishing businesses, and will allow time to address many logistical issues that have surfaced since industry payments began,” said Jackie Odell, executive director of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, an advocacy group for groundfishermen in Gloucester.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

NOAA To Reimburse 85 Percent Of Costs For Fishing Monitors

June 24, 2016 — The following is excerpted from a story published yesterday by the Gloucester Times:

NOAA Fisheries today said it will reimburse Northeast groundfishermen an estimated 85 percent of the 2016 sea days needed for at-sea monitoring, alleviating if only temporarily the burden of fishermen assuming the costs of the observer program.

In a reversal of its previous stance and statements, NOAA said any groundfish sector trip beginning on or after July 1 may be eligible for the reimbursement of at-sea monitoring costs through a program the federal fisheries regulator is developing with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

The agency also stressed the reimbursement program is temporary and unlikely to last beyond the 2016 fishing season but “preserves the the contract relationships sectors already have in place” with third-party at-sea monitoring providers.

Federal groundfish permit holders absorbed the costs of at-sea monitoring — estimated at an average of $710 per day per vessel —  on March 1 after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it had exhausted the funds budgeted for that program.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

Northeast Fishery Observer Sea-Day Schedule Posted, Short-Term Reimbursement for Groundfish At-Sea Monitoring Available July 1

June 23, 2016 — The following was released by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center:

Today NOAA Fisheries published the 2016 Standardized Bycatch Reporting Methodology Annual Discard Report with Observer Sea Day Allocation and the resulting final 2016 sea-day schedule for our Northeast Fishery Observer Program.

This year we are able to fully fund our SBRM monitoring program and will use remaining funds to offset some of industry’s costs of the groundfish at-sea monitoring program.

Any sector trip beginning on or after July 1 may be eligible for reimbursement of at-sea monitoring costs though a program we are developing with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

Because this support is not likely to last for the entire year, this method preserves the contract relationships sectors already have in place with at-sea monitor providers.

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

Fishermen, scientists to evaluate NOAA stock assessments

June 13, 2016 — The most incendiary divide between groundfishermen and fishing regulators in the past two years has been the discrepancy between what NOAA Fisheries says its stock assessments show and what fishermen are seeing on the water.

The groundfish assessments by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — particularly for the iconic Gulf of Maine cod stock and certain flounders — have been uniformly dire, leading to the virtual shuttering of cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine and scant quotas for other species.

Fishermen — including commercial groundfishermen, charter captains and even lobstermen — paint a very different portrait of what they are seeing on a daily basis: cod, cod everywhere, and not a one they can catch.

On June 20, the city’s Economic Development and Industrial Corporation and fishing stakeholders will host a presentation by a team of University of Massachusetts scientists on their current findings and methodology for fish population counting in the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full story at the Gloucester 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