Saving Seafood

Factory trawlers praised for halibut conservation

December 26, 2015 — What a difference a year makes for the halibut bycatch controversy in the Bering Sea at the December meetings of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in Anchorage. The flatfish factory trawlers, vilified for much of this year, reported vigorous and voluntary efforts at halibut conservation, and even received praise from the Pribilofs. Their zeal was prompted by what might be termed resolution number two-by-four of the fish council last summer, which slashed halibut bycatch by 25 percent.

“It was a huge hit to our sector,” said Chris Woodley, executive director of the Groundfish Forum said last week.

But voluntary efforts by the flatfish fleet have already saved 265 metric tons of halibut this year, he said, exceeding the goal of 217 metric tons.

He cited the benefits of a special federal permit allowing deck sorting that gets the halibut back into the water faster and with greater chances of survival. With the halibut removed from the net and returned to the water from the top deck of the boat, only about half the halibut die, down from the 83 percent that perish when kept inside the huge trawl net for up to two hours while below decks in the factory area, he said.

At last week’s NPFMC meeting, representatives of the factory trawlers in the Amendment 80 fleet said that they were already taking measures to limit halibut bycatch, getting out ahead of the 25 percent cut that takes effect next year.

Read the full story at The Bristol Bay Times

 

Overfishing is Getting Filleted by Markets

December 9, 2015 — Overfishing is a serious threat to the nearly 200 million people who depend on the world’s oceans for sustenance. After all, nearly one in five people around the world consume fish as their primary source of protein and overfishing has deleterious cascade effects on other marine ecosystems.

Illegal and excessive fishing are to a degree inevitable because oceans, rivers and many lakes are publicly administered. This gives fishermen an incentive to take from them as much as is legally possible. Yet, market-based resource management is offering a concrete solution to this “tragedy of the commons” and has already begun alleviating strains on U.S. fish stocks.

The U.S. economy is intertwined with the fate of the high seas. By conservative estimates, commercial and recreational fishing alone account for 1.3 million jobs and nearly $60 billion in economic activity. Overfishing has pernicious effects on Americans’ livelihoods: commercial anglers can lose out on up to 80 percent of potential revenue when local fish species see drastic population decline, as was the case in New England when cod, flounder, and halibut populations were unexpectedly low in 2009.

With market-based resource management, data from September 2015 show that the total number of wild stocks placed on the “overfishing” watch list has fallen to its all-time lowest level since 1997. Since the 2007 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, annual catch limits (ACLs) have allowed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to reduce the number of overfished U.S. stocks by nearly 75 percent since 2007 alone (from 41 in 2007 to only 10 in 2014). ACLs create total tonnage allotments based on a series of population growth factors specific to certain fish species.

Read the full story at Economics 21