December 15, 2016 — LIHUE, Hawaii — The first round of several meetings addressing options for management of the newly expanded Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument came to Kauai Tuesday night.
Joshua DeMello, fisheries analyst with the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, explained the process to a scant audience at Chiefess Kamakahelei Middle School.
“We’re also looking at options for Native Hawaiian subsistence fishing,” DeMello said.
December 14, 2016 — Four Democratic congressmen have written to officials at the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claiming that Hawaii’s longline fishing fleet is operating illegally by employing — and in some cases possibly abusing — foreign fishermen.
The congressmen said fishing boat owners who are not in “compliance with the law” should not be allowed to sell their products.
Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva’s staff convened a forum about the matter on Capitol Hill last week. Activists at the event, who described what was happening as modern-day slavery, advocated a boycott of tuna until the alleged abuses stop.
The letter was signed by Grijalva, ranking Democratic member of the Natural Resources Committee; Jared Huffman of California, ranking Democratic member of the Water, Power and Oceans Subcommittee; Peter DeFazio of Oregon, ranking Democratic member of the Transportation Committee and Infrastructure; and John Garamendi of California, ranking Democratic member of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee.
It was addressed to Adm. Paul Zukunft, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, and Kathryn Sullivan, under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator, and was delivered Monday.
“This illegal activity does not represent American values and has dealt a blow to U.S. credibility as a global leader in fighting (illegal, unreported and unregulated) fishing and human trafficking,” the congressmen wrote.
John P. Connelly, president of the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group, told Civil Beat the industry is looking forward to the response by the Coast Guard and NOAA, saying that it would allow a “clarification” of employment law affecting foreign fishermen working in Hawaii.
December 13th, 2016 — On the high seas, our nation has all hands on deck.
Congress just passed landmark legislation giving the U.S. a formal role in international organizations that govern vastly important areas of the North and South Pacific Oceans, including the high seas adjacent to Alaska and the Pacific Islands and American Samoa, respectively.
Further, sweeping improvements were made to existing international fishery management in the Northwest Atlantic, which includes waters off the coasts of New England and Canada. Collectively, this week’s passage of three major bills demonstrates a renewed commitment to sustainably manage fisheries on the high seas and to protect vulnerable marine ecosystems from the effects of adverse fishing practices.
The milestone legislation is of particular interest to Hawaiian fishing interests. The U.S. can now bring its best practices to the management of seriously depleted stocks such as jack mackerel in the South Pacific and pelagic armorhead in the North Pacific. It further opens opportunities to advance U.S. interests in developing sustainable squid and other new fisheries on the high seas and, where U.S. fleets are active, to improve coordination with other organizations managing tuna, swordfish and other valuable species.
While the United States has long worked with other nations to improve international fisheries management, the new legislation ensures that our country will fully and formally participate in developing standards for best fishing practices in two new international organizations in the North and South Pacific, respectively. Until now, our status with these organizations has essentially been that of observer. With the new legislation, the U.S. will speak with an active global voice. We have new opportunities to learn, and a proud track record to share and leverage.
December 9th, 2016 — A lot was said over the past five days in the conference rooms and hallways of The Sheraton Fiji Resort, during kokoda lunches poolside and lobster dinners at the nearby marina.
But all that talk didn’t amount to much.
The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission wrapped up its annual meeting Friday as it often has in the past, with many of its international members and nonprofit advocates frustrated by the slow progress made on pressing issues like tuna overfishing and overall accountability on the high seas.
Some left shaking their heads in dismay. Others departed with a tired indifference. A few flew home before the commission adjourned.
But some action was taken amid signs that the commission may become more functional under the leadership of Chair Rhea Moss-Christian.
Overall, she said she was “extremely pleased” with the commission’s progress.
“In comparison to prior years we were able to have a lot more focused discussions on some real critical issues, especially related to tuna management overall,” she said.
“What happened this week is really setting the new tone for how the commission addresses any stocks in critical condition or in an overfished state.”
December 7th, 2016 — Congress should act immediately to improve slave-like conditions for hundreds of foreign fishermen working in Hawaii’s commercial fleet, speakers at a congressional forum said Tuesday.
“These fishermen are treated like disposable people,” said Mark Lagon, a scholar at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, who told the forum the fishermen live like modern-day slaves. Crew members earn less than $1 per hour, and total costs for crews of nine or 10 men are less than the cost of ice to keep the fish fresh, Lagon said.
“Slavery is not just some abstract concept,” said Lagon, the former director of a State Department office to monitor and combat human trafficking.
Slavery “is something that touches our lives. It goes into our stores, and it goes into our mouths,” Lagon said.
Lagon was one of several speakers at a forum Tuesday on slavery and human rights abuses at sea. The forum, sponsored by Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee, followed an Associated Press investigation that found fishermen have been confined to vessels for years without basic labor protections.
The AP report found that commercial fishing boats in Honolulu employ hundreds of men from impoverished Southeast Asia and Pacific Island nations who catch swordfish, ahi tuna and other seafood sold at markets and restaurants nationwide. A legal loophole allows the men to work on American-owned, U.S-flagged boats without visas as long as they don’t set foot on shore.
Fishing “is used as a tool for slavery,” said Kathryn Xian, executive director of the Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery, a Honolulu-based advocacy group.
December 6th, 2016 — Honolulu International Airport is a ghost town. It’s 1 a.m. Sunday, hours past the routine blitz of interisland travelers and down to the handful of passengers heading to far-off lands plus a few others sleeping off the disappointment of a canceled flight.
I hand over my passport to the woman working at the Fiji Airways counter, throw my luggage on the conveyer belt and hope it arrives in Nadi, where I’m going to cover the weeklong meeting of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission.
The commission — a treaty-based group composed of 26 members including Pacific Island nations, the United States, the big tuna players from Asia, the European Union and others — decides how to manage and conserve highly migratory fish stocks while reducing bycatch and ensuring the overall sustainability of one of the world’s biggest sources of protein.
Over the course of five full days, hundreds of scientists, government officials, nonprofit leaders and others will debate the myriad issues facing the health of tuna populations, the safety of fishing observers, the effects of climate change, the value of marine protected areas and the impact of new policies on local economies and international relations.
I was mulling this over on the plane while waiting to take off when the Boeing 737’s captain interrupted my thoughts with an update on what to expect on our way to Fiji.
November 28, 2016 — In the months leading up to the Nov. 8 election, President Barack Obama signed a series of proclamations to dramatically increase the amount of land and water that is federally protected from commercial fishing, mining, drilling and development.
On Aug. 24, he established a nearly 90,000-acre national monument in the Katahdin Woods of Maine.
Two days later, Obama expanded Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands by 283 million acres, making it the world’s largest protected area at the time.
And on Sept. 15, he created the first national monument in the Atlantic Ocean, protecting more than 3 million acres of marine ecosystems, seamounts and underwater canyons southeast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Obama has used a century-old law called the Antiquities Act to federally protect more land — 550 million acres and counting — than any other president. He’s established 24 new national monuments in at least 14 states since taking office eight years ago, with the bulk of the acreage in Papahanaumokuakea and the Pacific Remote Islands.
But with Republican Donald Trump’s surprise upset of Democrat Hillary Clinton, attention is turning to what Trump plans to do when he takes office in January and whether he will seek to undo or at least modify the national monuments that Obama created.
Advocates for commercial fishing interests on the East Coast have started nudging policymakers to consider what changes the next administration could make. But West Coast and Hawaii industry groups are still gathering information and developing plans.
Saving Seafood, a nonprofit that represents commercial fishing interests, has already started pushing policymakers to consider what changes the next administration could make to the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.
Saving Seafood Executive Director Robert Vanasse told the Associated Press earlier this month that he thinks it would be “rational” to allow some sustainable fishing in the monuments.
Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat
November 18, 2016 — The National Marine Fisheries Service is reopening the public comment period on the proposed rule under the Marine Mammal Protection Act to prohibit swimming with and approaching a Hawaiian spinner dolphin within 50 yards.
The rule would apply for persons, vessels, and objects, including approach by interception. The comment period for the proposed rule that published on Aug. 24 closed on Oct. 23.
NMFS is reopening the public comment period to Dec. 1 to provide the public with additional time to submit information and to comment on this proposed rule.
November 14, 2016 — The Western Pacific Fishery Management Council is wasting no time seeking financial compensation for those in the fishing industry who may claim they have been harmed by President Barack Obama’s expansion of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in late August.
At its meeting last month — shortly after being advised by counsel of restrictions on lobbying legislatures or the president for funds — the council decided to send a letter to Obama highlighting the expansion’s impacts on Hawaii fishing and seafood industries and indigenous communities and requesting that the Department of Commerce mitigate those impacts through “direct compensation to fishing sectors.”
The council’s letter will also include a request that the ban on commercial fishing in the expansion area — which includes the waters between 50 and 200 nautical miles off the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands — be phased in. The letter will also ask for “other programs that would directly benefit those impacted from the monument expansion.”
Compensation for fisheries closures in federal waters is not unprecedented. In 2005, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) reimbursed the Hawaii Longline Association $2.2 million for legal expenses tied to the group’s lawsuit opposing a temporary closure of the swordfish fishery. Also, as part of the same $5 million federal grant that funded the reimbursement, lobster and bottomfish fishers displaced by the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve established by President Bill Clinton also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct compensation and funds for fisheries research.
With regard to the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, after it was first established by President George W. Bush in 2006, then-Sen. Daniel Inouye inserted an earmark in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 that provided more than $6 million to NMFS for a “capacity reduction program.” That program allowed vessel owners with permits to fish for lobster or bottomfish in the NWHI to be paid the economic value of their permits if they chose to stop fishing well ahead of the date all commercial fishing was to end in the monument, June 15, 2011.
November 14th, 2016 — As of Monday, virtually all commercial fishing will be banned from the newly created Marine National Monument that includes the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts off the coast of southern New England.
The closure includes more than 4,900 square miles of ocean, or about the same area as the state of Connecticut, about 130 miles east-southeast of Cape Cod.
The Northeast Canyons represent 941 square miles of that total, while the protection afforded the Seamounts stretches over 3,972 square miles.
Currently, only lobster and red crab fishing are exempted from the closure. Those fisheries are grandfathered in for seven years before they also will be excluded and the area wholly shut off to commercial fishing.
The closure, widely criticized by fishing stakeholders as an end-run around the established national fishery management system, is a product of President Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act on Sept. 15 to create the new Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.
The process, as it has in coastal communities around the country, pitted commercial fishing interests and other fishing stakeholders against environmentalists and conservationists in a contentious struggle over wide swaths of the nation’s oceans.
Some history:
In August, in a victory for environmentalists and conservationists, Obama ended a roiling debate by more than quadrupling the size of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument to 582,578 square miles in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, establishing the largest protected area on the planet.