Saving Seafood

Establishment of new federal marine sanctuary draws mixed reaction

September 26, 2016 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — To the predictable responses of the commercial fishing industry — largely negative — and the conservation community — largely positive — President Obama last week set aside nearly 5,000 square miles off the coast of New England as a marine sanctuary.

Acting under the aegis of the Antiquities Act of 1906, he established the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine Monument. That was the same statutory authority the President used to establish the controversial 87,600-acre Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in northern Maine last month.

In August, the President expanded the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument off the coast of Hawaii by 442,781 square miles, creating the world’s largest marine protected area.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the monument encompasses a total of 4,913 square miles in two tracts. The first, rectangular in shape, protects three deep-ocean canyons: Oceanographer, Gilbert and Lydonia. The second, a larger triangle, protects the Bear, Physalla, Mytilus and Retriever seamounts.

Each of the three protected underwater canyons is deeper than the Grand Canyon. The four underwater mountains are, according to NOAA, “biodiversity hotspots and home to many rare and endangered species.”

To be managed jointly by NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the protected areas are home to deep-sea coral ecosystems and home to unique species. Additionally, the protected areas create oceanographic conditions that concentrate pelagic species, including whales, dolphins and turtles; and highly migratory fish such as tunas, bullfish and sharks.

A large number of birds also rely on this area for foraging. The purpose of the proposed monument designation is to protect these fragile and largely pristine deep-sea habitats, and species and ecosystems.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

Program looks at industrial aquaculture

September 26, 2016 — LIHUE, Hawaii — Right now, anyone can throw a cage into the open ocean within the Economic Enterprise Zone and begin an aquaculture operation, said Joshua DeMello, of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council.

But with “gray area rules” on things like permits, species and reporting requirements, large-scale companies are hesitant to take advantage of the open ocean just yet.

“No one is doing that,” DeMello said. “We’ve gotten calls in the past about folks that are interested, but a lot of them are waiting to see what type of management plan comes out.”

The beginning of that aquaculture management program for the Pacific Islands Region is in the works, under the eye of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Marine Fisheries Service and in conjunction with Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council.

The entities are preparing a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) analyzing the possible environmental impacts of the proposed management program and alternatives.

“The purpose of it is to develop a management program to support sustainable, economically sound aquaculture in the Pacific Island Region,” DeMello said.

The PEIS process looks at options for permit duration, whether cages should be metal or net pens, and allowable species.

“The push is to have something in place so if someone does come in and do (large-scale aquaculture), there would be rules set up to ensure the wild stocks and environment are protected, and the rights of other fishermen and ocean users are preserved,” DeMello said.

Read the full story at The Garden Island

Alaska lawmakers on guard for new marine national monuments

September 26, 2016 — WASHINGTON — Alaska lawmakers are on the lookout for potential presidential decrees that could block fishing and drilling in the state’s ocean waters.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski and others have introduced legislation that they hope might stop future presidents from using a 110-year-old law — the Antiquities Act — to carve out lands and waters for new environmental protections. But the chance for new federal legislation to curb executive powers during President Barack Obama’s term has all but passed.

Now, with Obama’s recent expansion of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine Monument in Hawaii and designation of the first-ever marine monument on the East Coast, worries about a surprise Alaska announcement have arisen again.

“It seems like we read about a new designation every week — that’s probably an exaggeration, but it just seems like that,” Murkowski said Thursday. The Obama administration has used the 1906 Antiquities Act “as a tool to both sidestep and threaten Congress,” Murkowski said.

“I don’t have anyone in my office talking about monuments in Alaska,” Neil Kornze, who heads the Bureau of Land Management, assured Murkowski at a hearing Thursday.

“I can’t tell you what the president is or isn’t thinking, but in terms of my interaction with these issues, I’m not aware” of any potential new monuments in the making, he said.

Asked by Murkowski if he was aware of any “conversations outside of your particular office where there is discussion about designation, either onshore- or offshore-monument designation in Alaska,” Kornze said “no.”

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News

NOAA research vessel off Kona researching deep water organisms

September 23, 2016 — KAILUA-KONA — Some West Hawaii residents may have noticed a lounging visitor off the Kona coast over the past two weeks.

The vessel is the Oscar Elton Sette, a 250-foot National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship, used frequently for research expeditions out of the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center.

It’ll be hanging around Kona waters on and off through the end of October.

“The mission out right now is the (West Hawaii) Integrated Ecosystem Assessment,” said Dr. Ben Richards, who works in the stock assessment program and will lead a two-week scientific mission on the vessel beginning Oct. 13. “My research cruise is going to do the first fishery-independent survey for main Hawaiian Islands bottom fish.”

The Oscar Elton Sette is currently carrying members of the West Hawaii IEA Program, led by Dr. Jamison Gove, on a two-pronged expedition.

The first element of the research is studying the “mesopelagic boundary layer community,” which was discovered by earlier IEA expeditions and is classified on the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center website as a densely populated group of deep-water organisms thought to be a crucial food source for cetaceans, among other higher trophic groups.

Research is being conducted to more accurately categorize the elements of this community and understand why they prefer West Hawaii waters.

The second element of the mission is to study slicks, which appear as smooth tracts of water across the ocean’s surface due to higher water tension.

Scientists aboard the vessel are hoping to understand the ecological functions and physical mechanisms behind the slicks, which the website says “appear to function as biological oases” and “may contribute to the recruitment and retention of early life history stages of marine organisms, such as reef fish and turtles.”

Read the full story at West Hawaii Today

PAUL DALZELL: Commercial Fishing Interests Deserved Place At International Union for the Conservation of Nature Table

September 22, 2016 — “How Fishing Interests Infiltrated Conservation’s Biggest Event” by Nick Grube is a good example of how one of Civil Beat’s smiling imps makes nice to Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council staff who are quite happy and open to questions. Then he does a hatchet job full of insinuations and half-truths.

Shame on us, we never learn, but then again if we’d remained imperious and silent, we’d still get knifed between the ribs.

Applying and then being granted membership of the International Union for Conservation of Nature can hardly be called infiltration. The Council isn’t some form of clandestine organization bent on world domination. Implying that fishing interests have no place at IUCN is extremely narrow-minded. The majority of IUCN members recognize the importance of good management of resources, which is the Council’s function.

The IUCN 2017-2020 program has three pillars:

  1. Valuing and conserving nature;
  2. Promoting and supporting effective and equitable governance of natural resources; and
  3. Deploying nature-based solutions to address societal challenges including climate change, food security and economic and social development.

Read the full opinion article at the Honolulu Civil Beat

How Foreign Crews Are Able To Work Aboard US Fishing Boats

September 22, 2016 — Foreign crew members reportedly working in slave-like conditions for monthly wages as low as $350 would not have found their way onto Hawaii’s longline fishing boats without an exemption carved into the law almost 30 years ago, according to longtime industry leaders, federal officials and government records.

Today, almost all the vessels in the longline fleet have entirely foreign crews.

It wasn’t always that way.

As the Cold War was coming to an end in the late 1980s, there was a push to “Americanize” the country’s fishing fleets by instituting requirements similar to those imposed under the Jones Act on vessels engaged in coastwise trade — namely, that U.S.-flagged ships be built in the U.S. and crewed by U.S. citizens.

Congress passed a bipartisan bill to that effect, and President Ronald Reagan signed it in 1988 as the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Anti-Reflagging Act.

But the legislation exempted commercial fishermen fishing for highly migratory species, such as tuna and swordfish, from the law’s requirement that U.S. citizens comprise at least 75 percent of each crew.

At about the same time, the longline industry — then comprised of just a few dozen vessels — and more established purse seiners were leaving the West Coast to set up shop in Hawaii and Pacific Island territories. 

They left because of depleted stocks and, in the case of purse seiners, pressure to stop killing so many dolphins. 

The purse seiners were setting their huge nets, up to 500 yards deep, around schools of tuna near pods of dolphins. It created a national controversy that led to new restrictions and “dolphin-safe” tuna.

The longline boats, which catch fish by extending miles of line with thousands of hooks, initially remained strictly crewed by U.S. citizens. This changed as the fleet grew and it became harder to find local residents willing to work on the boats. Fuel prices also soared after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, adding to operational costs.

This spurred the longliners to take advantage of the foreign-crew exemption that had been pushed by members of Congress from the West Coast who were looking after the purse seiners’ interests, said Jim Cook, who co-owns several longline fishing vessels, a marine supply store and fish restaurant at Pier 38 in Honolulu. 

“It slowly infiltrated our fleet,” he said.

The longline industry now includes roughly 140 vessels, nearly all of which are ported in Honolulu, and most have entirely foreign crews, according to industry leaders and federal officials.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat

Fishing Industry Says It’s Working To Stop Abuse Of Foreign Crews

September 21, 2016 — Hawaii longline industry leaders say they have formed a task force and hired an expert on slavery in response to media reports about human trafficking, forced labor and poor working conditions aboard some of their boats. 

“We’re trying to get a sort of fleet assessment, get our arms around the problem and see where we’re going to take it,” said Jim Cook, who owns several longline fishing boats and serves on the Hawaii Longline Association board of directors.

He said Monday that the goal is to weed out the “bad actors,” in part by requiring a universal crew contract that incorporates international norms to address forced labor. That contract is being finalized and should be “ready to rock” in the next couple days, Cook said.

Starting Oct. 1, the Honolulu Fish Auction won’t let fishermen unload tuna and swordfish unless they have a signed contract as well as copies of their passports and I-95 Crewman’s Landing Permits from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

“The auction has taken a zero-tolerance stance for fishing vessels involved in forced labor,” said Michael Goto, a task force member from the United Fishing Agency, which runs the fish auction.

The task force also includes John Kaneko, program manager of the Hawaii Seafood Council, Khang Dang, president of Quota Management, and Katrina Nakamura, who was also hired as a consultant to provide guidance to the industry. She has developed criteria to address working conditions, such as amount of time off, whether the employee is bonded by debt and where the payments for their work are going.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat

Stricter standards for Hawaii’s longline fishing fleet

September 20, 2016 — More oversight and regulations are requested by outside groups and the industry itself.

After reports of slavery and unsafe working conditions, the industry takes steps to reel in problem boats and protect contract workers.

Unlike regular jobs, the fishing day ends when all the lines are back in, recovering broken lines, or hauling in completely full ones, making the long days even longer.

“Fishing is a brutal industry,” said Jim Cook, Hawaii Longline Association. “We have the highest fatality rate of anyone in the industry. We have working hours that the average person couldn’t come to grips with.”

After facing allegations of forced labor and poor working conditions on some boats, the Hawaii Longline Fishing Industry hopes to set standards for all crews to follow, including inspections of boats, questionnaires of workers to make sure conditions are safe, and proper documents; that includes a standardized crew contract.

If not come October 1st, they won’t be allowed to sell their catch at the Honolulu Fish Auction.

“We want you to show us your crew contracts, your I-95 & passports, prior to unloading, and if you don’t – you don’t get to unload,” said Cook.

The changes won’t shorten the long hours of fishing or hard work involved, but will make set standards for the industry.

“If there are outliers out there in this community, bad actors, we’re going to discover them. We’re going to find them,” said Cook.

Read the full story at KITV

HONOLULU CIVIL BEAT: Inquiry, Intervention Needed Now In Fishing Exploitation

September 20, 2016 — A human rights outrage that has quietly simmered below the public consciousness in recent years exploded on the national scene just days ago when the Associated Press disclosed near slavery conditions for foreign workers on American fishing boats in Honolulu and San Francisco.

A six-month investigation by Pulitzer Prize winners Martha Mendoza and Maggie Mason corroborated what has been known by senior U.S. officials and the Hawaii restaurant industry, among others, for years: U.S. flagged boats employ undocumented men, confining them to the ships sometimes for years because they lack the required visas to permit them to come ashore.

They’re paid as little as 70 cents an hour and often work 20 hours a day at backbreaking, sometimes dangerous tasks with the approval of the U.S. government but none of its legal protections.

As Civil Beat’s Washington, D.C., columnist Kirsten Downey reported Friday, the report has prompted the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate, with U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard pushing for immediate action to provide protections for the workers. Congressional candidate Colleen Hanabusa called for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to investigate, as well — it is home to the Coast Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

According to the AP report, Sen. Mazie Hirono sought to provide some help through legislation that would permit the fishers to fly into the United States. That would expand the transit visas already allowed the men, who are permitted to fly home from the Honolulu airport, despite technically never having legally entered the United States. But even that modest assistance did not pass.

Hanabusa and Schatz both made the point that, thus far, the matter consists of media findings that must be officially investigated. That’s of course necessary and appropriate, as well as long overdue.

Read the full editorial at the Honolulu Civil Beat

Hawaii lawmakers promise reform for confined fishermen

September 19th, 2016 — State and federal lawmakers are promising to improve conditions for hundreds of foreign fishermen working in Hawaii’s commercial fleet, and at least one company has already stopped buying fish from the boats following an Associated Press investigation that found the men have been confined to vessels for years without basic labor protections.

Whole Foods halted buying seafood caught by foreign crew until it’s clear the men are treated fairly. On Sunday, the Hawaii Seafood Council said that starting Oct. 1, the Honolulu Fish Auction will sell fish only from boats that have adopted a new, standardized contract aimed at assuring no forced labor exists on board.

The AP report found commercial fishing boats in Honolulu were crewed by men from impoverished Southeast Asia and Pacific Island nations who catch prized swordfish, ahi tuna and other seafood sold at markets and upscale restaurants across the country. A legal loophole allows them to work on the American-owned, American-flagged boats without visas as long as they don’t set foot on shore. The system is facilitated by the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection.

While many men appreciate the jobs, which pay better than they could get back home, the report revealed instances of human trafficking, tuberculosis and food shortages. It also found some fishermen being forced to defecate in buckets, suffering running sores from bed bugs and being paid as little as 70 cents an hour.

On Capitol Hill, Hawaii’s congressional delegation — U.S. Sens. Mazie Hirono and Brian Schatz along with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, all Democrats — said they were exploring legislative solutions after being startled by the findings about the state’s $110 million industry, which ranks fifth among the country’s highest-grossing fisheries.

“It is completely unacceptable that the inhumane treatment of any workers, foreign or not, is legal under U.S. federal law,” Hirono said in a statement.

In Honolulu, state Rep. Kaniela Ing, chair of the Ocean, Marine Resources and Hawaiian Affairs committee, asked state Attorney General Doug Chin to weigh in on whether boat owners should be regulated under Hawaii rules. If so, Ing said there would likely be an injunction ordered to halt labor or business violations. If not, he said he would introduce legislation to protect the workers, who labor up to 22 hours a day.

Read full story from The Missourian