Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: Will Magnuson roundtable come to Gloucester?

July 16, 2019 — Congress continues to bumble around in its effort to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which should come as breaking news to no one who understands the complexity of the law and the usual banality that ensues in Washington whenever more than three people gather in a room to discuss anything.

With that in mind, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman of California is taking his act on the road, going coast to-coast to hold a series of roundtable discussions to “engage diverse perspectives, interests and needs of individuals who have a stake in the management of our ocean and fisheries resources.”

Correct us if we’re wrong here, but isn’t that just about everyone in the whole US of A? Just sayin’.

Anyway, Huffman, who is chairman of the House Water, Oceans and Wildlife subcommittee, has not offered a specific agenda or schedule for his personal rolling thunder tour.

But he did say he is committed to holding at least one session in each of the eight regions managed by a federal fishery management council – including New England. So, perhaps Gloucester?

He also said he is committed to introducing a draft Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization bill by next spring. So, keep a sharp orb peeled for that on Amazon. Or just wait for the movie.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Latest stab at Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization excludes stickiest provision

July 15, 2019 — The Magnuson-Stevens (MSA) reauthorization bill that Alaska Republican Don Young and New Jersey Democrat Jeff Van Drew introduced last week in the US House of Representatives may have a higher mountain to climb in the 116th Congress than it did in the 115th, but it’ll be doing the hike with at least one major weight off its back.

The Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act (H.R. 3697)  does not contain controversial language that would assert that MSA is the top federal statutory authority over the management of the fisheries, giving it power over the Antiquities Act, National Marine Sanctuaries Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, confirms a review of the bill by Undercurrent News with the help of sources.

That was the language originally contained in HR 200, the bill introduced by Young in January 2017. Following much consternation, especially by ocean conservation groups, the Alaska lawmaker put forth an amendment to have it stricken before receiving a final 222- 93 vote to approve the legislation in July 2018.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Congressman Jeff Van Drew Fights for Jersey Fishermen, Introduces Bipartisan Magnuson-Stevens Act Reauthorization

July 11, 2019 — The following was released by the Office of Congressman Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ):

Today, Congressman Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ) and Congressman Don Young (R-AK) introduced the H.R. 3697, the Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act. This bipartisan legislation reauthorizes the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery and Conservation Management Act – landmark fisheries management and conservation legislation first written by Congressman Young in 1975. The Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) was last reauthorized in 2006.

Congressman Van Drew said, “Fisheries have long been the lifeblood of the South Jersey economy and culture. Our marine resources support the largest commercial and recreational fisheries in the Atlantic Coast, contributing more than $2.5 billion very year to our state’s economy. The Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act ensures that we have healthy fisheries, keep anglers in the water and keep fishermen fishing.”

“Alaska’s seafood industry is one of the primary drivers of our state economy, and for over forty years, the Magnuson-Stevens Act has allowed our fishermen, processors, and coastal communities to thrive,” said Congressman Young. “In 1976, I was proud to fight for our Nation’s fishermen alongside my dear friend Rep. Gerry Studds (D-MA) as we first drafted this bipartisan legislation, and in the years since, I have been proud to continue to partner with my Democratic colleagues to keep our fisheries healthy. As the nature of our ecosystem and fishing industry changes, we must ensure our laws are updated to keep pace in an evolving world. I am pleased to work across the aisle with Congressman Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ), industry leaders, and stakeholders in Alaska and throughout the country to update this important law. Future generations must have access to our ocean’s renewable resources. Simply put, sustainability is not a partisan issue – I have always valued having bipartisan support for this critical legislation and have incorporated input from diverse groups and interests into this bill. Our reauthorization takes important steps to protect one of our most important renewable resources, and ensures that generations of fishermen to come can earn a living by putting sustainable seafood on the tables of families across the country. I will be working diligently to ensure that our bipartisan MSA reauthorization crosses the finish line and is ultimately signed into law.”

According to Wayne Reichle, President of Lund’s Fisheries in Cape May “the NJ commercial fishing industry is grateful for the leadership and bipartisan efforts of Congressman Van Drew and for his commitment to productive fisheries and a prosperous industry achieved through quality science and sound management.”

“The Garden State Seafood Association has been advocating for MSA reform since 2009. We sincerely hope that Congressman VanDrew will receive the support he deserves from all of the national recreational and commercial fishing groups,” said Greg DiDomenico, Executive Director of the Garden State Seafood Association.

“Mr. Young and Mr. Van Drew are well versed on the current Magnuson-Stevens bill and how it penalizes fisherman while stocks are healthy. Thanks to both of these great fishery issue leaders for taking on the challenge of pragmatic Magnuson reform,” said Jim Donofrio, Executive Director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance.

This legislation tailor’s federal fishery management actions to give Regional Fishery Management Councils the proper tools and flexibility to manage their fisheries effectively. The bill specifically:

• Affords flexibility by allowing Councils to base fishery stock rebuilding timeframes on science rather than the one-size-fits-all approach;
• Increases transparency in science and management by allowing the public to play a greater role in the development of science and Fishery Management Plans;
• Gives stakeholders a voice in the management process and requires the Secretary of Commerce to develop a plan for implementing cooperative research with fishermen and outside groups; and
• Seeks to further improve the science and data on which Councils base their management, including key provisions relating to the collection of data from the recreational saltwater fishing industry.

This bill passed the House of Representatives in the 115th Congress with bipartisan support.

Read the release at Congressman Van Drew’s website

Read about Congressman Jared Huffman’s Magnuson-Stevens listening tour here

Rep. Huffman Announces Healthy Oceans & Fisheries Listening Tour In Advance of Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization Bill

July 11, 2019 — The following was released by The Office of Congressman Jared Huffman (D-CA):

As Chair of the Water, Oceans, and Wildlife Subcommittee, Representative Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) today announced that he will hold a series of roundtable discussions throughout the United States to engage diverse perspectives, interests, and needs of individuals who have a stake in management of our ocean and fisheries resources.

This listening tour, which kicks off this Fall, is a part of Huffman’s broader work as Chair of the Water, Oceans, and Wildlife subcommittee to foster a more transparent, deliberative, and science-based process for developing natural resources legislation than the backroom deals and partisan power plays that have frustrated good policymaking in recent years. The input Huffman receives from this listening tour, and from other stakeholder outreach that is already underway, will inform his introduction of a Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization bill next Spring. Through this comprehensive and inclusive approach, Huffman hopes to restore the historically bipartisan character of marine fisheries policies including prior successful Magnuson-Stevens reauthorizations.

“From coast to coast, American families and communities depend on healthy oceans and productive fisheries to sustain jobs, businesses, and recreational enjoyment,” said Rep. Huffman. “As Chair of the Water, Oceans, and Wildlife Subcommittee, I want to hear from you on how Congress can help manage our oceans and fisheries to be as environmentally and economically resilient as possible. This public process will inform and improve future marine policy to meet the challenges our oceans and fisheries face in the 21st century, such as climate change, the need to utilize advances in science and technology, to support coastal economies, and to protect ocean and fishery resources to keep faith with future generations.”

The nation’s main fisheries law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, is proof that an emphasis on science and sustainability works. Through its science-based annual catch limits and other provisions, overfishing has been reduced and more than 45 fish stocks have been rebuilt since 2000.

Rep. Huffman’s goal for this listening tour is to assess whether improvements to the Magnuson-Stevens Act are needed and if so, what they should be. Topics covered in the roundtables will include, but are not limited to:

  • Climate change impacts on fisheries and whether managers have the tools and resources they need to ensure resilient fish populations and stability to fishing communities;
  • Challenges of modernizing and improving our data collection systems;
  • Supporting working waterfronts, coastal communities, and subsistence fishing, such as improving the fisheries disaster relief system and mitigating the harmful impacts of trade wars and unfair, illegal fishing practices;
  • Examining how current fisheries management practices are maintaining ecosystem roles and functions, protecting important habitats, and minimizing bycatch;
  • Challenges associated with stocks that are still unhealthy or experiencing overfishing; and
  • Ensuring equitable access to resources and a sustainable future for seafood.

Rep. Huffman is committed to holding at least one public forum in each of the regions managed by Fishery Management Councils under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and to introducing a draft Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization bill, informed by this public process, by next Spring. Huffman believes the lack of transparency, limited stakeholder engagement, and partisan nature of recent Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization efforts contributed to their demise; and that this new approach will not only produce better legislation, but also a broader, non-partisan base of political support to improve the bill’s chances of passage.

Specific dates and locations will be announced soon so that stakeholders around the country can determine how best to participate in shaping next year’s Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization bill.

Read the full release here

Moulton, Ferrante: Trade war hurting lobstermen

July 1, 2019 — The U.S. trade war with China has turned into a war of another kind, as representatives at the state and federal levels are taking aim at tariffs that have rocked several sectors of the New England seafood industry.

In Washington, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democratic candidate for president, filed legislation to expand disaster relief to fisheries — such as the New England lobster industry — harmed by retaliatory tariffs that have choked off lucrative trade with China.

The bill calls for amending the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act “to require NOAA to evaluate the impacts of duties imposed on American seafood” and to ultimately allow the federal Department of Commerce to consider the impact of trade wars on the fishing industry as a means of providing disaster relief.

A similar measure was filed in the U.S. Senate by Sen. Ron Wyden, the senior senator from Oregon.

“The president’s lack of strategy and the uncertainty in our local economy is the perfect storm for local fishermen who are already doing more with less,” Moulton said in a statement. “Until the president ends his misguided trade war, Congress should step up and provide some relief.”

In Boston, state Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante of Gloucester pushed for a hearing in Gloucester by a joint committee of the Massachusetts Legislature on the Trump administration’s trade policies with China “and its effects on the Massachusetts lobster industry and corresponding ports.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

ALASKA: Rep. Young fights fish farms

May 21, 2019 — In his 46 years as Alaska’s lone representative in Congress, Don Young helped toss out foreign fishing fleets from Alaska waters with the onset of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 1976, and today he is intent on doing the same with offshore fish farms.

The MSA established an ‘exclusive economic zone’  for US fleets fishing from three to 200 miles from shore. Now, a bill introduced by Young aims to stop the Trump Administration’s push to use those waters for industrialized fish farming operations. The fish farms are being touted as a silver bullet to boost seafood production, provide jobs and reduce the $15 billion seafood trade deficit that comes from the nation importing over 85 percent of its seafood.

Earlier this month, Young filed the Keep Fin Fish Free Act which would stop officials from allowing fish farms in US offshore waters unless specifically authorized by Congress.

“The biggest selling power we have in Alaska is wild caught salmon and other fish products, and I don’t want that hurt,” Young said in a phone interview. “If we put in a commercial operation offshore, outside of state jurisdiction, we’d have a big problem in selling our wild Alaskan salmon.”

Young’s effort follows a push that began a year ago by over 120 aquaculture and food-related industries to have lawmakers introduce an Advancing the Quality and Understanding of American Aquaculture (AQUAA) Act, which failed to get any traction. The campaign is organized under a new trade group called  Stronger America Through Seafood and includes Cargill, Red Lobster, Pacific Seafoods and Seattle Fish Company.

Read the full story at The News Miner

Federal appellate court upholds NOAA Fisheries’ definition of bycatch

April 18, 2019 — A panel of federal appellate judges has upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled on NOAA Fisheries’ method for assessing bycatch in New England fisheries.

The ruling, which was announced on Friday, 12 April, in the District of Columbia chambers of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, allows NOAA Fisheries to use statistical sampling to determine the amount of bycatch. It stems from a 2011 court case where judges ruled the agency did not establish methodology standards to assess the number of other species caught and discarded when harvesting selected fish.

In both instances, environmental group Oceana pursued the lawsuit.

After that decision, NOAA Fisheries decided to utilize human observers on vessels. In most cases, the observers were trained biologists who reported on a vessel’s harvest. However, since it was too expensive to place an observer on every vessel, the agency created a statistical formula that allocated the observers in a fashion that reduced bias. This enabled NOAA Fisheries officials to build fishery-wide assessments based the observers’ findings.

Oceana filed the subsequent suit in July 2015 and argued that the sampling method implemented violated the Magnuson-Stevens Act. In addition, it claimed that observers were only counting the bycatch of species under management plans within the agency.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

SEN. DAN SULLIVAN: Northern Lights: A global seafood superpower

March 26, 2019 — The seafood industry is the lifeblood of many of Alaska’s communities. The industry is the third largest economic driver in Alaska and the top employer. Alaska accounts for more than 50 percent of total U.S. commercial fishery harvest in volume and contributes more than 78,000 jobs to the Alaska economy. We are also the top exporter in the country of fish and seafood products.

Enhancing Alaska’s seafood powerhouse is one of the primary reasons I have fought to sit on the Senate Commerce Committee — which has fishing under its jurisdiction. As a member of that committee, I have worked relentlessly to continue the important work of my predecessor, Sen. Ted Stevens, who co-authored the Magnuson-Stevens Act. But there is a whole host of fisheries issues that also come before me, including ensuring that our fisheries remain healthy and vital, fighting burdensome regulations that would needlessly restrict access to our fishing resources, and, importantly, expanding the markets for our fisheries.

In my time as a senator, I’ve been working diligently on all of these priorities, and we’ve had some important successes. For instance, the Save Our Seas Act, a bill that I coauthored with Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) to help keep plastics out of our seas, was signed into law by the president in October. I recently negotiated a provision, known as the Vessel Incident Discharge Act, to provide Alaska fishing vessel owners and operators relief from a patchwork of overly burdensome and confusing federal and state regulations for vessel ballast water and incidental discharges.
We’ve also had important successes in Congress to expand markets for Alaska fisheries.

When I arrived in the Senate, I was surprised to learn that while the national school lunch program requires school districts to buy American-made food, fish had been largely excluded from those requirements in practice. It was a major loophole that allowed, for example, Russian-caught pollock, processed in China and injected with phosphates, to be sent back to the United States for purchase in the National School Lunch Program. And it qualified for a Product of USA label because it’s battered and breaded here.

Not only was this bad for Alaska’s fishing industry, the chemical-laden, twice-frozen fish that was served to students just didn’t taste good. It literally turned a generation of kids in America off of seafood.

Read the full opinion piece at National Fisherman

US judge rules cod quota set-asides for Alaskan cities are unlawful

March 25, 2019 — Washington, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Timothy Kelly ruled March 21 that the North Pacific Council’s Amendment 113 (A113) to the Bering Sea Groundfish Fisheries Management Plan does not comply with Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) requirements.

The amendment, adopted in 2016, provided 5,000 metric tons of Pacific cod as a set-aside for processing facilities located west of 170 degrees longitude. It named the specific cities of Adak and Atka in the US state of Alaska and the plants located there as the plants that would benefit from this set-aside.

Shortly after the amendment was adopted in late 2016, the Groundfish Forum, United Catcher Boats and other groups who rely on cod, flatfish, and other groundfish in the Bering Sea, filed a complaint challenging the rule, based on five separate claims for relief.

They contended first, that the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) didn’t have the authority to “allocate shore-based processing privileges” and overstepped its authority with this amendment.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Trump took shot at fishery management councils in signing of Modern Fish Act

January 7, 2019 — Despite earlier resistance from commercial fishing and ocean conservation groups, little uproar was registered after US president Donald Trump signed the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act of 2018 (S. 1520), also known as “the Modern Fish Act”, last week. The parts of the bill most objected to were removed.

However, the president’s brief comments – in a statement released after his signing of the bill – are raising a few eyebrows as well as questions about what actions might be taken next at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Trump suggested his administration has concerns about both the increasing authority and makeup of the country’s eight fishery management councils (FMCs).

“The power of these councils,” he said, “has steadily increased over time, raising constitutional concerns related to the manner of the appointment and removal of their members and of members of certain scientific and statistical committees that assist them.

“Keeping with past practice of the executive branch, my administration will treat the plans promulgated by the council as advisory only; the adoption of the plans will be subject to the discretion of the secretary of Commerce as part of the regulatory process described in section 304 of the Magnuson‑Stevens Act [MSA],” he said.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News