Saving Seafood

Local buyer for Carlos Rafael’s fishing permits, court documents say

September 21, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Documents filed in federal court Monday reveal that a local buyer has been identified for Carlos Rafael’s fishing permits. The potential deal would remove Rafael from commercial fishing, according to a 14-page document filed by Rafael’s attorneys opposing federal forfeiture.

The single buyer is identified as having “a spotless compliance record” to purchase at least the 13 groundfish permits and vessels. The document is unclear if Rafael’s additional permits and vessels, estimated to be at least 35 in total, are included in negotiations. However, it states, “Rafael has taken substantial steps to voluntarily remove himself from the federal fishery entirely in a manner that does not jeopardize New Bedford’s economy.”

The document appraises the 13 groundfish permits, related to Rafael’s illegal reporting guilty plea in March, as worth more than $30 million. Rafael’s ownership, excluding other business partners’ shares, amounts to more than $19 million. The purchase price for the identified buyer is $16,333,558, according to the document.

In contacting a number of sources within the fishing industry Wednesday, The Standard-Times found no evidence that this deal had been completed. Rafael is scheduled to appear Monday and Tuesday for sentencing in U.S. District Court in Boston.

Two prominent businesses in New Bedford possess the means to acquire the permits based on financial means and ability to operate a fleet of that size: Whaling City Seafood Display Auction and Eastern Fisheries. Neither returned requests for comment.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

New Bedford Standard-Times: Court, NOAA should put Rafael assets to greatest good use

August 21, 2017 — Carlos Rafael’s challenge of the forfeiture of 13 permitted groundfish vessels stirs the concerns of hundreds — maybe thousands — of fishermen and fishing support workers, municipal officials from Rhode Island to Maine, and state and federal officials left with all the more uncertainty of the impact of his punishment once it’s finally handed down.

His guilty plea in March, to three decades of cheating in the groundfish fishery, hasn’t stopped his boats from fishing out of New Bedford, where they bring in 75 percent of the groundfish landed each year, representing 10 percent of all the landings in the nation’s richest port.

New Bedford’s mayor has argued convincingly that removing all 13 vessels from the Port of New Bedford would have an immediate, significant impact on the livelihoods of scores of workers and their families, and the court’s granting of postponements while a full exit from fishing (including nearly two dozen scallopers) is negotiated by Mr. Rafael and the government suggests official harmony on that point.

Read the full editorial at the New Bedford Standard-Times

New Bedford Standard-Times: Stakeholders deserve open process in monument designation

August 26, 2016 — Today, the Standard-Times in New Bedford, Mass., the highest grossing seaport in the country, dedicated its opinion section to the issue of marine monuments designated by executive authority under the Antiquities Act. This was done in conjunction with today’s announcement that President Obama will quadruple the size of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument off the coast of Hawaii.

In its editorial, the Standard-Times noted that a monument designation off the coast of New England “lacks checks and balances that would deliver a better policy” and that environmental groups have pushed for a monument in secret “in order to gain an advantage over industry and other stakeholders.” 

Together with today’s editorial, the Standard-Times published letters to the White House by two coastal mayors, Jon Mitchell from New Bedford and Clyde Roberson from Monterey, Calif., questioning the efficacy of offshore monument designations and asking for a more transparent process. The following is excerpted from the Standard-Times’ editorial:

The National Park Service was established 100 years ago when President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act.

The 84 million acres under the NPS is a treasure that belongs to all of us, and we applaud efforts to expand the protection of our natural resources, but we also recognize some such efforts go too far, including in the push to establish a national monument off the New England coast.

The Canyons and Seamounts are indeed precious resources, but the scope and the current process being advanced by environmental organizations lack checks and balances that would deliver a better policy.

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell last week sent a letter to the acting director of the Council for Environmental Quality, a White House agency that advises the president on such issues, noting the push for the seamounts monument has kept stakeholders from participating in the process.

Indeed, we have previously reported on efforts by environmentalists to keep their advocacy for the monument designation a secret in order to gain an advantage over industry and other stakeholders.

The president did not go along with the environmentalists last fall, and it is our fervent hope that if he isn’t advised by CEQ to pursue the more open process, the duty to represent and hear all stakeholders will prevail.

See today’s opinion page in the New Bedford Standard-Times

Read the full editorial at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Read Mayor Jon Mitchell’s full letter here

Read Mayor Clyde Roberson’s full letter here

New Bedford Standard-Times: Cooperation pushes fishery advocacy to next level

June 6, 2016 — Last Thursday, House Natural Resources Committee Chair Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) joined Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA) and Mayor Jon Mitchell in New Bedford, Mass., to discuss issues relevant to the local seafood and fishing industries. The National Coalition for Fishing Communities (NCFC), which helped organize Rep. Bishop’s visit, hopes to continue working with the Natural Resources Committee and its staff to arrange bipartisan visits to all the seaports where NCFC members conduct their business.The following editorial about Rep. Bishop and Rep. Keating’s visit to New Bedford was published yesterday by the New Bedford Standard-Times:

Geography is both a blessing and a curse for commercial fishermen in the U.S. They have access to rich fishing grounds along thousands of miles of seacoast, but the distance between the fish they catch and the American consumer prevents a full understanding of the lives of fishing communities.

The visit to New Bedford’s waterfront Thursday by the chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, was more than a step in the right direction, it’s proof of treading the right path. The committee is responsible for ocean issues, including the current reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

City support

The National Coalition for Fishing Communities was formed with city-directed grant money, and the Harbor Development Commission’s membership in the coalition emphatically states the city’s commitment and leadership. Their advocacy is often first to be heard, which means they’ll wait longest for remedy.

Advocacy

Saving Seafood’s years of advocacy in Washington on behalf of the Port of New Bedford and the East Coast has enabled the creation of the coalition. More than two dozen municipalities, businesses, and associations from around the country are represented: Alaska, Hawaii, West Coast, Gulf Coast and East coast. Members from Rhode Island, Long Island, New Jersey and around New England had their voices heard by the chairman on Thursday. An industry with such diversity had its voice heard on national issues and discovered new resources to address local issues more effectively.

The coalition’s website says: “We are committed to the tenets of National Standard Eight of the Magnuson-Stevens Act,” which is summed up in the balancing of the sustainability of both the ocean environment and the fishing community. For the record, The Standard-Times is similarly committed.

Good government

There seems little good to be done recounting the sins of either fishermen or government agents, but it is instructive when considering the case of an alternative for the monument designation proposed to protect corals in fishing grounds south of Cape Cod. Industry representatives cooperated at the White House Executive Office level, the Council on Environmental Quality, to produce an alternative that satisfies preservation and fishing goals alike.

In addition, the CEQ’s counsel can influence how frequently deference might be claimed by regulators, nudging court decisions more in line with the statutory balancing act of National Standard 8.

The chairman’s visit to New Bedford is a recognition that there remain injustices and inequities in the administration of Magnuson-Stevens; reaching out leads to better decisions.

Bipartisanship

Chairman Bishop’s congressional district in Utah borders on the Great Salt Lake, which sees millions of pounds of brine shrimp eggs landed each year. The industry can move more than a billion dollars through the economy annually, but its fortunes are fickle. The lake’s changing salinity affects shrimp reproduction, which can shut the season down if severe enough.

The chairman may have seen the workers in his district reflected in those at the display auction in New Bedford on Thursday, icing down Gulf of Maine flounder. Or at Northern Wind, where workers use machines to process vast amounts of scallops, the port’s signature harvest.

The only “politics” surrounding the chairman’s visit was of the traditional variety: How can we get the people’s business done? New Bedford’s Democratic U.S. Rep. Bill Keating could readily see eye to eye on the issues of fishing communities as they toured the New Bedford waterfront together.

Managing ocean resources may never be easy, but cooperation is what gets the people’s business done, moving toward National Standard 8’s goal of a sustainable balance between humanity and the environment.

Read the editorial at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Saving Seafood Executive Director Talks Lost NOAA HabCam

 

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) – May 25, 2016 — A $450,000 camera used to survey scallops on the ocean floor was lost Friday when a NOAA-chartered vessel towed it too close to a known ship wreck, as reported yesterday by the New Bedford Standard-Times.

This morning, Saving Seafood Executive Director Bob Vanasse spoke with New Bedford 1420 WBSM morning host Phil Paleologos about the accident, saying it proves the need for changes to the Atlantic scallop survey.

“The Fisheries Survival Fund [which represents members of the Atlantic scallop fleet] has been arguing for some time that the Federal scallop survey should not be done just by one single piece of equipment on one single vessel, but that there should be backups,” Mr. Vanasse said.

Compounding the problem the lost camera will have on this year’s Federal scallop survey is the fact that respected scientist Kevin Stokesbury, from UMass Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology, did not receive government funding for his own survey. Dr. Stokesbury’s surveys, which use cameras dropped into the ocean to take pictures of the seafloor, had previously been funded every year since 1999.

Mr. Vanasse called the loss of NOAA’s HabCam habitat camera last week “a combination of really bad circumstances.” He raised concerns about researchers aboard the R/V Hugh R. Sharp piloting the expensive HabCam so close to the well-known and charted wreckage of the Bow Mariner, where a cable apparently snagged the sunken ship and detached the camera. He also pointed out that many industry leaders raised concerns that a volunteer worker was piloting the HabCam at the time of the accident.

NOAA researchers are beginning efforts to find the HabCam today, nearly a week after it was lost, and say they will be able to make up for lost time. But scallop industry experts are unconvinced, according to Mr. Vanasse.

“That doesn’t really make sense,” Mr. Vanasse said of the industry perspective. “If they plan to go out for a certain time, they do that because they need it.”

The timing issue is further complicated because NOAA leases the Sharp from the University of Delaware for a limited period of time at high expense. Even if NOAA is able to salvage the HabCam, it will likely take more than a week of valuable time, Mr. Vanasse said.

The lost HabCam is not the first issue NOAA has had a with a research vessel in recent weeks. Earlier this month the R/V Henry B. Bigelow, the ship that surveys for groundfish and many other species on the East Coast, was delayed due to mechanical issues with its generators. The Bigelow was already running more than a month behind before its generator problems. Mr. Vanasse pointed out that Dr. Bill Karp, director of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, has been pushing for NOAA to charter commercial fishing boats as backups, including at April’s NEFMC meeting (skip to 31:51 to listen to Dr. Karp).

“We need higher ups at NOAA to listen to what Dr. Karp has been saying about needing backups on the groundfish survey,” Mr. Vanasse said. “And we need everybody at NOAA to pay attention to what the [Fisheries] Survival Fund has been saying about having backups on the scallop survey.”

Listen to the full segment here

Catch Share Programs Under Fire On Both Coasts

March 23, 2016 — This week, catch share management has come under fire on both the East and West Coasts, as articles in the New Bedford Standard-Times and Seafood News criticize key facets of regional catch share programs.

In New England, Massachusetts State Rep. Bill Straus writes about the side-effects of implementing catch shares in the New England groundfish fishery, calling the subsequent fleet consolidation “a government-created near monopoly.”

In Sacramento, Seafood News details how low quotas for critical “choke species” are preventing some boats from fishing for the entirety of 2016.

For nearly a decade, the Environmental Defense Fund’s ocean policy has been “to ensure that the world’s fisheries are restored back to health through the advancement and implementation of a transformational fisheries management approach known as catch shares.” In May 2009, while serving as Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the vice-chair of EDF’s board of trustees, enacted a national policy encouraging the consideration and use of catch shares.  Regarding its trustees, EDF notes on its website that “Fortune magazine called them one the most influential boards in the country.”

Excerpts from the two articles are provided below:

State Rep. Bill Straus: Impact of the Federal Fisheries Arrests in New Bedford

No one who supported the catch shares idea in 2009 can honestly say this concentration and its results are a surprise. The statements challenging this bad idea back then came locally from Dr. Brian Rothschild at UMass Dartmouth and many others; I added a cautionary word as well on the pages of this newspaper on June 24, 2009. It is frankly depressing to re-read this portion of what I said then about the coming catch shares program:

“Amendment 16 will send many fishermen and smaller ports to the sidelines; in other words, they will lose their jobs. There will be winners and losers, and the advocates of Amendment 16 have done little or nothing to point out that the system that is chosen for allocating catch shares will determine who will thrive in the new world of federal regulation and who will be abandoned.

“Amendment 16 will result in a concentration within the fleets of all ports; to think otherwise would be naive.”

In the coming weeks and months, more information on the way the industry runs will no doubt come to light and whether, as I believe, the catch shares system played a role in allowing the port economy to shift as it has. A discussion needs to start and soon for two reasons. First, the federal government at some point will no doubt have to consider whether serious permit holder violations have occurred such that revocation and some new system of permit availability for groundfish participants should be created. That is a major question, and it’s never too soon to get going on whether catch shares’ day (if there ever should have been one) has come and gone.

West Coast Catch Share Program Failure Keeps Vessel Off Fishing Grounds For 2016

Criticism that the West Coast catch shares program is underperforming came to the forefront recently at the Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting in Sacramento.

West Coast trawlers have been operating in fear of a “disaster tow” or “lightning strike” of a choke species since the beginning of the individual quota program in 2011. And for the F/V Seeker, a disaster tow of 47,000 pounds of canary rockfish – a species at the time listed as overfished — in November 2015 will prevent it from fishing for all of 2016.

The Seeker’s misfortune is an extreme example of the program’s failure, particularly for those fishing in the non-whiting sector.

Jeff Lackey, who manages the vessel, testified to the PFMC the vessel is in a bind and already has made plans to fish in Alaska for most of 2016 and return to fishing off the West Coast in 2017. The Seeker fishes in both the non-whiting shoreside sector and in the whiting mothership sector.

The Seeker is a victim of several features of the current regulatory system in the West Coast individual quota program.

First, current vessel limits prohibit the Seeker from acquiring enough quota to solve its deficit.

Second, canary rockfish was listed as overfished for more than a decade but an assessment accepted by the council in 2015 shows canary rockfish has been rebuilt.

And third, the PFMC’s management process operates on a two-year cycle, with no way to change annual catch limits (ACLs) mid-cycle.

“[The F/V Seeker] is not the only one,” Pete Leipzig, director of the Fishermen’s Marketing Association, told the Council. Other trawlers have come up against vessel limits for other species that have prevented them from fishing for some time, but none have been confronted with the extremity of the Seeker’s situation.

The vessel limits were designed to prevent consolidation of the fleet. Bycatch of choke species have prevented many vessels from capturing target fish. Fear of a disaster tow — one so extreme that a quota pound deficit cannot be covered in the existing fishing year — has limited trading of quota as fishermen hoard these species to cover their fishing operations for the year.

The Seeker is a member of the Newport, OR based Midwater Trawlers Cooperative. The organization proposed a solution to the Seeker’s problem: use an alternative compliance option that was eliminated during the development of the catch shares program. It would have been available for overly restrictive events, such as the Seeker’s, but still hold fishermen accountable. The council opted not to move forward with examining that option at this time.

This is the new reality of the West Coast individual quota program: rebuilding species will be encountered more frequently and fishermen could be held to conservative annual catch limits for a year or more if they experience an infrequent disaster tow and have insufficient quota to cover their deficit.

“As the regulations are currently written, any vessel that experiences the same situation would likely have to sit out of the shoreside trawl program for several years … This seems overly punitive and raises equity concerns,” Heather Mann, executive director of the MTC, wrote in a public comment letter to the council.

ANTHONY FERNANDES: Mismanagement, not ‘overfishing,’ threatens industry

October 8, 2015 — “Overfishing” or “overfished” are terms used when, for any reason, the stock level of a species of fish is not at a sustainable level. It doesn’t matter what the cause.

The long-term use of these terms has hurt the fishermen in the eyes of the public. The continued use of the terms insinuates that the fisherman have been somehow circumventing the laws or pirating fish. So it’s difficult to get support from politicians or the public, and it has empowered the green groups who have grown with more donations and have been more aggressive with NMFS to add more restrictions for fisherman and increase observers under the umbrella of ending overfishing, no matter what the cost or the consequences.

Because the stock is declared overfished, the solution always falls to more layers of fishing restrictions in the form of an emergency action, a framework adjustment or a full amendment, depending on the severity. There is no requirement to find out exactly what was wrong with prior plans, leaving no feedback loop to correct the problem or problems. Nobody is held accountable for their analysis, their science or their models, therefore it rarely changes and the burden is placed squarely on the backs of the fishing industry: Somehow, it is their fault, even though they fished according to what NMFS and these regulations required and landed what they were legally allowed to land.

So here we go with another framework. Is this one going to work? Why didn’t the previous dozens of frameworks work for Gulf of Maine cod? Are we doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting different results?

A good analogy for this was watching the recent Hurricane Joaquin coming across the Atlantic and hitting the Bahamas. There were several tracking models displaying what the projected track was going to be up the East Coast. I counted 10 different tracks by 10 different models. The one that was correct was the Euro model, and it was the one I saw the least. It was right, the rest of the models were wrong in there projections, but used together one could understand the scope of possibilities, and that was helpful. But if they had only shown one model and that was wrong, how helpful would that have been?

That is why the fishing industry is so frustrated. It has been under the wrong model or fishery plan for a long time now for Gulf of Maine cod. How much would you depend on the Weather Channel if they were wrong over and over because they were using the wrong model or only showing the result of one model or using the wrong data?

The fishermen are not the cause of the failure of these fishery management plans. They fish within the regulations approved by NMFS. They all have satellite tracking devices (required for all groundfish boats for more than 10 years) to show NMFS where they are fishing and they bring observers by law whenever NMFS says so. The fishery management plans fail because the plan itself is flawed in some way. The industry has been on this rollercoaster ride since the early 1990s. A better term to use next time a stock update determines a fish species is below a level required by the fishery management plan should be: The stock is mismanaged and mismanaging still occurring.

Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

NEW BEDFORD STANDARD-TIMES: Fishery management needs balance

September 30, 2015 — The requirement that the cost of at-sea monitors be paid by the fishermen who participate in the Northeast Multispecies Fishery is mere weeks away from being phased in.

Study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggests as many as 60 percent of affected boats could be pushed out of profitability by the requirement, based on estimates of monitors costing $700 per day.

Republican U.S. Rep. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire hosted a roundtable mid-month with NOAA representatives and fishermen to address the issue.

“We’re supposed to take into account that we don’t destroy the fishing communities,” Rep. Ayotte said, according to Sept. 18 report by the Portsmouth Herald. “(Requirements to protect fishermen) are being ignored in all this.”

She was referring to National Standard 8 of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which says measures used to manage the fishery must “take into account the importance of fishery resources to fishing communities by utilizing economic and social data,” consistent with the prevention of “overfishing and rebuilding of overfished stocks.”

The requirement for consistency, above, might explain why Greater Atlantic Regional Administrator John Bullard told Rep. Ayotte that “eliminating overfishing” supersedes all other priorities.

The Standard-Times is having a very difficult time trying to understand why a policy that will have such a clear negative impact on fishermen is being instituted when the beneficial impact on the resource — the fishery — is so unclear.

Read the full editorial from the New Bedford Standard-Times

New Bedford Standard-Times slams federal at-sea monitoring decision in dual opinion pieces

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — September 15, 2015 — This past week, the New Bedford Standard-Times ran two opinion pieces criticizing current federal policy that will require fishermen to directly pay for the costs of at-sea monitoring. The first, an op-ed by fishing boat owner Carlos Rafael, notes that many of the remaining fishermen will be unable to afford the cost of the program, which is expected to cost the fishery an estimated $2.64 million per year. This will cause many to leave the fishery entirely and lead to further consolidation of the fleet.

The second piece, from the Standard-Times’ editorial board, argues that the policy on at-sea monitors is the latest in a series of rules and regulations from the federal government that have distorted the seafood market and do not properly take into account the economic costs imposed on fishing communities. The editorial calls for environmental groups to fund further studies to more accurately estimate the health of regional fish populations.

Excerpts from both articles are reproduced below.

Carlos Rafael: White House should heed call
on burden of at-sea monitors

In a show of bipartisan cooperation that’s all too rare in today’s politics, Massachusetts’ Republican governor and all-Democratic congressional delegation united late last month to call upon the Obama administration to reverse a particularly egregious federal policy: the current plan by NOAA to require the fishing industry to pay the full cost for at-sea monitors for the groundfish fishery. Fishermen will now be required to hire monitors from an approved short list of for-profit companies. This policy will impose a significant burden on area fishermen, and poses a threat to the future of a fishery that is already reeling from a string of onerous federal regulations.

Thanks goes to Gov. Charlie Baker, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, and all nine of our Massachusetts representatives in Congress for giving voice to what fishermen have been saying for years: Forcing fishermen to pay for the observers who monitor their catch will be a financially disastrous outcome for the fishery. As their joint letter notes, ther National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s own analysis of shifting the cost of monitors onto the industry finds that 60 percent of the fleet would be operating at a loss if required to pay for monitoring. In just the first year, the program would cost fishermen an estimated $2.64 million.

Yet NOAA does not seem to fully realize how seriously this policy puts the fishery at risk. The $2.64 million that NOAA expects the fishery to pay in monitoring costs is $2.64 million that fishermen simply don’t have. The fishery still has not recovered from years of declining quotas and a federally declared economic disaster in 2012. Imposing another unfunded mandate on the fishery will force many remaining fishermen to exit the industry altogether.

The agency at least needs to look into alternatives to reduce the exorbitant price tag for the at-sea monitoring program, as well as look at ways to make the program more cost-effective. A program that is too expensive for the fishery and which the federal government refuses to pay for is not sustainable in the long term.

Read the full opinion piece here

New Bedford Standard-Times: Environmental groups’
misguided spending on oceans

In a free market, fishermen are going to see a net filled with sanddab and move to another part of the ocean. They’ll judge whether it makes more sense to spend labor on discarding the bycatch or to land the fish at a loss while pursuing a more valuable species.

This minutia of the market shows how poorly devised is the current regime of management tools. Our confidence in what good data would say notwithstanding, we would not advocate wholesale changes to policy based on our certainty. We also know that the government is hardly going to be convinced to reallocate scarce funds to measure the vast, unseen worlds below the surface.

Therefore, we would call on the most powerful advocates for ocean health to put their hundreds of millions of dollars to the highest use, that is, to count the fish. Environmental groups that for two decades have solicited and spent half a billion dollars trying to restrict fishing under the narrative that the oceans are in crisis owe it to their benefactors to determine how accurate their claims are.

The lower fish landings we count at the dock can be blamed on overfishing, but it’s far more likely that the cause is the changing ocean environment. Let’s find out for sure. Let’s see if one environmental group has the integrity to actually improve fishery science by supporting good work like that being done at UMass Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology to improve the accuracy of stock assessments. Ironically, the environmental groups appear to have blamed fishermen and overlooked the true culprit of challenges in the fishery: climate change.

There is no indication that any stocks considered to have been “rebuilt” achieved that status as a result of regulations. Fish aren’t bouncing back, we would argue, they’re just swimming back. Environmental advocates have resources and leverage that could maintain sustainable fish stocks and fishing communities. It’s a shame that power is misdirected.