Saving Seafood

NEFMC Endorses 2019 U.S./Canada TACs; Receives Groundfish Progress Report

September 27, 2018 — The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

The New England Fishery Management Council has accepted 2019 total allowable catches (TACs) for three groundfish stocks on Georges Bank (GB) that the U.S. shares with Canada–Eastern GB cod, Eastern GB haddock, and GB yellowtail flounder. The TACs were recommended by the U.S./Canada Transboundary  Management Guidance Committee (TMGC) based on advice from the U.S./Canada Transboundary
Resources Assessment Committee (TRAC). The U.S. has members on both the TMGC and the TRAC.

The TACs will be included in Framework Adjustment 58 to the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan, which is still under development. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS, NOAA Fisheries) must approve the TACs before they are implemented.

Read the full release here

MASSACHUSETTS: New herring rules prompt angst at dock

September 27, 2018 — The protections for the Northeast herring fishery enacted this week by the New England Fishery Management Council are not welcome news for Cape Seafoods and could force the Gloucester-based seafood company to change the way it fishes.

The council, meeting this week in Plymouth, voted to supplement severe rollbacks of herring quotas with a new inshore buffer zone aimed specifically at preventing mid-water trawlers — such as Cape Seafoods’ 141-foot boats, Challenger and Endeavour — from fishing within 12 miles of shore in most areas of the Northeast.

In some areas around Cape Cod, the buffer zone expands to 20 to 25 miles.

The council also voted for cuts in catch levels for the next three years. In 2019, catch levels will be capped at 21,226 metric tons — less than half of the 50,000 metric tons allowed in 2018. Those catch-level reductions and the creation of the buffer zone still must be approved by NOAA Fisheries.

“It’s not good,” Gerry O’Neill, president of Cape Seafoods, said Wednesday. “The majority of fish we catch every year are caught inside that 12-mile buffer. The long and short of it is this is going to have a serious impact on our business and I’m not really sure what we will do to survive it.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Judge: NOAA can’t regulate fish farming under fisheries law

September 27, 2018 — A federal judge in New Orleans has thrown out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s rules for fish farms in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the agency lacked authority to make them.

Tuesday’s ruling halts a plan that would have allowed, “for the first time, industrial aquaculture offshore in U.S. federal waters,” according to the Center for Food Safety , which sued NOAA on behalf of what U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo described as “a bevy of special interest groups representing both food safety advocates and Gulf fishermen.”

The government considers fish farming, including that on the open sea, to be “vital for supporting our nation’s seafood production, year-round jobs, rebuilding protected species and habitats, and enhancing coastal resilience.” Opponents say huge numbers of fish confined in nets out in the ocean could hurt ocean health and native fish stocks, and the farms would drive down prices and devastate commercial fishing communities.

“It’s a landmark decision,” George Kimbrell, lead counsel for the Center for Food Safety, said in a telephone interview from San Francisco.

“NOAA wanted to do this sort of industrial permitting not just in the Gulf of Mexico but in the Pacific and along the Atlantic coast,” he said.

The agency was working on rules for waters around Hawaii and other Pacific islands.

NOAA is considering whether to appeal the ruling handed down Tuesday, it said in an emailed statement.

The decision doesn’t forbid aquaculture, the statement emailed by spokeswoman Jennie Lyons noted. “NOAA remains committed to expanding the social, environmental, and economic benefits of sustainable marine aquaculture in the U.S.” it said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Washington Post

Federal officials promote aquaculture, or fish farms, as next big thing in seafood production

September 26, 2018 — Offshore fish farms could soon dot the seascape along with those oil and gas platforms being proposed for U.S. waters by the Trump administration.

The fish farms, which would be installed from 3 to 200 miles out, are being touted as a way to boost seafood production, provide jobs and reduce the nation’s $16 billion trade deficit due to America’s importing nearly 90 percent of its seafood favorites.

The U.S. Commerce Department is holding meetings around the country through November to talk about its strategic plan for getting aquaculture off the ground. At a recent session in Juneau, NOAA Fisheries Assistant Administrator Chris Oliver said that wild harvests simply can’t keep up with global demand.

“Aquaculture is going to be where the major increases in seafood production occur, whether it happens in foreign countries or in U.S. waters,” Oliver said.

“Aquaculture would seem like an ideal industry for the country, since it has the second-largest exclusive enterprise zone in the world — meaning it has proprietary marine resource rights over an area totaling roughly 4.4 million square miles in three oceans, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico,” wrote Seafood Source.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Right Whale Rules May Have Worsened Fishing Gear Entanglements

September 26, 2018 — A report by federal scientists says it’s time for a new look at regulations that aim to protect the endangered North American right whale — because they aren’t working and may have made things worse.

Over the last decade, regulators required lobstermen to change their gear and reduce the overall number of traplines in U.S. waters. But the new 30-page National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration technical memo finds that a 2015 rule requiring fewer trap lines in the water — with more traps per line in some areas — meant lobstermen had to use stronger lines to accommodate the increased loads. The tougher rope may have unintentionally contributed to an increase in the severity of potentially deadly entanglements with right whales.

They also find that as lobster seek cooler waters farther offshore, lobstermen are following them, right into likely whale travel lanes. Meanwhile, right whales are changing their patterns, too, swimming longer distances to forage for increasingly unpredictable prey species.

Read the full story at Maine Public

City leaders angered by US government action against former Rafael captains

September 26, 2018 — A recent action by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to punish 22 captains of fishing vessels owned by convicted New England fishing mogul Carlos Rafael crosses the line, believe some important figures in the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the South Coast Today reports.

Last week NOAA filed a 51-page superseding charging document that added 20 of Rafael’s ship captains to the list of the two previously charged with violating a long list of fishing-related regulations. It seeks the revocation of 17 of the captains’ operator permits.

The captains have 30 days to request modifications to the charges against them, administrative hearings to challenge the charges, or additional time to respond.

NOAA’s latest move, which also includes increasing civil money penalties from about $1 million to $3m, builds on a civil action filed in January.

Rafael began serving a 46-month sentence in November after pleading guilty in March 2017 to operating a long-running scheme through which he submitted falsified records to the federal government to evade federal fishing quotas.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Researchers Studying What Climate Change Could Mean for Fisheries in the Northeast

September 25, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Researchers with the Northeast Fisheries Science Center are studying warming ocean waters in an effort to understand what climate change could mean for “future stock conditions and the fisheries that depend on them.”

Congress recently provided the Northeast Fisheries Science Center with funding for a fisheries climate action plan that they released in 2016. Thanks to the funding, the Science Center now has 10 projects underway to “improve stock assessments through new modeling, better surveys, and more work to understand the vulnerabilities of coastal communities to climate change.”

The Science Center is working with fishermen, along with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, State University of New York Stony Brook, Rutgers University Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, NOAA Ocean and Atmospheric Research, Gulf of Maine Research Institute and Delaware Sea Grant.

A list of the stock assessment projects, survey projects, modeling projects and social science projects can be found here.

This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

MASSACHUSETTS: NOAA’s recent Codfather update leaves New Bedford reeling

September 25, 2018 — Right when it seemed as if the seas were settling around New Bedford, Massachusetts and the crimes of disgraced fishing magnate Carlos “Codfather” Rafael, another wave of controversy has hit the beleagured city.

The latest contention in New Bedford comes in the wake of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) issuance of a 51-page superseding charging document related to the agency’s civil administrative case against Rafael, initiated in January 2018.

Earlier this month, NOAA filed the new document, which called for the revocation of 17 operator permits held by Rafael’s captains and increased the civil penalties associated with the case from just under USD 1 million (USD 983,528, EUR 834,673) to more than USD 3 million (USD 3.3 million, EUR 2.79 million). The noncriminal document also upped the number of alleged fishing law violations – ranging from misreporting species to gear, scallop, and observer violations – to 88, according to The Standard Times.

These new developments have left some stakeholders in New Bedford’s fishing industry baffled. Jim Kendall, a former fishing captain and executive director of New Bedford Seafood Consulting, told local newspaper South Coast Today that he suspects former New Bedford mayor and ex-regional administrator for NOAA John Bullard of continued involvement with the case, even though Bullard retired from his post back on 19 January.

“I’ll tell you right now, you can print it or not, but I think John Bullard still has his thumb on the scale,” Kendall said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

BOB JONES: USTR Announced Additional Duties on Chinese Seafood Imports

September 25, 2018 — The following was released by the Southeastern Fisheries Association:

Where will the seafood industry end up after the tariff war is concluded?

“Last night, at the direction of President Trump, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) announced that a 10 percent additional tariff would be imposed on a massive amount of Chinese imports, including imports of aquacultured seafood products effective on Monday, September 24th. The USTR additionally announced that these tariffs would increase to 25 percent on January 1, 2019.”

US fishermen can’t provide more fish to the domestic market because NOAA and the Councils have taken most of the seafood away from the non-boaters.

For instance, we can only harvest under our quotas 18,000,000 pounds of fish from Virginia through the Keys while the anglers have been gifted with 40,000,000 pounds.

In the Gulf of Mexico it seems when the red snapper needs 6,000,000 more pounds, nothing is based on science or process but rather by a stroke of the pen, the Secretary of Commerce can issue a ‘temporary rule re-opening the private angling component of the red snapper fishery in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) for the 2017 season on select weekend and holiday dates through Labor Day , September 4, 2017.’ (Page 1 of Motion for Summary Judgement between two environmental groups and Wilbur Ross as Secretary of Commerce-Case 1:17-cv01408-ABJ)Basically Commerce could not be punished because their temporary rule expired before the case got to the judge so everything was moot. The recreational fishing industry’s powerful vendors won again. Not Rule of Law.

It is good that qualified members of the domestic shrimp industry are compensated from tariffs received from foreign countries. It is bad that the domestic seafood industry as a whole was supposed to have a dynamic seafood program in place from the tariffs collected under the Saltonstall-Kennedy legislation but somehow, most of these tariffs are used for salaries and upkeep on NOAA facilities instead of going to where they should go.

Senators Kerry and Snowe tried to fix this in 2012 and it needs to be tried again. Tax money the anglers bring in from foreign tackle go to their issues. NOAA needs to do what the original act demands.

“The Saltonstall-Kennedy (S-K) Act directs 30% of the duties on imported fish products to a grant program for research and development projects to benefit the U.S. fishing industry. It is estimated that for 2010, the total duties collected on the imports of fishery products was $376.6 million. The S-K Act directs 30% of that total to be transferred to the Secretary of Commerce. In 2010, that equaled $113 million. Of that $113 million, $104.6 million went to NOAA’s operations budget, and only $8.4 million was used by NOAA for grants for fisheries research and development projects. We believe that we should follow the original intent of Senators Leverett Saltonstall and John F. Kennedy and restore this funding to help the fishermen and communities for whom it was originally intended.”
https://californiawetfish.org/fishingnews/tag/saltonstall-kennedy-act/

Ample S-K funds for honest stock assessments and for treating the “providers of seafood for non boaters i.e. commercial fishermen” as an important and vital sector of the society. We have been oppressed by NOAA policies for too long.

NOAA officials say seal die-off linked to virus

September 24, 2018 — Gray and harbor seals have lured sharks in increasing numbers into Cape Cod waters, with tragic results, but the burgeoning seal population is taking a hit from viruses.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has issued an unusual mortality event alert for both species of seal in the Gulf of Maine.

From July 1 to Aug. 29 (when the alert was issued) 599 seals were found dead (137) or ill and stranded (462) on New England shores. In the few weeks since that number has soared to 921. Most of those were in Maine (629), with 147 in New Hampshire and 125 in Massachusetts.

The dead or dying seals have been located mostly to the north but a couple were found as far south as Plymouth in Cape Cod Bay.

The dead or dying seals have been located mostly to the north but a couple were found as far south as Plymouth in Cape Cod Bay.

For comparison the nearly 500 seals found last month is roughly 10 times the number that stranded in August of 2017.

“That is attributed to the influences of disease,” noted Terri Rowles, NOAA’s Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Program coordinator.

Read the full story at the Eastham Wicked Local