Saving Seafood

EU auditors’ report reveals lack of transparency of EU fishing in developing countries

October 21, 2015 — A report by the European Court of Auditors has revealed a lack of data that jeopardises the sustainability of EU fisheries agreements with third countries (Sustainable Fisheries Partnership agreements or SFPAs). According to the Common Fisheries Policy, EU fleets can only target the surplus of a stock, but the report questions the calculations of this surplus and if the actual catch data is reliable. Oceana is concerned about these findings, which adds to the long-existing absence of public information on vessels operating outside the EU.

View a PDF of the report

Read the full story at EU Reporter

 

Oceana celebrates fishing ban in Danish marine parks

October 15, 2015 — The Chamber of Jigger Owners from Argentina (CAPA) decided to carry out a symbolic protest at the local port due to the serious economic and competitive challenges faced by the sector.

The lights remained lit in the boats between 8 pm and 10 pm. “Jiggers do not want to turn off the lights,” is the slogan chosen by the chamber.

“We are going through a terrible crisis due to currency exchange issues, soaring domestic costs and the increase in the theft of our resources in the Mile 201 by foreign fleets offering their products at a lower selling price than we do,” representatives of the sector claimed.

Read the full story at FIS World News

 

At “Our Oceans” Conference in Chile, Obama announces the first new marine sanctuaries in 15 years

“Several advocacy groups have been pressing the administration to declare two new national marine monuments off New England’s coast: Cashes Ledge and the New England Canyons and Seamounts, which are home to a major kelp forest and network of deepwater corals, respectively. But some local fishing operators raised objections to the designations of the two areas in the run up to the global conference, and the president did not use his executive authority to put them off limits.”

The following is an excerpt from a Washington Post story, written by Chelsea Harvey with contributions from Juliet Eilperin: 

WASHINGTON (The Washington Post) October 5, 2015 — In a video message to conference attendees, President Obama announced plans for two new marine sanctuaries, one off the coast of Maryland, and the other in Lake Michigan. They’ll be the first new national marine sanctuaries designated by the federal government in the past 15 years.

One of these sanctuaries will be an 875-square mile section of Lake Michigan off the shore of Wisconsin, which is recognized for its collection of nearly 40 known shipwrecks, some of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The other sanctuary is a 14-square mile area of the Potomac River, which includes Maryland’s Mallows Bay – an area known for its ecological significance, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and home to bald eagles, herons, beavers, river otters and numerous species of fish.

…

Several advocacy groups have been pressing the administration to declare two new national marine monuments off New England’s coast: Cashes Ledge and the New England Canyons and Seamounts, which are home to a major kelp forest and network of deepwater corals, respectively. But some local fishing operators raised objections to the designations of the two areas in the run up to the global conference, and the president did not use his executive authority to put them off limits.

Marine national monuments differ from marine sanctuaries in that they can be established by presidential proclamation, whereas sanctuaries are designated by NOAA and require extensive public input – however, they can offer similar protections and human use restrictions over marine ecosystems.

The United States is also announcing several other plans aimed at protecting marine resources. In Chile for the conference, Secretary of State John F. Kerry announced the launch of Sea Scout, a global initiative targeting illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing by uniting world leaders, expanding technology and information-sharing and identifying illegal fishing hot spots. NOAA also has plans to expand the development of a technology known as the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, which detects boats and may help alert nations to illegal fishing activities. The technology will be implemented in several nations in 2016, including Indonesia and the Philippines.

The Sea Scout initiative “provides a real opportunity to improve coordination and information sharing around the world as a way to combat illegal fishing,” said Beth Lowell, senior campaign director for Oceana, in a statement to The Post. According to Lowell, the biggest challenges to combating illegal fishing are an untraceable global seafood supply chain and a lack of enforcement. And on these fronts, there’s still more to be done.

“The first step to effectively stop IUU fishing and seafood fraud is to require catch documentation for all seafood sold in the U.S.,” Lowell said. “While Oceana applauds the president’s task force for taking great steps in the right direction, full-chain traceability is ultimately needed for all U.S. seafood to ensure that it’s safe, legally caught and honestly labeled.”

Read the full story from the Washington Post

Read Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks here

 

Obama announces new measures to crack down on illegal fishing

WASHINGTON — October 5, 2015 — The Obama administration on Monday announced plans to further crack down on illegal fishing, a global problem that can hurt both fishing communities in impoverished nations and the seafood industry in the United States.

As part of a package of initiatives announced in a video message to participants at a major oceans conference in Chile, President Barack Obama announced new steps to tackle illegal fishing. They include the launching of a program called “Sea Scout,” designed to increase cooperation among nations seeking to identify and prosecute illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing around the globe.

Experts say the problem is extensive around the world.

The Pew Charitable Trusts said the issue is difficult to quantify, but that experts estimate that illegal and unreported fishing cost the global economy up to $23 billion annually.

Read the full story from the Miami Herald

Federal Fishery Managers Cap Bycatch in California Swordfish Drift Gillnet Fishery

September 14, 2015 – Today, the Pacific Fishery Management Council (Council) adopted hard limits on the number of endangered marine mammals and sea turtles that can be injured or killed in the California-based swordfish drift gillnet fishery. Oceana commends the Council’s action to safeguard sensitive marine wildlife. If too many endangered species are caught over a two-year period, the fishery will be shut down for the remainder of the fishing season.

“This important action is needed to clean up one of the nation’s dirtiest fisheries,” said Ben Enticknap, Oceana’s Pacific Manager and Senior Scientist. “The bycatch caps will help protect animals most at risk and create an incentive for fishermen to avoid catching these animals in the first place. Ultimately, however, the swordfish fishery needs to switch to clean gear types.”

Drift gillnets — stretching a mile in length and 200 feet below the ocean’s surface — target swordfish and thresher sharks in federal ocean waters off California. Yet they create a deadly trap for all ocean wildlife that swims in their path. On average, the swordfish drift gillnet fishery throws overboard 64 percent of its catch, much of it dead or dying. Marine mammals feeding off the coast of California are regularly ensnared in these invisible nets and they drown when they are not able to surface for air.

According to the Council decision, hard caps will be set for the following nine wildlife species: endangered fin, humpback, and sperm whales, short-fin pilot whales, and common bottlenose dolphins; as well as for endangered leatherback, loggerhead, olive ridley, and green sea turtles (see table, below). Federal fishery observers are expected to monitor 30% of the fishery to determine if the caps are hit in the next two fishing years, and fishery monitoring will increase to 100% in 2018 according to the Council action.

Read the full story from Yuba Net

NMFS Must Consider Climate in Turtles Plan

September 2, 2015 — WASHINGTON –The National Marine Fisheries Service erred by not considering the impact of climate change when it drafted a biological opinion on loggerhead turtles in the northwest Atlantic, a federal judge ruled.

But in his August 31 ruling, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said over all the agency’s biological opinion on the impact of seven east coast fisheries on turtle populations is not arbitrary, as greens had charged.

Friedman granted in part and denied in part a motion for summary judgment filed by Oceana Inc., challenging the agency’s determination that seven fisheries it studied are not jeopardizing the existence of loggerhead sea turtles, and sent the opinion back to the fisheries service for certain clarifications.

In an “incidental take” report on seven east coast fisheries, the agency calculated the numbers of sea turtles that might be caught in specific types of fishing devices, and of those how many might die.

By the agency’s calculations, approximately 483 loggerhead turtles will be caught annually, 239 of which might die.

Oceana had challenged the agency’s report, saying it uses five year study intervals in its calculations, which is too long, and doesn’t take into effect the shorter-term effects of global warming.

Friedman agreed with Oceana that the “incidental take” report doesn’t explain how the agency will monitor whether the take limits have been exceeded, and that the agency’s reasons for why it only monitors the turtles every five years aren’t clear.

While the court isn’t in a position to say that the agency’s five year monitoring cycle is “per se arbitrary and capricious,” as Oceana had claimed, Friedman found that, “there is apparent ‘tension’ between the regulatory mandate and the infrequency with which NMFS measures take estimates against the take limit … and this dissonance places an onus on the agency to adequately explain the reasonableness of the approach.”

Read the full story at Courthouse News Service

 

ALASKA: Fish and Game hiring too many environmentalists, says Alaska state senator

August 6, 2015 — ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commissioner Sam Cotten is defending the recent hire of a former employee of the environmental group Oceana following a complaint from a Republican state senator that Cotten’s department is picking new employees from the “injunction industry” — a sarcastic reference to lawsuits filed by advocacy organizations.

Anchorage Sen. Cathy Giessel sent a letter to Cotten last week referring to a “steady stream of personnel changes” at Fish and Game, with replacements coming “overwhelmingly from the conservation advocacy sector.”

“It is my sincere hope that the arrival of individuals who have dedicated a part of their lives in an antagonistic relationship with the state of Alaska is not a reflection of a new philosophy in policy on the part of the department,” said the letter from Giessel, who chairs the Senate’s resources committee and is a mining- and oil-industry booster.

Cotten said in a phone interview Wednesday that he’d been hearing concerns about his department’s recent hiring of Chris Krenz, a former senior scientist at Oceana who worked on the group’s campaign opposing Shell’s oil drilling program in the Arctic.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News 

 

Feds Let New England Fish Go to Waste, Oceana Claims

August 3, 2015 — WASHINGTON — New federal bycatch rules are not enough to keep Northeast Fisheries from circling the drain, environmental protection group Oceana claims in Federal Court.

Oceana filed a lawsuit against the government last week for its “continued failure to create a method for monitoring the amount of wasted catch in New England and Mid-Atlantic fisheries, a region spanning from North Carolina to the Canadian border,” according to an Oceana statement.

The group sued United States Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“Bycatch” is the term for the collection of ocean species other than the ones for which commercial fishery crews are fishing. Often, these fish and animals are discarded, either dead or dying, into the ocean, or when the boat reaches shore.

In its statement announcing the lawsuit, Oceana writes, “New England, in particular, has been plagued for decades by lax monitoring and overfishing. The failure to monitor catch and enforce catch limits is in part responsible for the collapse of the New England groundfish fishery, including historically important Atlantic cod populations in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, which are currently at 3 and 7 percent of their former population levels.

Read the full story at Courthouse News Service 

OCEANA AGAIN SUES NOAA OVER BYCATCH MONITORING

July 29, 2015– WASHINGTON — Oceana, the maritime environmental group that successfully sued NOAA Fisheries in 2011 over its bycatch rules, is challenging the federal regulator of the nation’s fisheries over its newest bycatch rule for the Northeast region.

Oceana again sued NOAA Fisheries on Wednesday, claiming the current bycatch reporting rule finalized last month for the region — in part, as a response to Oceana’s earlier legal victory — is underfunded, uniformly inadequate for providing accurate information and in violation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

The 43-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., claims the new bycatch rule “leaves loopholes that would guarantee that observer coverage will never meet its performance standards, ultimately failing to fix current insufficiently low levels of monitoring in the region,” Oceana said.

The group’s lawsuit said NOAA’s new Statistical Bycatch Reporting Method (SBRM) “fails to address the fundamental legal flaws” identified in its previous lawsuit and “effectively doubles down on the Fisheries Service’s decade-long practice of under-funding and marginalizing its bycatch monitoring systems.”

That under-funding, Oceana said, impedes NOAA Fisheries’ ability to generate statistically reliable data needed to assess the impact of bycatch on individual fisheries.

The lawsuit draws a direct connection between faulty bycatch monitoring and overfishing. It specifically targets NOAA Fisheries’ bycatch monitoring performance in New England and among the Northeast multispecies groundfish fleet.

“New England in particular has been plagued for decades by lax monitoring and overfishing,” said Oceana Assistant General Counsel Eric Bilsky. “The failure to monitor catch and enforce catch limits is in part responsible for the collapse of the New England groundfish fishery, including the historically important Atlantic cod populations of the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Oceana Petitions Feds to Mandate Use of Species Specific Seafood Labels

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [SeafoodNews] July 22, 2015 — Oceana has started a campaign to get US officials to clear up seafood nomenclature issues and mandate “one name for one fish” for use on products labels, menus and other packaging.

Currently the FDA only requires the acceptable market name to be used for consumer-facing seafood labels, which Oceana says can cause confusion among consumers about the source and type of seafood they are buying and eating.

“Throughout the supply chain, seafood is often transformed from whole fish to fillet, shrimp to cocktail and crab to cake. The current seafood naming system makes it almost impossible for consumers to make informed choices about what they eat. For example, it’s difficult for seafood buyers to know if their ‘grouper’ sandwich is made with a more responsibly-fished black grouper caught off Florida’s Gulf coast or if it’s actually a vulnerable giant grouper from the Indo-Pacific, or even a critically endangered Warsaw grouper,” said Beth Lowell, Oceana’s senior campaign director.

Seafood labeling has become a point of contention for some domestically managed US fisheries like Alaska-caught walleye pollock. In this case, the acceptable market name for walleye pollock products sold in the US is “Alaska pollock.” This is regardless if the fish is caught in Alaska or Russia. For the Alaskan fishery the issue lies in the large difference between the sustainability and management practices of the Alaskan pollock fishery versus the Russian counterpart.

“As I have previously stressed, this change in nomenclature is necessary to minimize consumer confusion and avoid ongoing misrepresentation of the origin of pollock that is purchased and consumed in the United States,” Sen. Murkowski said in the letter sent to the FDA in May. “This problem has been compounded by the large volume of Russian-harvested pollock, 113 million pounds in 2012, that is sold to U.S. consumers as ‘Alaska pollock.’”

Oceana’s goal would be to eliminate the use of acceptable market names in favor of the scientific name. For pollock this would require all “Alaska pollock” be deemed just “pollock.”

“Requiring the use of species-specific names – one name for one fish – from boat to plate will help deter seafood fraud and illegal fishing. One name for one fish will benefit American consumers as well as the U.S. seafood industry, which is being undercut by illegal and mislabeled products. It will also protect endangered and vulnerable species, decrease the chance of eating seafood with health advisories such as for mercury and allow consumers to source sustainably caught seafood,” Lowell said.

This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.