Saving Seafood

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.

 

DON CUDDY: Spreading misinformation about our fisheries

July 15, 2015 — Anyone knowledgeable about the commercial fisheries of the United States will find nothing original in the op-ed piece recently submitted to the New York Times by the environmental organization Oceana.

Even its title ‘A Knockout Blow for American Fish Stocks’ is misleading. American fish stocks are healthy. NOAA’S annual report to Congress, submitted at the end of 2014 showed that only twenty-six of the three hundred and eight fish stocks assessed were subject to overfishing.

‘Overfishing’ occurs when too many fish are removed from a population to produce maximum sustainable yield. As a scientific term it is quite misleading, carrying, as it does, the clear implication that low stock assessments result solely from fishing pressure; whereas ‘overfishing’ can result from a number of other factors, such as changes in water temperature or salinity, degraded habitat and increased predation.

NOAA also maintains an ‘overfished’ list; comprising any stock whose biomass is such that its capacity to produce its maximum sustainable yield is in jeopardy. Only thirty-seven of two hundred and twenty eight stocks found themselves on that list. Hardly a knockout. No new stocks were added to the list in 2014. In fact, three were removed from the previous year, according to the NOAA report.

The Oceana piece also asserts that recent estimates determined that New England cod stocks were at three to seven percent of target levels. As fishermen in the Gulf of Maine can attest, most of that bottom is now taken over by lobster gear and neither the fishermen nor the NOAA survey vessel can tow through that. So nobody can determine with any certainty how much cod might be out there; not to mention the fact that if a fisherman sees cod in the water he goes someplace else. Why? Because the introduction of fishing sectors and catch shares in New England have made cod a commodity, like pork bellies. The result is best illustrated by New Hampshire fisherman Dave Goethel’s plight. He has a photo showing 2000 pounds of cod that his 40-foot boat caught, after a one-hour tow on a research trip last December. If sold, the cash value at the dock would have brought him $3,000. But to lease those 2,000 pounds of cod would have cost him $4500. That’s what you call a knockout. In a multispecies fishery you need some cod quota, even if you are targeting haddock or other groundfish species and so the lease price keeps going up. That is one reason why the percentage of fishing quota actually caught in the New England groundfishery in 2013-2014 was only 33 percent of the allowable catch limit. Because of regulatory constraints fishermen are now avoiding fish that allegedly are not there.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times