Saving Seafood

For New England lobstermen, resilience in ‘a season of uncertainty’

August 13, 2020 — “Gimmie a Hulla” motors across the glassy harbor, backed by the silhouettes of trees and the rocky shoreline. Yvonne “Beba” Rosen is heading out to haul her lobster traps at 5:30 a.m., as she does five days a week, April through November.

This is a tough season so far for Ms. Rosen, but over her 15 years of lobstering off Vinalhaven, Maine, she’s always been a better fall fisherman, she says. This season is like no other – the lobsters are slow to appear, but more than that, the coronavirus has caused trade to plummet and tourists to stay home.

Ms. Rosen squints into the sun, now sitting just above the horizon, and half shouts over the guttural diesel engine. “Tourists come to Maine to eat lobster. That’s what they do,” she says grimly, hands on the wheel.

Without the regular influx of tourists, and with restaurants across the country closed entirely or open with limitations, lobstermen in Maine and Cape Cod have gotten creative to keep operating their boats, exercising the resilience for which the industry is known.

A slow spring is not unusual, although this one was difficult because “markets were really feeling the brunt of the supply chain,” says Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

Read the full story at The Christian Science Monitor

Lobstering group wants to raise $500,000 for legal defense fund

May 7, 2020 — The Maine Lobstermen’s Association has launched a campaign to raise $500,000 to fund its legal efforts to protect the state’s most valuable fishery from the consequences of a recent federal court ruling that calls for more government protections for the endangered right whale.

Last month, a federal judge found the National Marine Fisheries Service had violated the U.S. Endangered Species Act by its authorization of the U.S. lobster industry – including Maine’s $485 million-a-year fishery – because it failed to report the fishery’s harmful impacts on the endangered right whale.

“This case could lead to closure of the world’s most sustainable fishery,” said executive director Patrice McCarron, whose association is the oldest and biggest lobstering group in Maine. “We cannot let that happen. Right whales are not dying in Maine lobster gear.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Maine Lobstermen’s Association Asks For Public Donations To Help ‘Save’ The Industry

May 7, 2020 — The Maine Lobstermen’s Association is calling for a half-million dollars in public donations to help it “save” the state’s lobster industry from potential extinction.

The MLA says the money would go to its legal defense of the fishery in a federal court case brought by conservationists who want better protections of the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

The whales can be injured or killed by entanglement with rope used to tend trap-pot gear, such as lobster traps. But the MLA’s Executive Director Patrice McCarron says there is no proof that the whales are actually interacting with traps set by the Maine fleet.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Lobstermen launch campaign to save Maine industry; new threats on the horizon

May 6, 2020 — The Maine Lobstermen’s Association is fighting a federal ruling that threatens the demise of the fleet, according to Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

In early April, Judge James Boasberg of the Federal District Court for Washington, D.C., ruled that NMFS violated the ESA in permitting the lobster fishery. The judge’s opinion states that “Congress enacted the ESA in 1973 to halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction, whatever the cost.”

“The MLA has launched a campaign to raise $500,000 to save Maine’s lobster industry,” McCarron said. The MLA is an intervenor in the court case and is the only organization in Maine that has been granted standing to participate in the case.

Whale entanglement data collected by NMFS show that no right whale deaths or serious injuries have ever been documented in Maine lobster gear. This is in stark contrast to the death of 10 right whales in Canada last year.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Right whales: Lawsuit on protections could last for months

April 27, 2020 — A judge’s ruling that the federal government didn’t take adequate steps to protect endangered whales will probably result in another monthslong court battle, parties to the lawsuit said.

Environmental groups sued the U.S. government with a claim that regulators’ failure to protect the North Atlantic right whale from harm was a violation of the Endangered Species Act, and U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled April 9 that they were right. The right whales number only about 400 and are in the midst of a worrisome decline in population.

The government, environmentalists and industry members who are involved in the lawsuit must still return to court to determine a remedy. Boasberg ruled that the risk posed to the whales by the lobster fishery was too great to be sustainable, and that a remedy could ultimately result in new restrictions on lobster fishing.

The whales are vulnerable to lethal entanglement in lobster fishing gear.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

Maine fishermen seek relief, new markets to navigate ‘economic disaster’

April 24, 2020 — With many restaurants shuttered, and typical export pipelines closed, demand for lobster and other Maine seafood is way down, leaving Maine’s $674 million-a-year commercial fishing industry scrambling to find new markets and short-term economic relief to survive the pandemic.

“It appears that we have a long road ahead,” Patrice McCarron, the director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said in the group’s latest newsletter. “While the timeline for the coronavirus and its corresponding economic disaster are unknown, we must prepare for long-term impacts.”

The pandemic has forced the closure of almost one out of three restaurants, according to the latest reports. The restaurant industry, along with food service, consumes about 80 percent of U.S. seafood. It’s worse for lobster, a luxury item, which counts casinos and cruise ships among its biggest customers.

This comes on the heels of the $485 million-a-year Maine lobster industry’s struggle to replace the market it lost in the trade war with China, which had accounted for 1 out of every 3 pounds of lobsters exported overseas, and Canada’s sweet trade deal with the European Union.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

MAINE: Fishermen still waiting to access pandemic relief funds

April 21, 2020 — Once they acknowledged that the current coronavirus pandemic, in addition to its public health consequences, would cause an economic disaster, Congress and the administration in Washington, D.C., established a $2.2-trillion economic relief program. The program was designed to put money in the pockets of millions of newly unemployed workers and to help thousands of small businesses keep workers on the payroll.

While the federal programs are designed to provide substantial aid, so far they have done little to help the thousands of entrepreneurial Maine fishermen who are self-employed and don’t qualify for ordinary unemployment insurance benefits. It is an open question when any help will be forthcoming.

“The state of Maine continues to await guidance from the federal government on guidelines to expand unemployment to self-employed persons,” Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said Friday. “The only source of info is the state. They continue to tell self-employed not to file because the application will result in denial since the program is not set up.”

On March 27, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act that, among other provisions, authorized one-time “economic impact payments” of $1,200 to adult U.S. residents with incomes of under $99,000 plus an additional payment of $500 for each child in a household. According to the U.S. Treasury, the first payments were issued last week. Some payments were to be transferred by direct deposit into taxpayers’ bank accounts, but as of Monday many people were still waiting for the money to appear.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Lobstermen Vow to Fight for Fishery in Wake of Whale Ruling

April 13, 2020 — A Maine lobster fishing trade group said Monday it will fight for the future of the fishery in court in the wake of a judge’s ruling that the federal government hasn’t done enough to protect rare whales.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled last week that the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to protect North Atlantic right whales by understating lobster fishing’s ability to kill the whales via entanglement in ropes. The ruling stated a remedy will come in the future, and members of the U.S. lobster industry have said they’re concerned that could mean new fishing restrictions.

Maine Lobstermen’s Association executive director Patrice McCarron said Monday the court has only heard from environmental groups and the federal government so far in the case. She said the group will make sure the judge will “consider evidence about what happens on the water to protect whales.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

Coronavirus-related closures impacting US fisheries, driving down prices

April 1, 2020 — As the COVID-19 pandemic continues across the U.S., with many states issuing stay-at-home mandates that will last at least a month, a growing number of fisheries are facing choppy waters.

The restaurant industry is seeking relief as its profits have plunged during the crisis, and many of the fisheries that supply those restaurants with seafood are facing similar downturns. Fisheries and suppliers of premium seafood products have been hit especially hard, with sales of products like lobster plummeting due to lack of demand.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

‘It’s All Going To Suck’ – Lobstermen Criticize Pending Federal Regulations At Maine Fishermen’s Forum

March 9, 2020 — The annual Maine Fishermen’s Forum is underway in Rockport, where the intertwined fates of lobstermen and endangered North Atlantic right whales are a hot topic.

The executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, Patrice McCarron, had a blunt message for members at its annual meeting, held during the forum Friday at the Samoset Inn: “It’s all going to suck.”

McCarron has spent more than a year trying to fend off threats of pending federal action to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales from entanglement with the lobster fleet’s trap and buoy ropes. She told hundreds of fishermen that the MLA continues to oppose the gear restrictions being floated by state and federal regulators. And she pushed back against calls by some to walk away from the process altogether.

Read the full story at Maine Public