January 19, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Frequent claims that the NOAA action against Sector IX for failure to comply with its operational permits have cost New Bedford 300 jobs are simply not true.  The figure being bandied about is based on an economic model, and it inflates the impact of this short term action.

Economist Dan Georgianna created the 300 lost jobs number by looking at the volume and value of what sector IX vessels delivered to the Whaling City Display Auction during the one month from Nov. 20^th to Dec 20^th 2016, and assumed that if the sector was still operating, they would land the same amount this year.

Georgianna first assumes that the four vessels seized by the court had quotas that would be immediately transferred to other operating sector IX vessels. This is a unlikely assumption, as NMFS has the power to approve or disapprove such transfers, and they have emphatically said they will not permit sector IX to continue business as usual without restitution for fishing violations. In the real world, no one would count on such vessels continuing to provide an economic return.

But the 300 jobs figure also seems aimed at pressuring NOAA to take a more lenient position regarding the operational permit of sector IX.

Here too, the math is dubious. For example, Georgianna says the sales impact of the shutdown is approximately $5.6 million, which is thought to represent about 49 jobs involving harvesters, processors and wholesalers in New Bedford, with the majority of these jobs being harvester jobs

This is a good estimate. But then, Georgianna relies on a Michigan state visitor spending survey for restaurant multipliers, and also includes his own estimates of retail multipliers, and using these models says that the loss of restaurant and retail jobs is much greater. He claims that the number of restaurant waiter, chef and supermarket jobs lost due to the Sector IX shutdown is around 250 jobs.

No restaurant worker got laid off because the owner couldn’t get fish from sector IX. Same thing with Retail. In both cases, the restaurants and retailers simply replaced the product they could not get from Sector IX with other product, including seafood not from New England.

So this loss of 250 jobs is largely fictitious, and certainly is not something that could possibly have happened just in New Bedford, or just in New England.

The actual fair disposition of permits following Sector IX’s failure to monitor illegal fishing remains a complex issue for NOAA, but it certainly is not helped by a public campaign by New Bedford officials claiming 300 job losses in their city, when in fact the real number is around 50, most of whom are harvesters working on the vessels that are shut down because of violations by their Sector.

For those who want to judge the numbers for themselves, here is a link to the report.

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