Saving Seafood

Nation’s Fishery Management Councils Recommend Ways to Support American Seafood, Improve Coordination with National Marine Fisheries Service

September 28, 2020 — The following was released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council:

Leaders of the nation’s eight Regional Fishery Management Councils concluded their second biannual meeting in 2020 yesterday by videoconference. The Council Coordination Committee (CCC) meeting provides the Councils and heads of the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS, also known as NOAA Fisheries) an opportunity to discuss issues relevant to all of the Councils. Under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), each Council is authorized to develop, monitor and amend fishery management plans for federally managed fisheries in its region. Once approved by the Secretary of Commerce, these plans are implemented by NMFS. The two-day meeting was open to the public and hosted by the Western Pacific Council. Among its recommendations, the CCC addressed President Trump’s Executive Order (EO) 13921 on Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth, new National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) measures issued by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), and NMFS coordination on a proposed National Seafood Council and on overfishing technical guidance.

EO 13921 aims to strengthen the American economy, improve the competitiveness of American industry, ensure food security, provide environmentally safe and sustainable seafood, support American workers, remove unnecessary regulatory burdens and ensure coordinated, predictable and transparent Federal actions. At its May 2020 meeting, the CCC released a preliminary joint statement, and, subsequently, each Council provided its own regional recommendations or status in the process of identifying potential changes to regulations, orders, guidance documents and other similar agency actions. The May 2020 CCC letter highlighted the consequences of marine national monuments on the Nation’s fisheries and can be found at www.fisherycouncils.org/ccc-correspondence. Yesterday, the CCC requested that NMFS continue to brief the CCC and the individual Councils on the review and implementation of their recommendations.

EO 13921 also includes actions for more effective permitting related to offshore aquaculture and long-term strategic planning to facilitate aquaculture projects. Taking this into account, the CCC yesterday recommended that its consensus statement on aquaculture be revised and considered for review at the next CCC meeting planned for May 2021.

The CCC also recommended that NMFS coordinate with the Councils to release the aquaculture programmatic environmental impact statement (EIS) for public comment. The EIS assesses the impacts of siting aquaculture facilities. The CCC further recommended that NMFS, prior to identification of Aquaculture Opportunity Areas (AOA), provide the spatially referenced data used to identify the AOAs and that the Councils be included on the AOA implementation teams.

Another initiative to support and increase the value of sustainably managed U.S. fisheries is an industry-led National Seafood Council that the NMFS Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee recently recommended. In regard to this proposal, the CCC requested that NMFS evaluate the NOAA FishWatch criteria for the purpose of serving as an equivalent to third-party certification deeming U.S. fishery products as sustainable. The CCC requested that NMFS report on the utility of FishWatch for this purpose and any possible alternatives by the May 2021 CCC meeting. Information on NOAA FishWatch can be found at www.fishwatch.gov.

Several other recommendations by the CCC focused on improving coordination between the Councils and NMFS.

The CCC moved to create a CCC subcommittee to make recommendations to NMFS in developing guidance on the new NEPA rule announced by CEQ on July 15, 2020. Such guidance could include determining and implementing the functional equivalency provision of the new rule, which would address current duplication in MSA and NEPA requirements. Signed into law in 1970, NEPA requires Federal agencies to consider the environmental effects of proposed major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.

The CCC requested that NMFS circulate draft reports of its National Standard 1 Technical Working Groups through the Councils with sufficient time for the Councils to consult with their Scientific and Statistical Committees and develop a response through their full Councils. The MSA contains 10 National Standards. Standard 1 says conservation and management measures must prevent overfishing while achieving, on a continuing basis, optimum yield from each fishery for the U.S. fishing industry. The issues addressed by the Working Groups were estimating fish population reference points, quota carry-over and phased-in catch limits, and alternative management approaches due to data limitations.

The CCC also requested that the NMFS Office of Sustainable Fisheries form a working group comprised of NMFS and Council staff members to determine alternative approaches to the use of annual catch limits (ACLs) to manage data limited stocks. The 2006 reauthorization of the MSA mandated that overfishing be addressed through enforceable ACLs that cannot exceed scientific recommendations. Alternative approaches identified in the CCC recommendation include those that are based on fishing mortality rates, fish lengths and fishing trip limits, among others.

For more information on the CCC meeting, go to http://www.fisherycouncils.org/ccc-meetings/september-2020-ccc-meeting.

Rep. Bishop Statement on Appointment of Kathleen Hartnett White as CEQ Chair

October 13, 2017 — WASHINGTON — The following was released by the House Committee on Natural Resources:

Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced the nomination of Kathleen Hartnett White to chair the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT) released the following statement:

“Kathleen Hartnett White is a great choice to help the administration realign priorities at CEQ. Over the past eight years, this executive office has attempted to use the National Environmental Policy Act as a tool to stonewall any project with a federal nexus. I look forward to working with her on a long overdue streamlining of NEPA and other efforts to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the administrative state to people.”

White House to eject its environmental advisers from their longtime main headquarters on Friday

February 24, 2017 — The following is an excerpt from a story published yesterday by the Washington Post:

The White House on Friday will move its Council on Environmental Quality out of its main headquarters at 722 Jackson Place, a red brick townhouse it has occupied since it was established nearly half a century ago.

Although some White House CEQ staffers will remain in adjoining townhouses, the shift means the council will lose its main conference room. While the influence of CEQ waxes and wanes depending on which president is in office, it traditionally plays a key role in executing the White House’s overall environmental agenda and coordinating key decisions among different agencies.

The number of staffers also varies widely at different times, and includes employees detailed from other agencies. Shortly after being established under Richard Nixon, it had 54 staffers: its first chair, the late Russell Train, recalled in an oral history interview with Bates College that it had the same number of employees as the Council of Economic Advisers “and I was told we couldn’t have any more than they did.” At the end of former president Barack Obama’s term, the number of career staffers was about 15 out of the roughly 50-person staff, and earlier in his term the total staff reached 60 employees.

Under several administrations, including Obama’s, Clinton’s and Nixon’s, the council has steered federal decision-making in a more environmentally-friendly direction. “We really put the environmental impact process into effect and was able to bring the various agencies somewhat to heel who didn’t want to comply,” Train recalled in the 1999 Bates interview.

Read the full story at the Washington Post

‘Sad day’ for the fishing industry following marine monument designation

September 16, 2016 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Backers of the Northeast U.S. fishing industry reacted with anger, chagrin and legal arguments Thursday to President Barack Obama’s declaration of a marine national monument south of Cape Cod, saying the ocean preservation effort circumvented public process and will significantly damage a key economic engine — and way of life — in the region.

“It’s all anybody’s talking about, that’s for sure,” said Jon Williams, president of Atlantic Red Crab Co. on Herman Melville Boulevard. “The general feeling is (that) it’s a sad day for the New England fishing industry.”

Obama’s designation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument — in two areas also known as New England Canyons and Seamounts — permanently bars those areas from an array of commercial and industrial uses, including commercial fishing. The areas total 4,913 square miles, are more than 100 miles southeast of Cape Cod and are the first such monument in the Atlantic Ocean. The designation follows at least a year of concerns and opposition from advocates of the commercial fishing industry, who feared yet another financial hit from government regulations that already include catch limits and quotas broadly questioned by fishermen.

“Millions of dollars of lost revenue are at stake” in the monument decision, states a letter from the Washington, D.C. office of international law firm Kelley Drye & Warren.

The firm sent the letter Sept. 14 to Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, on behalf of the Southern Georges Bank Coalition. The coalition of fishing representatives includes Williams, J. Grant Moore of Broadbill Fishing in Westport, and at least 10 other members from Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York.

The letter said those entities “are directly affected by the monument description, as it includes their fishing grounds,” and called Obama’s use of the Antiquities Act to declare the marine monument, “an illegal and illegitimate use of presidential authority.”

“I think there’s widespread and pretty much universal disappointment, anger, frustration and feelings of betrayal in the commercial fishing industry,” said Bob Vanasse, a New Bedford native and executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Saving Seafood.

“There is widespread and deep feeling that our fisheries should be managed under the public process of the Magnuson-Stevens Act,” Vanasse added.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Obama sections off part of Atlantic Ocean

September 15, 2016 — President Obama will designate a section of the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Cod on Thursday as a national monument, banning commercial fishing in the area by 2023 in an effort to protect the region’s ecosystem.

The move, which the president will formally announce at the Third Annual Our Ocean Conference in Washington, won praise Wednesday from environmental groups but drew condemnation from the fishing industry.

But on Wednesday, the Southern Georges Bank Coalition, which has representatives from local fisheries and industry groups including the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association, criticized the new designation off the Cape.

In a letter to Christina W. Goldfuss of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, attorneys for the coalition wrote that “millions of dollars of lost revenue are at stake” for local fisheries, and they questioned the legality of the move.

Some elected officials in Massachusetts have raised concerns about the plan, including Mayor Jon Mitchell of New Bedford, whose city is home to a commercial fishing port.

“While I believe the industry generally was in a position to manage the implications of the so-called ‘sea mount’ area of the monument, the inclusion of the ‘canyons’ area would have benefited from more industry input,” Mitchell said, adding that “these types of decisions should be subjected to the more robust regulatory processes under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which has successfully led to the protection of sea canyons . . . without unduly burdening the commercial fishing industry.”

His concerns were echoed by Senator Edward J. Markey, who called the president’s action an “important milestone” for conservation but said he was “concerned that the impacts of this marine monument designation on the fishing community in New England were not fully minimized.”

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

Northeast Fishing Groups Question Legality of Antiquities Act in Monument Designation

September 14, 2016 (NCFC) — In a letter today to Christy Goldfuss, Managing Director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, representatives of the Atlantic offshore lobster, red crab, squid, and whiting fisheries challenged the legality of the use of the Antiquities Act in the declaration of a new marine monument off the coast of New England.

I. THE ANTIQUITIES ACT DOES NOT ALLOW FOR MARINE MONUMENT DESIGNATION IN THE EXCLUSIVE ECONOMIC ZONE 

The letter, which was authored by attorneys from law firm Kelley Drye & Warren, representing the fisheries, argued the President’s use of the Antiquities Act to declare new marine monuments in the United States’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is “an illegal and illegitimate use of presidential authority.” The letter specifically notes the legal contradiction between the applicability of the Antiquities Act – passed in 1906 – and the EEZ, which was not established until 1976.

“The Antiquities Act did not apply to areas to which Congress staked its MSA [Magnuson-Stevens Act]-based claims, moreover, because the United States had never claimed any right or authority to manage the area for fisheries, natural resource protection, or anything else, prior to 1976”, the letter states. “Indeed, the MSA provides that it is “to maintain without change the existing territorial or other ocean jurisdiction of the United States for all purposes other than the conservation and management of fishery resources.”

II. FISHERIES ARE BEST MANAGED UNDER THE MSA 

According to the letter, fisheries should instead be managed under the process established by the Magnuson-Stevens Act, particularly the successful marine conservation efforts undertaken by the New England and Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Councils. The councils are required to operate according to science-based management.

“The MSA requires decisions to be made based on the best scientific information available,” the letter states. “In complete and total contrast, the monument ultimately designated in the Atlantic was largely the result of a series of political compromises layered with a thin veneer of public outreach.”

III. THE PROPOSAL IS NOT NARROWLY TAILORED AS REQUIRED UNDER THE ANTIQUITIES ACT 

Finally, existing federal law requires monuments to be as tightly confined to the area necessary to accomplish their objectives as possible. The letter states this is not the case for the proposed monument in the Atlantic.
“The proposal for a monument designation in the Northwest Atlantic canyons is not narrowly tailored to achieve its objectives,” the attorneys wrote. “Unlike the deliberative, scientifically- based fishery management council activities to protect habitat based on the presence of or suitability for corals, a restricted fishing area based solely on geographic location and depth contour is neither narrowly tailored, nor practically defensible.”

For further information or to arrange interviews with any of the fishermen mentioned in the letter, please contact NCFC Executive Director Bob Vanasse at bob@savingseafood.org.

Read the full letter here

Will Obama fence off more of the ocean? US fishermen are fearful

September 13, 2016 — American fishermen are deeply fearful that the Obama White House could cut them off as early as this week from major fishing areas of the U.S. continental shelf on both coasts, further restricting one of the most highly regulated fishing industries in the world.

At stake are millions of dollars in fishing revenue and hundreds of jobs — and in some parts of the country, the survival of an embattled way of life that has persisted for centuries but is facing environmentalist pressures unlike anything before — and without  the chance for hearings and legislative back-and-forth that U.S. laws normally require.

“This totally affects us, but we don’t know what’s going on,” one fishing boat owner, who asked to remain anonymous, told Fox News. “We are just out of the loop. No one even wants to say what effect it will have.”

“They are throwing all fishermen under the bus, along with their supporting industries” declared Marty Scanlon, a fishing boat owner and member of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries advisory panel on highly migratory fish species in the Atlantic. “They’ve done everything they can to put us out of business.”

What the fishermen fear most is the kind of unilateral action by the White House that they have already seen elsewhere. As part of their ongoing environmental ambitions, the Obama administration’s Council on Environmental Quality, and the president himself, are aggressively interested in creating preservation zones that would ban fishing and other activities within large portions of the 200-mile U.S. “exclusive economic zone” of maritime influence, and just as interested in getting other nations to do so, in their own as well as international waters.

That aim, supported by many important environmental groups, is cited as urgently required for protection against diminishing  biodiversity, overfishing and damage to coral and unique underwater geological features — not to mention the fact that with only a few months remaining in his term, the president sees such sweeping gestures as part of his legacy of achievements, and as the boat owner put it, “the window is narrowing” for the administration to act.

As one result, pressure from lobbying campaigns both for and against new declarations of such no-go zones both along the U.S. northeastern Atlantic coast and the coast of California have been mounting.

So has, apparently, behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get influential Democratic legislators to support such new preservation areas publicly — a tough call, since the affected fishermen are also constituents. So far, many of the Democrats are keeping a low profile.

Read the full story at Fox News

National Marine Monument off New England coast?

September 12, 2016 — The third installment of the Our Ocean forum will convene in Washington, D.C., this week and the betting window is open on whether the Obama administration will use the event to announce the designation of new National Marine Monuments.

No one — neither conservationists nor fishing stakeholders — claims to know exactly what will happen when the two-day, international event opens Thursday. But it has not escaped anyone’s attention that the Obama administration has used the same forum in the past to make similar announcements.

[In March], in a victory for fishing stakeholders, the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality removed Cashes Ledge, which sits about 80 miles off of Gloucester, from consideration as a possible site for a new National Marine Monument.

The Obama administration’s decision not to use the Antiquities Act to designate any portion of Cashes Ledge as a monument validated fishing stakeholders and others who characterized the proposal — which originated with the Conservation Law Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pew Charitable Trusts — as an end-run around the existing fisheries management system and wholly unnecessary given the existing protections already afforded the area.

Cashes Ledge currently is closed to commercial fishing.

In the wake of that defeat, conservationists redoubled their lobbying efforts, urging Obama to invoke the 1906 Antiquities Act to unilaterally designate a number of potential sites, including canyons and seamounts off southern New England and off the coast of Monterey, California, as Maritime National Monuments.

“All eyes are on the canyons and seamounts,” said Jackie Odell, executive director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

New Bedford Standard-Times: Stakeholders deserve open process in monument designation

August 26, 2016 — Today, the Standard-Times in New Bedford, Mass., the highest grossing seaport in the country, dedicated its opinion section to the issue of marine monuments designated by executive authority under the Antiquities Act. This was done in conjunction with today’s announcement that President Obama will quadruple the size of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument off the coast of Hawaii.

In its editorial, the Standard-Times noted that a monument designation off the coast of New England “lacks checks and balances that would deliver a better policy” and that environmental groups have pushed for a monument in secret “in order to gain an advantage over industry and other stakeholders.” 

Together with today’s editorial, the Standard-Times published letters to the White House by two coastal mayors, Jon Mitchell from New Bedford and Clyde Roberson from Monterey, Calif., questioning the efficacy of offshore monument designations and asking for a more transparent process. The following is excerpted from the Standard-Times’ editorial:

The National Park Service was established 100 years ago when President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act.

The 84 million acres under the NPS is a treasure that belongs to all of us, and we applaud efforts to expand the protection of our natural resources, but we also recognize some such efforts go too far, including in the push to establish a national monument off the New England coast.

The Canyons and Seamounts are indeed precious resources, but the scope and the current process being advanced by environmental organizations lack checks and balances that would deliver a better policy.

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell last week sent a letter to the acting director of the Council for Environmental Quality, a White House agency that advises the president on such issues, noting the push for the seamounts monument has kept stakeholders from participating in the process.

Indeed, we have previously reported on efforts by environmentalists to keep their advocacy for the monument designation a secret in order to gain an advantage over industry and other stakeholders.

The president did not go along with the environmentalists last fall, and it is our fervent hope that if he isn’t advised by CEQ to pursue the more open process, the duty to represent and hear all stakeholders will prevail.

See today’s opinion page in the New Bedford Standard-Times

Read the full editorial at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Read Mayor Jon Mitchell’s full letter here

Read Mayor Clyde Roberson’s full letter here

East & West Coast Mayors Write White House on New Marine Monument Declarations

August 25, 2016 — New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell recently sent a letter to the White House Council on Environmental Quality expressing concern about the possibility of President Barack Obama issuing an Executive Order that would declare certain offshore areas marine monuments.

Bob Vanasse, the Executive Director of Saving Seafood, told WBSM News that one of the biggest complaints from members of the fishing industry is that, although they met with federal officials, they weren’t presented with any specific proposal.

“There was no actual proposal from the administration to be discussed,” said Vanasse “they were having this listening session but the listening session was something of a peculiar one way street, in that they listened to concerns, but they never responded.”

Vanasse says that if the administration issued the order, through the Antiquities Act, it could have a huge impact on the local fishing industry.

“The best estimate suggests that 20 to 25 percent of the fishing areas in these regions could be affected,” said Vanasse “the most affected fisheries are the red crab industry, lobster, and tuna but there are other industries.”

While stating that the fishing industry would be opposed to such a move Vanessee says including at least one concession would make it more tolerable for many fishing families.

Read the full story at WBSM