What’s wrong with this picture? Earlier this month, at the same time the Patrick/Murray Administration was demanding $21 million federal dollars in economic fisheries damages, many of the best fishing businesses that have been catching cod, haddock, and other groundfish in Massachusetts and New England wrote a joint letter to their elected officials telling them that their political actions are putting their businesses at risk. And the politicians and the fishermen are both talking about the same management program.
Here’s what’s wrong: too many of the Massachusetts elected officials are looking backward at fisheries to score political points and the people actually in the fishing business desperately want to look forward so they can get on with their lives.
For the last year, Governor Patrick charged his fishing agency with developing evidence to prove that Massachusetts fishermen are in fact in economic crisis because of the new catch share program that was implemented to restore health to groundfishing in New England. But now that the results of all that effort have surfaced, what’s evident is that there’s practically nothing there. His disaster claims could not be supported even by deliberate manipulation of the data his team developed.
Contrary to the local headlines and talking points from Massachusetts politicians rushing to align themselves with “the working man,” there is no evidence of a disaster in the Massachusetts groundfishing industry. In fact, the Massachusetts groundfish fleet netted $3 million more under the new program than the previous year, even though fuel costs soared some 30%.
The group of fishermen that the state analyzed most closely appear to have lost $405,000 year-to-year, which is not good news, but they left more than 1 million pounds of the fish they were allocated in the water, which doesn’t make any sense. If they leased those fishing rights, their losses would have been closer to $135,000. Loss of crew revenues in that group were real and troubling, on the order of $240,000.
There seems to be a phantom group of fishermen that Massachusetts politicians are trying to protect with this $21 million reparations claim. That request might not have been as significant when federal dollars were flowing more freely and the Massachusetts economy was strong. But the problem now is they are failing to understand and represent the very serious interests of the real fishermen who are out on the water. Therefore, they risk squandering whatever scarce federal fishery dollars still exist for their own political reasons.
Read the full article at the CLF blog, Talkingfish.org.
Analysis: CLF Massachusetts Senior Counsel Peter Shelley criticizes Massachusetts elected and government officials who he said were “rushing to align themselves with “the working man,” and argued “there is no evidence of a disaster in the Massachusetts groundfishing industry.”
His assessment of the New England groundfishery ignores the plight of many small business owners struggling to stay afloat under the “sector” version of catch shares implemented in the New England groundfishery. Regarding a recent letter concerning the catch share system sent by industry members to the Commerce Department, his article incorrectly characterizes that correspondence as constituting an industry endorsement of the status quo. To the contrary, many of the original signers of that letter offered further comment on the same subject in a follow-up letter on December 1, stating “the letter was not meant to champion a national catch share agenda, and it is simply wrong for anyone to suggest that it does.”
While some in the industry have fared well under the catch shares system, a significant portion of this historic and crucial industry continues to suffer from the economic disparity the system has created. Those industry members whose signatures appeared on the letter hold positions for, against, and neutral to catch shares, but they all recognize the problems arising from this troubling trend. As such, they intended for their letter to give voice to concerns that, rather than scrapping catch-shares and creating uncertainty and disruption, the program’s problems be corrected.
An October 2011 report by NOAA on the health of the Northeast groundfishery revealed several disconcerting trends, including declining catches, concentration of revenue among the top vessels, and further consolidation of the fleet. Meanwhile, groundfish landings also decreased to 58 million pounds in 2010 from a high of 72 million in 2008, and nominal groundfish revenues declined below their 2007-2010 levels (p. 5-6). This has also led to a decline in active vessels, and a decrease in several important indicators of employment within the industry, such as available crew positions and number of groundfish trips made (p. 27-30).
The same report saw the top-earning vessels account for an increasing share of revenues even amid a general decline in revenue and fleet size. Between 2007-2010, the top 20 percent of vessels drastically increased their hold on total nominal revenues in the groundfish fishery, increasing from 67 percent to 80 percent (p. 23-24). The fleet’s Gini coefficient, a statistical measurement of income inequality, swelled past levels indicating “extreme inequality”(p. 25).
NOAA’s report confirms a reality that Shelley’s article overlooks: catch shares, as implemented in New England, have increased the rate of disappearance of smaller fishing vessels from within the groundfish fishery, and have increased the growing disparity between the advantaged minority and the many others struggling to make ends meet.