Economic Impact

February 28, 2013 — The following was released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

Recently issued 2012 reports for Maine’s commercially harvested marine resources reveal a 10 percent increase in pounds landed and a 20 percent increase in value over 2011. Reports compiled by the Maine Department of Marine Resources show that as of February 19, 2013 314,989,031 pounds with a boat price of $521,533,430 were landed in Maine in 2012.

The reports are still considered preliminary as the department continues to receive and audit landings data throughout the year.

The increase in pounds is primarily credited to a growth in lobster and farmed salmon landings for 2012. The Department also attributes most of the 20 percent upturn in value to the increase in salmon landings and to an increase in elver prices, which hit a record high of $2,600 per pound last year due in large part to surging demand in Asia.

Preliminary 2012 reports indicate that 126,091,174 pounds of lobster with a value of $338,942,522 were landed, which are the highest lobster landings and value recorded since DMR and National Marine Fisheries Service began keeping records.  The pounds and value increased over 2011 by more than 21 million pounds and $4 million.  However, the average price-per-pound of $2.69 for 2012 was the lowest on record since 1994.  For reference, 2011 landings were 104,896,584 pounds with a value of $334,716,325 and $3.19 per pound.

The department also reports that there were 7,266 active Maine commercial fishermen in 2012.  Of those, 4,288 were active commercial lobster harvesters out of 5,963 lobster license holders. The top five fisheries in terms of active harvesters included soft shell clams with 1,709, marine worms with 689, periwinkles with 648, and elvers with 565.

The species with the greatest increases compared with 2011 pounds and value include alewives, groundfish, eels and scallops. The species with the greatest decreases compared to 2011 landings in terms of pounds and value include crabs, spiny dogfish and worms.  Urchins and mussels saw a decline in pounds landed and shrimp and Mahogany quahogs saw a decline in value.

 

Landings report data is available on the Maine Department of Marine Resources

 

 

PORTLAND, Maine — February 28, 2013 — Lawmakers are looking to boost Maine’s troubled lobster industry with proposals that would pump more money into marketing the state’s signature seafood and offer tax breaks to encourage more lobster processing.

The moves follow last year’s chaotic fishing season that saw a lobster glut, a crash in wholesale prices and tensions boil over.

One bill calls for sharply increasing surcharges on lobster fishing, wholesale seafood and other lobster-related licenses, with the aim of eventually raising about $3 million a year in promotional funding. This year’s marketing budget is about $380,000.

Lobstermen for the most part will probably accept the higher license fees, grudgingly, because they recognize the need to better promote lobster, said David Cousens, a lobsterman from South Thomaston and president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

‘‘If we want to put our money where our mouth is and stop whining about low prices, we’re going to have to start having a marketing program that has enough money to affect the market and do some positive things,’’ he said.

Last year’s upheaval was brought on by a lobster glut that caused prices to plunge. Lobstermen last year caught a record 123 million pounds, but they received only $2.68 a pound on average, the lowest price since 1994.

The proposed law would increase license fees by nearly eight-fold in three steps over three years beginning in 2014. The annual surcharge on the most common lobster fishing license would go from about $63 to $488. Surcharges on wholesale seafood and lobster transportation licenses would rise to $1,950 a year, while processors would pay $2,600.

 

Read the fully story at The Boston Globe

February 28, 2013 — At America’s oldest fishing port in Gloucester, Mass., a way of life is dying off as federal restrictions limit the number of Atlantic cod that can be caught.

The fishermen, who haven’t been able to meet their cod quotas, are now facing new restrictions that are even more strict. NBC’s Ron Mott reports.

Watch the video at NBC Nightly News

February 25, 2013 — Two organizations that favor federal intervention to ensure that NOAA’s catch share management system for the groundfishery — now in danger of collapse due to draconian catch limits — does not drive fishermen’s quota almost solely into the hands of large-scale boats and corporations is planning a series of workshops to examine how to keep fleet diversity and many of the smaller boats and businesses afloat.

The Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance and the Penobscot East Resource Center are co-sponsoring the series, which includes one planned for Gloucester, at Maritime Gloucester, 23 Harbor Loop, from 4-7 p.m. this Friday.

The New England Fishery Management Council has voted to develop an amendment to the catch share system, which has been in place since 2010. NOAA’s own data has shown that Gloucester’s groundfishing fleet alone has fallen from roughly 96 boats to 71 over that time, while catch share systems elsewhere have also yielded consolidation of the industry, with many smaller, independent boats unable to effectively buy or lease quota gobbled up by larger businesses that accumulate more “catch shares.”

The Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition and the Gloucester Fishing Community Preservation Fund have questioned the wisdom of the government’s attempting to impose structure on the largely laissez-faire commodification system that is not legally a limited access permit program, or LAPP.

 

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

 

February 22, 2013 — In a video segment aired on Fox News, New England fishermen offered critical opinions of new catch restrictions set to go into effect on May 1.

The catch reductions include a 77 percent reduction for Gulf of Maine cod, and a 60 percent reduction in flounder.

Richard Burgess, President of Northeast Fishery Sector 3, said that, if the regulations were to go into effect, "the entire fishery between the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, whether it's big boats or small boats, will be entirely put out of business." He added that cod stocks have been known to leave the area before, only to return at a later date.

Burgess concluded the segment with a renewed call for fishery disater relief for the region. "We'd like to see President Obama step in and help this Northeast region with disaster relief immediately, because we've got mennow that have not had paychecks in months," he said.

 

Watch the full video at Fox News

 

 

February 20, 2013 — Fishing isn’t just a way of life here but a $1 billion industry, so when fishermen complain government-mandated reductions on groundfish catch coming May 1 could be devastating, that brought not one but both U.S. Senators for the state to hear their concerns Wednesday.

"What would one year do here, just to put a stay on everything?" said Harriet Didriksen, daughter of a Norwegian immigrant fisherman, owner of New Bedford Ship Supply, and a former groundfish boat owner who now owns a scallop fishing boat. Along with many people connected to the lobster, scallop, and groundfish business and associated processing and packaging and shipping businesses here, she’s reeling from the proposed cod catch reductions being pushed by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

NMFS scientists say their studies show the cod stock is badly overfished and dangerously close to collapsing, leading the service to push for a 55 percent reduction in the allowable cod catch on Georges Bank in the year starting May 1 –- and a 77 percent reduction in the Gulf of Maine cod catch. (The service is proposing to let fishermen who catch less than their allotment in the year ending April 30 carry over between 2 and 10 percent to the next fishing year, but many fishermen scoff that’s unlikely to mitigate the disastrous effects of the deep reduction in allowed catch for 2013-14.)

But Didriksen and many other people in the fishing business in New Bedford and elsewhere in New England have no faith in the NMFS studies.

"Truthfully, the industry does not really believe National Marine Fisheries numbers," Didriksen said. "It's gotten to a point that we just don't have confidence in it."

 

Watch the video on the Northeast Cable News Network

 

 

February 19, 2013 — In May, New England's fishermen will again see a cut to the number of fish they can catch, this time so deeply that the historic industry's existence is threatened from Rhode Island to Maine. But as hard as the cuts are likely to hit fishing communities, local seafood eaters may not notice at all. In the region's markets, grocery stores and restaurants, imported fish dominate, and the cuts make that less likely to change.

The cuts will shrink the catch limit 77 percent for cod in the Gulf of Maine and 61 percent for cod in Georges Bank, off southeastern Massachusetts. That's the worst of a series of reductions to the catch of bottom-dwelling groundfish, such as haddock and flounder, that many fear could be fatal to the industry.

"They're going to wipe it out!" said Gilson. "The only thing that's going to be the same is the ocean you're looking at."

For fish consumers, a sharp drop in the local groundfish catch may jar a select group of diners who seek fish caught that day. But the cut's effects may not ripple further than that.

Just 9 percent of the seafood eaten in the United States is domestically caught, the federal government estimates. In New England, locally caught cod was just a slightly larger fraction of all cod eaten, 12 percent, according to fisheries economist Jenny Sun of the Portland, Maine-based Gulf of Maine Research Institute. And she estimates that could drop to 4 percent after the coming cuts.

Much of the imported cod is caught and frozen in Norway and cut in China, and there's plenty of it, Sun said. If the local cod catch dips to near nothing, fish processors "could easily fill in with imports," Sun said.

 

Read the full story by Jay Lindsay of the Associated Press at NBC News

 

 

February 15, 2013 — Mr. Brown is one of hundreds of fishermen caught in the net that has tightened around this industry and its seaside communities as the numbers of both fish and boats appear to be at historically low levels. Changes in the ecosystem, lingering effects of decades of overfishing and imperfect fishery management could all be to blame for the crisis, depending on whom you ask.

The situation looked so dire that the Commerce Department declared the Northeastern commercial groundfish fishery a disaster last fall, along with three salmon fisheries in Alaska and Mississippi’s blue crab and oyster fisheries.

That declaration paved the way for Congress to appropriate financial relief to those areas — a stop-and-start process that saw $150 million attached to, then stripped from, the Hurricane Sandy relief bill. Recently, Representative John Tierney, a Democrat of Massachusetts, proposed legislation that would draw aid money from a tax on imported fish.

But the prospect of significant money coming into the community has ignited a debate here over who gets it, dividing the fishermen on the piers, who see it as a lifeline in a time of deep struggle, from city officials who agree, but would also like to spend some of it as a boost to a new shoreline economy.

On a cold winter day, Carolyn Kirk, the mayor of Gloucester, looked over a fallow stretch of the inner harbor where a white sign read “Under Idea Development.” This, she says, could be a research center or the home of an ocean technology company. She hopes businesses like that could help Gloucester maintain its economic identity as a port city, even as the fishing fleet shrinks.

“T-shirts, taffy, not interested,” said Ms. Kirk, alluding to coastal communities like Hampton, N.H., that have built boardwalk economies. “How do we take the working port and put it back to work in a different kind of way?”

To Ms. Kirk, a former management consultant who is running for a fourth two-year term, the disaster money is an opportunity to help the fishermen — but also to diversify the economy, which she thinks could position itself at the center of the marine science and technology sector. That, she hopes, could help the city rebuild its economy as have some Massachusetts mill cities, like Lowell and Worcester, that now host biotech companies and warehouse apartments.

 

Read the full story at the New York Times

 

 

February 13, 2013 — A New Bedford company has been approved by NOAA Fisheries to provide at-sea and dockside monitoring services for the 2013 fishing year, which begins on May 1,the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northeast Regional office said in a news release.

According to its website, AIS Inc., located at 89 Water St., provides trained and certified inspectors and observers "for maritime activities requiring certification of compliance with environmental regulations." The company also collects data for use by federal, state, municipal and other government agencies, its site said.

Read the full story in the New Bedford Standard Times

 

 

 

 

YORK, Maine — February 3, 2013 — Area lobstermen are fearful that last summer's low prices could return again this year.

More than 50 area lobstermen filled the meeting room of York Public Library on Thursday night to hear what Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher could do to help them with lobster prices during a glut as was experienced last June.

Warmer than usual water temperatures last spring drove lobsters into shallow waters to shed their hard shells at least a month ahead of schedule, making for large catches of soft-shell lobsters and low prices. Usually on the Fourth of July when tourists arrive in Maine looking for a lobster dinner, restaurants and dealers are hungry for supply. Not this past summer.

"Around the 14th, 15th of June, dealers started calling," Keliher said. "Product was backing up on their docks."

Keliher was forced to issue a warning to lobstermen who talked of wanting to impose a de facto shutdown of the industry to drive prices back up, and who had expressed a willingness to coerce other fishermen to comply with threats of trap molestation and cut gear.

There were no cut lines, Keliher later said. The problem, and glut, was worse in northern waters than in southern Maine, he said.

Lobstermen who spoke Thursday expressed frustration over the price difference last summer between what they were getting for lobster and what tourists were paying in restaurants. While many diners got a bargain, Keliher agreed he saw signs in front of restaurants along the same main street in Freeport advertising lobster dinners for anywhere between $14.99 and $34.

 

Read the full story at SeaCoast Online