Management & Regulation

NOAA Fisheries Service Issues a Correction to the October 28, 2009, Permit Holder Letter Regarding Changes for Midwater Trawl Vessels Fishing in Groundfish Closed Area I. Read the correction here.

SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton – Nov 3, 2009 – The protests in New England over NMFS rules have not focused on the true economic facts. The New England groundfish fleet is operating at a financial loss, and must take radical steps to recover. Here is a tale of two fisheries: In New England, there were 789 groundfish vessels fishing under the days at sea program in 2008, including vessels who had leased days. The average gross stock per vessel was $80,354, using the catch value averaged over the past five years.

Out of this $80,000, the typical vessel has to pay fuel costs, dock fees, insurance, a captain’s share – generally about 10% of the gross stock, plus a lay share for the crew, which runs 35% to 40% of gross stock after deductions for fuel, groceries etc.

In a nutshell, the average groundfish vessel is dividing about $40,000 to $50,000 between two men and an owner. How can a crew member support a family on $20,000 per year fishing income. It just doesn’t work.

By contrast, the Scallop fleet has 348 active vessels, and the average gross stock per vessel is over $1 million. With a five or six man crew, a captain’s share, and fuel costs and groceries, the scallop fleet is highly profitable. Actually a couple of weeks ago in New Bedford, a Captain got a $50,000 share for a single ten day trip.

The scallop fleet is financially healthy, and with upcoming rules to allow two permits per vessel, the gross stocks could easily rise to $2 million per active vessel fairly quickly.

Into this mix comes catch shares for the New England Groundfish fleet. The very first requirement for a successful program is to make the fleet doing the actual fishing financially viable. That is going to take a huge reduction in vessels.

New England has approached this problem backwards, due to the fierce resistance to hard TAC’s in the multi-species groundfish fishery. In other areas around the country, when the number of boats could harvest the entire TAC in a four or five day period, it was obvious to all that the only avenue to financial stability was to reduce the number of vessels, and to compensate those owners leaving the fishery. This is what happened through the halibut and crab IFQ programs in Alaska.

Because the solution was so obvious, the prospect of consolidation through issuing of catch shares won widespread support.

But in New England, without the hard TAC’s to graphically illustrate over capacity and the huge number of excess vessels, the pressure has been to make all existing vessels whole. This is impossible when the average value of the groundfish landings are around $63 million per year, total. This has led to antagonism towards NMFS when the scientists say that 11 of 19 groundfish stocks still are classified as being overfished with overfishing continuing to occur. Legally, NMFS must further reduce catches – but when you are a fishermen looking at earning maybe $20,000 to $30,000, when 20 years ago the same job would pay $50,000 to $60,000, your back is against the wall.

Having been involved in these fisheries for 30 years, it is obvious to me that the key question is not tweaking stock estimates or modifying arcane rules, although these are very important in a stable system, but in first achieving financial stability.

The New England fisheries can be compared to a patient having a heart attack on the operating table. First the patient must be stabilized – then we can deal with everything else.

As part of this process, we have agreed to participate and co-sponsor a couple of meetings next week in New Bedford and Gloucester where three key figures in the Alaska fishery plan to talk about the issues that made their fisheries financially stable and viable.

Here is a link to the flyer for the meeting.

Over the next year, the transformation of New England fisheries will continue to be one of the most important issues in the industry – getting a lot of attention in Congress, and from the Obama administration, from outside groups and NGO’s and finally, from within New England itself. We hope to continue to highlight the real issues at stake, and the solutions proposed.

John Sackton, Editor And Publisher
Seafood.com News 1-781-861-1441
Email comments to jsackton@seafood.com

"There’s quite a few people from New Hampshire here," said Padi Anderson about the 40 commercial fishermen who participated in Friday’s rally in Gloucester, Mass., to protest new federal fishing rules.

Commercial fishermen from Maine to Maryland traveled to Gloucester to make their voices heard outside the National Marine Fisheries Service office located in Blackburn Industrial Park.

The rally featured several speakers, including her husband, Michael Anderson, a commercial fishermen who has fished out of Rye Harbor for 35 years, and Jay Driscoll, another fishermen from Rye.

Read the complete story at Fosters.

After the rally, Patricia Kurkul, the service’s regional administrator invited five protesters into a conference room on NMFS’ ground floor for an ad hoc exchange of ideas; the meeting ended with Kurkul tacitly agreeing with the general bill of particulars but demurring that her job was to administer, not make, rules and laws, and only Congress can redress the grievances, according to conferee Mike Walsh, who owns four draggers based in Boston.

"The meeting didn’t accomplish anything," Walsh said.

Another conferee, Chris Odlin of Scarborough, Maine, who with his wife owns two Boston-based trawlers, walked out mid-meeting.

Bob Vanasse, executive director of an industry public relations organization, said the Magnuson Stevens Act allows NMFS to make exceptions. A bill, the Flexibility in Rebuilding America’s Fisheries Act of 2009, was filed by Congressman Frank Pallone, D-N.J. and sponsored by a number of New Englanders, exists to clarify congressional intent, he said.

Read the complete story at The Newbury Port News.

The following message and letter was transmitted by NOAA advising fishers that there may still be opportunities to join sectors.

If you are interested in shifting from the common pool and joining a sector, there may still be opportunities.  Contact sector organizers to see if any are willing to re-open their rosters. Act quickly, so the sector organizer can submit a revised roster to NOAA Fisheries Service before the November 20th deadline.

Changes to rosters may prompt additional environmental assessment analyses.  If the changes to the rosters are significant (e.g., expanding the sector’s geographic range or gear types), the analyses will take some time, and the regulatory authorization for the added vessels may not be ready by the May 1 start of the fishing year. Roster changes received after November 20 can not be adopted and processed before May 1.

The regulatory processes for authorizing vessels that are already on a sector roster to start the season on May 1 will not be affected by this opportunity to reopen the rosters.

Read the complete Sector Roster notice.

The fact that some local and state political officials will not be lending their in-person support to this morning’s Gloucester rally in support of New England’s and the East Coast’s fishermen may, in some ways, seem disappointing.

After all, one of the key points the fishermen and their allies at today’s demonstration is that the catch shares program — and the general commitment by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, through policy and enforcement by the National Marine Fisheries Service, to drive even more fishermen and their boats out of the business — takes a significant economic toll on communities these pols are sworn to serve.

But even if Mayor Carolyn Kirk and local state lawmakers are wary of endorsing this grass-roots effort, the most important thing is certainly not for them to speak, but to hear the fishermen’s call. And that goes double for federal lawmakers, notably local Congressman John Tierney, Sen. John Kerry and interim U.S. Sen. Paul Kirk, who must now take up the demonstrators’ bullhorn and push legislatively for at least a delay in converting to a catch-share regulatory format, and a demand that NMFS rectify its admitted errors before even a single fishermen’s 2010 catch is wrongly cut back through the agency’s data gathering and processing incompetence.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

Hundreds of fishermen from the Northeast rallied in front of the headquarters of federal fishery managers Friday, demanding changes in the "dysfunctional" management that they say is destroying their industry.

Some fishermen held signs reading "Let Fishermen Fish"; other signs pictured Adolf Hitler with the word "Nazi" replacing the first word in National Marine Fisheries Service.

One group marched toward the New England regional headquarters entrance chanting, "Down with NMFS! Down with NMFS!" while a man roamed the crowd dressed as the grim reaper, with NMFS printed on his scythe.

Speakers addressed the crowd in front of a display of two fishermen at the gallows being hanged by a figure of Jane Lubchenco, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has charge over the fisheries service.

Read the complete story at WBZ 38.

Hundreds of commercial fishermen are expected to protest fishing regulations Friday, October 30, in Gloucester during a rally outside the regional office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service.

Rally organizers are seeking to achieve four goals: more flexibility in rebuilding timelines for overfished stocks, better management and greater professionalism from NOAA Fisheries, an independent economic analysis of the projected impacts of fisheries regulations prior to enactment, and the offset of economic impacts through credit availability and boat buyback programs.

"We don’t object to ending overfishing within two years — no one cares more about the health of the fisheries than fishermen," rally organizer Amanda Odlin, a boat owner from Maine, said in a press release. "We object to the government placing artificial deadlines on nature."

Read the complete story at The South Coast Today.

From far-flung ports north and south of here, a broad-based movement of aggrieved fishermen is on its way to Gloucester, where protesters planned to meet at 8:30 a.m. today outside the new federal fisheries office building to register objections to the impact on their ways of life of a new wave of policies.

The demonstration, authorized by the Gloucester Police in consultation with Homeland Security, Immigration, Customs and Federal Protective Services, includes a speakers’ list of about a dozen, mostly fishermen.

The Blackburn Industrial Park offices from which the 200 bureaucrats, lawyers and law enforcement investigators of the National Marine Fisheries Service regulate fishing Maine through the Carolinas will be open or business, officials have said.

Late yesterday, Amanda Odlin, lead organizer of the meeting, took her children, Lydia, 10, and Maya, 12, to karate and put the finishing touches on a press package that features a letter of solidarity from Elinor Ostrom.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

For anyone interested in participating in a multispecies fishery sector in 2011, there is still time to submit requests for data corrections so that your Potential Sector Contribution (PSCs) can be calculated in time for the start of the fishing year. NOAA Fisheries Service is extending the deadline for data correction submissions to December 31, 2009.

PLEASE NOTE: All information that you want NOAA to consider in making these data corrections must be submitted by December 31st.  Any information received after that date will not be considered.