Management & Regulation

NOAA has announced that the limited access general category (LAGC) scallop fishery will be closed to individual fishing quota (IFQ) scallop vessels, including vessels issued Letters of Authorization fishing under appeal effective 0001 hours, July 19, 2009.  Therefore, effective 0001 hours on July 19, 2009, an IFQ scallop vessel fishing under LAGC regulations may not declare a trip and may not fish for, possess, or retain any scallops.  The LAGC scallop fishery is scheduled to re-open to IFQ scallop vessels on September 1, 2009. The complete notice is available here.

New England Fisheries Management Council Member David T. Goethel argues in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, that the New England Council failed to uphold the requirement that allocations shall be "fair and equitable to all fishermen".

Councillor Goethel states that the NEFMC failed to uphold the requirement in National Standard 4 that allocations shall be "fair and equitable to all fishermen" by allocating to the "two existing commercial fishery sectors their best 5 year period of Georges Bank cod and to the recreational fishery it’s historic 5 year high allocation of Gulf of Maine cod and haddock.  The remainder of the commercial fishery was allocated the period of 1996-2006 based on catch history."

Councillor Goethel argues that the "problem could have been easily remedied by establishing a common, fair and equitable baseline of 1996-2006 for all user groups."  But he says "the message was lost in the din of special interest groups clamoring for more than their fair share of the allocation."

He expressed concern that this could "result in a lawsuit that could hold up implementation of Amendment 16".

In his letter, he has urged the Commerce Secretary "to remand the [relevant] sections back to the New England Fisheries Management Council with clear instructions to put all user groups on a level playing field and comply with Congressional policy."

Read Councillor Goethel’s letter.

The latest version of the ‘asset commoditization’ of USA fisheries is well underway with the New England Fisheries Management Council’s approval of “Catch Share” systems to convert part of the common pool into sectors for the sake of non-fishing investors.

Catch shares back East are being handled through ‘sectors’ — community-based fishing cooperatives. These are not the familiar processor-linked-cooperatives we’re used to in Alaska’s collectivist oppression system, and the temporary rhetoric is that they are not (yet) individual fishing quotas. But we recognize this species-by-species march of economic warfare that moves relentlessly forward in the allocation jackboots of political racketeers until the boots-on-deck fishermen and our coastal communities fall into indentured servitude. New England fisheries are now well on the way, too.

There is much to this story about how the need for Total Allowable Catch limits (or Annual Catch Limits) management is being leapfrogged by outside investor needs, that it’s already quite the story on the East Coast. Use your favorite search engine and check out the tremendous reporting from Richard Gaines of the Gloucester Daily Times. If you thought environmentalists’ real concerns were for the health of fisheries, be prepared to learn more about following the money and power, and who is in cahoots with whom.

Read the complete story at Alaska Report.

Thank you for the editorial in support of new appointments to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council ("More balance on fishing board," July 3). The candidates are well qualified for their roles and each will make unique and exceptional contributions to sustainable fisheries management in the Mid-Atlantic.

The New Jersey appointee, Chris Zeman, is especially well suited for his role representing the Garden State.

An attorney and conscientious recreational fisherman, Zeman has worked for years on fisheries management issues on behalf of some of the nation’s leading environmental organizations, including Oceana and Natural Resources Defense Council.

Read the complete story at APP.

Richard Allen, a fellow commercial fisherman, wrote a letter (Times, Saturday, July 11) raising a basic question: How much fish should fisherman catch?

I agree with him in that fishermen would catch all they could, even if it was just enough to clear expenses — and if it were the old days, not now.

The fleet today is about a tenth of what it use to be. The mesh size is so big that legal size fish fall right through. If it wasn’t a school fish, such as cod that are so plentiful at certain times they plug up the end of the net (cod end) that allow the fish to not be able to get through, the catch would be probably 25 percent of what it would be with a smaller net.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

NOAA Fisheries Service will hold an additional scoping meeting on July 15th to solicit public input on an initiative to protect sea turtles that are incidentally caught in trawl gear, including gear used in the Atlantic sea scallop, summer flounder, and croaker fisheries.

Public comment is being sought on potential management alternatives, including the use of Turtle Excluder Devices in certain trawl fisheries.

For a copy of the Notice of Intent and Scoping Document Information Please Visit —

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/turtles/regulations.htm or call Ms. Alexis T. Gutiérrez at 301-713-2322.  

For more information see this announcment.

In this month’s Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook writes that privatizing the seas through use of individualized transferrable quotas (ITQs) is the solution to the grave problem of overfishing. Recently, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco came out strongly (PDF) in favor of ITQs (which the agency is calling “catch shares”), and has committed her agency to ” transitioning to catch shares ” as a solution to overfishing. Would that the solution to overfishing were so easy!

Today, fisheries managers set a “total allowable catch” (TAC) for open-access fisheries. A fishery is open until that TAC is reached. Not surprisingly, there is often a mad scramble to capture as large a share of fish as quickly as possible. Sometimes fisheries, like the pre-ITQ Alaskan halibut fishery, are only open for a few days, or even a few hours.

Catch shares work to eliminate this incentive to catch all of the fish today. Thus, Easterbrook contrasts the orderly halibut fishery in Alaska today with the free-for-all of the pre-ITQ days. And catch shares do make a fishery more orderly. When a boat has a right to a specified share of the TAC, it removes the incentive to catch each fish before someone else does, the so-called “fisherman’s dilemma.” ITQs seeks to solve this problem by enclosing the commons and creating clear private ownership rights.

Read the complete story at Grist.

A few years ago at the Double Musky Inn in Girdwood, Alaska, I had a halibut dinner so delicious, I can still taste that fish. Good restaurant? Yes, but even better fishery management.

About a decade ago, the Alaskan halibut catch was switched from a system of “catch all you can” in a very short period, to a system of tradeable permits. Now halibut season does not happen over a few chaotic days marred by colliding boats and overlapping lines, followed by freezing of the fish and a price bust as everything hits the market at once.

Instead, fishermen holding an assured right, which they won on the free market (to bid for a permit, go to www.alaskabroker.com), spread their work over many months. Thus halibut coming to the market are just-caught fresh, and the price of fish is less likely to soar and plunge. And halibut stocks, spared a concentrated onslaught of fishing boats, are more sustainable.

Read the complete story at The Atlantic.

Now that it looks like Scituate fisherman Frank Mirarchi may get what he’s asked for, he’s also looking a lot of hard work to make it turn out right.

Mirarchi has been working — both on his own and as a member of the local nonprofit Friends of South Shore Fisheries — to get the government to change the way that it limits the commercial fishing of groundfish such as cod or flounder.

On June 25, the New England Fisheries Management Counsel voted to amend the rules to allow groups of fishermen to form cooperatives, called sectors, which would each be limited in the pounds of fish they could catch. By joining a sector, fishermen are no longer affected by previous regulations, which limit days at sea and which Mirarchi called ineffective and unwieldy.

Read the complete story at Wicked Local.

What the fishing community and the public need to ask is whether they would rather have the scientists and the regulators make a mistake by leaving too many fish in the water or make a mistake by allowing too many fish to be caught. In the first case the fish are still growing and reproducing, making more fish for next year. In the second case, one year’s excessive catch leads to less fish production the next year and the next.

One of the common threads that runs through articles and letters about the fishing industry is that there are plenty of fish but the regulators won’t let fishermen catch them. Sam Frontiero (Letters, the Times, Wednesday, July 8) nailed the problem facing both fishermen and regulators when he pointed out that "boats catch their quota in 10 minutes time — even less sometimes."

Frontiero and many fishermen contend that regulators should let fishermen catch more. But how much more? At what point would fishermen and their supporters be satisfied that they were being allowed to catch the right amount of fish? Would that level of catch be sustainable, or would it cause another cycle of fishery depletion?

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.