GLOUCESTER, Mass. – February 2, 2010 – The Northeast Seafood Coalition congratulates Senator Brown for asserting leadership on an issue sorely in need of Congressional attention. Congress made clear in both National Standard 8 and the required economic impact statements that understanding and minimizing the economic impacts of federal fishery regulations on fishermen and fishing communities must be among the very top priorities of the Councils and NMFS. Instead, this has proved to be a weak link in the fishery management process as we have experienced first hand with groundfish management. Although prepared by Council and agency staff, fishery impact statements appear to have little if any operative effect in the actual fishery management process and so have been reduced to mere lip service to Congressional intent. When originally championed by Senator Olympia Snowe in the 1990's as part of the Sustainable Fisheries Act (SFA), National Standard 8 was intended to provide the crucial, missing balance to those elements of the SFA that were focused strictly on fish stock conservation. In practice, it is difficult to see any real evidence that the National Standard 8 mandate to minimize adverse economic impacts on fishing communities has been taken seriously in the New England groundfish process. NSC believes that if enacted, the amendments in Senator Brown's bill would substantially reform the fishery management process by providing some real teeth behind National Standard 8 and the fishery impact statements. The requirement for truly independent impact analyses and a mandate for the Secretary of Congress to mitigate unacceptable economic impacts would be a giant leap forward in restoring balance to a process that threatens the foundation and economic stability of the New England groundfish industry. We greatly appreciate Senator Brown's vision and call on fishermen and their representatives in Congress throughout our region and across the nation to get behind this important legislation.
MRAG Americas to host invitation-only forum on catch share evaluation
MRAG Americas, a major contractor for NOAA and a provider of on-board monitoring services for the rollout of catch shares in New England's groundfishery, is hosting an invitation-only workshop next Monday as part of a project to create methods for evaluating the success of the new fishery management system.
MRAG — a for-profit company whose president is Andrew Rosenberg, a former high official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fisheries service — was contracted for the catch share study by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has steered millions of dollars in grants to groups promoting the catch share system, including the Environmental Defense Fund and the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen's Association, the MRAG website notes.
Together, grants to the Hook group and EDF related to New England catch shares have totaled more than $4 million.
Read the complete story in the Gloucester Times
Global fish consumption hits record high
The global consumption of fish has hit a record high, reaching an average of 17kg per person, a UN report has shown.
Fisheries and aquaculture supplied the world with about 145m tonnes in 2009, providing about 16% of the population's animal protein intake.
The findings published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) also stressed that the status of global fish stocks had not improved.
It said that about 32% were overexploited, depleted or recovering.
"That there has been no improvement in the status of stocks is a matter of great concern," said Richard Grainger, one of the report's authors and FAO senior fish expert.
"The percentage of overexploitation needs to go down, although at least we seem to reaching a plateau," he observed.
The authors added that it was estimated that the level of overexploitation had increased slightly since 2006, but 15% of the stocks monitored by the FAO were either "underexploited" or "moderately exploited".
This meant that catches in these regions could increase in order to meet the demand for fish products.
Read the complete story from the BBC News.
Fishermen voice concerns about impact of offshore wind farms
NEW BEDFORD — Calling offshore wind turbines "the new frontier for renewable energy," Daniel Cohen, head of an offshore wind company owned by fishermen, spoke to a small but lively crowd at the New Bedford Whaling Museum Monday.
Cohen is president of Fishermen's Energy, made up of principals in several other New Jersey-based fishing companies who want a stake in how and where wind turbines are sited, he said.
"Offshore wind is happening," said Cohen, who is also CEO of Atlantic Capes Fisheries, a New Jersey company that operates more than 20 fishing vessels.
Eight companies are currently proposing projects off Maryland, he said, and his company is one of the eight. "If we didn't exist, seven of them would still be there," he said.
But some of the fishermen in attendance Monday predicted further ruin for the industry if such projects become a reality.
Read the complete story from The South Coast Today.
SOUTHEAST RECREATIONAL: NOAA fisheries considering black sea bass closure
Federal fisheries managers are set to close another popular recreational fishery in the South Atlantic in the latest example of how chronic lapses in science and data-collection are wreaking havoc on the recreational angling sector. Less than two months after narrowly avoiding a massive closure of all bottom fishing in the South Atlantic to recover red snapper, federal managers have announced that black sea bass are set to become off-limits from February to June due to circumstances that sounds frustratingly familiar to anglers.
"When Congress strengthened the Magnuson-Stevens Act in 2006 in an effort to end overfishing, it did not intend NOAA Fisheries to achieve that goal simply by ending all fishing," said Chester Brewer, chairman of Coastal Conservation Association's National Government Relations Committee. "We need to end overfishing, but we have to have better data and more timely assessments before such harsh restrictions are imposed."
The last full benchmark assessment for black sea bass was conducted in 2001, and was simply updated in 2005. Based on those reports, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council adopted a management plan in 2006 that used a constant catch strategy despite strong objections from CCA. The strategy allows for a slightly higher catch limit for the first three years of the plan, but locks in a lower limit until at least 2015. As the stock rebuilds, anglers are encountering black sea bass more often and, according to the government's notoriously suspect recreational catch data, anglers are over their quota by up to 30 percent.
Managers are once again left with using the most draconian management measure available to fix a problem that may not even exist anymore. Black sea bass were scheduled to undergo another full benchmark assessment in 2010, but the furor over red snapper delayed it until 2011.
Read the complete story from Sport Fishing.
EDITORIAL: Officals should back Brown’s call for indy fishing probe
The slaps in the faces to fishermen, their advocates and even to members of Congress just keep on coming from the federal agencies that oversee the industry.
Indeed, the actions of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke last week confirm they will keep coming indefinitely unless the region's congressional delegation finally steps up and demands some accountability from an entire federal department that, under the Obama administration, has hopelessly lost its way.
While there has been plenty of heated rhetoric during the past year from members of Congress regarding those agencies' punitive regulations, vindictive enforcement and blatant misconduct, U.S. Sen. Scott Brown is the first on the federal level to openly call for what is long overdue — an independent investigation into agents and enforcers of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That, Brown said, may be the only way, "to right the many wrongs our fishermen have suffered."
His colleague, Sen. John Kerry, along with Congressmen John Tierney and Barney Frank should join in that demand. For, it should be clear to them by now, that talking isn't going to accomplish anything.
The misdeeds of NOAA enforcement were documented more than a year ago, in an audit by U.S. Department of Commerce Inspector General Todd Zinser.
For a while, it seemed that Secretary Locke would pursue justice for fishermen, both in promising to consider relaxing some of the most draconian federal limits on fishing, and in opening the door to revisiting unjust prosecutions of fishermen.
But now, Locke has been backing off. Two weeks ago, he refused to relax the limits, even after the recently retired chief scientist at NOAA, Steve Murawski, said in an interview that this year will be a "milestone" because it will mark the end of overfishing by the U.S. commercial fleet.
And last week, Locke backed off even more. Last fall, he had said he would be willing to explore past cases of government wrongdoing. But now, he has put new limits on an investigation into the prosecutions by Special Master Charles Swartwood III.
Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times.
Gov. Patrick takes fish fight directly to President Obama’s desk
Gov. Deval Patrick today appealed directly to a personal friend, President Obama, to intervene with the federal Commerce Department to provide administration for regulatory and economic relief for fishermen from government-created hardships.
Patrick's letter, dated Friday, marked the first reach to the president himself since Patrick and Massachusetts' congressional delegation last year began negotiations and lobbying efforts to recognize and respond to the economic hardships, including a "poorly planned transition to the 'catch shares' system," that the new regulatory regimen has wrought.
"That the governor is redoubling his effort on behalf of our fishing communities gives us a glimmer of hope that something might change yet," said Mayor Carolybn Kirk. "The circumstances require intervention by President Obama, and I applaud Governor Patrick for making good on the promise he made to Gloucester fishermen when he visited us this past fall."
In his appeal, Patrick noted that the industry based in Gloucester and New Bedford employs 80,000 people in fisheries and shoreside businesses and generates $4.4 billion into the economy.
Patrick and the ports were rebuffed by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke earlier this month. The secretary swept aside as insufficient an economic and regulatory analysis of the impact of the catch share system linked to fishing cooperatives that found direct losses of approximately $20 million due to super-conservative allocations into the commodities market created for the groundfishery by the New England Fishery Management Council.
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.
Patrick asks Obama to intervene in fishing regulations dispute
NEW BEDFORD — Citing his “extraordinary frustration” in dealing with the U.S. Commerce Department, Gov. Deval Patrick has appealed to President Barack Obama to intervene in the dispute over fishing regulations in the Northeast.
After listing all of the ways in which he and others have been rebuffed by fisheries regulators, Patrick asks Obama in a three-page letter to “set your Department of Commerce and its agencies on a course of cooperation and consideration with regard to the fishing industry in Massachusetts and the coastal communities that depend on it for sustenance and identity.”
The letter comes in the wake of sweeping refusals by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to do anything to change the system of sector management and the level of catch shares imposed on the fishing industry last year.
Despite lawsuits and intense political pressure from a bipartisan group of lawmakers mainly from the Northeastern states, nothing has changed with regard to the regulations and limits on fishing.
Patrick wrote, “Our fishing communities face severe challenges, and are currently suffering great hardship, as a result of well-intended but often ill-conceived and poorly executed efforts by federal regulators to constrain the fishing harvest and rebuild our fish stocks.”
Read the complete story from The South Coast Today.
UN: Fish consumption at record high, stocks low
ROME – January 31, 2011 – Fish is becoming a larger part of people's diets thanks to the booming fish farm industry, but ocean stocks continue to dwindle despite increasing international efforts to regulate catches and stop overfishing.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said in a report released Monday that there had been no improvement in the level of global fish stocks and that the overall percentage of overfished, depleted or recovering stocks is expected to be slightly higher than in 2006.
While expressing concern at the trend, FAO suggested that the financial and nutritional plusses of increasing fish production and consumption should not be brushed off.
Overall, fisheries and acquaculture support the livelihoods of some 540 million people — eight percent of the world's population, FAO said in its State of the World's Fisheries and Acquaculture report. In addition, in 2007 fish accounted for 15.7 percent of the world's intake of animal protein.
Much of that is due to fish farms, or acquaculture, which is set to overtake capture fisheries as the main source of fish as food, FAO said. In the early 1950s, acquaculture production was less than 1 million tons per year; in 2008 it was 52.5 million tons worth $98.4 billion.
But in the open seas, fish stocks are dwindling due to overfishing and unregulated, illegal hauls which bring in an estimated $10 billion to $23.5 billion annually, FAO said.
Read the complete story by the Associated Press at The Boston Globe.
Virginia Senate conservation panel kills menhaden bill
January 31, 2011 – The Senate conservation committee today killed a bill to have the Virginia Marine Resources Commission regulate menhaden fishing.
Menhaden are small but ecologically important fish that serve as food to bigger fish such as striped bass.
Senate Bill 765, sponsored by Sen. Ralph S. Northam, D-Norfolk, would have taken oversight of the fish from the General Assembly. The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources defeated it on a voice vote.
Read the complete story from The Richmond Times-Dispatch.
OTHER PERSPECTIVES:
ATLANTIC MENHADEN: Facts and Unsubstantiated Claims