NOAA Fisheries Service Announces Bluefish Catch Levels and Possession Limits Proposed for 2011 Fishing Year. Public Comment Period Ends January 31, 2011.
See NOAA for more information.
NOAA Fisheries Service Announces Bluefish Catch Levels and Possession Limits Proposed for 2011 Fishing Year. Public Comment Period Ends January 31, 2011.
See NOAA for more information.
NEW BEDFORD — It may still be possible to obtain some federal financial aid for the local fishing industry, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., told the mayor's fishery advisory council Thursday.
He said he still thinks Commerce Secretary Gary Locke's denial of Gov. Deval Patrick's request for increased catch allocations was "offensive and stupid and wrong."
But in a conversation with Locke Thursday, Frank surmised that Locke was unaware of the total dismissal of economic help in a letter to the governor by Eric Schwaab, head of the National Marine Fisheries Services.
"I asked him if he read Schwaab's letter," Frank told The Standard-Times. Locke said "No."
And Locke then offered to negotiate the issue, he said.
Patrick had requested $21 million in assistance with sector management, which has added a new layer of expensive bureaucracy that Locke and Schwaab did not discuss even as they pointed to increased revenues.
Read the complete story from The Standard Times.
BOSTON—This week Department of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke rejected Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s request to increase federal catch limits and his request for $21 million in direct economic relief for the impacts caused by the transition to “Catch Shares.”
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the catch share program is a “general term for several fishery management strategies that allocate a specific portion of the total allowable fishery catch to individuals, cooperatives, communities, or other entities. Each recipient of a catch share is directly accountable to stop fishing when its specific quota is reached.”
According to many in Massachusetts, the policy has hurt Massachusetts fishermen.
In his letter rejecting the governor’s request, Locke said, “I stand ready to increase catch limits whenever new scientific data are available that meet the requirements of the Magnuson-Stevens Act.” The Magnuson-Stevens act is the primary law that governs marine fisheries in the United States. About the $21 million aid, Locke said, “the data provided are insufficient to warrant either a fishery disaster or a commercial fishery failure under that act.”
Read the complete story from The Epoch Times.
The Marine Fish Conservation Network announces a search for its next Executive Director. For a description of the position and how to apply (by February 15), please click here. The Marine Fish Conservation Network is seeking to hire its next Executive Director, working out of its Washington, DC office. MFCN is a national coalition of almost 200 national, regional and local environmental organizations, recreational and commercial fishing groups, aquariums, and marine science groups dedicated to marine fish conservation and to sustainable fish populations, ecosystems, and fishing communities. To learn more about the Network, please visit our website: www.conservefish.org.
Take Part, an online media project of Participant Media, is urging readers to take action based upon former NOAA cheif scientist Steve Murawski's comments that overfishing will not occur in U.S. waters this year by downloading the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch application.
According to their website, Participant Media was born in January 2004 when Founder Jeff Skoll assembled a team of entertainment industry executives who shared his interest in creating quality entertainment about meaningful issues; together, the team built an environment to foster storytelling that engages the audience, generates awareness of topical and interesting issues and inspires individuals to take action.
The following year, Participant's debut slate of films, North Country, Syriana, Good Night, And Good Luck and the documentary Murderball, received a total of 11 Academy Award® nominations and one Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for George Clooney’s performance in Syriana. The company's many social action efforts for these films included a program for North Country that provided support for organizations and advocacy efforts, which resulted in the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
Participant was responsible for a worldwide phenomenon with its 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which went on to win two Academy Awards® for Best Documentary and Best Original Song and become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Participant's social action campaign directly resulted in more than 28 thousand downloads of our online guide on how to reduce oil dependence, nine countries incorporating An Inconvenient Truth into their curriculum for high school students and the offset of over 106 thousand tons of CO2, and indirectly resulted in four bills on climate change being introduced in Congress. Global warming was now part of the international conversation.
This particular Take Part item by Jon Bowermaster links to an action item that sites the widely-challenged assertion that the oceans will be empty of all but jellyfish by 2048, stating "If current commercial fishing practices continue unabated, scientists have estimated that there could be no fish left in our seas come 2048. Yes, that's in your lifetime."
The contention of Steve Murawski, NOAA’s recently retired chief scientist, is that by the close of the current fishing year, which ends April 30, federal statistics will show that New England fishermen will have taken fewer than the allotted fish in all but one stock (winter flounder). The same, according to Murawski, is true in other regions, from the South Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico; credit is being given to the new laws as well as more awareness of overfishing among both fishermen and consumers.
Before uncorking the champagne—and before the Barney Frank brigade acquires any resignations—it’s worth noting that the stats Murawski cites represent a single year. That year comes on the heels of a century during which U.S. fishermen have badly overfished every region.
Led by Senator Barney Frank (D-MA), northeastern politicos including U.S. Senator John Kerry and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and dozens of state representatives jumped on Murawski’s comments as leverage against the Obama administration's tough catch-share laws. In particular, the rhetoric has denounced marine biologist Lubchenco, who has been tagged by her opponents as “an environmental activist scientist.”
Commerce Secretary Locke sent a letter last week to Governor Patrick vowing that the federal government would not back down on catch shares, despite a study by marine scientists at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth that the strict laws were “delivering a body blow” to the local fishing industry.
In a 30-minute radio interview, Frank said he felt “betrayed” by the decision and vowed to take the fight to the White House. He and others have been agitating for Lubchenco’s resignation since last summer.
Read the read complete story from Take Part.
Last week's decision by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to refuse a request by the governor of Massachusetts to raise catch limits for groundfish in the Northeast has angered New England fishermen and politicians. None more so, perhaps, than leading Congressional Democrat Barney Frank of Massachusetts. In an editorial published this week in the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Frank called the move an "assault" on the fishing industry.
Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, agrees. "I'm very disappointed in the Secretary's decision," Collins says. She also says she was surprised it.
"I felt that the entire New England delegation made a very strong case for him to invoke his emergency authority to raise the catch limits, and I'm very concerned that his failure to do so may be catastrophic for what remains of our fishing community and fishing industry in New England," Collins says.
Locke said back in October that he was open to ordering increases in the catch, but needed evidence to support it. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick responded in November, sending a letter and scientific report to Locke that said unnecessarily low catch limits were creating an "economic disaster" for local fishermen.
Read the story and listen to the audio from MPBN.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Thursday formally joined the hub fishing ports of Gloucester and New Bedford and a coalition of industry interests from Maine to North Carolina, challenging the Obama administration's groundfish regulatory regimen in federal district court.
The filings by state Attorney General Martha Coakley for Gov. Deval Patrick accuse the federal government of violating four national standards written into the 2006 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act and illegally hurting the economy of the industry and fishing communities.
The latest version of Magnuson simultaneously commanded an expeditious restoration of overfished stocks, while also directing the effort to involve the optimal sustainable yield to the fishing industry.
The filing by the attorney general for the governor also accused the federal government of violating Magnuson's required use of "best scientific information available," while minimizing "adverse economic impacts" on the fishing communities.
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.
Port Clyde, a coastal community of 1500 people, has only had one drastic change in the last decades. It’s the fish: there’s just not so much of them anymore.
Glen Libby, 54, a Port Clyde fisherman, remembers the time when you could catch more in a day than what people now need four days to catch. “Over the last decades, it’s been a steady decline,” said Glen Libby, chairman of the Midcoast Fishermen’s Association, a non-profit group seeking to improve the lives of local fishermen, and president of a local fishermen’s cooperative. “Every year you hope it’s the year that it turns around. We’re still hopeful it will.”
The decline in groundfish (haddock, cod, flounder, halibut, hake, Pollock, and red fish) is due to the influx of industrial fishing in the region in the last few decades. Despite the challenges, Glen Libby is part of a family of fishermen—Glen, a former groundfisherman and current shrimp fisherman. Glen’s brother Gary Libby, 52, is a groundfishermen, lobsterman, and shrimp fisherman. Glen’s son Justin Libby, 30, captains a groundfish boat. Glen and Gary’s father, Roger Libby, who is in his 70’s, originally got the family into fishing and is still a constant presence on the Port Clyde docks, keeping his eye on the family business.
But the family has had to adjust to higher fuel prices, federal regulations and competition from industrial fisheries. Their strategy to stay afloat? They organized the Port Clyde fishing cooperative last year, with local fishermen processing and selling their catch directly to customers. The fishermen use environmentally-friendly fishing gear that meets or exceeds federal requirements and attracts customers who want to support a local, sustainable fishing model. The coop, called Port Clyde Fresh Catch, offers a delivery subscription service and online sales, where customers can have fresh or frozen seafood shipped to their home. The coop also has extended to restaurant and farmer’s market sales.
Read the complete story from Earth Justice.
An expansion of wind energy is well worth pursuing off the coast of Massachusetts.
But that expansion should not come at the expense of the fishing industry, and it appears that the latest wind energy initiative by the Obama administration once again puts commercial fishing — along with the jobs it creates and preserves and the food it provides for this region and beyond — at the bottom of its priority totem poll.
Those in the industry and their representatives at the Statehouse and in Congress who profess to be advocates for fishermen should intervene now to make sure an already endangered industry does not remain at the bottom of that priority list.
For this initiative comes in the form of the U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement already asking wind energy companies to notify it of any interest they have in leasing portions of a massive, 2,200-nautical-square-mile sector of the ocean, south of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.
That area contains some of the richest fishing grounds off the coast of Massachusetts.
According to David Goethel, a commercial fisherman and member of the New England Fishery Management Council's Habitat Committee, "a half billion dollars worth of seafood comes out of this area."
Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times.
The bluefin tuna is one of the most majestic and prized creatures in the sea. Last week, one caught off Japan sold in Tokyo for $396,000, to be used as sushi.
Now the fish is the subject of a scientific fight that shows how hard it will be to gauge the environmental fallout of the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
The U.S. government will wrap up public meetings next week on whether to recommend declaring the Atlantic bluefin an endangered species. If the government declared the fish endangered, it would bar fishermen from targeting the fish in U.S. waters. An environmental group filed the request last year, claiming in part that the western-Atlantic stock of the fish, long believed to spawn only in the Gulf of Mexico, would "be devastated" by last year's spill from a blown-out BP PLC well.
But scientists disagree about what portion of last spring's crop of young tuna, or larvae, were hit by oil. They disagree about whether the Gulf is the only place where the western-Atlantic bluefin spawns. In short, they disagree about virtually every aspect of the spill's effect on the fish.
Read the complete story from The Wall Street Journal.