Management & Regulation

NOAA Fisheries reports that President Obama’s 2010 budget has proposed sufficient funding for NOAA Fisheries Service to fund an at-sea monitoring program, providing a minimum 30-percent coverage level for all sector groundfish vessels. This would be in addition to the Northeast Fisheries Observer Program coverage levels implemented to support the Standardized By-catch Reporting Methodology (SBRM). Amendment 16 to the Northeast (NE) Multispecies Fishery Management Plan proposes mandatory sector at-sea monitoring programs beginning in fishing year (FY) 2012.  For FY 2010 and FY 2011, Amendment 16 proposes that each sector would have an assumed discard rate applied to their landings, unless the sector voluntarily chooses to fish under a NOAA Fisheries Service approved at-sea monitoring program.  Under the Amendment, it was also anticipated that the fishing industry would cover the cost of at-sea monitoring.  We are pleased to be able to provide support to the fishing industry to help them cover this cost during the initial stages of sector implementation.

For FY 2010, assuming Amendment 16 is approved, NOAA Fisheries Service has determined that sectors should achieve a minimum 30-percent at-sea monitoring coverage rate in order to obtain:

    • an accurate catch estimate to ensure that the groundfish fishery as a whole does not exceed its annual catch limit;
    • more precise annual catch entitlement (ACE) accounting for each sector to avoid the inadvertent overharvest or underharvest ACE leading to negative consequences for the sector members;
    • better bycatch estimates for most stocks; and
    • information necessary to better define coverage levels in the future.

This level of sampling in the groundfish sector fishery also corresponds to recent practices in deploying observers in a Northeast fishery with unknown bycatch characteristics (e.g., the U.S./Canada Management Area).  According to NOAA Fisheries, it is not possible to determine coverage levels based on historical observations of bycatch in the groundfish fishery since there will likely be changes in fishing practices with the shift to sectors — NOAA maintains that a smaller sample size of observed trips may not accurately represent the entire sector.

For further information on sectors and common pool measures please visit the NOAA Fisheries Sector Management Webpage:
http://www.nero.noaa.gov/sfd/sfdmultisector.html

It’s time to Chart the Future to better prepare for the external developments and challenges we face while continuing to serve as the nation’s most trusted source on environmental leadership. Join us in our commitment to reassess and renew the mission, vision, and goals of NOAA as part of the Next Generation Strategic Plan.

The objective of the Next Generation Strategic Plan is to inform and respond to the priorities of the new administration; to engage and respond to stakeholders; to respond to the long-term external challenges facing the agency; and to meet the GPRA and related requirements. This initiative aims to support our role in helping understand and predict changes in Earth’s environment and conserve and manage coastal and marine resources to meet our Nation’s economic, social, and environmental needs.

For more information on the development of the NGSP, please refer to the NGSP Presentation or the more detailed NGSP Terms of Reference. You may also refer to the schedule of events, a regularly updated timeline of the NGSP development process.

Read the complete story at NOAA.

The Obama administration talks much about its support of diversity. But, apparently, not when it comes to management and regulation of the New England fishing industry. In that case, it appears the goal is to stack it with environmental activists.

Since Jane Lubchenco was appointed head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration earlier this year, the balance of power on the New England and Mid-Atlantic fishery management councils has been shifting to those with ties to environmental groups, and away from the fishermen themselves.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that the majority of new appointments to those councils have ties to the Pew Environmental Group, a subdivision of the Pew Charitable Trust, with an endowment of more than $4 billion. Lubchenco has been a beneficiary of Pew funding, and she also sits on the board of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Read the complete story at Newbury Port News.

With questions already swirling around the federal government’s plan to regulate the New England fishing industry through "catch shares," all eyes have been waiting for the National Marine Fisheries Service’s first listing of the total allowable catch limits for some of the fishery’s species. Those figures, after all, will set the ceiling for the overall catch fishermen in their cooperative "sectors" can land under the new system. So it will be those figures that decide how or whether the new format will work. Now, with NMFS’ posting the total allowable catch for pollock, we know the answer: It won’t.

Gloucester’s Vito Giacalone — who, as policy chief of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, has tried to work with government officials to ease the transition to the catch shares format — says the 67% figure will simply "break the system."

Raymond Canastra, co-owner of the Whaling City Seafood Auction in New Bedford, says the NMFS’ pollock limits would be "the death knell" for many fishing boats — each of which, of course, is a small business and cog in the wheels of the local economy. 

Read the complete editorial at The Gloucester Daily Times.

John Sackton of Seafood News took an alternative view, read his op-ed.

Sector fishery cooperatives, the linchpin of federal plans to protect wild fish stocks in New England, could collapse under new catch restrictions for one of the ocean’s more unpredictable species, members of the industry working on the system say. Pollock, the low-profile relative of cod often consumed anonymously in breaded cutlets and fish sticks, is dangerously overfished in the northwest Atlantic, federal scientists say, and needs to be protected with sudden, large-scale catch reductions.

According to preliminary recommendations, the reduction could represent a cut of 67 percent from last year’s pollock catch.

But fishermen and boat owners say pollock is doing much better than the scientists say and the new rules could make the already uncertain transition to a quota-based catch share system — an imperative of the Obama administration and environmental groups — a disaster. "This stands to break the system," said Vito Giacalone, policy director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, the largest industry group on the East Coast. "There is not even enough for bycatch. The viability of sectors is potentially fatally compromised by the recommendation of allowable catch for pollock."

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.

Supposedly, the Obama administration supports and promotes diversity.

But that’s apparently not when it comes to management and regulation of the fishing industry. In that case, it appears one of its goals is to stack the key regional management councils with members tied to environmental activists — most with ties to the Pew Environmental Group. And that can only fuel the distrust between the fishing community and this government agency which is supposed to be trying to bridge an enormous credibility gap, not make it worse.

Since Jane Lubchenco was appointed head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration earlier this year, the balance of power on the New England and Mid-Atlantic fishery management councils has been shifting to those with ties to environmental groups, and away from the fishermen themselves.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.