Washington

WASHINGTON — March 8, 2013 — A bipartisan group of senators is pressing for an independent review of how the federal government calculates fishing stocks in the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic.

Those stocks are used to determine catch limits and have long been a source of contention for the fishing industry and environmentalists.

Environmental groups concerned about dwindling stocks of vulnerable species say overfishing could affect the Gulf region’s ecology and economy for decades.

Fishermen say current catch limits are based on flawed science and have cost coastal communities jobs and other economic benefits.

The senators, led by Republican Marco Rubio of Florida, want to settle the dispute.

They’ve asked the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog arm, to look into how the National Marine Fisheries Service determines which fishing stocks to analyze, how often they’re examined and how much it costs federal taxpayers to conduct the inventory.

 

Read the full article at Tallahassee.com

 

 

March 7, 2013 — Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey introduced revised legislation Wednesday intended to fight the widespread mislabeling of seafood.

Markey filed the bill in response to studies on seafood fraud, including a report by the environmental group Oceana that found a third of 1,215 fish samples it collected from 674 retail outlets were mislabeled.

"Fish fraud is a national problem that needs a national solution," Markey said in a statement. "From tackle to table, this bill makes the entire seafood supply chain more transparent and trustworthy."

The bill aims to ensure that information about domestic and imported fish — such as its species and where and how it was caught — follow the fish from boat to market.

It also seeks to establish civil penalties for violators and strengthen the ability of federal regulators to stop fraudulent seafood shipments from entering the country.

 

Read the full story at South Coast Today

 

 

March 6, 2013 — US Representative and Senate candidate Ed Markey Wednesday introduced a new version of bill to combat seafood fraud by tracking fish from a boat to a diner’s plate.

Markey amended earlier legislation he filed in July to reflect input from federal agencies, fishermen, consumer and conservation groups. The new bill will require information already collected by fishermen, such as species name, catch location, and harvest method, to be made available to consumers and requires imported fish to have equivalent documentation.

It also expands the ability of the US Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to refuse entry of unsafe or fraudulent seafood shipments.

 

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

March 6, 2013 — The Honorable Doc Hastings, Chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources has informed Members of Congress and staff that the Committee will hold an oversight hearing on the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act on Wednesday, March 13, 2013, at 10:00 a.m., in Room 1324 Longworth House Office Building.

Witnesses are by invitation only.

View the website of the House Natural Resources Committee (Majority)

View the website of the Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans and Insular Affairs (Majority)

View the website of the House Natural Resources Committee (Democrats)

Wiew the website of the Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans and Insular Affairs (Democrats)

 

 

March 6, 2013 — The following was released by the office of Congressman Ed Markey, (D-Massachusetts) Ranking Member of the House Natural Resources Committee:

National Studies Show Rampant Fish Mislabeling that Cheats Fishermen, Consumers

WASHINGTON (March 6, 2013) – Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) today introduced a new bipartisan version of his legislation to combat rampant seafood fraud, a nationwide epidemic that cheats fishermen and consumers, while posing health risks to pregnant mothers and others. The legislation responds to studies showing most recently that seafood is mislabeled 33 percent of the time in restaurants, supermarkets, and other retail locations across the United States. This second version of Rep. Markey’s legislation reflects intensive discussions with fishermen, consumer and conservation groups, and federal agencies that improved the original legislation.
 
“Fish fraud is a national problem that needs a national solution. This bill finally tells the seafood swindlers and fish fraudsters that we will protect America's fishermen and consumers from Massachusetts to Alaska,” said Rep. Markey, the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee. “From tackle to table, this bill makes the entire seafood supply chain more transparent and trustworthy.”
 
To prevent seafood fraud, Rep. Markey’s SAFE Seafood Act, formally the Safety and Fraud Enforcement for Seafood Act, requires information that is already collected by U.S. fishermen — such as species name, catch location, and harvest method — to ‘follow the fish,’ and be made available to consumers. It also requires foreign exporters of seafood to the United States to provide equivalent documentation.
 
The bill also expands the ability of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to refuse entry of unsafe or fraudulent seafood shipments, and allows NOAA to levy civil penalties against violators under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.
 
In addition to the fraud prevention measures, THE SAFE Seafood ACT addresses concerns over seafood safety raised by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a 2011 report by requiring cooperation and progress reporting. The report found that a lack of coordination between FDA and NOAA is resulting in needless duplication of seafood safety inspections at a time when resources are only allowing for 2 percent of seafood imports to be examined for safety.
 
Rep. Markey was joined in the legislation by original co-sponsors Walter Jones (R-N.C.), John Tierney (D-Mass.), Bill Keating (D-Mass.), and Lois Capps (D-Calif.) and Jo Bonner (R-Ala.). Senator Mark Begich (D-Alaska) will introduce companion legislation in the Senate.

Detailed summary of the legislation:

H.R. XX, the Safety And Fraud Enforcement for Seafood Act (MARKEY, D-Mass.)

In October 2011, separate investigations by the Boston Globe and the advocacy group Oceana found that seafood fraud – the mislabeling or misrepresentation of seafood – by restaurants and grocery stores in the Boston area was rampant. Using DNA testing, the Globe found that 48% of the seafood it sampled from restaurants and stores was not the species that was advertised; Oceana found fraud in 18% of its DNA tests, which were limited to seafood from supermarkets. Subsequent investigations across the country have made similar discoveries, culminating in Oceana’s nationwide report released in February 2013. These results confirm the fears expressed by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a 2009 report that the Federal government was not adequately addressing seafood fraud, especially with respect to the 91% of seafood that the U.S. imports. This lack of oversight can harm the health and finances of consumers, and negatively affect the profitability of U.S. fishermen who play by the rules. Ensuring that seafood is traceable from sea to sale requires improved coordination of Federal agency activities, and new authorities to hold violators accountable.

Following the Boston Globe investigation, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) sent letters to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) inquiring about their oversight of seafood fraud. The FDA has the lead responsibility for seafood safety and seafood labeling at the Federal level, but NOAA also has significant expertise and resources that could be utilized to address safety concerns. The FTC is responsible for regulating whether seafood is being truthfully advertised. The responses to these letters indicated that the agencies could more effectively work together to combat the issue of seafood fraud. Further, a 2011 GAO report found that Federal agencies are failing to coordinate appropriately to ensure that seafood imported into the U.S. meets basic requirements for safe human consumption. FDA and NOAA had pledged to improve coordination in a 2009 memorandum of understanding, but the GAO report made clear that the agencies have taken little action to implement the agreement.

GAO estimates that only 2% of seafood imported into the U.S. is inspected at all, and that only 0.001% is inspected for seafood fraud. This puts U.S. consumers at risk of being swindled and sickened. It also puts U.S. fishermen at risk of having the prices they receive for their catch undercut by inferior and falsely labeled foreign product. Government reports and outside investigations have made clear that we need to address this issue, leading to the development of H.R. XX, the Safety And Fraud Enforcement for Seafood Act (SAFE Seafood Act).

SAFE Seafood Act
Section by Section Analysis:

Section 1

– Lists the short title as the “Safety And Fraud Enforcement for Seafood Act.”

Section 2

– Requires the Secretary of Commerce (Commerce) and the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to execute a memorandum of understanding to improve interagency cooperation on seafood safety between NOAA and FDA.

– Ensures inspections conducted to determine seafood safety also look for seafood fraud.

– Establishes procedures for increasing the number of local, state, and federal officials authorized to conduct seafood fraud and safety inspections.

– Requires development of a publicly available list of exporters by country who violate Federal seafood safety laws.

Section 3

– Requires HHS, in consultation with Commerce, to update and improve its list of standardized names for seafood and ensure that the list is accurate and publicly available.

– Requires data already required to be collected by U.S. fishermen on species, production method (gear type, farmed or wild), geographic catch area, and weight or number of fish to stay with the seafood through processing, distribution, and sale, and requires equivalent data to accompany imported seafood.

– Allows the Secretary of Commerce to refuse shipments of fraudulent seafood from foreign exporters, and requires the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of Health and Human
Services to coordinate on sanctioning exporters.

– Ensures inspections conducted to determine seafood safety also look for seafood fraud.

– Requires development of a publicly available list of exporters by country that violate Federal seafood fraud laws.

Section 4

– Gives state attorneys general the authority to bring a civil action on behalf of a state’s residents to enjoin fraud and/or receive damages.

Section 5

– Requires a biennial joint report from Commerce and HHS on progress made in ensuring seafood safety and preventing seafood fraud.

Section 6

-Protection of stronger state seafood safety and fraud laws.

Section 7

– Definitions: Seafood fraud means the mislabeling or misrepresentation of seafood in violation of the Act or other Federal laws and regulations.

 
Summary of the major changes to the bill:

SAFE Seafood Act – Changes from 112th to 113th

After the introduction of the Safety And Fraud Enforcement for Seafood Act (H.R. 6200) in the 112th Congress, Rep. Markey worked with the fishing industry, conservation and consumer groups, and the affected federal agencies (FDA and NOAA) to improve the bill language in advance of reintroduction in the 113th Congress. While the general principles and mechanisms remain intact, the following significant changes were made:

– Section 2 dealing with seafood safety was revised to more fully recognize FDA’s existing authority and new responsibilities under the Food Safety Modernization Act, especially with respect to refusal of admission of seafood based on safety concerns.

– Section 2 was also amended to provide more flexibility for FDA in determining how to incorporate data obtained through inspection of seafood by other federal, state and local agencies into their seafood safety inspection program.

– Section 3 dealing with seafood traceability was revised to require more specific information about where imported fish was caught or grown.

– Section 3 was also revised to ‘hold harmless’ from penalties any domestic seller of seafood that passes along a product that was misrepresented to that seller, provided that the seller can produce the original fraudulent documentation that came with the seafood shipment.

– Section 3 was further amended to clarify the roles of NOAA and FDA in refusing imports of seafood found to be fraudulent.

– Finally, Section 3 was changed to make clear that it required updating of FDA’s List of Standardized Names for Seafood, rather than the creation of a new and separate list.

 

Read the Boston Globe story "Mislabeled fish a national problem"

 

 

March 1, 2013 — Jane Lubchenco’s tenure as NOAA administrator ended Thursday, three years, 11 months and nine days after it began, with the groundfishey she promised to save in an apparent death spiral

Her next stop will be Stanford University, which has hired the marine scientist long associated with marine protected areas and other concepts to limit or control fishing for the spring semester to be the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service.

No successor or acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been named.

In the Obama administration, she delivered on his 2008 campaign promise for “change you can believe in,” but the changes she brought, while audacious in nature — junking the original notion of the wild stocks as commonly held for an allocation of catching rights based on the principle of commodity trading — did not produce the promised results, conservation of the resource and profitability for the participants.

Her appointment brought into authority over the oceans and atmosphere a figure many in the fishing community came to see as an ideologue, and her initiatives triggered angry protests by fishermen and their families, as she moved quickly to institute her program which was predicated on making the still largely locally owned industry more open and available to investors.

The first protest, outside NOAA’s Northeast headquarters in Gloucester’s Blackburn Industrial Park in October 2009, featured a effigy of Lubchenco lynching fishermen. In February 2010, up to 5,000 fishermen and supporters gathered at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., united for the first time in history by common concerns. A third protest followed in D.C. a year later.

 

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times

 

 

March 1, 2013 — A day after the NBC Nightly News highlighted the economic disaster facing small fishing boat businesses in Gloucester, Congressman John Tierney once again called on his colleagues Thursday to support disaster relief legislation for the Northeast groundfishery.

Congress stripped $150 million in disaster assistance from a Senate approved $60 billion Hurricane Sandy relief bill at the end of the 112th Congress. Despite having acknowledged the disaster in a legal finding declared by the Department of Commerce last September, the Obama administration has not advocated publicly for disaster assistance to address the issue.

“As public outcry intensifies, I urge my colleagues to join me in pressing for relief for our fishermen,” said Tierney in a prepared statement. “The fishing industry is one of the oldest and most relied upon in the country, and it is facing near catastrophe. The Department of Commerce has recognized this and designated fisheries disasters in Massachusetts and several other states last year. Yet, sufficient relief for our fishermen still has not been provided.

”Fishermen in my district and across the country deserve better,” Tierney said.

In a letter to his colleagues, Tierney wrote about his bill, identified as H.R. 799

”Each year, the federal government receives funds collected from tariffs on imported fish products,” Tierney wrote. “The Saltonstall-Kennedy Act of 1954 directed that a percentage of these funds go to benefit and improve our domestic fishing industry. Since then, an ever-increasing amount of those monies has been inappropriately redirected to fund the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

 

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

 

WASHINGTON — March 1, 2013 — The following announcement was made today by Northeast Fisheries Science Center Director Bill Karp during a meeting with the commercial fishing industry and others at the Maine Fishermen's Forum in Rockland, Maine:

We know the cost of at-sea monitoring remains a serious concern for the groundfish industry given the condition of stocks and commensurate low quotas for next fishing year.  We recognize this will be an exceptionally difficult year for fishermen so we are working on a plan to cover as much of these costs as possible at NOAA.  While this is our intent, we cannot definitively commit to this because of the high degree of uncertainty due to the potential effects of sequestration and the lack of a FY13 budget.

We are projecting that if effort goes down next year, NOAA will be able to fund at-sea monitoring in the groundfishery.  If effort remains the same, NOAA will fund at-sea monitoring but can only do this by using funds currently slated for research to develop electronic monitoring in the Northeast. This funding choice may delay this important effort.

We understand that fishermen need to be able to plan for how much of the monitoring costs they are expected to pay next year.  That is why we are communicating our intentions at this time despite the significant budget uncertainty the agency currently faces.  Sequestration or other major changes which might be enacted in the FY13 budget could significantly reduce our ability to cover all of these monitoring costs.

This will not apply to certain exemptions requested by sectors that require 100 percent at-sea monitoring coverage. NOAA is working to ensure that there is a way for fishing operations to obtain and pay for required monitoring this coming fishing year, as well as in the future as monitoring costs are transitioned to the industry.

 

 

February 28, 2013 — NBC Nightly News highlights need for disaster relief and improved scientific research as Gulf of Maine cod catch drastically reduced

The following was released by the office of Congressman John Tierney.

Washington, DC –February 28, 2013 — As attention and outrage continue to grow over the devastating impact that new catch share rules will have on Northeast fisheries, Congressman John Tierney (D-MA) called on his colleagues throughout the country to support necessary disaster relief for the fishing industry. Last night, NBC Nightly News highlighted the economic disaster facing small fishing boats in Gloucester, MA in a segment called “Death knell for cod fishermen?”, which includes interviews with local fishermen who are losing their businesses, homes, and livelihood. Along with various ports in Massachusetts, eight other states received 2012 emergency disaster declarations for their fishing communities and are still waiting for the disaster assistance they deserve.
 
“As public outcry intensifies, I urge my colleagues to join me is pressing for relief for our fishermen. The fishing industry is one of the oldest and most relied upon in the country, and it is facing near catastrophe. The Department of Commerce has recognized this and designated fisheries disasters in Massachusetts and several other states last year. Yet, sufficient relief for our fishermen still has not been provided. This is unacceptable. Fishermen in my district and across the country deserve better,” Congressman Tierney said.
 
 
Congressman Tierney’s bipartisan Fisheries Disaster Relief and Research Investment Act would:
 
– Allocate the funds directed to the Department of Commerce under the Saltonstall-Kennedy Act only in Fiscal Year 2014 to be used for assistance to those states affected by fishery disasters declared by the Secretary of Commerce in calendar year 2012. (While the specific amount that would be generated in 2014 is not yet known, it is worth noting that in Fiscal Year 2013 the amount directed to Commerce under Saltonstall-Kennedy was $124 million; and in Fiscal Year 2012, it was $109 million)

– Beginning in Fiscal Year 2015, the bill would direct those same funds to research, and put fisheries research, monitoring, and data collection in the hands of regional management councils by requiring multi-stakeholder regional committees, authorized by the bill and appointed by the nation’s eight fishery management councils, to develop plans to identify priorities for investment in each region. The committees would use those priorities to evaluate and recommend grants for funding.
 
The Saltonstall-Kennedy Act of 1954 ensured that a percentage of tariffs on imported fish products go to benefit and improve our domestic fishing industry.  Since then, these funds have been inappropriately redirected to the operations fund at NOAA, depriving our nation’s fisheries of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

Read Congressman Tierney’s letter to his colleagues

 

 

February 26, 2013—Senator Mark Begich (D-AK), Representative Doc Hastings (R-WA), and Eric Schwaab, speaking for the Administration, will be featured speakers at the much-anticipated Managing Our Nation’s Fisheries 3 conference, held May 7-9, 2013 at the Mayflower Renaissance Hotel in Washington, D.C.

“There is tremendous interest building for the Managing Our Nation’s Fisheries conference,” said Dr. Donald McIsaac, Executive Director of the host Pacific Fishery Management Council. “This excellent lineup of featured
speakers enhances the focus and relevance of the conference.”

Senator Begich, Chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Oceans and Fisheries, is noted for his proactive leadership in sustaining the billion-dollar seafood and recreational benefits of the fish-rich State of Alaska.
Congressman Hastings, Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, is well-known as a steady advocate for responsible fishery management and the jobs and economic benefits that flow from properly managed fisheries. Mr. Schwaab, acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Conservation and Management and former head of the National Marine Fisheries Service, is a passionate advocate for fish in the Obama Administration, credited with many successes in balancing environmental protection and robust fisheries at the regulatory level. This conference follows up on the highly successful Managing Our Nation’s Fisheries conferences held in 2003  and 2005.

Managing Our Nation’s Fisheries 3 will focus on how the concepts, policies, and practice of fishery sustainability can be advanced to a higher level. The discussion will address Magnuson-Stevens Act reauthorization issues, as well as adjustments to current management that do not require legislation to implement. The conference will provide a forum for information exchange and an opportunity to hear a wide range of perspectives on the sustainability of fish stocks and ecosystem functions, and the fishing communities that depend on them.

The conference will be organized into three sessions focusing on improving fishery management, advancing ecosystem-based decision making, and providing for fishing community stability. The conference will specifically address nine hot topic focus areas that represent opportunities for changes to how marine fisheries are currently managed.

Registration for the conference is now open. Attendance is limited to 600 people; there are still seats available at this time.

The conference is convened by the eight Regional Fishery Management Councils and hosted by the Pacific Fishery Management Council of Portland, Oregon.

View a list of all conference speakers here

Visit the conference website here