Opinion

October 31, 2012 — If you were at a policy level in NOAA, the Department of Commerce, the Democratic Party or the Obama Administration, would you release the second Swartwood report, possibly focusing on even more enforcement abuses against independent fishermen or would you sit on the report until after the election?

Fact: Senator Scott Brown (Republican) and candidate Elizabeth Warren (Democrat) are in a close race for one of the two Massachusetts seats in the United States Senate.

Fact: A majority in the United States Senate, which is now in the hands of the Democratic Party, is considered by many pundits to be “up for grabs” in the rapidly approaching election, and the outcome in Massachusetts will be critical in determining which party controls the Senate – and the United States Congress – starting in 2013.

Fact: Senator Scott Brown has been an ardent supporter of the commercial fishing industry and has been particularly outspoken about an ongoing investigation of corruption at the highest levels of the enforcement branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Fact: New Englanders in general and residents of Massachusetts in particular tend to be extremely supportive of their fishing communities and of the fishing heritage that has played such a significant role in shaping the character of their coastline.

Fact: A 514 page report on the follow-up investigation by Special Master Charles Swartwood of NOAA enforcement abuses of fishermen and fishing associated businesses centered in New England and primarily in Massachusetts was completed and delivered to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce in March of 2012.

Fact: In spite of strong bipartisan Congressional prodding to make the report public, prodding in which Senator Scott Brown has assumed a leadership role, (Acting) Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank has refused to do so. To her credit Elizabeth Warren, his opponent, has been seeking the release of the report as well.

Fact: Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s brother, Cameron Kerry, is general counsel of the Department of Commerce.

Suppose the follow-up report of Special Master Swartwood had been made public by the Secretary of Commerce in a timely fashion and suppose it to be at least as damaging to the reputation and to the credibility of the Department and of NOAA as was the original investigation – necessitating that the Department pay $650,000 in “reparations” to fishing industry members who were victimized by NOAA, a supposed reworking of how NOAA enforcement operated, and a public apology by then Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and NOAA head Jane Lubchenco to the victims of an out-of-control federal agency? There would have been a clamor in the media, the issue would have been front and center for a few days, and by now it would have been forgotten.

That didn’t happen and, at least initially, it’s easy to understand why it didn’t. John Bryson, who had replaced Gary Locke as Secretary of Commerce, resigned in June of this year after an episode of automobile accidents and seemingly strange behavior, and Ms. Blank took over as Acting Secretary. It’s hard to imagine that this rapid and perhaps somewhat strained turn-around in leadership didn’t have a profound temporary effect on business as usual in the USDOC.

The extended delay since then in making the report public, even in a severely redacted form, has been explained by a Department of Commerce spokesperson as necessitated by Secretary Blank’s request “to gather more information regarding issues identified in the second Swartwood report.”

That’s almost half a year of gathering “more information.”

In the meantime the race for the Massachusetts Senate seat between Senator Brown and Ms. Warren was heating up.

So, if you were at a policy level in NOAA, the Department of Commerce, the Democratic Party or the Obama Administration, what would you do? Would you release the report, possibly focusing on even more enforcement abuses against independent fishermen and small fishing related businesses by NOAA law enforcement (the follow-up report is reportedly twice the length of the initial report), making it appear as if they were victims of an Obama Administration that has been campaigning on the idea that it is pro-small business and pro-middle class and were likewise entitled to another embarrassing public apology from the Secretary of Commerce and the head of NOAA, or would you sit on the report until after the election?

I think it’s safe to assume that Senator Scott would do all that he could to insure that the report got all of the attention it deserved, and rightly so. Could it help him to a victory in the election? If it’s as close a race as it’s reported to be, why wouldn’t it? Could that seat determine which party has a majority in the Senate and the entire Congress? You betcha!

But what of the people who have been identified as additional victims of NOAA enforcement (I’m assuming here that Special Master Swartwood didn’t put together a 500 page report based on the fact that there were no additional victims)? Like many of the victims identified in the first Swartwood report, their lives have been – at best – on hold since their encounters with an out-of-control federal agency. Several of them have had businesses which it took them a lifetime to build wantonly destroyed. How many of the second round of victims are still in a politically induced economic and personal limbo? 

And what of any additional NOAA employees who were found to have engaged in still more egregious abuses of their sworn offices or of those employees who allowed them to engage in those abuses (ditto the 500 pages)? Are they still and will they continue to be employed by the Department of Commerce, collecting their taxpayer-provided paychecks and using their taxpayer provided benefits?

While it’s hard to imagine that the future governance of the United States could hinge on the delayed release of a single report, if the delay of the release of that report was due to high-level political interference, it surely should. Politics is politics and justice is justice, and a large part of what has made the United States the country – and the ideal – that it is is the stringent separation of the two. I hate to think that somewhere high up in the Obama Administration a line has been crossed, but it’s hard to think that it hasn’t and it’s even harder to think that it’s once again at the expense of hard working and law abiding members of the fishing industry.

 

 

October 25, 2012 — Preserving an important industry like fishing while also developing strategies for protecting our natural resources represents the ultimate reflection of Congressman Morrill's vision for a public university — and the mission of the University of Massachusetts.

It was 150 years ago this year that President Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant Act, the landmark legislation that led to the creation of most of our top public universities and to the birth of the University of Massachusetts only a year later.

The Morrill Act, signed during the darkest days of the Civil War, opened the door to higher education for all in this country, directing us permanently away from a system where only those with great means could follow their dream to higher education.

The goal of Congressman Justin Morrill's bill was to create a national system of public colleges that would transform individual lives and also make our communities, our states and our nation smarter and more competitive. The bill was about innovation, impact and change. A year later, it led to the establishment of the Massachusetts Agriculture College, the academic seed that has grown into the five-campus University of Massachusetts system.

All of that — the noble goal of the bill, the hopes its supporters must surely have harbored — came back to me this month as I traveled the state on a 500-mile bus tour to see exactly what that landmark bill had accomplished in a century-and-a-half. It is no stretch at all to say that what Congressman Morrill started led directly to the innovations I saw at the UMass Cranberry Research Station in Wareham, at the UMass Dartmouth School of Marine Science and Technology in New Bedford and, most strikingly, in a packed auditorium in Dartmouth where nearly 300 students put Morrill's vision for full-participation democracy into action as they watched and dissected a presidential debate.

The century-old University of Massachusetts Cranberry Research Station has been a key to keeping Massachusetts' most important agricultural crop competitive and profitable — a source of jobs and revenues for thousands of people in the southeastern part of the state. Senate President Therese Murray, UMass Chairman Henry M. Thomas III and I saw firsthand the work being done by entomologists, hydrologists and botanists. The Research Station has done exactly what Morrill envisioned: It has worked tirelessly on innovations to grow more crops, preserve water, fight disease, create a valuable food source and help ensure the industry remains a vital source of quality jobs.

While the cranberry is at the heart of Massachusetts agriculture, fishing is tied to the very soul of the state. Where else but in Massachusetts would a carved codfish hang from the ceiling of the Statehouse?

At SMAST, UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Divina Grossman, New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell and I met with the men and women at the forefront of one of the most important research projects in the country right now, as they work to preserve an industry threatened by declining fish stocks and a changing ocean. Research is being done in several key areas, including ocean physics, fisheries science and management, and fish stock assessment — and the work and advancements in these areas is being watched nationally for the simple reason that it will greatly impact the future direction of the fishing industry.

 

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard Times

 

 

October 21, 2012 — I am working with other New England officials to ensure our fishermen receive much-needed economic relief …. I am also urging NMFS to improve the science behind their fish-stock assessments and to compensate fishermen for the costs incurred by the monitoring required to comply with regulations.

New Hampshire fishermen got a piece of good news last month when the National Marine Fisheries Service announced it would delay until winter a two-month fishing closure of coastal waters in the Gulf of Maine.

The closure had been put in place to help protect harbor porpoises accidently caught by fishermen. But had the closure happened in the fall, it would have been devastating for New Hampshire fishermen, who rely on fish caught during those months to make much of their annual income. Despite this helpful reprieve, the New Hampshire fishing industry, so important to our coastal economy and to the character of our state, is still struggling to survive.

In recent years, New Hampshire fishermen have seen their incomes decline as federal regulations designed to end overfishing have limited the amount of fish they can catch. To make matters worse, these often-onerous regulations haven't helped the cod population rebound as expected. In fact, a 2011 scientific study by the National Marine Fisheries Service found so few codfish in the Gulf of Maine that the quota for the upcoming fishing year must be set extremely low — so low that it jeopardizes the survival of New Hampshire's fishing industry.

Fishing is one of the Granite State's oldest industries. It generates $106 million in economic activity and supports 5,000 full- and part-time jobs here. Yet what makes our state's fishing industry unique also makes it vulnerable. New Hampshire fishermen depend on cod more than those in any other New England state; it's more than 90 percent of their revenue. Our fishing businesses are almost all family-owned and use small day boats, fishing close to the shore. Most do not have the boats or equipment to catch other deep-sea species to compensate for the lack of cod. They do not have the profit margins of larger fishing companies, so a couple of bad years can easily put our state's fishermen out of business.

 

Read the full story at Seacoast Online

 

 

October 20, 2012 — Last week’s $366 million settlement with a company for its pollution of New Bedford Harbor, the largest in the three decades of the nation’s Superfund toxic cleanup program, is both something to be hailed and an unsettling symbol of the extent of prior decades of dumping in the name of industrial progress.

The money will come from AVX Corp., a South Carolina-based electronics components manufacturer. From the 1940s through the 1970s, AVX, then known as Aerovox, was the primary leaker of carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, into the Acushnet River, which empties into New Bedford’s harbor. Two decades ago, AVX paid $66 million in cleanup costs but the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Commonwealth reserved the right to ask for more money if that did not prove sufficient. It did not.

A 2004 settlement netted $100 million from several companies, including AVX, to supplement the $15 million and $1.5 million the federal government and the state, respectively, had been spending per year for the cleanup. But New Bedford was still looking at decades of limited use of its harbor because of the pollution.

Now, the EPA says this latest settlement will slash the cleanup schedule from the original 40 years to seven. It says fishing may be possible in a decade.

Local environmental groups, including the Coalition for Buzzards Bay and the Hands Across the River Coalition, are skeptical. This is the last chance for the government to collect from AVX, and harbor advocates say the EPA has consistently underestimated the amount of money needed to clean up the waters surrounding the city.

 

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

 

 

GLOUCESTER, Mass. — October 17, 2012 — Congressman John Tierney is certainly right to continue to step up the push urging Acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank to release the extended special investigator’s report citing 66 case studies of likely enforcement abuses by NOAA officials on the fishing industry, as he did in a letter last week.

Yet he, Senators Scott Brown and John Kerry and other Massachusetts federal lawmakers should be well aware by now that neither Blank, NOAA chief administrator Jane Lubchenco, or — therefore, by extension — the Obama White House gives two hoots what any lawmaker says or does regarding the second report culled and filed seven months ago now by retired judge and former Massachusetts Ethics Commission chief Charles B. Swartwood III. And it’s clear that Blank and the ever-defiant Lubchenco have no intention of releasing a report without doctoring it — an effort that shows through Blank’s response that Commerce staffers are gathering  “more information regarding issues” cited in the 554-page report. So it’s past time that our federal delegation take an action that should have been pushed long ago — to seek a full-fledged criminal investigation and a hearing body that can, with proper subpoena power, get to the bottom of these excessive policing issues once and for all.

Simply put, the shielding of this report — initially commissioned by Commerce’s own Inspector General Todd Zinser, and carried out with taxpayer dollars — has become an obstruction of justice. And as Tierney himself indicated in pressing for the report last week, justice delayed is indeed justice denied.

Any such probe would likely require a push from Kerry, whose Senate Commerce Committee would be the one to call for such an action. And that could be telling in its own right. While Kerry has touted himself as being on the side of our fishermen, he remains the only member of the state delegation tied to coastal issues who has not called for Lubchenco’s ouster. And his staff noted that, while it’s important for the report to be released promptly, it’s also important that it be “comprehensive” — as if Swartwood’s 554 pages were somehow not sufficient without Commerce and/or NOAA administrative input.

Obstruction of justice and contempt of Congress — as Lubchenco, especially, has shown for three years — are serious matters. And it is only through a fully independent congressional probe that Kerry and his Senate committee colleagues can now convey that these “public servants” are not above the law. An independent probe is long overdue.

 

Read the full story in the Gloucester Times 

 

 

 

 

October 12, 2012 — The most dangerous American fishery is in the Northeast, not in Alaska. From 2000 to 2009, workers in the Northeast's groundfish fishery, which includes cod and haddock, were 37 times more likely to die on the job than a police officer. That's why the Massachusetts Fishing Partnership is offering free survival training for commercial fishermen from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Oct. 19 at Stage Harbor in Chatham.

The hands-on training will be conducted by Coast Guard-certified fishing vessel safety instructors. The training includes onboard firefighting, man-overboard procedures, flooding and pump operations, flares and EPIRBs, survival suit deployment, life raft equipment, helicopter hoist procedures and first aid.

The Visiting Nurse Association and the Chatham Health Department will also offer free tetanus and flu shots as well as Tdap and pneumonia vaccines for attendees and their families from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Such training and education are critical. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, NPR News and WBUR in Boston recently found that commercial fishing in the Northeast operates in a cultural tradition and regulatory environment that thwarts safety improvements.

In 1988, Congress required fishing boats to carry lifeboats, personal flotation devices and other safety equipment. But unlike inspections of passenger ferries and other commercial vessels, fishing boats are not regularly inspected by the Coast Guard.

Part of the problem is the culture. Fishermen are tough. Working in an industry against the caprices of weather and an unforgiving ocean requires ruggedness, individuality, ingenuity and perseverance. But toughness sometimes works against them when it comes time to ask for help or training.

In Alaska, a sharper focus on safety reduced the number of fatalities in the fishing industry there. In recent years, fishermen, state regulators and the Coast Guard have worked together to make fishing less deadly.

 

Read the full editorial from the Cape Cod Times at the New Bedford Standard Times

 

 

October 9, 2012 — "New Jersey Newsroom" website gets it all wrong on East Coast scallop fishery.

The New Jersey Newsroom website was formed by journalists and ex-journalists, primarily from the Newark (New Jersey) Star Ledger, with collective experience adding up to “over 1,000 years.” On their site those journalists wrote “our contributing writers, driven by passion and purpose, contribute as volunteers who believe in the cause…. NewJerseyNewsroom.com's goal is to provide high-quality news for New Jerseyans and not just about New Jerseyans. We will do our best to gather all the stories you want, regardless of the original sources.”

Impressive sounding, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, at least judging by a recent article on the scallop fishery off the East coast, the content on the site doesn’t come close to living up to its billing. With particular reference to the “contribute as vol-unteers” quote, an article posted on their website on September 27 is about as good a demonstration I’ve seen of the old adage “you get what you pay for.”

In Jaws for hire: Fewer sharks mean fewer scallops at the Jersey Shore, Robert Kinkead came to some startling conclusions and yet another undeserved and inaccurate indictment of commercial fishing based on 1) a graphical depiction of a marine foodweb from an article referenced in the current edition of Scientific American, Ecosystems on the brink, and 2) his wife not being able to order scallops at Poor Henry’s restaurant (in Montvale, NJ) because, as related by the server, they didn’t have any that day.

From this beginning he crafted an article in just under 800 words that laid out a plausible sounding argument for the fact that an increase in the price and a decrease in the supply of scallops, as so convincingly demonstrated by his wife’s failure to have her first choice entrée at Poor Henry’s, was due to the unregulated slaughter of oceanic sharks.

Citing the Star Ledger He writes “it’s a near-innocuous business story.  Good news about fishing off Cape May, wherein that port has been named the second most prosperous on the East Coast because rising scallop prices have offset diminishing catches of shellfish.”

But, he continues “increased revenues are due to the growing scarcity of scallops, in turn attributable to a complex change in the predatory food chain off the coast of New Jersey.” The argument is so plausible, in fact, that as of this writing it has accumulated 153 Facebook “likes.” 

Starting out with Scientific American, the foodweb that impressed Mr. Kinkead was derived from re-search reported in 2007 and 2009 that purportedly showed that a decline in scallop stocks was attributable to a decline in large sharks due to overfishing. (What else would we expect from Scientific American?)

When this research was first published in 2007, there were a few problems with it (see my 2007 National Fisherman  column Of sharks and scallops and questionable science at http://www.fishnet-usa.com/natfish_sharks_rays.htm). Regardless of the validity of the conclusions reached by the team of researchers, however, the research very clearly dealt with East coast bay scallops, Argopecten irradians. These are small scallops that, as their name clearly indicates, live in estuaries. 

Getting back to Poor Henry’s and poor Mrs. Kinkead, who had to settle for her second choice for dinner, a visit to the restaurant’s website shows that the scallops served there are “Bedford scallops.”

As Mr. Kinkhead accurately relates in his article, the value of landings by commercial fishermen in New Bedford, Massachusetts has led all other commercial fishing ports in the U.S. for quite a few years, and the reason for this is because of the concentration of scallop vessels there. Hence, I assume, Poor Henry’s geographically focused menu items.

Mr. Kinkead informs us that “according to Wikipedia, by far the largest wild scallop fishery in the world is the Atlantic sea scallop (Placopecten magellanicus) found off the northeastern United States and eastern Canada.”

The scallops landed in New Bedford, Cape May, Barnegat Light and other fishing ports on the East coast the scallops that make up the most valuable fishery in the U.S. are those very same sea scallops.

Not surprisingly, sea scallops spend all of their time – from egg to adult – in the ocean.

Then he writes “according to the (National) Marine Fisheries Service, this wonderful resource is in sad decline.”

Just how much of a decline is the sea scallop fishery experiencing? The below chart, taken from the Na-tional Marine Fisheries Service commercial landings online database, shows that landings have been remarkably stable for the last decade. Reductions in allowable landings are currently being considered for fishing years 2013 and 2014, but the fishery is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring.

East Coast Sea Scallop Landings
Year    Metric tons    Value
2001    21,053.10    $172,582,812
2002    23,891.70    $202,092,361
2003    25,386.80    $229,096,518
2004    29,079.30    $320,038,726
2005    25,685.20    $432,514,317
2006    26,768.20    $384,758,496
2007    26,512.80    $386,044,356
2008    24,215.30    $370,057,384
2009    26,178.90    $374,022,276
2010    25,876.90    $450,965,800
2011    26,618.00    $580,907,132

 
In fact, the most recent surveys (see New Survey of Ocean Floor Finds Juvenile Scallops are Abundant in Mid-Atlantic at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/press_release/2012/SciSpot/SS1208/) have shown that sea scallop recruitment this year was at or near the maximum recorded off the Mid-Atlantic States.

The northeast sea scallop population, at least in terms of large, marketable scallops, appears to be lower that it has been, but measures will be put in place to protect the recruits in the mid-Atlantic, the opening of scallop-rich areas off New England that have been closed to scalloping is being considered, and any reduction in scallop landings will be of a temporary nature.

While Mr. Kinkead did manage to get the part about rising scallop prices right, they are higher than they have been because, most knowledgeable people agree, of the rapidly developing middle class in China and the corresponding worldwide increase in the demand for high quality seafood. They prices have been elevated for the last several years, and as the above chart shows, there has been no decline in the harvest up until 2011. This is a definite contradiction of his “increased (scallop) revenues are due to the growing scarcity of scallops.”

The Scientific American food web dealt with bay scallops and the supposed impact that shark overfishing had on their abundance. Confusedly, Mr. Kinkead supports his thesis that shark overfishing has brought about his “sad decline” of sea scallops, not bay scallops. There is no relationship between the abundance of bay scallops and the abundance of sea scallops. There is no relationship between the price of bay scallops and the price of sea scallops. There is no relationship between the abundance – or lack thereof – of large sharks and the abundance of sea scallops, and there is no relationship between the abundance of cownose rays – the assumed predators on bay scallops and the assumed prey of the supposedly missing large sharks – and the abundance of sea scallops.

As a relevant aside, the fisheries for large sharks in U.S. waters has been so stringently over-regulated that the commercial fishery has all but disappeared. This is one of those bothersome facts that Mr. Kinkead neglected to mention. Another is that the practice of finning sharks, which he certainly didn’t neglect, has been illegal in U.S. fisheries since the passage of the Shark Finning Prohibition Act in 2000.

But he has provided one of the best illustrations I’ve come across of a little knowledge going a long way. Unfortunately it’s going in a host of completely wrong directions.

Other than as a prime example of inadequate research and even more inadequate fact checking, what’s the big deal about this article, and the dozens of others of similar slant that get “published” on the web each year? Do a Google search on “sharks scallops” and on the first page of results is a link to this article. It’s on the first page for “scallops New Jersey” as well. Search on “Poor Henry’s scallops” and it’s the second listed link. How far and wide will the misinformation in this article spread, and for how many years?

To give you an idea, there is an article on summer flounder (aka fluke) that I posted on the New Jersey Fishing website (http://www.fishingnj.org) in 1999. I haven’t done a thing with the page in the intervening 13 years. That page was visited 1586 times in June of this year. The search strings that got these visitors there was some variation of “fluke fishing.” Assuming that the number of visitors has increased steadily over 13 years, the average per month would be around 700 people. In the years that page has been up on the order of 120,000 people have visited it – a page on a website that has not been promoted for over a decade. That’s the curse, of the internet. Once it’s posted it’s there forever, regardless of how close to reality it actually is.

Needless to say, as soon as I read Mr. Kinkead’s article I posted a comment on the web page and sent a message to him via the “contact us” page. In my message to him I invited him to call me. He hasn’t, and the article is still on the New Jersey Newsroom website as it was written, blemishes and all.

I’ll let you know if that changes. But in the meantime, it’s incumbent on everyone in or connected to the commercial and recreational fishing industries to let the publishers, editors, producers, webmasters, writers, bloggers, journalists, etc. know when anything is broadcast, printed or posted that unfairly and inac-curately faults fishing. Fishermen have been the victims of this undeserved assault for over a decade, and it’s well past time that we started to collectively do something about it.

 

 

October 7, 2012 — Several recent developments give us hope that the tide is turning and that instead of fighting, fishermen and scientists will begin to work together in a sane, responsible manner.

In a recent interview with Seacoast Sunday, Bullard said fishermen and scientists see the ocean very differently and "they speak different languages." "There's an urgent need to repair that relationship," he said.

He said fishermen and scientists have to stop viewing each other as stereotypes: the former as greedy and irresponsible and the latter as ill-informed and clueless. "All of those stereotypes are so handy and every one of them does a disservice and gets in the way of working together," he said. "There are tough decisions in our future. There is pain that is going to happen. We're going to have to face the tough decisions and make them."

In an interview with our sister paper, the Standard-Times in New Bedford, Mass., Bullard said: "It seemed to me that it's a real shame that the issues being faced were not being faced intelligently by any party." Not NOAA, not Congress, not fishermen, not environmentalists. Communication was by lawsuit. "I think we can do a better job," he said. "I'm not a biologist. They didn't hire me because I know the science of fish populations. But I can communicate. I know how to listen. I have the intestinal fortitude."

Bullard will create an environment of mutual respect that should lead to far more rational decision making and we encourage him in his efforts.

 

Read the full story in the Portsmouth Herald

 

 

October 5, 2012 — In light of the recent disaster declaration for the New England groundfishery, fishermen and managers need to begin planning for the future of this important industry to ensure that affordable opportunities exist for young fishermen as groundfish stocks rebuild.

Let's fast-forward, for a moment, to when populations of cod and haddock are commercially abundant off Maine's coast once again.

What will this mean for local fishermen?

The shocking, short answer is that most Maine fishermen won't have the rights to be able to catch those fish.

While there's been a lot written about the high abundance and low price of lobsters this year, one thing that hasn't been discussed is that most of the fishermen in this state don't have the federal permits required to catch anything other than lobster.

Over the past 25 years, Maine has lost its fisheries diversity — boats of different sizes, from different ports fishing with a variety of gear types for a variety of species.

The other key component of coastal fisheries is versatility — the ability to fish for multiple species throughout the year, or from one year to the next.

Both diversity and versatility are extremely important to the health of our fisheries economy, the lifeblood of Maine's coastal communities.

That's where Penobscot East Resource Center's New Entrants Project comes in.

Penobscot East Resource Center is a nonprofit organization committed to fostering marine stewardship at the community level.

Through our projects, we aim to secure a healthy future for coastal fishing communities.

 

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

 

 

October 4, 2012 — The world's waters are dangerously overfished, threatening the health and livelihood of millions across the planet.

A new study from consulting firm California Environmental Associates, part of which appeared in the journal Science last week, estimates that “over 40 percent of fisheries have crashed or are overfished, producing economic losses in excess of $50 billion per year.”

If you’ve heard more encouraging numbers before now, that’s because these new figures include estimates of what’s happening to unmonitored stocks, from which fishermen draw 80 percent of the world’s harvest, not just those stocks that authorities closely assess. One indication of fishery depletion, the report notes, is that people are spending more effort — traveling farther, sinking more hooks, staying on the water longer — to catch fewer and fewer fish. Unsurprisingly, the problem is worst in middle- and low-income countries, where regulation is more often spottily enforced or nonexistent.

Just because many fisheries are strained, however, doesn’t mean they are beyond repair. At the root of the problem is that too many fishermen face incentives to take too many fish out of the water to secure immediate benefits. With few controls and many boats on the water, captains aren’t punished for pulling in full net after full net, but they do worry that competition will limit their ability to catch as many fish in the future. Changing those expectations to reduce overfishing in the short term can result in more fish available for catching in the long term, since fish populations would have time and space to rebound and grow. The study estimates that 64 percent of unmonitored areas could, in fact, provide a bigger harvest on a sustainable basis if properly regulated.

The best way to do that is to give fishermen a direct stake in the long-term health of a stock. U.S. fishery managers, for example, have increasingly introduced “catch share” systems in which regulators divvy up fishing rights among local captains. This system caps the number of particular species that fishermen can catch, and it eliminates the perilous race to fish when authorities limit fishing to just particular seasons.

 

Read the full story at the Washington Post