Opinion

Given the implications for Gloucester and New England's other fishing communities, it's essential that the purported new data showing a dire decline in the Gulf of Maine cod stocks undergo the kind of independent peer review for which it's scheduled beginning later this week.

And to that end, Steve Cadrin, a University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth scientist who worked with the new data, deserves credit for noting that substantial changes can be made during that process.

Let's face it, despite Cadrin's and others' best efforts, NOAA's trawling science and data collection simply does not have a credible recent history. And if the new cod figures can somehow be confirmed, it will mostly just show that NOAA's own 2008 data showing the cod stocks had largely been rebuilt were grossly off as well — in fact, by indicating that the amount of spawning in the Gulf of Maine cod may have somehow been nearly triple the actual amount.

But in the course of this and other reviews — and certainly before the agenda-driven NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco and other fed fishing officials put any new clamps on fishermen and what is arguably New England's most important species — it's absolutely critical that they provide full accounting of the trawling survey, including all aspects of the boat, the netting, the locations of the trawls and other information that have clouded these efforts in the past.

Read the complete editorial in The Gloucester Times

 

 

 

 

 

As mayor of a community that relies upon healthy fisheries to sustain our economy and city services, I find the prospect of a centralized ocean policy that restricts the autonomy of our Regional Fishery Management Councils to be troubling.

For over a year, the Obama administration has been in the process of developing a National Ocean Policy process that appears to reduce the autonomy and authority of our regional councils. This significant shift from a regional council with considerable public input to a massive federal panel that largely excludes the public is being sold as a necessary change to enhance the conservation of our marine resources while coordinating activities that take place at sea. Yet, after spending significant time and resources, officials are still unable to address basic concerns of our commercial fisheries and fishing-dependent communities.

Unalaska/Dutch Harbor has been the most prolific fishing port in the nation for 22 years running. The large scale of our fishing activity and the community's financial stability speaks volumes about the current regional fishery management process and its success, and indicates the current system is working.

Read the complete opinion piece from the Anchorage Daily News.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Atlantic salmon debacle is being repeated on the north Pacific Rim. Overfishing, hydroelectric or irrigation dams, or habitat degradation and fragmentation have destroyed or severely reduced wild Pacific salmon runs in California, Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Japan and Russia. The Columbia River has 3 percent of the salmon run it did when Lewis and Clark visited. In the Sea of Japan, overfishing, dam building and habitat destruction, such as lining streams with concrete to protect rice fields, resulted in a wild salmon return of almost nothing by 1968. Genetically homogeneous hatchery fish, farmed fish and now the prospect of genetically modified salmon, "Frankenfish," are replacing the decimated wild stocks.

Pacific high seas wild salmon fishing is not the free-for-all it was in the Atlantic thanks in part to Section 101, Part B of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. After establishing a 200 mile limit (Part A), the act asserts that the United States claims authority over all anadromous fish "throughout the migratory range of each species." In other words, if they spawn here, they are our fish.

All is not well, however. For example, Bristol Bay Kvichak River sockeye runs dropped significantly after Japan, known to drift 100-mile-long nylon nets in the open ocean, negotiated fishing agreements in Russian waters (beyond the reach of the Magnuson-Stevens Act). Kvichak salmon migrate farther west than any other Alaska salmon, into Russian waters, and some show net marks indicating they have escaped open ocean nets.

Read the complete opinion piece from the Anchorage Daily News.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The collapse of the so-called Jones Amendment amid congressional budgeting for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deals a blow to fishing interests whose plight is now even recognized by Gov. Deval Patrick as a documented "economic disaster" for Massachusetts and New England.

Indeed, the Jones Amendment — an earlier version of which passed the U.S. House last February — would have represented a logical means of getting a handle on NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco's and the Obama administration's job-killing catch share management system.

The amendment, filed by North Carolina Congressman Walter Jones, with the bipartisan backing of Massachusetts Democrats John Tierney and Barney Frank, would have cut off funding for expanding catch shares to any more U.S. fisheries, lest they follow New England's independent fishermen into the black hole of NOAA's Amendment 16, which has already driven 21 of 96 boats out of business last year in Gloucester's fleet alone. And it would have bought more time to assess New England's economic damage.

Read the complete editorial from the Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

The Monterey Bay region’s healthiest fisheries are under attack by extremists. Touting studies with faulty calculations, activists have been trying to persuade federal regulators to massively curtail sardine limits, if not ban fishing outright. But the science doesn’t support their conclusions.

Today’s fishery management of coastal pelagic species along the West Coast portion of the California Current Ecosystem is recognized as the most protective in the world, one of only a few areas that’s deemed sustainable by internationally recognized scientists. This is not a newly implemented strategy. The state and federal government established guidelines more than a decade ago for coastal pelagic species harvested in California and on the West Coast, maintaining at least 75 percent of the fish in the ocean to ensure a resilient core biomass for other marine species.

The sardine protection rate is even higher, at close to 90 percent. In addition, California implemented a network of marine reserves in state waters through the Marine Life Protection Act. Many reserves were established explicitly to protect forage species for other marine life. For example, more than 30 percent of traditional squid harvest grounds are closed in reserve, including important bird rookery and haul-out areas around Año Nuevo and the Farallon Islands.

Does that sound like overfishing to you?

Read the complete opinion piece at The California Wetfish Producers Association.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To the editor:

Given the flap over last week's fishermen's letter regarding catch shares, it seems to me that we should really be having a serious discussion about the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Act.

Its fabricated, unrealistic goals and requirements, expectations and regulations are arbitrary, un-achievable, and in many cases unnecessary. Same goes for the Marine Mammals Protection Act, MPA.

Any engine that drives a vehicle that provides the opportunity for a single entity to "own" 39 percent of an entire stock (Georges Bank winter flounder, just one glaring example) is a runaway and desperately in need of a complete overhaul.

Replacing belts, hoses, pumps and filters won't fix the problem. The overcompensated armchair "mechanics" at NOAA, the councils, and even some of our own organizations, excel at protecting their own interests and paychecks, yet are remarkably reluctant to roll up their sleeves, get their hands greasy — not just their palms! — and rebuild the source of the problem.

Read the complete letter from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Tuesday, two letters about the New England groundfishery, which includes 12 bottom-dwelling species such as cod, haddock, and flounders, landed on desks in Washington, D.C. One focused on the past, the other on the future. But taken together, they illuminate a disconnect among distinct portions of the fishing industry and some of the politicians who represent them. And while one requested declaration of a “fishery resource disaster,” a much larger potential disaster still looms on the horizon.

A letter from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to Secretary of Commerce John Bryson, supported by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Scott Brown (R-MA), as well as by Massachusetts Reps. Barney Frank, John Tierney, Bill Keating, and Ed Markey, cites both a loss of fishing revenue and consolidation of operations in the groundfishery that left 109 fewer vessels fishing for groundfish in 2010 than in 2009. Patrick’s letter focuses particularly on a group of small-boat fishermen operating outside the major ports of New Bedford and Gloucester, and asks for $21 million to alleviate the disaster.

Gov. Patrick blamed this situation squarely on the transition to a new “catch share”-style management system that regulators implemented in the groundfishery in 2010. This system allocates percentages of the total amount of fish that can be caught to fishermen who join collective groups known as “sectors” based on how many fish each fisherman has caught in the past. They are then permitted to trade allocation to others within or outside their sector. The fear is that such trading will result in excessive consolidation of too many fish in too few hands.

Read the complete opinion piece from The Center for American Progress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

While Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is right to make his renewed pitch for a disaster declaration the $21 million will not begin to address the problem.

In fact, fishermen and waterfront business owners in New England and around the nation aren't looking for this level of economic aid, or any other handouts.

Throwing money around won't fix the problems of  the fishing industry. The only thing that will is to have Bryson and Lubchenco concede what fishermen and the lawmakers who back them already know. Lubchenco's job-killing catch share management system, designed by the Environmental Defense Fund for its corporate backers, has been an economic disaster by design, actually aimed at steering more and more fishermen's quota into the hands of larger boats and corporations. And it continues to drive out small, independent boats while creating what amounts to an "agribusiness of the seas," akin to the corporate dominance that long ago swallowed the family farm.

There's really been no need for Bryson or Lubchenco to even wait for the governor's latest disaster declaration request. Indeed, Patrick, using data compiled by the marine science center at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth last year, had made a clear case for such a declaration last year — only to have then-Secretary Gary Locke, now our ambassador to China — fail to stand up to Lubchenco and make the justified call.

Read the complete editorial by The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

16 Nov 2011 – Yesterday, New England’s groundfishermen—from Rhode Island to Maine and from day boat to trip boat—took back their fishery from the politicians. In a letter addressed to the New England Congressional delegation, more than one hundred boat owners stated clearly that what they need most now is stability, profitability, and flexibility.

In one of those moments that have happened too rarely over the past many years, all I can say is  “amen.”

The letter was written in response to politicians’ calls for the dismantling of the sector system for the groundfish fishery, a management system that went into effect in May 2010 and has been lambasted ever since by a small vocal minority of fishermen. While critics of sector management frame the system as if it puts New England’s iconic groundfish fishery in danger of being controlled by only a few colossal corporate boats, the letter reminds the delegation that the entire groundfish fleet in New England is a small business fleet. There are some bigger small businesses and some smaller small businesses, but there is no danger of takeover by factory ships or foreign fleets. The small business owners who signed this letter say that the politicians are putting their well-being at risk by calling for the overturn of the sector system.

These boat owners were likely appreciative of the Massachusetts delegation’s intent in trying to intervene on the industry’s behalf. But in the letter, they demonstrate that they are of one mind that the new sector system is one they can work with, that they want to work with. The outcomes they have been fighting for–stability, profitability, and flexibility–are what groundfish sectors are all about. Almost no one who fished under the old days-at-sea management system wants to return to that failed program.

There are still many groundfish management problems facing the New England Council, and Congress could certainly help resolve them by securing funding to improve fisheries data collection, stock assessments, gear research and development, and to cover the cost of on-board monitors. Senator Kerry has introduced important legislation that may well help support these needed initiatives, and it would be nice to see thoughtful discussion and action on these real needs in Congress.

The message of the unequivocal and unprecedented fishing industry letter sent yesterday is that the problems of the few in the fishery should not be used to paint the management system as fundamentally flawed. With this letter, a diverse group of fishermen publicly defended the sector system and implicitly pushed back strongly against both those who have attempted to repeal it through lawsuits and those Congressional offices that have sought to politicize the fishery. If Washington ends up breaking the regionally-designed sector program by its interventions, then Washington will own the results. But for these fishermen, New England is on the right course. Again, amen.

Read the complete opinion piece from Talking Fish.            

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dozens of commercial fishermen wrote to New England's senators and congressmen pleading them to Catching crab in the Bering Sea can be treacherous. But most people don't realize that it's become a lot less deadly since 2005, when fishing regulations for Bering Sea crab changed dramatically. The old regulations forced fishermen to race against the clock.

To control overfishing, the government set a cap on how much crab fishermen could collectively catch, and we all had to stop when that limit was reached. Some years that meant we had seasons as short as three days. As in a car race, boats used to line up for the minute the season began. 

This intense competition was thrilling but it was also incredibly dangerous. Crabbers worked around the clock, sometimes in terrible weather. There was no time to go back and forth to the docks, so some boats would be overloaded with too many crab pots, making them unstable. The result was that from 1990 to 2005 an average of five crabbers died a year.

Part of my finger was cut off during a violent storm when I got knocked off of my feet and landed on an air compressor. I decided against going to the hospital to have it stitched back on because I knew the fishing season could end any day and my crew had mortgages to pay. I nearly lost my hand after developing a nasty infection.

If that accident happened today, there wouldn't be nearly as much pressure to keep fishing. Since August 2005, we fish under a much better system called "catch shares," which are also in place in some other fisheries. Now regulators divide up how much crab the fleet can catch among individual fishermen, as opposed to collectively, so we can fish at our own pace during significantly longer seasons. Tighter Coast Guard requirements have also improved safety.

Read the complete opinion piece at The Wall Street Journal.