Opinion

The following op-ed by Priscilla M. Brooks, Ph.D. and Berl Hartman ran in the New Bedford (Massachusetts) Standard-Times. Priscilla M. Brooks is vice president and director of ocean conservation for the Conservation Law foundation, and Berl Hartman is chapter director, E2 New England.

The National Oceans Council is composed of cabinet secretaries, agency administrators, executive office directors, and White House officials.

Many in the commercial fishing industry have expressed concern that the only member of the Council with ties to the fishing industry is the NOAA Administrator, a post currently held by Dr. Jane Lubchenco.  The Governance Coordinating Committee has representatives with closer ties to fisheries.

The Council was established by executive order, not by Congressional action or legislation.

In July 2010, after two Blue Ribbon Commission reports and an extensive nationwide series of hearings, President Obama issued an executive order establishing the nation's first comprehensive National Ocean Policy for the stewardship of our oceans, coasts and Great Lakes.

This policy will establish better ocean management through regional partnerships, stakeholder engagement, science-based decisions and an open public process where all ocean users have a seat at the table. It will also save taxpayer dollars by improving government efficiency; reducing duplication between agencies; increasing coordination; and ensuring the comprehensive data collection and public involvement that informs decision-making.

Read the complete opinion piece from The Standard-Times.

Read about the National Ocean Policy from the White House.

Read about the National Ocean Council.

 

 

 

 

 

Of all the widespread NOAA offenses against the fishing industry, the most insidious may be the blatant misrepresentations of truth to fishermen and to the American people as a whole.

Perhaps the most blatant misrepresentation came last week.

That's when Maureen Wylie, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's chief financial officer, proudly released an audit of NOAA enforcement's notorious Asset Forfeiture Fund, with a press summary indicating that the Clifton Gunderson accounting firm had found "no abuse" of the fund over a five-year period ending in 2010.

Wylie's summary would shoot down the findings of poor oversight, wrongdoing and excessive tapping of the fund all found by Inspector General Todd Zinser and an earlier audit carried out for his office by KPMG, one of the nation's "big four" auditing firms. But while Wylie's press statement touts a finding of "no (fund) abuse," the Clifton Gunderson report makes no such reference. Indeed, the report notes that the company's task — carried out at a cost of $427,000 — was only to examine expenses of $3,000 of less, hardly a probe that would have turned up the purchase of the luxury boat and costs of NOAA agents' overseas travel well-documented by Zinser and KPMG.

Wylie's out-and-out lie is a blatant slap in the face to the Inspector General and to congressional leaders and others who should be able to trust a department CFO's audit statement. But once again, when it comes to NOAA, they can't — and that can cannot be tolerated.

Read the complete editorial from the Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you didn’t know better, you might think that forage fish like sardines and squid are on the brink of destruction in California.

That’s what some activists imply.  However, nothing could be further from the truth.

California’s coastal pelagic ‘forage’ fisheries are the most protected in the world, with one of the lowest harvest rates.
 
In addition to strict fishing quotas, the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) has implemented no-take reserves, including many near bird rookeries and haul out sites to protect forage for marine life.
 
But activists are pushing even more restrictions in the form of Assembly Bill 1299.

California already provides a science-based process to manage forage species.  The federal Pacific Fishery Management Council is also developing a California Current Ecosystem Management Plan, covering the entire West Coast, not just California state waters.  Further, the federal Coastal Pelagic Species Fishery Management Plan that governs these fish adopted an ecosystem-based management policy more than a decade ago.
 
To initiate new legislation like AB 1299 as if no regulation exists is fiscally irresponsible and disrespectful of California’s management history.
 
The National Marine Fisheries Service voiced concern about the bill’s redundancy and overlap with federal management, pointing out that it could actually impede ecosystem-based management.

AB 1299 won’t protect forage species because virtually all range far beyond California state waters, which only extend three miles from shore.
 
But the bill does jeopardize the future of California's historic wetfish fisheries, the backbone of California's fishing economy. AB 1299 restricts California fishermen unfairly, because virtually all the forage species listed are actively managed or monitored by the federal government and most species are harvested along the entire West Coast.

In this economic crisis, why would California squander millions of dollars– and sacrifice thousands of jobs – on an unfunded mandate that duplicates existing laws?
 
Apparently this doesn’t matter to activists, whose rhetoric claims that overfishing is occurring in California now and a change is needed.

AB 1299 proponents have made many false claims about forage species. For example, they referenced a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) evaluation of the California Current Ecosystem, predicting a downward trend for some marine life, including squid, but failed to explain that this report was simply a draft. The evaluation excluded southern California waters, where 80 percent of the squid harvest occurs.  A record spawning event also occurred in 2010

And consider sardines. After their decline in the 1940s, fishery managers instituted an ecosystem-based management plan that accounts for forage needs before setting harvest quotas, and reduces quotas in concert with natural declines in the resource. The harvest quota for the West Coast plummeted 74 percent from 2007 to 2011.

But activists embellished a NOAA graph to “prove” their claim that the current sardine population decline was due to overfishing.  The marine scientist who developed the graph pointed out their error, stating, “You can rest assured that the U.S. has not exceeded the overfishing limit based on the rules in place today.”

In fact, the majority of California’s fishing community – municipalities, harbor districts, recreational and commercial fishing groups, seafood companies and knowledgeable fishery scientists – oppose AB 1299, seeing it as a disingenuous attempt to curtail sustainable fisheries unnecessarily.

D.B. Pleschner is executive director of the California Wetfish Producers Association, a nonprofit designed to promote sustainable wetfish resources.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fishermen have just as much desire to avoid by-catch as conservationists do. By-catch doesn’t just harm the environment; it also harms fishermen’s bottom lines.

THE BIGGEST environmental risk from fishing isn’t that fishermen are too successful at netting their catch but that they’re too successful at catching everything else. Although this problem is commonly associated with tuna fishermen catching dolphins in their nets, it affects a wide variety of species, from right whales to sea turtles and everything in between. However, an innovative program being developed at the New England Aquarium through the Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction offers hope for real improvement. This organization pairs scientists and fishermen to find innovative yet non-intrusive ways to work together to cut down on bycatch without negatively impacting fisheries.

 

Read the complete editorial from The Boston Globe

 

 

 

 

 

Sustainability is the ultimate buzzword in fisheries. Yet on the wallet cards that attempt to provide an accurate breakdown, there’s one species that’s never talked about: commercial fishermen.

There's no question that the number of jobs available in many fisheries declined in recent years, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that this will continue. But unlike other industries in which job loss is driven by economic decline or market contraction, in fisheries, productivity is limited by just one thing: fish. Not enough fish means not enough fishing.

Complicating matters is that at the same time these strict catch-limit policies have taken effect, a new management system touted mainly by environmental groups has gained quite a bit of traction with federal regulators. Catch shares is an overarching term for a management system that, in one form or another, divides up the total amount of fish available for harvest in a given year and allocates it to permit holders annually, usually on the basis of their historical landings. Fishermen can then either fish their allocation, or lease or sell it to their colleagues. Think of it as a cap-and-trade system for fish. A Fish on Fridays column from April has more on the details of catch shares.

In certain circles, catch shares have not been fondly received. Some industry members have opposed catch shares in part because they feel initial allocations of fish are too low to allow particularly small, independent operators to remain viable. They fear that economies of scale will result in consolidation of large percentages of fish in few hands, ultimately begetting fewer jobs. While this is certainly a legitimate concern, it’s worth noting that fishery managers can include consolidation caps or other antitrust mechanisms to prevent this occurrence.

 

Read the complete opinion piece from The Center for American Progress

 

 

 

 

 

This summer bunker schools have been the prey of many species off Long Island's coast, including sharks, and while this feast has been going on, fisheries managers and corporate entities along the Atlantic Coast are busy preparing for a week of heavy bunker discussion.

The reduction of menhaden, widely dubbed by Dr. Bruce H. Franklin as "The Most Important Fish in the Sea," is such a concern that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASFMC) is meeting to consider whether its harvest should be significantly lowered for the first time in years.

This meeting is of particular importance to the Omega Protein Corp., which fished about 160,000 metric tons of menhaden in Atlantic coastal waters, which represent 80 percent of the total catch (the other 20 percent is allotted to the bait industry).
Coincidentally, Omega Protein, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange announced that it expects to release financial results for the recent fiscal quarter today after the market closes.

"This time last year, Omega was only trading at about $4 a share, but 12 months later after having had a banner year of decimating bunker stocks in the Chesapeake, this Houston-based fish meal corporation is now trading between $12 and $14 a share," said Jim Donofrio, executive director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA). "Perhaps things really turned around for Omega since they mounted their public relations campaign carrying the endorsement of ASMFC's executive director, Vince O'Shea."

Donofrio cited a video created by Omega which shows the head of the ASMFC extolling the virtues of the corporate behemoth and its bunker reduction operation. "Our Commission [ASMFC] and I believe Omega Protein share the common long-term goal of managing menhaden resource that is healthy, abundant and sustainable," O'Shea said on camera, while also claiming that the menhaden resource is healthy.
According to the RFA however, O'Shea's own stock assessment team recently found that overfishing was occurring in 2008 leaving anglers wondering why the executive of an interstate fishery commission would ignore the stock assessment experts while siding instead with a publicly traded corporate entity like Omega.

"ASMFC needs to do the right thing here and reduce menhaden harvest for the reduction folks, then we can start to address the highly mechanized vacuum gear used by Omega and start pushing for a complete ban on this type of destructive fishing," Donofrio said.

Read the article at the New York Post

Analysis: The article is incorrect in its claim that Omega's operations in the Chesapeake Bay are leading to the menhaden population being overfished. While the ASMFC recently did conclude that overfishing had occured in 2008, while the level of fishing only slightly above the mortality threshold, it was the only year in the past ten years that overfishing was judged to have occured. The ASMFC concluded that while overfishing did occur in 2008, the menhaden population was not overfished.

Not so long ago, New England’s historic groundfish fisheries were the poster child for chronic overfishing. Today, the region’s fisheries are becoming a good news story for the first time in years under a new system of fishing sectors and catch limits implemented by Amendment 16 to the groundfish fishery management plan. The number of stocks experiencing overfishing is sharply down; catch limits are in place; a number of previously overfished species are rebounding; and fishing revenues and allowable catch limits on healthy stocks are going up.

But you wouldn’t know any of that by reading Brian Rothschild’s recent editorial in the New Bedford Standard Times, published on August 10th. Rothschild, a long-time fisheries scientist and academician based in New Bedford, paints a bleak picture of uncaring federal bureaucrats and inflexible, draconian regulations that are killing fishermen’s jobs. The facts simply don’t bear him out, but that has not stopped him from declaring that the whole system of federal fisheries management is broken.  His exaggerated portrayal of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as the source of everything wrong with fisheries management lacks only horns and a tail to be complete.

It would be easy to dismiss the Professor’s jeremiad as a piece of political grandstanding were it not for the fact that his views are taken seriously by Massachusetts political leaders. Last year, Rothschild was instrumental in making the case for Governor Patrick’s petition to the Secretary of Commerce urging him to loosen catch restrictions on rebuilding fish stocks. Having lost this argument with both the petition and a similar argument with the federal court, Rothschild and others are looking to Congress for a legislative solution. Rothschild appears to believe that nothing less than a congressional commission and a new national fisheries oversight board can fix what is allegedly broken at NOAA.

Rothschild’s exhortations to loosen all restrictions and free up more fish in the name of jobs echo sentiments heard decades ago. In the early 1980s, as fish stocks began to recover from the massive overkill by foreign fishing fleets a decade earlier, New England’s fisheries managers made a fateful decision to abandon the use of unpopular catch limits as unduly restrictive on jobs. So the managers opted for a complex, ineffective system of effort-based rules. With no hard limits, fisheries initially boomed, but it was not long before scientists began to warn that fishing mortality had reached dangerously high levels and was not sustainable. Predictably, the scientific warnings went unheeded, and the boom was soon followed by bust as stocks of cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder collapsed. By the 1990s, most commercially valuable groundfish stocks were considered badly overfished.

The fisheries are finally beginning to rebound after years of diminishing returns and hardship.  Professor Rothschild alleges that Amendment 16’s new catch limits unduly restrict fishing and ignore science, but he of all people should know better. The Department of Commerce Inspector General’s 2009 report on groundfish fishery management found that the science on which the New England regulations are based meets the MSA’s “best scientific information available” requirements and is considered world-class. Moreover, the IG’s report concluded that the region’s fishery managers often set catch levels at the maximum point in the range recommended by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, even when considerable evidence pointed in the opposite direction.

 

Read the complete opinion piece from Talking Fish

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's good to hear that Mayor Carolyn Kirk and her New Bedford counterpart, Scott Lang, have filed notice to appeal a June 30, Boston-based federal court ruling regarding the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fishing regulations.

Yet, Mayors Kirk and Lang, the other 28 fishing-related plaintiffs in this federal suit and our federal lawmakers should also heed the sentiments of Gloucester fisheries attorney Stephen Ouellette. He suggested in the wake of Zobel's June 30 ruling that legislation, not the courts, may be the primary route to slowing Lubchenco's relentless push for catch shares, even in defiance of congressional action.

Catch shares have devastated many of the smaller fishing operations in this region, putting fishermen out of business. Its aim seems to be to centralize the fishing industry, giving the lion's share of the catch to large commercial operations. It is anathema to New England's fishing traditions, and it's costing many independent middle-class workers their jobs.

Lubchenco's brazen lack of accountability showed as much as ever last week when her one-time finalist for the job of heading the National Marine Fisheries Service, former Alaska fisherman Arne Fuglvog, was socked with a $150,000 fine and a 10-month prison sentence for misreporting landings and cheating on that state's catch-share system.

Yet, of the $150,000 poor Fuglvog has to cough up, $100,000 of it is being steered to the quasi-public National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

 

Read the complete opinion piece from The Daily News

 

 

 

 

 

 

About this time for the past few years it seems we devote this column to the subject of menhaden; or rather the lack of menhaden. Usually we just lament the paucity of the fish that is so vital to the health of the striper, bluefish and so many other species of fish, and go on to denounce the lack of action by the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission in doing anything about it.

But this year's menhaden column is different.

Oh no, sorry to say, the menhaden (a.k.a. bunker) are still as scarce as snake legs in Long Island Sound. In fact, if anything, there are fewer adult bunkers in Long Island Sound this season than last. Only an influx of small bait like sand eels and silversides has kept the inshore fishing scene alive with small bluefish and stripers hanging around for the feast.

What is different about this bunker column is that as of early this month, after a decade of dithering, ASMFC actually took a big step on the path to cutting the commercial menhaden harvest. It happened at the council's annual meeting where an almost unanimous vote approved a period of public comment on menhaden protection. Called draft amendment V (not for victory), the proposal offers five management options from doing nothing (that would fit nicely with ASFMC's past polices) to cutting the commercial take by as much as 45 percent.

That commercial take is accomplished in great part by a Houston, Texas-based company called Omega Protein that has processing facilities in Reedville, Va. (This accounts for the Virginia delegation being the only one to vote against the menhaden proposal.)

Read the full article at the Connecticut Post.

Analysis: The article is incorrect in implying that menhaden are overfished. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which is responsible for ensuring that menhaden are fished at a sustainable rate, recently concluded in their stock assessment that the population was not overfished. Overfishing has only occured once in the last 10 years.

The article is also wrong in blaming poor recreational fishing on the lack of menhaden. In addition to not being overfished, menhaden are not a large part of the diet of many fish prized by anglers. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science, in an ongoing study, found that menhaden only account for 9.6% of striped bass diet and 11% of bluefish diet.

 

 

Lubchenco's lack of accountability showed as much as ever when her one-time finalist for the job of heading the National Marine Fisheries Service was socked with a $150,00 fine and a 10-month prison sentence for — surprise, surprise — misreporting landings and cheating on that state's catch share system.

Yet, of the $150,000 poor Arne has to cough up, $100,000 of it is being steered to the quasi-public National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

Federal officials are saying that's because they want to target where the harm was done to the fishery — and that would be fine, if it were true. But in reality, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation is the organization Lubchenco has already tapped for money to expand her catch share push — after Congress shut down funding to the any such programs as part of the federal budget agreement.

It is that type of defiance that shows Lubchenco's utter contempt of Congress and the corruption of the fishery management system.

And that must be fixed by our congressional lawmakers, not by a federal court judge.

 

Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times