Both Mr. Hansen and Mr. Minkiewicz of the Fisheries Survival Fund stressed the need for flexible management of a healthy fishery, such as scallops.
Eric Hansen and Drew Minkiewicz of the Fisheries Survival Fund (FSF) , which represents the majority of the full-time Limited Access scallop fleet, testified this morning at a Senate field listening session before Alaska Senator Mark Begich, Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard, and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren on the re-authorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. U.S. Sen. Edward Markey and U.S. Reps. John Tierney and William Keating, Massachusetts Democrats, also attended.
Both Mr. Hansen and Mr. Minkiewicz stressed the need for flexible management of a healthy fishery, such as scallops.
Mr. Hansen focused on the Northern Edge and the Amendment 15 overfishing definition failing to take account of scallops in closed areas in allocation-setting.
Mr. Minkiewicz argued that NMFS has failed to make needed investments in scallop management and that scallopers have earned the right to have a greater say in how they are managed, especially given that the industry itself is paying for observers and almost all research, and is participating proactively in management.
Summary of Testimony of Eric Hansen
FSF was organized in 1998 after the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) told us bankrupting cut-backs were necessary to rebuild our fishery and preserve our way of life. Our industry didn't just give up and complain. Instead, we invested millions of dollars, and thousands of hours, in cooperative research and scallop rotational management. Even by 1998, we had taken steps to end over-capacity and make other needed conservation changes.
Our investments and sacrifices have paid off. NMFS declared scallops rebuilt in 2001, and our fishery has flourished. We have created valuable, world-wide markets for scallops. For many years running, New Bedford, the center of the scallop fishery, has been the number one fishing port by value in the United States.
All is not well, however. We are facing a total of over 50% cuts in allowable catches over two years, despite the fact scallops remain at high, near record, levels of overall abundance. The problem is that NMFS and the New England Fishery Management Council have frittered away opportunity after opportunity to fix problems while we had the chance.
To be clear, we are facing a management failure, not a resource failure: a combination of demonstrably unproductive habitat closures on Georges Bank and strait-jacketed scallop management can derail in two years what it's taken us two decades to create.
Summary of Testimony of Drew Minkiewicz
FSF requests that Congress amend the Magnuson-Stevens Act to allow the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to manage stable, rebuilt fisheries flexibly for success, rather than as inflexibly as the law requires for recovering stocks. Flexible management has at least two components: (i) regulatory flexibility, allowing timely decisions to be made without burdensome and unnecessary process; and (ii) management flexibility, allowing economic considerations, such as stability of market supply, to be considered in setting harvest levels. One technique that has been successful in other countries is to delegate management of a fishery to an Industry Organization, if that fishery is not experiencing overfishing and is not overfished.
The Atlantic scallop fleet has demonstrated the responsibility to be entrusted with such a role. Over the past two decades, scallopers have created the most valuable fishery in the United States, supplying world-wide markets with a world-class product. They already either conduct or pay for the vast majority of research and management functions in this fishery. NMFS has been glad to let the industry foot the bill. In fact, NMFS has often required this. But, NMFS has been slow to make its contribution to the support that we need to manage the fishery for long-term success.
With all of the challenges that NMFS is facing, proactive management of a sustainable scallop fishery is not a priority for the Agency. Managers lurch from one issue to the next, missing deadlines, creating confusion and distrust, and wasting the resource. That being the case, the industry wants to step into the breach and maximize the benefit of this fishery for the rest of the nation and put an end to the entropy that is currently growing in the fishery.
Read the testimony from Eric Hansen
Read the testimony from Drew Minkiewicz