Pew Charitable Trust Archives

Ray Hilborn on the role of industry funding

April 12, 2021 — It is true that my research program receives funding from the fishing industry. Industry funding makes up about 22% of my total funding, while I receive similar amounts from environmental foundations, Universities, and private individuals unassociated with the fishing industry. In addition, I receive funding from environmental NGOs, including over the years the National Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, and the Pew Institute for Ocean Science.

Here is my response to those who say this means you should not believe what I say about fisheries:

Science is collaborative, not individual

When I say that all fish will not be gone by 2048 or that fish stocks are increasing in abundance in much of the world, these are not personal opinions, but results of scientific papers authored by a large group of people, each of whom stands by the results of the paper.

When the claim that “all fish would be gone by 2048” came out, the lead author on that paper, Boris Worm, and I agreed to meet together to understand why we had different perspectives. We organized a group of about 20 scientists and looked at trends in fish stock abundance where it was measured and found no sign that these stocks were generally declining. In 2009, we published a paper in Science Magazine showing this, and the lead author was Boris Worm. It is absurd to say that because I, one of 21 authors, had received funding from the fishing industry this work was biased.

I was the first author on the 2020 follow-up paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Effective fisheries management instrumental in improving fish stock status, that showed that fish stocks were actually increasing in much of the world, but this paper had 23 authors, including professors from several different universities, an employee of The Nature Conservancy, a member of the Board of Directors of The Nature Conservancy, a member of the Board of Directors of Environmental Defense, and an employee of the Wildlife Conservation Society all of whom stand by our conclusions. It is not my work, but group work, and where I get some of my funding is largely irrelevant.

Almost every paper with my name on it in fisheries has a range of authors and many of them have at least one author representing conservation organizations.

Look at the data and what was actually done

My research is not cloaked in secrecy. In every research paper I have been a part of, we tell the reader what data we used and how we used it to get the results we did. This is the methodology section. We describe our data and methods so you, or anyone else, can redo and/or verify the analysis.

This is an important part of science. I have criticized the methodology section of others before, and others have criticized mine—this is what makes information evolve closer to truth. Unfortunately, that part of science gets lost in press releases and hyperbolic headlines, which was a large reason I started this website—to explain the methodology sections of important fisheries papers to give the public (and journalists) proper context. For example, we have been highly critical of Oceana’s seafood fraud methodology on this website, but we appreciate the work they do and gave them a platform to respond to our criticism.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Pacific Meeting to Target Control of Tuna Fisheries

December 5, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Researchers are calling for the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission to better address its fisheries management challenges.

The commission – responsible for managing the vast ocean waters – meets in Papua New Guinea this week.

The Pew Charitable Trust has said due to the high volume of fishing vessels, trans-shipment (transfer of catch between fishing and carrier vessels) and port activities in the region, the Commission had been unable to increase its observer coverage.

The Trust said the commission needed to strengthen oversight of fishing vessels at sea, and in port, and modernise management for long-term sustainability.

Jamie Gibbon, of the Trusts’ international fishing team, wrote in an article for Pew that illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing was a major threat to the sustainability and profitability of the world’s fisheries.

He said sound fisheries control also required clear rules regarding how much fish could be caught and with what gear.

Mr Gibbon said that would help fishing levels become sustainable.

To achieve that, the commission should strengthen port controls, increase observer coverage and improve monitoring of trans-shipment.

The commission also needed to advance harvest strategies and protect the sharks, mantas and mobula rays.

Meanwhile, Fisheries Minister Semi Koroilavesau will lead the Fiji delegation at the meeting and said he would discuss crew policies to ensure Fijian nationals were protected on local and foreign fishing vessels.

He said the supply of tuna from several of its neighbours would also be high on the agenda for Fiji at the meeting.

“I think PNG, Solomons and Vanuatu would be ready to discuss the details of it. We have been working with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the last year in trying to achieve this.”

Mr Koroilavesau said Fiji would also push for a quota system given the number of foreign fleets on the high seas.

That, he said, would protect smaller and developing Pacific states.

Mr Koroilavesau urged Pacific governments to improve control over their fisheries to protect their value.

The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission meeting starts on Thursday in Port Moresby.

This story was originally published on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Call for Pacific regional fisheries committee to ban trans-shipping

September 25, 2019 — American researchers are calling for the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Committee to ban trans-shipping.

The Pew Charitable Trust said tens of millions of dollars each year was lost to the practice of offloading catch before it reached its final destination.

A 2016 survey found that dozens of vessels were likely carrying out unauthorized trans-shipment in the Pacific.

Read the full story at Samoa News

Pacific nations resist US push to lift tuna quota

December 11, 2018 — Pacific island nations have vowed to oppose US efforts to increase its catch limit in the world’s largest tuna fishery, saying the proposal does nothing to improve sustainable fishing.

The United States is expected to try to increase its quota for bigeye tuna at a meeting of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) taking place in Honolulu this week.

The meeting brings together 26 nations to determine fishing policy in the Pacific, which accounts for almost 60 percent of the global tuna catch, worth about $6.0 billion annually.

It is mostly made up of small island nations but also includes so-called “distant-water nations” that come from as far afield as Europe, China, the United States, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan to fish Pacific tuna.

Island nations regularly accuse them of being reluctant to curb the lucrative industry in the interests of long-term conservation.

President Donald Trump’s administration will push this year to catch more bigeye—one of the most sought after species of tuna for sashimi—as a reward for complying with the commission’s monitoring rules.

All fishing fleets are supposed to carry independent fisheries observers on at least five percent of their boats as means of ensuring quotas are not exceeded and to collect accurate data.

However, most nations aside from the United States ignore the monitoring requirement.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

A Famed Fishing Port Staggers as Carlos Rafael Goes to Jail

February 12, 2018 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Carlos Rafael, whose initials are emblazoned on boats all over this port city, boasted that his fishing empire was worth even more than official records showed. His trick? When he caught fish that are subject to strict catch limits, like gray sole or cod, he would report that his nets were filled with something far more plentiful, like haddock.

“We call them something else, it’s simple,” Mr. Rafael told visitors who seemed interested in buying his business. “We’ve been doing it for over 30 years.” He showed off a special ledger labeled “cash.” And he described an under-the-table deal he had going with a New York fish buyer, saying at one point, “You’ll never find a better laundromat.”

But Mr. Rafael’s visitors turned out to be Internal Revenue Service agents, and the conversations, caught on tape and described in court documents, began the unraveling of Mr. Rafael, whose reign over a segment of this region’s fishing industry gave him his larger-than-life nickname, “the Codfather.”

As Mr. Rafael sits in prison, having pleaded guilty to lying about his catches and smuggling cash out of the country, nearly two dozen of his boats have been barred from fishing for species like cod and haddock, grinding part of the centuries-old maritime economy in the nation’s most lucrative fishing port to a halt.

Fishermen, ice houses and shoreside suppliers who once did business with Mr. Rafael are anxious, as their own businesses have slowed or stopped. Regulators, who oversee a federal system aimed at limiting what the industry fishes for, want more penalties, raising doubts about the future of the port when it comes to groundfish, the bottom-dwelling species like cod that were once the backbone of the fishing industry in New England.

“There are a lot of people on this waterfront, very hardworking people, whose livelihood depends on Carlos’s landings,” said Jon Mitchell, the mayor of New Bedford. “They don’t deserve to suffer along with him.”

Tony Fernandes, a captain on one of Mr. Rafael’s boats, said he was collecting unemployment benefits and waiting to learn when he may be able to fish again. “He’s putting in his time and he paid his fine,” he said of Mr. Rafael. “We are in limbo.”

For decades, Mr. Rafael, 65, was a blustery, polarizing figure along these piers. He called himself a pirate, and mocked smaller competitors as maggots or mosquitoes. When he wasn’t yelling into his phone in Portuguese, he held court around town, talking politics and fish. The authorities said he owned one of the country’s largest commercial fishing enterprises, and analysts estimate that he controlled about one-quarter of New England’s landings of groundfish. Mr. Rafael also had boats to harvest scallops, which now make up a much greater share of New Bedford’s total landings than groundfish do.

But Mr. Rafael also served as a dealer for the seafood that came off his boats, which prosecutors say made it easier for him to lie about what he was catching and how much he was getting for it.

“Carlos Rafael has been well known in the commercial fishing industry for 30 years,” said Andrew Lelling, the United States attorney for Massachusetts, who prosecuted the case. “And, for almost as long, federal law enforcement has heard rumors and concerns about Rafael acting illegally.”

Some people in New Bedford saw Mr. Rafael far differently — as a Robin Hood of sorts, with a pack of cigarettes and a dinged-up Silverado. He was a Portuguese immigrant who had started out cutting fish and eventually provided jobs for many people along a waterfront that has been bustling since Herman Melville immortalized its cobblestone streets and whaling ships in “Moby Dick.”

He saw an opportunity eight years ago when the government moved forward with a new regulatory system in New England, after Congress mandated that science-based limits be used to prevent overfishing. The cod catch, long a staple of New England’s economy, had fallen over the years.

Instead of the former approach of limiting how many days boats could spend at sea, the new regulations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration set specific ceilings on how many fish could be caught. The rules instantly were contentious, especially when regulators set low limits for dwindling species like cod to help them rebound.

Read the full story at the New York Times

‘Cod Is Dead’: New Netflix Series Details Challenges Facing U.S. Fishermen

January 5, 2018 (Saving Seafood) — The challenges facing American fishermen, ranging from declining quotas to disputed science to fleet consolidation, are highlighted in a new Netflix documentary series premiering today.

The new series, Rotten, “travels deep into the heart of the food supply chain to reveal unsavory truths and expose hidden forces that shape what we eat.” The series’ sixth and final episode, “Cod is Dead,” focuses on the domestic seafood industry, and the business and regulatory climate that has made it increasingly difficult for fishermen to make a living. Special focus is given to the ongoing fallout from the Carlos Rafael seafood fraud case and the continuing impact of the controversial catch share management system.

The episode interviews fishermen, scientists, environmentalists, and other stakeholders, with special emphasis placed on industry members in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The full list of interviewees is:

Steve Welch – Commercial Fishing Captain
Richard Canastra – Co-Owner, The Whaling City Seafood Display Auction
Peter Baker – Director, U.S. Ocean Conservation-Northeast, The Pew Charitable Trust
Ian Saunders – New Bedford Dock Worker
Dr. Jonathan Hare – Science and Research Director, Northeast Fisheries Science Center
Seth Macinko – Professor of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island
Aaron Williams – Commercial Fishing Captain
Scott Lang – Former Mayor of New Bedford/Lawyer
Jake Kritzer – Director of Fishery Diagnostics and Design, Environmental Defense Fund
Tor Bendikson – Vice President, Reidar’s Trawl Gear & Marine Supply
Arthur Bogason – Chairmen, Icelandic National Association of Small Boat Owners
Ragnar Arnason – Professor of Economics, University of Iceland
Charles Smith – U.S. Coast Guard
Tom Williams – Commercial Fishing Vessel Owner

Rotten is available now on Netflix

ICCAT decision to raise bluefin quotas draws scrutiny

November 24, 2017 — Conservation groups reacted with outrage after the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) concluded its annual conference, as the member nations decided to increase catch limits on bluefin tuna.

ICCAT’s decision to raise eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin limits to 36,000 tons by 2020 represents a 50 percent increase from current levels. The move prompted fears the species that was threatened due to years of overfishing may face peril yet again, according to Alessandro Buzzi, a WWF fisheries project manager.

“We have been fighting for the last 10 years to save bluefin tuna, we are so near recovery that it is a scandal to see ICCAT going back to business as usual; this could jeopardize all the progress we’ve made,” Buzzi said.

In a statement, the commission said it was following the advice of its scientific committee to grant the “considerable” increase. The limit will be raised gradually over the next three years, with next year’s limit set at 28,200 tons.

In addition, a tentative agreement on next year’s quota share was reached, with discussions on future years set to take place in March.

“While a larger pie to share should have led to greater possibilities of consensus, the demands by those who already had a quota for a larger slice made negotiations tougher than ever,” the commission said.

Officials with The Pew Charitable Trusts said the decisions made during the conference were among the “poorest” in a long time.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Authors of New Research on Forage Fish Respond to Critiques from Lenfest Task Force

June 5, 2017 — The following was written by authors of a new paper on forage fish that found that previous research likely overestimated the impact of forage fishing. The piece addresses criticisms made by the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force. The authors are Dr. Ray Hilborn, Dr. Ricardo O. Amoroso, Dr. Eugenia Bogazzi, Dr. Ana M. Parma, Dr. Cody Szuwalski, and Dr. Carl J. Walters:

First we note that the press releases and video related to our paper (Hilborn et al. 2017) were not products of the authors or their Universities or agencies. Some of the authors were interviewed for the video, and each of us must be prepared to defend what was said on the video. The LENFEST Task Force authors criticize our statement in the video that:

“What we found is there was essentially no relationship between how many forage fish there are in the ocean and how well predators do in terms of whether the populations increase or decrease.”

Our paper was specifically about U.S. forage fish, where we found very few relationships that were stronger than one might expect by chance. It is certainly likely that there are places where there is a significant relationship, but we noted that the LENFEST report did not include any analysis of the empirical data and relied only on models. Our point is that the models used by the LENFEST Task Force assume there will always be such a relationship, whereas in many, and perhaps most cases there may be little if any impact of fishing forage fish on the abundance of their predators. The scientific literature suggests that central place foragers, such as seabirds and pinnipeds at their breeding colonies, may be exceptions, and we acknowledge as much in our paper (p. 2 of corrected proofs, paragraph starting at the bottom of first column).

Specific response to the “shortcomings” of our study listed in the LENFEST Task Force response

We included species not considered by the LENFEST Task Force to be “forage fish.” We simply looked for harvested fish and invertebrate populations that were an important part (> 20%) of the diet of the predators, and thus we would argue that our analysis is appropriate and relevant to the key question: “Does fishing the major prey species of marine predators affect their abundance?”
The LENFEST Task Force authors criticize our use of estimates of abundance of forage fish provided by stock assessment models, and then suggest that because these models were not designed to identify correlations between predators and prey we were committing the same error that the LENFEST Task Force did, using models for a purpose they were not designed for. This is wrong: the stock assessment models are designed to estimate the abundance of fish stocks and the estimates of forage species we used to examine correlations with predators were considered the best available estimates at the time of the analysis. Similarly, the stock assessment models used for the predatory fish species represent the best available estimate of the abundance, and rate of change in abundance, of these predators. We did not claim the stock assessment models told us anything directly about the relationship between forage abundance and predator rates of change. We simply asked “Is there any empirical relationship between forage species abundance and either the abundance or rate of change in abundance of their predators?” The answer, with very few exceptions, was “no.”
The LENFEST Task Force authors criticize our use of U.S. fisheries because they are better managed than the global average. Most of the key criticisms we made of the LENFEST study were unrelated to how fisheries are managed, but to the basic biological issues: recruitment variation, weak relationship between spawning biomass and recruitment, relative size of fish taken by predators and the fishery and the importance of local density of forage fish to predators rather than total abundance of the stock. U.S. fisheries are not only better managed, but also often better researched, so U.S. fisheries are a good place to start examining the biological assumptions of the models used by the LENFEST Task Force.
We did not argue that fisheries management does not need to change – instead we argued that general rules such as the LENFEST Task Force’s recommendation to cut fishing mortality rates to half of the levels associated with maximum sustainable yield for “most forage fisheries now considered well managed” (LENFEST Summary of New Scientific Analysis) are not supported by sound science. Our analysis suggests that there’s little empirical evidence that such a policy will increase predatory fish abundance. Instead, every case needs to be examined individually and management decisions should weigh the costs (economic, social, and ecological) of restricting forage fisheries to levels below MSY against the predicted benefits, while accounting for uncertainty in both. Our abstract concludes “We suggest that any evaluation of harvest policies for forage fish needs to include these issues, and that models tailored for individual species and ecosystems are needed to guide fisheries management policy.”
Essington and Plagányi feel we incorrectly characterized their paper. We simply rely on the words from the abstract of their paper. “We find that the depth and breadth with which predator species are represented are commonly insufficient for evaluating sensitivities of predator populations to forage fish depletion. We demonstrate that aggregating predator species into functional groups creates bias in foodweb metrics such as connectance.” Carl Walters, one of our co-authors and the person who conceived and built the EcoSim model certainly agrees that the models the LENFEST Task Force used were insufficient for the task they attempted.

Moving forward

We agree that the next steps are to move beyond U.S. fisheries and we are doing so. We have current projects doing a global analysis of relationships between forage fish abundance and the population dynamics of their predators. We have an almost complete review of recruitment patterns in forage fish stocks. We are doing specific case studies of other regions with models explicitly designed to evaluate the impact on predators of fishing forage fish. Finally, we are exploring alternative management strategies for forage fish, considering alternative recruitment patterns, across a range of case studies. We hope that many of the authors of the LENFEST report will collaborate with us in these efforts.

Japan joins Port State Measures Agreement

May 24, 2017 — Japan has become the 48th country to join the Port State Measures Agreement (PSMA), a global treaty designed to help eradicate illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

The treaty was ratified in June 2016 after it reached the threshold of 25 signatories. Since it went into effect, an additional 20 countries have become parties to PSMA, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Japan’s movement to become a part of the treaty is significant due to its large consumption of imported seafood – ranked third globally behind the European Union and the United States.

“The ratification of the agreement signifies a critical step in Japan’s efforts to close its ports to illegal fishers,” the Pew Charitable Trusts said in a statement.”

Tony Long, director of Pew’s Ending Illegal Fishing Project, delivered high praise Japan for its action.

“Japan is one of the world’s top fishery producers and has demonstrated a growing concern about illegal fishing in the past several years through its membership in all regional fisheries management organizations and its consistent support of catch documentation schemes and IUU fishing measures,” Long said. “Although fertile fishing grounds surround the country, its fishery production has been on the decline for the past few decades, making it more dependent on imports. Given Japan’s importance as both a fishing nation and consumer of seafood, its accession to the Port State Measures Agreement is an important step toward eliminating it both as a market and opportunity to land seafood that has been caught illegally.

Read the full story at Seafood Source