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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 36 Number 6
February 2009
Industry reels from NMFS groundfish proposal
GLOUCESTER, MA – The groundfish industry couldn’t have been more shocked in mid-January when the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) released its proposed rule for secretarial interim action to further reduce fishing mortality during the 2009 fishing year.
“People are stunned,” said George Lapointe, commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR). “They’re trying to figure out what this means and if there are any options.”
The interim rule, which is out for public comment until Feb. 17, proposes to significantly expand the 2-for-1 days-at-sea counting area to encompass the entire Gulf of Maine and the northern portion of Georges Bank. It also proposes to create an enormous Southern New England Closure Area where all groundfish dragging and gillnetting would be prohibited.
“Those two measures alone are huge,” said Lapointe. “People are reeling from this.”
The proposed rule contains numerous other provisions, including modified trip limits for several species (see list of measures page 13A).
And it also reiterates the fact that vessels will be allocated 18.2% fewer A-days for 2009 as required under Amendment 13’s default measure, changing the percentage split in allocation of A-days to B-days to 45:55.
This means boats that went into Amendment 13 with an 88-day baseline will be allocated 39.6 days for fishing year 2009, which begins on May 1, regardless of what happens with the rest of the proposed interim rule.
Vessels that can’t get out of the 2-for-1 counting area will effectively be able to fish only 19 or 20 days – max – if they don’t lease or permanently acquire additional days.
“There’s no way any boat is going to survive on 20 days a year,” said Bert Jongerden, general manager of the Portland Fish Exchange. “This is just unbelievable what they’re suggesting.”
Reaction everywhere was similar.
“We are infuriated,” said Jackie Odell, executive director of the Northeast Seafood Coalition. “This is way beyond what is required for an interim rule.”
Maggie Raymond of Associated Fisheries of Maine echoed that sentiment.
“They didn’t have to go this far,” she said. “This is a callous disregard for fishing families and fishing businesses.”
Congressional action
Industry members were quick to turn to Congress for help. US Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) was among several who responded immediately.
Snowe, who is the ranking member of the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, expressed outrage over the proposal. She said she was troubled that NMFS could present the measures as a “viable solution to the current crisis in the groundfishing industry.”
On Jan. 21, a Snowe staffer confirmed that the senator was pushing for alternatives.
“Sen. Snowe is working with her colleagues in the New England congressional delegation to rectify what is inherently an unacceptable situation,” the staffer said.
“We will continue to pressure the new administration for a long overdue disaster declaration that can facilitate distribution of funding to this fishery, and we are writing legislation that would provide immediate relief from these unnecessarily harmful regulations,” the staffer said. “At this point, nothing is off the table.”
Council proposal
Back in September, the New England Fishery Management Council recognized that it wouldn’t be able to finalize Amendment 16 to the groundfish plan in time for implementation on May 1, 2009. And so it voted to ask NMFS to take interim secretarial action to bridge the gap until Amendment 16 took over.
At the time, the council wanted to be “proactive” and have a hand in proposing measures for the interim action since it expected NMFS would publish an interim rule anyway.
The council’s package was based on suggestions advanced by the Northeast Seafood Coalition. It contained the required 18% default reduction in A-days, along with trip limits on certain species, “mitigating measures,” and target total allowable catch (TAC) levels for a number of key stocks. It also included a “payback method” so that any TAC overages in 2009 would be made up in 2010 (see CFN October 2008 for complete details).
NMFS response
NMFS, however, determined the package was “insufficient to end overfishing” and did not adopt the council’s recommendations.
“NMFS’s proposed interim action was developed with the understanding that the Northeast multispecies plan requires that overfishing be ended in 2009 and that most stocks be fully rebuilt by 2014,” said Pat Kurkul, the agency’s Northeast regional administrator, in mid-January.
“The council’s proposal wouldn’t have done that,” she said. “If we continue to allow overfishing, there’s a potential for further decline of the resource and we could be in worse condition in the future.”
If the council had been in a position to complete Amendment 16 for a May 1 implementation, the resulting measures – by law – would have to have been even stricter to meet rebuilding targets based on the latest stock status updates released in August through the third Groundfish Assessment Review Meeting (GARM III), Kurkul explained.
“We didn’t go as far as the council would have had to go,” she said. “But if we had not taken significant action, it would have reduced the probability of having good recruitment and getting good economic returns sooner vs. later.”
Finally, a decisive interim action rule, coupled with Amendment 16’s implementation in 2010, will make it much less likely that the council and NMFS will have to take additional and more draconian action before 2014, Kurkul said.
Why no discretion?
Jackie Odell, however, said NMFS should have used the interim rule to “provide a bridge” from 2009 to 2010 when Amendment 16 would come on line with sector management.
“Instead, they went to the extreme,” she said. “We feel there was a level of discretion that could have been applied.”
According to Odell, the Northeast Seafood Coalition was particularly angry that NMFS rejected the council’s interim recommendations, which passed 15-1 in September.
“These measures focused on the TACs and science provided by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and hinged on TAC management and catch-based management principals,” she said.
Odell called NMFS’s proposed interim rule “a calamity.”
Maggie Raymond emphasized that the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), under Section 304(e)(6), states that when a fishery management plan, amendment, or proposed regulations are already under development, a council can request secretarial action to implement interim measures “to reduce overfishing” until the council action can be put in place.
The MSA language further states that “such measures … may be implemented even though they are not sufficient by themselves to stop overfishing of a fishery.”
This is what industry members view as the crucial “discretionary” language.
“You have to wonder why NMFS would not avail itself of the flexibility afforded by this section of the act,” said Raymond. “They knew a plan was coming from the council with Amendment 16, so they just had to put in some reasonable measures. Instead, their measures go far beyond what’s required.”
Economic impact
According to NMFS, the overall short-term economic impact of the actions under consideration “would be negative.”
If the interim action measures remained in place for the full 2009 fishing year, NMFS estimated that “total trip revenue for commercial vessels” would decline by roughly 20% or $39 million.
The two states anticipated to suffer the deepest revenue reductions are Maine and Massachusetts at 34% and 27% respectively.
“For vessels that fish exclusively in the Gulf of Maine, the 2-for-1 differential days-at-sea counting, coupled with the default 18% reduction in days, is equivalent to a 59% reduction in days-at-sea,” NMFS said.
The agency estimated that reductions in revenue for vessels homeported in other states would be: New Hampshire, 16%; Connecticut, 17%; Rhode Island, 8%; and New York, 6%.
NJ, Mid-Atlantic
The one state that NMFS said might be able to “increase sales” under the interim action was New Jersey. The new Southern New England Closure Area would replace differential days-at-sea counting in the area, so some grounds outside the closure area would revert to 1-for-1 counting.
New Jersey fisherman Jim Lovgren called that analysis “wrong.”
“No New Jersey boats would benefit from this,” he said. “The only groundfish we have down here now is blackbacks (winter flounder), and they want to make the possession limit on that zero. This is not a rosy scenario.”
Lovgren said he wasn’t overly worried that Southern New England boats would flock to the Mid-Atlantic to escape the large closure area.
“What are they going to come down here for?” he asked. “Those that want to go squid fishing are already here.”
Between groundfish restrictions and the new limited-access general category scallop rules, fishing opportunities off New Jersey have faded, Lovgren said.
“The management plans that have been put in place have slowly taken away our ability to fish in the fisheries we have here,” he said.
Gulf of Maine
While no one knew exactly what would happen if the interim action measures were put into place as written, many officials and industry members were particularly worried about two likely scenarios.
First, many Southern New England boats that wouldn’t be able to fish in the large closure area blanketing their own backyard might travel to the Gulf of Maine, putting additional pressure on the groundfish resource there.
Second, vessels that used to steam outside of the 2-for-1 area to fish on northern Georges or elsewhere wouldn’t be able to do so any longer given the enormous size of the differential counting area. So those fishermen, too, would be forced to fish in the Gulf of Maine.
“I just hope that we have some semblance of an industry left to benefit from Amendment 16 in 2010,” said Terry Stockwell of the Maine DMR, who represents the state on the New England council.
Bert Jongerden said the Portland Fish Exchange handled 8.4 million pounds of fish in calendar year 2007 and 8.3 million pounds in 2008.
“We can survive on that – barely,” he said. “But if they put this in, I don’t know. We’ll hang in there as long as we can, but the impact of this on the Portland Fish Exchange is going to be profound.”
Besides the effect of the proposed interim rule on groundfish, Stockwell expressed concern about the implications for both monkfish and skates. NMFS acknowledged in the proposed rule that both the monkfish and skates fisheries would be negatively impacted.
Any recourse?
According to Chairman John Pappalardo of Massachusetts, the New England council will talk about how to respond to the proposed interim rule during its Feb. 9-11 meeting in Portsmouth, NH at the Sheraton Harborside Hotel.
The council will begin the discussion at 9 am on Tuesday, Feb. 10 during a two-hour block of time specifically reserved for that purpose. Pappalardo emphasized that those two hours will be in addition to a separate multiple-hour session that will be devoted to finalizing Amendment 16 for public hearing purposes.
Since the council had not met since NMFS released the proposed interim rule, Pappalardo said he couldn’t say for sure how members would respond. But he predicted the council would revisit its previous recommendations to NMFS and seek to better justify its rationale for using those measures as a “transition to quota management.”
That transition to quota management is expected to be further advanced by the inclusion of sectors bound by hard TACs in Amendment 16. And there is a possibility the transition could be aided by an economic package from Congress.
But, he added, the best way to convince NMFS to reconsider the direction of the interim rule proposal and gain needed support from Congress is for council members to speak with one voice.
“We need to be united in our response,” Pappalardo said. “It’ll require unanimous support from all players at the table to get a transition to quota management.”
Pappalardo concluded, “The interim rule shouldn’t be a bridge to a continued, failed days-at-sea system.”
Janice M. Plante
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