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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 37 Number 7
March 2010
NMFS budget off on research, catch shares
With inadequate and even reduced funding in key research areas, the President’s 2011 proposed budget for the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) contradicts the agency’s mission and further undermines its already tenuous relationship with much of its fishing industry constituency.
In the introduction to the budget summary, the administration reiterates NMFS’s commitment to be “effective stewards of living marine resources through science-based conservation and management and the promotion of ecosystem health.” Yet, by proposing only relatively modest funding increases for fisheries stock assessments, the proposal fails to fully address the growing crisis caused by attempting to manage fisheries with inadequate information.
Further worsening an already grim situation, the administration is proposing to slash by two-thirds funding for cooperative research, which is listed in the budget under the heading “activities supporting fisheries.” Cooperative research may have started more than a decade ago as a way to help subsidize struggling fishermen, but it has evolved into much, much more than that.
Fishermen, working hand-in-hand with researchers, now routinely contribute invaluable data to the science needed for effective conservation and management. Cooperative research projects also provide a crucial channel for clear and accurate communication among scientists, fishermen, and fishery managers. If anything, the agency should be seeking to significantly expand funding for cooperative research.
Instead, the administration is asking for an increase of $36.6 million to fund a new initiative – a “National Catch Share Program.”
To long-time NMFS watchers, this looks like the new administration came in with good intentions to fix all of the agency’s problems but with a fundamental misunderstanding of what those problems are.
Let’s start with the failure to seek substantial new funding for fisheries stock assessments. The NMFS Northeast Fisheries Science Center simply does not have enough resources to provide up-to-date reports on the ever-evolving status of so many fish stocks. This is painfully clear right now with industry’s critical need for a new herring stock assessment.
As a result, Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) members are roped into making conservative – sometimes extremely conservative – recommendations for acceptable biological catch levels.
Under the current law, these SSC recommendations are binding on the fishery management councils, which must then allocate what may be artificially small catch limits to fishing industry participants. The consequences can be devastating, including huge financial losses for vessel owners and seafood processors, and job losses for crewmen and packing plant workers, often in communities with no employment alternatives.
Then there’s the catch share program. The administration is proposing using the $36.6 million to implement sectors and catch shares, including New England groundfish sectors, and to: analyze and evaluate economic performance, fleet behavior, and bycatch reduction; develop fishery management plans and regulations to support catch shares; provide for at-sea and shoreside monitoring, observers, and enforcement; and implement electronic logbooks and other data collection strategies.
Since catch shares are steadily moving forward in the Northeast despite deep ongoing concerns, these are all important program components, many of which industry members involved in sectors have said are essential.
But, ironically, no catch share program can work effectively in the absence of solid stock assessment science. Industry will have its hands full explaining that to the new NMFS leadership and members of Congress as the budget process unfolds. /cfn/
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