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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 9
May 2008
Industry braces for groundfish Amendment 16
PROVIDENCE, RI – Everyone already assumes that Amendment 16 to the federal groundfish plan will be bad – really bad. But so far, no one has a good sense of what that might mean in terms of days-at-sea cuts, differential counting, or even area closures.
This will change on May 13 when the New England Fishery Management Council’s groundfish committee gets its first look at potential draft effort reduction measures developed by the groundfish plan development team (PDT).
The proposals presented at the meeting may or may not come close to mirroring the final management measures to be adopted by the council in October, but they’re sure to be extremely sobering.
“All of these options will look very draconian,” warned Tom Nies, groundfish plan coordinator and PDT chairman, during the full council’s April 15-17 meeting in Providence.
Amendment 16, the next step in federal groundfish management, must be implemented May 1, 2009, and it is proving to be the PDT’s most difficult challenge yet. That’s because the PDT has been charged with developing effort reduction alternatives for Amendment 16 without knowing the revised status of the 19 stocks in the groundfish plan.
Furthermore, the PDT won’t have this crucial information in hand until September, which is when scientists involved in the Groundfish Assessment and Review Meeting (GARM) are expected to release the final updates.
Despite this lack of essential data, the council must approve a draft supplemental environmental impact statement for Amendment 16 at its June meeting and then sign off on a final amendment in October – barely one month after receiving the official stock status updates.
Amendment 13
Although the council has been aware of this timing problem for close to two years now, it still puts the council itself and the PDT in an impossible quandary, especially since the GARM was unable to select final assessment models in February as originally planned.
“It’s hard to develop effort control changes when you don’t know how much of a mortality reduction you need to target,” said Nies.
In order to proceed at all, the PDT has decided to design effort control measures to meet the targets currently in place for 2009 in Amendment 13, which, explained Nies, is far from ideal.
“We don’t know if those are going to be the right mortality reductions because we don’t where we are stock-status wise,” he said.
Under the Amendment 13 targets, white hake would need a 77% reduction in fishing mortality and southern windowpane flounder would need a 50% reduction.
“These are huge reductions,” said Nies.
And any management proposals designed to achieve reductions of this magnitude will “sacrifice yield on a large number of other stocks,” he added.
Other stocks requiring substantial – but not quite so drastic – effort reductions under the old Amendment 13 schedule include Cape Cod and Southern New England yellowtail flounder and Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic winter flounder.
New targets
What makes this most difficult, said Nies, is that GARM III might conclude some stocks are doing much worse – or much better – than their Amendment 13 targets, which means the PDT effort reduction proposals for Amendment 16 could look significantly different in September than those developed in May under Amendment 13 targets.
The GARM was scheduled to take its first crack at developing new biological reference points for each stock at the end of April. But since the GARM has not yet selected assessment models for the 19 groundfish stocks, it can only come up with a range of biological reference points – not specific ones as required in the final amendment.
While it wasn’t clear whether the range would be broad or narrow, Nies said the PDT hoped the range would help the group construct effort control measures more attuned to Amendment 16 than Amendment 13.
Massachusetts council member David Pierce summed up some of the council’s frustrations and said he was not looking forward to the public hearings.
“This amendment will be extremely difficult to explain, and it will be extremely difficult to defend. The work is still underway, so we do not have the scientific underpinnings for what we need to do in this amendment,” he said. “This is not the council’s fault entirely. This is the system’s fault.”
DAS leasing
Given that Amendment 16 has the potential to contain significant additional cuts in days-at-sea allocations, Maine council member Jim Odlin made a motion to remove the cap on days-at-sea leasing.
The proposal won quick support from Vito Giacalone of the Northeast Seafood Coalition.
“We strongly support this due to differential counting,” he said. “Without removing the cap, if you lease 88 days, you effectively end up with 44. With differential counting in the pipeline, we’re going to have a serious problem.”
National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northeast Regional Administrator Pat Kurkul said she had “mixed feelings” about the idea.
“I don’t think this is conservation neutral,” she said, “so we’d have to accommodate for this some other way.”
New Hampshire council member David Goethel was flatly opposed.
“What we’re talking about here is fundamentally wrong,” he said. “We’re saying, ‘If you have enough money, you can buy your way out of the problem.’ Now it’s about your access to capital, and I don’t think that’s the way to go.”
Goethel said he’d rather see people consolidate permits.
“At least we’d get a boat out of the fishery permanently,” he said.
The motion to remove the cap on days-at-sea leasing failed 4-to-11 with two abstentions.
Janice M. Plante
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