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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 37 Number 10
June 2010
Herring monitoring: Where’s the money?
MYSTIC, CT – One of the primary objectives of Amendment 5 to the federal Atlantic herring plan is to improve catch monitoring of both landings and discards in the fishery.
But it’s now all too clear that catch monitoring is going to be expensive. And so far, there’s no clear-cut way to pay for it.
The New England Fishery Management Council discussed the dilemma at its April 27-29 meeting here after receiving a progress report on Amendment 5’s development.
Herring plan coordinator Lori Steele told council members that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) had expressed significant concerns about catch monitoring costs.
In a March 22 letter to council Chairman John Pappalardo, NMFS Northeast Regional Administrator Pat Kurkul wrote, “Minor changes to catch reporting, (such as) increasing the frequency of catch reporting, expanding the use of vessel monitoring systems, and expanding notification requirements, can likely be administered with existing NMFS resources.”
However, said Kurkul, “The development of new monitoring programs, (such as) at-sea or dockside monitoring, video-based electronic monitoring, and catch monitoring and control plans, or specific requirements for existing monitoring programs, (such as) 100% observer coverage, would require new funding sources.”
Kurkul encouraged the council’s herring committee to continue working an Amendment 5, but since the draft document at this point does not address the cost issue, she urged the committee to identify potential funding sources for any alternatives that propose new or greatly expanded monitoring programs.
“Without additional funding, these alternatives are not viable,” she said.
Set-asides
The herring committee, which struggled with this issue during its March 30-31 meeting, voted to “develop two funding alternatives establishing a monitoring set-aside.”
The set-aside, modeled on the familiar research set-aside (RSA) and observer set-aside programs, could involve a monitoring set-aside “in addition” to the herring fishery’s existing RSA as one option and a monitoring set-aside that would replace the RSA as a second alternative.
“These alternatives will include suboptions that will cover some or all of the cost of a new monitoring system,” voted the committee. “The percent allocated to the monitoring set-aside may increase as the allowable biological catch and the total allowable catch (TAC) for the fishery as a whole increases.”
While recounting the committee’s vote to the full council, Steele expressed some hesitancy.
“I’m not terribly confident that a set-aside approach is going to be adequate,” she said.
Committee Chairman Doug Grout of New Hampshire emphasized that finding ways to pay for new monitoring programs will be extremely difficult.
“Funding is one of the real issues we’re struggling with,” he said. “It’s not money that’s going to just come out of the sky.”
Bycatch accountability
The herring fishery operates on high volume but low value, so options that require industry to fund a major portion of monitoring costs could financially crush the fleet, especially during years when TACs are extremely low.
As the herring committee wrestled with this problem, it eventually voted to ask the council’s interspecies committee to “consider developing a mechanism” to allow herring vessels to retain bycatch of species managed both on the federal level and through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC).
The motion further asked the council to “potentially consider allowing landing and sale of bycatch as a means to fund monitoring” in the herring fishery.
This quickly raised a red flag for New Hampshire council member David Goethel.
“I’m very uncomfortable with landing bycatch and selling it,” he said. “It starts off with good intentions and then the next thing you know, people are fishing for bycatch and profiting from it.”
According to council Executive Director Paul Howard, bycatch accountability is now required under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), so the council will need to track bycatch in the herring fishery, even if it’s not used as a funding source for monitoring.
“We now have to account for everything that’s caught,” he said. “That’s the new Magnuson.”
Since the council must specify annual catch limits (ACLs) for all stocks, Howard said, “Once you know what the bycatch is, then every single species committee has the authority to say, ‘Do we take that off the top or give it a sub-ACL?’”
The council voted down the committee’s motion by a large margin and then went back to discussing other funding avenues to cover herring monitoring costs.
But it didn’t get very far.
Kurkul said, “I think we need to have a clearer idea of the direction the committee is going. What we need to know is: ‘What type of monitoring are we trying to implement in the fishery’ and, ‘What are the costs of that?’”
Costs secondary
Council Chairman Pappalardo voiced his own worries about the recent developments.
“My concern is that committee is going to stall,” he said. “People are unwilling to develop a suite of alternatives because they want to see the costs first.”
Yet seeing costs first isn’t possible because the herring plan development team (PDT) needs alternatives to analyze before moving forward to calculate how much money each proposal would require.
Steele, who chairs the PDT, said, “We can’t tell you what this monitoring program is going to cost because we don’t know what it’s going to look like.”
However, Steele could say that a full-scale program “wasn’t going to be cheap,” and she pointed to several documents on the council’s web site that would give industry a sense of monitoring program costs from other parts of the country and world.
One paper, which was pulled together for the council by Alan Lovewell and is called “Case Studies in Maximized Retention and Monitoring for the New England Herring Fishery,” cites numerous examples.
Pappalardo concluded, “The council voted more than once that catch monitoring is a priority. Go back and look at the goals and objectives of Amendment 5. And then build the best system you can.”
What’s next
According to Steele, the council still has much more work to do with catch monitoring despite devoting two solid days to the issue at the end of March.
“We are not there yet with the catch monitoring options,” she said. “We made some significant progress, but there are still issues that need to be addressed. Right now we have a menu of options. We need to package them into viable alternatives.”
The herring committee was scheduled to meet on May 17 to work primarily on river herring bycatch issues. It planned to meet again in July to wrap up lingering river herring and catch monitoring work.
However, the committee still has several other issues to address in Amendment 5, including midwater trawl access to groundfish closed areas and spawning protection for Atlantic herring – a new element to Amendment 5 that the council added to the document last November.
Steele said the committee would try to bring forward a broad set of alternatives that the council could approve for further analysis in September.
The council’s goal is to pick public hearing alternatives during its January 2011 meeting. And, if all stays on schedule, the council hopes to submit a final document to NMFS in time for the agency to implement new measures sometime during the 2012 fishing year.
Janice M. Plante
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