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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 11
July 2008
Industry braces for new groundfish direction
PORTLAND, ME – Industry members met the grim news about the revised status of groundfish stocks with weariness, resignation, and a sense of futility, but most agreed with the New England Fishery Management Council’s decision to delay Amendment 16 in order to wait for final stock updates at the end of August.
“I don’t know what to say,” said Vito Calomo, executive director of the Gloucester Fisheries Recovery Commission, at the council’s June 3-5 meeting here following a report about preliminary 2006 stock biomass levels and fishing mortality rates (see story page 1A for details).
Years worth of effort reductions have pared the fleet down to bare bones, Calomo said.
“What you have today is the cream of the crop. You have the very best, and now they’re starting to get out. With more restrictions we are doomed. What are you going to have left? A token fishing industry? That’s the direction you are headed. I don’t know what to do to stop the bleeding,” he said.
Bill Gerencer, a buyer for M. F. Foley Company Inc., known as Foley Fish, agreed that the fleet was a fraction of its former size.
“We used to have different size boats,” he said. “Now, the 135-footers are gone. Seventy-to-90-footers are considered the big boats. We lost many of our localized fleets. The ability to fish – or the fishing power – has been reduced dramatically. My guess is that it’s a quarter or a fifth of what it was.”
Gerencer attributed much of the problem to the law, which uses biological reference points to gauge the status of fish stocks in a completely inflexible manner.
“Fish don’t follow biological reference points,” he said. “Fish stocks rise and fall and all the legal mandates in the world aren’t going to change that. To have all these stocks at the right biological reference points is impossible. We’re basically set up to fail. The law needs to be changed.”
Meld sectors with regs
Even under the original timeline for Amendment 16, the council did not intend to cast a final vote on specific effort reduction measures until November. It picked November – the latest date possible to still allow the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) enough time to implement the amendment by May 1, 2009 – in order to consider, albeit in a very short timeframe, biomass and fishing mortality levels for 2007, which will become available at the end of August.
Glenn Delaney of the Northeast Seafood Coalition said, “I do appreciate very much that we’ve had a snapshot of 2006, but we expect to see some significant changes between 2006 and 2007. I’m not trying to create a rosy picture here, but I hope we focus on what the whole point was, which was to get 2007 data.”
Delaney asked whether the council could use Amendment 16 simply to eliminate the default measure, which will automatically implement an 18% reduction in allocated A-days on May 1, 2009 if nothing else is approved. He also asked if Amendment 16 could be used to retime the “midterm adjustment” – required under Amendment 13 to keep stock rebuilding on track – from 2009 to 2010.
Under this scenario, NMFS would be able to implement approved groundfish sectors and Amendment 16 effort reduction measures all at once, he said.
“What the industry needs is a tool to deal with the cuts that are coming,” Delaney said. “That was the idea behind sectors. Once those were left behind, all we had to work with was days-at-sea management.”
George Darcy, assistant regional administrator for sustainable fisheries at the NMFS Northeast Regional Office in Gloucester, said the midterm adjustment deadline was already on the books and couldn’t be changed.
Is enough enough?
Rhode Island fisherman Phil Ruhle said he considered the past two-and-a-half decades of groundfish management to be a failure and that it was time for a major adjustment.
“We have 25 years of management under our belt now – 25 years – and this is where we are,” he said. “It didn’t work with quotas and it didn’t work with days-at-sea.”
All of the council’s stock rebuilding alternatives, which so far have called for as much as a 70% reduction in days-at-sea, would mark the end of the industry, said Ruhle.
“It’s just a matter of how much time one guy lasts over the other. You’ll turn this over to the selected few who have the wherewithal to ride this out. I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it,” he said.
Ruhle asked whether it might be better to just “close the fishery for five years, and then try to build something that works.”
“In the old days, you shifted fisheries when times were tough. But now everything has limited entry, so you can’t jump out of this fishery and go to the next. If you close the fishery, for once the industry will know where it stands,” he said.
Several audience members mumbled that Amendment 16 would be a de facto industry shutdown. However, Calomo said he didn’t think it was wise for the council to take such an extreme approach.
“The infrastructure would be lost, never to come back,” he said. “If you shut down the industry for five years, you’d never have room again for an auction house, a fish house, or a commercial fishing dock. You would lose the processors, and you would lose a way of life.”
Watching the deadline
John Williamson of The Ocean Conservancy said the council’s decision to extend its Amendment 16 deadline did not remove the legal mandate for NMFS to implement needed stock rebuilding measures by the start of the next fishing year.
“We fully expect that the statutory requirements will be met on May 1, 2009,” he said. “That responsibility now clearly falls on the service (NMFS).”
Williamson, who at previous meetings indicated The Ocean Conservancy already had strategized in anticipation of the possibility the council would miss its deadline, called the preliminary 2006 stock status information “merely a shift in emphasis.” He encouraged the council to “work through the summer” on Amendment 16 to get a document “out the door” as soon as possible.
Rich Canastra of the Whaling City Seafood Display Auction and the Boston Seafood Display Auction encouraged the council to ignore the ultimatum.
“They threaten to sue,” he said to the council. “I say, ‘So what.’ Let them sue. You’re saving an industry here. We always speak about protecting the fish, which is good, but we have to speak about protecting the industry too. By postponing this, you are definitely helping the industry.”
A positive action?
Maggie Raymond of Associated Fisheries of Maine also thought the council made a wise choice by deciding to wait for final stock status information.
“We think the council is moving down a sensible path with changing the schedule,” she said.
Raymond suggested that NMFS implement a “positive action” to help industry members get through the transition period until sectors were implemented and Amendment 16 was fully developed.
For example, she said, NMFS could:
Reauthorize the Eastern US/Canada Haddock Special Access Program (SAP), which will expire at the end of the 2008 fishing year;
Continue the 18" minimum size on haddock, which is set to expire in August; and
Remove the “conservation tax” on days-at-sea transfers.
Maine council member Jim Salisbury put those suggestions, plus an additional one to expand the Closed Area I Haddock SAP as described in Amendment 16, into a motion asking NMFS to take interim action.
Salisbury said, “I think it’s important for us to do as much as possible to mitigate the economic impacts and improve the situation.”
But several council members worried that NMFS, once presented with such a request, would use the opportunity to implement other measures not requested by the council.
“I agree with the sentiment, but let’s not give them any ideas,” said David Preble of Rhode Island. “I think we need to digest this new information before we start asking for interim action.”
The motion failed six-to-seven with one abstention.
Janice M. Plante
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