SITTING ON ARMEGEDDON
continued from Home Page
Dave Goethel, NEFMC meeting, Plymouth, MA. “To sit on the verge of Armageddon this year and to say we’re going to do the same thing we’ve done for the last 40 years, and expect that, somehow, groundfish this time, will magically come out better than they were, is pure folly.” © Photo by Sam Murfitt.
“Everything bad has happened to us, from people losing houses to families having problems,” Ed Barrett told the NEFMC. Barrett is a commercial fisherman and president of Sector 10, which comprises a membership of 40 permits with 27 ownership entities, who land primarily in Scituate, Marshfield, Plymouth and Provincetown.
Barrett said he has been pretty much living on his boat since May, fishing mainly out of ports in Nantucket Sound. Many factors affect the status of the resource, not just fishing, he said. These include, he said, construction of the Cape Wind offshore wind farm in the sound, which provides essential habitat for juvenile fish.
“We’re about to embark on a four-year construction project,” he said. “The newspapers say we’re a dying industry, and the general public thinks we overfished it.”
Barrett said that, given the many regulations imposed on the industry over the last 15 years, fishing probably has the least impact on stocks. He asked the NEFMC to expand its scope to examine other effects on the fish and habitat.
Frank Mirarchi, a Sector 10 member from Scituate, said the future of the sector is in question.
The sector’s members have limited means, he said. They own small boats with limited range and limited capacity, meaning “we wait for the fish to come to us; we don’t go to the fish,” Mirarchi said. Over the past summer, he said, the fish did not come inshore. “It’s been an anomalous summer,” he said. “Fish distribution has been very scarce.”
The sector has met to figure out options, he said.
“But we have no answers,” he said. “Once a fishing community goes under, it’s not going to come back. They’re not creating any more waterfront real estate, and the connections of family lineage, once severed, will not be reconnected again.”
Sector 10 was the subject of an economic survey and analysis published by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries in 2011. The sector was chosen as the subject of study because of the severe economic impacts that hit those fishermen with the implementation of Amendment 16. Fishermen there suffer because their vessels are smaller and have limited range, and because the sector is located adjacent to a number of federal fishing closure areas, the study said.
“Consequently, small vessels fishing inshore have reduced catch histories relative to larger vessels that were not impacted to the same degree…” the study said.
Sector 10 landings and gross revenues for all fish on groundfish trips showed a precipitous decline, the study said. Groundfish landings dropped from 2 million pounds in fishing year 2009 to 784,300 pounds in 2010, a 61 percent decrease. Net revenue loss for groundfish trips was 52 percent, from $1.2 million down to $596,000. For individual groups of fishermen within the sector, losses went deeper, the study said. Approximately one-third of Sector 10 permit-holders experienced a drop in net groundfish revenue of 80 percent.
At the NEFMC meeting, David Goethel spoke of the “immense amount of frustration in the fishing public,” many of whom “simply feel they aren’t being listened to.”
“When we’ve got to the point, after 40 years, that we have to declare a fisheries disaster, you have to admit that groundfish management has failed entirely,” Goethel said.
Goethel was referring to the disaster declaration announced on Sept. 13 by the Department of Commerce for the commercial groundfish industry of New England.
Goethel said he has been involved in fisheries management since 1967. He said the blame does not fall on any one management body, but on the process itself.
“My feeling is, when something fails, you have to examine it wholesale and figure out why it’s failed,” he said. “We keep doing the same thing over and over, and we keep expecting a different result – and we never get it.”
A central problem, he said, is that single-species management, with individual-species quotas and other single-species management tools, “will continue to be a failure in a multi-species fisheries.”
Goethel also spoke of “a consistent deflection of the groundfish problem,” a “tyranny of the majority” that moves forward management measures that “protect the powerful.”
A prime example, he said, was the NEFMC’s rejection, when Amendment 16 was drafted, of a proposal to hold a referendum on groundfish allocation. “If a requirement of Amendment 16 had been a referendum on the allocation, we would not be here today discussing Amendment 18,” Goethel said. “A referendum would have never passed with the allocation scheme put forward, because it disenfranchised the majority of the people. If we had a referendum, everything today would have been different. I believe who fishes matters and who catches what matters. A number of people can get by on a relatively small amount of fish and we can have relatively high employment, or we can let it go to three or four corporate interests, employ relatively few people and wreak indescribable damage on fishery habitat and on the fishery for a lifetime, that may last for generations. I think it’s time for this council and for [NMFS] to examine an entirely different way of doing business with the groundfishery.”
That may mean changes to the federal fisheries law known as the Magnuson Act, or changes to the way the act is interpreted, he said.
“But to sit on the verge of Armageddon this year and to say we’re going to do the same thing we’ve done for the last 40 years, and expect that, somehow, groundfish, this time, will magically come out better than they were, is pure folly,” Goethel said.
The discussion came about after a report from Bullard on the “listening sessions” he has held, from Maine to Virginia, since he first arrived at NMFS in August.
Bullard said that, from the first, it was clear that NMFS was in “a crisis situation.”
In an effort to get a handle on the problems, he said, “I wanted to spend a lot of time going out and meeting with people in their places of business.” He said his goal was to learn more from fishermen, scientists, environmentalists, seafood dealers and processors, the aquaculture industry and other members of the interested public.
The problem that dominated every session, he said, was the distrust fishermen feel for the science that is used to inform the management process.
“It’s not just one voice that’s saying, We don’t have confidence in the way science is done. It’s a lot of voices. It’s prevalent. It’s everywhere,” Bullard said.
The issue, he said, boils down to two separate problems – whether the science is any good, and whether it’s effectively communicated. “You can have good science but not communicate it effectively,” he said.
Fishermen are feeling a great deal of economic distress, Bullard said.
“In Gloucester, in every community I’ve gone to, a guy sitting there looks me straight in the eye and says, ‘John, am I going to make it?’ That question has been asked of me over and over again. It’s that question of economic distress. And he wasn’t talking about, ‘Am I going to survive what’s going to happen on May 1, 2013?’ He was thinking about next week, next month. Up and down the coast, there is economic distress out there.”
Fishermen in the Mid-Atlantic, he said, are concerned about shifts of fishing effort from the Northeast southward, exerting undue pressure onto healthy fisheries.
Bullard said the NEFMC can help distressed fishermen by providing access to fish species that are in good shape. “How can we get access to them through looking at areas that were closed under the old regime…and saying, ‘Can we responsibly open them, because their usefulness as effort controls is not needed now,’” Bullard said. “You’re hard at work at that and that might provide ways to provide income in responsible and sustainable ways.”
Abundant dogfish might provide a significant new income stream, he said. “We can be smart about potential income. There is income out there,” he said.
At the same time, he said, managers must look at ways to reduce expenses for fishermen, notably by finding ways to pay for observer coverage. “The cost for observers is tremendously high,” Bullard said. “Fishermen said observers can be half the cost of a trip. And what are we getting for it? Twenty-five percent coverage? It’s not that great coverage. Is there technology where we might get a better product, 100 percent coverage? And this council and others might think of ways where you combine technology and full retention, and get a better product of 100 percent coverage and no discards.”
In general, Bullard said, fishermen said they feel unheard. Fishermen are the best observers of the marine environment, he said, and their information about changing conditions must be incorporated into the information stream.
“I asked a fisherman in Ellsworth, ‘What do you see out there in temperature?’” he recalled of one listening session. “One guy said, ‘It’s always been 45 degrees, and then three or four years ago, it’s 50 degrees. And this year, it was 65 degrees.’ So temperatures are changing, currents are changing, and fish are moving. What are the implications of that? When you have changes that profound, that has to change the way we manage fish, right? How does it change the way we manage fish? I’m talking to guys who say, ‘My state allocation is based on catches that we did in the ‘80s.’ How does that make sense when fish are moving as fast as they are moving, in a northward direction, which means that states are going to be losing fish, but they’re also going to be gaining fish?...If fish are moving, why would you base how much fish a state gets on what someone was catching in the 1980s? That is ridiculous. Somehow or other, the [New England and Mid-Atlantic] councils need to get together and say, ‘If fish populations are moving in a northerly direction, then we need to start thinking about how we manage fish. New fish are going to be showing up at our doorstep and fish are going to be departing. How do we say hello to new fish and goodbye to old fish?”
At all of the sessions, Bullard said, there has been “tremendous appreciation for reaching out. People were very pleased that something as simple as going out and asking what they think would happen. That suggests that maybe we should do more of that.”
The issue of fleet consolidation also came up at every meeting, he said. “It would be phrased in different ways, sometimes as access, sometimes as consolidation, sometimes as big boats versus little boats,” he said.
Consolidation is happening, and was happening before implementation of the sector system, Bullard said.
“It should be addressed overtly,” he said. “That is, it shouldn’t just be allowed to occur while we’re not paying attention.
At a listening session in New Bedford, a young man from the Cape said, ‘I’m a small guy. My father, my grandfather were in fishing. My brother’s in fishing. And I want to have access to fishing.’ He was standing next to a person who’s acquired quite a few permits. I said, ‘I don’t know whether five or 10 years from now the New England groundfish fishery will be owned by three or four people. But if that’s the vision of fishing, we should take a vote on that. If that’s what we want fishing to be, then we should take a vote on that. It shouldn’t just happen when we’re not paying attention. Because I think if you ask people, if you ask elected officials, if you ask the council, if you just walk down the sidewalk and ask people, I don’t think that’s what they would vote for.”
The NEFMC is currently considering the issues of consolidation and fleet diversity in the form of Amendment 18 to the groundfish management plan. Amendment 18 is intended to protect the diversity of the Northeast groundfishing fleet, and to forestall further consolidation of the groundfish resource to a shrinking number of boats by imposing accumulation limits. The number of groundfish vessels has plummeted by 61 percent over the past 16 years. The latest figures show that vessels throughout the region numbered 524 in 2010, compared with 1,354 in 1996. The state which lost the greatest number of active vessels was Massachusetts, which went from 716 in 1996 to 270 in 2010. Maine went from 188 in 1996 to 52 in 2010.
If no delays are encountered, the NEFMC expects to select the proposed action in mid-2013 and implement new regulations in 2014.