Vito Giacalone of the Northeast Seafood Coalition said the industry finds itself now in the position of trying to get through the 2009 fishing year with an obsolete system and tools. “Deep days-at-sea cuts are not an alternative for the industry to survive this,” Giacalone said. NEFMC member David Goethel said the proposal is not perfect and only represents a template for NMFS to look at and build on. “We’re sitting here in the 11th hour, 55th minute, trying to come up with, in five minutes, a plan that usually takes three years to write,” Goethel said. Vito Calomo, executive director of the Gloucester Massachusetts -based Fisheries Recovery Com-mission and a third-generation fisherman who has fished for 40 years, said his organization supports the proposal as a way to get through 2009. “We’re in a life raft at this time, with an abandon-ship drill going on,” he said. “And the life raft is half full and we have a little can to bail it out.” The proposal came in response to the NEFMC’s invitation to the industry to come up with, basically, anything that could meet the requirement that an interim rule must stop overfishing, while also trying to avoid the initial proposal heard by NEFMC from its Groundfish Committee – to impose zero retention on the worst-off stocks – ocean pout, northern/southern windowpane flounder, halibut, Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic winter flounder, Gulf of Maine winter flounder, and Cape Cod/GOM yellowtail flounder. With zero retention proposed on so many species, NEFMC member David Pierce questioned whether fishermen can actually target specific stocks without catching others as bycatch. Pierce said the goal was to avoid a huge, across-the-board DAS cut. A DAS cut, he said, would make it difficult to transition into sector management in 2010. “We don’t want to gut the sectors by causing the fleet to fall apart because they’re not able to make it through 2009,” Pierce said. He said that, if TACs are exceeded under such an interim rule, A16 hard TACs would have to be reduced accordingly. But Mark Gibson, saying the proposal seemed overly complex, said that for the one fishing year, it made more sense to just do 19 TACS with the existing DAS. In his area, he said, the fleet sets up quotas by sub-periods to ensure they can make fixes as needed through the fishing year. NMFS regional administrator Pat Kurkul objected to the proposal. “Everyone is trying to get through the near-term to get to the sector-based system in 2010,” said Kurkul. “But we need reductions in fishing mortality. All this would do is make the council’s decision more difficult.” NEFMC member Rodney Avila warned that, no matter what comes down the road, it doesn’t look good. “This industry needs to know that half of us are not going to be here next here,” said Avila. “Maybe more than half. Nothing that I see is going to save this fishery. Since 1994, we’ve had management plans. These guys here have abided by these management plans. They’ve cut down the days-at-sea, increased mesh sizes, increased fish sizes, closed areas. They’ve done everything. And it hasn’t worked. We’ve got to look back. We’ve got to make it work. If it doesn’t work, we’ve just got to shut down the fishery, because we are not the problem. The fishing industry is not the problem. We always blame overfishing, but it’s not. It’s either natural mortality or predators, which nobody wants to ever look at. Everybody wants to cuddle a lousy seal. But the lousy seal is killing us.” New Bedford, Mass., Mayor Scott Lang, who said he was speaking for fishing ports across New England, told NEFMC that, with the industry hanging by a thread, fishermen need to have confidence in the numbers. Conservation measures to date, he said, have not worked for restoring the fishery as a whole, yet they have decimated the fleet. “The easiest way to regulate is to drive the fishery out of business,” Lang said. Federal fisheries law calls for balance between competing needs, he said. “Any action taken now in a lasting way will lead to the demise of the fishing industry, and it won’t be able to come back,” Lang said. “Please proceed with extreme, extreme accuracy and caution,” he said. Hundreds of people are signed up for sectors in 2010, Giacalone said. DAS cuts for 2009, he said, will remove half or more of those people from the fishery and make it impossible for them to get back in. Rick Canastra of New Bedford said that, at best, with any solution, his area will lose 20 percent of the fleet in 2009. Calomo reiterated the broader view, that undermining the fleet also does away with shoreside infrastructure. “In Maine, I’m taken aback by what’s been lost,” Calomo said by way of example. Calomo later added: “I hate to lose an industry I was born into. I hate to lose an industry that I love and adore. And I hate to lose an industry that I’ve represented for a long time.” Maggie Raymond of Associated Fisheries of Maine in South Berwick said her organization supported the proposal. But she added that, if NMFS ends up contemplating a DAS cut greater than 18 percent, it should not be a cut per se of Category A days, but rather a method of differential counting or allowing only a percentage of the Category A days to be used. The reason, she said, is that fishermen can’t afford to have anymore of their Category A days lapse to Category B, which would render them useless for leasing. John Williamson of the Ocean Conservancy said the proposal has major flaws. An 18 percent DAS cut, he said, falls far short of the PDT’s recommendation of a 40-50 percent cut in effort overall for 2009 and, in SNE/MA a 70-80 percent cut. With only an 18 percent cut, there will automatically be huge overages throughout the region, he said. And that will result in the need to address effort reduction on an ever-larger scale in 2010 due to 2009 overfishing. This would essentially shut down SNE and, overall, put the industry in a much worse position for 2010, he said. GARM III, issued by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Mass., showed that, overall, groundfish stocks had worsened since the last assessment, despite a tortured array of efforts to improve the situation. Of the 19 groundfish stocks, the GARM III report says that 11 of the stocks are now both overfished and experiencing overfishing, compared to seven in 2004. Pollock, witch flounder, Georges Bank winter flounder, Gulf of Maine winter flounder and northern windowpane have deteriorated in status, while GOM cod has improved. In 2004, five stocks (pollock, redfish, northern windowpane, GOM winter flounder, and witch flounder) were classified as not overfished and not experiencing overfishing. In 2007, four stocks achieved this status – redfish, American plaice, GB haddock, and GOM haddock. Presenting one of the biggest problems is Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic winter flounder, which might not rebuild by 2014 even without any fishing mortality. The fishing mortality for SNE/MA yellowtail flounder to rebuild will also have to be very low. “Catches for these two stocks may need to be limited to very low levels and may require reducing discards in other fisheries,” a memo from NEFMC’s Groundfish Plan Development Team to the Groundfish Oversight Committee said. Ocean pout is also problematic. Preliminary results indicate that mortality reductions for the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank areas may be on the order of 40 percent for most stocks, while for SNE they could be twice that amount, the memo said. The mortality reduction for GOM/GB windowpane flounder is also approaching 80 percent. There’s also some good news. The report says that redfish, American plaice, Georges Bank haddock and Gulf of Maine haddock are not overfished nor is overfishing occurring, and increased stock growth is occurring in southern windowpane flounder. Also positive, the Gulf of Maine cod spawning stock biomass is at least as high, or higher, than it has been in 30 years; and while overfishing is still occurring, this stock is no longer overfished. Cape Cod yellowtail flounder has shown some rebounding in the last several years. Large relative increases also occurred in other yellowtail flounder stocks (Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic and Georges Bank). In some cases, the science center’s Dr. Paul Rago told NEFMC, stock size increases are attributable to a single good year class and does not necessarily signal stock recovery. Rago warned against being too optimistic. Gulf of Maine cod, for example, is now classified as “not overfished” despite overfishing to date. Periodic strong recruitment does not constitute broad-based restoration and does not actually reflect a reduction in fishing to sustainable levels, he said. “Mother Nature is kinder than we are, I guess,” Rago said. Because of the poor results, NEFMC found itself faced with a possible 40 percent reduction in fishing mortality in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank area, and much larger reductions for stocks in the Southern New England and Mid-Atlantic areas. Especially problematic is SNE/ MA winter flounder, which the assessment says cannot be rebuilt by 2014 even if there’s no fishing on the stock. This stock, said NEFMC fishery analyst Tom Nies, could represent a policy change, since to eliminate fishing on the stock could mean that any fishery that catches the stock as bycatch would have to stop fishing also, including not only other groundfishing but scallop fishing. The development of A16 was delayed this summer as NEFMC awaited the results of the assessment. The need to develop an interim rule for the coming fishing year further delays A16’s development. An interim rule is expected to be in place at least until fall 2009. The rule will run for six months, with the option to renew for another six months. Kurkul said the interim measure essentially represented NEFMC’s failure to accomplish its mission. NEFMC chairman John Pappalardo agreed the council failed to put forward A16 in time. But, he said, “We’ve known all along this amendment would be a difficult task. I certainly don’t feel like we failed. A lot of people right now are struggling to get to the next level. The options available to us are, at best, draconian.” Jim Odlin proposed, the development of an interim rule should itself be delayed a month, due to lack of information. But Kurkul noted that, if NEFMC waited another month, the rule wouldn’t make the May 1, 2009 start date. And, she said, the development of the rule competes for staff time with the development of A16, so any delay of one also delays the other. Gary Libby of the Midcoast Fishermen’s Association in Port Clyde, which has 11 boats and 21 fishermen, presented his organization’s proposal for a Gulf of Maine Multispecies Special Access Program to be considered in the interim rule options. The potential for a year-round closure there would impact eastern Maine fishermen and eliminate nearshore gear, Libby said. The SAP, he said, recognizes the unique differences between fishing areas. “2009 will be the worst year our fleet has seen,” Libby said. “We feel that any closure will eliminate the remaining near-shore fishing fleet in Maine through attrition. MFA first presented the proposed SAP at the June NEFMC meeting as an alternative to a massive closure that was being proposed for the Gulf of Maine in response to preliminary stock assessments. In August, the Groundfish Committee determined there are several stocks of concern that will affect fishing in the Gulf of Maine. The proposed program includes: targeting species for which the previous years’ TAC was not achieved, not changing measures designed to minimize adverse impacts of fishing on EFH, hard TACs on species of concern, a defined area, measures to reduce discards, explicit monitoring and VMS reporting requirements for accountability, andidentification of stakeholders fishing in this proposed area through trip declaration per VMS. |
