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Fishery Council Flooded By E-mails On Herring
by Laurie Schreiber
NEFMC received more than 8,000 e-mails asking NEFMC to make herring a priority. And they heard from fishermen and others who said the midwater herring trawler fleet needed to be more closely monitored. Paul Parker, executive director of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association, said increased monitoring is needed to get a better understanding of catch and bycatch. “It could be a clean fishery, and in many instances, it is a clean fishery,” Parker said. But, he said, in the Pacific, he’s seen far greater cooperation between fishery groups to address mutual needs. “Until we get that, you’ll continue to see divisions,” he said. “We need to move forward to build a better platform for mutual understanding.” Steve Weiner, chairman of CHOIR, said the sheer number of emails is a true representation of what people feel is happening in the trawler fishery. Weiner said the intention is not to shut the fishery down, but to know what’s happening. “We want a healthy fishery,” he said. “You can say it’s a healthy fishery, but we don’t know what’s being landed,” particularly offshore and unobserved. “This is the most important species in the Gulf of Maine. What’s the fear of knowing more?…If the industry is really serious about it, what’s the worry?” Others in the fishery said there’s already plenty of monitoring of the trawler fleet. Jeff Kaelin of Portland, who works with midwater trawlers, said it’s too early to start another herring amendment, since NEFMC just completed Amendment 1. Kaelin said the trawler fleet is already in the midst of significant adjustments due to recent management changes. One of the trawlers he works with was rigged over for purse-seining, at considerable expense. Trawler fishermen were also seriously impacted by new spawning closures, he said. The thousands of emails, he said, speak to issues NEFMC has already dealt with. “To say there’s no monitoring in this fishery is a surprise to me,” Kaelin said. The fleet already has observer coverage and is required to call in their catch on every trip, he noted. Observers have identified groundfish bycatch as low, he said. And trawlers take observers whenever they’re asked, he said. “So I’m confused as to how anyone can say there’s no monitoring in this fishery,” he said. He added that the industry has been accommodating. “The industry has been on Capitol Hill asking for additional funding for the observer program,” he said, adding, “The dog and pony show we see going on today on this issue is a travesty.” Jim Kendall, of New Bedford (Mass.) Seafood Consulting, said the herring industry in his area is trying to make the fishery as clean and helpful as possible. He said the assertion that monitoring is inadequate is untrue. “The size of the problem has been magnified way beyond what is justified,” Kendall said. Some council members also said development of new herring measures is not needed yet. David Gaithell said the effects of herring Amendment 1, completed just last June, are not yet clear as to how they’ve affected the fishery. NEFMC’s history, he said, has been to take action, then to start looking into a subsequent action before the impacts of the previous one are fully understood.
Jim Odlin agreed. A1, he said, made sweeping changes, including imposing limited entry measures for the first time. And, he said, herring is already monitored. “It’s quite robust,” Odlin said. “If we’re going to manage fisheries by letter-writing, we’re going to have a big problem.” David Simpson wanted to know why monitoring would require a new amendment, rather than simply reallocating resources in NMFS’ observer program. The discussion came about during NEFMC’s November meeting to develop its list of priority fisheries to work on in the coming year. For 2008, NEFMC’s executive committee recommended the list should include skate, monkfish, and continued development of NEFMC’s omnibus habitat amendment, which is expected to wrap up in 2008, followed by work on an ecosystem plan. They recommended NEFMC should continue work on groundfish Amendment 16, with work to start later to develop A17 for area management, sectors, etc. They recommended NEFMC should start a new scallop amendment, mainly to address issues concerning the limited access fleet, including capacity reduction through measures such as individual fishing quotas and days-at-sea leasing and transfers, as well as examining the overfishing definition. And they recommended that herring should be a priority. Future amendments for all the fisheries are expected to take into account new provisions in federal fishery law, the Magnuson Stevens Act, that require annual catch limits and accountability measures for each fishery. NEFMC executive director Paul Howard said NEFMC is waiting for guidelines from the National Marine Fisheries Service on how to address the requirements; guidelines are expected in the coming months. Howard said that, because the herring fishery is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring, work on annual catch limits and accountability measures for that particular fishery does not need to begin immediately. However, the staff recommendation to make herring a priority was based on the need to improve monitoring for the fishery. David Pierce, who chairs NEFMC’s pelagics committee, pointed out that NEFMC already has a goal of 20 percent observer coverage for the herring fishery. Observer coverage currently amounts to only 3 percent. Pierce wanted to know what good revisiting the issue would be if the observer program already can’t meet the current goal. NMFS regional administrator Pat Kurkul agreed, saying that people seem to think NMFS has some way of doing herring monitoring differently. “There are no other mechanisms,” she said, “and no way to increase observer coverage without thinking about things like industry-funded observers.” Sally McGee said funding for the observer program is “the elephant in the room.” At the same time, she said, a program of industry-funded observers “is going to get a lot of people’s hackles up.” McGee said NEFMC needs to examine how other regions in the country conduct their observer programs less expensively. Gaithell said whiting should replace herring on the priorities list for the coming year. Whiting, he said, is a far smaller fishery that would provide a good foundation for figuring out how to accurately assess landings and proceed from there to figuring out how to institute new annual catch limit and accountability requirements in a systematic way. Once the process is in place, he said, it would significantly help the groundfish fishery. On the topic of scallops, the Department of Marine Resources’ Terry Stockwell said the state of Maine is interested in re-addressing the northern Gulf of Maine total allowable catch. Some attention was also paid to the bycatch of river herring by the midwater trawl fleet. Mark Gibson said the river herring issue is important and time-sensitive, since river herring populations have declined significantly in recent years. Pierce said that river herring bycatch in inshore areas is an Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission issue. |
