Catch shares here to stay

This was in a Dec 24 2009 issue of the Gloucester times.


Feds admit plan means loss of jobs: Fishermen wonder why government pushes economic loser

GLOUCESTER DAILY TIMES, MASS. | RICHARD GAINES | Thu, Dec 24, 11:09 AM





Dec. 24--The federal government's next-generation fishery regulatory regimen for New England openly acknowledges that social and economic hardship starting with job losses will be among the first effects.
Only later does the document anticipate economic recovery and a brighter future -- as in the classic stages of the medical cleansing with distasteful purgatives.
That's raising questions and concern among fishing industry leaders, and from lawmakers like Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who wonder how the U.S. government can openly push a policy with negative economic impacts for fishing communities like Gloucester.
The New England Fishery Management Council has approved the so-called Amendment 16 catch-share regulatory system to take effect next May 1.
Barring court action, the New England groundfishery will be split into two classes -- one characterized by fishermen into cartel or guild-like cooperatives, the other by those who decline to join the "sectors," who will fish under a constricted version of the current effort control system, with limited days at sea and no-fishing zones.
"There would likely be short-term negative economic and social impacts associated with this action," the National Marine Fisheries Service asserts in its draft text and analysis of Amendment 16, which runs nearly 1,000 pages.
But the government also anticipates a strong, economic rebound in the new system, which has been in research and development for more than three years.
"There would likely be positive, longterm biological, economic and social impacts as stocks rebuild and more sustainable fisheries and the fishing communities are maintained," the NMFS text states.
Fishermen and a leading industry analyst concur with the projection of short-term hardship, but are less sure of the long-term benefits accruing to the people of the Ocean Nation, according to interviews conducted for an on-line feature to be published on Dec. 31.
The split system is meant to be transitional, with the entire groundfishery coming eventually under the catch share principles that are to be used next year only by the 15 sectors now in the final stages of organization -- primarily in the offices of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition.
The offering to fishermen of the option of joining a sector or fishing independently helped obviate the statutory need for an industry referendum on the adoption of catch share policy -- which splits the total allowable catch into slices that can be caught by each fisherman.
Catch shares are catching rights, and according to Gloucester's Vito Giacalone, a prime architect of the sector system to be used in New England next year, Amendment 16 contains few constraints on the trading and accumulation of catch shares or allocation.
The short-term hardships discussed in Amendment 16's economic analysis involve the power of catch shares to catalyze a powerful consolidation.
"Global analyses show catch share fisheries tend to end up with somewhat fewer jobs, but much better jobs," according to Jane Lubchenco, the first-year head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and government's lead advocate of catch shares. Lubchenco forged her views while a prominent academic scientist and vice chair of the Environmental Defense Fund, which has been lobbying for the system for many years.
On President Obama's nomination, she was put in charge of NOAA last spring.
EDF makes no secret of its effort to encourage investment capital into the catch share system.
The Amendment 16 draft document acknowledges that, with so many moving parts, quantifying the short-term economic hardship was impossible.
But Giacalone makes the case that the root problem isn't catch shares but the Magnuson-Stevens Act, whose reauthorizations have been heavily lobbied by the ENGOs -- environmental non-government organizations.
"Magnuson has set us up to fail," he said.
He cited the requirement of the 1996 iteration of the law that established the 200-mile limit in 1976 and has been revised at 10-year intervals, yet still requires that all stocks be rebuilt as one in 2014. The ocean ecosystems don't work that way, he said.
The other arm of the vice was the provision in the 2006 version of Magnuson that mandated imposition of annual catch limits which beget hard TACs or total allowable catches and accountability measures.
Giacalone said that requirement made some form of catch share or a related commodification of the stocks inevitable.
"The law says the world will come to an end if you don't do it (rebuild) in that 10-year period," he said.
Some idea of the impact of catch limits on the coming economic squeeze shines through the Amendment 16 draft that the future maximum sustainable yield in the new system will be about 75 percent of the present.
Thus emerges the seeming anomaly of fast-rebuilding fish stocks and still tighter controls on fishing.
Edward Smith, a Gloucester gillnetter, and Joe Orlando, a longtime Gloucester trawler, both report the seas more active with fat cod close to the shore than at any time in their memory.
"Stocks have come back so dramatically," said Smith, who noted that he now takes his 800-pound day's limit in a three-hour trip out and back.
"Fish are so abundant," said Orlando. "One and a half hours out, catch my limit in 10 minutes and back to dock. You can check my log book."
Both wonder, however, whether they will be able to survive the transformation of the fishery into a market in which fishermen's catch shares can be bartered as commodities, and with the short-term restrictions on their catch. If not, they wonder, who will be there to buy them out?
"We're at a good point; there's plenty of fish out there," said Orlando. "Who's going to own it?"
"We rebuilt this fishery," he said. "Who're we going to lose it to?"



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