Ahab's Journal

'Catch shares' a growing concept in fisheries management

But recreational anglers not likely a good fit

"Catch shares" likely will grow as a primary management tool for commercial fisheries -- but the concept may not prove workable for the recreational sector, federal fishery managers say.

Catch shares now used in 13 U.S. fisheries affect only commercial harvesters, Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a Dec. 10 briefing.

"Most catch-share programs are focused on the commercial sector," Lubchenco said in the conference-call session. "We don't have any recreational fisheries using this type of management."

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News analysis: Where's the 'spiral?': NOAA chief's fishery comment raises questions

In her national pitch for catch shares, oceans administrator Jane Lubchenco lauded the rights-based system for its capacity to transform fishing-based economic systems in chronic decline.

There are "many in a downward spiral," she said.

Lubchenco did not elaborate in her hour-long teleconference last week.

But yesterday, in response to an inquiry, Monica Allen, a public affairs specialist with NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, said the "downward spiral" phrase was not meant to describe the ocean ecosystems that are harvested, but rather the communities that do the harvesting.

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IFQs shrink harvester profit margins as management death sentence hovers

From National Fisherman:

The 2010 red snapper outlook is more convoluted and contradictory than usual.

Fishermen report abundant snapper, but the 2.55 million-pound Gulf of Mexico commercial quota continues.

Aside from the quota, the IFQ program seems to be working well for major shareholders. However, fishermen in the eastern gulf who have to rent allocation to participate are finding it harder to turn a profit.

On Florida’s Atlantic coast, supply is sufficient to undercut the gulf price by nearly a dollar. At the same time, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council is pushing an amendment that, if implemented, would close almost all snapper-grouper fishing indefinitely — a virtual death sentence for commercial, charter and recreational fishing communities.

“What NMFS and the South Atlantic council is doing to the fishermen, dealers, communities and the anglers is bigger than the Florida net ban,” says Bob Jones, executive director of the Madeira Beach, Fla.-based Southern Offshore Fishing Association.

The last fisherman: Josh Churchmen in Marin County, Ca.

I live in a small town in Marin County, California called Bolinas. I have fished here for forty years and I have accumulated every permit I could get over the years. Marin is very interested in “locally” caught” fish, organic produce… My concern with catch shares is that all the permits will be sold out of my port and that will therefore finally end a long history of that ports fishing and deprive our community of what it says it wants.

Has there been any discussion of “locking in” allocations or permits to the ports ? A port without fishermen is a hard thing to recover from.

In Bodega Bay, where I have a second boat with a L/E fixed gear permit, I am the only boat currently landing fish. All the other permits were sold to other parts of California where quotas were higher. With no salmon, the only thing left is crab for the remaining boats. I am getting old and when I quit will I have be the last fisherman ever to land fish in both of these California ports?

You have a responsibility to pass on something better to the next generation. Keep the small ports and their fishermen.

 

Josh Churchmen

415 868 0982

(Comments sent to catchshares@noaa.gov)

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NOAA Encourages Use of Catch Shares to End Overfishing, Rebuild Fisheries and Fishing Communities

NOAA released today for public comment a draft national policy encouraging the use of catch shares, a fishery management tool that aims to end overfishing and rebuild and sustain fishing jobs and fishing communities. In doing so, NOAA recognized that catch shares are not a panacea or one-size-fits-all solution, but are a proven way to promote sustainable fishing when designed properly at the fishing community level.

To read and comment on the draft policy, go to http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/catchshares. The public may submit written comments until April 10. After reviewing and considering comments, NOAA will issue the final policy.

Listen to the Catch Shares telephone press conference [MP3].

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EDF Applauds NOAA's New Catch Share Policy and Introduces the Catch Shares Action Toolkit

A policy released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration charts an historic new course for the nation’s fish stocks, giving hope for the recovery of struggling fishing communities and depleted fish resources. With the new policy, NOAA is seeking to correct decades of failed management that has resulted in economically-depressed, unsafe, and unsustainable fisheries around the country.

The policy promotes greater use of catch shares, and we at EDF applaud NOAA for promoting this innovative fisheries management approach proven to improve fishermen’s lives and livelihoods and restore fish populations. NOAA’s policy builds upon the significant work of fishermen, fishing communities, scientists, fishery managers, and conservationists to design and implement catch shares in fisheries around the country.

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Pew applauds NOAA for its conservation-minded catch shares policy

WASHINGTON – Lee Crockett, director of Federal Fisheries Policy at the Pew Environment Group, today issued the following statement in response to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) release of its draft policy on the use of catch shares in federal fisheries.

 

“NOAA and its Catch Shares Task Force recognize that catch shares are not a one-size-fits-all fisheries solution and not all fisheries can or should be managed by them. In keeping with that determination, the draft NOAA policy released today encourages, rather than mandates, that catch shares be one of several possible management tools regional fishery management councils should consider when developing their plans. 

Catch Share Task Force Statement Vague

Statement of Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter

“Poorly designed privatized catch share systems can actually harm marine resources by supporting industrialized seafood production, often at the expense of more sustainable and local seafood producers. Countries that have tried the privatization approach often experience job loss, lower wages for fishing crews, and threats to smaller-scale, historic fishermen and their communities.

In 2007, the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that Iceland’s privatized catch share system violated international law because the system forced fishermen to pay money to a privileged group of citizens who exclusively held the nation’s fishing rights. Iceland is now working to undo the damage that this policy has caused.

“Food & Water Watch opposes any push to privatize access to public resources, but not the use of publicly managed catch share programs. We support continued public management of fish resources and expect the federal government – when applicable – to rent catch shares directly to eligible entities and use the rental revenue for better ocean management. This means fairer long-term access to fish, and a system that benefits the fishermen, the environment and broader community – not primarily larger businesses.

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NOAA Proposal Aims to Spur Cap-And-Trade Management of Fisheries

But the programs are not without controversy. Some environmental and fishing groups have pushed back against the Obama administration's aggressive attempts to institute the new systems. The Pew Environment Group, for instance, says the programs have often been successful in meeting conservation goals but can pose problems for commercial fishers, including the possibility of shutting out small fishing operations or consolidating the industry.

Still, the group says it was pleasantly surprised by this morning's draft policy. "I think they have moved in a direction that makes us more comfortable. They are not mandating catch-share policies, and that's a good thing," said Lee Crockett, director of federal fisheries policy for the Pew Environment Group. "They are not even mandating they be considered in every fishery, but they are clearly setting them up that they should be considered."

The group supports a more bottom-up approach where local councils would decide on their own about whether or not to sign onto catch-share programs, and Crockett said he still wonders where the money and personnel for such ventures will come from during the economic downturn.

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Capitalists outline investment options for 'catch shares'

Investment capital is almost certain to find a role in the conversion of America's fisheries from essentially common resources to privately managed fishermen's cooperatives through a system known as catch shares.

Just ask Michael Van Patten, a Greenwich, Conn.-based entrepreneur — or Ed Backus, vice president for fisheries at Ecotrust, the Oregon non-profit that seeks community solutions to social and environmental problems.

Van Patten and Backus have followed carefully the long unwrapping of the Obama administration's policy for carrying the nation's fisheries down the home stretch and back to sustainability from the dire straits they faced in the 1970s, after decades of rapacious fishing by foreign factory trawlers and smaller American boats.

They both see enormous opportunities for the infusion of investment capital to strengthen the fisheries, and a great danger of unsettling communities and indenturing small boat businessmen and women, the backbone of America's fisheries and the people who could find themselves at the mercy of speculators.

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Groups Support Catch Share Programs

December 9, 2009

 

Dear Member of Congress:

 

We represent millions of people across the country – including fishermen, fish processors, fishing organizations, chefs, community leaders, economists, recreationists, and conservationists – who support vibrant fisheries. We have come together with the common belief that restoring fisheries to full abundance is a necessary and achievable goal for marine fisheries management in the United States and ask that you support the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in restoring our fisheries, including through the development and implementation of well designed catch share management programs.

Allotment of fishing shares debated

MDI — Small-boat fishermen are worried that fishing rights will be divvied up and that they will be forced out of business.

And many fear the federal government is hastening the process.

Many small-boat fishermen think they will be put out of business by a new management process that for the first time would allocate catch shares to individual fishermen and many fear could risk consolidation of fishing opportunities to large corporate entities.

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Fishing sectors 'set up to fail,' coalition says

Hard annual catch limits, mandated by Congress and established last month for the first time to cover the 2010 fishing season have cast a pall over industry efforts to organize viable fishing cooperatives.

And even with sectors, as the coops are known, a sizeable fraction of the small boat fleet based here is given no chance of surviving by a fleet owner and the executive director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, where the vast majority of the cooperatives are being organized.

"Federal law has set fisheries up to fail in New England and across the nation," the coalition said in a statement.

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Lack of fed cash final nail in catch share plan

The $18 million promised by first-year NOAA chief administrator Jane Lubchenco has not been funded by Congress — and there is no indication it will be.

To that end, Lubchenco — no doubt drawing on her career as a scientist, educator, Pew fellow and vice president of the Environment Defense Fund — is welcoming "fund-raising" efforts by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a public-private philanthropy that is backed by a number of corporate partners.

But, while providing government grants to nonprofit groups and other agencies is one thing, somebody had better tell Lubchenco that it is grossly inappropriate for the government to accept money for its own mandated programs from a foundation whose funding — or investing — "partners" include the likes of Wal-Mart, Anheuser-Busch, Bank of America and the Big Oil gang of British Petroleum, Exxon/Mobil, Marathon Oil, Shell, and Conoco-Phillips.

Even local city councilors, selectmen and municipal administrators know the potential conflict and dangers that can come through letting private entities openly contribute to projects that are government-run and should be government-funded.

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If 'catch shares' catch on, many independent fishermen will be swallowed up

HARRINGTON — By this time next year, entire fishing communities in Maine and throughout the country could be destroyed by a fisheries management plan called "catch shares" if they are not carefully developed.

Catch shares are a system that could privatize access to fishing to a handful of boats.

The government sets a limit on how much fish can be caught and gives away shares to those who have fished the hardest and fastest in the past.

The recipients can then fish, sell or lease their shares as they please.

As we have already seen in Alaska and Canada, under this system independent fishermen often receive a quota so small that it is no longer economically viable for them to fish.   

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A Catch Shares Program Designed in Restraint of Trade

Re C2 GOA Rockfish Program – Refining Alternatives for Analysis

A Catch Shares Program Designed in Restraint of Trade

 

Dear Secretary Locke, Chair Olson and members of the NPFMC:

 

GSNA is a U.S. owned company that operates a small processing facility in Kodiak, and again we would like the Secretary and Council to discontinue the flawed package of Alternatives and restore competition to the GOA Rockfish and related fisheries.

Designed to bridge the Rockfish Pilot Program’s final season (2010) immediately into a permanent two-pie Catch Share regime, the C2 package of alternatives is being rushed through to serve particular interests.  This program is not being designed by a proper public process, but rather primarily at the hands of the Alaska Groundfish Data Bank (“AGDB”) and trawl interests in conjunction with the larger processors, all of which are wrongfully combined in linked cooperatives — now ruled in violation of law.

This arrangement did not only exclude small processors such as GSNA and severely harm our profits, fishermen, customers and workforce. Especially due to its 3-year extension in MSAR 2007, the ‘rockfish demonstration’ program acted as a de facto government subsidy to our competitors — a means of wealth transfer to specific competitors in advance of designing a permanent program to continue restraint of trade.  As such, it provided the funds for those included parties to not only lobby the Council and Congress at GSNA’s expense, but to sit in a prominent position today while designing these new alternatives, often behind closed doors.

Catch share debate heats up nationally

The fully national debate over fishermen's catch shares is about to begin in earnest.

A draft policy created by a special task force for Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is scheduled for release and three months of public comment on Dec. 10, NOAA spokeswoman Monica Allen said yesterday.

Lubchenco has made $18.6 million available for the development of catch share fishing cooperatives in New England, but according to Monica Medina, who chairs the task force, no national funding commitment from Congress has been obtained.

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Catch Shares or Share-Croppers?

Once upon a far-off time, folks lived in neighborly communities where they knew each other as tinkers, tailors, soldiers and sailors, and sent their children down to the corner mom-and-pop store for eggs and milk from Farmer Brown’s chickens and cow.

Along came faceless corporate efficiency and big-box stores that swallowed up the mom-and-pops and farmed out tinkering and tailoring to China, leaving communities rootless and neighbors disconnected.

“Mom-and-pop” fishermen fear their small businesses could be swallowed up and their communities disrupted by similar corporate forces.

And many fear the federal government is hastening the process.

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Individual quotas on grouper catch could change the landscape for many fishermen

CLEARWATER — For the past few years, Brian Lewis and his son-in-law have caught about 25,000 pounds of grouper that made its way between buns and tartar sauce at Frenchy's restaurants.

Come January, though, the rules of commercial fishing are going to change. Some boat owners will gain a big advantage — so much so that they can make money without leaving the dock.

Others like Lewis will get the short end of the stick. Their costs will jump because they will have to pay their competitors for the right to fish.

This is the new world of "individual fishing quotas,'' where select boat owners will own a fixed share of the total allowable grouper catch.

Shareholders can try to catch the fish themselves. Or they can lease their percentage of the annual federal quota to someone like Lewis, who will do the work, then fork over part of the cut.

Quota shares for 2010 are already leasing on the Internet for 75 cents to $1 a pound for the right to catch a red grouper worth $3 when the fisherman sells it. Adding another $1 to his existing costs could eat up his profit, Lewis said. 

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Catch shares, and government 'thievery' of the commons

How does the mind deceive us! Let me count some of its infinite ways.

It was a painter, Goya, who pinpointed the problem. He saw that "Dreams of reason produce monsters."

And it was my father who gave me the key to unlock some of the related mysteries. He offered this rule: "Every excess is a defect."

Private property is a very good thing. It was Saint Thomas Aquinas who made an exhaustive and convincing list of the benefits of private property. Very little has been added to that list — except an error.

The error consists in believing that the benefits of private property extend without limits, even to cover the privatization of common property.

Privatization of the commons is not a newly discovered truth. Privatization of the commons is an ideology whose results have been proven disastrous time and time again.

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Activists want review of fishing rules

A group of activists delivered 558 signed postcards to U.S. Sen.  Olympia Snowe’s Portland office today calling for congressional hearings on new commercial fishing rules scheduled to take effect May 1.

Fair Fish Portland, with support from Peace Action Maine and other local groups, is opposing the new system of catch shares, which will allow groups of fishermen to catch certain amounts of fish. Fishermen also can buy and sell their catch quotas, which critics say will lead to rapid consolidation and the end of the traditional small-scale family fishing businesses.

Fair Fish Portland, a campaign of Washington-D.C.-based Food and Water Watch, collected the signatures from citizens and business owners. The group is targeting Snowe because she is the ranking Republican on a subcommittee that oversees fishing regulation.

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Limits option better choice

A large group of concerned commercial snapper-grouper fishermen and fish houses from Florida to North Carolina are aware of the efforts of Phil Conklin, Matt Ruby and others, including the radical Environmental Defense Fund, to seek a "catch share" program for the fishery - a program that could cause participation in the fishery to be sold to the highest bidder.

I've been involved with the snapper-grouper fishery off South Carolina for nearly 30 years and would like to be in business for many more years, but a catch share program will likely result in many local fishermen being pushed out of the fishery, causing more unemployment at a time when we need the opposite.

While we agree with Conklin's and Ruby's goal of extending the fishing year for all snapper and grouper by eliminating derby-type fishing efforts that result in the quotas being met prematurely, and respect their efforts, we strongly disagree with a catch share approach.

We just don't want to see our life's work reduced to a commodity that can be bought up by those with the deepest pockets.

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NCWU Writes Governor About Catch-Share Programs

November 25, 2009

Dear Governor Perdue,

Enclosed is a copy of the letter sent to Secretary Gary Locke of the US Department of Commerce by Governor Rick Perry of Texas, Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Governor Bob Riley of Alabama in regard to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) movement to implement Catch Shares programs for fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico.

 

The North Carolina Watermen United is respectfully requesting the North Carolina Governor’s Office and our North Carolina Congressional Delegation to join other East Coast Atlantic states, along with the Gulf States, to see the inherent flaws in Catch Shares and Limited Access fishery programs which denies the traditional users – commercial harvesters, charter/headboat operators, recreational fishermen and seafood consumers – access to our fishery resources.

Privatization of fisheries hurts family fishermen

There are few places where the term “family fisherman” has more meaning than here in Ballard.

Our Fishermen’s Terminal houses one of the largest commercial fleets on the West Coast and affords locals the opportunity to purchase fish right off a boat or near the docks at the Wild Seafood Exchange.

Unfortunately, there are also few places where the fight between anonymous, large-scale corporate ownership and small-scale family fishermen is more apparent.

Driving over the Ballard Bridge, you can witness this clear division in the industry: factory trawlers bearing the logos of large, transnational seafood companies dwarf the family fishing boats boats tied to the Terminal docks.

This physical juxtaposition of small versus large embodies the struggle currently playing out on the national stage over the privatization of our fisheries.

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Limits looser for common poolers

But NMFS' chief gets more clout in revising rules

NEWPORT, R.I. — The New England Fishery Management Council has removed a powerful disincentive for fishermen who have chosen to remain outside the catch share system and instead fish independently in the common pool next year.

But the margin of the vote Wednesday night — against running the fishing clock at double time against the common poolers for time spent on the inshore grounds — was most narrow, with the recommendation from the council's Groundfish Committee rejected 8-7 with one abstention.

Moreover, the council has given Patricia Kurkul, the National Marine Fisheries Service's regional administrator, nearly limitless authority to step in to change the fishing rules as she sees fit at any time after midnight on May 1, the starting date of the fishing year that will debut a partial catch share regulatory system with fishermen working in voluntary fishing cooperatives known as sectors.

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Paper shows Big Green's 'inside' push for catch shares

EDF's 2005 document hails staffer's slot on fishery council as a way to 'work' regulatory process

1Since at least the 1990s, EDF has been pushing globally to have commonly owned ocean fish stocks converted into catch quotas that could be assigned as rights, creating tradeable market products that attract capital investment. New England has become the primary battleground.

In a paper an EDF official described as a grant proposal not meant for public distribution, the New York-based nonprofit environmental giant indicated four years ago that the appointment of "ocean program senior staff" member Sally McGee to the council in 2003 would allow EDF to "work the regulatory process from the inside."

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Nobel prize (not Obama’s) is self-governance win

Elinor Ostrom's winning of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences ought to kindle a new interest in freedom.

Ostrom made her mark through field studies that show people solving one of the more vexing problems: efficient management of a common-pool resource (CPR), such as a pasture or fishery. With an unowned "commons," each individual has an incentive to get the most out of it without putting anything back.

If I take fish from a common fishing area, I benefit completely from those fish. But if I make an investment to increase the future number of fish, others benefit, too. So why should I risk making the investment? I'll wait for others to do it. But everyone else faces the same free-rider incentive. So we end up with a depleted resource and what Garrett Harden called "the tragedy of the commons.”

Except, says Ostrom, we often don't. There is also an "opportunity of the commons." While most politicians conclude that, depending on the resource, efficient management requires either privatization or government ownership, Ostrom finds examples of a third way: "self-organizing forms of collective action," as she put it in an interview a few years ago.

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New rules may end snapper alliance

As the congressionally mandated deadline to end overfishing of red snapper by 2010 approaches, the longtime alliance between charter boat captains and recreational fishermen against the Gulf's commercial fleet is in danger of splintering.

Each recreational group suspects the other of catching more than its fair share of their collective 2.5 million-pound snapper quota in 2009.

Part of the problem, say federal officials, is that no one can definitively say how many fish the private recreational fishermen landed, as they don't report their catch like commercial anglers and some charter boats do. Now, a group of charter captains is pushing to be regulated the same way commercial fishermen are, meaning a "catch share" system. 

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Quota costs threaten commercial fishers

Inshore commercial fishermen say the high price they are paying to quota owners will eventually squeeze many out of business.

The Quota Management System was introduced 20 years ago to ensure sustainable fishing and stop key stocks from being plundered.

But inshore fishermen now say the system is turning them into an endangered species.

Fisheries giants Sanford, Sealord, Talleys and Aotearoa Fisheries own 80% of quota rights, with the remainder owned by smaller companies.

Others have to lease quota rights and pay annual catch entitlement fees that can account for two-thirds of the price they get for a kilogram of fish.

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Fishing industry imperiled

Fishermen need to take control of their fishery by supporting a move that the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council recently made to explore catch share management for snapper and grouper species.

Catch shares are a proven management tool that should be given a chance to save the Southeast's fish and its jobs.

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Changes in Red Snapper Individual Fishing Quota Program in the Gulf of Mexico

On August 31, 2009, NOAA Fisheries Service published a rule in the Federal Register establishing a grouper and tilefish IFQ program for commercial fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico. This rule also made changes to the red snapper IFQ program to align that program with the grouper and tilefish IFQ program. On January 1, 2010, both IFQ programs will be merged into one online IFQ program with an updated format.

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Alaskans' visit spotlights differences in fisheries

Coming across country, two Alaskans describing their deep, different and varied experiences in the nation's newest, biggest volume and value fishery also underscored how different their catch share system histories are from the one the New England groundfishermen have to look forward to.

Amendment 16, now published for comment, would, if approved as written, institute split system for the groundfishery — with one segment of the industry working off shares that are pooled in harvesting cooperatives while the independents continue to work in a continuation of the preexisting effort control approach — only with ever less effort allowed.

Both representatives who visited here Wednesday evening — with The Gloucester House a middle stop on a speaking and question-answering tour that started Tuesday in New Bedford and ended yesterday in Portland — readily agreed that Alaska has nothing like the mixed stock New England groundfishery, which has been operating in the Western Atlantic for half a millennium.

Scale and scope were cited as fundamentally different.

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Catch Share Programs Exposed

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is intensively promoting and implementing programs which grant exclusive access privileges to public fishery resources to private individuals and corporations. Several national environment groups and the commercial industry are also promoting catch shares. Unfortunately, in mixed fisheries where there is a large and growing recreational sector, exclusive fishing rights proposals maximize benefits to the commercial fishing industry while ignoring the participation and beneficial economic impacts of recreational fishing. Damaging impacts on recreational fisheries are being disregarded.

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Radical rethinking needed for New England's catch share program to succeed

SEAFOOD.COM NEWS [Editorial opinion] by John Sackton - Nov. 13, 2009 - This week, we sponsored two public meetings in New Bedford and Gloucester to discuss the issue of catch shares with Steve Minor, exec director of the N. Pacific Crab Assoc., and Joe Childers, President of United Fishermen of Alaska.

Having worked in Alaska for many years on fisheries issues, including the crab rationalization program, it seemed appropriate to me to provide a forum for some discussion and comparison of the Alaska and New England experiences when the opportunity arose.

Despite calls from some of the more wild-eyed reader comments in the Gloucester newspapers to run us out of town, the Gloucester meeting attracted over fifty people, and for two hours, there were civil back and forth questions and a very informative discussion.

Several key issues came out.

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NMFS pushes back deadline for appealing landing data

Ten-year catch histories, chosen by the New England Fishery Management Council as the determining factor in the region's tentative first distribution of an overall catch limit in individual catch shares next year, are rife with inaccuracies — with many permits enjoying unearned credit and others unfairly pinched, according to an informal survey by the Times.

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EDF, fishing publishers set catch-share forum

At a pivotal moment for the New England fishing industry, the Environmental Defense Fund, a lead advocate of catch shares, and two fishing industry news publishers are co-sponsoring informational meetings this week — one in New Bedford, one in Gloucester — on the hotly-disputed fishery regulatory system and its economic shift from one of public-resource competition to managed market commodities.

EDF and the meeting sponsors, Seafood.com News and Saving Seafood (Savingseafood.org), assert the meetings are strictly informational and not promotional. The meetings, which are free to the public feature two Alaskans with experience in the catch share systems in Alaskan fisheries.

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Congressman Frank to NOAA chief: Many questions on catch shares

In a pointed letter to the Obama administration's top fisheries administrator, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank has added his voice to a growing chorus of concerns about the transition of the New England groundfishery to a "catch share" regulatory system.

He also expressed a number of related frustrations with federal fisheries management, including the death by old age of "tens of millions of dollars" of scallops in a overlooked, closed area of Georges Bank. 

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Pew's catch-share paper reiterates need to push back catch shares

For months, the Gloucester fishing community and industry leaders across New England and the nation have begged federal regulators to delay the implementation of a new regulatory structure that, by many counts, could throw the regional industry into chaos and drive many independent boat owners out of business.

Now, one of the biggest environmental lobbies in the nation is joining them — sort of.

This doesn't mean that the Pew Environmental Group is suddenly in sync with area fishing interests. The $5 billion philanthropy still believes in draconian restrictions on fishing, in the name of preserving the resource and fighting the effects of alleged and disputed "overfishing." The Big Green still supports "catch-shares," a system of fisheries management that divides the resource into saleable commodities, for the groundfishing industry in New England, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Marine Fisheries Service are moving toward implementing the system next year.

But the words from Lee Crocker, director of Pew's federal fisheries policy — outlined during a nationwide teleconference Tuesday and reported in yesterday's Times — took many by surprise. That's because Crocker urged the Obama administration — and that means NOAA chief and former Pew Fellow Jane Lubchenco — to "go slow" on catch shares, and not to make it "the default management system."

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Catch share slow-up hailed

A consumer group, Food & Water Watch, yesterday seconded the Pew Environment Group's motion that the Obama administration ease its ardor at commodifying public fisheries to achieve ecosystem restoration with investor principles.

And the latest action may have sparked a full-fledged national debate on the privatization of the oceans' resources.

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Request for Oversight Hearings on Catch Shares

Dear all,

Concerned about the implications of Catch Shares, we are sending the
letter below asking for congressional oversight hearings.  We want to
hear directly from Congress whether the current state of fisheries
management meets their intent when they set out to create the Magnuson
Stevens Act.

The letter below is directed to Senator Snowe because she chairs the
committee.  The letter was put together by NAMA and Food & Water
Watch.  Although it specifically talks about Maine, we are looking for
a cross section of fishermen, fishing groups and families as well as
individuals, fishing community businesses, scientists, etc. from all
over to sign on if they feel comfortable doing so.

Pew: Go slow on catch shares

Stand shows split between enviro groups

The Pew Environment Group yesterday urged the Obama administration to "go slow" on fishermen's catch shares, the economic system of fisheries management pushed by the Environmental Defense Fund and Jane Lubchenco, its former vice chairman, now the national administrator for fisheries.

"Do not make catch shares the default management system," said Lee Crockett, director of Pew's federal fisheries policy. "One size fits all is inappropriate and ignores local variability."

Pew made its pitch for a cautious, bottom-up approach to catch shares in a national teleconference.

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EDF's Kate Bonzon Responds to the Pew Catch Share Report

"Pew is right that these are tough problems for fisheries, but they neglect to mention that catch shares are better at achieving positive outcomes than nearly any other management approach currently in use."

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The Pew Environment Group's Catch Share White Paper: "Design Matters"

At the start of the briefing,  Lee Crockett, director of Federal Fisheries Policy at the Pew Environment Group, and moderator of the teleconference made clear that the Pew Environmental Group has "not yet communicated its thinking on [catch share] programs"

He stated that Pew does "not support making catch shares the default management system in every sector of every fishery in the United States."  And he expressed concern that "this one-size-fits-all philosophy is inappropriate and ultimately harmful to sound fisheries management because it ignores local variability."

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Fish share proposal rankles activists

SM PIER — A few feet from the Santa Monica Pier's iconic sports fishing sign, a group of environmentalists engaged in a symbolic game of tug-of-war, pitting small fishermen against corporate giants in what has become a bitterly divisive debate over how best to manage seafood supplies.

The activists with Food & Water Watch, a consumer advocacy group, are trying to draw attention to a new management plan intended to protect endangered fish species by limiting the number that can be caught during a given season, dividing that number into "fish shares" or "catch shares" which are then distributed like stocks to fishermen, cooperatives or communities who could then buy, sell or lease their shares.

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Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council Forming King Mackerel LAPP Panel

The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council is forming a new Ad Hoc Advisory Panel to consider the trading of catch shares and other issues related to limited access privilege programs for Gulf king mackerel.

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Fishery council pushes to continue rockfish pilot program

Federal fisheries officials are considering making permanent a controversial rockfish pilot program that essentially privatizes that fishery in the central Gulf of Alaska.

The final program likely would exclude the divisive requirement that deliveries must be made to specific processors, federal officials said.

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Fishing rules lawsuit in works

A nonprofit corporation formed by Rhode Island fishermen is working with a major Boston law firm on a legal and constitutional challenge to the recently voted federal groundfish management plan that would transform the commonly held resources of the sea into privately held fishermen's catch shares.

Catch shares have become a bitterly divisive issue nationally, pushed hard by the Obama administration and many major environmental organizations, but resisted by many fishermen and at least one consumer group.

Tina Jackson, a Point Judith, R.I., fisherman and the president of the newly created American Alliance of Fishermen and their Communities, yesterday identified the firm formulating the Amendment 16 challenge as Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge.

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Anti-catch share group stifled at NH fishery forum

Last week's two-day seminar on the dynamic potential in transforming the commonly owned resources of the sea into private, tradeable catch shares produced many concerns and worries.

But only one voice was heard against the transformation already underway in New England — and that voice was muted and constrained at that.

Food & Water Watch was the conference contrarian. A Washington-based, non-profit, consumer group, Food & Water Watch has staked out a lonely position in unequivocal opposition to privatizing common wealth and the creation of a limited-access commodities market in fisheries. That's the expressed top priority of the Obama administration for reinventing fisheries conservation through catch shares, industry management and product availability on the world market.

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News analysis: 'Neutral' catch-share convener? Not at Mount Washington

BRETTON WOODS, N.H. — Conversion of the commonly held wealth of the seas into a tradeable, private commodity and then dividing the whole into "catch shares" was soft-sold with less than full disclosure to the management of New England's fisheries this week.

"We are a neutral convener, we take no position on catch shares," proclaimed Amy Schick Kenney, the co-leader of the Fisheries Leadership & Sustainability Forum, at the start of a two-day workshop on catch shares organized by the New England Fishery Management Council at the Mount Washington Hotel Resort.

But if the forum itself — along with Kenney and its co-facilitators — professed neutrality, the moving force behind the forum and a co-sponsor was the Environmental Defense Fund, the global giant ENGO or environmental non-government organization which has been the signature champion of catch shares for many years.

The forum is a joint operation, merging resources of Duke University's Nicholas Institute of the Environment and the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.

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Federal fishing official looks to 'better times'

BRETTON WOODS, N.H. — An emissary from the federal administrator for fisheries came here yesterday with praise for the New England industry's struggle with — and cautious embrace of — market privatization or regulatory catch shares.

But Monica Medina deflected a direct question about the willingness of the Obama administration to help finance a buyout program that would fuel a radical downsizing of the fleet.

That is the intended result of converting the New England fishery from traditional to market principles. Most estimates here put the culling at 50 percent, more or less, and have raised flags of social and cultural dislocations with or without a buyout.

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