By Richard Gaines
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.
However, the congressionally chartered National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a public-private philanthropy with many corporate partners, has become raising money to support the federal catch share program, according to the foundation's Anthony Chatwin.
At a catch share workshop in New Hampshire last month, Medina said she is was in nearly daily discussions with Congressional budget officials — fruitlessly, to date.
The original date for release of the policy was October, but Medina sought and was given an extension by Lubchenco.
The two months since have been marked by a steep uptick in activities aimed at selling, explaining and condemning catch shares — a change in the fishing regulatory system that, at its core, transforms commonly held resources of the sea into government-granted and economically tradeable fish-catching quotas.
While the local debate over catch shares has focused on Gloucester and New England, whose groundfishery is targeted for conversion to the catch-share system in 2010, the issue has caught fire elsewhere.
Gulf Coast weighs in
Gulf Coast governors recently wrote to U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Lubchenco's boss, objecting to the "direction and rapidity" of the movement to implement catch shares in the Gulf of Mexico.
And the Pew Environment Group organized two national teleconferences last month to urge the administration to move cautiously toward commodifying the ocean's stocks.
The initiatives were acknowledged as efforts to distance Pew from the Environmental Defense Fund, where Lubchenco was vice chairwoman before joining the Obama administration. EDF has been ardently promoting catch shares for their potential to align investor dynamics with the fishing conservation mandates of the Magnuson Act.
Magnuson mandates the institution of annual catch limits, a system that Lubchenco and many fishery managers assert is most compatible with dividing the hard quotas into shares. But, globally, catch shares — or ITQs (individual tradeable quotas) — radically consolidate the industry as scale and capital winnow out small business boats.
In the past decade, the size of the New England fleet has been cut in half, with Lubchenco prescribing further contraction.
N.E. activism
Ground zero for the catch share experiment has become New England, which faces an complicated introduction of catch shares to the groundfishery next May.
A peaceful mass protest against the rush to catch shares was mounted in Gloucester — in the parking lot of the regional offices of the National Marine Fisheries Service — in late October. The demonstration drew more than 200 fishermen from as far away as northern Maine and Montauk, Long Island.
Meanwhile, Congressman Barney Frank, who represents New Bedford, has written to Lubchenco with concerns that conservative allocations could undercut the catch share roll out set to begin next May for part of the groundfishing fleet.
Between New Bedford and Gloucester, commercial catches in 2007 sold for more than $300 million. Only $57 million was attributed to groundfish, but the groundfishery is the linchpin of the regional industry and, according to an analysis by Vito Giacalone of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, landings could increase "twofold in the near term" under a "more efficient management scheme."
Lubchenco's role
A celebrated academic scientist, Lubchenco came to office convinced of the value of catch shares, and soon after her Senate confirmation personally directed the New England Fishery Management Council to complete work on a long-planned partial conversion of the groundfishery to a catch share system fused to voluntary fishing cooperatives known as sectors.
Lubchenco made no mention of catch shares in her prepared statement to the Senate Commerce Committee; nor did she put the senators and the nation on notice that her priority fishing initiative nationally would be to roll out catch shares aggressively wherever possible.
But she was a key member of a working group in an EDF research and policy paper that urged President Obama to install catch shares wherever possible.
The need for catch shares was argued by reference to scientific papers — disputed in some quarters — that concluded overfishing would soon leave the seas the province of "jellyfish."
In her second appearance in New England after her confirmation, a May address to the annual meeting in Boston of the nation's eight regional fishery management councils, Lubchenco expounded on the value of catch shares through unqualified praise similar to that used in the EDF paper she helped write.
"The scientific evidence is compelling that catch shares can also help restore the health of ecosystems and get fisheries on a path to profitability and sustainability," she wrote. "These results, these scientific analyses, are why moving forward to implement catch share programs is a high priority for me."
But since that address, many more nuanced — and cautionary — evaluations of catch shares have emerged, from Europe, Canada and New England.
Days at sea
In a presentation to the European Parliament, European Union Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg suggested scrapping annual fishermen's catch limits in favor of effort controls — the days at sea system of the New England fishery now being unwound and to be replaced by catch shares.
EcoTrust Canada, a community building non-profit division, released a scathing report on the impact of catch shares in British Columbia.
"Individual transferable quotas are being heavily promoted as a solution for both conservation and the financial ills plaguing fishing fleets around the world," said Tasha Sutcliffe, fisheries program manager for Ecotrust Canada. "However, our experience in B.C. is that highly unregulated, speculative ITQ markets can create as many problems as they solve."
"Under ITQ markets, working fishermen in British Columbia are increasingly becoming 'tenants' who pay exorbitant rents to landlords, or 'sealords,' who own all the quota. The lucrative leasing has, in turn, driven up the cost of fishing and the price of purchasing quota, making ownership prohibitively expensive for many fishermen," Sutcliffe said.
In June, Seth Macinko and William Whitmore of the Department of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island published a report on sectors, commissioned by the Mass. Division of Marine Fisheries, that debunked many of the claims for catch shares' panaceaic qualities.
The only congressional oversight hearing into the Obama administration's fishing management policies took place in late October. It was then that the House Committee on Natural Resources' Subcommittee on Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife took testimony from nine people, including David Goethel, a New Hampshire fisherman and member of the New England council.
Goethel warned that with catch shares, and without a buyout or systems designed to assist small boat businesses, an economic and cultural disaster looms.
"Absent massive intervention at a congressional level, most commercial fisheries in New England will contract to a handful of large boats in large ports and a way of life that has existed in New Hampshire for over 400 years will be lost," Goethel said. "Most of the fishermen I know wish to continue fishing as independent small boat owner/operators not as share croppers."
The Gulf state governors' worries scanned a very different ecosystem and fishing economy than those of Europe, Canada or New England. Along the Gulf Coast, recreational fishing plays a greater economic role than in the other regions.
'Negative impacts'
"Our concerns center on the potential negative impacts catch share programs could have on our states' economies, as well as how such programs could restrict citizens' access to fisheries resources that should be shared by all," wrote Govs. Rick Perry of Texas, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Bob Riley of Alabama.
The governors cited "negative impacts" from the red snapper catch share system, and said they are "concerned about negative impact from the pending program for Gulf grouper. Creating an exclusive harvesting right for a small group of commercial fishermen inherently marginalizes other users who do not have the same access privileges."
No plans to bring recreational fisheries under catch shares have been announced, but the possibility bringing recreational fisheries under catch shares has been acknowledged by the administration.
Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or via e-mail at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com
