By Richard Gaines
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.
Allen cited New England as one of the regions suffering from a chronic economic downward spiral.
"Stocks are overfished, there's too much capacity and the (local) economies are not improving," she said.
What catch shares will not do, Lubchenco explained, is "prevent additional job loss."
"In the short term," she said, "we will see continued job loss" through the conversion of fishery management to a system that now has the formal backing of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and thus the Obama administration.
Soon after taking office last spring, Lubchenco, through a spokesman, said she believed that a "significant fraction" of the fleet needed to be eliminated.
Converting fisheries that have long been regulated as commonly owned resources into the system based on fishermen's catch shares, which grants holders the right to catch or trade fish stock allocations in a limited-access fishery, seems to result in radical consolidation just about everywhere.
No anomalies among the 13 current catch-share fisheries have been noted in months of informal testimony about catch shares, produced for New England ears by government officials and the Environmental Defense Fund, the lead advocate of catch shares nationally.
Consolidation — concentrating fishermen's catch capacity in fewer, but stronger hands while weaker and smaller boats are sent to the sidelines — is a brutal reality, with potentially big winners and lots of losers.
New England is on the cusp of experiencing this transformation. Years in the engineering in the New England Fishery Management Council, the New England version of catch shares is scheduled to begin in May.
The New England system is unique in that the rollout will create a dual system, with catch shares granted to those boats committed to fishing in harvesting cooperatives known as sectors.
Fishermen who choose to avoid the cooperatives will continue to work under the longstanding system of effort control, which has been based on regulating fishermen's days at sea and access to fishing grounds. But next year's "common pool" fishermen will see their days at sea ratcheted down. Plus, the New England council has agreed to empower Lubchenco's Gloucester-based regional administrator, Patricia Kurkul, to make mid-year effort cutbacks.
The approach will likely drive some fishermen into sectors, and others into retirement or another field.
Allen said catch shares are also needed in New England to lift the fishery back to ecological stability.
But, on several counts, it is no longer reasonable to describe the New England fishery, with its mix of stocks, as in a "downward spiral."
Throughout the entire census of stocks, the restoration policies based on the 1996 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act have been noticeably effective.
Although 15 stocks remain "overfished" — that is to say, with populations that remain too low — and eight stocks are still taken at a rate that is too high, and remain subject to overfishing, Allen concedes that "we have made great progress."
She added, however, that "it is not fair to say that we are really close" to achieving the statutory goal of full sustainability.
Industry backers, however, question whether there remains an ecological justification for catch shares, as Lubchenco made last year when, as a member of a working group empaneled by the Environmental Defense Fund, she helped write a catch share policy proposal anchored to the assertion that without them, we are on the cusp of an ocean dystopia — here and globally.
"There is scientific consensus," Lubchenco's group wrote, "that fishing is fundamentally altering ocean ecosystems, which are increasingly likely to yield massive swarms of jellyfish rather than food fish."
The group further asserted that "current fishery management is insufficient to reverse the decline."
Nationally, according to NOAA's own statistics, 80 percent of stocks are not subject to overfishing, and 75 percent of stocks are no longer overfished.
So, while that leaves plenty of room for improvement, it also reduces the case for catch shares to a largely theoretical economic argument.
The NOAA draft policy will be subject to public comment until April 10. The draft policy and a link to submit comments is available by going to NOAA's catch share Web site at http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/catchshares.
Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or via e-mail at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com
Comment on catch shares
The NOAA draft policy will be subject to public comment until April 10. The draft policy and a link to submit comments is available by going to NOAA's catch share Web site at http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/catchshares.
