Fisheries chief sees end to overfishing

The administrator of federal fisheries has reportedly declared restoration efforts of overfished stocks — now in their fourth decade under Magnuson-Stevens Act mandates — have succeeded in making sustainable the nation's last great wild food resource.

In informal remarks during a private meeting with a seafood marketing group on the first day of the International Boston Seafood Show, Eric Schwaab, administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, was applauded not only for his optimistic assessment of the long struggle to end overfishing, but for his commitment to marry government resources with U.S. industry efforts at increasing the domestic share of the global seafood market, according to multiple audience sources.

Schwaab spoke to about 70 members of the National Seafood Marketing Coalition on Sunday, during the first day of the three-day seafood show, considered an apex event on the global fisheries calendar.

Expressed in multiple variations, the theme of the show, according to Seafood.com, an industry news site, was supplier and seller efforts to measure and demonstrate seafood sustainability in a global market in which 84 percent of U.S. consumption is imported, half of it farmed.

The leading exporter to U.S. markets is China, to which the United States had a $1.6 billion trade deficit in seafood alone in 2010, according to government statistics.

Schwaab's characterization of the success of stock restoration efforts in the United States intersects the pending Senate confirmation hearing as ambassador to China of Gary Locke.

Locke, the Secretary of Commerce, has become the center of a festering dispute between coastal state congressional leaders and the White House over administration fisheries policy, and whether the conversion to catch share management and a commodities market system has caused grave harm to the industry and fishing communities, as U.S. Sens. John Kerry, Scott Brown and Congressmen John Tierney and Barney Frank, all of Massachusetts, and other lawmakers have argued.

Locke and Schwaab have held that conservation efforts cannot be modified to relieve economic distress; Kerry chairs the Senate Commerce Committee that vets the Locke nomination.

"I was not taking notes, and he was not reading," Dick Gutting, an attorney for the marketing coalition and the former general counsel for NMFS' parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said of Schwaab's remarks. "He said that, with regard to fisheries that are under management plans, they were all being managed sustainably, and that while not all have been fully restored, all are on the way to being restored."

"At least twice," Gutting said in a telephone interview Tuesday, Schwaab made reference to the "sacrifices" fishermen had made to achieve "the end of overfishing," and said "the agency should speak out to pay them back."

Through the NOAA press office, Schwaab confirmed Gutting and others' recollection of his message.

"If a stock is stock is managed under a fishery management plan (that under catch limits and accountability measures required by the 2006 reauthorization of Magnuson-Stevens)," Schwaab recalled in a written synopsis of his comments, "that is a sustainably managed fishery."

In written remarks delivered at an open meeting of the Boston seafood show Monday morning, Schwaab provided an assessment calibrated with adjectives to convey a nuanced message that the government's "making progress" and "making significant progress."

Schwaab's comments were greeted with frustration in Gloucester, which typifies the New England ports undergoing structural losses of jobs and boats in the first year of the government's re-engineering of the $60 million groundfishery into a commodities market trading in a highly reduced allocation of catch shares.

"Fishermen have known that the stocks were sustainable for a long time," said Vito Calomo, a retired commercial fisherman and former member of the New England Fishery Management Council. "There is no justification for catch shares; they should reduce regulations and restore lost jobs."

Calomo, who advised Sen. Brown on fisheries, said he had not discussed the Schwaab statement with Brown, so was not speaking for the senator.

"The statement is too late coming," said Vito Giacalone, policy director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, the largest groundfish industry group.

Giacalone's boat, Jenny G, was among those in recent days landing masses of haddock, a species whose Gulf of Maine biomass was at 99 percent of optimum and whose Georges Bank biomass was double optimum size, according to FishWatch, NOAA's sustainability report, based on figures that are at least two years out of date.

Schwaab promised the seafood marketing coalition that FishWatch would be updated and strengthened and that NOAA would partner with suppliers and sellers to make the case for American seafood.

Gutting said Schwaab described the moment "as a turning point," that the achievement of overall sustainability of U.S. fisheries was "something that people didn't fully understand. He said there was a need to communicate much better than the agency had been doing."

Steve Murawski, the longtime chief scientist for NOAA fisheries until his retirement in January, has been asserting for some time that overfishing in U.S. waters had been vanquished, and that the effort to meet the Magnuson-Stevens mandate of creating sustainable fisheries should be seen as an American success story.

He said as much to the Times in the summer of 2010, and to the Associated Press in January as he retired to an academic post.

But fisheries policy was handed to NOAA chief administrator Jane Lubchenco and her allies in the wing of academic and grant-financed scientific community, and they have insisted the battle to protect the fish stocks was being lost using conventional management methods — that only catch shares, with fishermen encouraged to buy, sell or trade their "shares" among each other, or to outside corporations and investors, could reverse the historical trend.

Just before her appointment to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Lubchenco co-wrote an advocacy paper for the Environmental Defense Fund, urging the quickest introduction of catch shares before overfishing rendered the seas sterile except for jellyfish.

In the policy paper for the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Wildlife Fund and the Marine Conservation Biology Institute published during the 2008-2009 presidential transition, Lubchenco and her co-authors wrote that "evidence is overwhelming. The global oceans are being emptied of seafood. Scientists report that 90 percent of large fish — lightly sought-after species like tuna and swordfish — have been removed ...."

That 2003 claim was based on a study of dubious credibility.

"Faith-based Fisheries," a direct challenge to the paper which has remained the foundation of efforts to convert the oceans into investor markets, was published three years later by Ray Hilborn.

A marine scientist at the University of Washington, Hilborn in refutation said the paper "purporting to show" the decline of the "large pelagic fish stocks" was given credence by media influenced by agenda-driven true believers and "raised a furor among many scientists ... who knew the same data, knew it was being misinterpreted," and knew there was a large body of contradictory findings.

Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.

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