By Richard Gaines
Staff Writer
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Commercial groundfish landings in New England have crashed since the May 1 start of the new regulatory system tied to allocated catching rights, or "catch shares," for fishing cooperatives known as sectors.
The imposition of catch shares has brought fierce resistance, and helped make New England a test case for the controversial management regimen favored by the Obama administration through its National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Over the first 21 percent of the fishing season — May 1 through July 17 — the part of the fleet organized into sectors had landed only 6.5 percent of what it was allocated to catch for the year in the mixed groundfish stock complex.
Sector catch share landings were 5,247 metric tons of mixed groundfish — roughly half as much groundfish as was landed during the same period in 2009, according to NOAA Fisheries figures.
Avoiding stocks for which the allocation is low has kept the industry from landing anything close to the allocation in stocks that are healthy and thriving, haddock, for example.
The industry landed only 4.6 percent of the 53,253 metric tons of haddock in the first fifth of the fishing season.
Haddock swims with cod, and with fishermen worried about exceeding their cod allocations huge values of haddock were also left uncaught.
"They have created a totally dysfunctional fishery," said Richard Burgess, who heads a Gloucester-based gillnetting sector organized under the umbrella of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, and owns a four-boat groundfishing business.
The landing reports confirm predictions from across the industry and anecdotal reports from Gloucester, New Bedford and Point Judith, R.I., that groundfishermen were either avoiding fishing altogether, or pursuing prey outside the groundfish complex, the primary source of fishing revenues for the fleet since pre-colonial times.
Larry Ciulla, president of the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction — the No. 1 sales platform for fish taken in the Gulf of Maine — said "dayboat landings are down between one-half and two-thirds so far this year.
Thirty percent of the boats aren't fishing due to the quotas established by NMFS, he said in an interview Thursday.
Prices for groundfish have been higher than last year, because supply has dropped, Ciulla added.
"The behavior right now of fishermen isn't to go fishing," said Nina Jarvis, the auction office manager. "They're trying not to go fishing."
Paltry as the current numbers are, the industry has been stuck for years in a regulatory vise that has kept its groundfish boats from landing anything close to the total allowable catch because of the mixed-stock nature of the fishery and regulatory strictures.
One added problem facing groundfishermen this year, however, is that their low allocations based on a 10-year catch histories for each stocks.
These typically produce an eccentric mix of liberal-sized quotas in some stocks, but miniscule quotas in others.
A related problem is a provision in the reauthorized Magnuson-Stevens Act that puts overfished stocks on a 10-year rebuilding deadline, which has led to fractional allocations in the final years of the timetable.
Together, they've put fishermen in regulatory handcuffs, according to research presented last spring to U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke by a bipartisan, bi-cameral coalition of senators and congressmen from New England and New York in an appeal for liberalizing quota sufficiently to keep the industry running.
"In 2007 (the last year for which we have data)," the caucus of 23 federal lawmakers wrote, "only 27 percent of the total allowable catch was harvested because of regulatory measures designed to protect the weakest stocks. Thus, 73 percent of the allowable, sustainable catch was left in the ocean, costing our fishermen and our coastal economies approximately $500 million."
NOAA Fisheries officials Thursday acknowledged the lag in landings.
"Preliminary landings data show that the industry is keeping catch below the quotas, even for some of the weaker stocks," said Maggie Mooney-Seus, spokeswoman for Patricia Kurkul, the federal fisheries regional administrator. "Sector vessels could be timing fishing trips for greater efficiency and higher economic returns.
"Average prices for some species have been higher than for the same period last year, and have likely generated more revenues for the fleet," she added.
But Mooney-Seus emphasized that "these are aggregate numbers...."
"We're only a quarter of the way through the fishing year," she said, "and there are still certainly individuals who are suffering under this year's lower catch limits."
A sunnier analysis came from Seafood.com editor and publisher John Sackton, a longtime advocate for catch shares and one-time research contractor for the Environmental Defense Fund, where the main push for a national catch share policy was carried forward by Jane Lubchenco, who served as vice chair of the EDF board before her 2009 appointment as NOAA's chief administrator.
"Sectors are pacing themselves so that not a single species is in danger of being fished to an extent that the fishery might close," Sackton wrote. "This is clearly the result of careful management."
Industry attorney Stephen Ouellette, however, scoffed at Sackton's analysis, countering that the new sector catch share system is on pace to keep the industry to about one-third of the allowed harvest. For this, he said, the government has spent $30 million to convert the fishery to the catch share sector regimen.
A sizable majority of New England's groundfishing boats, with more than 95 percent of catch history were joined to sectors so as to be assigned quota. A minority of the boats, most of them with little or no catch history, remained in the common pool, and worked in a constricted version of the days at sea system.
NMFS this week announced cutbacks in allowable catches in cod and yellowtail for the common pool boats. Catches in those stocks were already beyond 70 percent of annual limits, but over the entire mixed stock, the common poolers had landed 27 percent of the total in about 24 percent of days allowed.
While expected to rationalize landings — and eliminate so-called "derby" fishing, the kind that continues in the common pool — the new catch share sector system also is predicted to produce social and cultural upheavals.
"The sector system is being launched with a mixed reception," Brian Rothschild, a fisheries scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said in congressional testimony days before the opening of the catch share era on May 1.
"The facts of the matter are that property rights systems such as 'sectors,' reduce the open-access-like wasteful imbalance between capital and the amount of fish that can be caught.
"However," Rothschild added, "they also change the social structure of the industry, reduce boats, negatively affect shoreside businesses, as well as destroy the social fabric of fishing communities."
Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3446, or rgaines@gloucestertimes.com
