America's fisheries continued to recover and grow stronger in 2009, with swordfish — once the subject of a "do not eat" campaign mounted by environmentalists fearing its pending extinction — leading a group of four stocks taken off the overfished/overfishing watch list of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Along with Atlantic swordfish, Atlantic scup, Gulf of Maine thorny skate and Gulf of Mexico pink shrimp were also removed from the overfished/overfishing list.
NOAA defines "overfishing" to mean a harvest rate higher than what would produce a maximum stainable yield, and "overfished" to mean a stock whose biomass level is below a biological threshold established under a management plan.
Overall, the Stock Sustainability Index, which measures the performance of 230 key stocks, went up for the ninth straight year. The increase in 2009 was 3.1 percent; for the nine-year era of improvement, the index is now up 60 percent.
NOAA's Office of Sustainable Fisheries described the index as representing "significant progress."
The report, released Monday, held that 85 percent of the stocks examined were free from overfishing and 70 percent were not overfished.
The annual report to Congress was made at a pivotal moment for national fisheries policy, with environmentalists and the industry in a running argument about the health of the fisheries — the richest and most diverse in the world — and their capacity to sustain harvesting by fishermen.
With the installation of Jane Lubchenco, a scientist and former high-ranking board official with the Environmental Defense Fund, at the top of NOAA at the start of the Obama administration, the government shifted greenward. Before the inauguration, EDF assembled a cadre of scientists, including Lubchenco, to advocate for the rapid transformation of the nation's fisheries into catch share systems, with assigned catching rights that can be traded, bought and sold.
The argument was wedded to claims of imminent destruction of global fish stocks that would leave the oceans empty except for jellyfish.
The United States currently imports about 80 percent of its seafood, much of it from nations with less effective conservation and management.
And according to a federal lawsuit challenging constraints on the industry filed this week for interests from New Hampshire to North Carolina by lawyers in New Bedford and Gloucester, the boats will be able to harvest "less than 40 percent of the total allowable catch" in the new fishing year, which began May 1.
Commercial fishermen on three coasts are protesting hard catch limits at conservative levels from the 1996 and 2006 reauthorizations and rewrites of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and the New England groundfishery finds itself in the early stages of an experimental transition into a catch share system.
A delegation of 23 New England federal lawmakers is scheduled to meet Wednesday with U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke in an appeal for emergency allocations increases and other relief measures to keep the industry viable.
NOAA administrator Lubchenco, however, has asserted the policy goal of removing a "significant fraction of the fleet" to make the fishery "sustainable and economically stable."
According to a second report released Monday on Fishery Economics of the U.S., fishing revenues have dropped dramatically in each of the five New England coastal states between 1999 and 2008. The industry supported 73,000 full- and part-time jobs in 2008, the government report said.
In 2008, dock price revenue was $805 million, through fin and shellfish landings of 594 million pounds.
Massachusetts led with almost $400 million and 236 million pounds landed, followed by Maine with $301 million and 179 million pounds, Rhode Island ($67 million, 72 million pounds), New Hampshire ($21 million, 11 million pounds) and Connecticut ($17 million, 7 million pounds).
In the years between 1999 and 2008, according to the report, Maine finfish revenues were off 29 percent — 43 percent in real-dollar terms when factoring in the rate of inflation.
Maine was followed by Connecticut at 30 percent and 45 percent, respectively, New Hampshire (17 percent and 34 percent), and Rhode Island (17 percent and 33 percent).
Massachusetts was the only state to experience an actual value increase of 11 percent, but that amount was the equivalent of a 12 percent decrease when factoring in inflation.
Amid the wide reports of recovering stocks, the removal of swordfish from NOAA's overfished list spotlights an especially strong recovery for swordfish.
The "Give swordfish a break" campaign was launched in 1998 by SeaWeb, an organization that was spun out of the Pew Environment Group, and the National Resources Defense Council, and managed by Fenton Communications, a marketing company of choice for the environmental movement.
Fenton Communications also helped launch the 1989 "Alar-on apples" campaign that helped ruin the market for a year based on hyped-up fears of a chemical treatment.
Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.
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