Amateur Hour in Fishery Management
Marine fisheries are a multi-billion dollar industry. The New England Fishery Management Council serves, in effect, as the board of trustees for the production line and operations of this industry.
Individually, Fishery Management Council appointees are civic-minded citizens of the fishing community, responsible representatives of the fishing industry, or career employees of the marine resource agencies of five NE states. Without exception, these people serve with the best of intentions. Collectively, however, the group would be laughed out of any corporate board room, as rank amateurs.
Amateurism was in full display when the New England Fishery Management Council met this week in Portland.
The problem for groundfish goes back decades. Too many boats were built to catch fish in the 1980s, before we fully understood the limits on a sustainably managed resource. Managers institutionalized the problem in 1995 by qualifying four-times too many of these vessels for permits to pursue groundfish in a targeted fishery. Meanwhile, from 1990 to 2003, managers consistently ignored or fudged scientific recommendations to curb overfishing, allowing these stocks to descend into chronic depletion.
Then, in 2003, a federal court ruling ordered managers to restore groundfish stocks consistent with scientifically derived standards under the law. Rebuilding must be completed by 2014. That’s the law – but you’ve never seen such foot-dragging!
The final stage of this court-ordered remedial action, a year-five reassessment of stock status and updating, is due for May 2009. The Fishery Management Council this week missed a critical deadline in that process. They stepped away from their collective responsibility under the law, because difficult decisions were outside the comfort zone of too many council members. It's become predictable.
Real businessmen take decisive action when faced with hard choices. In the 1990s, and at numerous junctures since then, real business mangers would have recognized that far too many boats were chasing too few fish. They would have placed a premium on maximizing the value to the industry (and nation) by growing the resource, restoring it to its full potential as quickly as possible.
Skillful planners would have acknowledged the disparity between capital investment and available opportunity. They would have created a master-plan to guide vessel owners on where to invest or disinvest – in effect providing a road-map for an orderly economic progression to a more desirable capital structure over the long-term.
In contrast, for years fishery managers on the New England Council have procrastinated, obfuscated and deflected blame for their collective misjudgment onto the science and law that should serve as their guideposts.
Citizens of Maine are rightfully concerned that groundfishing is disappearing from the Maine coast, and that the supporting infrastructure is collapsing. It’s true. But law and science have not made this tragedy. Years of chronic depletion has deprived Maine fishermen of opportunity far more than conservation measures. Capricious management has perpetuated an unstable and unpredictable business context that has disadvantaged the most capable small-businessmen/fishermen, exhausting their resources.
The lack of professional vision was on full display at the New England Fishery Management Council again this week in Portland. For those who would like to believe in the nobility of governance, it was a sad dereliction of responsibility.
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I was thinking about some yummy flounder until I read their press release:
"Reacting to updated but not yet final scientific information concerning the status and condition of a number of stocks, the Council will continue work on several elements of Amendment 16 to its Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan, but agreed it is essential to have final numbers for stock size as well as fishing mortality, or the rate at which fish are removed, before completing measures that control fishing levels.
The preliminary results of the Groundfish Assessment Review Meeting (GARM), a regional peer-
review process which allows the Council to gauge its progress toward rebuilding fish stocks,
indicated that many flounder stocks would require much more of a management focus than previously assumed by the Council. Of equal concern was information pointing to a reduction in the overall productivity of the ecosystem, a finding that will affect the Council’s rebuilding programs in ways that are not yet clear. In the interest of producing a document for the public that accurately reflects this news, the Council will wait to receive the final GARM results in September and at that time will design management measures accordingly."
Hmm. Who are these "peers" that are doing the reviewing? Why aren't the results final by now? Weren't they expected to be done? Are there any penalties for not doing their homework on time?
I better not run out of flounder. Grr.
Posted by sharky
June 7, 2008 05:50 AM
Hey Sharky! Great questions.
More than two dozen fishery scientists from NMFS, the states, Canadian DFO and academia have been working since October on a "benchmark" assessment of the 19 NE groundfish stocks. They are doing a top-to-bottom review of stock models, biological reference points and encorporating new data available since the last benchmark assessment five years ago. As they complete parts of this exercise, the procedures and findings are "peer-reviewed" by independant experts, unaffiliated with NE fisheries -- often scientists from outside the US.
Trawl surveys, port sampling, landing weigh-outs and at-sea observer data are used in stock assessments. But you can't just take the raw data fresh from the boat and plug it into a model - it has to be compiled, audited and analyzed. Data from 2007 is making its way through that analysis now.
18 months ago, the Council declared that Amendment 16 would be based on data through 2007. Regulatory development at this level has to follow procedures that take almost a year from start to finish. Therefore a timeline was developed that required the Council to approve a range of measures in June for public hearing, with final recommendations of the scientists being incorporated in the plan in October. More public hearing and submission to NOAA. The Commerce Department would then have reviewed the submitted plan and implemented at the start of the next fishing year -- May 1, 2009.
Completing action by that date is an important step in the remedial action satisfying the court order from 2003.
The Council press release is one spin on the story. From my viewpoint it was evident that the Council was not in agreement on measures to take to public hearing and was looking for an excuse to delay. A report on the GARM process offered some unexpected news that provided the excuse. The real truth is that they procrastinated for months in addressing the fundamental questions for this Amendment and simply ran out of time.
The net effect is delay of implementation of the Amendment, missing statutory deadlines by at least 6 to 8 months but most likely a full year. This behavior is consistent with the history of groundfish management.
The onus is now upon NOAA to take secretarial action to meet the required statutory deadline.
Posted by
John WilliamsonJune 7, 2008 01:50 PM
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