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The last few years I have been unable to attend the December Joint Meeting of ASMFC and the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council. My proxy Chris Zeman attended for me. This year I attended myself and knew I was going to be disheartened as usual. Since last October I have written many articles on the summer flounder situation. I will not rehash that information. Please read the articles for 2015 for January, February, March, September and December including the additional articles by John Toth and Paul Haertel. In particular, I want you to read the articles from October and November, 2014. Those articles provide the graphs and information about the loss of angling trips and boats in the mid-atlantic region. If you need those articles, just email me.
New Jersey is more than 40% under the target set for 2015. Because we are the biggest player along the coast on summer flounder, our undercatch is bailing out the rest of the coast so there will not be any reductions required for 2016. Think about this statement. Some are celebrating the fact that New Jersey’s regulations failed to allow our anglers to come close to the target for 2015.
When I get New Jersey’s recreational trip numbers, summer flounder trip numbers and boat registrations, I will revisit the discussion about the impact on New Jersey’s economy.
At the joint meeting, the ASMFC Summer Flounder, Black Sea Bass and Scup Board decided to write an amendment to deal with the summer flounder issue in Delaware Bay which will be published and have public hearings before the February ASMFC meeting. The press release is not available at this time but the minutes and webinar are available on the ASMFC webpage. In summary, the amendment will make New Jersey a separate region that will require us to have the same regulations as New York and Connecticut everywhere except Delaware Bay. New Jersey, New York and Connecticut will have an 18 inch size limit, a 5 fish bag limit and a 128 day season. Delaware Bay will have a 17 inch size limit, 4 fish bag limit and a 128 day season. This is not the same as Delaware since they will have a smaller size limit and no closed season. If the last wave of figures for 2015 are as predicted, the coast will be status quo and our catch will be well below the 29% reduction already required for 2016. Since we are not using some of these fish to bail out the coast, we were able to allow this change in Delaware Bay without penalizing any other state. Is this a perfect solution? No. But it is the only amendment that we could get in place for 2016. It will give some relief to the anglers who fish in Delaware Bay. I am asking for 2 public hearings in New Jersey, North and South.
Note: Just as we were going to print the hearing information was made available. See article just below this one.
Arlington, VA - The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Management Board approved Draft Addendum XXVII for public comment at the Joint Commission/Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council meeting in Annapolis, Maryland earlier this month. Draft Addendum XXVII proposes regional management approaches for the 2016 summer flounder and black sea bass recreational fisheries. The Atlantic coast states of Massachusetts through Virginia have scheduled public hearings to gather public comment. The details of those hearings follow:
Draft Addendum XXVII was initiated to consider extending use of regional management approaches for the 2016 recreational summer flounder fishery, including an option that would allow for a Delaware Bay specific region. The Draft Addendum also includes options for extending use of ad-hoc regional management approaches for black sea bass recreational fisheries in 2016 and 2017. In the event the options in Draft Addendum XXVII are not approved for management, the Board extended the current summer flounder regional management approach for use in 2016.
In 2014, the Board approved Addendum XXV to shift away from traditional use of state-by-state harvest targets under conservation equivalency to use of an alternative regional strategy for managing summer flounder recreational fisheries. Based on its success in keeping recreational harvest within the RHL and providing greater regulatory consistency among neighboring states, this strategy was extended for use in 2015. State-by-state harvest targets previously utilized under conservation equivalency created difficulties for some states as overages occurred due largely to state shares and limits not reflecting local summer flounder abundance and its availability to recreational fishermen. In 2014 and 2015 management regions were the following: 1) Massachusetts; 2) Rhode Island; 3) Connecticut-New Jersey; 4) Delaware-Virginia; and 5) North Carolina.
The Draft Addendum also proposes two options for the 2016 black sea bass recreational fishery (1) coastwide measures or (2) the continued use of management measures by northern (Massachusetts New Jersey) and southern regions (Delaware North Carolina). The regional management approach has been used since 2011 and offers advantages over coastwide regulations by addressing geographic differences in the stock (size, abundance and seasonality) while maintaining the consistent application of management measures by neighboring states.
Fishermen and other interested groups are encouraged to provide input on Draft Addendum XXVII either by attending state public hearings or providing written comment. The Draft Addendum is available at this link and can also be accessed on the Commission website (www.asmfc.org) under Public Input. Public comment will be accepted until 5:00 PM (EST) on January 21, 2016 and should be forwarded to Kirby Rootes-Murdy, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, 1050 N. Highland St., Suite 200 A-N, Arlington, Virginia 22201; 703.842.0741 (fax) or at krootes-murdy@asmfc.org (Subject line: Draft Addendum XXVII). For more information, please contact Kirby Rootes-Murdy at krootes-murdy@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.
Lee van der Voo considers catch shares in the US to be, “one of the coolest vehicles environmental policy has seen in decades,” because they reduce fishing effort, diminish incentives to fish in dangerous weather, can boost the value of seafood, and most importantly, were designed to keep fishing rights with the fishermen and their communities. However this last attribute has not worked for most catch share programs and increasingly these rights are bought by large investment firms and offshore companies that find loopholes in the loosely-regulated catch share laws and regulations.
Van der Voo fears that over the long term catch shares will increase costs, fishermen will earn less because of higher rental payments owed to, “people in suits,” that own the fishing rights. Consumers would then pay more in this scenario while a handful of investors would become rich.
Atlantic coast clam fisheries are the first example of this cycle: Bumble Bee Foods which has exclusive rights to almost 25% of America’s clams, was recently acquired by Lion Capital, a British equity firm. The Alaskan crab fisheries have also experienced a disconnect in recent years between fishing rights ownership and the people actually harvesting the resource.
Proponents of catch shares need to, “acknowledge that it’s an investment vehicle too, and the fish councils that manage it lack resources and political savvy to keep fishing rights in the US and in the hands of fishermen.”
Comment by Stephen J. Hall, David J. Mills & Neil L. Andrew
In the context of US fisheries, the term “catch shares” refers to a system in which the government grants fishing rights (quotas) to individuals or companies on a de facto permanent basis and establishes a market for buying, leasing or selling those rights. In other parts of the world, this same approach is referred to as Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), or Transferable Fishing Concessions (TFCs).
For ensuring the sustainability of fish stocks, catch shares in the US are, “one of the coolest vehicles environmental policy has seen in decades.” Yet while the potential of catch shares to reduce fishing mortality to sustainable levels is clear, the long term benefits for fishers and fishing communities are much less so. Van der Voo describes how catch shares in the US clam fishery have accumulated in the hands of a few wealthy investors and offshore companies. Clearly, it is an issue that deserves much greater attention.
Lessons from Experience
The potential pitfalls of catch shares and other schemes to allocate private property rights in fisheries have not escaped scholars. For example, Benediktsson and Karlsdóttir (2011) describes how the ITQ system in Iceland saw 50% of quota in the hands of 10 companies by 2007, a result that arguably contributed to the country’s financial crisis. Analyses of events in Denmark and Chile point to similar concentrations of quota with marked negative impacts on traditional fishing communities. In Chile, an estimated 68% of people working in the fisheries sector had to share 10% of the quota with the remaining 90% was owned by just four companies.
Rights-based fisheries (RBF), the concept that environmental and economic objectives in fisheries are best served by introducing private property rights, has been a dominating proposition over the last two decades. Zealous promotion of RBF (e.g. Neher et al. 1989, Cunnigham et al, 2009), and experiences such as those described above, has led to equally zealous rebuttal, largely on the grounds of social justice, particularly for small-scale fishers.
In South Africa, that rebuttal ultimately took the form of class action to challenge the prevailing system. Based on ITQs, this system was intended to reduce poverty by creating small-scale fishing enterprises that generated wealth for fisher households. Unfortunately, it was a system that saw 90% of the country’s 50,000 small scale fishers lose their rights. As Isaacs (2011) notes:
This system failed as many new entrants were allocated unviable fishing rights, most of them were vulnerable, many sold their rights to established companies, and some fell deeper into poverty. At local community level, the wealth-based approach of allocating small quotas to many rights holders resulted in the community elite (teachers, artisans, shop-owners and local councilors) capturing the rights. Many bona fide fishers with limited literacy and numeracy skills were unable to comply with all the formal requirement of the rights allocation process.
In 2007, the courts granted an order requiring the government to develop a new small-scale fishing policy. This new policy was endorsed in 2012. Instead of being based on the principles of individual property rights, the focus was on collective rights granted to communities.
As with the US clam fishery, these examples suggest that, even when measures are put in place to try and avoid unwanted social impacts and retain an equitable distribution of benefits, catch share (rights based) schemes often fail to maintain social justice and the livelihoods of small-scale fishers and fishing communities.
A Confused Debate
Setting a total allowable catch and allocating rights can certainly be an effective way of ensuring the sustainability of a stock, provided that the level is appropriate, ongoing monitoring processes are well designed and there is compliance. Arguably, it is for this reason that many NGOs have convinced philanthropic investors of the merits of this approach. In the last decade, fisheries improvement projects in both the developed and the developing world have become big business; establishing “catch shares” is often a key selling point.
What is not always clear, however, is the extent to which these NGOs, in promoting “catch shares” are also advocating the allocation of private property rights in a market-based system. The language that distinguishes between this strict definition of “catch shares” and other approaches for ‘sharing the catch’ (which, of course, all systems must ultimately do) is terribly blurred.
Exploring this idea, Macinko (2014) argues that a tool (pre-assigned catch, i.e., catch shares) is being confused with an ideology (the sellable, but simplistic notion that private ownership promotes stewardship). everal social movements, for example, feared the now defunct Global Partnership for Oceans’ (GPOs) use of terms such as “community rights” reflected “a new euphemism and language strategy in pursuit of more private and individual access rights regimes.“
A more generous interpretation of the GPO terminology is that, after an early period of advocacy, the pitfalls of “catch shares” with respect to social outcomes were recognized and other ways of sharing the catch were acknowledged. The same interpretation can also be applied to NGOs currently involved in fisheries improvement projects around the world. The proof of that generosity will lie in the approaches that are adopted for inclusion of small-scale fishers. What should those approaches be?
Finding Solutions
Because of the widely differing social, economic and ecological settings in which fisheries occur, there is no single best approach for sharing the catch. Deciding how to make the most of an near shore canoe fishery that spans 500 miles of remote coast and serves both local consumers and a regional trade for dried fish is quite different from deciding how to manage a lake fishery that shows natural boom and bust cycles of fish productivity and meets the needs of a wide range of part time fishers, many of whom migrate to the region for the boom periods. Compare these two examples with the simpler challenges posed by a large-scale offshore fishery with relatively few boats, all of which land in one of a few ports to provide inexpensive fish for urban markets.
It is this diversity of context that led Jentoft et al. (2011) to argue for a “dexterity principle” when searching for solutions. The key to fostering dexterity is to focus first on how the management approach is decided and who participates. To this end, we offer two suggestions from Hall et al. 2013:
While we share the view that “catch shares” are an important and proven tool in conserving fish stocks, they are not universally appropriate. In deciding on their usefulness in any given context, the broader objectives of the fishery need to be considered from diverse perspectives, along with pragmatic issues of implementation. Some of the more breathless advocacy for catch shares conflates their potential environmental benefits with the societal consequences of different forms of implementation. In doing so, it also sidelines the most important voices for designing and sustaining effective and equitable governance – fishers and their communities.
Stephen Hall was Director of World Fish from 2004 until November 2015. You can contact him here or find him on twitter here.
Neil Andrew is Regional Director for East Asia & Pacific and a Principle Scientist at WorldFish.
David Mills is a Senior Scientist at WorldFish.
If you click on this link, you will find a chart showing where the top NJ/NY fishing areas were 100 years ago. I’m sure you will not be surprised to find that you could use this chart to go fishing today; it listed the same areas we still use. However this may not be the case in the future.
Sand mining is currently underway to protect the New Jersey coast from future storm damage. No one disputes that this is an important project, it is. However the sand mining being performed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is targeting, damaging and severely altering New Jersey’s shoals and lumps which are a habitat for our fisheries.
Last year, I asked my fellow NJ Marine Fisheries Council members to approve sending a letter to the Corps of Engineers “strongly recommending that these efforts (sand mining) begin focusing on mining sand outside prime fish habitat”. This letter was sent on July 8, 2014. On August 26, 2014, Paul B. Owen, Colonel, U.S. Army, Commander, replied citing that the practice of dredging shoals or bathymetric high spots for beach replenishment was discontinued in 1997, The Colonel also cited use of best practices and that “analysis showed that the benthic populations (in) these borrow areas recovered within 12-18 months depending on when the dredging was completed”, Ref; Benthic populations include crabs, lobster and flounder. No mention was made regarding the restoration of the damaged or altered shoals and lumps.
At the November 12, 2015 meeting of the NJ Marine Fisheries Council, I proposed that the council send a follow up letter requesting that the Corps of Engineers implement a mitigation plan to restore the damage and alterations to N.J.'s shoals/lumps designated as important fisheries areas. I also proposed that the Council restate its position that while it supports efforts to protect the N.J. Shore from future natural disasters, sand for beach replenishment must be taken from areas other than those areas designated as important N.J.'s fisheries.
The proposal was approved. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my fellow council members for supporting actions to protect N.J.’s resources, habitat and fisherpersons.
A letter will be prepared by the NJ Bureau of Marine Fisheries and be sent to the NJDEP Division of Land Use Management, the Corp of Engineers and appropriate federal agencies, Governor Christie, our representatives in Congress and other interested parties.
Closing comments; Environmental mitigation (mitigation banking) is used by the U.S. Government to offset adverse impacts, damage and alterations to existing historic or natural resources such as streams, wetlands, endangered species, etc. N.J.'s shoals/lumps are historic fisheries areas. I am told that they were formed during the last ice age and once destroyed are gone forever (or until the net ice age). As an important marine environment they are certainly a natural resource.
The use of low height reef material (concrete pipe, rubble, etc.) could be used to stabilize and initiate the natural buildup of sand to bring the said shoals/lumps back to their original profiles. This is environmental mitigation or environmental banking.
We protect and restore trout streams, wetlands and woodland habitat. We should all remember that our marine environment is as least as important as any of the above. It's just harder to see.
