Hoo Boy…doesn’t take much digging.
Whenever you see a newpaper article or any other media release touting how the implementation of “catch shares” or IFQ’s or whatever they call them this time are going to be the savior of all fish, fish eaters and fishermen, it doesn’t take long to find out exactly who is behind it.
The article recently printed in the St. Pete Times newspaper and credited to Connie Mack is a perfect example…Read article here.
Almost sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? The incoming President has an opportunity to “quickly solve” a complex situation with one simple solution. Wow.
It is indeed too good to be true. The first thing I wondered was why Connie Mack, a retired Senator who had little connection to environmental or fisheries issues when he was in the Senate, where he appeared to concentrate on matters of banking, tax codes and biomedical research, would take the time to participate in a group studying fishery regulation. He is now a lobbyist Senior Policy Advisor in King & Spalding’s Government Advocacy and Public Policy Practice Group working with that firm’s clients to “develop and implement strategies to successfully achieve their legislative goals” which sounds like he would be quite busy being quite gainfully employed, yet here he finds the time to participate in this group.
The truth is, if you are a fisherman who had any thoughts that perhaps your vote in the referendum about IFQs or anything else you had to say about them would amount to anything, well, I don’t want to dash anyone’s hopes but the folks at the Environmental Defense Fund — you know, the ones who still call grouper an “environmental WORST choice” — have assembled a pretty impressive list of names willing to add their two cents and claim to be speaking their own minds in regards to the matter, Connie Mack III is but one of the many.
A former Interior Secretary and a former Congressman headed the group that Mr. Mack says he participated in, a group apparently funded by the Environmental Defense Fund who came to the surprising conclusion that all we need to do is follow the plans being outlined by the Environmental Defense Fund and we will save the world…or at least the fishes.
“President Obama and the 111th Congress have before them a unique opportunity — to restore abundant oceans, that offer a sustainable source of food, employment and diverse wildlife for the American people. By expanding the use of “catch shares” — a performance-based management approach — in fisheries at home and around the globe, the President can lead the world in securing food for more than a billion people, growing the fishing economy, and improving and protecting the oceans.”
Read the EDF articles here and here.
But don’t miss this one while you are on their site.
The truth is, Connie Mack no more knows anything about fishery management than the people currently managing the fisheries, but he was happy to put his name to a press release which simply parrots the EDF position and have it appear in the local newspapers with his name adding to its credibility.
EDF then goes on to tout a “definitive scientific study” that claims to have examined more than 11,000 fisheries around the world between 1950 and 2003 which “confirms” that catch share systems for fisheries can help solve the fishery crisis.
Say what? NMFS can’t even keep track of the information we are giving them now. We have to fill out and submit Federal log reports for every trip, fill out detailed catch and effort reports at the fish house for the State for every trip, carry Federal observers on board a good percentage of boats and have dockside State workers doing random checks of many boats as they unload, measuring and cataloging all the fish that come off them, yet the NMFS seems to consistently get their stock assessment information wrong. As far as I know, and I’ve been fishing the Gulf of Mexico for 30 years, nobody even started keeping track of landings in the Gulf fisheries until the 1990’s….but these guys have made a definitive study based on thousands of fisheries from the 1950s until 2003?
Sorry, sell that offal somewhere else, I don’t want any.
EDF now happily claims credit for the snapper IFQ system and further claim that the red snapper IFQ system has been a huge success.
Then…
“Environmental Defense has been working with fishermen and local communities for over 10 years to help design and implement a red snapper fishing quota system that will revitalize our troubled fisheries and marine ecosystems,” said Regional Director for Environmental Defense’s Gulf of Mexico Program Pam Baker. ”We now look to the Commerce Department to implement the program as soon as possible to stop destructive fishing and get red snapper recovery on the right track.”
And now…
One year after an innovative management system was applied to the red snapper fishery in the Gulf of Mexico, preliminary data shows that wasteful discards are down by at least 50 percent, the fishing season has tripled, and the value of the fish at market has increased.
Tell that to all the other fishermen being put out of business by all the western gulf snapper boats now being free to pursue — and help close down earlier every year — other fisheries until they are good and ready to snag up their snapper quotas. Tell that to all the fishermen who didn’t get any snapper shares — for whatever reasons — and now have to lease them from the fish dealers and fish houses that seem, in my neck of the woods anyway, to be holding the majority of the shares. Tell that to those fishermen with no access to any snapper shares who are catching and being forced to discard red snapper by the basketloads just trying to get through them to catch some grouper off their favorite grouper spots…spots which are increasingly being taken over by snapper which those fishermen will NEVER be allowed to catch.
Tell that to the entire recreational snapper contingent who now face multi-month closures and increasingly draconian bag limits while having the same problem of getting through the out of control snapper to catch one or two grouper.
The truth is, the Gulf of Mexico red snapper IFQ system, like so many attempts at fishery management, was not very well thought out, was poorly and unfairly implemented and is horribly mismanaged by a power hungry bureaucracy that has no idea what being a fisherman is all about but are happy to pile on more and more silly rules about how many hours notice they want before the boat can actually come to the dock with their catch and other sundry things. The truth is, for every little success that the snapper IFQ system has had, there are a whole slew of other things that it has irretrievably damaged in the process. The truth is, even if the snapper IFQ system, or some IFQ system that was implemented in some totally unrelated fishery somewhere else at some other time, was an unqualified success, that does NOT mean that it is suddenly a panacea, a be all and end all solution to any and all fishery woes.
If anything saved the snapper fishery in the Gulf of Mexico it was the implementation of fish shooters in the shrimp trawl industry. It is no secret (anymore) that for decades those shrimp trawlers shoveled piles of juvenile snapper overboard, most of them dead or dying, every night.
General ecological concerns aside, bycatch reduction has a more pragmatic consequence for fishery management: alleviation of incidental mortality on heavily fished finfish stocks. For example, juveniles of a common Gulf of Mexico species (red snapper, Lutjanus campechanus) and a common South Atlantic species (weakfish, Cynoscion regalis) have been particularly identified as fishes impacted by shrimp trawling. Similar impacts are hypothesized for two other species (king mackerel, Scomboromorus cavalla, and Spanish mackerel, S. maculatus) which occur in both the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic. This juvenile mortality is thought to effect recruitment to the fishable stocks, thus restricting allocations for directed recreational and commercial fishing efforts. The initial goal of the Bycatch Program was to reduce incidental mortality on these species, and others, by 50%.
Branstetter, S. 1997. Bycatch and it reduction in the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic shrimp fisheries.
The success of the fish shooters, or more properly “Bycatch Reduction Devices”, which were mandated in the late 90’s has been huge…but nobody wants to credit them with anything. Have you heard them mentioned as regards the health of the snapper fishery?
Could it be that if we credited an already established regulation with saving or contributing to the overall health of a fishery then that would mean there would be no need to continue growing the bureaucracy charged with over-regulating that fishery until the fishermen are ultimately put out of the fishing business while the bureaucrats all collect comfy government checks and benefits?
Ya think?
The IFQ system in the Gulf of Mexico red snapper fishery is a huge mess and is almost universally hated by everyone in the industry except by the few fishermen who hold enough snapper shares to matter and by those non-fishermen who hold so many of those valuable shares and profit hugely by leasing them to fishermen. However, we are being told repeatedly how IFQs have been the salvation of so many fisheries and will, ultimately, save our oceans if only we will hurry up and implement them in all the fisheries.
One theory holds that the IFQ system is simply a system that the environmental groups with immensely deep pockets see as a way for them to ultimately be able to step in, buy up and retire shares, and be able to control the fisheries, or, in other words, to privatize the fishery. NO other method of fishery management leaves the door wide open in the future for these extremist groups to step in and take control of something they never should be allowed to have a hand in other than to express their opinion.
Not too surprisingly, if you follow the links from the Environmental Defense articles to the sciencemag.org site where if you pony up ten bucks you can read the “definitive study” they are so high on , you find that the editors of that site also recommend an article titled, somewhat ominously:
“Privatization Prevents Collapse of Fish Stocks, Global Analysis Shows”
Privatization? Well, I’m private but I somehow don’t think I’m what they have in mind. Who exactly do they want to privatize these fisheries to?
As long as that 800 Lb Gorilla, The Pew Trusts, is in the bank for Environmental Defense Fund, and as long as big names like Connie Mack III and other former “Public Servants” are willing to lend their names to give these incredible studies credibility, the average fisherman might just as well put some rollers on the bottom of his white boots to ease the downhill slide that the fisheries and the people that fishery management should really be working to protect and benefit, the fishermen, are in for.
Why am in this basket and why is it getting so hot?
The full report from the ED panel is here in pdf format.
