“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
hitched to everything else in the universe.”
That’s a truth particularly relevant to fishery management,
where single-species management efforts often run afoul of the realities
presented by food webs and overlapping fisheries. In the coming months, we may see that
relevance reinforced once again, if actions taken to conserve Atlantic herring
up in New England impact the menhaden fishery in the mid-Atlantic.
To understand what’s going on, it probably makes sense to
take a look at both fisheries, as they exist today.
Both are what can be termed “high volume, low value”
fisheries, in which profit can only be made by selling large volumes of fish that
command a very low price per pound.
Where the fisheries differ is in the concentration of
fishing effort, and in the eventual use of the fish.
The
Atlantic menhaden fishery is prosecuted, to a greater or lesser degree, by
almost all Atlantic Coast states, but the vast majority of the harvest, 323,000,000
pounds, or more than 80% of the total 2016 landings, was landed in Virginia. Out of
that total, about
315,000,000 pounds, was caught by the so-called “reduction” fishery, which “reduces”
menhaden into fish meal and oil used in various industrial products, from
aquaculture and livestock feeds to paint additives to human cosmetics. The remaining landings are used for bait in
various fisheries, including the New England lobster fishery.
In
November 2017, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission revised its state
menhaden allocations. Such reallocation reduced
Virginia’s share of the overall quota, and redistributed such fish to other
states, particularly to states in the Northeast. Virginia
challenged such reallocation, even though an increase in the overall quota, along
with transferred quota from other states, allowed the state to actually land
more menhaden than it had landed before.
Although that challenge was eventually withdrawn, there is no question
that Virginia’s share of menhaden landings remains a touchy subject, and there
is little doubt that any further effort to reduce that allocation will again
draw Virginia’s fire.
Now, given recent events in the Atlantic herring fishery, it
seems likely that another attempt to reallocate menhaden landings will be made
in the not-too-distant future, as New England lobstermen seek to whittle down
Virginia’s dominant share in order to secure a reliable source of inexpensive
bait.
That’s a real possibility, because Atlantic herring haven’t
been doing too well in recent years. A
2016 article in the Portland Post Herald
noted that
“The offshore supply of fresh Atlantic herring, the go-to
bait for most Maine lobstermen, has been in short supply, driving prices up as
much as 30 percent in late July, the Maine Lobstermen’s Association said. The shortage triggered near-shore fishing
restrictions to try to stretch out the summer herring catch in hopes of keeping
bait bags full as Maine’s lobster season hits its peak.
“With herring getting scarce and expensive, fishermen have
turned to other bait for relief, especially the pogie, the local name for
Atlantic menhaden. It’s the No. 3 bait
fish among Maine lobstermen, according to a state Department of Marine
Resources survey.”
The herring shortage
was a serious problem in 2016, and last year as well, although ASMFC did take
some steps to give Maine relief in the form of somewhat higher menhaden
landings. However, an action taken by
the National Marine Fisheries Service earlier this month is going to take that
problem to a whole new level of severity.
A
new benchmark stock assessment of the Atlantic herring revealed a fish
population in serious decline.
Recruitment—the number of new fish entering the population—has fallen to
all-time lows over the past five years.
In response to that new information, NMFS
cut the 2018 Atlantic herring quota from 110,536 metric tons to just 49,900 mt,
a reduction of about 55%.
“The stock assessment projected that the [New England Fishery
Management] Council’s recommended level of catch was likely to result in
overfishing for 2018, so we chose to reduce the Council’s recommended catch so
that we would meet the 50 percent probability of overfishing target that was
used in previous specifications for setting the overfishing limit…Based on the
2018 stock assessment projection, we expect this reduction to reduce the
probability of overfishing in 2018, increase the estimated herring biomass in
2019-2021, and provide for more catch for the fishery.”
It was a prudent action on NMFS’ part, and one that was
completely consistent with federal fishery management law. However, there’s little doubt that the
lobstermen up in Maine, and elsewhere in New England, are already wondering how
they’re going to make up for the approximately 60,000 metric tons of herring
that have suddenly been removed from their bait supply.
Menhaden are the obvious answer, but what isn’t obvious are
where those menhaden will come from. The
entire menhaden quota is just 216,000 metric tons, and Maine
only gets a tiny fraction, 0.52%, of that, much of which is already being
caught and turned into bait. Another 1%
or so is set aside for “episodic events,” or an unexpected abundance of
menhaden in northeastern waters, but even that will leave them well short
of what they’ve lost. The only big bait
harvester on the coast is New Jersey, which is allocated nearly 11% of all
landings, but once again, just about all of that quota is already being caught
and utilized.
So that just leaves Virginia. Its 78.66% of the harvest, about 170,000
metric tons in 2018-2019, makes it an obvious target for those who might want
to redistribute menhaden landings. But,
as mentioned before, Virginia would certainly fight any such reallocation with
every tool at its disposal.
Based merely on ASMFC’s guiding documents, it would be an
interesting debate. ASMFC’s
Interstate Fisheries Management Program Charter requires that
“Fishery resources shall be fairly and equitably allocated or
assigned among the states.”
The problem with that, of course, is that the meaning of “fairness”
shall ever and always lie in the eye of the beholder. Rare is the child who, after receiving the bigger
scoop of ice cream or larger slice of pie, will deem the distribution process “unfair,”
although those getting smaller allocations might see the whole thing a lot
differently.
Thus, Virginia clearly believes that it is entitled to 80%
of the entire menhaden harvest and, in its aborted challenge last winter,
argued that it was being “unfairly” reduced to a mere 78.66%. Maine, which was given a quota just 0.7% the
size of Virginia’s, is unlikely to be sympathetic to such a position.
On the other hand, ASMFC’s
Appeals Process guidance document clearly gives a state the right to appeal an
ASMFC action if
“Historical landings period [is] not adequately addressed.”
Virginia could and did make that claim in its recent
challenge, but once again, the apparent validity of any such assertion depends
very much on perspective. In the course
of any allocation of fishery resources, the various interested parties will
argue and maneuver in an effort to convince fishery managers to select “base
years” that provide the greatest benefit to the party in question. In the case of Atlantic menhaden, the
Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission based the allocation on years when
Virginia was the dominant harvester. If
they had chosen other years, before the reduction fishery had consolidated in a
single state, and was spread out along the Atlantic Coast, the allocation would
look very different than it does today.
In addition, while the Appeals Process guidance document
does require historical landings to be “addressed,” neither it nor any other
ASMFC document requires historical landings to be determinative of how landings
in any fishery are allocated. As
ASMFC leadership noted in their response to Virginia’s challenge,
“Commission guiding documents do not require Boards to allocate
quota based solely on historic landings information”
Instead, management boards may use other criteria
“to accommodate changing conditions in a fishery that cannot
be addressed through the use of historic landings.”
Of course, there is also the practical aspect of any attempted
reallocation. Virginia could just tell
ASMFC to take its new allocation and shove it, flatly refusing to reduce its
menhaden harvest. That’s far from an
unlikely scenario, as Virginia
is currently defying ASMFC on another menhaden-related issue, refusing to amend
its state law to reduce the quantity of menhaden that the reduction fleet can
remove from Chesapeake Bay.
Such refusal to reduce its overall landings could well see ASMFC refer the state’s noncompliance
to the Secretary of Commerce, who has the power to impose a complete moratorium
on the state’s menhaden fishery. On the
other hand, given that the Secretary would have to find that such harvest
reduction is
“necessary for the conservation of the fishery in question,”
and given that ASMFC’s
Atlantic Menhaden Technical Committee advised, in August 2017, that even
increasing the annual harvest as high as 280,000 pounds would only present a
2.5% chance of overfishing the menhaden stock, it is very possible that the
Secretary, who believes in the importance of
would rule in favor of Virginia, and decide that if ASMFC
wanted to give more menhaden to New England, it could do so by increasing the
overall quota and not by reducing Virginia’s share.
And thus the stage is set for an intense fisheries battle,
in which New England states try to obtain more bait for their lobstermen by
taking menhaden away from Virginia while Virginia resists, a fight in which the
final decision rests in the hands of a
Secretary of Commerce who doesn’t seem to believe in conservation at all.
Of course, right now that’s all speculation. Such a fight may never occur. But right now, the pieces are in place for a
landmark debate that has the potential to completely change the menhaden
management paradigm.
Whether that change would be for good or ill is something
that, at this point, no one can know.
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