ANOTHER DOMINO FALLS IN NEW ENGLAND

Last week, news came out of Gloucester, Massachusetts that one its two local groundfish “sectors” will be consolidated for the 2019 fishing year, because maintaining the smaller of them, the so-called “Northeast Groundfish Sector III,” is no longer economically feasible.

There’s just not enough fish, and in particular not enough cod, in the ocean to keep the two sectors operating independently.  So instead of remaining a separate sector, the remaining half-dozen boats and 30 groundfish permits of Sector II will be rolled up into Northeast Groundfish Sector II, which will remain a financially viable entity that will include about 35 boats and 128 permits.

That’s bad news for a port that has been part of the northeastern groundfish fishery since it was founded in 1623, and bad news for northeastern groundfish in general, as it evidences a continuing lack of fish that leaves both the future of the fishing industry, and of the fish themselves, in considerable doubt.

Unfortunately, there has been a lot of bad news for New England fisheries over the past few decades, and there is little reason to believe that the news is going to get better at any time soon.

As the history of Gloucester suggests, New England has supported fisheries for cod and other groundfish since the first colonial settlements were established on the Massachusetts coast.  For many years, fishing was a major industry in coastal towns, although as populations increased and technology advanced, the fish started feeling the strain. 

The Atlantic halibut fishery was the first to collapse as a result of overfishing.  Although it is a relatively young fishery, that didn't really get underway until the early 1800s, the halibut fishery reached its peak before the 20^th Century began, and had collapsed by the early 1940s.  That collapse relegated Atlantic halibut to mere “incidental” status in the greater fishery for cod and other groundfish, which was successfully prosecuted for a few decades more.

But the groundfish fishery started feeling real pain in the 1960s, as foreign factory ships plundered the fisheries off the U.S. East Coast.  As reported in a 1976 article from the New York Times,

“From the air, foreign ships could be seen today scattered throughout the expanse of cobalt blue from north of here [off Ocean City, New Jersey] to Cape May.  Rusty-hulled trawlers, nets out on cables, pitched gently in 4-foot-high waves and rolled with the swells under gale force winds that flecked the ocean with whitecaps.

“Eight miles from shore, off Ocean City, the 100-foot trawler Kanter tied up alongside the Polish factory ship Pomorze to unload herring.  Aboard the big “mother” or “factory” ship, its yellow superstructure, gleaming in the sun, crews were at work processing the catch.  Fifteen miles out, two dozen Eastern European fishing ships the size of the Kanter and larger plied the cold waters, crewman on deck in orange parkas and hoods to break winds that chilled the air to 10 below zero.

“About 30 miles offshore, trawling for mackerel, were scores of Soviet ships, including processing factories up to 600 feet long and refrigerated transportation ships nearly as large that would take the filleted, frozen and packaged product back to Soviet ports…

“’Our own fishing industry can’t compete with that,’ said John W. Brown of Ocean City, South Jersey regional director of the Emergency Committee to Conserve America’s Marine Fisheries…’They are depleting the supplies.  Haddock is practically an endangered species here already.  Herring is declining rapidly.  Cod is seriously jeopardized.’”

According to the Times, when that article was written, about 150 foreign vessels, including 97 from the Soviet Union, were fishing off the U.S. Atlantic Coast north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and were doing real harm to the local fish stocks.

So, later in the same year, at the insistence of American fishermen, Congress passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 which, after later amendments, became what is now known as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. 

The 1976 law pushed most foreign vessels out 200 nautical miles from the U.S. coast, but it did not require regional fishery management councils to adopt measures that would rebuild depleted fish populations; however, it did create financial incentives for fishermen to build new vessels that allowed them to start where the foreign vessels left off, overfishing domestic fish stocks. 

New England groundfish weren’t exempt from that process.  In 1982, the New England Fishery Management Council did away with annual quotas for cod and the other fish stocks under its jurisdiction, claiming that the fishery would self-regulate as it responded to changes in fish abundance. 

There was little hard evidence to support such a view.  Between 1977, when the new federal law was first implemented, and 1983, the number of New England groundfish boats nearly doubled, from 825 to 1,423.  It soon became obvious that the cod population, along with populations of haddock and yellowtail flounder, were still skidding downhill.  But fishermen still resisted regulation.

A 1995 report notes that

“as NMFS scientists warned of declining stocks of cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder, the council dithered.  That changed only in 1991, when the NMFS was sued by the Conservation Law Foundation.  Under court order, the council began drafting regulations…the goal being to cut fishing effort and presumably fishing mortality in half.  Fishermen protested:  while the council system turns the henhouse over to the foxes, it manages to leave most foxes feeling unrepresented…

“It’s come to the point now where unless you’re absolutely blind you can’t pretend that the stock isn’t in very bad shape, because it’s almost gone, says [Andy] Rosenberg [a NMFS biologist and spokesman].  And still people are arguing, ‘We don’t want to have a   direct control on how much we catch.’”

Finally, Congress ended up passing the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which amended Magnuson-Stevens, to require that overfishing be ended and that overfished stocks be timely rebuilt.  While the 1996 law did end council “dithering” in most places, it failed to make much of a dent in New England, where the New England Fishery Management Council still shunned hard-poundage quotas while favoring input controls such as trip limits and restrictions on days at sea.

That didn’t work.  Overfishing still occurred, overfished stocks weren’t rebuilt., and most groundfish stocks continued to decline.  In response, when Congress reauthorized Magnuson-Stevens in the closing days of 2006, it included provisions that required regional fishery management councils to set hard-poundage catch limits for all managed stocks, and to hold fishermen accountable when they exceeded those limits. 

The New England Council finally stopped its previously incessant fight against regulation and, in 2010,  adopted a catch share program, which would assign a designated share of each stock to one or more designated “sectors”—effectively, groups of fishermen who were united by geography and/or their use of the same types of gear—based on their prior reported landings, while setting some fish aside for “common pool” vessels that opted out of the catch share program, and were still subject to traditional quotas.

Fishermen who tried to skate around previous regulations—or tax obligations—by failing to report all of their catch were disadvantaged, as well as displeased, when such allocations were made.

But there were still problems.

Federal investigators discovered that, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Carlos Rafael, who called himself the “Codfather” and dominated the port’s fishing fleet, had been illegally harvesting overfished species and, with the help of cooperative crewmen and unethical fish wholesalers, mislabeling them as other, less regulated fish.  When the legal system was done, New Bedford’s Northeast Groundfish Sector IX was barred from fishing until it repaid the overage that Rafael’s boats had accrued, and put safeguards in place to prevent further overfishing.

Usually, any overharvest would be attributed to the boats who actually took too many fish, but Rafael’s illegal schemes made that impossible, so 55 Rafael-owned boats left Sector IX and joined Northeast Groundfish Sector VII, leaving just 3 boats behind to be held accountable for the excess landings.  At the same time, all of the boats that had previously been in Sector VII, perhaps not wanting to be associated with any bad actors from Sector IX, exited that sector, with 16 of them joining Northeast Groundfish Sector VIII, where they might have a better chance of avoiding any legal taint.

It’s hard to say what the result of all that moving around was, although it’s probably safe to assume that it didn’t do the cod any good.  Some people have argued that the catch share system didn’t end up doing the fishermen any good, either, although such arguments tend to be made only by either the fishermen themselves, or by one of their traditional advocates, rather than by unbiased observers.

Whatever the truth, it's undeniable that things have gotten bad enough that the entire recreational cod fishery has been shut down in the Gulf of Maine, although it limps on elsewhere.

It is also undeniable New England once hosted a vibrant and economically important groundfish fishery, and that such fishery suffered from many years of overharvest.

And that fishermen, when confronted with the problem, did their best to avoid any meaningful regulation for a very long time.

And that, in the end, after years of overfishing, it was many of the fishermen themselves who disappeared.

The first domino to fall was the halibut fishery, that died before the Second World War.

After that, some fishermen succumbed to the damage done by the foreign fleets—the only damage that was, for many years, beyond their control.  But after both the United States and Canada pushed the foreign fleets off their shores in 1977, it was their domestic fishing fleets that expanded and overfished groundfish stocks.  Off both nations, the cod populations declined; the Canadian decline was so bad that, in 1992, the Newfoundland fishery was completely closed.

So second domino fell.

And the thing about dominoes is that, when they start to fall, it all begins slowly.  The first hits the second, and the second knocks the third piece down.  But then, things seem to speed up.  And things certainly sped up for groundfish.

Sector IX was effectively shut down in 2017, although it’s still allowed to lease quota today.

The recreational cod fishery in the Gulf of Maine closed in 2018.

Now, only a few months into 2019, we’ve already witnessed Sector III’s demise.

Five dominoes down.  How many to go?

It’s hard to say.  The smart money is on many more.

For fishermen seem slow to learn that, in the long run, conservation doesn't hurt their businesses.  It's the only way to keep them alive.