Thursday, September 3, 2020

ACCURATELY COUNTING THE CATCH IS EASIER SAID THAN DONE: PART ONE--THE COMMERCIAL CATCH

 

It’s impossible to manage marine fisheries without knowing just how many fish are removed from the populations each year.  Some of those removals take the form of commercial catch, some take the form of recreational landings, and some—and some of the hardest to quantify—take the form of fish returned to the water, either as regulatory discards, economic discards, or fish that anglers catch and voluntarily release, but don’t survive the experience.

Together, those fish make up the overall level of fishing mortality, often designated by the symbol “F” in stock assessments, management discussions, and scientists’ calculations.  In every case, the accuracy of the managers conclusions is heavily dependent upon the accuracy of their calculations of F.

Some fishing mortality is relatively easy to quantify.  

Commercial fishermen are generally required to report their landings, and when the fish landed are sold to a dockside buyer, as is typically the case, managers can compare the buyers’ records with those of the fishermen, and quickly detect any discrepancies that might suggest that someone is not reporting accurately.

We saw something like that happen last November, after the Coast Guard analyzed three separate databases, and determined that, between 2011 and 2015, over two thousand trips, accounting for about 2.5 million pounds of New England groundfish, were misreported.

Further investigation showed that most of the misreporting was probably accidental, with boats fishing close to management area borders—the National Marine Fisheries Service divides the ocean into “statistical reporting areas” that fishermen are supposed to cite when filling out their catch reports—inadvertently attributing catch to an adjacent reporting area, rather than the one in which it was actually caught.  But in the case of more than 350 trips, the misreporting seemed to be intentional.

Such misreporting generally involved just four different species, winter flounder, yellowtail flounder, code, and haddock.  The Gloucester [MA} Times, which reported on the misreporting issue, noted that

“The goal of the misreporting, according to the [Coast Guard’s] report [of its findings], is to keep fishing without exceeding catch limits and annual catch entitlements”

for designated stocks in the fishery.

In the northeast, misreporting not only of reporting areas, but also of the species caught, reached its known apex in the case of Carlos Rafael, the so-called “Codfather,” who was sent to federal prison for falsely reporting between $1.4 million and $3.7 million (depending on how the valuation was done) in New England groundfish.

Rafael was only able to get away with such gross misreporting because he owned both the boats and the fish house that purchased the catch.  Thus, both the fisherman and the buyer were easily able to conspire in order to keep both the vessels’ trip reports and the fish house’s weigh-out slips from conflicting.

It would be nice to believe that Rafael’s wrongdoing was a singular event, but that is, unfortunately, not the case.  Here in New York, fishermen’s abuse of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Research Set-Aside Program was so severe that the Council ultimately decided to suspend the program.

NMFS described one of the cases this way:

“…an investigation initiated in July 2010 by NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) culminated in the sentencing of a Levittown, NY, fisherman, who was convicted of mail fraud, wire fraud, and falsifying federal records charges.

“Anthony Joseph was sentenced to seven months incarceration and three years of supervised release by federal court in the Eastern District of New York.  Joseph was also ordered to pay $603,400 in combined fines and forfeitures.

“The [Research Set Aside] program was established as a mechanism to fund research and compensate vessel owners through the sale of fish harvested under a research quota or research days at sea.  When using set-aside days or quota, vessels were often exempt from trip limits, some seasonal closures, or other restrictions that would otherwise apply.

“However, numerous people, including Joseph, found ways to misuse the program which led to its reorganization and restructuring.

“In all, OLE agents determined that Joseph filed 158 false fishing logs and was complicit in the submission of 167 false dealer reports.  These violations led to a plea of four felony charges…

“Joseph concealed the over-harvests by underreporting his total catch to NOAA.  He then used two cooperating dealers to file false federal dealer reports to avoid detection.  The two related dealers, Alan Dresner and Jones Inlet Seafood, have been charged and the cases have been adjudicated.”

While it’s nice to believe that fishermen such as Carlos Rafael and Anthony Joseph are just two bad apples in an otherwise sound barrel, another issue that arose in New York casts doubt on that rose-colored view of life.  It is described in the complaint that New York State filed in its lawsuit against multiple plaintiffs, including the Secretary of Commerce and NMFS, over the state’s commercial fluke quota.

In that complaint, New York argues that the data used to allocate summer flounder among the states, in an action taken by the Mid-Atlantic Council in 1993, is outdated and no longer represents the best available science.  One of the reasons that continuing use of such data is inappropriate, according to one paragraph of the complaint, is that

“When the 1993 Allocation Rule was adopted, the state allocations were based on commercial landings of summer flounder reported for the respective states between 1980 and 1989.

“During that period, landings in New York were underreported as a result of the infiltration of organized crime in the state’s fishing industry at the onshore purchase and wholesale level, which infiltration has subsequently been eradicated.  [internal numbering omitted]”

The way one commercial fishing representative described it to me, fishermen would drop off their summer flounder to a dockside packing house.  The fish were then boxed and shipped to the Fulton Fish Market, which was then controlled by the New York mob.  Some time later, the fishermen would get an envelope containing payment for the catch.  

Sometimes, the envelope was a thin one, containing a check, while on many other occasions, the envelope was fat and filled with cash. 

Landings that generated checks were reported, both to NMFS and to the Internal Revenue Service; landings that generated fat envelopes, on the other hand, were never mentioned again.  Thus, the fishermen got an illegal tax break when they were paid in cash, but when NMFS got around to allocating the summer flounder among the states, based on past landings, New York fishermen were not credited for the unreported landings.

Today, the fishermen are calling that situation unfair.

Others might just call it karma.  After all, the fishermen still could have reported their landings, despite the cash payments, if they had opted to do so, and accepted the tax consequences that would have been triggered by such reporting.  The fishermen chose to avoid such consequences, by avoiding such reporting, instead.

Efforts to avoid consequences doesn’t just impact landings reporting.  They impact bycatch reporting, too.

Bycatch is even more difficult to quantify, because out in that big ocean, there’s usually no one to see and report what gets dumped over the side.  And when fish returned to the water dead can result in a significant cut in the annual quota, fishermen have an incentive not to report such discards.

That’s a particularly big issue in New England, where cod stocks sit on the verge of collapse and fisheries managers have been unable to put them on the path to rebuilding.  Back in 2015, the Conservation Law Foundation noted that

“…the claims that fishermen can’t get away from legal-sized cod wherever they turn creates at least the appearance of abundance of Gulf of Maine cod…

“Under these circumstances, one would expect to see high catch and discard numbers reported for Gulf of Maine cod in May and June, i.e. lots of apparently abundant post-spawning cod being caught either to be landed or pitched overboard.  What’s curious about this case is that we aren’t.

“For the first two months of the year not only were the reported commercial cod bycatch numbers low—at 7% which is still just slightly above the normal range—but the overall number of cod reported as caught (landed plus discards) seems low at only 13% of the greatly reduced annual catch limit.

“So, if we are to believe the claims, why didn’t the obvious happen?  Why didn’t the reported catch reflect the reported increase in cod abundance and the newly opened areas?...

“a fair number of fishermen tell us that there are few rational reasons under the present circumstances for a fisherman to accurately report the number of cod he or she is actually catching.  Under this hypothesis, massive numbers of cod are simply being pitched overboard on un-observed trips, dead or dying and never accounted for as ever been caught.  [emphasis added\”

In theory, the true level of discards should be picked up by observers, who record the level of bycatch and its ultimate fate each time they go out on a fishing vessel.  But right now, observers are only carried on a minority of all codfishing trips, and fishermen can easily abandon their typical fishing behaviors on those few trips when they have an observer on board.  

A 2018 memo to the New England Fishery Management Council’s Groundfish Committee included a list of uncertainties that could impact commercial landings estimates, including

“Unreported and misreported catches (landings and discards) by species/stock,”

“Lack of independent verification of landings may lead to catch reporting conspiracy/collusion between a dealer and a vessel, and has occurred,”

“Fishermen behave differently when observers are on-board,”

and

“Incentives exist in any quota-based system for misreporting/unreporting of catch (landings and discards).”

Now, two groups that advocate for better fisheries management, the Conservation Law Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund, are calling for more effective groundfish management.  As reported by seafoodsource.com,

“The groups…take federal officials to task for not having good data available.  They claim the Atlantic cod stock is overfished to the point of potential collapse, and they also say, citing government reports, that fishermen also discard tons of cod without it being officially recorded by government observers.”

In response to the problem, the New England Council is proposing that 100 percent observer coverage be required on groundfishing vessels.

But, as The Gloucester Times reports, that proposal isn’t going over very well with fishermen.

“…the fishermen made their displeasure clear, skewering some of the data that was used to tabulate the estimated costs and benefits of going to 100% monitoring levels and flatly proclaiming that forcing the industry to pay for 100% monitoring would bring an end to the historic commercial fishery…

“’This amendment will put the final black mark on the industry,’ said Angela Sanfilippo, the president of the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association and a longtime fishing advocate.  ‘It’s not fair to fishermen and it’s not fair to taxpayers.’

“Gloucester fisherman Paul Vitale veered away from the data to talk about the simple act of fishing and how the constant presence of monitors aboard his 48-foot Angela + Rose will impact how he does his job.”

If the conservationist’s suspicions are right, the constant presence of monitors aboard all groundfishing boats might have its greatest impact on the estimates of how many cod are discarded dead; a higher estimate would either shut down the fishery or require fishermen to go out and purchase unused quota from others, at what would undoubtedly be a very high price, in order to cover their discards and allow them to keep on fishing for other species.

And those are things that few, if any, fishermen want to see.

So the incentive to misreport discard numbers remains strong, as does the incentive to go out and convince the New England Council that it shouldn’t require universal observer coverage.

Without such coverage, cod discard numbers will continue to be suspect, and it may be impossible for managers to rebuild the stock based on the data that they now have on hand.

But to fishermen who want to keep fishing, a badly depleted cod stock remains the lesser evil, when compared to being tied up to the dock, and not making money, in order to let the cod stock rebuild.

 

 

 

 

 

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