Thursday, August 30, 2018

WILL HERRING SHORTAGE AFFECT MENHADEN MANAGEMENT?



“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.





Although that challenge was eventually withdrawn, there is no question that Virginia’s share of menhaden landings remains a touchy subject, and there is little doubt that any further effort to reduce that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.



“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.


“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.


“necessary for the conservation of the fishery in question,”

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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