Anyone following Atlantic menhaden management in recent
weeks is aware that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic
Menhaden Management Board, when it met on October 28, did nothing to reduce
menhaden landings in upcoming years, even though the
most recent stock assessment update indicated that, to have a 50% probability
of avoiding overfishing, such landings should be cut more than 50%, with the
total allowable catch for the years 2026-2028 reduced to 108,450 metric tons
from the current 233,550 mt.
“the Board set the 2026 total allowable catch (TAC) at
186,400 mt, a 20% decrease from the 2023-2025 TAC of 233,550 mt…
“The Board also initiated an addendum to Amendment 3 to
consider options to reduce the Chesapeake Bay Reduction Fishery Cap by up to
50% and distribute the cap more evenly throughout the fishing season…”
The problem is that
commercial menhaden landings were only 166,844 mt in 2023, and only 186,155
mt in 2024. It’s too early to know
what final 2025 landings will be, but looking at the 2023 and 2024 data, it
appears that while the Management Board’s actions may have cut the TAC, and so
theoretical 2026 landings (the Board originally intended to set the TAC for
2026-2028 in a single action, but decided to revisit the 2027 and 2028 TAC at a
future time), by 20%, but out here in the real world, where fish are actually
removed from the water, they don’t seem to have reduced 2026 landings at all.
The ASMFC press release states that the Management Board didn’t
drop the 2026 TAC to 108,450 mt because
“The Board expressed concerns about the socioeconomic impact
of implementing such a significant cut in a single year and chose to take a
more moderate cut for 2026 only,”
which was an entirely predictable and not completely
unreasonable position for the Management Board to take, but it would have been
nice, if the ASMFC was going to talk about taking “a more moderate cut,” that
an actual cut—that is, to real-world landings, and not just to the TAC—had been
taken. What the Management Board
actually did was much more akin to maintaining the status quo, so that, if any
real cuts to landings in 2027 and/or 2028 take place, they’re going to have to be
from 2023 and 2024 (and probably 2025) levels, rather than from a cut that had
actually been made in 2026.
It would also have been nice had the ASMFC noted in its
press release that a motion had been made at the October 28 meeting to phase in
a real landings cut over three years, but that the Management Board had voted
it down in favor of the quasi-status quo motion that was ultimately adopted. To let people know that there was “a more
moderate option” that didn’t call for the entire cut to be taken “in a single year,”
but that it was rejected by the Management Board.
But all that is now in the past, and what really matters is
what the Management Board intends to do going forward—and what those people and
entities advocating for some form of menhaden conservation are going to do to
point the Management Board in the right direction.
At this point, I feel compelled to point out that the
menhaden advocacy community didn’t do themselves proud—and didn’t do the
menhaden any favors—in the way that they addressed the issues to be decided on
October 28.
In
a piece that I wrote shortly before the meeting, I noted that
“we’ll undoubtedly see the folks who worship at the menhaden’s
altar, and have regularly made irrational and scientifically unsustainable
calls for the elimination of the menhaden reduction fishery, increase the
volume of their yowling, and use the 2025 assessment update as an excuse to
redouble their efforts, never seeming to realize that a menhaden that dies in a
pound net is just as dead, and has the same impact on the stock as one that
dies in a purse seine.
“By focusing on eliminating a gear type instead of reducing
the TAC, such persons will make it easier for the industry to prevail, as they
open the door to equally emotional arguments that the reduction fishery is
unjustly targeted, that ending the reduction industry would kill an economically
important business in an generally depressed area of the coast, and that
closing that fishery would deny employment for people—including many people off
color—in a region that offers few viable alternatives.
“And it will be easy for the industry to argue that, even
with the population size revised downward, the menhaden stock is not in
anywhere near as bad condition as the industry’s opponents maintain.”
And that’s pretty much what happened.
“Establish a 2026-2028 TAC of 75,616 mt, a level that has a
significantly less than 50% probability of exceeding the ERP F target, accounts
for additional model and ecosystem risk, and protects the coastwide bait
fishery; and, Reallocate all quota to the bait fishery, allowing the lobster
and crab industries to maintain current levels of bait availability or better,
and prohibit menhaden fishing for reduction purposes. [emphasis added, numbering and formatting
omitted]”
That was never going to happen.
It should have been perfectly obvious to anyone who
understands how the ASMFC works that it was going to be extremely difficult to convince
the Management Board to cut landings by over 50% just to set the TAC at 108,450
mt; believing that it might be possible to set the TAC even lower was an idea
that could only arise from a pipe dream—or, in these times, perhaps from indulging
in a few too many of those high-THC gummies.
If the Board had agreed to a three-year phase in that came
somewhere close to the 108,000 mt level, it would have been a major win.
But then the various organizations compounded their error by
calling for a complete elimination of the menhaden reduction fishery, a move that
would remove six
multi-million dollar fishing vessels, their crews (roughly 17 per boat), a
land-based fish processing plant and its employees, as well as support staff
and businesses, from the fishery—and from Virginia’s coastal economy—in a
single swipe. The
organizations justified such action only by alleging that
“Removing menhaden from the ecosystem and rendering it into
animal feed and other industrial products, most of which is exported to other
countries, is a poor use of this vital resource. Menhaden are many times more valuable to
local and the national economies when used as bait for commercial lobster and
crab fisheries or when left in the water to support the local fishing industry.”
They provided no economic analysis to support that claim. But what they did do was force the Management
Board into a position of picking winners and losers, and force the majority of
that Board to decide whether they wanted to confront the representatives from
the Commonwealth of Virginia—the only state with a menhaden reduction industry—and
shut down an industry important to at least a small part of that state, without
Virginia’s consent, while promoting the bait fishery.
Management Board members typically don’t like to be forced
into such positions, a fact that, all other considerations aside, doomed the
proposal to failure from the start.
“The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400
Union has released a new video highlighting the voices of its members who work
as commercial fishermen in the Atlantic menhaden fishery. The video showcases the pride, tradition, and
hard work of union members whose livelihoods depend on a fishery that has
operated from Virginia’s Northern Neck for well over a century.
“In the video, crew members describe the menhaden fleet as a
family, one bound by generations of work on the water. Many fishermen are second-, third-, or even
fourth-generation employees, carrying on a legacy of providing for their
families and their community…
“The video highlights how the menhaden fleet, operated by
Ocean Harvesters, an American-owned company, provides hundreds of
family-supporting union jobs in Virginia’s Northern Neck. Ocean Harvesters’ crews are overwhelmingly
local and members of UFCW Local 400 Union.
The company’s operations are deeply tied to the region’s economy, employing
one of the largest minority workforces in Northumberland County…”
Folks I spoke with, who attended the Management Board
meeting, said that something like 240 people attended, with many of those
people clearly identifying themselves as members of the reduction industry.
If anyone thinks that the Management Board was going to look
those people in the eye and effectively tell them, “We’re going to vote to
eliminate all of your jobs, and put you on the unemployment line,” without a
clear and compelling need to do so, they were chewing far too many
of those THC gummies.
So, faced with some voices calling for the Management Board
to outlaw the reduction fishery and give the entire 75,000 mt TAC to the bait
fishery, others calling for a one-year reduction to 108,450 mt, a few
supporting a 3-year phase-in, and others opposing any reduction at all (in
a post-meeting press release, the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition called the reduced
TAC “unnecessary”), the Management Board took the easiest path, slicing the
proverbial baby not just in half, but into a few smaller pieces, reducing the
TAC while maintaining the current level of landings, limiting its decision to a
single year, and also initiating an addendum that will consider, but not necessarily
do something about, the volume of menhaden landings in the Chesapeake Bay.
With that done, the next question is, can the menhaden
advocates get their act together sufficiently to improve the outcome the next
time around.
Personally, I doubt it, largely because of their chronic focus
on the reduction fishery itself, rather than on the actual problem, cutting the
TAC back to a sustainable level.
I mean, I understand where they’re coming from.
There remains a sort of romantic aura surrounding the small-scale
fishermen, the image of men in small boats fighting to wrest a living from a
cold, relentless, and dangerous sea. That
makes it easy to cast the reduction fleet, with its 165-foot vessels and all-encompassing
seines as the villain of the story, and makes it really easy to drum up public
support for a campaign against the big “foreign-owned fishing boats” [which is
untrue, although you see it said all the time anyway] sucking up millions of
pounds of menhaden, reducing it to fish meal, and shipping it overseas, instead
of leaving it in the water to benefit U.S. fish and small-scale U.S. fishermen.
But the truth is that, even if a 75,616 mt TAC was
politically feasible, from a biological perspective, it would make no
difference to the menhaden stock whether that TAC was caught by the reduction
fishery, the bait fishery, or some combination of the two. So if the menhaden advocacy folks are going
to make any progress, they probably ought to focus on biology, and the needs of
the menhaden, and find a way to put their emotional and ideological aversions
to the reduction fishery on the shelf for the duration of the campaign (and,
perhaps, those advocates ought to spend some time thinking about the regulatory
and resultant conservation advantages of having to oversee a small fleet of
vessels, and monitor the landings that they make at a single Virginia facility,
compared to the far more difficult task of trying to monitor the catch of
hundreds—and more likely thousands—of small-scale operators who land menhaden in
a vast number of ports all along the East Coast, and who might see the advantages
of quietly selling at least some of their catch for cash, without reporting
either the catch or the cash to state authorities or to the IRS, and skewing
the data as a result).
And no meaningful TAC reduction is going to happen unless some
sort of quota allocation occurs that assures that the bait fishery can harvest
a reasonable amount of product. It’s
going to be very difficult to get the northern New England states—that is,
Maine and New Hampshire, and probably Massachusetts—to agree to meaningful cuts
if that means that their lobster fishermen have to go without bait. Even though lobstermen in the Gulf of
Maine and on Georges Bank are now overfishing the American lobster resource,
reductions in effort, at least in the short term, are unlikely to occur, and
the need for bait thus won’t decline anytime soon.
So the menhaden advocates ought to be thinking about a
meaningful and realistic reallocation, which means not trying to outlaw the
reduction fishery—which is a dead end—but rather to allocate enough fish away from
Virginia to meet the bait fishery’s needs (and it’s not all about lobster; I
freely disclose that as an active participant in the shark fishery, both for
recreation and for research, I go through a lot of menhaden chum over the
course of a year), but not so much that it can be cast as an intentional effort
to shut down the reduction boats.
In other words, they are going to have to shift their campaign
from an emotional appeal to the general public to something that makes
biological and—yes, I have to say it—economic sense to the Management Board.
Can they do that?
I hope so, because the most recent scientific findings
suggest that we need a big change in the TAC, and change often needs to be
championed for it to happen.
But finding the right champions, willing to fight the menhaden’s
fight instead of their own, might prove a difficult thing to do.
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