Hamilton Project director Melissa Kearney moderated the discussion. Steve Tomeny of Steve Tomeny Charters (l), joined John Mimikakis of the Environmental Defense Fund and John Pappalard of the Cape Cod Commercial Fisherman’s Alliance, on the panel. Photo: Ralph Alswang/Brookings
by Ed Lallo/Gulf Seafood News Editor
Gulf Seafood Institute founding member Steve Tomeny recently joined a panel of seafood experts, academics and environmental non-profit leaders to address such issues as individual fishing quotas (IFQ) and possible revisions to the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) at the Brookings Institute for a Hamilton Project roundtable discussion.
The non-profit Hamilton Project mission is to seek America’s promise of opportunity, prosperity, and growth. It believes that an increasingly competitive global economy demands public policy ideas commensurate with the challenges of the 21st Century.
An introduction to the roundtable, Casting the Net: A More Efficient Approach to U.S. Fisheries Management, was given by former Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin, a founder of the eight year old project. Photo: Ralph Alswang/Brookings
An introduction to the roundtable, Casting the Net: A More Efficient Approach to U.S. Fisheries Management, was given by former Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin, a founder of the eight year old project.
“Since we started the Hamilton Project, we have focused on broad national issues and what we viewed as being critical policy challenges with jobs, healthcare and poverty,” said Rubin, avid salt water fly fisherman. “Today we do something we have never done before, and that is to focus on a specific industry — commercial and recreational fishing, that rarely garners attention in policy circles in Washington, but nevertheless, is of enormous importance.”
In its first industry specific discussion the project decided to focus on ocean fisheries for three important reasons:
- The long-term vitality of the commercial and fishing sectors.
- Fishing is emblematic of similar industries that are individually small in comparison to the whole economy, but are critical to their specific communities.
- Resources must be managed so they’ll be sustainable for the long run rather than being depleted in the short run.
Roundtable Discussion
The roundtable discussion centered around a paper written by the University of California, Santa Barbara, Environmental and Resource Economics professor Chris Costello. Photo: Ralph Alswang/Brookings
The roundtable discussion centered around a paper, Tomorrow’s Catch: A Proposal to Strengthen the Economic Sustainability of U.S. Fisheries, written by the University of California, Santa Barbara, Environmental and Resource Economics professor Chris Costello.
GSI’s Tomeny, owner of Steve Tomeny Charters in Port Fourchon, LA, joined fellow discussants John Mimikakis, Associate Vice President for Oceans Environmental Defense Fund, Lee Crockett, Director, U.S. Oceans Pew Charitable Trusts, and John Pappalardo, Executive Director, Cape Cod Commercial Fisherman’s Alliance. The moderator is Melissa Kearney, Professor of Economics, University of Maryland and Director of The Hamilton Project.
In the paper, Costello states that in fisheries, the economy and the environment go hand in hand, at least in principle. If a fishery collapses so does the fishing community, resulting in an effect on the consumers that depend on them.
Panel members included John Pappalardo (l) of the Cape Cod Commercial Fisherman’s Alliance, and Lee Crockett of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Photo: Ralph Alswang/Brookings
Moderating the discussion, Kearne asked Tomeny and Pews Ocean expert Lee Crockett to address one issue of Costello’s paper of interests to both Gulf recreational and commercial fisherman – catch shares and electronic monitoring.
“At Pew we have done a lot of focus groups to figure out what recreational fishermen think and how they feel about regulations,” said Crockett about the issue of catch shares. “They don’t see themselves as the problem, because they look at themselves as an individual and they go, how can a Grandpa taking out his two kids, catching four fish, be a problem?”
According to Pew’s head of U.S. oceans, what is needed in the recreational community is to have the veracity and trust to start talking about preserving their avocation and coming up with a better way to do this. “Unfortunately, we’re not having that discussion,” he said.
Gulf Red Snapper
Steve Tomeny’s Gulf Red Snapper fisheries group is working within current law and through the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council process n to create a new fishing “component” for the charter boat community and manage it differently than the rest of the recreational fishery, he explained.
“I’ve been living this, what’s in Chris’s paper,” Tomeny told the international audience comprised of senior level legislative aides and government officials, and members of academia and environmental groups. Photo: Ralph Alswang/Brookings
“I’ve been living this, what’s in Chris’s paper,” Tomeny told the international audience comprised of senior level legislative aides and government officials, as well as members of academia and environmental groups. “When I started in the charter fishery it was pretty wide open. I think I remember the first rule on red snapper was in the late 1980’s, they put a size limit on them.”
According to the Port Fourchon GSI member, getting his first big boat about the same time regulations on red snapper started to grow. “All of a sudden we went from being able to run with no rules, to having a bag and size limit. At the same time, they were regulating the commercial fishery, and there was lots of resistance and push back.”
Having thirty years to look back at it, Tomeny explained that so many things have worked out well. The red snapper commercial fishery that went into an IFQ system has changed our lives and there’s not a commercial fisherman, for all the guys that will complain and whine, that would really like to go back to where it was ten years ago.
“We’ve had this decline in the red snapper seasons in our recreational charter fishery. The National Marine Fisheries Service hastold us this is what’s going to happen. And yet we’ve had this belligerent, let’s stay with status quo going on at the councils. We have great industry movement right now for something better than what’s been going on.”
Catch Shares
The Louisiana charter captain explained “We’re on the stage of getting a separate allocation for the charter fleets. It’s not quite a catch share, but most of the industry charter boat guys are trying or going to try to embrace this. Charter fleets have realized that we’ll never go back to the wide open access that we had.”
The Gulf charter fleets are about to embrace some kind of a catch share program and at least the very first part of it is to have a separate quota for the charter for hiring, he told the panel and overflow audience.
“I think everyone on the panel saw the potential for catch shares in the recreational fishery, but most agreed that it would be difficult to amend Magnuson over the issue,” Tomeny told Gulf Seafood News. Photo: Ralph Alswang/Brookings
“We’re proposing putting VMS’s, which is a GPS tracking device, where NOAA will know who went fishing every day,” he said. “And we’ll have a corresponding catch report that is emailed off of this satellite-tracking device. We have the technology and are moving real quick into a very stringent accountability measure for all the charter boats.”
Crockett ended the catch share discussion saying, “I think catch shares are a great tool to make single species management work well. But they don’t obviate the need to do larger management of the system. It’s a tool that could be very useful in having sustainable single species but we also have to think broader and in a more eco-system focus and how fishing impacts the eco-system and how the eco-system impacts fishing and take that into consideration in our management considerations of what quotas we set, where we allow fishing to take place, how the fishing, what types of fishing we allow.”
“I think everyone on the panel saw the potential for catch shares in the recreational fishery, but most agreed that it would be difficult to amend Magnuson over the issue,” Tomeny told Gulf Seafood News.
STEVE NEEDS TO TALK TO THE FISHERMEN THAT DON ‘T HAVE CATCH SHARES & SEE WHAT THEY THINK. I HEAR IT EVERY DAY, BORN LOUISIANANS ARE LEFT OUT, AND THEY DON’T LIKE THE GOVERMENT DECIDING WHO FISHES OR NOT. HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE GOVERMENT DO ANYTHING RIGHT?
A complete lie on the whole catch shares mess, ask any recreational fisherman on the Gulf Coast and you will see that a large percentage of the edible fish in the Gulf of Mexico are given to non fisherman ( aka Fish brokers) who then lease by the pound to commercial fishermen.
In a nutshell the broker is given (From the Feds) X amount of lbs to catch for $0 dollars a pound, They then lease by the pound to the Commercial fishermen for around $4 a pound, the Commercial guy catches the fish and sell’s it to the market for around $6 a pound.
And the whole time this is going on the true owners of the resource set at home and are not allowed to catch these fish. Recreational Fisherman had a 9 day season this year, while the Fish brokers had 365 days to sell or catch their fish. SAD SAD SAD