The U.S. House Natural Resources Committee heard more than three hours of testimony Thursday on eight bills to reform federal fishery laws, with the chairman asserting his intention to modify the Magnuson-Stevens Act, a move sought by fishing industry leaders throughout the East and Gulf Coasts.

The plethora of bills to amend Magnuson — it does not require reauthorization for another five years — and a brief exchange between a Democratic member of the committee from New Jersey and the Republican chairman from Washington State demonstrated a shift toward action, at least in the House.

“We should schedule a vote,” said Congressman Frank Pallone, the New Jersey Democrat who has been at the vanguard of the movement to instill some statutory language in Magnuson that allows flexibility in rebuilding time lines. “I hope we can mark up these bills,” he added.

“My intentions are to deal with these bills,” was the response from Doc Hastings, the chairman.

The bills — including legislation by Reps. Barney Frank and William Keating, Massachusetts Democrats, Pallone and Republicans Walter Jones of North Carolina, Jon Runyon of New Jersey, Rob Wittman of Virginia — all “provide fertile ground for moving forward,” noted Rick Marks, a fishery scientist, industry lobbyist and former member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council.

Marks described the shared concern of flexibility advocates — that the 2006 reauthorization brought the nation “the Alaska model,” where the scale of the industry produces enough revenue to support stock surveys, acute technological monitoring, and scientifically based findings allowing confident calibrations of conservation and fishery yields.

The approach is “a good idea,” Marks testified, “provided the scientific capabilities of the Alaska region also applied.

“We all know they don’t,” he continued. “Instead, we ended up with a rigid implementation model resulting in precautionary buffers and lower yields at the expense of our industry and our nation.”

That problem was the rallying cry for the February 2010 outdoor gathering of up to 5,000 fishermen at the U.S. Capitol, which was organized by the New Jersey based Recreational Fishing Alliance.

The pending bills and Thursday’s hearing were seen as among the first tangible results from the 2010 rally — and they come with plans already afoot for a second “United We Fish” rally sometime next spring.

In his opening remarks Thursday, Hastings provided a similar analysis to Marks’.

Read the rest here.

A national alliance of fishing groups, including the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, and advocates for the nation’s farmers, ranchers, builders and miners have urged Congress to negate President Obama’s National Ocean Policy, rolled out in 2010 via executive order.

Fishing interests warn that the policy entails a kind of ocean zoning that threatens fishing industry jobs, while the land-based alliance expressed concern about executive overreach that might lead to decisions based on uncertain values and priorities, squelching business along inland waterways.

The White House has denied the policy is akin to ocean zoning, and, in two heated hearings by the House Natural Resources Committee this fall, Congressman Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, has scoffed at the worries.

“Opposing ocean planning is like opposing air traffic control,” Markey argued at the second hearing on Nov. 7. He described the opposition as engaging in “scare tactics.”

But the Republican majority, led by the committee chairman, Congressman Doc Hastings of Washington, agreed with the ocean zoning characterization in sparring with Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, who was representing the president.

Congressman Jon Runyon, a New Jersey Republican, said the top-down approach to the National Ocean Policy reminded him of the way that Lubchenco’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration introduced her catch share policy by top-down leverage.

“NOAA does not impose catch shares,” Lubchenco countered.

“I’ve never seen anybody dance around the answers like that, you never answer the questions,” Congressman Don Young, an Alaska Republican, told Lubchenco and Sutley.

Hastings said he doubted that the White House had the legal authority to introduce the National Ocean Policy by executive order.

Lubchenco also introduced catch shares — which has created a commodities market within fisheries and is widely blamed for accelerating job losses and fleet consolidation — without congressional input or approval in 2009.

“It’s a new fad bureaucracy, whether states want it or not,” said Hastings. “I’ve asked for the statutory authority, but I’ve only been given a hodgepodge list. They haven’t been concise. The Obama administration has decided that the president’s signature along is all that’s required.”

The National Ocean Policy involves new concepts, including marine spatial planning and ecosystem-based management, championed for years by Lubchenco.

Marine spatial planning’s closest terrestrial parallel is simple zoning. But, as White House officials told the Times last year, “instead of mapping it out,” nine regional advisory committees reporting to the National Ocean Council would attempt to work out how shipping, commercial and recreational fishing, recreation, aquaculture, mining and drilling and other uses might be fit together, if continued mining and drilling are allowed at all.

Read the rest of the story on the Gloucestor Times.

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — Stevie Fitz, a commercial fisherman, was pulling up his catch in one of his favorite spots off of Point Reyes in June when he saw something terrifying — in his nets were nearly 300 bocaccio, a dwindling species of rockfish protected by the government.

There are such strict limits on catching the overfished bocaccio that netting a large load, even by accident, can sideline and even ruin an independent fisherman.

Still, Mr. Fitz did not try to hide his mistake by slipping it back into the deep. Instead, he reported himself. With a few swipes on his iPad, he posted the exact time and location of the catch to a computerized mapping system shared by a fleet of 13 commercial boats, helping others to avoid his mistake.

“It was a slap in the face,” he said, “but we are trying to build an information base that will help everyone out.” He was later able to sell the bocaccio, although the catch still counted against his quota for the year.

A lifelong fisherman, Mr. Fitz is part of a very unusual business arrangement with the Nature Conservancy, an environmental group that is trying to transform commercial fishing in the region by offering a model of how to keep the industry vital without damaging fish stocks or sensitive areas of the ocean floor.

Five years ago, the conservancy bought out area fishing boats and licenses in a fairly extreme deal — forged with the local fishing industry — to protect millions of acres of fish habitat. The unusual collaboration was enjoined to meet stricter federal regulations and the results of a successful legal challenge. But once the conservancy had access to what was essentially its own private commercial fishing fleet, the group decided to put the boats back to work and set up a collaborative model for sustainable fishing.

Bringing information technology and better data collection to such an old-world industry is part of the plan. So is working with the fishermen it licenses to control overfishing by expanding closed areas and converting trawlers — boats that drag weighted nets across the ocean floor — to engage in more gentle and less ecologically damaging techniques like using traps, hooks and line, and seine netting.

The conservancy’s model is designed to take advantage of radical new changes in government regulation that allow fishermen in the region both more control and more responsibility for their operating choices. The new rules have led to better conservation practices across all fleets, government monitors say.

“It is blowing me away what is happening out there,” said William Stelle, the administrator for Pacific Northwest region of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine fisheries service. But, he added, the conservancy “may be the most sophisticated example of the successful marriage of interests between the environmental community and the fishing industry in marine conservation.” Similar programs are beginning to appear in other places.

American fish stocks have been troubled since the early 1990s and remain so because of overfishing, pollution, and warming seas. The government says that today 23 percent of fish stocks are not at self-sustaining levels at current fishing pressure.

Congress passed a law in 1996 demanding that local fishery councils protect “essential fish habitat.” In 2006, it also imposed tight catch limits for overfished species. As a result, if a fishery exceeds its limit on just one of these species, under federal law, the entire area could be closed to commercial boats for a season.

Local councils have struggled to balance the inherent tensions of adhering to these limits without ruining the fishermen’s ability to make a living. To do this, they have imposed regulations like prohibiting fishing in some areas, dictating the catch season and limiting what techniques and gear are used.

But last year, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council replaced some of those restrictions with strict quotas on six imperiled species and parceled them out among all 138 commercial vessels along the coast. Government observers are now put on every boat to make sure there is no cheating.

The downside is that if one boat lands too much of a sensitive species, known as bycatch, it must be docked until it can buy another boat’s unused quota — and there is not always a market to balance the catch. The quota system also provides incentive for each fisherman in the risk pool to help prevent others from using up their quota. And the early results for fish stocks are promising. Bycatch has dropped from 15 percent to 20 percent of the total haul to less than 1 percent.

The Nature Conservancy first got involved in central California in 2004 when it was looking to invest in marine conservation zones. The group realized that it needed better information to preserve the most critical areas.

“What the fishermen had was a deep local knowledge of the habitats of certain species,” said Michael Bell, senior project director with the conservancy. “There wasn’t scientific information at that level that could match the fisherman knowledge.”

Read the rest from The New York Times.

The Monterey Bay region’s healthiest fisheries are under attack by extremists.

Touting studies with faulty calculations, activists have been trying to persuade federal regulators to massively curtail sardine limits, if not ban fishing outright. But the science doesn’t support their conclusions. California already has a precautionary management system in place that provides comprehensive overfishing protection for sardines and other coastal pelagic “wetfish,” including market squid.

The facts don’t seem to matter to groups with a protectionist agenda. Their rhetoric leaves those unfamiliar with the fishing industry with the impression that overfishing is a huge problem in California. It isn’t.

Oceana and similar organizations want unnecessary cutbacks in sardine fishing, as well as substantial limits on other forage fish, including herring, anchovies and squid — which are also already managed sustainably.

Today’s fishery management of coastal pelagic species along the West Coast portion of the California Current Ecosystem is recognized as the most protective in the world, one of only a few areas that’s deemed sustainable by internationally recognized scientists. This is not a newly implemented strategy. The state and federal government established guidelines more than a decade ago for coastal pelagic species harvested in California and on the West Coast, maintaining at least 75 percent of the fish in the ocean to ensure a resilient core biomass for other marine species.