The search for balance between economic and environmental concerns intensified this week over catch limits from those in both commercial and recreational fishing industries.

Key North Carolina congressional delegation members have asked U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke “to consider other well-established fishery management techniques” to help keep the industry alive.

A letter from Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., Rep. Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., joined several senators and congressmen from other East Coast states in the request. The request came over “concern that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations catch share policy will further endanger the economic vitality of the already-struggling fishing industry and will not end overfishing.”

“The fishing industry is a crucial part of our nation’s economy, but in these tough economic times too many fishermen are struggling to provide for themselves, their families and their communities,” the letter said.

It maintains, as have fishermen speaking at recent public hearings in New Bern before the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council this year, that NOAA has “committed significant funding to encourage the adoption of catch share programs when it has not committed sufficient funds to adequately assess the stocks of our nation’s fisheries.”

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A nationally televised report has told the world of the travails of the Gloucester-based fishing industry at the hands of government regulators.

Featuring testimony from longtime port of Gloucester fishermen Bill Lee and Richard Burgess, the CBS News report broadcast Wednesday night marked the first extended network coverage of a struggle that was joined with the start of the Obama administration and has built in intensity for two years

The grievances against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Marine Fisheries Service trace back more than a decade, as the federal Commerce Department inspector general has acknowledged.

The report by CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian covered issues that readers of the Times have been immersed in — stultifying overregulation and vindictive, debilitating law enforcement, which together put small businessmen out of business — but CBS also added a new perspective.

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The U.S. House has voted to cut off funding for future catch share programs, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration policy that opens the door to commodities trading of fishermen’s catch allocations — and a policy already steering control of the fishing industry to larger corporations while driving out smaller, independent boats.

The 259-159 vote early Saturday morning was largely un-lobbied by either fishing industry backers or the Obama administration and its environmental allies, notably the Environmental Defense Fund that developed and has pushed hard for catch share policies.

The vote marked the first time a House of Congress has weighed in on the management regimen, and it looms as a setback for the Obama administration, whose most visible advocate of catch shares is Jane Lubchenco, the embattled NOAA administrator who formerly served as a top board member with Environmental Defense.

While with EDF, she helped organize a disputed scientific justification for catch shares, implying that without them, all food fish would soon be taken.

On Jan. 30 The Herald published an excerpt, headlined “Overfishing triggered ruin of the sardine,” from a book by authors Steve Palumbi and Carolyn Sotka.

But there’s just one problem. The story is not entirely true.

“Ruin” is a harsh – and incorrect – headline to describe the storied sardine decline in the 1940s.   While the fish exodus may have ruined the canneries that once crowded Cannery Row, the sardines did return. And so has Monterey’s wetfish industry – so named because these species were canned ‘wet from the sea’ with little preprocessing.

In their column, Palumbi and Sotka actually allude to the fact that there is much more to the story than simple overfishing.  They note that, “Ed [Ricketts] also somehow knew that part of the problem was not overfishing, but a change in the ocean.”

In the 1960s, two decades after Ed Ricketts, scientists studying anaerobic sediments in the Santa Barbara Basin in Southern California discovered a natural historic record of pelagic fish populations, including sardine and anchovy.  These initial findings were the first step in proving Ed Ricketts’ earlier theories about ocean cycles.

In fact, analysis of the scale-deposition series showed that sardines and anchovies both tended to vary, layered in the deep mud, over a period of approximately 60 years, with the average time for sardine recovery about 30 years.

What’s more, the scale-deposition record counted nine major recoveries and subsequent collapses of the sardine population over a 1,700 year period.  Scientists Soutar, Isaacs, Baumgartner and others found the current recovery was not unlike those of the past in its rate or magnitude. Sardines were fated to decline with or without fishing pressure:  warm-water cycles favor sardines, and cold-water cycles favor anchovies.

The sardine decline spurred the creation of the California Cooperative Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), a consortium composed of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), Scripps Institution of Oceanography and California Department of Fish and Game (DFG), whose focus was to study the sardine and other coastal pelagic species in the California Current System. California’s wetfish industry contributed funding and manpower to advance the research.

The DFG curtailed sardine harvest beginning in the late 1960s, and lifted the moratorium to allow a 1,000-ton harvest nearly 20 years later, after estimating a biomass of at least 20,000 tons.  The sardine resource expanded at an estimated 30 percent per year in the 1980s, stretching its boundaries from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest and Canada by the late 1990s.  New research and scientific models estimated the population at more than one million metric tons in 1999, when management authority transferred to the federal NMFS, which declared the population fully recovered.

Currently there’s a shift to a cold-water Pacific decadal oceanic cycle; the sardine population may again be entering another natural decline.  But now California’s sardine industry is limited to only 65 permitted vessels (63 active), restricted by a capacity goal and landing limits.   The sardine fishery is regulated under the federal Magnuson Act, with strict overfishing limits and annual catch limits to prevent overfishing.

The harvest control rule deducts 150,000 metric tons off the top of the biomass estimate (all fishing would be curtailed below that level) to provide forage for other marine life, as well as ensure a sustainable base population.  In addition, the allowed harvest rate is only 15 percent (net 10-11 percent after subtracting the 150,000 mt ‘cutoff’), far lower than other fishery exploitation rates.

Today the wetfish industry in Monterey is a traditional industry with a contemporary outlook.

Fishermen and markets actively engage in collaborative research on sardine and also market squid. The sons of the fathers and grandfathers before them who now harvest and process the wetfish complex– sardines, anchovies and market squid, all dynamic resources with natural cycles of abundance – still form the foundation of Monterey’s storied fishing community – culturally and economically.

These fishing families hope to carry on; and they should – wetfish resources are among the most sustainable marine life species in California, especially under today’s precautionary fishery management.

With 30 years of fishing industry experience, D.B. Pleschner is the executive director of the non-profit California Wetfish Producers Association, whose mission is to protect wetfish resources and the historic industry.  She’s a former contributing editor of Pacific Fishing magazine, and manager of the California Seafood Council.

The hearing comes just prior to the California Fish and Game Commission’s Feb. 2 meeting in Sacramento at which a series of fishing and gathering closures and restrictions along the Humboldt, Del Norte and Mendocino county coastline are expected to be adopted. The regional group that generated a unified proposal for the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative has the support of more than 40 agencies and fishing and environmental organizations. The unified proposal was the first such agreement in the MLPA process in the state.

”I know it was a major achievement, but it doesn’t surprise me,” said committee Chairman Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro at the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors chambers.

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