Industry worries about new members of council
(08/06/2009) When the names of new state delegates to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council were announced in June, representatives of both commercial and recreational fisheries cried foul. Even the council’s executive director and New York’s director of marine resources seemed puzzled. East Hampton Town officials plan to protest.
Critics have said this was a new strategy by well-funded environmental groups to unnecessarily curtail landings and reduce the size of East Coast fishing fleets by circumventing the grassroots approach to choosing delegates to the federally empowered management council.
Stuffing council seats was the latest effort, they said, by groups including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Environmental Defense Fund to paint an unrealistically dark picture of the ocean’s resources at a time when both fishermen and the government’s own scientists report robust stock recoveries.
According to those close to the process, the goal was to gain control of policy without the necessary vetting of management concepts that normally begins when people with broad experience in the field recommend delegate candidates to each state’s marine resource agencies, including the Department of Environmental Conservation in New York. The vetting normally continues when those agencies review the candidates and pass their own recommendations to the governor.
This was not done in the case of three newly appointed delegates to the council, said Arnold Leo, secretary of the East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association and a director of the town’s fisheries consultancy and committee.
According to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the body of United States fishing law, the final picks are made from the governors’ list at the Department of Commerce headquarters in Washington, D.C., and its subagencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Marine Fisheries Service.
There are eight federally empowered management councils nationwide that set fishing regulations that are codified and enforced by the fisheries service. The Mid-Atlantic Council oversees species found outside of the three-mile state jurisdictions between New York and North Carolina.
Since President Barack Obama took office and selected Jane Lubchenko to serve as NOAA administrator, the agency has aggressively advocated a fundamental change in the way the fishery resource is managed, according to a NOAA spokesman, from a scheme in which fishermen have open access to a common resource managed by quotas and seasons, to a system in which fishermen are given “catch shares” of a government-restricted resource, under strict rules of eligibility, or else remain in an even more restricted common pool.
Proponents say the catch-share system extends fishing seasons, reduces the overall catch, and tends to raise the price of fish at the dock. Opponents say the approach forces many out of business, and destroys the fabric of shoreside communities. In the process, they say, catch limits are set far lower than necessary to maintain sustainability, which is a rate of fishing that will not endanger the resource.
The Long Island Commercial Fishing Association is not alone in its opposition to the catch-share model. The group claims that the result would be a marketplace governed not by the laws of supply and demand, but one in which catch shares are traded like a commodity with prices directly tied to “total allowable catches” set by the federal government.
Dan Furlong, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Council said catch shares were attractive in some ways, but “administratively burdensome.”
According to Richard Gaines, a veteran reporter with the Gloucester Times in Massachusetts who has written extensively about what he calls the “Pewification” of the fisheries, the catch-share concept now being promoted by NOAA was largely an academic enterprise. It had been percolating for years within a network of academic institutions and staged media symposiums largely funded by environmental organizations especially by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Environmental Defense Fund.
Lee Crockett, the director of Pew’s federal fisheries reform polices, said, “We have nothing going on regarding council appointments. I don’t think catch shares should be the across-the-board, de facto management scheme.”
NOAA’s new director, Ms. Lubchenko, is a Pew scholar from the University of Washington, an ocean scientist who served on the board of trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund, and served as its chairman in 2005. E.D.F. is funded, in part, by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Once appointed, Ms. Lubchenko named Justine Kenny to push the catch-share agenda for the agency. Ms. Kenny was the director of communications for the Pew trusts.
Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, said the fear was that by circumventing the delegate appointment system, decades of accepted science and at-sea experience will be replaced by unfounded dogma.
Ms. Brady claimed that much of the science used to discredit the current U.S. management schemes and to paint an unfairly dire view of the resource had an incestuous relationship with the organizations funding it, and with the media outlets that reported it. “Peer reviews say they’re using faulty science,” Ms. Brady said. “The dirty little secret is, stocks are recovered. We’ve done the pain, where’s the gain?”
In a recent report to Congress, NOAA stated that 77 percent of 199 species studied to see if they were being overfished were not. Scientists also reviewed 251 species to see which were being harvested at too high a level. Only 41 stocks, or 16 percent were considered overfished. Monica Allen, a NOAA spokeswoman, said the important statistic was the fish stock sustainability index, a tracking model created with the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which set stock recovery deadlines. “It’s risen, a sign of improving information and condition of fish stocks.”
Ms. Brady said the most recent appointments to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council were a troubling example of an attempt by powerful environmental groups to crowd fishermen out of management decisions.
In June, the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Virginia chose delegates to the Mid-Atlantic Council: Steven Schafer of New York, Christopher Zeman of New Jersey, and Peter deFur of Virginia, whose names were not well known to the industries they are supposed to represent. They had not been recommended to the governors by the state agencies overseeing marine resources, as has been the accepted norm since the councils were created in 1976.
Instead, their names apparently went directly to Govs. David A. Paterson, Jon Corzine, and Tim Kaine. How this was done is the subject of a freedom of information request by The East Hampton Star to the office of Mr. Paterson, and is the subject of an enquiry by Representative Tim Bishop.
The question of who, specifically, recommended Messrs. Zeman, Schafer, and deFur was put to all three executive chambers. Press agents for Mr. Paterson and Mr. Corzine would not comment. A spokesman for Mr. Cane said Mr. deFur’s name had come out of the governor’s own cabinet.
“I had never heard of him until after the appointments,” Jim Gilmore, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation’s director of marine resources, said of Mr. Schafer.
Mr. Gilmore said Mr. Schafer had not been recommended by his agency, even though it was customary for the governor to choose his delegation from the list proffered by the D.E.C. Mr. Gilmore was quick to add, however, that there was nothing on the books to prevent others from submitting prospective candidates to the governor. “The real decision is the National Marine Fisheries Service’s — the N.M.F.S. administrator,” Mr. Gilmore said.
Mr. Schafer’s at-large seat means he will be involved in commercial fishing issues relative to New York and elsewhere within the council’s purview. He won the seat over three experienced candidates the D.E.C. had reviewed: Emerson Hasbrouck, an agent for the Cornell Cooperative Extension who has been involved for decades in the state’s commercial fisheries, Dan Farnham, a veteran longline fisherman from Montauk, and Mark Phillips, a draggerman long involved in fishery issues from the North Fork.
In addition to being a former professional golfer, Mr. Schafer is director of retail operations for Wild Edibles, a seafood shop in New York City. The “personal fisheries experience” form submitted to the Mid-Atlantic Council noted that he was “a seafood expert relied upon by Martha Stewart, and the New York Times, among others. It also described him as “an affable man with all-American good looks.”
Mr. Schafer has worked with the nonprofit group Blue Ocean Institute founded by Carl Safina of Amagansett, a Pew scholar. Reached on Monday, Mr. Safina said he had written a letter of recommendation for Mr. Schafer. “He waged a prolonged and energetic campaign to get through the vetting. He met with everybody, got letters of support, really went after it. He spoke to a variety of people in NOAA and the Congressional delegation.”
Mr. Safina said, “catch shares are generally extremely good if they have the right safeguards . . . you want to be mindful of certain social considerations,” he said, adding that the shares should be owned by those actually fishing, not by corporations of processing plants that make sharecroppers of everybody.”
Mr. Schafer could not be reached for his views on catch shares versus the current management scheme, but critics claim it is his inexperience that was at issue.
“The Magnuson Act requires a balanced makeup of the council — commercial, recreational, and other, which usually means environmental, or scientific representatives. We were outraged by Steven Schafer,” Mr. Leo said yesterday. “He is obviously not commercial. The Town of East Hampton had written a letter to the governor recommending Dan Farnham, Emerson Hasbrouck, or Mark Phillips. We are extremely unhappy that someone with such obvious environmental connections has been given one of the commercial positions on the council,” Mr. Leo said.
New Jersey’s new delegate, Mr. Zeman, is an attorney for Zurich North America and has worked with leading environmental groups such as the Ocean Law Project, American Oceans Campaign, and Oceana. Oceana was created in 1999 with underwriting from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Mr. deFur, the delegate for Virginia, is president of Environmental Stewardship Concepts and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has served on the staff of the Pew-funded Environmental Defense Fund, whose president, Fred Krupp, has championed the harnessing of market forces for environmental ends, the goal of catch-share management.
All three delegates begin their three-year terms on Tuesday with the possibility of serving for the next nine years.
Dan Furlong, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Council, said council delegates “are supposedly knowledgeable. None of the people who are new have been engaged with our council. The governor has to appoint qualified people. The criteria is specific,” Mr. Furlong said, going on to cite the section of the Magnuson-Stevens Act that states that governors may not submit a name unless he or she has determined the candidate is qualified after consulting with commercial and recreational users of the resource.
Lori Nolan is the council delegate who left New York’s delegate seat open after completing her third three-year term representing commercial fishing interests. She said that with the new slate of delegates, the Mid-Atlantic Council had no delegate with any actual fishing or industry-related experience outside of the states’ three-mile limit, which is the council’s jurisdiction.
Tony DiLernia, a veteran charter fisherman who represented sportfishing interests as a state delegate from 1991 to 2002, said he saw a sea change in the way fishing policy was being debated and shaped. He said in the past it was the sportfishing industry and the market (commercial) industry that went head-to-head over quota shares and other regulations.
“Now it’s the commercial industry, both sport and market fishermen, people who make their living on the water, versus the environmental industry,” Mr. DiLernia said.
