The numbers don't lie

(from the December, 2008 issue of National Fisherman)

Among the more useful services from NMFS are the online landings data bases (http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/st1/commercial/index.html). With a fast internet connection and a little bit of skill with spreadsheets, it’s easy to determine what fishermen caught, where and when.

Now, and this might be a surprise to some of you, I’ve been a wee bit skeptical of the “fisheries crisis” claims being made ad nauseum by various anti-fishing groups. They’re easy to make, based on the “research” of a handful of advocates who are being sold to the public as objective scientists, but they never seem to be seriously substantiated. So, armed with a 10 megabytes/second connection and Microsoft Excel 2003, I set out to do a little substantiating, or not, of these crisis claims.

I started out with East Coast landings, but minus menhaden because their landings are determined by international commodity markets and politics, not resource availability. For the 57 year period starting in 1950, landings averaged 535,000 tons per year. They plummeted to just over 400,000 tons in the late 60s and early 70s, undoubtedly because of the foreign catcher/processor fleets fishing right off our beaches, recovered rapidly after the passage of Magnuson in 1975, and have bounced around the average since then.. Starting in 1996 they have been tending downwards, and 2007 shows the lowest landings since Magnuson became law, 424,000 tons.

Is this a reflection of a resource crisis? While the antis would have us believe so, it’s much more likely that it’s an artifact of how we’re now being forced to manage our fisheries, with precaution piled on precaution, with all stocks supposedly capable of being at high levels simultaneously, and with inflexible “rebuilding” requirements regardless of Ma Nature’s inability to conform to them.

The difference in landings between the post-Magnuson high in 1980 and the 2007 low is 160,000 tons. This seems like a big pile of fish, and indeed it is. But just how big?

Off the Northeast there’s about a half a million metric tons of spiny dogfish, a quarter of a million tons of Acadian redfish and a third of a million tons of haddock swimming around. That’s well over a million tons of catchable and marketable fish. In 2007, 3,400 tons of spiny dogfish, 800 tons of redfish and 3,600 tons of haddock were landed. Over a million tons of biomass yielding less than 8,000 tons of landings, and most of those million tons within reach of boats from New England that are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Can we convert those fish swimming around out there into landings that would reverse the decline that provides the antis with so much of the ammunition they use against commercial fishermen? In spite of the jobs that would mean, the businesses saved and the misery avoided, we can’t. There aren’t enough large female dogfish, in spite of the fact that there are so many dogs that they’re interfering with virtually every other fishery (and, according to a recent paper, eating about a third of the young cod and a third of the young fluke and, according to NMFS, 68 million tons of herring every year as well). It’s just about impossible to fish for redfish and haddock because of gear and bycatch controls. And none of the restrictions on fishing for these three species can be eased because all of the discretion in the management system has been removed by the expensive and effective lobbying of the antis - who are all willing at any opportunity to expound on how they’re only interested in saving the short-sighted fishermen from their own selfish selves.

So a hundred thousand tons or so of fish worth maybe $50 million are going uncaught. But if they were caught, where would the evidence of a “fisheries crisis” be? A hundred thousand tons would get the Atlantic landings right up to the 57 year average, and that would sure cut into the old doom and gloom by the professional hand wringers, wouldn’t it?

Thirty or forty years ago, when they saw the stocks they were fishing on declining, guys would go fish for something else. But they’d keep on fishing. That’s the way it went for generation after generation, with the government there to help them – after all, it used to be called the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. Today they can’t. Inflexible management, unfeeling “conservationists,” billion dollar foundations and a bureaucracy increasingly remote from fishing communities have left us with what is hard to describe as anything but a mismanagement system.  

Nils E. Stolpe