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Tuesday, 27 January 2015

Cooperate to succeed - in US style academia speak!

When you are addressing your audience it is a good idea to use plain English - and not use so many academic terms that mean nothing to the lay person or in this case the Great Lakes fishermen of Michegan.!

Signing a Memorandum of Understanding between the Food and Agriculture Organization of The United Nations (FAO) and Michigan State University (MSU) to support cooperation in the area of inland fisheries

I spy with my ......

The Pew Charitable Trusts launched groundbreaking technology that will help authorities monitor, detect, and respond to illicit fishing activity across the world’s oceans. Project Eyes on the Seas, as the system is known, furthers a long-term effort by Pew to dramatically reduce illegal or "pirate" fishing.

European Commission acts to protect sea bass stock

(26/01/2015) The European Commission has announced measures to avert the collapse of the declining sea bass stock. Immediately effective emergency measures will place a ban on targeting the fish stock by trawling while it is reproducing, during the spawning season, which runs until the end of April. This will be complemented by further measures to ensure that all those who fish sea bass make a balanced and fair contribution to saving the stock.

Protecting sea bassThe European Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Karmenu Vella, said: "The impact of this stock collapsing would be catastrophic for the livelihoods of so many fishermen and coastal communities. This is about saving sea bass and saving jobs in the commercial and recreational fishing sector. I am proud of our quick reaction to what is an immediate danger to the stock". The pelagic trawling ban is a critical first step in this package of measures. This ban will protect the stock from being targeted when at its most vulnerable – when the fish is coming together in shoals during the spawning season to reproduce.

The spawning season is already underway and will last until end of April. Pelagic trawling on is a major source of mortality and reduces the spawning stock as it makes up 25% of the impact on the stock. With a reduced spawning stock further actions and any rebuilding of the stock would be endangered. The measure will therefore come into force immediately and last until 30 April 2015. It will apply to the Channel, Celtic Sea, Irish Sea and southern North Sea.

Commercial and recreational fishing

In order to help the stock of sea bass recover, more action is needed to address the impact of all other commercial and recreational fishing activities.

Therefore the Commission is currently making a renewed and urgent effort in order to help Council and Member States put in place a package of measures to manage commercial and recreational fisheries on seabass more effectively. For recreational fishing which accounts for 25% of sea bass catches, this would include a limit of three fish per day per angler. Member States would also need to set a minimum size of 42 cm so that fish are not caught, or are released, before they have reproduced. For other commercial fisheries than pelagic trawling, this would also include limiting catches. The Commission is working with the Member States involved to prepare a proposal to the Council of Ministers as soon as possible.

Background

Sea bass is one of the most valuable fish on which many fishermen, especially small fishing enterprises, depend. Recent scientific analyses have reinforced previous concerns of unsustainable fishing advising urgently a substantial reduction in fishing mortality. We are witnessing a rapid decline of sea bass that risks leading to a collapse if no action is taken. International scientific bodies have called for an 80% reduction in catches to turn the situation around.

Around 100 fishermen depend to a higher degree for part of the year on pelagic trawling of sea bass, while during the rest of year their income is made up also from other fisheries. There are however several hundred small scale fishermen that depend solely on sea bass for their income and for whom finding another source of income is much more difficult. With over 1.3m recreational anglers in France and another 800 000 in the UK, many thousands of jobs also depend on recreational fishing.

Following a lack of agreement between Member States since 2012 on coordinated and effective measures to protect this important stock and another lack of agreement of EU ministers in December's Fisheries Council, on 19 December 2014 the UK made a formal request to the Commission to take emergency measures. The Commission then consulted the Member States involved and analysed the scientific evidence available. On the basis of discussions with all Member States and based on the scientific evidence the Commission has taken its own decision. The Commission has previously taken such emergency measures to protect vulnerable stocks, most recently with anchovy in the Bay of Biscay.

We need to "have access to data to help understand small-scale fisheries"

ON 10 JUNE 2014, the member States of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) adopted the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (1) (“Guidelines”).

To make these Guidelines effective, it is crucial that the FAO, governments, and civil society have access to data to help understand small-scale fisheries. Currently, catches from these fisheries are not collected separately, but are lumped in with industrial catches, even though they represent about one-quarter of global catches, and the majority of catches in many developing countries. To promote the transparency needed for good governance (2, 3), the FAO ought to request from member countries a report of catch data that distinguishes between industrial and small-scale fisheries.

Many decades of debate have failed to produce one, agreed-upon definition of a “small-scale fishery,” but the modest variations in definitions between countries do not preclude efforts to gather global statistics. Just as the Guidelines do not impose a single definition of small-scale fisheries, each of the FAO’s member States could define their own small-scale fisheries, reflecting local realities.

These changes would help to highlight the importance of small-scale fisheries and may also help governments that still treat these fisheries as a solution to demographic pressure and rural landlessness (4) to focus instead on their inherent value.

Daniel Pauly1 and Anthony Charles2 *
1Sea Around Us,
Fisheries Centre,
University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, BC V6T1Z4,
Canada.
2School of Business and School of the Environment,
Saint Mary’s University,
Halifax, NS B3H3C3,
Canada.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: tony.charles@smu.ca

Monday, 26 January 2015

Lessons to be learned!

Here's a good news story from the across the pond where stricter West Coast fishing rules spur new technology aimed at recovering groundfish species:

View a slideshow of the technical details of the new trawls designed to help overcome the restrictions imposed by the changing rules and technical regulations enforced across the board: http://s.oregonlive.com/q52QHHV

The report:

Sara Skamser's net building business, Foulweather Trawl, has begun manufacturing modified nets to help fishermen avoid catching fish they would rather leave in the water.

The owner of Newport's Foulweather Trawl fishing net company has been a trusted business partner of West Coast trawlers for three decades, but many of them were skeptical when she began developing special nets designed to keep out unwanted species.

They didn’t want to invest thousands of dollars in a new tool with no guarantee that using it wouldn’t also make it harder for their desired catch to stay in the net.

“They’re human – they don’t want to have to try something new that isn’t working perfectly yet,” Skamser said.

New federal rules created to curb overfishing in the West Coast groundfish industry limit the amount of unintended catch that individual fishermen can bring up in their nets, and have turned many of Skamser’s skeptics into customers.

While no officials records track how many Oregon fishermen use gear modified to more closely target the types of fish they bring aboard, both fishery managers and trawlers say use of the technology has skyrocketed since the new rules took effect.

And it’s having a major impact on the sustainability of Oregon’s commercial marine fishing industry. The nets can help fishermen avoid sensitive and overfished species and are an important piece of the effort to rebuild West Coast groundfish – yelloweye and darkblotch rockfish, for example -- that in the early 2000s stood on the brink of collapse.

New rules change fishing practices

In the old days, trawling along the West Coast was a free for all.

Seasonal fishing caps and limits on unintended catch were set fishery-wide, with no regard for how much any single fisherman was taking. As a result, each season was a race to catch as many pounds as possible before the fishery was maxed out.

Kurt Cochran, a Newport-based fisherman who trawls for “anything that swims,” says in those days, unwanted fish that came up in fishermen’s nets were known as “dinner.”
But starting in 2011, federal regulators switched Oregon, Washington, and California groundfish trawlers to the catch-share system, creating a strong financial reason for fishermen to reduce their chances of bringing in unwanted species.

Under the new rules, each fishing outfit is granted a share of the season’s catch – say, 30 tons of hake, out of a 227,000-ton fishery-wide limit. Likewise, individual fishermen are limited in the amount of unwanted fish they can bring up in their nets. If they surpass that quota, they could be forced to stop fishing whether or not they have reached their catch limit.

“We use an excluder of some kind or another for every fish we do anymore,” Cochran says.
The push for better sorting tools – called excluders -- has also created an unlikely partnership between fishermen and scientists from the regulatory agencies that police their harvest.
“It used to be this side against side; academia versus fishermen,” Skamser said. “There’s a growing collaboration on the port.”

Mark Lomeli and Waldo Wakefield, two scientists with the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, spend their days listening to fishermen’s worries. If a fisherman tells them too many halibut getting tangled up in their hake nets, Lomeli and Wakefield find ways to fix it. They also loan out excluder nets and cameras so fishermen can test the gear themselves.

The pair’s experiments offer fishermen valuable information about which tools work best.
“It’s easier to justify buying something if somebody’s done a little research on it to prove it’s a gain,” Cochran said.

Innovation yields success

Two major successes in the past year in the groundfish and shrimp trawl fisheries illustrate the value of the partnership.

In July, Lomeli, Wakefield and scientists from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife tested the effectiveness of LED lights in keeping eulachon smelt out of pink shrimp nets. The tactic was a slam-dunk. Fishermen who dragged the lighted nets saw a 91% reduction in the weight of eulachon they brought aboard.

By the end of the season, Lomeli said, “everyone was using them.”

Part of that is because the lights are only $40 apiece to buy – a small expense, considering that trawl nets run tens of thousands of dollars. Convincing fishermen to buy into a $21,000 net modified to keep salmon out of hake nets is more difficult. But last fall, a close call in the hake fishery convinced many fishermen the expense was worthwhile.

With the season well underway, the hake fishery was nearly shut down after too many Chinook salmon got caught up in trawlers’ nets. Recognizing that salmon numbers were unusually high in 2014, fishery managers ruled the fleet could continue fishing, but they had to move into deeper waters where salmon were sparser. Many fishermen also volunteered to use new nets that are designed to give salmon a way out.

“We’ve had our share of close calls, and the worry of a shutdown makes it really important to use the excluders,” Cochran said. Lomeli and Wakefield are still experimenting with strategically placed net lighting that, they believe, could further reduce the number of salmon coming aboard. They’re hoping to finish those studies next year, and have new tools to share with the industry.

Full story courtesy of:

Kelly House
khouse@oregonian.com
503-221-8178
@Kelly_M_House

Education, education, education!

One man's high street experience:

"I've just been on the high street of my local town where I was accosted by a very young girl raising money for Greenpeace. I normally just walk past anyone collecting for Greenpeace but I gave her a chance to say her bit. Then I asked what she knew about the UK fishing industry.... oh she had all the patter ---- 'millions and millions of tonnes are being taken from the sea every year, and half of it isn't even recorded. No one can stop the fishing boats. And they are destroying the seabed at the same time and killing off birds, dolphins and all sorts of other things..."

Trying to contain my anger, I asked how many fishermen were there in the UK - didn't know. So I asked how many tonnes of fish is caught in the UK every year -- didn't know. So I changed my line of questions and asked how much money does Greenpeace get from donations in the UK every year.... didn't know. I just walked away.

But all of this makes a point.

There were three of these Greenpeace kids (probably earning about £25 for the day and just given the script of what to say) and this is their second 12hr day here -- so how many unsuspecting members of the public have been told by them about all the criminal fishermen and how this industry isn't regulated by anyone? It's no wonder the world thinks this is a crooked industry when they are being brainwashed like this."

Open consultation Common Fisheries Policy: implementation of the demersal landing obligation (discard ban) in England

HAVE YOUR SAY!

We are seeking views on how we should implement the demersal landing obligation in England. The demersal landing obligation is a ban on the discarding of fish. This prevents fish being thrown back into the sea after being caught, except when subject to specific exemptions. Demersal fisheries are those in which fishermen primarily catch demersal species (fish which live and feed close to or on the seabed) such as cod, haddock, sole and plaice.

In particular, we are seeking views on five keys areas of implementation including:

phasing in of the landing obligation

quota management

access to exemptions

catch management

monitoring and enforcement

The landing obligation for demersal fisheries will come into force gradually between 1 January 2016 and 1 January 2019.

Implementation of the demersal landing obligation is one of several measures that will contribute towards achieving Good Environmental Status in our seas.

Overview

We are seeking your views on our proposals to implement the landing obligation in England for demersal fisheries. The landing obligation puts an end to the wasteful practise of discarding, thus preventing fish being thrown back into the sea, dead, after being caught.

The phased introduction of a landing obligation, also known as a “discard ban”, was one of the key successes the UK Government secured in reforming the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The reform is designed to deliver sustainable fish stocks, a healthy marine environment and a prosperous fishing industry.

We are consulting on five key areas including how to best utilise the flexibilities the UK secured as part of the reform package, to enable our fleet to operate successfully under a landing obligation; enabling vessels to fish throughout the whole year, land more fish and benefit financially. Full details of these are included in the consultation document, which along with a draft impact assessment can be found on the consultation webpage.

Why We Are Consulting

This consultation will run until the 31st March and the responses will inform our policy position and negotiations at the regional groups to ensure we develop an appropriate, fair and effective Discard Plan for demersal fisheries. These demersal Discard Plans must be submitted to the EU Commission for adoption no later than June 2015.

We will publish a summary of responses along with a Government response to the consultation 12 weeks after it closes.