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Alaska's Mafia-style fisheries managementThis is a story about one of the most powerful families doing business in the 49th state, though most Alaskans do not think of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council as a family. The members are not related by blood, and a goodly number of them to do not even live in Alaska. Theoretically at least, they aren't even supposed to be a family, let alone engaged in business. By law, "the council family," as University of Alaska Anchorage economist and long-time observer Gunnar Knapp describes the NPFMC, is supposed to be the watchdog for the marine resources of the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. This, it can be argued, the family has done well. But that is not all the council family does. The council family also doles out the rights to harvest more than $2 billion in U.S. fisheries resources. The council family has significant power to manipulate where this money goes. That power has become an issue this summer because the council family wants to take about 1.4 million pounds of halibut away from small, often mom-and-pop-owned charter fishing businesses in Southcentral Alaska and give the halibut to commercial fishermen. The charter businesses are not part of the council family. The charter businesses say the council family plan would bankrupt them. The commercial fishermen poised to get the extra halibut are part of the family, and they say that what is happening is only fair. Their argument goes like this: The biomass of halibut in the waters off Alaska is declining. This has forced the International Pacific Halibut Commission -- a treaty group that oversees management of halibut for Alaska, Canada and Russia -- to steadily lower the allowable catch. Since the commercial catch is tied to biomass reductions, it has been going down. The charter halibut catch, meanwhile, has stayed steady below a fixed guideline harvest level. As a result, a halibut charter catch that once took about 15 percent of the biomass in Cook Inlet and the northeast Gulf is now pushing toward a 20 percent allocation. MORE: Halibut charter fishermen sue FedsIgnored in this discussion of fairness is the fact that since commercial fishermen were given an ownership interest in halibut in 1995 with the creation of what are called "individual fishing quotas," the value of commercially caught halibut has risen dramatically. Halibut worth $1.50 to $2 per pound dockside in 1995 now bring $6 to $7 per pound at dockside. The 2010 halibut catch of slightly more than 40 million pounds was valued at almost $200 million to commercial fishermen. That is more than double the value of a similar size catch in 1995 and significantly above the value of peak catches of more than 60 million pounds per year in the early 2000s. Simply put, commercial fishermen are now working less, catching fewer fish, and making a lot more money. The same is not true of the charter businesses, which have struggled along with other Alaska tourism businesses in the wake of a softening U.S. economy. The value of halibut to these businesses has increased little, but they struggle on as key components of the economies of many small, rural Alaska communities like Homer, Seward, Ninilchik and Kodiak. Homer bills itself as "The Halibut Capital of the World." The city that stretches out onto a spit in Kachemak Bay near the south end of the Kenai Peninsula is home to commercial halibut processors and a number of commercial halibut fishermen, but the town title is tied to the charter fishing businesses that help fill the community with tourists every summer. The owners of those businesses say the hammer the National Marine Fisheries Service is preparing to bring down on them at the behest of the council family will prove economically deadly. Yes he used strong language in this story but its intent i suppose is to get local people that will be affected by these changes mad. It takes mad people to get things done in this world. I am mad! These are our resources and council members that are owned by big money corporations should be replaced with real people from local fisheries, so where do we start and how can this be done??? That is the question. Beyond the situation of allocation and the debate between charter and commercial, the CSP has significant problems. I believe the State, the Charter sector, Commercial sector, and local communities have a right to clearly understand what this rule will mean. The lack of economic analysis is astounding. In addition, circumventing the public process by leveraging the IPHC is unfortunate. All citizens have the right to comment on changes of this magnitude. Lastly, the GAF provision is problematic for both commercial and charter. Has anyone bothered to review how the GAF provision will affect commercial fishermen? Will the commercial guys be under compensated based on the average size rule as currently projected in the CSP? Mmmmmmmmmm. "Alaska's Mafia-style fisheries management" is quite powerful and right to the point. This management style isn't only applicable to the halibut fishery down there in Southcentral Alaska but also the the King Salmon issue of the Western Alaska Coastal area. Tied into the demise of the King Salmon is the pollock fishery of the Bering Sea and the CDQ program looking after themselves and their big piece of pie. Without over-sight and transparency to the stakeholders of the CDQ program, they have a "Mafia-style" Public Monies management style. They use bully like tactics against those who are outspoken about the way the program is managed up here in the Norton Sound area. It's definitely a buddy system. Thank you Craig for stepping out. Whoever thought up and implemented the IFQs deserves to be shot. No where else in the world does someone pay another private party to catch a public resource. Anywhere else in the US, the fisheries just get shut down when quotas are reached. Not here. The trawl bycatch is far bigger than the sport caught fishery yet these NMFS clowns aren't doing a thing about it. This bycatch should count against the commercial quotas. After all, its the commies that are wasting them, not sports fishing. "The trawl bycatch is far bigger than....." as in the halibut situation, so is the salmon bycatch numbers. Though recent reports say the numbers of salmon bycatch are down, who should we trust(?) is the issue. To ALL the readers that believe that the FED's Limited Entry Program and ONE 37" Halibut rule for the sportfishing industry is a conservation effort just look at the June 2011 data from these new control measures. Consistently, 2 big halibut die for every 8-10 fish that are caught and released till the angler finally catches the one small enough to keep. By the way, the sportfishermen's average size now allowed to keep is the size that the commercials have to release!! So the sportfishermen's catch is an ILLEGAL size for the commercial fishermen!!! Check out the video tholepin.blogspot.com/2009/10/filthy-video-of-halibut-waste.html AREA 2C is under ONE THIRD of its allowed limit! 9 pounder average!! Remember the Small Business support Alaskans got from the Knowles administration back eight+ years ago. This corporate support attitude is smothering the small guys. There are more of us than them so we have the power to influence regulators through laws. It's great that finally the fishing practices of backwoods Alaska is coming to the forefront. It's been buried and obscured for as long as our state is old. Mr. Medred, Perhaps, 'rainman', you should study Alaska history. Then you, or anyone, will understand the Rape of Alaska resources. tholepin.blogspot.com Wiglaf knows where all the halibut are going. All of this is just a sideshow act. The "fish mafia" is the UFA and the corrupt bastards, the groundfish data bank, and the foreign processors. How much Halibut do you think a 1000HP trawl catcher vessel can catch in a day? I'll give you a hint- they fill up on 300,000 pounds of arrowtooth and other bycatch in 24 hours of towing. They can kill as many halibut as they want as long as they don't have an observer on board, with coverage of only 1 out of 3 days and observed catch volume around 10-15%. Why is observed catch volume 10-15% when observed days total 33%? Because they're raping the shit out of the halibut and they bring observers to areas of low bycatch, which subsequently affects their catch rate and their harvest of allowable bycatch such as skates, Codfish, and other higher-value flatfish species. Arrowtooth were discarded as waste back into the ocean not too long ago. The reason they are now landed and processed at shore plants and on factory ships is to keep up with the Groundfish retention standards and allow the harvest of the high value bycatch of Cod, Skates, pollock, and other species. Craig...since when are you an expert on deep-sea fishing or commercial fishing in general? I love your wildlife columns (or did when the outdoor section was in ADN) but this seems out of your league. Yea the council is way jacked up, people knew this long before Anre Fgvlugly. Ever heard of Crab rats? Rockfish Pilot program? I guess people think the Halibut IFQ process has been a success since it's been pounded into their heads since before I was born. Never did get to go make money Halibut fishing, but i'm sure some silver spoon fed brats are fat and happy now that their daddies IFQs are worth $33 per pound. Couldn't even fill a seiner with $1,000,000 worth of IFQs and companies/individuals are out their in boats that pack 200-300k. Yea, it was a consolidation effort. And it went straight through, or so i'm told. I'll stick to open access fisheries. Even if I have to bloody my knees sorting 300,000lbs of Arrowtooth on deck and getting paid 7c per pound. Commercial halibut fisherman are sellout RATS Thanks for this enlightening article. We now know who to blame, not that we didn't know that without reading this---but now we have the facts to back up our automatic "real world" grasp of things. It's the greedy rotten commercial fishermen who keep us all fed, even if we are paying way too much. How about this? We have two choices. We could just go back to not having any oversight of the industry at all. Disband the Pacific Halibut Star Chamber. Let the fishermen fish till they drop and until the halibut population is decimated, until the fishermen bankrupt themselves, and destroy the source of their living, instead of doubling or tripling their take home each decade. Or, we could close the fishery, period, just stop all halibut fishing for say, five years, let the halibut recover, let the fishermen all find other jobs, and say ---enough of this crap. If you can't respect the resource and can't agree among yourselves, the rest of us have decided to solve the problem for you. We'll just go without eating halibut for a few years and you can go chase Pacific cod or go crabbing or find a job inland. All the current rats would be forced out of business and the halibut industry would cease to exist with either choice, but at least we would be free of this annual gripe fest. Seems like we spend an awful lot of time and money trying to protect this resource and improve the lives of the fishermen, but all they can do is argue among themselves and cheat each other and act like---well, fishwives ---accusing each other, sneaking around finding ways to cheat, not really caring a rat's rump about the fish or the legitimate rights and concerns of other people, including the consumers, who use the resource. So---until the fishermen grow up, how about a boycott? We could all just decide not to buy halibut. At $16 per pound, that's not too hard a choice. And we don't allow export of any halibut to the rich people on the coasts of the Lower 48, either. We "Just Say No!" to the commercial fishing captains, and we outlaw halibut charters, period. Give them something to scream about and rage about and write their Congressmen about----something REAL. NO commercial use of halibut. People using their own boats for their own use can take one halibut per day, but no charters, no commercial fishing. Alaskans would be able to find and fish and actually afford to eat halibut again, and ALL these cretins would be out of business. Using the headline "Mafia" implies corruption all the way to the top and thievery/murder. Why is that term being using to describe our public process? Reasonable minds can disagree over allocation of resources, but the fact of the matter is alot of this is fueled by sports fisherman who do not want to share the conservation burden. They need to be more honest about this. This is inflammatory rhetoric. The council is highly regarded on a nationwide basis for doing a good job on overall fisheries management. The acrimony you cite is due to allocation issues, and by definition someone is going to end up being unhappy. The title of this article could better be titled, "Commercial sports fisherman face limits and they don't like it". This article is a very one sided argument using very inflammatory rhetoric. Craig used the term because the council, "Family", is a one sided 10 to 1 entity which then imposes its will on others. The halibut issue was passed when a crooked fisherman was in charge, Lisa's aid. So I think the term applies. Isn't it Fair Practice to negate all that was done in the past when something crooked is discovered, especially this "halibut issue" having been "passed" when Arne F. got busted. Chugach...... There is thievery and there have been murder in fisheries. There are fisheries 'dons' who control fleets and distort facts. There are bought and paid for scientists and politicians. There are research ships named after fisherman who make arne fuglvog look like he was shoplifting at a 7-11. Privatization efforts have been ongoing if you haven't noticed or just came out from under your rock. Ongoing since they first came out with the idea of "permits." Are you familiar with what a ponzi-scheme is? Arne Fuglvog was a member of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council. Have you heard about his jail sentence? The high regard nationwide for the fox guarding the hen house, just goes to show how effective politics is and how stupid people are. My question is what can we do to change this? For my family this means not eating halibut because it cost too much catch ourselves. There are added costs such as lodging and meals that are not part of the charter price. This will take much more money out of the local economy than just the price of a charter. Get in touch with your lawmakers, governor's office, testify at the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council meetings. It's a sad state of affairs if the poorest Alaskans can't afford to buy halibut or King Salmon to eat. These are public resources and by our constitution, subsistence users get top priority. Let's not forget that promise by our Govermental Forefathers. Let's think now, a guide is a person who takes a Recreational Angler out fishing. A short time ago, guides and crew on a charter boat were not even allowed to fish. So in turn, this is not the halibut charter's fish, it is YOUR fish. When these limits, changes, whirlwinds come down, it will be only a matter of time before EVERYONE is affected. Not just charters, not just commercial, but ALL ANGLERS and users of the sea. Please realize this is not a good fisherman/bad fisherman argument. It is a let's work together, force leadership to do ACTUAL research and then come back to the drawing board. Small fact, commercial by-catch equates to thousands of pounds, that's fish being killed and dumped back into the sea for all those who didn't know. Yeah, let's be environmental? How about let's be realistic and HONEST. Be firm with research to preserve the fishery but be fair to the stakeholders to create regulation. Leaders telling me they don't have a budget to research an economical impact with their regulations but if we wanted to create a new fishery, say on Kelp Greenlings, I would have to offer an environmental impact statement. Does that sound like they're putting my tax dollars to work for my benefit? I think not. C'mon people. This is a 'User State,' not a Fishing rights are a finite public resource that have been privatized, much like FCC licenses. Why will I go to jail if I broadcast my radio station without buying a license or I start my cell phone company on any bandwith I want? As for a good chunk of the profits coming after the fish start getting handled stateside, not really. Most of the value accrues to the owner of the quota. That's true of the halibut fillet I bought for $17.95 lb last week at Costco. The buyer at the dock and Costco both made money but not as much as the quota owner. Oh, good luck trying to buy Halibut on the dock from the fisherman... IPHC has made the regulations so stringent that even though in theory it is legal to do so, most fisherman do not dare to try to sell Halibut across the dock. Claiming that the Quota holder I getting the lion’s share of profit is completely untrue. It works like this, the fisherman has quota that he owns and each delivery of fish he makes is weighed and deducted from his allowed pounds for the year. Then after weighing, the buyer discounts 20 percent for heads and slime and pays the fisherman dock price for that. so 1000 pounds of Halibut @6.00 a pound amounts to $4800 in gross earnings to the fisherman. Somewhere between there and Costco the price went up to 17.95 a pound for that 800 pounds of fish. That’s an 11.95 increase in the price of Halibut that had nothing to do with the fisherman. So... Where does the money really go? A year ago i started to try and figure this out and gave up when I realized that I could regularly buy Fresh Live Maine Lobster in Juneau for two to three dollars a pound less than Halibut. I have been boycotting Halibut every since. It's hardly a public resource when 85% of the catch go to commercial boats and 15% go to the charters. Most people can't afford or have the skill to fish with their own boats. That's not a public resource. That's private. |
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