I. Background on History, Issues, and Findings
Fishing households relying on the Multispecies Groundfish Fishery (MGF) of New England and the Mid Atlantic are facing a crisis in their communities. Declines in groundfish stocks, and the resultant restrictive Amendments # 5 and # 7* to the MGF management plan puts many fisher and supporting occupational households in a state of social and economic crisis. The general perception in the MGF fishing communities is that the crisis is the result of recent regulations that dramatically restrict their number of days at sea. These regulations are already hampering the ability of many fishers to survive economically. Yet, causes for the present fishery crisis are complex, include regulation impacts and declines in traditional groundfish stocks, but are also linked to less understood community-level issues and processes and that are the basis of this report. For example, increased costs of fuel, equipment repair, insurance, dockage fees, as well as other factors adversely impact those individuals relying on the MGF. This results in a breakdown of cooperative fishing units, associated formal and informal coping networks, and forms of capital (e.g., social, human, and cultural).
*Note by Clay: For details of the current Amendment # 7 regulations, return to the NEFSC homepage, choose "Information", and scroll to "A Guide to Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan Amendment 7." Full text can be found through a Federal Register search. Amendment # 5 was implemented in May of 1994 and Amendment # 7 was implemented in July of 1996. Amendment # 6 was minor in scope, changing only the hadock trip limit.A common perception among fishermen in the New England and Mid-Atlantic MGF, similar to other regions and fisheries, attributes restrictive government regulations for problems associated with the management of fishery resources (Sinclair 1983; Durrenberger 1995; Maril 1993; Griffith 1996; Johnson and Orbach 1996). Disputes between fishers and managers over the cause of fishery decline date back to governmental intervention in the late 19th century codfish fishery of Newfoundland (Hewitt 1993). Fishers also commonly complain that policy responses to declines in fish stocks and other problems with marine ecosystems (e.g., red tide) are often too restrictive and overcompensatory, often being derived purely from political motives (Fritchley 1993). In this study, we elicited numerous responses that suggested that fishers believe the current decline in MGF stocks dates back to misguided government policies of the late 1970's where low-interest loans* provided to fishing families overcapitalized the fleet, encouraged outside investment in fishing by "absentee owners," led to routine overfishing and stressed marine resources.
*Note by Clay: For information on the Capital Construction Fund (CCF) see ccf.htm. You may also wish to request "Data Description and Statistical summary of the 1983-92 Cost-Earnings Data Base for Northeast Commercial Fishing Vessels" NOAA Technical Memeorandum NMFS-NE-112, available from Research Communications Unit, Northeast Fisheries Science Center, 166 Water Street. Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA. For information on the Fishing Vessel Obligation Guarantee Program see fvog.htm.It is unlikely that the cause of the recent and current declines in fish stocks can be traced to a single misguided policy or even set of fishing practices. The collapse of fishery resources, historically, is neither unique nor necessarily permanent (McEvoy 1986; Aranson and Felt 1995). Fisheries near collapse have, in some cases, recovered to a level of sustainability (Alverson 1987). In the New England fisheries, in fact Doeringer, Moss, and Terkla (1985:20) report that during the mid-1960s: "The decline in the stocks greatly alarmed the New England offshore groundfish fishermen." As one Gloucester fishermen said, "There will be no fish and with no fish no boats and no fish plants." In the view of another, "years ago we used to get capacity loads, now all we are doing is scraping the bottom. The industry as a whole has declined to a disaster point." Less than a decade later, crewmen on fishing vessels in Gloucester and other parts of New England had experienced their incomes rise to levels that were far higher than previously, and the passage of the Magnuson Act ushered in a brief period of prosperity for fishers that surpassed any of the cautious hopes of fishermen, boat owners, and processors voiced publicly (Doeringer, Moss and Terkla 1986: 26).
There have been cases, of course, where declines in fish stocks have been severe and complete (Hutchings and Myers 1995). Causes for these declines, again, are rarely due to single causes, but include overcapitalization, unrestricted fishing with highly productive fishing technologies, weak management structure, poor enforcement of fishing restrictions, and environmental factors such as habitat destruction from coastal development and pollution, oceanological processes (El Ni~no), and the fishing practices of foreign fleets (Warner 1977). Several of these factors combined to bring about the utter collapse of the Peruvian anchovy fishery (McCay and Acheson 1987; Dobyns and Doughty 1978).
Blaming management for fishery collapse, from ineffective enforcement or overly restrictive regulations, stems in part from the perception, common among fishers, that managers rarely respond quickly to the plights facing fishers and fisheries (Dyer and McGoodwin 1994). For the past two years, the North Carolina herring fishery has been closed on April 15, or between two and six weeks prior to the end of the herring run (Griffith 1996). Responding to these restrictions, all but one pound-net herring fisher in Albemarle region agreed to cut the number of nets in the fishery in half, if only fishery managers would allow them to fish in May. Herring fishers we interviewed in the Spring and Summer of 1996 complained that repeated appeals to fishery managers concerning these voluntary, self-imposed restrictions had been met with silence.
In late April, one herring fisher invited us to examine his pound-nets--which were catching nearly 10,000 pounds of herring that day that he had to release--in an attempt to convince local state fisheries biologists that the herring stocks had recovered. State fisheries biologists, who refused to examine these late season catches, explained that the stocks needed four seasons of healthy recruitment to recover previous levels, although they expressed some surprise that the nets, in late April, were catching 10,000 pounds of herring per day. Despite this surprise, they did not bother communicating directly with the herring fishers, preferring instead to communicate with university faculty working on the issue, and refused to examine the daily catches themselves.
Similar to the herring fishers' views of fishery managers, fishers we interviewed in New England viewed the National Maine Fisheries Service as having outdated stock information nearly two years behind actual stock conditions*, in part due to the transition from dockside surveys to fishers' log reporting methods. They also were concerned that data from the current log book system was not even being integrated into stock assessment calculations. The case of the herring fishers is but one illustration of misunderstanding, miscommunication, and misinformation both within the fishing community and the management context leading to disputes between fishers and fishery managers. Blaming fishery managers for declines in fish stocks seems particularly unfortunate, for declines, as just noted, rarely derive from single causes.
*Note by Clay: For information on how NMFS gathers fishery data return to the NEFSC homepage, choose "Fish FAQs" and scroll to "Fisheries Information Gathering Techniques."
In the same way that complex sets of factors contribute to fluctuations in fish stocks, generally restrictions on fishing practices also derive from several resources. Again, when we examine the historical record in New England and elsewhere, we find that rarely are single causes to blame for either problems with marine ecosystems or the resulting political responses to these problems. Policies designed to address declines in fish stocks and associated declines in fishing incomes, whether restrictive measures such as Amendment # 7 or compensatory measures such as occupational retraining programs, may originate from strictly biological concerns yet may also originate in conflicts between user groups (whale watchers and commercial netters) or from differential claims on the resource. In 1891, for example, we read in a letter to the state capital from Roanoke Island, North Carolina:
"The people here are poor and depend entirely upon the waters for support, in a way of fishing and oystering. But the Virginia men are down here and have taken entire possession of all the oyster grounds, their boats are much larger than those here, and when these are at work the Virginians will run down upon them and tear them up; and when they try to retaliate it is useless, for they are armed to the teeth with Winchester rifles and some have 36 lb guns. Unless something is done to stop their dredging, these people will be in a starving condition in twelve months, for it will be useless for the fishermen to put in any shad nets, for these Virginians pay no attention whatever to their nets; they run their boats through and tear them up, and the consequence will be these nets will be all cut to pieces, and no fish caught, and when there are no fish caught there will be no bread."
This user conflict, which over a century ago precipitated tightening of oystering regulations, resulted from both perceived declines in oyster stocks from larger vessels from the Chesapeake entering North Carolina waters as well as from the actual space problems and physical confrontations on the water. No one familiar with these cases should be surprised to find the problems facing today's fishers at least as complex.
Information on the dynamics of impacted fish stocks has been a priority since 1964 with the initiation of annual groundfish surveys by the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. Variations in MGF stock numbers, recruitment, and related measures have been tracked for decades (Wright 1987). A series of increasingly detailed quantitative models were developed that consider interactions among species. Lamentably, application of these models has not translated into management policy capable of preventing the decline of target groundfish species (NMFS 1993). Applying biological information on stocks to management has failed to check the ongoing decline in New England groundfish fisheries partly because it has not been matched with equally useful community-level information on the dynamics of user groups (Poggie, personal communication 1996). Because such information has not been available to integrate into effective fishery regulations, the application of such concepts as Optimum Sustainable Yield (OSY) to the MGF is dubious at best.
Another difficulty facing managers is the decline in federal funding* for the collection of biological information on the MGF. This will necessitate developing new avenues of information flow to track the state of the fishery. The most rational source of new, improved information is through cooperative endeavors between fishers and managers. Such endeavors require updated comprehensive information on the state of fishing communities, and an accurate reporting by fishers of catch and related observations on the state of both stocks and habitat. From the community perspective, a comprehensive SIA followed by an ongoing series of periodic updates can best provide users and managers with the information needed to develop cooperative, sustainable management scenarios for the MGF.
*Note by Clay: For information on the fiscal year 1998 NOAA budget request, go to http://www.noaa.gov/. For information on the Federal budget for fiscal years 1997 and 1996, go to http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/budget/index.html.The common perception of overregulation or misguided regulation among fishers is compounded by belief that fishery managers often fail to account for the community impacts of fishery regulations. Fricke (1985) proposes that fundamental concerns of managers are not to respond to critical community issues but are rather to avoid "adverse user and public comment, further deterioration of the resource, and challenges to agency policy" (1985: 47-48). Poor communication between users and managers, lack of co-management and other cooperative strategies, and reliance on ineffectual public hearing processes are also blamed for the collapse of fisheries resources (Pinkerton 1989; McGoodwin 1990). Reasons proposed for ineffective communication include inflexibility in the management structure (Fricke 1988), lack of a common language and world view (Smith 1988), and lack of an ecosystem management approach that "links changing scientific understanding of a region with evolving human values and needs as a basis for making [management] decisions" (Burroughs and Clark 1995:660). Many of these driving factors explain the critical social and cultural aspects of the MGF.
The MGF fisheries have not escaped the historical trends of social and economic decline facing fisheries on all coasts of the U.S. What is particularly alarming about the decline of this fishery is that it has previously been so sustainable, characterized by a fishing history that has made it part of the American cultural landscape. Many Americans are familiar with the symbol of the Gloucester fishermen, representing generations of fishing tradition dating to 1623 (Vickers 1995). North of New England, the ecologically contiguous Newfoundland codfish fishery, now in a state of collapse, has even more historical precedent, with fishing dating from 1504 (Quinn 1979). Despite these many centuries of sustainable fishery use, recent management measures on the Atlantic codfish, the prime target species of the MGF, have resulted in a moratorium on the Newfoundland fishery while surveys in Norway, Iceland and Scotland reflect greatly reduced numbers of larger codfish (FAO 1990).
Outcomes of the Newfoundland experience have been tragic, with entire communities being forced to abandon both their livelihood and communities as the fishery was shut down. Some predict that this fishery, which lasted for nearly half a millennium, may never recover. Certainly, the social and human capital lost during this moratorium will be difficult to replace (Felt, personal communication 1996). At the 1996 meeting of the Maine Fisherman's Forum, public comments by fishery leaders, particularly fishers' wives, reflect the view that they do not want to replicate the 'Canadian model.'
While the MGF is in a crisis state, it may still be possible to recover the fishery without impacting the communities to a degree beyond recovery. This study provides baseline social and cultural information that gives direction to managers in resolving the current crisis in a way that can minimize the negative impact to fisher communities. However, this will not happen without innovative ways of collecting and applying necessary biological and community-level information to the management of the MGF. Innovation includes willingness to experiment and adapt new management measures, timely use of data, and engaging significant outside (community-based) involvement (Burroughs and Clark 1995). One option may be the employment of an ecosystem approach to management. Such an approach would require better flow of information between users and managers, and the proactive integration of the human dimensions of management.
This report represents a first step towards a holistic systems-based approach to management. When combined with a follow-on SIA, it should provide sufficient detail for managers and users to initiate a more sustainable system for the management of the MGF.