New England Seeking Funds To Decrease Bycatch
By Scott Brooks
WASHINGTON — Almost a third of all federal dollars going to reduce occurrences of bycatch in U.S. fisheries—catching and killing fish and other sea dwellers in nets set for other species—would go to New England regulators, according to President Bush’s budget proposal for fiscal 2004.
New England would receive $830,000 for bycatch. That money, part of a $2.8 million allotment to address the issue nationwide, would be spent to increase the time that government observers spend on commercial fishing excursions as well as on research and testing.
The Northeast would also benefit from a proposed $3 million to meet additional observer requirements. This allotment would pay for regulators who monitor groundfish intakes, with much of their focus on monitoring and reducing bycatch.
Gordon Helm, spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said bycatch is one of the key issues the agency is addressing. Bycatch, recently a factor in a lawsuit brought against the agency, has troubled the fishing industry and environmentalists alike.
Fishing nets and traps take in unwanted marine life, including sea turtles and sea birds, which often die before they can be returned to the water. Often, fishermen catch more of a species than they are entitled to under law, or else haul in fish that are too small to meet regulations. These fish are thrown back to the sea, often injured or dead.
Teri Frady, communications director for the Fisheries Service’s Northeast offices, said the observation process is crucial to alleviating the bycatch problem. Observers collect data from groundfish commercial fishing boats, which the government uses to assess the fisheries’ impact on marine life and fishing communities. In addition to bycatch, data includes tallies of overfished stock catch, discarded finfish and total catch.
“Over time, you can try to look for trends. Once you can start to identify how this is occurring, then you can start to reduce it, because that’s what the law requires,” Ms. Frady said.
“It’s a pretty significant job to try to characterize all the bycatch and try to mitigate it,” she said. “No small job.”
In an April ruling intended to force a compromise between fishermen and environmentalists, federal Judge Gladys Kessler ordered an increase in the number of observers to track bycatch. Under the settlement, which is currently being worked out, regulators have been asked to pay for observers on 10 percent of all fishing days. Ms. Frady, however, said that is “more than we really need.”
She said the lawsuit may have helped shape the agency’s budget request, but the agency has been looking to address the problems for many years. Since the 1970s, she said, federal observation of New England fisheries has been financed under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which she said was not written to cover the many problems now being addressed. The lawsuit offered a new impetus to increase observation.
“It may have a lot to do with how much we asked for, but I suspect we were asking for a lot of this money because we really need it,” Ms. Frady said. “Certainly, the fact that we knew we’d have to be in compliance had something to do with the amount we asked for.”
Mr. Helm was reluctant to guess whether the Fisheries Service will receive the funds it has requested.
“We will certainly be happy to explain the need for these funds to members of Congress,” he said.
Published in The New Bedford Standard Times, in Massachusetts.
