Tag Archives: Pacific whiting fishery

Enviro Defense Fund Applauds 9th Circuit’s Pacific whiting fishery ruling

The Ninth Circuit on Wednesday upheld a federal program that limits the number of Pacific whiting, or hake, fishermen can catch off the Northwest Coast. Two fishing companies, Pacific Dawn and Jessie’s Ilwaco Fish Co., sued the Secretary of Commerce and the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2013, claiming the Fisheries Service unreasonably refused to consider fishing activity after 2003 and 2004 when it set new quotas in 2011 and 2013. The three-judge panel Wednesday refused to overturn U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson’s 2013 grant of summary judgment. Writing for the panel, Judge Sandra Ikuta agreed that the Fisheries Service considered more recent fishing activity when it set quotas but that it “gave greater weight to historic participation” in setting the new limits. Pacific Dawn said it was “disappointed’ with the ruling. “The decision upholds an individual fishing quota program that resulted from no meaningful consideration of current harvests or present participation in the fishery, as Congress requires,” Pacific Dawn said in a statement. Read the rest here 11:59

BURT PARKER, CHRIS PETERSON, AND DENNIS RYDMAN: NOAA must change Pacific whiting quotas to benefit small fishermen

The first inconvenient truth is that the allocation was purely political and was made primarily to gain support of those who wanted to retire from the fishery holding IFQ to lease or sell to active participants.

The second inconvenient truth is that the Pacific whiting fishery, after being listed as overfished in 2002-2004, had by 2010 become the model of good management, earning the right to use the Marine Stewardship Council sustainability logo.

The third inconvenient truth is that studies of earlier IFQ Programs, in particular the British Columbia halibut fishery, have concluded that IFQ Programs that do not consider the cost of leasing going forward have shown very little improvement in efficiency.

They called these hidden costs of leasing IFQs ”the elephant in the room.”  This elephant is now rearing its ugly head in the Pacific whiting fishery because of the poorly conceived initial allocation of IFQ approved by NOAA in 2010.

Read More Here.