Council wrong to prioritize Outside fishers

This editorial originally appeared in the Thursday edition of the Juneau Empire

It’s not just how much you catch. It’s how you catch it.

Last weekend, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council voted 6-3 to reduce the halibut bycatch cap in the Bering Sea by 21 percent, and 25 percent among the most important sector of the fleet.

That’s a good thing. But for most Alaska fishermen, it doesn’t go far enough.

That’s a pretty technical paragraph. But if you’ve ever fished for halibut — or even just eaten it — it’s a big deal for you.

Trawlers in the Bering Sea haul in billions of pounds of seafood each year. It’s mostly Pacific cod and pollock, the cheap fish that ends up in your fish sticks and Filet-O-Fish sandwich.

Trawlers are amazingly efficient machines, bringing up massive amounts of fish with few crew. There’s a catch — or maybe we should say a bycatch.

Trawlers are imprecise. When they’re pursuing cod and pollock, they also catch other species — king salmon and halibut, to name a few.

We call those other species bycatch. And when trawlers pull them up, it’s a problem. Under federal law, the trawlers can’t retain those fish. They get dumped overboard and usually die. Millions of pounds of otherwise edible fish are wasted.

Trawlers are getting better about reducing their bycatch, but it doesn’t appear that they’ve gotten good enough fast enough.

For the past decade, International Pacific Halibut Commission scientists have been finding fewer and fewer halibut in the North Pacific. As a result, the halibut commission has been lowering catch limits for halibut across the Gulf of Alaska and elsewhere in the Pacific.

You’ve probably experienced this with reduced sportfishing limits. If you don’t fish, you’ve seen the price of halibut skyrocket over the past two decades.

Trawlers operate under a federal bycatch cap. There’s a limit to the number of halibut they can pull up. Too many, and the fishery shuts down. Unfortunately, that cap hasn’t changed in nearly 20 years, even as the overall halibut catch limit declines.

Imagine a small box inside a pumped-up balloon. Start to let the air out of the balloon, and that box takes up more and more of the space inside the balloon, even though it isn’t getting any bigger.

That’s been the situation for halibut fishermen. They’ve seen their proportion of Alaska’s halibut shrink while trawlers keep throwing millions of pounds overboard.

The Bering Sea is far from Juneau, but events there matter here. Tagging studies conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service show that a halibut born in the Bering can and will end up anywhere in the Gulf of Alaska or the North Pacific.

Months ago, halibut fishermen in the central Bering Sea asked the North Pacific council to cut the share the trawlers get. They said they needed at least a 41 percent cut. Almost 20 Alaska communities and groups asked the council for a 50 percent cut. Without that, they said, they wouldn’t have enough halibut to stay in business. Instead, they got a 25 percent reduction and a big stick in the eye.

Halibut fishermen are, by and large, Alaskans. Their boats are local, they fish locally, and they live locally. Trawlers tend to come from Oregon and Washington, sailing north for the fishing seasons, and sailing south when they end.

It’s an insult, as the North Pacific Council has done, to prioritize the wants of Outside fishermen over those of Alaska fishermen when fishing in Alaska waters.

The trawl industry says it fulfills an important purpose, feeding the world efficiently with cheap seafood.

Honestly, we don’t care, at least not as much as we do about Alaska’s fishermen.

Alaska and Alaskans accrue little to no benefit when trawlers crowd out hook-and-line fishermen. Why should we care about an efficient market when the result is empty harbors, fishermen out of work and “closed” signs on businesses in fishing towns?

For good reason, Southeast Alaska banned trawling in 1998. The result has been a healthy, community fishing industry in places like Sitka, Petersburg and, yes, Juneau.

The North Pacific council made a drastic mistake with its vote June 7, and we hope that the council will revisit its decision soon, before the halibut fishery’s health further declines and a once-vibrant fishery disappears beyond recovery.