Pacific Council News
Summer 2007

Progress Continues on Trawl Rationalization (IFQ) Deliberations

National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has fully funded Council consideration of trawl rationalization, and Congress has required that the Council submit a fully analyzed proposal for rationalizing the trawl groundfish and whiting fisheries by January 2009. The Council is scheduled to approve a preliminary environmental impact statement (EIS) with preferred alternatives for public review in June 2008 and to take final action to adopt an alternative for submission to Congress and recommendation to NMFS in November 2008.

The trawl rationalization alternatives being considered by the Council would apply to nearly all directed catch by vessels holding limited entry trawl licenses for the groundfish fishery. One trawl rationalization alternative would manage the entire groundfish fishery (including the whiting sectors) with individual fishing quotas (IFQs) and another alternative would manage the whiting sectors with co-op programs. Under the co-op alternative, there would be a separate co-op program for each whiting sector (shoreside, mothership, and catcher processor) and each program would include some form of limitation on participation by processors. Status quo management also remains an alternative.

The Council further refined the trawl rationalization alternatives at its June meeting. Some of the major modifications follow (section numbers refer to the trawl rationalization alternative sections, available from the Council website):

IFQ Alternative
1. Add an option for the whiting sectors under which IFQ would be used for whiting but bycatch species would be managed using bycatch caps (bycatch pools). (Section A-1.1)
2. Add an option that would allocate quota shares (QS) to permits based entirely on permit landing history (the option for equal sharing of the QS pool associated with buyback permits will also be maintained). (Section A-2.1.3)
3. Add options pertaining to QS allocation for processing history. Option: Specify that such shares will expire after a certain number of years.
Option: Specify that such shares will not be allocated to entities if the result would be that the recipient would receive shares in excess of the accumulation limits. (Section A-2.4 Items 1 and 2. Item 3 of this section was rejected.)
4. Add an adaptive management option that would allow up to 10% of the trawl allocation to be used to create incentives to adjust for program impacts and unanticipated consequences. Such quota pounds could also be auctioned off to generate funds to compensate processing companies that demonstrate they have been harmed by the IFQ program. The Council did not adopt the GAC’s recommendation that this provision apply for only the first 10 years of the program. (Section A-2.4 Item 4 and Section A 3)
5. Add Individual Halibut Bycatch Quota (IBQ) as an option. Retention will not be allowed. (Section A-4)

Co-op Alternative
Shoreside and Mothership Co-op Programs

Allow the permit whiting endorsements and the associated catch history to be transferred as a whole from one limited entry trawl permit to another. In the section on “Co-op Formation and Structure,” include an option to extend, for the entire duration of the program, the provision that requires permits to participate in the non-co-op fishery for a period of time before switching to a different proces- Trawl rationalization, continued from page 16 sor. The current language limits this requirement to the early years of the program.

In addition to these recommendations, the Council asked staff and advisors to develop options to allow more flexibility for moving management lines once the IFQ program is in place; to reallocate QS as stocks move between overfished and rebuilt status; and to establish a minimum amount of quota pounds a vessel would have to hold prior to fishing.

Over the summer, in addition to staff work on analysis of the alternatives, NMFS will be developing a set of alternatives for tracking and monitoring individual fishing quotas (IFQs) and will address issues related to program implementation costs and fee structures. The Council will not address trawl rationalization at its September meeting, but the SSC economics subcommittee will meet September 9th to review plans for analysis. The Groundfish Allocation Commiittee is scheduled to meet September 25-27, 2007 to address the issue, and the Trawl Indivdiual Quota Committee (the Council’s constituent advisory committee on the issue) is scheduled to meet October 11-12, 2007. At its November 2007 meeting the Council will have an opportunity to make limited adjustments to the alternatives in response to preliminary analysis and NMFS work on tracking and monitoring. More details are posted on the Council website at http://www.pcouncil.org/ groundfish/gfifq.html.