Seafood Harvesters of America: Letter to Chairman Dan Sullivan, Senate Commerce Committee

The Honorable Dan SullivanChairman, Senate Commerce Committee702 Hart Senate Office BuildingWashington, DC 20510Chairman Sullivan,

On behalf of the Seafood Harvesters of America and our Alaskan members, I write to express our support for your efforts to modernize and strengthen the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), while maintaining the Act’s core conservation provisions and accountability standards upon which the long- term viability of our fisheries depend.The Harvesters represent an array of commercial fishing organizations and fishermen across Alaska and the nation, including those who use pots to crab in the Bering Sea, those who seine for Copper River salmon and those who trawl for Pollock or use longlines to catch black cod in the Gulf of Alaska. While we may use different gear and target different species, we all have in common a desire and commitment to manage our fisheries sustainably. The Harvesters bring together fishermen from across the nation to learn from each other’s successes, as well as our failures, and collectively champion policies to ensure that we have well-managed fisheries. Our members are privileged to go to sea every day, bringing to market healthy, domestic, sustainable seafood.As you know, The United States has one of the most successful fishery management systems in the world, with almost 500 federally managed stocks producing almost 10 billion pounds of seafood valued at over $5 billion annually direct to fishermen. Our success in managing this renewable resource is based on the MSA’s regional management approach, rooted in sound science. The short- term sacrifices that our industry made to adhere to annual catch limits have yielded greater long- term benefits of rebuilt stocks that we are enjoying today.

Through the accountability standards and conservation mandates in the MSA, our fisheries have improved dramatically as the commercial fishing industry has become more responsible, transparent and efficient. In Alaska, we have reversed the culture of disregard and led the nation in sustainable managed fisheries from the Bering Sea, to Bristol Bay and Prince William Sound, on down to the Dixon Entrance. We have found a better way to fish through limited access privilege programs that have ended the race to fish and enabled more flexible harvesting, allowing for more complete yields of target species, reducing bycatch and discards and avoiding catch of prohibited species. These programs have allowed us to be vested caretakers of the resource while at the same time offering financial stability and increased safety. Consequently, we support Assistant Administrator Chris Oliver’s recent testimony before your committee that “Limited Access Privilege Programs, while not appropriate for all fisheries, are an important tool in our collective tool box, and the current Act allows for development of such programs to be tailored to the specific needs of each fishery.”

While Alaska has the best managed fisheries in the world, there is still room for improvement. We believe that the modernization and streamlining of fishery information systems is critical to provide more timely science for better management decisions. Unfortunately, existing systems are built using technology and practices that are outdated, slow, incomplete, expensive and often inaccurate. Relying on pen and paper to track billions of fish is obviously antiquated and results in management uncertainty and economic inefficiencies.

If we are going to renewably maximize the bounty that the ocean can provide to our nation, we need additional and better monitoring, accountability, and enforcement throughout our fisheries. Many of our members are doing that by installing camera systems on their boats. When the nets are hauled back or lines drawn in, the cameras turn on and record the catch so that there is certainly about what is landed and what is discarded. We are now working to ensure that these real-time data are utilized to make wise management decisions. We look forward to working with you to innovate and implement electronic monitoring and electronic reporting of real-time catch data to reduce uncertainty in our fisheries and thus maximize sustainable harvesting.The Seafood Harvesters’ mission is to develop sustainable fisheries, using accountability as the sword and the shield. We are the fishermen who rose out of the ashes of overfishing and are using the hard lessons we learned to chart a path to prosperity and environmental health. We have an obligation to make wild-caught fish a viable, enduring, dependable source of food. Healthy fisheries are vital to the economic well-being of our coastal communities, now and into the future.

We greatly appreciate your consideration of our concerns as you look to reauthorize and strengthen the Magnuson-Stevens Act. We hope you will work with us to improve the law through modernizing the data collections systems, innovating better ways to incorporate real-time data into stock assessment, while maintaining science based catch limits to prevent overfishing, rebuild vulnerable fish populations and protect the safety and long-term stability of our fishing communities.

Thank you for your consideration, leadership and support for the commercial fishing industry. Sincerely,Kevin R. WheelerExecutive Director