A key panel advising the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) has overwhelmingly endorsed an approach that is favored by the Alaska pollock sector for managing chum salmon bycatch that avoids hard caps that could shutdown the fishery.
But it’s not the final word as the full NPFMC convenes over the weekend to review the alternatives for handling chum bycatch alternatives with a decision expected Tuesday (Feb. 10) at its meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.
The 13-4 vote on Thursday (Feb. 5) by the formal advisory panel (AP) came after four days of impassioned testimony from rural Alaska residents, salmon interests and the groundfish sector arguing for and against caps that would shutdown pollock fishing as soon as a certain number of salmon were landed. The pollock industry warned such a requirement could be cataclysmic for the billion-dollar fishery, as Undercurrent News reported.
The AP endorsed Alternative 4 — with some tweaks — to codify existing industry plan agreements (IPA) that are contractually binding and require the trawl fleet to avoid chum salmon. It would require vessels to employ salmon excluder technology in both the pollock A and B seasons and impose weekly in-season bycatch reporting requirements to tribal entities and other “salmon interests” during the harvest, among other provisions…