http://newportnewstimes.com/articles/2004/05/28/news/news05.txt
Oregon fishing industry on the
rebound
By Joel Gallob Of
the News-Times
After several years of
woeful news, the worst appears over for the
Oregon coast - and the broader West Coast -
commercial fishing industry.
"We've bottomed out, we're coming back up, and
I think that's very important," Ginny
Goblirsch, past president of Newport
Fishermen's Wives and now a commission member
at the Port of Newport, said this week.
Dave Wright,
manager of the Pacific Shrimp processing plant
in Newport, agreed. "There's an awful lot of
positives happening," he said.
"We've been through the worst," said Onno
Husing, Director of the Oregon Coastal Zone
Management Association (OCZMA). "In 2002 there
was an air of desperation. Now there's an
increasing sense of optimism. There's a
proliferation of new small enterprises,
including fish buyers at the wholesale and
retail level who are using new trends in
consumer demand and pioneering new markets."
Dissenting opinions
Not everyone feels that way. Jeff Boardman,
President of the Newport Shrimp Producers
Coop, went back out shrimping this week after
a ten-day boat "tie-up" collapsed. When the
price talks began, boats out of Westport
(Washington) went shrimping while others
stayed home to negotiate prices. When the
Westport vessels later received a price rise,
Boardman concluded the new price negotiation
system under the state Department of
Agriculture, which worked so well in setting
prices for Dungeness crab, may not work in the
future.
The details of a report issued this month by
Yachats-based economist Hans Radtke and
Shannon Davis - together, the Research Group -
make it clear there are some trends still at
work that are not so cheerful. But the
positive ones are far more numerous.
The overview
"Sardines," said Radtke, "are back after 50
years." The Dungeness crab, he said, "is a
cycle we thought was seven years, but it's
been up quite a while now." The shrimp
situation, Radtke continued, "is kind of sad,"
as the West Coast fleet faces "very tough
competition" from other regional shrimpers and
from aquaculture. "You can grow Chinese pond
shrimp and they look good; they don't taste
that great, but they're OK for presentation."
Further, adds Lincoln County Commissioner and
former commercial fisherman Terry Thompson,
this year's shrimp are nearly all three and
four-years olds, with hardly a juvenile
around. That's good for shrimpers now, but
doesn't bode well for the next couple years.
Salmon, Radtke said, "has been a good story"
in the past few years, and whiting, just
recently placed on the overfished list, may
soon be taken out of that category.
That puts nearly all the key fisheries in
improving shape.
The factors
Numerous factors have converged to lift the
fishing fleet.
Some are government related. One is the recent
federal buyback of groundfish permits, which
has cut fishing capacity in Oregon by half.
Another is the new role the Oregon Agriculture
Department (ODA) now has in facilitating
pre-season price talks between fishermen and
buyers. Other factors include the increasingly
strict limits the PFMC placed on groundfish
catch in the past several years, and the
Endangered Species Act protections and Oregon
Salmon Plan habitat enhancements of the past
several years.
Market factors have helped, too. Recent wide
publicity about the drawbacks of farmed salmon
- first reported in Oregon by the News-Times
and later the focus of a five-part series by
The Oregonian - have sparked a price rise for
Oregon-caught salmon. Americans have become
more health conscious, and consumers have
become more aware of the benefits of seafood,
Husing said, with its low carbohydrates and
high levels of Omega 3 fatty acid, documented
as useful in fighting heart disease and
depression.
About the same time, Governor Ted Kulongoski
began his Brand Oregon project with a Seafood
Oregon marketing effort. That promotional
effort got a major boost from the federal
government. In January, Oregon Senators Ron
Wyden (D) and Gordon Smith (R) and other
members of the Oregon delegation secured $3
million for marketing for Oregon seafood. Half
went to the Oregon Trawl Commission, which has
taken the lead in the Seafood Oregon effort,
the other half to the Oregon State University
Seafood Laboratory for new seafood product
research and development.
The fishermen themselves, too, are "being
proactive and adaptable," said Goblirsch, and
began looking for new niche markets for their
products even before the Seafood Oregon
project began. "Now the opportunities are in
value-added products and niche markets. My
family," she added, "just launched our own
website."
Other sources of the upturn are natural, with
a striking, if cyclical, upturn in the
Dungeness crab harvest. And the numbers of
salmon coming across the Columbia River dams
have astonished scientists, while the numbers
in many (though not all) coastal streams have
also jumped.
Perhaps most important is the huge fact that
the ocean has returned to conditions favoring
larger fish populations. The changes are
cyclical, based on a return of strong cold
water upwellings. These sweep nutrients up
from the seafloor, making them available to
fish up and down the water column.
Triple factors
Husing says there's been "a trifecta of
factors."
One was the buyback program, with its "promise
that if you stay in the industry, the trip
limits will go up. In return for a small
assessment on those who do stay in," he
recalled, "to help pay the buy-out costs,
there was to going to be an increase in the
value you can catch. And the PFMC just met and
had a lot of smiles because that end of the
bargain has been met."
Number two was the legislation that brought
crab and shrimp price talks under the ODA
umbrella. That not only got the crabbers out
on time - an unusual event - but it "got
people out shrimping," Husing noted, whatever
the subsequent issues. And the shrimp price is
better, he added, than it had been a year or
two earlier, before the ODA process. "There's
always going to be brinkmanship," Husing said,
"but at least there's a forum, a chance to
have price negotiations. A huge barrier's been
removed."
Part three, Husing said, is the Seafood Oregon
effort. "It's an unprecedented collaboration,
and it got a big, timely shot in the arm with
the publicity about farm fish and wild fish.
That really moved prices up."
County Commissioner Thompson, who sold his
fishing boat in the buy-back, added "part of
it is the biological information we get. It's
starting to catch up with what the fishermen
have been saying. They've been saying there's
more fish out there than the scientists think,
but it takes a couple years to go from the
fish tickets to the databases."
All agree the return of good ocean conditions
has been critical - and that change began with
the end of the El Niño ocean phenomenon a few
years ago.
Radtke warns "a lot of this is cyclical" and
"things could go down again in a few years."
That may be implicit in the nature of cycles,
but, says Goblirsch, "we survived the
downturn, we're on the upswing now."
