By Margaret Bauman
Alaska Journal of Commerce

Proponents of a rockfish pilot program in the Gulf of Alaska say it has worked as expected: Slowing the pace of the fishery, improving product quality, reducing incidental fish harvests and boosting the local economy.

Others in the industry say the pilot program is simply a way to begin privatizing groundfish fisheries in the Gulf of Alaska.

Julie Bonney, executive director of the Alaska Groundfish Data Bank, said in a statement released through the Marine Conservation Alliance in Juneau that the pilot program to test cooperative management in the gulf's rockfish fishery was successful in its first year.

“It shifted a significant part of the catch to off-peak months, avoiding conflicts with the salmon fleet and lowering unemployment on the island,” Bonney said.

Several industry observers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the rockfish pilot program was simply a way to allow certain participants in the fishery to grab the quota and utilize fish caught incidentally to the directed rockfish fishery.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council initially considered the rockfish pilot program as a two-year plan to improve quality, reduce bycatch and slow the pace of the fishery. In fact, critics of the pilot project said, the plan slid through Congress as a rider on an appropriations bill, without benefit of further discussion at the federal council or in Kodiak, creating a five-year pilot program for a closed class of processors and harvesters.

At the time the rider passed, Congress had already ordered the North Pacific council to determine whether any rationalization plans made sense by doing economic analysis, critics said.

The North Pacific council is scheduled to hear a report on the first year of the pilot program at its February meeting in Seattle, and also an outline from council staff on the one-year review of the pilot program. The council won't take up the matter again until October, when it will consider options for changes to the program, sources said.

Oleg Nikitenko, president and owner of Global Seafoods North America, has openly criticized the program, from which his firm was excluded. “They designed a program to eliminate us from the rockfish fishery,” he said.

Global Seafoods, a medium-sized processor in Kodiak, opened in 2000. The qualifying years for the rockfish pilot program were 1996 to 2000. Two other small processors in Kodiak, Island Seafoods and Alaska Fresh, also were excluded from the pilot program.

Nikitenko said his company's gross margin from rockfish processing was slightly over $700,000 in 2006. “Now it is taken away without any compensation,” he said.

Bycatch, concerning fish caught incidentally in the rockfish fishery, is also a controversial topic.

According to Bonney, the participants imposed strict bycatch standards.

“Individual fishermen could be held accountable for unacceptable rates and that prompted them to innovate,” Bonney said. “The result was a significant increase in fishing off the bottom, fewer gear impacts to habitat and more than a 70 percent reduction in halibut bycatch.”

Improved retention and utilization of the harvest was also a goal of the pilot project, and discard rates were held at close to zero, Bonney said.

Nikitenko and others have said the pilot program allows much of what was formerly considered bycatch to be harvested as secondary species. The pilot program, in fact, awards them bycatch, they said.

Bonney said that like any new program, not everything was perfect in the first year, “but participants in Kodiak's rockfish pilot program are very pleased with the success of the cooperative fishery and look to build on that to achieve additional benefits for harvesters, processors and the broader community of Kodiak.”

Bonney said that rockfish are a $3 million part of Kodiak's seafood economy, but under the old derby-style fishery, the fishery took place during the first three weeks of July just as the salmon season was getting underway. A cooperative fishery could spread those rockfish landings throughout the year and particularly to off-peak processing months, she said.

The rockfish season opened May 1 and continued through November, Bonney said. Most of the catch occurred in May and June, when landings ranged between 1,000 tons and 2,000 tons a week. That was usually a slack season for processors, but the cooperative fishery kept the plants humming.

Rockfish production jumped 20 percent, from 15 million pounds in 2006 to more than 18 million pounds in 2007, and unemployment rates in Kodiak dropped from about 10 percent to 6 percent in May and June, Bonney said.

Margaret Bauman can be reached at margie.bauman@alaskajournal.com.