Amendment 47 to the FMP for the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands King and Tanner Crabs

NOAA Fisheries issues regulations to implement Amendment 47 to the Fishery Management Plan for Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands King and Tanner Crabs and to make minor clarifications to regulations implementing the Crab FMP. This final rule addresses how individual processing quota use caps apply to the Bering Sea Chionoecetes bairdi Tanner crab fisheries: the eastern C. bairdi Tanner and the western C. bairdi Tanner. This regulation exempts EBT and WBT IPQ crab that is custom processed at a facility through contractual arrangements with the processing facility owners from being applied against the IPQ use cap of the processing facility owners, thereby allowing a facility to process more crab without triggering the IPQ use cap. This exemption is necessary to allow all of the EBT and WBT Class A individual fishing quota crab to be processed at the facilities currently processing EBT and WBT crab, and will have significant positive economic effects on the fishermen, processors, and communities that participate in the EBT and WBT fisheries.