From Collapse to Sustainability: West Coast Groundfish Are Back

From Collapse to Sustainability: West Coast Groundfish Are Back

0:00:01.6 John Sheehan: About 20 years ago, the West Coast Groundfish Fishery collapsed due to
overfishing. It included many popular species like sablefish, flounders, skates, and sanddabs. And
the resulting closures of hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean was a financial disaster for
fishermen.
0:00:18.9 Jana Hennig: That was pretty devastating for the West Coast fishing communities.
0:00:23.0 JS: In response, the fishing community, scientists, and regulators came together and
made a plan. A recovery effort that, through sacrifice and compromise, has largely been a success,
and today many stocks have been rebuilt and are fished sustainably.
0:00:38.4 JH: We do have one of the best ecological comeback stories, but it's not yet an economic
success.
0:00:45.8 JS: This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries, I'm John Sheehan, and today we'll hear about
this decades long effort to get West Coast Groundfish back on the plates. My guest is Jana Hennig,
the executive director of the non-profit collaborative Positively Groundfish.
0:01:00.5 JH: Our main mission is to re-stimulate market demand for underutilized, but very
sustainable West Coast Groundfish species. That's things like rockfish, dover sole, petrale sole,
lingcod, black cod, it's about 90 different species that fall into that species complex.
0:01:17.6 JS: Positively Groundfish is a NOAA Fisheries partner and a recipient of a Saltonstall-
Kennedy Grant, one of NOAA Fisheries funding mechanisms that supports US sea food. I wanted
to know just what happened to groundfish 20 years ago?
0:01:32.7 JH: Well overfishing and depletion. So if I back up a little bit, Groundfish was probably
the most stable fishery out here on the West Coast. You could fish it almost all year round and
rockfish, for example, was the white fish out here on the West Coast. If you got a fish and chips or a
fish taco somewhere, it was very likely that that was a rockfish. And during the '80s or so it
probably had its absolute heyday, but after that, the stock started to decline quite rapidly and
bottomed out, so it was during the '90s. And then by the year 2000, the fishery had kind of
collapsed and was declared a federal disaster. And so it was shut down in the year 2000/2001. That
was pretty devastating for the West Coast fishing communities.
0:02:25.7 JS: So how did they bounce back from it?
0:02:28.0 JH: Well, it was a tough time for sure and there was definitely plenty of people who
were angry about it and left the fishery. They might have taken their boats up to Alaska instead or
retired altogether. But those that stayed were completely committed to figuring out how to turn this
fishery back around and get on a path towards sustainability. And fishermen and scientists actually
came together to figure this out. And, to this day, it's a pretty collaborative environment over here
on the West Coast. So a whole host of measures were implemented. The first was a radical
reduction of the fleet size. The groundfish fleet was over 500 vessels, and it was reduced down to
below 100. One of the main contributing factors to overfishing beforehand was that we had over-
capacity, we just had too much fishing capacity for the stock that was out here.
0:03:26.0 JH: Then a whole bunch of closures. Geographical closures, rockfish conservation areas
were implemented, seasonal closures, then of course, all kinds of gear modifications were put in
place. Longer footropes, gear that is more selective radically, reducing the amount of by-catch and
discards. And one of the big contributing factors to overfishing was that we simply didn't know how
much groundfish there was, or really understanding the biological behavior of a lot of the species in
the complex. And so there was a lot of investment and science in better, more accurate stock
assessments, more frequent stock assessments, and sort of also an understanding by fishermen that
signs is absolutely necessary. If you want to have better signs, which then reduces your uncertainty
factors, which actually means you have better quotas in the end. So that's been a huge contributing
factor to getting back to sustainability.
0:04:29.7 JS: And that's such a great success story too, of communities coming together with the
scientific community, with government, and everyone making some pretty significant cut backs, but
leading to a rebuilt fishery.
0:04:43.1 JH: Absolutely. I'm not gonna say that it wasn't without pain, and there wasn't a lot of
discussion and arguments over how exactly things should be implemented, but overall, there was a
joint and mutual commitment that we want to get the fishery back on its feet to a point where we
can fish it again. West Coast Groundfish was one of the pioneers of the IFQ, individual fishing
quota.
0:05:12.7 JS: A quick note here, Individual Fishing Quotas are a kind of regulation putting a limit
on the amount of fish an individual can catch.
0:05:20.3 JH: Again, painful, to begin with but it does mean that we have a system out here on the
West Coast now where there's full accountability. We record data meticulously and that goes hand
in hand with us having 100% observer coverage. In fact, they call it 200% observer coverage
because there's one on the vessel and one on shore, as things are landed.
0:05:45.6 JS: Okay, one more thing, observers are independent monitors that verify and quantify
catch aboard fishing vessels, and actually they do way more than that, but suffice to say they're very
important to ensuring sustainability. And it's pretty uncommon to have observers on every vessel.
0:06:02.2 JH: That system of accountability and tracking and compliance for all of the rules, and
it's what gives consumers trust that we didn't just bounce back now, but we're gonna make the same
mistakes again? No, we're not.
0:06:22.0 JS: Absolutely. And here we are today with a rebuilt fishery, so why aren't consumers
clamoring for more?
0:06:30.1 JH: It's complex. We do have one of the best ecological comeback stories, but it's not yet
an economic success. What happened when the fishery was shut down, it meant that over the next
10 years or so we lost a lot of fishing capacity and processing capacity, and with that went a lot of
infrastructure as well, especially in California. And that puts us into a position now that it's really a
chicken and egg kind of situation where you can't have fishing vessels coming back in to fish when
they don't have a processor to sell it to and you can't have a processor coming in investing millions
of dollars in a facility when they don't have vessels bringing them fish. And everything has to
restart from a small scale space and kind of grow organically back into something, a larger scale.
From a market perspective, being off market for 10, 15 years meant that our species were no longer
in the fish case, were no longer on the menus. And it coincided with the rise of low price species
from Southeast Asia like tilapia, swai, and they were replaced. When consumers don't see it on the
menu or in the case for a long time it just means they forget about it.
0:07:54.0 JH: And what makes it even harder, I would say, is that at the same time market demand
is slow, but as stocks are rebuilding, it means that supply is ever increasing and when supply is
increasing, but demand is not, that puts downward pressure on price. But at the same time, costs
have increased substantially for producers for the vessels as well as the processors right? And on
top of that, because volumes are so low, they don't have the economies of scale anymore and so the
cost per pound harvested is also high. So we have, economically speaking, a triple whammy of high
costs, low volumes, and low prices in market. And that means almost nobody has money left over
to re-invest in the fishery. The fishing capacity, the processing, the infrastructure nor in the
marketing. And really the marketing is the one thing that could turn this whole thing around. 'cause
you're not gonna affect the cost space very much, but you have to affect the price in market by
differentiating your product, and you wanna drive up the volumes that you sell so that you can have
better economies of scale.
0:09:08.8 JS: It's the one thing you can control.
0:09:10.2 JH: It's the one thing you can control, it's the one thing that can turn this around into a
positive feedback loop, but it's the thing that nobody has money for.
0:09:18.5 JS: Yeah. And it's so counter-intuitive because you would expect, "Oh, it's a local
product that had historically been so popular. It's this delicious fish that's sustainably caught, of
course it'll do well," but as you just illustrated, it actually is really hard for various market forces.
So what do you do? What actions can you take? What's your strategy?
0:09:43.1 JH: The first thing we do is research, market research. I personally believe it's incredibly
important that we understand the consumer and key market keepers, gate keepers like fishmongers,
chefs, etcetera that we understand them much better than we currently do. We found that, yes,
awareness levels are pretty low. Even lower than that though are what we call "trial", meaning you
have actually eaten it at some point and you know whether you like it or not, you've tried it. And
trial levels for our species were typically about half of the awareness levels. So that's a big, big
drop-off between people who know that a rockfish exists and have ever actually eaten it. And when
it comes to food, having actually eaten something and knowing whether you like it or not is
absolutely key to getting a sale. So we decided to do a big sampling campaign, so to speak, and we
built a little mobile kitchen and we would go to lots of events. Whether they were trade shows
aimed at chefs and retail buyers or public events, and just something to the public. And we would
make really great, like very high quality restaurant-level quality samples. These were not sad little
Costco samples, these were beautifully presented, it looked great, it had a great name, and it tasted
fantastic. And once they were hooked by the great food, and everyone loves free food, then I could
tell them more about the sustainability story.
0:11:25.2 JH: About why this is such a great choice. That was our first campaign, the first year of
our existence. And then the pandemic hit [laughter] and we could no longer go to events or do any
kind of in-person sampling. So we pivoted and decided we need to get our story out in a digital
format and we need to get a lot more video and photo content. I hired a young filmmaker who also

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happens to have a marine science degree so he understands what he's talking about, and I send them
on a big road trip. All the way from San Diego, all the way up to Seattle and back. And along the
way would meet interesting people that work in our fishery. All the fantastic faces, the chefs, the
scientists, the artists and everyone would be able to tell their stories. We would film them and
basically that started what is now a mini-documentary series. And yes, we also record great recipe
video demonstrations and that kind of stuff, and that was a real blessing. So that meant we started
our social media. YouTube is actually our biggest thing now, and the reach that we can have with
that far outweighs anything we could have done with events and sampling, etcetera.
0:12:48.0 JS: That's amazing. You started out as kind of a guerilla marketing campaign, taking into
the streets, and then you pivoted to the new age of digital influencing, that's amazing.
0:13:01.3 JH: Basically. And what's important to us there is that it's never really us that's on
camera. It's not about us, it's not about Positively Groundfish at all. In fact, I don't care if people
know our name, to be honest, I want them to know the names of the species. And I wanna highlight
all of the fantastic people that are doing the right thing, all of the great restaurants and chefs that
really take an interest in highlighting local species, those are the ones I wanna shine a light on and
that I want more and more people to go to so I spend our marketing dollars on promoting them. And
that is actually been an approach that allowed us to make friends all along the West Coast and
create a sense of, "We're all in this together, we're doing this together, we're moving forward in the
same direction," and create a sense of momentum.
0:13:50.8 JS: Yeah. You're directly supporting the community that is trying to support the fishery
so thereby creating that loop.
0:13:57.6 JH: Yeah. And we try to stay on sort of the fun and positive emotional side, I mean that's
why we're called Positively Groundfish, right? Because we don't believe in the wagging finger of
sustainability, [laughter] guilting people into buying things just because they're sustainable. So
showcasing all these fun, great people that are working in our fishery and letting them speak has
kind of been our recipe for success.
0:14:26.4 JS: And I will say your videos, the videos on your website, they're gorgeous. It's just
everything I've seen looks so well-composed including the recipes on your site, which I looked at
some right before lunch, and I don't recommend that unless you have the ability to go out and get
yourself some fresh groundfish, it was very frustrating. Do you have any favorite recipes?
0:14:51.3 JH: I mean, when it comes to black cod, sablefish is an absolute favorite. Such an
indulgent, buttery, beautiful fish, highest Omega-3 content of any fish sea food out there so it's also
healthy for you, but a simple smoked black cod, just like that, with nothing else beats a smoked
salmon any day, in my opinion. Obviously Nobu Miso black cod, classic, beautiful, cannot go
wrong with that. Rockfish is all about being versatile. It is such a clean, mild whitefish, great
texture and you can pretty much do anything with it, but we love showcasing it as a crudo. Just raw
with a couple of beautiful flavors on there and people are just gobsmacked with that.
0:15:44.2 JS: Jana Hennig, thanks so much for talking with me.
0:15:46.9 JH: You're welcome. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share our story.

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[music]
0:15:51.4 JS: Jana Hennig is the executive director of Positively Groundfish, a non-profit
collaborative and recipient of the Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant. If you wanna see some of the videos
Jana was talking about, visit their site, positivelygroundfish.org and if you want to support the
fishing communities that work so hard to rebuild stocks and ensure sustainable harvest, ask your
favorite retailer if they carry West Coast groundfish and other US-harvested species. And as always,
you can learn more about the SK grants or anything about groundfish really at fisheries.noaa.gov.
I'm John Sheehan, and this has been Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.