Informed fisheries business decisions start with the right information
August 2023 was a rough month for grapefruit farmers. They only made $8.87 per box of fruit, instead of the $11.96 they earned the month before. If I were a citrus grower, I could have found this information in the monthly USDA commodity reports, along with production volumes, primary export countries, and much more industry-wide data. As a business owner, authoritative and reliable industry data helps me plan my operations and recruit partners to build a successful business. Banks and investors can easily find independent information about seasonal trends, consumer demand, and market dynamics. USDA’s frequent, detailed, and public reporting reduces investors’ time and effort for due diligence, which helps incentivize investments. USDA data also drives the development of products like crop insurance and informs long-term purchase contracts. Sharing this data supports U.S. agriculture in a global marketplace.
Unfortunately, the U.S. fishing industry isn’t in the same position. NOAA spends more than one billion dollars per year on fisheries conservation and management and the agency is proud to proclaim its global leadership in fisheries sustainability. But unlike USDA, NOAA doesn’t publish fisheries business information in a timely, reliable manner. There are no monthly dealer reports, retail insight analyses, or other timely and standardized investable information. NOAA has a fisheries finance program that provides long-term fixed-rate loans for fisheries businesses but NOAA doesn’t report on the performance or outcomes of that program. You can dig around in the NOAA Fisheries commercial landings database to look for recent landings by state, and you can find an annual report on the sustainability status of fish populations for the prior year, but the last Fisheries of the United States report came out in 2020.
NOAA recently published a National Seafood Strategy with the purpose of “supporting a thriving domestic U.S. seafood economy and enhancing the resilience of the seafood sector in the face of climate change and other stressors.” A thriving seafood sector requires providing businesses of all sizes -- from owner-operators to corporations -- with the information to support informed business decisions. When the U.S.’ fisheries law was written in the mid-1970’s, it was a pushback on foreign fishing within U.S. waters and meant to drive the growth of U.S. fishing industry. So it included special language making fishing business information confidential, above and beyond basic trade secret protection, perhaps in the hope that this would give U.S. fishermen a competitive advantage. Fifty years on, that language remains the same but fisheries have evolved and need better information flows to participate in a data-driven economy.
Keeping fishing business data overly restricted hurts fishing businesses. U.S. fishing businesses need NOAA to share verified data with exporters so they can document their supply chains and sell into international markets, particularly as the public grows increasingly aware of tragic human rights abuses and illegal fishing in the global seafood industry. Authoritative data products support fishing businesses seeking disaster relief and offer documentation for innovation programs, like clean energy subsidies. Technology vendors need APIs of permits and vessel ownership to support monitoring and reporting tools like digital logbooks. NOAA needs to update its data sharing policies, and consider how improved data availability, transparency, and timeliness can help the agency support U.S. fisheries sustainability and profitability.
