Hawaii commercial fishers’ catch down 15% in 2020

Hawaii’s commercial fishers caught 6 million pounds fewer pelagic species of fish and brought in $27 million less in revenue in 2020 — a product of the coronavirus pandemic, which crushed demand for fish.

Fishers caught about 31 million pounds of fish and brought in $80.2 million in revenue in 2020, down from nearly 36.5 million pounds of fish caught and $107.2 million in revenue in 2019.

The closures of restaurants and hotels in March 2020 brought on “tremendous demand destruction” to commercial fishing, said Russell Ito, a fishery biologist for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It was the volume that was sold that really decreased everyone’s bottom lines,” he said last week during a Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council meeting.

He was presenting Hawaii’s 2020 Stock Assessment and Fishery Evaluation, or SAFE, report for the council’s advisory Pelagics Fishery Ecosystem Plan Team.

Hawaii’s visitor industry had essentially collapsed by the end of March 2020 due to coronavirus-related restrictions. Hotels, restaurants and catering services, major purchasers of fish, closed en masse.

Tuna makes up the bulk of the commercial catch in Hawaii, and the most commonly caught tuna species, bigeye and yellowfin, barely had a market during the pandemic.

The bigeye tuna haul was down nearly 700,000 pounds in 2020 compared with 2019, while revenue made from the species was down $11 million.

Ito said the bigeye tuna catch has been relatively stable during the past four years, including in 2020. Just about 17 million pounds of bigeye tuna was caught in 2020, compared with 17.6 million pounds in 2019. But about 17 million pounds was also caught in 2018.

Revenue from the species was just $53.2 million in 2020, down from $63.5 million in 2019. The revenue in 2019 was itself a fall from 2018’s $67.5 million, but that drop was just $4 million.

For yellowfin tuna, 5.1 million pounds was caught in 2020, 6 million pounds in 2019 and 7.6 million pounds in 2018. Similar to bigeye tuna, the SAFE report revealed yellowfin tuna revenue to be $13.7 million in 2020, down from $20.9 million in 2019 and close to just half of the $26.8 million in yellowfin tuna revenue reported in 2018.

According to the SAFE report, during the past 10 years, oilfish and mahimahi catches have experienced what Ito called a “long-term decline,” while billfish, pomfret, ono and moonfish hauls peaked at different times during the past decade and have since been declining.

Albacore was one of the few species that fishers caught more of in 2020 than in 2019, although annual catch has been steadily falling since at least 2011. About 366,000 pounds was caught in 2020, and only 255,000 pounds was caught in 2019.

Despite the closure of hotels, restaurants and other businesses during the pandemic, the demand for fish didn’t totally disappear, according to Clay Tam, a researcher, fisher and member of the Pacific Islands Fisheries Group.

“This situation created new markets and direct sales to the public,” Tam said in a presentation on fisher observations to the Plan Team. “It helped redistribute the fish. The demand was still there. … It was still important for the community to have fresh fish.”

The “fish-to-dish” program in Honolulu, for example, was a federally funded program introduced in 2020 to help the ailing fishing industry.

The demand could be represented by the measured effort of commercial fishers. The number of deep-set longline vessels and the trips by those vessels peaked in 2019 after stead­ily growing since 2011. There was a dip in those numbers in 2020 from 2019, although not as much as Ito expected given the challenges of the coronavirus.

“I thought there’d be a steeper decline in vessel activity and trips, but there wasn’t really that much of a decline compared to the previous year. It’s actually similar if not more than what we saw in 2018,” Ito said. “It’s still on an upward trend.”

Deep-set longline fishing is by far Hawaii’s most lucrative form of fishing, representing about 88% of the revenue from pelagic fishing in 2019 and 89% in 2020.

The federal CARES Act also provided $4.3 million for Hawaii’s fisheries and included commercial fishing, federally recognized tribes, charter businesses, aquaculture and other related businesses. Another round of federal relief provided $3.7 million to Hawaii for those fishing-related activities.