Murkowski Highlights Value of Alaska's Fisheries and Coastal Communities at International Summit

Press Release

Senator Lisa Murkowski joined her Senate Oceans Caucus co-chair Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) at the Department of State's "Our Ocean" Conference to lead a discussion on America's leadership in managing fisheries on a sustainable basis. In her joint remarks, Murkowski said "We have a good thing going" with fisheries management in Alaska -- citing it as a model for fisheries worldwide -- while also discussing the importance of recently-passed treaties to combat pirate fishing and the continued vigilance needed on the issue of tsunami debris.

Senator Murkowski opened her side of the colloquy with Senator Whitehouse by discussing the issue of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, its incredible harm to Alaska's crab fisheries and the importance of the Port State Measures Agreement that passed in April with the help of her leadership, saying:

"One of the areas where we have seen very negative impact is the illegal harvests of king crab by the Russians. This has been a problem for us since 1990. In 2011, NOAA seized 112 metric tons of illegally harvested Russian King Crab that was being shipped to US markets through the Port of Seattle and 99 million pounds of illegal Russian King Crab. American crabbers lost an estimated $600 million, coastal communities have lost millions in tax revenue, 40% of King Crab sold in world markets during 2012 was from illegal Russian harvests. It not only impacts the communities, it jeopardizes the fisheries, but it also brings in other illicit activities, whether through human and drug trafficking -- and these things absolutely have to stop. That's the importance of the Port State Measures agreement, the first binding global agreement that sought to combat IUU fishing and to prevent illegally caught seafood from getting to market.

So how we deal with this in a coordinated and coherent fashion is very important. I'm going to mention just one intercept that happened this past month, it was a boat that was detained by the US Coast Guard for illegal drift fishing in the north Pacific. But the coordination that happened here was the boat was spotted by a Canadian aircraft, with the assistance of Japanese monitors, it was seized by the US Coast Guard, with the support of Chinese law enforcement officials. So it is everybody coming together to really work with multilateral cooperation. We've got a great team with the US Coast Guard, with NOAA, the State Department, it really does make a difference."

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