How Foreign Private Equity Hooked New England’s Fishing Industry

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A first step was to find out how many permits the company owns. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provided a database breaking down the permit holdings in the groundfish industry for the 2022 fishing year. Each permit has a unique identification number and represents a certain percentage of the total allowable catch of a species of groundfish. Blue Harvest holds permits in the names of limited liability companies. Most of these companies have “BHF” as part of their corporate name, and we confirmed that they were linked to Blue Harvest through their corporate filings, which list Blue Harvest’s executives. Our analysis was limited to permits that could be clearly linked to Blue Harvest through these records. It is possible that Blue Harvest holds additional permits.
We measured Blue Harvest’s share of permits as a percentage of the total quota by weight. When aggregating across different kinds of groundfish, these percentages were averaged, consistent with how NOAA calculates its 15.5% cap. We found that Blue Harvest owns permits for 12% of groundfish quota—the industry’s term for the total pounds a permit-holder is allowed to catch—in the current fishing year.
In addition to owning permits outright, companies can also lease permits. However, company-level lease agreements are not made public. Instead, NOAA posts leasing transactions at a more summary level.
Permits are managed in groups of permit holders known as “sectors.” If one permit holder leases to another in its own sector, NOAA does not publish the transaction. If a holder leases to a party in another sector, that transaction is recorded publicly, but only the sectors are identified, not the specific lessor or lessee.
Most of Blue Harvest’s permits are kept in two of the 18 sectors. NOAA’s leasing records through May of this year show that more than 14 million pounds’ worth of fishing quota have flowed from other sectors into those two sectors since 2018. Interviews with individual fishermen and others in the industry indicate that Blue Harvest has a significant leasing operation; however, lack of precise data from NOAA makes it impossible to determine the exact extent of the company’s leasing.