Fishing tales of woe: 'It's about overregulation

[LuckyLady]

dmcdonald@s-t.com
November 10, 2010 12:00

BEDFORD — The frustration was palpable as fishermen and fishing advocates lamented industry rules that many at a forum Tuesday night said were regulating livelihoods out of existence.

During the forum at the Fairfield Inn, fishermen peppered National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials and an environmental activist with pointed questions regarding the logic behind a new management system known as "catch shares" that came into effect May 1.

The inquiries often came at the end of tales of layoffs, fishermen going into debt to stay afloat and a way of life being marginalized.

The tense atmosphere was at times punctuated by shouts, boos and claps. The forum, sponsored by The Standard-Times, drew a standing-room-only crowd of a couple hundred.

Stephen Welch, a Massachusetts fishing vessel owner and operator who was on the panel, said "fishing has been nothing but a godsend to me" but lamented the overregulation.

He said he probably should get out of the industry that he loves.

"It is not profitable for me to go fishing," he said. "It's too much money. There's an ocean of fish out there and it's being taken away from us."

The new system groups vessels into fishing cooperatives known as sectors and allows fishermen the option to sell or trade their annual quota to other boats.

Unlike the previous system, which restricted the number of days each boat could fish, catch shares give fishermen a full year in which to go after their allocation.

Julie Wormser, the Environmental Defense Fund's New England and Mid-Atlantic regional director for the oceans program, said catch shares are "very designable" and that fishermen "are no longer racing against the clock."

Wormser said she believed there were "compatible values" that both fishermen and environmental activists shared. She spoke of catch shares presenting an opportunity to "shift control from the authorities to fishermen."

Nancy B. Thompson, a NOAA science and research director, said NOAA, like everyone else, wants to be working the most exact science possible while considering fishing regulation.

Eric C. Schwaab, NOAA's assistant administrator for fisheries, also fielded questions from the crowd.

But many suggested the new system is a disaster that is not grounded in solid economics or science and was crafted with no input from the people whose livelihoods are at stake.

Of the present sector management set-up, authorities should "scrap it, fix it right and do it over again," said Welch.

Fishermen faced two choices, neither desirable, before the new system took hold, said Richie Canastra, co-owner of the New Bedford and Boston Seafood Display Auctions. Under the previous system, allocations were so tight they spelled doom, he said. The other option was catch shares.

"The implementation of catch shares in New England was about as voluntary as Stalin's collective farms," said Canastra. "You didn't have to join one voluntarily, but the other option was Siberia."

David deOliveira, who manages two fishing sectors in New Bedford, said for many fishermen "the profit margin is at or near zero."

"It's about overregulation," he said. "And it's always been about overregulation."

DeOliveira said the next challenges include increasing the allocation and getting the data straight and "balancing our books in terms of fish."

During the first five months of the 2010 fishing year, two-thirds of state's groundfish fleet was inactive, said Canastra. More than half the fleet had not fished at all, he said.

Brian Rothschild, professor of marine science and technology at UMass Dartmouth's School for Marine Science and Technology, suggested the system was top-heavy, with 10 percent of the Massachusetts sector boats landing 65 percent of the total revenue, while 90 percent of the boats landed 35 percent of the total revenue.

"It is striking that this major federal action was put into place prematurely without level of analysis, planning budgeting and community dialogue that would be expected with a major federal action," said Rothschild. "It turns out that reasonable alternatives were not considered. A greater surprise is that the economic and social performance of the catch-share experiment is not being tracked by NOAA."

Rothschild suggested a hard analysis be undertaken of the sector system. He said he also wanted those who have been unfairly or illegally hampered by the catch-share system to be compensated by the federal government. Rothschild also called for more cooperative research, an acceleration of fishery management restructuring in New England using data collection, stock assessment and more communication to stakeholders. He said an emphasis should be placed on "flexibility and mixed species nature of our fisheries" and an independent commission needs to monitor the restructuring and report to Congress.

Harvey Mickelson, the attorney for the American Scallop Association, said he thought SMAST should be involved in "the core of any science" that would form the foundation for future fishing rules and regulations.

"The government of the United States does not care about fishermen or the fishing industry," said Mickelson.

[sashamy]

Get ready boys they wanna do some stuff like this with cod alotments for charterboats