—
When a major new regulatory system for commercial fishing gets a sudden, major revision barely three weeks after it started, it's evidence the system was not well thought-out. Indeed, the so-called "catch share" system that has been governing New England fishing since May 1 has yielded predictable chaos, along with even worse-than-expected economic damage for independent fishermen.
Just three weeks into the new regime, Patricia Kurkul, the Gloucester-based regional administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, ordered an even more draconian tightening of catch limits on those groundfishing boats that chose not to work within the catch share system and are part of what is called a "common pool."
The Northeast Seafood Coalition had previously warned that fears of Kurkul changing the catch limits at any time during the season would stimulate a "race to fish." Sure enough, NMFS reported that within 20 days, a third of the allocations of Gulf of Maine winter flounder and Georges Bank yellowtail flounder had already been caught.
So catch limits on those species, as well as haddock, were reduced. The only limits not changed were on cod.
In addition, common-pool boats were prohibited until last week from fishing for cod on the inshore banks of Middle Ground, while catch-share boats had access to it for all of May.
Such blatant economic discrimination has its purpose, of course. As fisherman Paul Cohan (who joined the catch-share system) put it, NMFS is "occupationally cleansing the fishery of the few holdouts who refused to sign into sectors (the catch-share mechanism)."
This is shameful. But it should not surprise anyone. This is the track record of NMFS and its overseer agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its leaders don't care about fishermen. They only care about implementing their vision of a conservation agenda.
The catch share system was designed to place such draconian limits on fishing that it would reduce the revenue from the groundfishery by 32 percent, according to the government's own numbers. The estimates of business failures in the industry, largely based in New Bedford and Gloucester, are now 50 percent or more.
But when NOAA head Jane Lubchenco received pleas from both the industry and members of Congress to delay implementation of the new rules, her response was to ignore the science, ignore the cost in economic suffering of families and jam the system through.
The result has been worse than insulting to the region's fishermen, who are being treated like bycatch in deference to an alleged environmental agenda.
