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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 34 Number 3
November 2006
Editorial
Cooperation puts us in the driver’s seat
As individuals or organizations, when we make a decision to speak out on a fisheries issue, we can do it in one of two ways – destructively or constructively.
Over the years, it has become clear that in-fighting yields hard feelings, drained bank accounts, worn-out people, and either regulatory paralysis or solutions, designed by managers, that don’t work very well for the people who have to live with them.
But when fishermen agree among themselves and work together, the results can be very different. We often see evidence of this in the pages of CFN and there are some particularly good examples among our guest columns this month.
Jeff Pike, an industry lobbyist, describes how a group of general category scallopers pooled their money to tap the scientific, analytical, and political expertise they needed to convince the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to allow them to return to critical fishing grounds in the Great South Channel.
As Pike puts it, “It’s easy to just rail against bureaucracy. But this time, all those concerned worked constructively and, as it turned out, productively to solve the problem.”
Greg DiDomenico, executive director of the Garden State Seafood Association, writes about what happened when a diverse group of fishermen and industry reps were thrown together for a four-day meeting of the Atlantic Trawl Gear Take Reduction Team.
By insisting that it was important for NMFS to clearly define what the industry must do to meet the requirements of the law, the industry bloc convinced the agency to identify its request as a priority in the development of a take reduction plan to minimize harm to small cetaceans like dolphins and pilot whales in several trawl gear fisheries.
DiDomenico concludes, “This small but significant result demonstrated to me as an industry advocate what we can accomplish when we ignore our fishery-to-fishery differences and work together for the common good.”
Fishermen often have good reason for looking at things from different perspectives. In some cases, they may even have pretty good reasons to hold a grudge. One strategy for getting beyond the hard feelings is to figure out something – even if it’s something minor – that people can agree on and start the conversation there.
Huge challenges now face the industry – reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the next step in federal groundfish management, a restructured interstate lobster plan, revitalization of the swordfish fishery, bluefin tuna quota shortfalls, and marine mammal take reduction plans, to name just a few.
With more and more restrictive rules on the horizon for nearly all fisheries in this region, most fishermen are under tremendous pressure and even the very idea of volunteering to give up anything can seem ludicrous. But working together to resolve differences and being able to present unified positions to managers and legislators is one way to at least begin to put the power back where it belongs – in fishermen’s own hands.
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