COMMERCE
Subscriber Services
Classified Ads
Subscribe
Advertise
NEWS
This Month
Editorial
Letters
F/V Safety
Past Issues
ABOUT US
Contact Us
Latest Issue
Subscribe
History
MORE CONTENT
CFN Archives
Links
Each month exclusively in the PRINT edition of CFN
Along the Coast
Ask the Lobster Doc
Bearin’s
Classifieds
Coming Events
Editorial
Enforcement Report
FISH SAFE
Fleet Additions
Letters
Lobster Market Report
New Boats
News Catch
Quahog Market Report
|
Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 34 Number 10
June 2007
Amd. 16 a chance to fix groundfish discards
The June meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council is one that industry people have been both preparing for and dreading. This is when the council is expected to begin making important decisions on Amendment 16, the next phase of groundfish management.
After years of closures, repeated cuts to days-at-sea, and tight trip limits, fishermen are exhausted and discouraged, and yet the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan still hasn’t been able to set many groundfish stocks right.
If Amendment 16 is to fulfill its promise to be the next giant step toward fixing groundfish management, there is one thing it must do – end wasteful and destructive regulatory discards. Every active groundfish fisherman on the water today knows the sickening feeling of having to shovel over hundreds, even thousands of pounds of cod, yellowtail flounder, and other species because of restrictive trip limits. Regardless of which approach the council opts to pursue in Amendment 16 and beyond, it must eliminate regulatory discards.
Convinced it’s time to try something dramatically new, several groups have worked hard to come up with innovative approaches to groundfish management that try to avoid the pitfalls of the current system. The challenge now is for these groups and the council to come to some agreement on how to move forward.
The Northeast Seafood Coalition has designed the point system, a way of assigning points to fishermen based on their vessel characteristics, days-at-sea allocations, and catch history and assigning “biological point values” to each stock of fish. This gives fishermen a way to “pay” for their fishing activities and allows managers to create incentives for fishermen to target healthy stocks by charging higher point fees for more vulnerable stocks.
The Area Management Coalition is backing the area management strategy, which would create management areas based on ecological factors and the abundance and distribution of fish and then set up a framework for communities to design rules that fit the social and biological characteristics of their areas.
There are those who now support sector management, in which groups of people pool their landing histories to come up with a total allowable catch and then enter into a binding contract with each other to follow self-imposed rules to manage how they will harvest that amount. There are two sectors in the Northeast now – the Georges Bank Cod Fixed Gear Sector and the Georges Bank Cod Hook Sector. As of mid-May, the council reportedly had received roughly a dozen-and-a-half additional sector proposals.
There also are proposals to modify the current days-at-sea system.
All of these approaches have potential downsides. The point system may wind up being considered a limited-access privilege program and require a lengthy industry approval process. Area management may be seen as exclusionary to nonparticipating fishermen. Sectors involve the de facto allocation of fish to specific groups, which seriously worries people opposed to individual transferable quota-like schemes. And to many, modified days-at-sea proposals sound all too much like what has failed in the past.
But these downsides are no reason to dismiss any of them. The council may have to choose a modified days-at-sea proposal for the sake of expediency, but the other proposals deserve full consideration over the longer term because they offer solutions to the discard problem. And that may be the most important thing of all.
Back to story list
|
|
Tell us what you think.
