October 28, 2013 –Using the hammer of quota cutbacks on fishermen is popular with the well-fed eco-lobbying groups such as the Pew or the Conservation Law Foundation. In fact, when fisheries managers pound fishermen on the head, the eco-lobbyists complain that the hammer wasn't big enough.
And yet, the policy of cut, cut, cut hasn't worked, and everyone knows it.
Barney Frank was in town last week and he was gloating, admittedly gloating, over a National Research Council report that basically told fishing regulators that they've been doing it all wrong.
Well, not ALL wrong, but wrong enough that the former congressman feels vindicated in his criticism of how the National Oceanic and Atmoshperic Administration fisheries does its business.
"Gloating is one of the few pleasures that get better with old age," Frank told a meeting of the fledgling Center for Sustainable Fisheries, a new pro-fishing lobbying group organized by former New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang. "I don't have to take a pill before, during or after."
OK, let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
What we have here is a golden opportunity. This report about how NOAA manages fish has been percolating for what, three or four years? Former NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco ordered up this study to deflect the hailstorm of criticism she endured following the catch shares and sector management scheme started strangling the Northeast groundfishery.
It was an escape hatch, a holding maneuver, to keep critics at bay while the eco-lobbyists within and without NOAA commenced dismantling the fishing industry.
Now, Lubchenco is long gone and it is left to her successors to figure out what, if anything, to do about this.
Amazingly, the report, done under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, was timed, perhaps accidentally, with the pending reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs commercial fishing.
Here's where the opportunity lies. Magnuson calls for a strict 10-year rebuilding plan for every fish stock in the ocean. It's like the fishing version of the No Child Left Behind Act. Even the proponents knew it was impossible, but the optics were good, as the saying goes.
Just as there was no way to get 100 percent of our children to be proficient in English, Science and Math by 2014, there was also no way NOAA could rebuild every species in the fisheries on a strict schedule. Even trying to do that was bound to cause unnecessary pain and dislocation.
We can see it's even worse than that, with the Gloucester fishery almost extinct with people's homes lost and lives in ruins.
What the National Research Council is saying is that an entirely new approach is needed, one that takes into account, among other things, better science including the environmental factors that sometimes have more to do with the fish than fishermen do.
It has to be flexible, not rigid.
Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times
Read Saving Seafood's previous coverage of the National Research Council study
Read the full study from the National Research Council