Given all of the factors now in play, it’s obvious the New England Fishery Management Council jumped the gun in June when it approved converting the New England groundfishery to a regulatory system of fishermen’s catch shares based on allowable quotas, rather than days at sea.
Indeed, it’s most telling that the New England Council and its staff didn’t participate in a major workshop on implementing the new system until four months later in October, when it hosted a retreat of sorts in Bretton Woods, N.H., at the foot of Mount Washington, not exactly an easy drive for fishermen or many other industry officials who, while the event was required to be public, were pretty much discouraged from sitting in.
But, amid calls for pushing the catch share conversion back a year, the council this week has to make perhaps an even more important series of decisions regarding the viability of any New England catch share: In its monthly meeting in Newport, R.I., (see Page 1 news story), the panel is poised to set the actual catch limits for the region’s groundfishery — and with it, show just how committed it truly is to all aspects of the fishery, notably the economic effect these changes may have on the industry, and communities such as Gloucester that are so deeply tied to it.
Read the complete story at the Gloucester Daily Times.