August 7, 2014 — But the truth is, NOAA owes fishermen and New England fishing communities such as Gloucester a lot of answers before anyone should be allowed to adjust any limits at all. And those questions frankly don’t have anything to do with the actual numbers in the NOAA study, or even the health of the cod stocks.
Instead, they have everything to do with NOAA’s handling of this “unscheduled” assessment, and the fact that the industry had no apparent knowledge that it was in the works, let alone input for it.
Russell W. Brown, deputy science and research director at NOAA’s northeast science center, told the Times that the science center chose to do the updated assessment of Gulf of Maine cod because the most recent survey data was fully updated and “readily available” — and that all survey indices continued to show across-the-board declines in the stock.
Yet, the fact that rank-and-file fishermen had seemingly no rule or input into the collection of this data, let alone the analysis of it, flies in the face of even NOAA’s vow to reach out for more cooperative research when it comes to precisely these types of assessments and reports. That’s just one more betrayal of not only the industry — which could really be pushed to its New England death bed with any additional cod limits cuts — but of the fishing communities whose economic impact is mandated yet regularly ignored to be considered for any NOAA regulatory changes.
Gloucester’s Vito Giacalone, who heads up policy direction for the Northeast Seafood Coalition, put it succinctly. “This is BS. This is not the way it’s supposed to work,” he said — and he’s absolutely right.
The simple fact is that none of this “unscheduled” data or analysis — peer reviewed or not — should be used to set any new catch limits unless and until representatives of the industry are taken in as among the reviewing “peers.”
Read the full opinion piece at the Gloucester Daily Times