December 4, 2014 — The controversy, questions, and misinformation about the number of cod in the Gulf of Maine won’t go away until we do what the successful Pacific groundfish fishery does — monitor every fishing boat to see what is caught and what is thrown back.
Currently, only about 20 percent of New England fishing boats include human observers, compared with 100 percent in the waters off the West Coast. Not only are roughly 80 percent of New England boats unmonitored, but the way we monitor that small percentage is expensive and inadequate. We pay these human observers to go out on boats for days at a time, a system that would cost us $25 million a year to expand to the whole fleet.
Read the full letter to the editor at the Boston Globe