April 2, 2015 — The successful inclusion of a Senate budget amendment to require the government to pay for at-sea and dockside monitoring in the Northeast Region fisheries is the result of an unnecessarily drawn-out process.
Never mind that it’s fair, wise and critically important to the fisheries beset by economic disaster.
Even the declaration of disaster that delineates the fisheries covered by the amendment was the subject of a humiliating fight for help in the wake of simplistic and myopic fisheries management.
Now, the Senate has recognized that the requirements of monitoring in the laws regulating fisheries must not be unfunded mandates borne by fishermen themselves.
Restrictions intended to correct the sin of “overfishing” ignored the impacts of changing ocean environments (a circumstance that may prove to have been far more impactful than any harvesting strategies once we have population data that can be agreed upon). In the case of the Northeast Multispecies Fishery, a simple system was implemented to manage a complex fishery of 19 species, confounding fishermen’s attempts to avoid “choke” species such that only a third of the fish that were allowed to be caught could be caught.
Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times