A leader of New England's commercial fishing industry is expected to urge a congressional committee today to junk the Magnuson-Stevens Act's mandatory rebuilding timelines for overfished stocks.
Vito Giacalone, policy director for the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, said the deadline-driven rebuilding requirements written into the act in 1996, when combined with 2006 requirements for hard catch limits with penalties, brought about a rushed transition from effort to output controls — days at sea to catch shares.
Read Vito Giacalone's Testimony before the Oceans Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee.
The changeover, he told the Times Monday, has brutally culled small boat businesses, left the big ones with even greater control over the industry, and set up an opening for commodity giants to take over.
"What we did was trample the other mandates of the Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization" including maximum sustainable yield equitable equitable allocations "to meet the abritrary timelines," said Giacalone. "We trampled the most important thing — to be fair and equitable."
In an interview about his written testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Science, Commerce and Transportation, Giacalone also said the regimen — a combination of catch shares and fishing cooperatives known as sectors — "hastily" created by the New England Fishery Management Council was a de facto "LAPP" or limited access privilege program.
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.