June 16, 2012 – It's a weekday morning, and the cavernous refrigerated hall of the Portland Fish Exchange — the country's oldest wholesale fresh-fish auction — is at a 10th of capacity.
It's not a bad day, given the state of the Gulf of Maine's fisheries, but all told there are just 25,000 pounds of product on the floor. Bert Jongerden, the exchange's general manager, estimates that the publicly owned facility is on target for 5 million to 6 million pounds in 2012, ahead of the record low of 3.8 million pounds in 2010, but a fraction of the 20 million pounds it took in annually in the 1990s.
"We're limping along, but you can't plan adequately because the science is so speculative," Jongerden said, alluding to the federal fisheries service's recent radical downward revisions of the health of New England's cod populations. "No one has any faith in the science anymore."
"Everyone's trying hard to stay in business," he said of the fishermen who still land their fish in Maine. "They've got so much capital investment in this they can't just bail on it, so they hope the government can get the science straightened out."
Last month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service released its annual report on the status of the nation's fisheries.
The report, released May 15, indicated that management is working and that fish stocks are, in fact, improving.
According to the report, six once-threatened fish populations had been rehabilitated to healthy levels over the previous year, from Bering Sea snow crab to summer flounder on the mid-Atlantic coast.
Over the past 11 years, 27 damaged stocks have been declared rebuilt, leaving just 45 to be restored out of the 219 that the agency tracks.
Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald.