January 2, 2012 — NOTE: The following article from the Gloucester Daily Times cites "two independent analysts, from the Northeast Seafood Coalition and the School of Marine Science and Technology at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth". The Northeast Seafood Coalition provided the Gloucester Daily Times with a prepared statement offering cursory observations and commentary pertaining to the recent performance report on the Northeast groundfish fishery released by NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center. To date, the Northeast Seafood Coalition has not conducted a thorough analysis of the report."
The NOAA Fisheries Science Center has published an analysis of the 2011 Northeast groundfishery — the second year of catch share trading activity and the last year of optimism in a fishery that has descended into a recognized “disaster.”
And the report acknowledges the size of the fleet diminishing while the “economic performance” of the survivors “has generally improved.”
But two independent analysts, from the Northeast Seafood Coalition and the School of Marine Science and Technology at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, see evidence of discouraging trends in the Science Center report. The coalition cited volatility and a researcher for the so-called SMAST program said the report shows troubling signs of uneven distribution of revenues.
The annual report on the groundfishery found the size of the fleet in 2011 to be 9.1 percent smaller than 2009, the last year before the industry was re-engineered into a two-tiered system — fishing cooperatives buying, selling, leasing, and trading quota in catch shares, and a small common pool of boats operating independently under the old days-at-sea limits.
The new report shows that Gloucester suffered the most extreme loss in active vessels from 2009 to 2011 — a drop of 29 percent, from 98 to 70, including a loss of five boats from 2010 to 2011 after a wider initial collapse.
Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times