January 9, 2013 — The Kodiak Island Borough Assembly and Kodiak City Council heard stark words from a visiting fisheries professor as it discussed a joint letter on the biggest Alaska fisheries issue in years.
Seth Macinko of the University of Rhode Island told the joint city-borough work session in plain language that if local government doesn't act, Kodiak risks losing out as the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council moves toward rationalizing the Gulf of Alaska groundfish fishery. "You're facing profound public policy changes here," he said.
During the past year, the management council that regulates federal fisheries in Alaska has been moving toward developing a catch share program as a solution to limit bycatch in the Gulf. The most common kind of catch share program involves assigning individual quota shares to particular fishermen, but that kind of program has significant drawbacks, Macinko said.
Before obtaining his doctorate, Macinko worked as a fisherman in Kodiak, and saw a catch share program implemented for Alaska's halibut and sablefish first-hand. Since then, he's observed other catch share programs implemented around the world, and in almost every case, the effect is the same: fewer fishermen on the water.
Macinko shared a map of fisheries changes in Denmark from 2005, when a catch share program was implemented, to 2010. The map was speckled with yellow and red balloons. A yellow balloon represented a fishing community that had lost half its fleet since catch shares were implemented. Red balloons represented towns that had lost their entire fishing fleet in the five years since the catch share plan was introduced.
"This could be Alaska; this could be the north coast of Iceland … this is the characteristic pattern," Macinko said.
In response to concerns like Macinko's, the joint city-borough fisheries group has drafted a letter asking the North Pacific council to examine a range of catch share programs, not simply individual quotas. The city-borough letter specifically asks the council to examine the idea of "community ownership," an idea that assigns quota to communities, which then lease that quota to fishermen in the community, guaranteeing a fishing fleet based in the community.
Read the full story in the Kodiak Daily Mirror