International & Trade

January's regional uprising against severe scalloping restrictions was a preview of coming attractions.

On Wednesday, fishermen from America's coastlines will converge on Capitol Hill to rally and lobby for congressional relief from draconian rules they say are putting them out of business.

They are backed by their local mayors and congressmen, and while three hours will be spent by the protesters on the Capitol steps, the day's agenda also includes visits to congressional offices.

The protest is organized by a group called United We Fish, and it expects up to 3,000 participants from the West, Gulf and East coasts and Great Lakes.

The rally will be followed up locally by a fisheries summit meeting in New Bedford set for March 8.

The fishing industry feels as though it has been backed into a corner. Dr. Brian Rothschild, dean emeritus of the UMass School of Marine Science and Technology, said there is really no one thing that brought this uprising.

"This has been going on for a long time," he said. "It's a case of incrementalism. It's a case of accretion, piecemeal kinds of things. You keep adding them up and then comes the straw that breaks the camel's back."

In the Northeast, that straw was last November's decision by the New England Fishery Management Council to drastically cut back the scallop harvest, far beyond what would be needed to avoid overfishing.

Pressure on regulators is coming from other directions as well. U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., met in late 2009 with Lubchenco over a series of fisheries problems. But when he deemed her eventual response as inadequate, Frank wrote a scathing letter demanding more action and fewer words.

More recently, Frank was joined by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, in questioning the rationale for demanding that all fish stocks be fully restored within a 10-year timeline, a goal that many scientists and fishermen call impossible and unnecessary.

They called on NOAA to fund an independent review of the policy, which is the underpinning of the entire regulatory scheme today. They, along with others such as New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang, question whether NOAA and its regulatory agencies are meeting their obligation not only to the fish, but to the fishing economy, a duty that is spelled out in the law.

Lang doesn't think that initially happened in the case of the scallops. And most in the fishing industry don't think it is happening now with the implementation of "sectors" along with "catch shares" in the Northeast.

Wednesday's rally is set for noon on the Capitol steps. Lang said he plans to attend.

Read the complete story at The South Coast Today [subscription site]

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Gill net fishing in North Carolina may be coming to an end due to federal and environmental concerns about sea turtles, but commercial fishermen are not going down without a fight.

In an effort to reach a compromise that will save North Carolina’s gill net fishing industry the Marine Fisheries Commission (MFC) voted to continue to allow large mesh gill net fishing, restricting it to four days a week.

The MFC had been considering eliminating large mesh nets from May 15 to Dec 15 to prevent interactions with sea turtles.

That may not be enough to keep gill nets in NC waters however, said the state’s top fisheries official.

Read the complete story at The Examiner.

LUBEC, Maine — The wall of her grandfather’s boathouse told the story. “On the inside of the big doors at the front of the boathouse, he had written every name of every person he knew that had been lost at sea,” Julie Keene recalled recently.

When asked how many names were on that list, Keene,52, could only close her eyes and say, “Too many. Too many.”

Keene is a periwinkle harvester who grew up in Lubec, one of generations of Keenes who manned lighthouses, built boats and fished. She spent a fair amount of time in her grandfather’s boathouse up the hill from the town’s wharf where he built the boats that would harvest the fish, the lobsters, the scallops and sea urchins that defined the town’s working waterfront.

But her grandfather’s list wasn’t just names to Keene.

She recalled as a young girl hearing screams of help from men tossed from their skiffs into freezing water in Johnson’s Bay one afternoon. Then came the silence after their drowning, and after that, the weeping of townspeople began.

Read the complete story at The Bangor Daily News.

Over the past two weeks I have been cramming for a test in Washington, D.C. I have the great honor and privilege as mayor of the city of Gloucester to deliver our message on the steps of Capital Hill to Congress, to our compatriots in the fishing industry, and to the American people as part of the "United We Fish" rally.

Gloucester's significance as an American commercial fishing port is unquestioned. In 2008, Gloucester ranked 10th in the nation, which includes all of the west coast ports, the gulf of Mexico ports, and the east coast ports, in terms of fish landings. Weighing in at about 120 million pounds, the value of Gloucester's landings was over $54 million.

The city's economic development plan relies on the fishing industry, the maritime economy, and tourism for attracting jobs and investment here. However, the economic return of the fishing industry continues to be in jeopardy as the noose is tightened by unnecessarily rigid regulations.

Read the complete story at The Gloucester Daily Times.