July 11, 2012 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — Not since the 1970s has the price Maine fishermen have been paid for their lobster been so low.
After having earned more than $4 per pound per year for four years running in the mid-2000s, lobstermen in Maine this week are being offered less than $2 per pound for their catch.
But the time warp has not affected the price of diesel fuel, which powers most lobster boats, or the costs fishermen face when they buy gear and bait, pay a sternman, or make a boat payment.
According to AAA, the price of diesel fuel in Maine this past week has been close to $3.80 per gallon. That’s about 10 times what diesel fuel cost at the pump in the mid-1970s, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.
A glut of landed lobsters is to blame for the extremely low price and, given their expenses, many fishermen have been talking openly of not going out.
If it costs more money to catch lobsters than they can make by selling them, they reason, what’s the point? How can they make a living that way?
“We had a parking lot meeting Monday night,” Warren Polk, manager of the lobstermen’s cooperative in the Gouldsboro village of Corea, said Wednesday. “We had a vote.”
Polk said the co-op members decided then to continue fishing, but may reconsider their vote. The price co-op members were being offered for their catch Wednesday was $1.50 per pound, he said.
“I think things are going to change today,” Polk said, referring to the decision concerning whether to continue fishing.
Other fishermen up and down the coast are considering the same thing.
Industry sources who do not want to be identified say that other cooperatives or groups of fishermen already have taken a few days off from hauling traps, refusing to work for a price they say they cannot live on. How widespread the tie-ups are was not clear around midday Wednesday.
The greater the number of lobstermen who stay ashore, some have openly observed, the greater the likelihood that prices will rebound in a timely fashion.
This observation has touched upon a sensitive nerve within the industry, however, that stems from a 1957 lawsuit that the Maine Lobstermen’s Association lost to the federal Department of Justice. The lobster association, the largest commercial fishermen’s organization in the state, was sued for trying to fix the price of lobster by limiting demand with a strike. It has been operating under a consent decree since it lost the case.
In a stern public statement issued Monday, Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher warned lobstermen against pressuring others not to go fishing.
Read the full story in the Bangor Daily News