It's almost been a year since sector management became the method that controls 95 percent of the New England groundfish quota. The management system's critics are adamant that it is destroying the fishing industry.
"It's working the way (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Jane) Lubchenco and others wanted it to work by forcing two-thirds of fishermen out of business, and makes the other one-third look like they are succeeding," said Jim Kendall, a former fisherman and president of New Bedford Seafood Consulting. Nearly 70 percent of the New Bedford groundfish fleet is tied up, not fishing, he said.
The issue gained national attention when NOAA, under the newly-appointed Lubchenco, pushed for the expansion of catch-share programs nationwide. Acting on a groundswell of protests from disaffected fishermen, the U.S. House of Representatives, in a bill co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, recently voted to cut NOAA's funding for promoting these programs. An amended bill that prohibits initiating any new catch-share programs before Sept. 30 awaits President Barack Obama's signature.
But for Hesse and other Cape fishermen who pioneered sector management and formed the region's first sector more than six years ago, the experience has been positive. They counsel patience.
"The first year is the worst year," advised Chatham fisherman John Our, who has four years of sector experience. "I thought, 'What have I gotten myself into?'"
"We weren't under the gun, and we worked the kinks out of it," Chatham fisherman Greg Walinski said.
Under a congressional mandate, as well as a 2004 court-ordered deadline to end overfishing and rebuild depleted fish stocks by 2014, New England fishery regulators and the National Marine Fisheries Service made it increasingly harder over the past decade for fishermen to catch fish based on the theory that reduced landings would leave enough fish to spawn and rebuild decimated populations.
They were attempting to close the spigot on landings using regulations that required less-efficient fishing gear and closed large tracts of ocean to fishing. But the most onerous method was known as Days-At-Sea, which reduced the number of fishing days each succeeding year. As combined measures failed to rein in overfishing, those fishing days dropped to just a fraction of what they had been. By 2009, most fishermen had 40 or less days of fishing per year and faced another big reduction in 2010.
This, along with severe limitations on what could be caught each day, had a withering effect on the New England fishing fleet, and the number of active groundfish fishermen in New England plunged by 60 percent over the past decade. On the Cape and Islands, that number dropped from 252 in 2001 to just 58 last year. In the New Bedford-Fairhaven area, there were 232 active fishermen in 2001 and just 111 in 2009. That all happened before the implementation of sector management.
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