Many small-boat fishermen think they will be put out of business by a new management process that for the first time would allocate catch shares to individual fishermen and many fear could risk consolidation of fishing opportunities to large corporate entities.
The management process in question involves the setting of annual catch limits and a wholesale strategy of establishing “catch shares” to ensure that limits for each fishery are not exceeded.
“This is a particularly sensitive subject in New England where fishermen who stopped fishing on severely depleted groundfish stocks have since been excluded from the fishery. In other words, Catch Shares as defined would punish these fishermen for their rebuilding efforts.”
Many fishing interests are alarmed by a statement from NOAA that says that transitioning to catch shares is a priority. They say that catch shares should not be viewed as a panacea for fisheries management. And they say the strategy privatizes the resource and makes fishing rights a commodity that can be sold to the highest bidder, thus risking consolidation to big business and the eventual exclusion of the small-boat owner/operator fleet and the resulting demise of fishing communities.
“The largest single systemic problem encountered has been the inability to provide fishermen or the council with analyses of the economic and social costs and benefits of various management options that are adequate to support meaningful public comment and debate,” New Hampshire fisherman David Goethel said. “For example, in groundfish, we voted an allocation scheme and management regimes in June and the ACLs in September; and yet no fisherman has any idea what these mean in terms of their catch and business viability in 2010.”
In a letter to the task force, a group of fishing interests – including Maine fishermen’s groups Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, Midcoast Fishermen's Association, and the Penobscot East Resource Center, as well as fishing industry individuals in Maine and Massachusetts, and marine scientists and professors – asks for a careful consideration of catch shares in the context of communities, ecosystems, varying scales of fishing practices, and fairness to conservation-minded fishermen. The groups asks for a change of the task force’s definition to ensure that catch shares are “equitably distributed among a limited number of individuals, fishing associations, communities, or specified areas,” in order to ensure that fishermen can be allocated catch on the basis of association with a community and/or with a specific ecosystem.