March 23, 2020 — Gov. Janet Mills is asking President Trump for help to support Maine’s fishing industry.
In a letter to the president Friday, Mills pointed to a collapse of the markets for seafood both locally and globally due to the COVID-19 pandemic and asked the administration to consider direct financial assistance, subsidies, operating loans or loan deferment, or tweaking existing programs to make them more accessible to fishing and seafood businesses.
“In the short-term, harvesters have only limited opportunities within their communities to sell small quantities of product in hopes to earn just enough money to buy weekly necessities,” wrote Mills, calling the men and women who fish for lobster, herring, groundfish and shellfish “the very backbone of our rural coastal economy.”
In the long term, Mills said, “it is clear that the collapse of the international and larger domestic markets will devastate Maine’s commercial fisheries.”