The written testimony of Vito Giacalone, from the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, attorney Stephen Ouellette and Professor Brian Rothschild of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, about 6,000 words combined, constitutes a complex warning that all is not well, or getting well with the federal government's management of the fisheries, especially the Atlantic groundfishery harvested by boats from North Carolina to Maine, notwithstanding reassurances to the panel by Eric Schwaab.
Vito Giacalone long has warned that commodification and catch share trading will lead to absentee owners. "It's a conversion to share-cropping," Giacalone said in a June 30, 2009, Times story. "It sets up a Wall Street approach. Now you handicap the product in the marketplace because people are skimming and renting a public resource."
The catch share regimen sought and implemented by Lubchenco, who advocated for it while an officer of the Environmental Defense Fund, "casts off all the protections" in place to protect the small boat business model for the last 17 years, Ouellette wrote to the committee, and "allows virtually uncontrolled consolidation …"
To be clear, Ouellette then quoted from a 2009 study by NOAA social scientist Julia Olson on the effects of consolidation. These include "employment loss, decreased income, decreased quality of life, changing relations of production, structural disadvantages to smaller vessels and firms, dependency and debt patronage, concentration of capital and market power …"
Rothschild faulted NOAA for lack of interest in and data about the true effects of the new regimen, and also noted that catch shares have done nothing to free up for landings the tons of "undercaught" fish that remain in the sea.
"The fact is that the fisheries management system in the Northeast is widely viewed as broken," wrote the research scientist from New Bedford. He attributed the failings to a continuing "lack of accountability."
Skeptical that NOAA can fix itself, he proposed a National Fisheries Management Board, which would ensure that NOAA responds to the intent of Congress and operate in an analagous way to how the National Transportation Safety Board oversees the Federal Aviation Administration.
Rothschild also said he believes "an ad hoc commission" reporting to Congress is needed to develop a five-year plan to put NOAA fisheries management back on track.
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.