November 11, 2014 — Perhaps the scariest thing about the new "emergency measures" being imposed on Gloucester fishermen and the New England groundfishing industry is that no one seems surprised.
Angry? Frustrated? Desperate? You bet — and with good reason.
But the fact that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fisheries service, through Gloucester-based NOAA regional administrator John K. Bullard, could and would close specific inshore areas of the Gulf of Maine to all groundfishing and close down the landing of virtually any cod effective today— yes, today — spotlights up the unilateral powers and lack of accountability this government agency has grabbed over the years.
And it raises the ante for federal and state lawmakers to take up both the legislative and legal fights needed more than ever to protect fishermen and the fishing industry not from scavenging offshore foreign trawlers, not from other competitive imports, but from a wing of our own federal government.
To his credit, Bullard has been up front about conceding that Gloucester's fishing and waterfront economy will take a devastating new hit, since the closure of inshore areas especially target the grounds most commonly fished by the city's ever-dwindling day-boat fleet.
But, as noted in a letter sent by Angela Sanfilippo, who heads the Massachusetts Fishermen's Partnership and the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association, the added closures can be seen as violating standards of the federal Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act that call for consideration of the economic impact of any changes on a fishing community's economy.
Bullard may say he did consider that impact. He freely admits that the six-month closures — with provisions to be rolled over for another six months after that — will be especially harsh on Gloucester, largely because even added quota for offshore haddock, for example, is out of the reach of most of Gloucester's smaller boats. But he says the closures are being imposed because NOAA's survey shows that the depleted cod are "hanging out close to shore," so that the necessary protections need to target those areas.
Therein lies another, and even bigger rub. The data that has spawned this latest step down a road to an even greater economic disaster has been drawn from an "unscheduled" survey that, despite promises to do otherwise, was essentially carried out in secret, with no input whatsoever from fishermen who fish these waters regularly — or at least when their government allows them to. And there are ongoing, legitimate questions as to whether that represents use of the best current science, another Magnuson mandate.
Indeed, considering the development of Sonar technology for fisheries through programs at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and projects like the Gloucester Genomics Initiative, an effort to better identify and trace the movements of cod through their genetic code, it's easy to argue that NOAA's trawls and model-based assessments – best known for the 2000 "Trawlgate" fiasco when the agency had to concede it was trawling with the wrong-sized nets — are hopelessly outdated and flawed. And the agency's sidestepping of any industry input on this most recent study further clouds its credibility.