Fishing panel eyes 'consolidation' remedies

DANVERS — New England's Fishery Management Council Wednesday decided to attempt an after-the-fact tweaking of the groundfish catch share/sector system to prevent "excessive" control and "over consolidation" of the nation's newest commodities market in wild protein stocks.

But questions about when, how or even if to proceed that emerged in committee and during debate by the full council meeting here left no clear hint of what the effort might produce — if anything.

Some industry forces, representing big off-shore boats based in Maine, have cautioned against actions that could serve to redistribute equity in the fishery.

The action was unanimous, but came following a 14-3 vote against holding off the start of the initiative until November.

The decision came a week after a study of the full first year of catch share fishing by quasi voluntary business cooperatives known as sectors, but the anti-monopoly initiative has been working its way toward the public since last year.

Published by the NOAA science center in Woods Hole, the report confirmed anecdotal reports that many years of consolidation of the fleet, based primary in Gloucester and New Bedford, accelerated in 2010 after the fishery was reorganized to encourage buying and selling of permits under the new catch share management system and trading of ultra low allocations.

A long-awaited report on "permit trading" during the launch year of catch share/sector activity — May 2010 to April 2011 — has been completed and could be made public as early as today.

Next month, the council hosts a workshop in sectors, the 17 nonprofit business cooperatives organized over promises that self-government would eliminate much of the suffocating regulation that frustrated the independent minded entrepreneurs.

"There should be public hearings in every state and major port in New England ... eight, nine ... we should reach as many people as possible," said Councilor David Goethel, a New Hampshire day boat fisherman.

"There's a sense of urgency here," said Councilor David Pierce, deputy director of marine fisheries in Massachusetts.

But Jim Odlin, who owns one of the region's biggest private fleets of all shore trawlers, argued for a more patient approach, and said that, until the workshop on sectors and the publication of the trading report, the council "doesn't know what it is sending out."

Jackie Odell, executive director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, made the same point in the debate before the Groundfish Oversight Committee last month.

"What we do know is that many people are hurting, " she said. "We need to figure out what happened in year one and what needs to take place for them to be better."

Peter Shelley, senior counsel for the Conservation Law Foundation and Brett Tolley, a community organizer for the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, both argued the need for the council to impede the accelerating trends.

Shelley suggested the council subdivide the fleet into inshore and offshore groups and manage them separately due to the different scales — the small, largely mom-and-pop day boats and the big, off-shore trawlers that have large capacities and stay out for a week or more.

"The effect of keeping the fleet together," he said, "is you cripple both fleets."

Tolley's organization, NAMA, submitted a petition of more than 1,300 signatures favoring the anti-monopoly initiative.

"Have we learned nothing from the agriculture, banking, financial institution and housing debacles?" Tolley, and two NAMA colleagues, Doug Maxfield and Brian Pearce, wrote in the September Commercial Fishing News.

Maxfield is a commercial fisherman in Gloucester; Pearce a commercial fisherman from Portland.

"This is not a stab at large-scale boats," they wrote. "The issue is protecting fleet diversity."

A relative burden more easily absorbed by the offshore boats due to their much larger business scale is the cost of monitoring.

At the council's Groundfish Committee meeting last month, the minutes said, "Several committee members stressed that when the fleet has to support monitoring costs, the small operators will not be sustainable, and the monitoring system needs to be overhauled as soon as possible in order to protect diversity."

At the same committee meeting, Maggie Raymond, executive director of Associated Fisheries of Maine, raised a series of caveats about efforts to instill "social welfare" values into the fishery.

"Basically," Raymond argued, "this is a message to ... people who have invested in this fishery ... that they can work hard, borrow a lot of money, and when some growth happens in the fishery, it will just be turned over to someone who has not done the same thing."

John Sacton, editor/publisher of the website Seafood.com, also weighed in Wednesday,

"The problem is not really at the council level," Sacton wrote. "Throughout the world, the seafood industry is changing, with more controls on quality, harvesting, and reporting, along with tighter regulations for origin and fishing method.

"At the same time," he added, "processing and sales sectors are consolidating as well. This is all happening as seafood becomes increasingly integrated into the global food system which is dominated by large scale buyers and sellers.

"Ultimately, this is not a regulatory problem — it is an economic one," Sacton wrote. "And it begs the question of what is the basis on which small-scale fisheries can survive and remain healthy. That is really the question before the council."

Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or at rgaines@gloucesetertimes.com.

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