The common pool of fishermen who stayed out of sectors, the voluntary cooperatives that will work under a catch share system, will be severely constrained under limitations approved this week by an advisory committee of the New England Fishery Management Council.
Industry officials denounced the action yesterday as condemning the common pool to oblivion.
The action comes at a pivotal time for the groundfishery as it accommodates a partial transformation into catch shares next May. Fishermen who elected to remain outside the sector or catch share system, however, will work in a common pool under a total allowable catch, and continued effort controls, such as those that limit their days at seas and access to fishing areas.
In New England, about half the permits were associated with sectors and catch shares with half remaining independent. But according to the National Marine Fisheries Service, about 95 percent of the allocation, or landings, has chosen to be in sectors.
The allocation will be made after the total allowable catch of each species is set. That's expected later this month at a council meeting in Newport, R.I.
Without a fisherman's allocation, membership in sectors would be futile. Sectors will be fishing under the controversial catch share system that gives rights to catch a set amount of fish based on the allocation formula.
Meeting on Thursday in Danvers, the New England council's Groundfish Committee voted to put a 1,000-pound per day limit on pollock catches by common poolers, while trip-limit takes of cod in the Gulf of Maine would be reduced from 2,000 to 800 pounds. The common pool previously had no limit on pollock.
The committee also voted to recommend 2:1 counting of days at sea on inshore Gulf of Maine fishing, and bar more than one trip in a 24-hour period. The committee also voted to authorize the regional administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Patricia Kurkul, to further modify trip limits during the fishing year that begins next May.
Together, according to officials of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, the action — if ratified by the full council — would make common pool fishing an economically precarious proposition.
The action was solicited by the full council in September after Kurkul submitted a letter saying she was influenced by calls from industry members complaining that the effort controls enacted by the council in June would set off a fishing derby by common poolers for pollock — even as the sector side of the fishery was given a 67 percent cut in pollock catch, a species brought under intense management for the first time.
The catch share concept is based on establishing hard total catch limits, and within the mixed stocks of the groundfishery, such a draconian cut in pollock for the sector fishermen could mean a shutdown of the fishery, some have argued.
Gloucester's Vito Giacalone, the industry innovator of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, urged the committee to limit its action to putting a limit on pollock and reducing the daily limit on cod.
"To be honest," he said, "most fishermen would have considered that a fair result.
"The science and the common pool measures don't add up," Giacalone said after the limits on pollock were announced.
Noting that the extremely low catch share on pollock was written to protect a stock deemed overfished for the first time, he had questioned why no limits were put on pollock catches by common pool boats. But he described the action of the Groundfish Committee as the "death knell" of the common pool fishermen.
Many fishermen objected fiercely to the sequence of events, with the proposal to tighten regulation of the common pool coming from Kurkul days after the deadline passed for signing on to one of the 17 sectors organized to work under the catch share system. The catch share regulatory format, slated to take effect May 1, has long been in the works by the New England council, but was finally approved in June at the urging of federal fisheries chief administrator Jane Lubchenco.
Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-2834-1000, x3464, or via e-mail at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.
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