By Richard Gaines
Hard annual catch limits, mandated by Congress and established last month for the first time to cover the 2010 fishing season have cast a pall over industry efforts to organize viable fishing cooperatives.
And even with sectors, as the coops are known, a sizeable fraction of the small boat fleet based here is given no chance of surviving by a fleet owner and the executive director of the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, where the vast majority of the cooperatives are being organized.
"Federal law has set fisheries up to fail in New England and across the nation," the coalition said in a statement.
Richard Burgess, who owns a four-boat business, and the coalition's Jackie Odell yesterday cited the conservative catch limit on Gulf of Maine cod — the stock on which the port of Gloucester most depends — along with a radical clamp-down on pollock — a stock subjected to rebuilding for the first time — as writing exit visas from the industry for dozens of day-boatsmen.
Many of them have been hanging on for years, via bank loans and second and third mortgages, Burgess said, hoping to remain on the water when the long rebuilding process, begun with the first Magnuson-Stevens Act in 1976, finally pays off with a sustainable and dependable fishery.
If not at hand, those days are coming into view.
But to Burgess and Odell, the continuing regulatory consolidation of the industry has a bitterly ironic edge: Although the biomass is increasing, the total allowable catch is getting smaller. And with a smaller allowable catch, said Odell, the fleet will shrink, too.
Odell said the real culprit in New England is the conservative catch limits.
Burgess, who was a founder of the coalition and heads two sectors among the 13 organized for catch shares next year, said he believes 50 percent to 75 percent of the 60 or so small boat businesses will not be able to make it through to 2011, given the catch share allocations with which they will have to work.
The progress in rebuilding the Gulf of Maine cod stock is an incipient sweet success story with a bitter after-taste.
According to stock assessment, Gulf cod are no longer overfished, but remain subject to overfishing. These terms have technical, scientific meanings, but overall, there is confidence that the rebuilding process is nearly completed.
But the legal and regulatory machinery, and the interpretation of it, Burgess and Odell say, by the National Marine Fisheries Service, have conspired to deny Gloucester boats what might be deemed their fair share of the rewards for a quarter century of sacrifice.
According to Tom Nies — chief fishery analyst of the New England Fishery Management Council, which established the hard annual catch limits last month during its meeting last month in Newport, R.I. — the rebuilding process is on track or even a bit ahead of the projected recovery timetable.
In 2008, based on a comprehensive assessment, Gulf of Maine cod were projected to be fully rebuilt by 2014.
But with the caveat that the results of 2009 are not known, Nies said yesterday, there is now a 50/50 chance the stock will be rebuilt by next year and 75 percent chance of achieving the goal in 2011.
Nies said he bases his projections on a definition of fully recovered as "reaching target spawning stock bio mass."
Still, the total allowable catch set by the council — 8,088 metric tons — is less than the 8,499 metric tons taken from the gulf in 2008, and significantly less than the projected 10,724 metric tons projected caught this year.
The commercial fleet must share the reduced allowable catch with the recreational fishermen and their share, due to a council vote, was based on different more lucrative baseline catch history criteria than the commercial fleet.
Additionally, Burgess and Odell said, the 10-year catch histories of the Gloucester boats that were used to determine their catch shares reflected the reduced catches of Gulf of Maine cod during the intense recovery effort.
So, they explained, suffering then for a worthwhile cause means suffering now for no good reason, when the stock is nearly recovered.
Odell traced the anomaly of government policies — allowing less catching even as the biomass expands — to the last two iterations of the Magnuson-Stevens Act — those of 1996 and 2006.
"Why are the total allowable catches — now called annual catch limits — being reduced when groundfish stocks are more abundant?" she said in a written statement. "Fishermen don't need to look far for the answer:
"No. 1, 1996 Magnuson which instituted the 10-year rebuilding (deadlines); No. 2, the 2006 Magnuson which instituted 'annual catch limits' and accountability measures; and No. 3, regional policymakers that don't seize the small amount of flexibility that is provided in the law.
"Setting fishing rates at precautionary levels which end overfishing and over the long term produce a biomass size that is reflective of the biology and takes into account population dynamics of each species is rational," the coalition statement went on to say. "However, setting arbitrary rebuilding timeframes for doing so, as is required by the law, is illogical."
Burgess said he knows a number of day boat fishermen who have been landing about 120,000 pounds of cod a year, based on the 800-pound trip limit and as many as 150 days of fishing that are allowed on the boat permits and right to lease other days.
At a rough average boat price of $1 a pound, those boats would have grossed $120,000.
But the catch history selected by the council last June to determine catch shares was 1996-2006. And extreme constraints on cod catching earlier in the period, Burgess explained, mean many Gloucester dayboats have been given catch shares so small that the boats are limited to a confiscatory level of cod next year via their sectors.
Allocation histories range from almost nothing to 30,000 or 40,000 pounds, he said. Those numbers, Burgess said, spell doom for the boats.
The pollock problem is related but may be more broadly devastating.
Only this year was the pollock stock determined to require rebuilding, based on limited trawl survey data.
In setting the catch limit, the regional regulators chose to set the catch limit at 3,148 metric tons, about one third of the catch from 2008 and one quarter of the expected catch this year.
Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or via e-mail at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.
