Fishing activists dig in vs. buyout

In the days before Sunday's world premiere of a documentary film that spotlights how the federal government continues to grind down the fishing industry, the latest and largest in a series of proposed buyouts has underscored a deep ambivalence within the fishing culture along the Northeast coastline.

Amid pleas for the $100 million relief package, backed by U.S. Sen. John Kerry, are a growing number of hardline arguments by prestigious fishing industry backers — including Gloucester-based attorney Stephen Ouellette and academic scientist Brian Rothschild — that throwing money at the problem would merely allow politicians to escape their own complicity in the growing crisis and undercut efforts to forge policies aimed at the root of the industry's clash with the federal regulatory system.

"The only assistance the fishing industry needs in the Northeast is for Congress to demand, or legislate (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to utilize common sense in interpretation and implementation of the Magnuson Act," Ouellette wrote amid a rolling online debate that has raged since the relief package was floated out on Aug. 5.

"Fishermen didn't ask for handouts when stocks were overfished; they certainly don't want them now that stocks are rebuilt," wrote Ouellette, co-author of a suit challenging the constitutionality and legality of the management regimen that brought the catch shares system to New England on May 1.

"It's time to get the fleet back to work, feed the economy and generate tax revenue so Washington can waste money on something else," Ouellette wrote.

Rothschild, an influential academic scientist at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, was a finalist for the job of heading NOAA Fisheries but was bypassed by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco earlier this year.

"Why don't we solve the problem (of economic dislocation) before we get into spending money?" Rothschild asked.

"Pure Washington ... BS," Jim Donofrio, executive director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, said of the buyout proposal.

"Throw money at a problem you created ... The only time (the politicians are) active is when everyone hollers," added Donofrio, primary organizer of the national fishermen's February protest at the U.S. Capitol.

The $100 million package was introduced earlier this month by Kerry and seven Senate colleagues in New York, Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut and New Hampshire, with the expressed hope of accelerating the ongoing exodus from the industry with the offer of a financial life preserver.

"It would be irresponsible of us to stand on the sidelines and watch this industry drown," Kerry said in a statement that accompanied the Aug. 5 release of the package, which has not yet been refined into a bill or other formal document.

Advocates of the buyout — notably officers of the Northeast Seafood Coalition, the region's largest industry group which is based here, and many of Gloucester's leading captains, such as Joe Orlando — argue for such a move as an ethically warranted palliative for a policy decision that has rendered many permits next to worthless.

In calibrating the relative shares of the total allocation in the new catch share system, the New England Fishery Management Council last year chose a 10-year term of catch histories to determine fishermen's total allowable "catch shares" for the current year.

And after granting favorable five-year terms for special groups — recreational boats, and a small, self-defined Cape Cod-based group closely tied to major environmental organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund and Pew Environment Group — the boats of the commercial ports were left with an often distorted mix of small amounts of the various stocks.

Orlando has often commented that conscientious fishermen who shifted away from groundfish to help the stocks rebound, as they were urged to do by the government, have paid for their actions by receiving smaller allocations for groundfish this year, in that their allocations reflected their conservationist choices to limit their catch over the past decade.

As Orlando has noted: No good deed goes unpunished for long in the federal fisheries regulatory system.

At a meeting with elected officials Friday at Gloucester City Hall, fishermen, including Orlando, brought to light a new policy cruelty — NOAA is charging permits with phantom discards based on a rough formula that assumes the inevitable mix of fish in the net whether they are there or not, and whether the permit has an allocation for the unwanted fish.

"I've been charged with 1,600 pounds of redfish and I've caught none," the Padre Pio captain said as colleagues muttered similar woes on the same subject.

Another exasperating problem came to light for the first time Friday was the ignorance of observers from private contractors about how to weigh the fish. In the rolling of the deck, weights recorded by the observers often, many fishermen noted, were far higher than the actual fish.

But the primary discussion Friday focused on the potential buyout. And a growing number of fishermen and industry backers holds its proponents responsible for enabling the federal fisheries regulators to dishearten, displace and destroy fishermen, picking them off one by one as in the law enforcement sniping and excessive fines.

In a general sense, a similar schism first showed last October when a regional protest in the parking lot of the regional offices of the regulators and law enforcers in Gloucester went off without much local involvement.

The Seafood Coalition stayed away, a decision consistent with its fundamental decision years ago to play by the government's rules in hopes of making them work for the fishermen. The protesters from points north and south saw the coalition as collaborating with the enemy.

Donofrio argues that the senators now proposing the buyout were for the most part acquiescent in the 2006 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act that is cited by regulators as requiring them to curb catch volumes even as stocks continue rebounding vigorously.

"These pompous senators passed Magnuson without reading it ... by unanimous consent," he said. "That is how much they really care about fishing communities."

Meanwhile, the documentary film, "Truth — Fishing Crisis or Government Mismanagement?" was to be screened Sunday night for the first time at the Rhode Island International Film Festival in Providence.

Produced by Brian Loftes, a third-generation commercial fishermen, and directed by Dana Neugent of the University of Rhode Island's Feinstein Providence Campus, "Truth" was described by Michael Janusonis in The Providence Journal as "a damning documentary against a government bureaucracy that doesn't understand the colossal problems their regulations have imposed on the fishing industry."

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

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