Given all of the factors now in play, it's obvious the New England Fishery Management Council jumped the gun in June when it approved converting the New England groundfishery to a regulatory system of fishermen's catch shares based on allowable quotas, rather than days at sea.
Indeed, it's most telling that the New England Council and its staff didn't participate in a major workshop on implementing the new system until four months later in October, when it hosted a retreat of sorts in Bretton Woods, N.H., at the foot of Mount Washington, not exactly an easy drive for fishermen or many other industry officials who, while the event was required to be public, were pretty much discouraged from sitting in.
But, amid calls for pushing the catch share conversion back a year, the council this week has to make perhaps an even more important series of decisions regarding the viability of any New England catch share: In its monthly meeting in Newport, R.I., (see Page 1 news story), the panel is poised to set the actual catch limits for the region's groundfishery — and with it, show just how committed it truly is to all aspects of the fishery, notably the economic effect these changes may have on the industry, and communities such as Gloucester that are so deeply tied to it.
Simply put, through these allocations, the council may well decide whether the catch share system has any chance of success in New England. And the early indications have not been encouraging.
That's because the early recommendations from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, would cut the allowable landings for pollock by more than 607 percent. While 11,370 metric tons of pollock were landed in 2008 in U.S. East Coast ports, Canada and in recreational fishing, according to NOAA's annual figures, the preliminary recommendation for a 2010 allocation would allow fishermen to bring in just 3,813 metric tons in 2010.
That level of allocation — divided among sectors under the planned catch share system — would not allow individual fishermen enough of a pollock catch to even account for their bycatch, Northeast Seafood Coalition businessman Vito Giacalone has noted. And the perception is that this level of cut would virtually collapse the pollock fishery. That's hardly the result the federal government should want to foist on one of our nation's longtime core industries, let alone on New England's fishing communities.
There are certainly a lot of dire questions regarding the catch share system as it moves forward. And it seems clear that, New England needs more time to put a workable framework in place. There are significant questions over an after-the-fact rules change that could severely penalize those fishermen who have not signed onto a cooperative sector. There are questions over fishermen's landings records that are being used to set the actual catch shares for each fishermen, and thus for that boat's sector as well. And the fact that the National Marine Fisheries Service acknowledges the errors, yet has no intent of correcting them for the coming 2010 fishing season severely hurts the credibility of the entire process.
But one answer seems clear: If catch shares are to work at all, they must work through a system that recognizes the recovery of many of the stocks, and it must offer fishermen the opportunity to at least have a catch to share. And as we've noted in the past, the only viable way for catch shares to work effectively for all is for the catch allocations to match at least the most recent landings figures. To allocate a catch at a 60 percent cut will merely drive more and more fishing boats — and fishermen — right out of business.
NOAA and NMFS, of course, have acknowledged that; it's just that, in their push to further "consolidate" the fleet in Gloucester and elsewhere around New England, they just don't seem to care about the economic impact that course will have on fishing communities.
In setting the allocations this week, the New England council will show us just what it thinks of fleet consolidation — and whether it truly wants to give the idea of catch shares even a fighting chance at success.
For if these allocations follow the early pollock projections, the catch share format — like the fishery itself — will collapse before it gets off the ground. And that's not going to serve anyone.
