The abrupt and seemingly arbitrary move by NOAA's regional fisheries administrator Patricia Kurkul to cut allocations in half for Gloucester's and New England's so-called "common pool" fishermen can be filed under the heading of "inevitable."
After all, last year's equally arbitrary actions of the New England Fisheries Management Council — tied to the puppet strings of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and thus to its fishery management puppeteer, the Environmental Defense Fund — granted Kurkul the authority to make random allocation changes. That only set the stage for this kind of outrageous regulatory action. Perhaps that's why there seems to be relatively little outrage; there's absolutely no surprise.
The fact is, Kurkul's latest cut — which targets those fishermen who could not realistically enter NOAA's and EDF's new catch share management system — proves once more just how grossly NOAA's management has set up the New England Fishery for failure. And cutting the common-pool fishermen's allocations by 50 percent merely expedites the collapse the agency and council had set in motion.
That motion began when the management council set fishermen's 10-year landing records as the criteria for fishermen's shares of the total allowable catch.
So fishermen whose 10-year records were low, or virtually non-existent, had no choice but to shun the new system and fish under the old rules, which regulated fishermen's effort, not their total catch, by blocking their access to certain grounds and limiting their days at sea.
It mattered not, of course, that NOAA used grossly incorrect landing records in the case of some fishermen. Indeed, NOAA's record-keeping has proven so incompetent that even Kurkul has admitted in the past the data is flawed — and that her truly pathetic excuse for an agency has no means of fixing it.
What matters now is that the two-tiered system has already failed. While fishermen who bought into the catch share system have been wary of even leaving the docks — understandably fearful of racing through their own share allocations early in the new fishing year — those in the common pool had, as of Aug. 21, already reeled in 88 percent of their year's allocation in Gulf of Maine Cod, 74 percent of Gulf of Maine winter flounder and — whoops! — 105 percent of the allocation of witch flounder,
On the surface, those percentages give a context to the need to take some sort of allocation action.
What they don't show, on their own, is that the science on which NOAA has based many of these allocations — notably for cod and winter flounder — isn't worth the paper on which the data is written. And they don't show the fact that Kurkul's action was, indeed, a disaster waiting to happen.
After all, the entire New England Fishery management system now in place is one that the council hastily cobbled together — acting on a format described very accurately by the Northeast Seafood Coalition's and Gloucester's Vito Giacalone as a case of "ready, fire, aim."
Kurkul & Co. will, of course, stand by the cut, noting that the common-pool landings over the first 3 1/2 months of the new fishing year have left them no choice.
They won't talk about the choice their federal agency, with national administrator Jane Lubchenco at the helm, has made to ensure, in Lubchenco's words, that a significant fraction of the fleet is driven out of business.
And they certainly will never admit what this latest allocation screams out to all — that NOAA's and the regional council system of management is in dire of need of the kind of reform that only legislative changes to the Magnuson-Stevens Act can bring about.
Again, it's time for our federal lawmakers to stop talking about these issues, and start undertaking the kind of serious reforms we need.
Kurkul's actions ensure that a few more fishermen are likely now out of work.
That tells us all once again that there is no more time to waste.
