The fate of New England fishery is more or less depend on N.H. conference where the participants would examine in great detail the new fishing economic system known as catch shares — a system they have already approved for the groundfishery next year. Otherwise known as individual tradeable quotas — or ITQs — fishermen’s catch shares would convert the swimming common property of the nation’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone into negotiable catching rights, thus converting public property into assignable private commodities.
New England Fishery Management Council already approved the new system and has drawn growing concern from the fishing industry in Gloucester, throughout New England and in other fishing communities around the country and the world. It is said that wherever catch shares have been imposed here in places and in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Iceland, the one universal impact of ITQs has been to radically consolidate fishing capacity in a small number of hands. A larger number of smaller fishing boat businesses become a smaller number of larger fishing boat businesses.
Jane Lubchenco, President Obama’s oceans and fisheries administrator, is not scheduled to be a party to the New England council’s conference held this week at the Mount Washington resort hotel at Bretton Woods, where an international conference was held in 1944 to reorganize the global financial system. But her virtual presence will be palpable. Lubchenco made no secret of her commitment to catch shares and essentially privatizing the fisheries, and she participated in an elaborate campaign to introduce catch shares as the salvation of the fisheries in the transition from President George W. Bush to Obama.
It si informed that the conference keynote speaker will be Monica Medina, the former chief counsel for NOAA in President Clinton’s administration who shifted to Pew before returning to government as a member of the Obama transition team.
