Obama demonstration has received an emergency economic opportunity program for New England commercial fishing industry from seven members of Congress. In that programme they asks for common sense executive action to break through bureaucratic knots and dubious science that are causing what was described as unnecessary job loss within the fishing industry.
Experts said that low-balled hard catch limits are expected to ruin as many as half the family-owned fishing businesses in New England during the coming fishing year which begins May 1. They further said that the bankruptcies would end fishing careers and put on the market their fishing permits at pennies on the dollar just as the catch share system introduces a rudimentary commodities market and privatization of the fishery designed to induce investors into the fishery.
The Environmental Defense Fund has been the driving force for catch shares. An EDF vice president David Festa has advised investors catch shares could produce profits of 400 percent or more. The letter to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke mentioned that the well-intentioned, but outdated bureaucratic system of fisheries management has created tremendous burdens on fishermen.
The other problems cited involve either outdated or flawed data that are unnecessarily holding back fishing for skates, yellowtail and pollock. The letter also was signed by Sen. John Kerry, and Congressmen John Tierney, Barney Frank and Jim McGovern, all Masschusetts Democrats. Also signing the letter were Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, and Rep. Madeleine Bordallo, D-Guam. Bordallo chairs a subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee that has held two hearings in recent weeks focused on the fishery management operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
