According to a commercial fisherman and federal official the New England fishing industry has a dim future, facing radical consolidation and the loss of “a way of life” that has existed for centuries without a “massive intervention at the congressional level.” David Goethel told a congressional subcommittee in Washington, that in setting polices to implement mandates for catch limits in the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act three years ago, the New England Fishery Management Council rushed through a series of pivotal decisions, including “an allocation scheme and management regimes.
Goethel was one of nine members of the fishing industry from various sectors and parts of the country to give testify yesterday at an oversight hearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources’ Subcommittee on Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife. Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter, D-N.H., is the only New Englander on the subcommittee. But many of its members, notably Congressman Frank Pallone, D-N.J., have taken leadership roles in Magnuson-related fisheries issues.
Goethel also noted the frustration of the fleet facing an allocation based on catch histories that NMFS has acknowledged are faulty, and beyond immediate correction. NMFS said the corrected histories would be applied to catch shares for 2011, not for the 2010 fishing year. Many fishermen in an industry that has been reduced in number of boats by approximately one half in the past decade are worried that the catch share transition will bring about even more draconian consolidations.
Radical consolidation of fleets, concentrating fishing capacity and equity has followed virtually everywhere in the small sampling globally where ocean resources have been privatized into catch shares, or Individual Tradeable Quotas (ITQs). Lubchenco was a vice chairman of EDF before her appointment by President Obama to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which manages the fisheries.
