Executive director of Northeast Seafood Coalition informed that the fforst to organisae viable fishing cooperatives goes wrong as with sectors, as the coops are known, a sizeable fraction of the small boat fleet based here is given no chance of surviving by a fleet owner. In his statement he said that federal law has set fisheries up to fail in New England and across the nation.
Richard Burgess, who owns a four-boat business, and the coalition’s Jackie Odell yesterday cited the conservative catch limit on Gulf of Maine cod — the stock on which the port of Gloucester most depends — along with a radical clamp-down on Pollock. Burgess, who was a founder of the coalition and heads two sectors among the 13 organized for catch shares next year, said he believes 50 percent to 75 percent of the 60 or so small boat businesses will not be able to make it through to 2011, given the catch share allocations with which they will have to work.
Tom Nies — chief fishery analyst of the New England Fishery Management Council, said that the hard annual catch limits last month during its meeting last month in Newport, R.I. — the rebuilding process is on track or even a bit ahead of the projected recovery timetable.
The commercial fleet must share the reduced allowable catch with the recreational fishermen and their share, due to a council vote, was based on different more lucrative baseline catch history criteria than the commercial fleet.
It is said that setting arbitrary rebuilding timeframes for doing so, as is required by the law, is illogical. Burgess said he knows a number of day boat fishermen who have been landing about 120,000 pounds of cod a year, based on the 800-pound trip limit and as many as 150 days of fishing that are allowed on the boat permits and right to lease other days.
