Fish processing plants of West Coast demand a cut of the roughly 100,000-ton catch of whiting, sole, black cod and other groundfish to be allocated to trawl fishermen under a ground-breaking quota plan up for approval this week. But fishermen and environmental groups are crying foul, saying big fish-processing companies are clearing their positions and thinking about their profits only without giving a second thought to the livelihood of fishermen.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council, which controls fishing off Oregon, Washington and California, is slated to approve the groundfish quota plan by Friday. When it takes effect in three years, it would be the first multispecies quota in the United States. It’s a big deal for Oregon, which nets most of the West Coast’s whiting and groundfish.
Now the fuss is all about whether to give processing plants a 20 percent quota share. It pushed ahead the tension between fishermen squeezed by catch restrictions and processors that buy the fish, providing hundreds of jobs in coastal towns. Now this tension turned into a virtual war between fishermen and processors.
Danene Lethin, a “fishing wife for 23 years,” said processors are arguing for an unprecedented quota share by presenting the illusion that they need protections against our husbands (delivering fish) somewhere else. Like others groundfish quota aims to make fishermen individually accountable for their inadvertent “bycatch” of overfished species. The council now sets overall caps on catch and bycatch, then closes the fishery if it estimates that fishermen have exceeded the overall limits. Under the new system, fishermen would get individual catch limits and bycatch limits based on their historical catch.
The National Marine Fisheries Service predicts that the number of boats in the nonwhiting part of the fishery could drop by two-thirds. Astoria, Newport and Coos Bay are somewhat vulnerable to those changes because of high dependence on groundfish. It is told that fishermen who get a quota share could sell the rights to fishermen and plants in other areas, leaving some processing plants without product.
