Peter Cabral, a fisherman, is finding hard to deal with are regulations that have put him, and much of the Provincetown fleet, out of the groundfishing business. He said that he sold his federal groundfish permit. When they cut back by 52 percent (on scallop fishing days) in March, he sold his federal scallop permit.
Cabral has rigged his boat to dredge for sea clams in state waters instead. It is fact that the Provincetown fleet has suffered under regulations that slashed the number of fishing days to 40 or less for most fishermen in order to rebuild stocks of cod, haddock and flounder. Regulations became increasingly hard to live by and so the New England Fishery Management Council passed an amendment to its groundfish management plan in June, allowing fishermen to form groups known as sectors.
Under this new management plan each fisherman in a sector was allotted a share of the annual groundfish quota, based on his or her recent fishing history. The sector would manage the total quota represented by all the shares of its combined membership by making rules that would ensure they didn’t go over their quota amount, including providing their own monitoring — and even enforcement.
It is told that the regulations would guard against consolidation of the shares into a small group of monied fishermen, who would buy up shares from others. Many of those protections were not included in the amendment that the New England council passed in June, but will be handled in subsequent additions.
Share allocation has been a concern in some Pacific fisheries, where “absentee owners” have leased out their shares at high cost to others, said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations.
