This post comes to us from Aaron Dority, Downeast Groundfish Initiative director at the Penobscot East Resource Center in Stonington, Maine.
Last week, over a dozen fishermen and Brett Tolley (NAMA’s organizer) and I attended the Northeast Fisheries Management Council meeting in Mystic, CT.
While there, we urged Council members to establish measures to protect inshore fishing grounds, particularly in the western Gulf of Maine, from excessive fishing pressure.
The Gulf of Maine |
A quick overview of why this is necessary: In 2010, the council established groundfish “sectors:” groups of fishermen governed by an overall catch cap or limit, that allows annual trading of fishing quota. When they created this new management system, the council also eliminated inshore fishing protections that were part of the old system.
Many community based fishermen have nowhere left to fish. |
From my perspective, when fishermen tell managers that we need more protections for the fish, rather than less, the managers need to take these comments seriously, and act accordingly.
Last week, this only partially happened. The council voted to assign a committee to devise inshore area protections. That was a win. But the council also explicitly forbid the re-establishment of trip limits, the precise management measure that fishermen were asking for.
The additional motion that the council passed will enable much greater transparency in the quota leasing market, a currently opaque series of transactions that often hides the true extent of fleet consolidation today. So the final result was generally positive, but not exactly what the fishermen were asking for.
Where does this leave us? Well first, that 12 fishermen all spoke in favor of ecological protections that will also benefit future fishermen: this was a tremendous feat. It showed council members how much fishermen care about this issue, and flexed some political muscle that some fishermen didn’t realize they collectively had.
In fleets and fish, diversity is a good thing. |