Regulators are trying to renew fish stocks. But are they throwing fishermen overboard?
Stephen Smith, a 36-year-old fisherman from Ipswich, steers the Scotia Boat Too, a 42-foot gill-netter, through Gloucester Harbor two hours before sunrise on a cold Tuesday in late January. But before beginning the day’s fishing trip, Smith and his two-man crew pull alongside the Belinda B, the gill-netter they used for yesterday’s fishing. After transferring their oilskins, hooded sweatshirts, and rubber boots into the Scotia Boat Too, they head out to sea.
They’ve left the Belinda B at the dock, but legally the boat is still out fishing. Late last week, Smith called the National Marine Fisheries Service to report that the boat was off on a fishing trip, but instead of taking it offshore, he let the Belinda B sit at the dock for several days. Then, yesterday, he took it out to sea for half a day, returning with 2,000 pounds of cod. By limiting his catch to 2,000 pounds (or 400 pounds for each day of the trip), Smith complied with the daily quota set by the New England Fishery Management Council to protect overfished stocks of cod in the Gulf of Maine.
Smith was free to land the fish any time, but he could not declare his five-day trip finished until today. So later this afternoon he’ll make a phone call from the wheelhouse of the Scotia Boat Too, notifying federal officials that the Belinda B’s trip is done. He’ll wait a few moments, then call again, announcing the start of the Belinda B’s next five days “at sea.” And after Smith and his crew unload today’s catch, he’ll call the fisheries service to say that the Scotia Boat Too has finished its five-day trip– moments before he calls back to start the clock on the next voyage.
Fishermen call it “burning time,” or “pre-loading the clock.” It’s an inefficient way to fish, but it’s a living. A single boat is allowed to catch 15 species of groundfish, including cod, no more than 88 days per year–with the calendar running from May 1 through April 30. But by switching back and forth between two vessels and pre-loading the clock for four-or five-day stretches, Smith and his crew can go out at least a couple of days every week and each take home about $50,000 annually. “We’d be expensed to death if we went out every day for 400 pounds,” he says. On this winter day, their catch sells for about 80 cents a pound and yields about $1,600, which–after deducting the cost of fuel, gear, and boat maintenance–will be split four ways among the boat’s owner and the three men on the boat.
Today, the catch is almost all cod, which is why the boat fishes only a few hours. In the summer, after the cod have spawned and mostly dispersed, the crew fishes 12 hours a day, six days a week, chasing a wider mix of species–including yellowtail flounder, haddock, and other flatfish–that aren’t subject to such stringent daily-catch limits. But their nets still catch some cod, which must be discarded when the fish exceed the 400-pound limit. On some days, the crew throws hundreds of pounds of dead fish over the rail.
“I don’t think any of it is helping,” Smith says of the regulations to prevent overfishing. “Throwing a limit on what you can land isn’t stopping you from catching it in your nets and killing it.”
But the waste was a lot greater in 1999, when the New England fishery council imposed a 30-pound trip limit on Gulf of Maine cod. Fishermen constantly shoveled over the side a species that regulators were trying to protect. Smith once found himself confronted by a dilemma worthy of King Solomon when he retrieved a 45-pound codfish from his gill net. Did the law allow Smith to butcher it and throw away the excess 15 pounds of meat? Or was he required to throw back the whole thing and look for a smaller fish in his net that didn’t exceed the limit? Smith decided on the latter course, but later asked a fisheries officer what he should have done. “He said to me, ‘The limit is 30 pounds,'” says Smith. “He didn’t want to entertain the question at all.”
That’s just one of the questions that fisheries officials don’t want to entertain. Since 1976, regulatory measures have stopped the worst of the overfishing that threatened to destroy the region’s fish stocks and allowed an industry of rugged individualists to survive (if only barely). That uneasy compromise was threatened in December by a US District Court judge who ruled that the federal government was not adequately enforcing conservation laws. In response, the fisheries service has proposed new rules that could cut in half the time at sea–from 88 to 44 days per year–for fishermen like Stephen Smith and his crew. One rule would count every day spent fishing in the Gulf of Maine between May and October (the first six months of the fishing season) as two days toward the annual limit. Also, boats would not be able to use more than 25 percent of their annual days at sea in the first or second quarter of the fishing season–in effect, keeping them to 11 days at sea from May through July, and another 11 from August through September. Any boat owner who could stay out of the Gulf of Main until November 1 would be entitled to the same 88 days at sea that fishermen have under current rules, but that option isn’t economically feasible for small-boat fishermen.
The new rules would also prohibit the front-loading of the trip clock, reduce the number of nets that can be used by gill-netters, require bigger mesh in the nets, and declare additional areas in the Gulf of Maine off limits to fishing boats during all or part of the year.
The federal government’s plan is scheduled to take effect on May 1, assuming final approval by Judge Gladys Kessler. But in late March, various parties were still urging her to reject the plan. Fishermen’s groups say the federal plan could be a disaster for their industry, and state officials have voiced similar concerns. The Conservation Law Foundation, which brought the lawsuit that led to Kessler’s ruling, says the new regulations don’t go far enough.
Bill Amaru, a former member of the New England fishery council and a fisherman himself, estimates that the restrictions would cost him 60 percent of his income. But others would fare much worse. “I’ve been around for a while,” he says. “I don’t have the debt other guys have. People who have bought new boats or rebuilt old ones and have taken on additional debt–they’re going to be destroyed.”
The big question is whether there’s any way to prevent overfishing without forcing boat owners and their crews out of business. The proposed new rules largely follow the strategy of the past 25 years, which is to impose increasingly heavy handicaps on individual fishermen–not only by limiting their daily catch and their time at sea, but also by regulating net sizes and declaring parts of their fishing grounds off limits. It’s an approach that starves the fleet but may not save the fish. While environmentalists, regulators, and fishermen haggle in federal court over ever-harsher restrictions on commercial fishing, support is quietly building for taking a different tack–a market-based approach that could turn fishermen into “owners” of the sea’s bounty, giving them an individual interest in preserving, as well as harvesting, the region’s fragile fish stocks. But not among the fishermen themselves, who see it as yet another assault on their incomes, and their way of life.
Fishing license
Fishermen and environmentalists have been at odds since 1976, when the federal government tried to appease both groups by moving against foreign fishing fleets. The Magnuson Fishery Management Act, named after a longtime Democratic senator from the state of Washington, set a 200-mile limit on American waters. This was especially popular in New England, which had attracted more than its share of foreign boats. The act also created eight regional fishery councils, which develop management plans that must be submitted to the National Marine Fisheries Service and the US secretary of commerce for approval. (The New England council has 18 voting members, including a representative from the National Marine Fisheries Service, representatives from each of the region’s five coastal states, and 12 members of the local fishing industry who have been nominated by governors and approved by the secretary of commerce.)
Spare the cod and spoil the flounder.
When the New England council was formed, conservationists and even a few fishermen argued that keeping foreign fleets out of the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank wouldn’t be enough to eliminate the threat of overfishing. Instead of heeding these warnings, the federal government offered subsidies to regional fishermen as part of an effort to “Americanize” the fleets. With a beefed-up local fleet on the waters in the late 1980s and 1990s, overfishing became the norm.
In 1994, trying to get a handle on the overfishing of cod, the New England council issued a moratorium on new groundfish permits and limited the number of days that permit holders could fish. Most vessels were allowed 176 days at sea, but owners of large boats who could document they had been fishing more than that won a higher number, with some boats getting more than 250 days a year. (In 1997, regulators cut everyone’s number in half.) While this inconsistency offended small-boat owners, the big operators had their own reason to be mad. The decision to issue permits to boat owners who could prove they had landed as little as one pound of groundfish in 1989, 1990, or 1991 resulted in many inshore boat owners getting approval for more days than they had ever fished before–undercutting the council’s stated goal of reducing the hunt.
Setting such loose entry requirements was the only way the days-at-sea limit could be imposed on the fishery, says Chris Kellogg, deputy director of the New England council.
“We needed to get this done,” he says. “We could have spent 10 years arguing about qualifying criteria. The feeling was, ‘Let’s move on.'”
The one-pound rule illustrated the difficulty of getting anything with teeth past the New England council. Its jurisdiction includes 1,700 boats (800 of them in Massachusetts) permitted to catch 15 different species of groundfish–cod, haddock, flatfish, and other bottom-dwellers that make up the backbone of the region’s fishing industry–in the Gulf of Maine. In 2000, the last year for which statistics are available, these fishermen landed approximately 120 million pounds of groundfish, worth a total of $100 million.
The New England council must weigh the interests of this sizable industry against the concerns of scientists and environmentalists, but it must also resolve conflicts among fishermen themselves. For example, differences in fishing gear make for all sorts of squabbles. Hook-and-line fishermen condemn trawlers for scraping the ocean floor with their nets and harming fish habitats. Trawlers condemn hook fishermen for targeting juvenile cod. Lately, inshore boat owners have been complaining about conservation rules that larger boats can avoid by fishing farther out at sea; they say such unfairness would be made worse by the proposed new regulations.
One of these regulations would require larger openings in fishing nets (from a minimum of six inches across to six and a half inches), but its effectiveness is complicated by the diversity of species being harvested. Increasing the mesh size of gill nets and trawls to protect younger cod allows flounder that could be legally harvested to get away. And if the flounder don’t escape, they get part way out and hang from the trawl nets as they are hauled through the water. The result is damaged fish that cannot be sold at a premium price. “By taking a few scales off here and there, it’s hard on the product,” says Jim Kendall, a member of the fisheries council and executive director of the New Bedford Seafood Coalition, which represents the commercial fishing industry in the South Coast area.
Comeback cod
Despite their flaws and unintended consequences, the government regulations do seem to be helping the fishing grounds, though not fast enough to restore them to their past abundance–or to allow fishermen to catch as they please. The biomass, or total weight of fish in the ocean, for 12 stocks of groundfish (the ones for which good estimates are available) increased from a low of 150,000 metric tons in 1994 to just over 400,000 metric tons in 2000. The recovery is most pronounced on Georges Bank, where haddock and flounder have returned to their highest levels in decades. For haddock, the biomass estimate in 2000 was just over 60,000 metric tons–an increase of 10,000 metric tons from 1999 and a sixfold increase from the low point of 10,000 metric tons in 1993. For winter flounder, the biomass is currently over 50,000 metric tons, up from the early 1990s low of 7,000 metric tons.
As for cod, fishermen say the species has become so abundant that they can’t stay away from the fish. But regulators say the sense of plenty is an illusion. Annual trawl surveys in the Gulf of Maine indicate that the cod’s geographic range has shrunk; with less competition from other fish, government scientists say, the cod have remained in preferred habitats, making them seem more plentiful than they are. The last good spawning season was in 1998, and when that large cohort of fish reach legal size (19 inches) later this year, things could get grim.
“That stock is going to be demolished in no time,” says Doug Hopkins, senior attorney for the nonprofit group Environmental Defense and a member of the New England fishery council. “It’s going to be a tragic loss.”
Fishermen have reason to be skeptical of this prophecy. The government almost shut down the 2002 monkfish harvest because the stock was supposedly in trouble, but fishermen were able to convince the scientists otherwise. The trick was to survey places that had been initially bypassed by the fisheries service’s research vessels.
Since official stock counts don’t jibe with their own experience, fishermen aren’t likely to accept the regulations that flow from those assessments, says John Pappalardo, policy analyst for the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association. “It’s real difficult for fishermen to see nothing but codfish and hear that everybody’s got to take a 60 percent cut across the board,” he says.
But that’s exactly what they are now hearing. Environmentalists have persuaded the US District Court that catches haven’t declined enough for the region’s groundfish industry to comply with a 1996 amendment to the Magnuson Act. That amendment requires fishery management councils to adopt regulations that will result in the full recovery of fish stocks within 10 years of their approval. In addition, environmentalists have accused both the national fisheries service and the New England council of not doing enough to stop overfishing and “bycatch” (the unintended harvest of fish that must be discarded because they’re illegal to land or not worth taking to market). Citing figures from the fisheries service’s own scientists, the conservation groups argued that 10 of the 11 stocks for which data are available are overfished. As onerous as the days-at-sea system, trip limits, and minimum mesh sizes have been to fishermen, the environmentalists say they haven’t stopped the fleets from killing too much cod in the Gulf of Maine.
According to the New England council, scientists from the national fisheries service recommended a total catch of approximately 4,000 metric tons of Georges Bank cod in 2000. Instead, fishermen landed more than 9,000 metric tons- and that figure doesn’t include what was thrown over the sides of fishing boats. In an effort to get better data, the fisheries service has promised to put more observers on boats to measure the bycatch and discards. (A few fishermen actually welcome the observers, hoping that they’ll be convinced- and will convince regulators- that cod stocks are recovering faster than environmentalists think.)
“What we’re really trying to do is to control the amount of fish taken out of the stock,” says Richard Allen, a Rhode Island lobster fisherman and fisheries consultant. “That’s the fundamental issue in fishery management. You want to reduce the fishery mortality rate whether the fish are landed or discarded…Days at sea don’t control removal from the stock.”
Following this train of thought, some environmentalists are calling for a “hard” total allowable catch in New England for each stock in the fishery. That means once the fishing industry approaches the annual harvest levels set by government scientists, the entire fishery is shut down. At that point, all the restrictions about mesh sizes and days at sea would become irrelevant.
“We want a backstop to make the system work,” Hopkins says.
If a hard catch limit were used, the fishery would likely be shut down within a few months of the fishing season’s May 1 opening. Once the harvest ended, boats would tie up at the dock until the following year. Deckhands would file for unemployment benefits and boat owners unable to make loan payments might abandon their vessels and declare bankruptcy.
Fishermen in Nova Scotia faced such a scenario in the 1990s when the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans imposed drastic reductions on the groundfishery. “We had 150 guys looking at bankruptcy,” says Brian Giroux, executive director of the Scotia Fundy Mobile Gear Fishermen’s Association.
A prolonged shutdown could be disastrous for the crew of Scotia Boat Too, whose members have worked in the fishing industry pretty much continuously since graduating from high school on the North Shore in the 1980s. They’re already hurt whenever the fishing grounds off Cape Ann are closed to protect stocks of spawning cod in the Gulf of Maine. (They could steam miles offshore to chase other fish, but in a 42-foot boat, that’s not a good idea.) When those areas re-open, scores of boats that have been idle for months steam in, making up for lost time. Predictably, they flood the marketplace.
“Everybody lands a huge amount of catch and the price drops,” Smith says. Last May, after the inshore fishing grounds were reopened, the price of yellow tail flounder, typically $2.50 a pound, fell to 10 cents a pound.
Counting the days
The tragedy, for both fish and fisherman, is that commercial fishing has become just too efficient. When the Scotia Boat Too arrives at the fishing ground just before 7 a.m., the crew starts hauling gear, using a hydraulic winch, and quickly moves through five strings of gill net, each about 2,000 feet in length, at a rate of just over one string an hour. The first four strings yield a total of 800 pounds of cod, but the last string yields close to 1,600 pounds of fish, resulting in a total catch that is well over the 2,000-pound quota Smith and crew have waited four days to qualify for. In order to keep the extra 400 pounds, Smith would have to sit out on the water past dark and into his sixth day officially at sea. So over the side it goes, much to the dismay of the crew. Smith has fished for just half a day, with a bare minimum of gear, and still caught too many fish.
Currently, the 1,700 holders of groundfishing permits are given a total of 150,000 days at sea to pursue their business. In the 1930s, according to Tom Nies, an analyst for the New England council, it took approximately 400 boats 30,000 to 40,000 days away from their ports to land 220 million pounds of cod and haddock. Back then, boats operated without global positioning systems, radar, fish finders, instantaneous weather reporting, or any of the other technologies that have sprung up since World War II. By comparison, fishermen caught only 34 million pounds of cod and haddock in 2000. Nies says that with an increased number of more efficient boats targeting a smaller number of fish, the overall number of days at sea should go down. “How can anyone argue that we need all 150,000 days at sea?” Nies asks.
Indeed, not all those days are getting used now. Out of the 150,000 days at sea issued to New England groundfish boats, Nies says, only 62,000 are actually used–by approximately 1,000 boats that collectively hold an additional 40,000 unused days at sea. Environmentalists see this latent capacity as a further threat to recovery, since it can be used at the first sign of improved stocks without violating current regulations.
A simple solution would be to further reduce the days-at-sea limit, but the New England council has balked at repeated recommendations from federal scientists to do so. (The national fisheries service, as part of its response to the environmentalists’ lawsuit, is now trying to impose the cutback anyway.) Instead, the council has imposed area closures and trip limits, trying to divert fishermen away from groundfish stocks that need protecting while still giving them a chance to make a living.
It hasn’t worked, Hopkins says, because fishermen can continue fishing even after they’ve exceeded total harvest quotas set by scientists at the national fisheries service, as long as they abide by the mesh-size restrictions and other narrow rules. “You can’t achieve the biological objectives of rebuilding targets and let people fish as much as they’ve fished in the past,” he says.
The recent court ruling has prompted some fishermen to acknowledge that some form of consolidation is coming down the pike. “The problems have come to a head in New England,” says Pappalardo. “Everybody’s scrambling…Deep in everyone’s heart people know some people are out, some people are in.”
His point is reinforced by a recent $10 million buyout program that allowed fishermen to sell their permits to the federal government. According to the national fisheries service, administrators received 502 bids from permit holders looking to get out of the business for a total of $99.2 million. The fisheries service estimates that it will be able to purchase 245 bids (offering between $1,400 and $127,000 for each permit, in some cases far below what was requested by boat owners), which represent 21,500 days at sea. While this may seem like a large reduction, most of the bids came from boat owners who have landed little or no groundfish since receiving their permits. Again, the real threat is the 40,000 unused days at sea held by boats that are unlikely to leave through a voluntary buyout.
“It’s a good start,” Nies says of the buyout. “Is it enough? Probably not.”
A piece of the action
Some say that it’s time to dispense with the days-at-sea system altogether and instead focus on the number of fish that are killed–something that many regulators have been urging all along. The way to do it, they say, is through individual transferable quotas, or ITQs. Regulators would set an overall limit on the allowable catch, then divide it up among participants in the fishery and allow them to buy or sell their percentages on the open market. Fishermen who can’t survive on their quotas could sell them and get out of the business.
The ITQ system has been implemented elsewhere in the US and in Iceland, New Zealand, and Canada. In the mid-1990s, such a system allowed Nova Scotia fishermen to leave the business with some dignity, according to Giroux. The number of boats in their fishery shrank from approximately 230 to 70, and those who remain are better off. “Profitability levels are way up,” says Giroux.
In addition to providing fishermen a way to recoup some of their investment on their way out, transferable quotas give those who stay an incentive to be good stewards, proponents argue. The resale value of the quotas is dependent on the amount of fish it allows its owner to harvest, and that amount can rise as a result of successful conservation measures.
“A quota share in good, healthy fishery is worth more than [one] in a degraded fishery,” says fisheries consultant Richard Allen. “If you make a decision to discard fish knowing it’s going to make the fishery worse off, you’ve got to think about its impact on the fishery. If you want to build up assets over time, you don’t want to bring the fishery down.”
But skeptics of this reasoning range from working fishermen (including the leadership of the Cape Cod fishermen’s association) to members of the environmental group Greenpeace. They see transferable quotas as a way of privatizing a public resource– fishing grounds–and creating highly concentrated fishing cartels. Opponents persuaded Congress to impose a moratorium on the use of ITQs by fishery management councils in 1996. The moratorium is now set to expire on October 1, and it isn’t likely to get another extension.
The 1996 moratorium, which was part of the reauthorization of the Magnuson Act, was enacted after US senators John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) overcame the threat of a filibuster by Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Washington). The two senators supported fishermen in their respective states who feared that powerful business interests could purchase enough quotas to control local fisheries lock, stock, and barrel. Gorton’s threat lent credence to this idea, since it was widely believed he was fighting for Seattle-based companies looking to control Alaskan fisheries.
“Stevens didn’t want the lower 48 to buy up the resource,” says a congressional staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “He wanted the industry developed locally. Gorton represented people who had a lot of capital to buy up shares.”
As the moratorium neared its original 2001 expiration date, lawmakers extended it by another year, but many wondered aloud whether it was time to replace it with legislation clearly detailing how transferable quotas should be used. At a Senate hearing in April 2000, Stevens asked Tom Hill, chairman of the New England council, for any new ideas on how to address the overfishing problem. When Hill said that the council had none, Stevens suggested another look at transferable quotas.
“I say that as one that’s always opposed to individual fisheries quotas, but I’m about ready to change my mind,” he said. “It may be the only tool we have left.”
At the same hearing, Kerry also expressed a willingness to revisit the issue. “We seem to care more about taxi cabs than a finite resource we call ‘fish,'” he said, comparing transferable quotas to the medallion system that limits the number of cabs on city streets. “There’s something out of whack here.”
It now seems that members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation could go either way on the issue of transferable quotas. A spokesperson for US Rep. William Delahunt (D-Quincy) is representative of their cautious attitude. “We’re looking to see what kind of consensus the fishermen can come up with,” the staffer said.
Fish or cut bait
Regardless of what local fishermen tell their legislators, the pressure for ITQs is mounting. In early February, the Bush administration announced its support for legislation allowing fishery management councils to use transferable quotas as a way to promote consolidation. That’s a substantial change, if not a 180-degree swing, from the policies of the Clinton administration. But Bush is operating under a different set of political conditions–not only increased frustration over excess capacity in the fishing industry, but a federal deficit that makes government buyouts a tougher sell.
“Money alone will not solve the management problems in US fisheries,” the Office of Management and Budget announced in its proposed budget for the Department of Commerce in February. “Providing market-base incentives to fishers, redirecting funds to meet the highest priority fishery management needs, and enhancing science and stock assessments tied to management decisions will.”
There is, however, a wrinkle to the Bush administration’s stance on ITQs. William Hogarth, head of the national fisheries service, recently told Congress that while transferable quotas may promote the efficient use of capital, they may not be applicable to areas with multiple species and multiple types of fishing gear–a description that fits the New England groundfishery to a T. But similar concerns were raised in Canada when transferable quotas were imposed on the Scotia-Fundy groundfishery, and the system still worked well, Allen says.
Proponents of transferable quotas point out that the system could do away with a lot of the regulations that drive New England fishermen crazy (if not broke). As long as they stay within their quota, fishermen could decide for themselves when, where, and how to fish. They’d be able to time their landings according to market conditions, and not to inflexible rules. “They’d be fishing for money and not for weight,” Allen says.
Some fishermen still say there is no fair way to distribute the quotas, and they fear that tomorrow’s catch will end up in the hands of a small number of boat owners. Deckhands and other employees also argue that they deserve to get stakes in the fishery, something that isn’t going to happen if quotas are awarded solely to the owners of fishing vessels.
“What about the guys who’ve been in the racket for 20 or 30 years?” asks Jim Kendall, who spent most of his career as a fisherman working as a skipper for boat owners who stayed ashore. “People ask me, ‘What did you invest?’ I invested 34 years of my life, but I walk away with nothing because I didn’t choose to be a boat owner. You’ll always have that class separation.”
But Frank Mirarchi, a Scituate fisherman and a former member of the New England council, says fishing quotas, if structured properly, could be used to fund health and disability insurance for deckhands–something that Smith’s two crew members, 33-year-old Craig Walker and 39-year-old Dan Fields, now lack. “I’d like to see a small but significant portion of the quota held in the name of the crews,” Mirarchi says. One method would be to set aside 10 to 15 percent of the overall quota for the fishery and use the revenue to support a fisherman’s welfare fund.
Allen says there are other ways to address the fairness issue. For example, deckhands could be given their own quota shares, which they could lease to their skippers or boat owners, he says. And to prevent the concentration of quotas in the hands of the few, Allen says, a limit could be placed on how much of the total catch any individual can own, preventing a few high rollers from buying up too many individual shares. As to creating a select class of quota owners, Allen says that’s exactly what buyouts do–except the money handed over to permit holders belongs to taxpayers.
The Conservation Law Foundation still has reservations. While agreeing that regional councils should be able to use fishing quotas in their management plans, the environmental group does not see the system as the fairest way to promote the recovery of fishing areas. Once a quota system is imposed, the CLF points out, it’s probably going to remain in place forever, even after stocks have recovered and fishing revenues are increasing.
“What a tragedy it would be to implement these difficult restrictions and not allow fishermen to reap the benefits when the stocks do come back- and rather allow them to be sucked away by people who haven’t sacrificed,” says Priscilla Brooks, director of the CLF’s marine resources project.
Some form of capacity reduction is necessary, says Brooks, but whatever method is chosen shouldn’t deny the children of fishermen an opportunity to get into the profession. “I think [quotas] would change the face of the fishing industry in New England,” she says. “I’m not convinced it would be all for the good.”
Smith is one fisherman who shares this view. Given the choice between today’s patchwork of regulations and a share system, he picks the status quo. Smith says the price of a quota would prevent anyone new from getting into the business. And he bristles at the idea of regulators dictating the total catch and his share of it- in effect, telling fishermen exactly how much they can make during the course of the year.
Of course, the days-at-sea restrictions, trip limits, and area closures come close to determining a fisherman’s maximum income now. But this web of regulations gives more wriggle room than Smith would get under a quota system. Now he can hope to match, or exceed, last year’s income by putting at least the same amount of fish on deck. But when a hard quota gets slashed, he says, that hope is gone.
“If you cut my quota back by 30 percent, that would have an immediate impact on my lifestyle,” he says.
But so, too, will the ever-tightening set of regulations, Hopkins says. Somehow, fishing has to be reduced in the New England groundfishery.
“I just hope that for those people who are ideologically opposed to [the quota system] that they come to the table with a serious commitment to figure out what we can do that will work,” says Hopkins. “I hope people start thinking.”
Dexter Van Zile is northeast bureau chief for National Fisherman.