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Seafood group eyes 'interim' cod rules

New England's largest fishing industry group, the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, Tuesday cited the case of the disappearing codfish stock as a sign of "a flaw in fishery policy" that makes impossible demands on science in an effort to predict developments in the ocean ecosystem.

And it predicted that, without new flexibility written into it, the Magnuson-Stevens Act's rebuilding policy "is doomed to fail again and again."

On the eve of today's publication in Providence of a peer-reviewed assessment of the inshore cod population by the NOAA Science Center in Woods Hole, the seafood coalition urged the federal fishery management system to halt the normal process of setting what is expected to be an economically devastating catch limit on Gulf of Maine cod based on the pessimistic findings and a rigid legal deadline for restoring the stock to sustainability.

Instead, the coalition recommends that the Science and Statistical Committee of the New England Fishery Management Council, which hosts today's meeting, adopt an "interim catch level that achieves at least in the short term— one year — the overarching intent of Congress in the Magnuson-Stevens Act to strike a balance between ... achieving a sustainable resource and a sustainable fishery."

Read the complete article from The Gloucester Times

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