January 8, 2018 — For New Englanders, Atlantic cod is not just another fish. The Sacred Cod that hangs in the Massachusetts State House is testament to the cod’s place in our culture and history.
For centuries, we fished for cod, and, as we watched the stock decline, we tried various ways to protect the resource that is considered as much a birthright as a commodity.
In 2009, the New England Fishery Management Council under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, agreed to try a system called “catch-shares,” which worked well on the West Coast.
The idea was simple: figure out how much fish from a particular stock can be sustainably caught— the “total allowable catch”—and divide that among fishermen.
By allocating quota, fishermen would have more control over when and how they fish, and — fishermen could fish when the weather and markets were most favorable. Catch shares eliminated the “race to fish” once a season opens.
A catch-share system allocating shares to groups of self-selected fishermen called ‘sectors’ went into place in the New England groundfish fishery in 2010. Within these sectors, fishermen organized themselves, determined how to fish their quota, and established other rules by which they would operate.
All sectors then submitted an operations plan to NOAA Fisheries and, under that plan, were responsible for policing themselves. The primary responsibility of a sector is to keep within its quota and account for its catch.
While most sectors have done a great job meeting this responsibility, Sector IX failed miserably over many years.
The former sector president, Carlos Rafael, is now behind bars for years of falsifying catch information, such as calling catch of low-quota, high-value cod, high-quota, lower-value haddock. He also admitted to tax evasion and bulk money laundering, all from his fishing operation.
Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard Times