SavingSeaFood - Brown to use visit to discuss fishing fight

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Brown to use visit to discuss fishing fight

NEW BEDFORD — U.S. Sen. Scott Brown will tour the state's two biggest fishing ports Saturday to demonstrate that he is helping step up the pressure on regulators and fisheries law enforcement to treat fishermen fairly.

In addition to a stop in Gloucester, he will meet with local officials and fishermen at 8:45 a.m. at the Waterfront Grille on Homer's Wharf.

Brown, R-Mass., has sponsored a bill he calls the Fishing Impact Statement Honesty (FISH) Act, to bring in a third party, probably the Government Accountability Office, to review the economic assessments of fishing rules now required by the Magnuson-Stevens Act. Those analyses are now done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration but have been criticized as superficial or missing entirely.

Brown has been joined by a co-sponsor, U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and he told a radio interviewer he is hoping to gain additional co-sponsors from coastal states with a stake in fisheries management.

Read the complete story from The South Coast Today.

MELISSA WOOD, NATIONAL FISHERMEN: Meting out the meager

May 22, 2012 - Listening to the New England Council's Groundfish Advisory Panel talk about how that industry is going to pay for monitoring costs is kind of like trying to figure out how to pay your bills when you've just lost your job. Though monitoring is important keeping costs down is critical. As Panel Member Gary Libby pointed out, "If we had 100 percent monitoring we probably wouldn't have an industry."

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