Two dozen federal lawmakers will sit down Wednesday with Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke to convince him to raise the allocations of key fish stocks so fishermen can have a fighting chance of surviving in an industry throttled by federal regulations and now-documented examples of excessive enforcement.
Their case is very basic. According to statistics cited by the caucus from 2007, the last full year available, NOAA and NMFS limits forced fishermen to leave 73 percent of the allowable catch in the sea, costing fishermen and the economies of fishing communities an estimated $500 million. And, under the direction of NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco and NMFS overseers like Gloucester-based New England administrator Patricia Kurkul, the limits for the new fishing year are even tighter, especially on stocks like pollock, which have dropped another 60 percent.
The early result, as fishermen and others noted in a Gloucester City Hall meeting Friday, is that fishermen are wary of even going to sea for fear they'll accidentally haul up pollock, for example, in their nets as by-catch — and shut down the pollock fishery altogether.
It's no wonder that state Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante — who hosted the meeting along with state Sen. Bruce Tarr and Mayor Carolyn Kirk — sounded the alarm that, just a week into the new fishing year, Lubchenco's beloved "catch share" management system and Kurkul's allocation tourniquets are steering the fishery toward "catastrophic failure on every level."
If that proves the case, remember, this is not a catastrophe NOAA and NMFS, agencies of our own government, are allowing to happen. It's a pending economic and social disaster these agencies have actually created. It's one that Lubchenco, who's acknowledged her catch share policy will mean "significant" fishing industry consolidation — meaning job losses and small business bankruptcies and closures — wants to happen.
That's something that, if Locke and the rest of the Obama administration are to maintain any credibility themselves, simply has to be fixed.
Read the complete editorial at The Gloucester Daily Times.