April 3, 2019 — BOSTON — While most of the thousands of attendees to the Boston seafood show were there to buy and sell fish or otherwise drum up business for their companies, Ryan Mulvey was on a “fact-finding mission” of sorts.
Mulvey, an attorney, along with a team of others from the Cause of Action Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, spent the show speaking to fishermen about what it refers to as “overregulation” in the fishing industry. This can include issues such as requirements that fishermen bear the cost of having observers on board, the development of offshore wind farms curtailing fishing areas, cuts to quota and problems with the “reliability” of federally conducted stock assessments, he told Undercurrent News.
“We want to hear stories and we had a huge number of fishermen come up to us and tell us ‘Oh, we’re struggling so much. Every year we’re allowed to catch fewer and fewer fish and we’re making less and less money and new and heavier regulatory costs get imposed on us’,” Mulvey said.
The institute advocates for what he called “reasonable regulation that still preserves economic freedom” and has been active in litigating on behalf of fishermen suing the federal government in cases of “government overreach”, Mulvey said. It does this through legal action as well as by launching investigations through the aggressive use of public records laws like the Freedom of Information Act.
Read the full story at Undercurrent News