May 26, 2022 — Local scallopers have crowded a series of public meetings this spring to fight a regulatory change under consideration they say could fuel further corporate consolidation in their industry, hurting not only fishing crews and their captains, but the legions of shoreside businesses that service their boats.
The proposed change, in the earliest stages of consideration by the New England Fishery Management Council, would allow boat owners to lease their government-granted access to scallop grounds out to other vessels, potentially opening the door for large commercial fishing operations to circumvent existing ownership caps and increase their already substantial share of the scallop market.
“The bottom line is this proposal is about global control, from the switch to the fish to the dish,” said Alan Cass, a former New Bedford scalloper who began his career as a deckhand and retired as a boat owner. “The resource will be at the mercy of a consolidated effort by these corporations to control ocean-to-table and economically injure the small entities in this industry.”
For nearly 30 years, scallopers like Cass and his son, who followed him into the industry, have gone to sea under a set of regulations that limit both the amount of scallops that can be harvested each year and the share of that harvest that belongs to the industry’s biggest players.
The arrangement, though complex to navigate, has kept a large class of independent fishermen competitive in a global industry alongside corporations with larger fleets and in-house processing and distribution services.