NOAA’s top regional administrator says he will “consider” applying a legal precedent presented by the Northeast Seafood Coalition that would allow for comparatively minor cuts in Gulf of Maine cod and haddock landings next year rather than the draconian cuts that would otherwise go into effect based on discouraging stock assessments.
Gloucester-based NOAA Regional Administrator John Bullard, whose offices in Blackburn Industrial Park regulate fisheries from Maine through the Carolinas, told the Times that “we will certainly consider the action the council recommended.”
Bullard spoke at length at the council meeting, describing the agonizing problems the industry faces as it seeks to survive while waiting for the stocks to revive. The council also reduced the minimum size of many stocks based on the theory that the move would reduce the waste of sending undersized fish back to die.
Allowing the interim actions would effectively give the council a year for sharpened science and perhaps a less pessimistic picture of the state of the stocks until a reckoning in 2014.
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.