NEW BEDFORD — The impending "sector" system of regulating fishing will be a disaster by midyear, according to fishing industry representatives at Monday's meeting of the Mayor's Ocean and Fisheries Council.
Sectors, in which boats are grouped together by category to decide for themselves how to manage their licensed allocations, work on a hair trigger. If one boat in the sector lands the sector's entire quota of one species, say pollock, the entire sector must stop all fishing for the year unless it can purchase another pollock license.
There was great concern that opportunistic members of a sector could grab everyone's share of a species and put them out of business without a method of holding them accountable.
Vito Giacalone of Northeast Seafood said another problem with sector management, which begins May 1, is that the computers and management software aren't ready and that the sectors will have to file weekly catch reports with government regulators the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper.
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