Since the founding of North Carolina, it has been accepted as fact that if you work hard, if you persevere, if you are determined, and if you are lucky, you can be a fisherman. You can own your boat. You can be your own boss. You can feed your family and the larger community. And you can put smiles on the faces and adventurous memories in the minds of countless charter customers who you help experience the wonder and mysteries of our waters.
The only apparent problem with this scenario of being independent, of being a self reliant contributor to society, of providing a service for others is that you do not necessarily get rich. The fishermen do not seem to find this to be a problem, but an alleged environmental group called the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) does.
That’s right, even though its employees do not live here or fish for a living, this group has decided that North Carolina’s fishing communities need to be fixed. Or, in their words, they need to be “more vibrant.”
EDF has published an endless stream of slick brochures and publications, held numerous conferences, and attempted to enlist numerous fishermen in an attempt to explain how society — make that the government — can implement a plan that will “create vibrant fishing communities”.
The plan is called catch shares. If you eat fish or like to catch fish, catch shares will affect you.
The Environmental Defense Fund has been the driving force behind this concept. The group has spent thousands and thousands of dollars promoting this concept. (In the name of full disclosure, I went to Vancouver, B.C., on EDF’s dime to learn about it.)
Catch shares are here. They are, as you read this, being implemented by NOAA through the National Marine Fisheries Service. The goal is to reduce the number of working watermen in the United States by more than 60 percent. The propaganda “informs” fishermen that the ones left standing, after their neighbors are economically destroyed, will be able to get rich and somehow fishing towns and villages will then “be vibrant.”
Welcome to catch shares. They are designed to kill off the fishermen. The infrastructure will then die and then somehow, according to the slick brochures produced by EDF and edited by the finest legal minds they can hire, fewer fishing boats and fewer fishermen will result in “vibrant fishing communities.”
Just what is a catch share? A catch share is an exclusive guarantee that whoever holds the catch share has the exclusive right to harvest a certain percentage of the total allowable catch of a particular species of marine life. That’s a mouthful, and you read it correctly.
It does not grant the right to catch a certain number of fish each year. How many fish can be caught is a number that National Marine Fisheries Service already determines and has imposed on fishermen for years. So if catch shares is not about saving fish, since we already have that scientific process in place, you may be wondering just what the purpose is.
The catch share program is not about how many fish can be caught. Catch shares is only about who gets to catch fish. Catch shares can be bought, they can be sold, and they can be leased or traded.
So the logical question is what is the conservation advantage of catch shares? The answer is that there is no conservation advantage. Catch shares policy is about taking the right to fish away from the masses, from those individuals who want to become fishermen for a lifetime or for a day, and giving that right to harvest fish to a select few. Catch shares is designed to privatize the ocean. As a free American citizen, you might want to think about that one for awhile.
Who will get catch shares? Basically, it will be those with the best past history of landings. That’s right — those who have caught the most in the past will be selected to keep on fishing — in the name of conservation and, of course, “vibrant fishing communities.”
Read the complete commentary from The Island Free Press.