Fishermen were faced with a Hobbesian Choice [sic]: join a sector, with little knowledge of how that system might work, in theory or practice, or go it alone in the common pool, with a steep reduction in their days at sea and other restrictions and which will, in three years, also be subject to a total allowable catch (TAC) or quota.
But this brave new world of fisheries management in New England comes with a terrible dilemma for community-based groups fighting to maintain their access to the gulf's fishery resources. On the one hand, sectors are a tool that may allow community-based fleets to stay in the game if enough fish are conserved to rebuild local stocks. But experience from every other fishing region in the world demonstrates that since quota allocations can be bought and sold, TACs result in at least a 25 percent consolidation in the number of boats in a quota-based fishery. It should be no surprise that smaller community-based vessels are those disproportionately squeezed out of a fishery.