Of all the fishing-related correspondence flying these days between and around New England and the Nation's Capitol, perhaps the most significant is the sharply-worded letter sent last week by U.S. Sen John Kerry to the ocean-ruling triumvirate of new Commerce Secretary John Bryson, NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco and her trusty sidekick, National Marine fisheries chief Eric Schwaab.
That's because, in calling for a badly-needed new study of Gulf of Maine cod stocks, Kerry also hit on what has been obvious to many in the fishing industry and in fishing communities for more than a decade.
Warning against any hasty regulatory action based on a new cod study showing the stock — thought to be rebuilding and nearly rebuilt just four years ago — is now cast as deeply depleted, Kerry wrote that "the (Gulf of Maine) cod situation is further proof that the entire research and data process needs to be completely overhauled."
He's absolutely right, of course. And he's right in his proposed remedy as well — a system of study and data collection that will include the input and analysis of "industry leaders."
That might well go over like the proverbial lead balloon in the offices of NOAA.
You see, Lubchenco and her cohorts with both NOAA and the nonprofit puppet masters like the Environmental Defense Fund would have us believe that people like Brian Rothschild — the nationally-respected UMass-Dartmouth marine scientist whom she shamefully shunned in appointing the laughably less-qualified Schwaab as NMFS chief, then further dissed by walking out before Rothschild's testimony at Kerry's own Senate subcommittee hearing in Boston this fall — don't know what they're talking about.
Nor, they would suggest, do experienced fishermen like Gloucester's Vito Giacalone, the Northeast Seafood Coalition's policy director, and Joe Orlando, who say they're finding plentiful cod stocks with every trip to sea.
Mere fishermen. Lubchenco and her academic "green" crowd would reason, simply can't judge the health of the stocks by what they find in random fishing trips. It's NOAA's survey data, they would say, that knows best.
But there's a big problem. That arrogant assumption has been proven wrong — and working fishermen proven right — time and time again.
Just last year, NOAA officials had to confess their data and tight catch limits on pollock in the New England fishery was so far off that they came back with a revised quota limit — granting fishermen a 600 percent increase. And that doesn't begin to approach the catastrophic, turn-of-the century "Trawlgate" fiasco, in which reviews found that the nets used to collect NOAA's data and set regulatory mandates were the wrong size, likely missing tens of thousands of living fish. True to form, NOAA officials at the time absurdly kept their regulations in place, saying that — skewed as it admittedly was — it was the only data they had.
Of all the issues driving the gulf of district between fishermen and their regulators, none needs more urgent attention than the well-earned absence of credence the industry gives NOAA's science. That's what makes Kerry's call for a systemic data collection "overhaul" so important.
If Bryson, Lubchenco and Schwaab want their agency to have any regulatory credibility, they would respond favorably to our senior senator's call. For, with realistic, industry input, this renegade agency may finally find a more realistic approach to data collection. And maybe, just maybe federal officials and lawmakers will realize there's neither a need nor reason for NOAA's job-killing regulatory policies that continue to drive family fishing boats the way of the family farm.
Bryson, Lubchenco and Schwaab must heed Kerry's message. It is indeed loud — and very, very clear.