In a pointed letter to the Obama administration’s top fisheries administrator, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank has added his voice to a growing chorus of concerns about the transition of the New England groundfishery to a "catch share" regulatory system.
He also expressed a number of related frustrations with federal fisheries management, including the death by old age of "tens of millions of dollars" of scallops in a overlooked, closed area of Georges Bank.
In the letter released yesterday, Frank told Jane Lubchenco, chief administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he worried that the voluntary reorganization of independent fishermen into cooperatives — or sectors — as planned for here next spring, may not be viable at its onset through the setting of overly conservative catch limits. The regulatory change would grant share-catching rights for a predetermined portion of the allowable harvest — with the shares seen as a tradeable commodity for corporations to buy out small-business fishermen.
Two influential industry figures — Vito Giacalone of Gloucester’s Northeast Seafood Coalition, and David Goethel of the New England Fishery Management Council — have recently expressed similar concerns, and on Tuesday the Pew Environment Group urged the Obama administration to slow the race to invoke market-based solutions to solve problems of alleged overfishing.