An EDF report claims that Limited Access Privilege Programs “stabilize” employment. Fishing is not an office job. There is no “full-time employment.” The work is inconsistent, linked to weather and climate, biological rhythms, migratory patterns and reproductive cycles of fish, and other natural phenomena. No one can control these factors—not even NOAA.
“Averaged over a year, a typical crew position before catch shares would have provided the equivalent of just one-half day of work per week. Afterwards, that potential [emphasis mine] rose to more than four days of work per week.”
This statement not only represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of fishing, it demonstrates the lengths to which the authors of this study have gone to manipulate the truth. Lubchenco and the EDF can call this a “welcome increase in full-time employment” if they want. The rest of us should call it what it is—a red herring, thrown in to obscure the fact that the number of jobs available in LAPP-managed fisheries are fewer.
To insinuate that LAPPs can make fishing, especially in North Carolina, somehow unseasonal is absolutely absurd. You can’t catch a cobia or a pompano off of Hatteras, in January, regardless of the management plan. And it’s just as impossible to fish during a 30-knot northeast wind under LAPP-management as it is under the current system.
Read the complete opinion piece from Island Free Press.