The need to shed excess boats doesn't come from any bureaucratic master plan or environmental manifesto. There are only so many fish in the ocean. It costs money to catch them. An excessive number of boats means the cost to land a given value of fish is higher than it would be with an efficient fleet.
About 600 groundfish boats were struggling to make a living in New England during the 1960s and early '70s. Then, as now, the average age of fishermen was increasing and few young people were coming into the fishery. In 1976 Congress passed the 200-mile limit, and fishermen were offered easy financing and vessel construction subsidies. The New England groundfish fleet doubled from 600 to 1,200 boats between 1976 and 1980.
This increase in the fleet happened at the same time that rapid technological advances were improving the catching capacity of each boat and the fishing grounds available to U.S. fishermen were being dramatically reduced by Canada's extension of fisheries jurisdiction to 200 miles. In 1984 the International Court of Justice gave the eastern portion of Georges Bank to Canada, excluding the U.S. fleet from the productive Northeast Peak. That left the U.S. with a rapidly expanding, increasingly sophisticated fleet of groundfish boats with considerably less area to fish.
Landings of groundfish in 1975 were 205 million pounds. Annual catch limits for all groundfish species in 2010 have been set at 160 million pounds, 100 million more than were landed in 2007, but 45 million less than were landed in 1975. Official numbers show that there were 739 vessels landing groundfish in fiscal year 2007, down from 955 in 2004. That still leaves the fleet with 23 percent more vessels than were active from 1965 to 1975 prior to the expansion of the fleet and the reduction in fishing grounds.
If each boat can catch more than its predecessors, the number of excess boats is even larger.
Read the complete op-ed in The South Coast Today [subscription site]