April 21, 2016 — The Nature Conservancy a 6.5 BILLION dollar ENGO (2014 IRS 990) has put forward a paper seeking Electronic Monitoring on groundfish boats by May 1, 2017. If people recall The Nature Conservancy said very little about the BP oil spill.
NOAA and it’s environmental partners are bound and determined to force paid monitoring and eventually EMS on the fishermen. The last EMS study was delayed and delayed so that NOAA’s partners could put out misinformation about costs. And when the report did come out it substantially underestimates costs by assuming the average groundfish trip is 1.5 days when in reality my sector’s average trip is 6-10 days which is 4 to 7 times greater in duration.
The report also underestimates the number of hauls, claiming the average trip has five haul backs when in fact we are looking at between 40 to 60 hauls per trip, an underestimation by a factor of 10.
Read the full opinion piece at the Center for Sustainable Fisheries