May 22, 2012 – Listening to the New England Council's Groundfish Advisory Panel talk about how that industry is going to pay for monitoring costs is kind of like trying to figure out how to pay your bills when you've just lost your job. Though monitoring is important keeping costs down is critical. As Panel Member Gary Libby pointed out, "If we had 100 percent monitoring we probably wouldn't have an industry."
When the GAP met today in Portland, the first item on its agenda was to come up with some ideas to help defray at-sea monitoring costs for 2013. That year New England groundfishermen will be forced to swallow drastic cuts — possibly 80 percent — to the Gulf of Maine cod quota. They may also be facing a similar reduction in the yellowtail flounder quota. (More on that to come.)
More than 9,000 sea days were monitored in the sector program last year, according to panel member Maggie Raymond. You multiple that by each trip costing $800 and you've got a price tag upwards of $7.2 million.
To help pay for this, the panel approved a motion to recommend compensating fishermen who take on the added expense of observers with extra fish. The mechanism would work the way the scallop set aside works for scallop monitoring. The motion also stated that any of the monitoring costs charged to the industry would not exceed 3 percent of total landings.
Read the full article at National Fisherman.