August 31, 2012 — At the end of last September, I wrote a column enthusiastically titled “Optimism for the New England Groundfishery.” My theory was that after a history of overfishing, subsequent belt tightening, and implementation of a new management system, the industry was on the cusp of recovery. The piece came out just days after New England’s beloved Red Sox sealed a historic September swoon, blowing a nine-game lead in just 24 days and losing the last game of the season in excruciating fashion to keep them out of last year’s playoffs. My assumption was that both the Sox and the groundfishery had nowhere to go but up.
Less than a month later, news broke that a new scientific assessment of Gulf of Maine cod, one of the fishery’s keystone species, showed it was in worse shape than scientists previously thought, and even if all fishing was halted, it would not recover by the end of its legally mandated timeline in 2014. As a result, fishermen saw their allowable catch of the fish reduced by more than 20 percent—an outcome all parties knew was just a one-year band-aid on what would have to be far more drastic cuts in 2013.
So much for optimism.
Similar results emerged as the cod assessment’s methodology was applied to other species in the fishery. Looking to 2013 the groundfishery now faces additional allowable catch cuts of 72 percent on Gulf of Maine cod, 70 percent on its cousin Georges Bank cod, 51 percent on yellowtail flounder, and 69 percent on American plaice, commonly known as sole. In the face of these numbers, it’s time to step back and reconceive of what this fishery can and should look like in the future.
As I detailed in my report, “The Future of America’s First Fishery,” the New England groundfishery had a decades-old history of overfishing. In recent years that practice has almost entirely been curtailed as legally mandated catch limits kept total harvest to sustainable levels. But populations left decimated by past overexploitation have been slow to rebuild, as the recent assessments indicate.
Some fishermen believe the 2011 assessments are too pessimistic and don’t reflect the reality on and under the water. Their arguments would be stronger if their nets were bursting with fish and they were pushing the limits of their annual quotas. But this has not been the case.
According to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s data, as of August 23 nearly one-third of the way through the fishing year, not a single major groundfish stock had exceeded 33 percent of its annual quota (though Gulf of Maine winter flounder was at 32.3 percent), and groundfish-sector fishermen had only caught 16 percent of their allocated Gulf of Maine cod. The most likely explanation for this is that fishermen simply aren’t finding the fish.
Despite the evidence on the docks and in the processing houses, in an editorial this week, the fishing industry-friendly Gloucester Daily Times perpetuated a myth that has formed the foundation of much of its coverage of the groundfishery, saying, “The only way to fix the ongoing economic fisheries disaster is to address the cause of the disaster itself — and that’s [National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Jane] Lubchenco’s, NOAA’s and the corporately-driven Environmental Defense Fund’s job-killing catch share management system.”
The Times’s endless scapegoating of Lubchenco and NOAA is not only factually incorrect, it actively works against the best interests of the fishery. It doesn’t matter how we manage a fishery if there aren’t enough fish to fill nets.
Management systems didn’t cause these fish to disappear. Overfishing in the 1980s and early 1990s took care of that. And now environmental conditions and global climate change are making it harder for those fish to replenish themselves even as fishermen have dialed back their effort.
We’ve seen this story before, in this same fishery, just northeast of the international boundary line in Newfoundland, where cod crashed in the 1990s and have yet to recover. It may not be too late for New England to avoid this fate, but to do so will require a major cultural shift.
Several New England governors have asked the secretary of commerce and NOAA to declare a federal fishery disaster. If a declaration is granted—which it should be—and Congress appropriates money for disaster relief, all stakeholders must be prepared to use that funding to make drastic changes in this fishery. Not to a regulatory system that the Times and others would like to blame, but to the root problem: Too many boats chasing too few fish.
As painful as it will be for many fishermen whose livelihoods, culture, and generational history is inextricably tied to the groundfishery, the time has come for all fishery stakeholders to look at the big picture. Right now, this resource cannot sustain the fishing pressure being brought to bear by the fleet. Whether by design or by natural attrition, boats will have to drop out of this fishery.
Read the full story at the Center for American Progress