June 20, 2016 — The following is excerpted from a story published Saturday by the New Bedford Standard-Times:

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — When you talk about fishing here in New Bedford, you have to start with the whaling era — and the lessons learned.

For decades, the pursuit of whaling chugged along without any dramatic changes. The ships, the equipment, the culture remained essentially the same for years, feeding countless families, lining countless pockets … until the bonanza ran out and the industry collapsed in the early part of the 20th century, never to be revived.

The fishing industry, both local and national, might have fallen into that same trap, but 40 years ago the U.S. government changed the game, adopting the most sweeping changes in the laws governing fisheries that reverberates to this day.

On April 13, 1976, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act was passed and immediately accomplished two major goals.

One, it set into motion a new and unique scheme of regulation to rebuild dwindling fish stocks, a system dramatically different than anything else the government had tried until 1976.

Two, it expelled foreign fishing vessels from fishing inside a 200-mile limit from America’s shoreline.

It isn’t talked about much today, but until 1976 the capacity of the foreign fleet exceeded the Americans, sending huge factory ships into fertile places like Georges Bank to virtually vacuum the fish into the hold and freeze it on the spot, allowing the ships to stay for weeks at a time. “There were West Germans, Poles, Russians, East Germans,” recalled former fisherman James Kendall, now a seafood consultant.

In 1975, the National Marine Fisheries Service reported there were 133 foreign fishing vessels fishing on Georges Bank. The Magnuson-Stevens Act ended that decisively.

Since 1976, much has changed. The unions, which once represented the fishermen and the workers in the fish houses, virtually disappeared from the waterfront. The venerable fish auction at the Wharfinger Building on City Pier 3 is now a museum piece, since the brokers years ago put down their chalkboards and picked up computer screens. Today it has evolved into a computerized display auction elsewhere on the waterfront, with complete transparency and documentation, and bidders located across the nation.

What else has changed?

For lack of a better term, everything.

Where, oh where has our groundfish fleet gone?

At the BASE New Bedford Seafood Display Auction, co-owner Richard Canastra called up data of groundfish sales in recent years that demonstrate a dropoff of more than 30 percent in the last few years alone.

Today there are some days that don’t warrant conducting the auction at all. “Sometimes it’s like a candy store,” he said. “Five pounds of this and three pounds of that.”

Much of the blame for the shrinking of the groundfish fleet, particularly in New Bedford and Gloucester, is laid at the feet of the catch shares and sector management introduced in 2010 by NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco. It dispensed with most of the old days-at-sea  system, which had reduced the annual days at sea to 50, down from around 225, that the boats once had available to them.

The term “sectors” was unfamiliar to the industry when NOAA announced their arrival in 2010. Essentially they are cooperatives, in which individual boats are grouped together along with their catch allocations, and the sector manager manages them as efficiently as he or she can.

This was predicted to cause a consolidation of the industry into the bigger players as the smaller ones weren’t getting enough quota to make it profitable to fish.

For some boat owners, the problem was that the catch shares were determined by the history of the boats but the practice of shack left no paper trail, no formal record, so catch shares were reduced in many cases.

Dr. Brian Rothschild, dean emeritus of the UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology and a critic of NOAA, noted that many boat owners found that they can “own it and lease it out and obtain money in windfall profits” without even going fishing.

Oh, those pesky environmentalists!

It was “not right from the beginning that NOAA has enforced this,” Rothschild said. “On top of that, NOAA enforcement didn’t come from a desire to make good public policy but because it came under the influence of organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund,” he said.

Catch shares and sector management have, however, withstood legal challenges in federal court, because of a legal doctrine named Chevron, in which government institutions are allowed to interpret laws such as Magnuson any way they wish unless the departures from congressional intent are egregious.

Rothschild is among those who believe that sector management under Magnuson has been ignoring key provisions of the act, notably the socio-economic impact evaluation and the instruction to use the best available science. That has largely excluded scientists outside of NOAA itself.

Outside scientists have occasionally run rings around NOAA. For example, SMAST’s Dr. Kevin  Stokesbury’s invention of a camera apparatus to quite literally count the scallops on the seabed individually has revolutionized scallop management, opened the door to a treasure trove of healthy scallops, and made New Bedford the No. 1 fishing port in the nation.

But NOAA now employs its own camera apparatus. It conducts regular surveys of fish populations and that has been a very sore point at times in recent years.

This is a departure from the days before Magnuson, when fishermen were issued permits for various species and were left largely on their own to discover how many fish were in the ocean, which were already dwindling at the time.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times