FROM THE CROWE’S NEST

The Taxes Fishermen Pay

Consolidation has been at the center of the financial collapse of the largest economy in history. Efficiency was the claim and stated goal of U.S.financial institutions. They lobbied and manipulated congress to do away with industry safeguards in place in the 1980s. Their collective power enabled financiers to do whatever they willed with the backbone of the economy. They did what many predicted.

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), running with the ambiguous goal to end overfishing is the agent of consolidation in the fishing industry. Plans for much bigger cuts in days at sea have just been announced. They are giving over access to the resource to fewer and larger corporations through reductions in access to more and more small boat fishermen. This will change forever what the fishing industry has been for thousands of years. It has always been a resource open to the smallest of boats, to many families, in many fishing towns. It has been a community builder.

Consolidation and technology has the capacity to make all that disappear. Consolidation will not result in oceans full of fish. It will simply be a bigger machine extracting the total allowable catch (TAC), with no regard to the problems NMFS has failed to recognize. NMFS does not know why stocks are down. Having fewer boats in the water is the best they can come up with. This is incompetence corporations can live with, maybe desire.

NMFS believes that fewer boats will be easier for them to manage. Alan Greenspan, a lot of banks, and no congressmen understood the ruse contrived by the financial industry. How will these bureaucrats, who understand little of fishing as it has been conducted, be able to fathom a corporate smoke screen?

The scallop industry is being threatened with individual transferable quota (ITQ) consolidation that will surely drive out all but the giants. The giants who will do nothing to improve the resource, have the power to stifle opponents, and leave little in the communities along shore.

The Magnuson-Stevens Act ironically supports consolidation and to a lesser extent fishing community preservation. Delivering boxes of frozen fish to Wal-Mart is not working in the fishing industry.

Fishing is boats, people, fresh fish, shoreside support, groups of people who live and work in a fishing culture that they and their forebears created. If NMFS refuses to recognize and respect that, then they should not be drawing checks from the taxes fishermen pay.