FROM THE CROWE'S NEST

No More Manuals, Grants, and Trusts

The federal process for trying to do something about the marine fishery resource is as complicated and useless as only bean-counting bureaucrats can make it.

The New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) has been under pressure from Congress to meet rebuilding goals with a looming deadline. The Magnuson Stevens Act (MSA) is demanding that catch limits and accountability measures also be in place. The despised time-based days-at-sea system will soon be replaced with a weight-based catch share system, but many fishermen will not be getting enough quota to get by.

Fishermen, scientists, politicians, business people, and academics agree the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) policies have failed all these years. But the agency has the momentum of a lumbering government bureaucracy behind it. Its process moves so slow that NMFS fish survey data is out of date and dead wrong when any given final rule comes down three years later.

Their process is more about counting fish, than growing them. Scientists and fishermen who know how fish spawn, grow, live, and should be caught are brushed off.

Fishermen are so at the end of their ropes they are marching on Washington on February 24 to demand changes to the MSA, federal fisheries management policy, and more time.

Into the progress void in recent years has entered a new breed of shark – the nongovernmental organization (NGO) — some tagged with an environmental prefix. PEW Trusts, the inheritance arm of the Sun Oil fortune, funds many of these environmental NGOs. They have thrown their money at Congress, picked up council seats, and crowded into fisheries meetings. Some of them would like no fish taken out of the ocean, unless of course it is by a corporation with shares bought on Wall Street.

All the science, research and economic studies that are critical of industrial fishing disaster stories from around the world, have not deterred the feds or the ENGOs on their quest to get fishermen off the water and corporations in their place.

Those whose skill sets are limited to reading bureaucracy manuals, writing grants, and milking inheritance laundry trusts are blocking the way to a real fisheries solution.

The MSA should be amended, the voices of reasoned fisheries habitat scientists need to be heard, and the rights of fishermen and fishing communities have to be respected.