FROM THE CROWE’S NEST

Let's Bury It

On April 17 the New England Fisheries Management Council officially gave up on a ground fish sector management plan for 2009. The prospects were never very good. Driven by a blind federal bureaucratic mandate, riding in a process impossibly cumbersome and slow, with self interested passengers grabbing at the wheel, the process will likely crash before the new deadline in 2010.

The fight is over fewer and fewer fish. The game: those with the most money buy the most permits to acquire enough days at sea to stay in the game. The last boat floating gets the last fish, end of game.

It is human nature to want to be best at the game, get the most, and for it win security and respect. That worked for hundreds of centuries while the fish reproduced faster than hooks and lines caught them. But the industrial model changed all that, real fast.

Management meetings are about days at sea, engine horsepower, boat length, groping for a TAC, now named annual catch limit, investment equals access—the industrial model. It is like discussing the number, size and days that backhoes can go out to weed a field of carrots for maximum yield.

The process is traveling away from the solution. As the fleet shrinks, it becomes more industrialized, fewer boats indiscriminately sweeping the resource to make it profitable for fewer people.

Until the focus is on how the public resource functions—how, where and when species spawn and grow, how to catch them, how to leave the best ones in the water to spawn, how to fish selectively, how to re-tune the system to grow fish at former optimum levels, management plans will continue to go nowhere.

Not a lot was known scientifically about these functions when the industrial fleet appeared a hundred years ago. Fishermen knew it. There are fishermen/scientists today who know it, but they are not allowed to get near the wheel of the process. The Midcoast Fishermen’s Association and Penobscot East are developing 21st century models. The industrial model has grown beyond the capacity of the resource. It is time to turn around.

Managers and fishermen need to look at ways to keep more fishermen on the water operating at a scale that matches the regional and Gulf wide reproductive capacity of the resource.

The industrial model is dead, let’s bury it.