FROM THE CROWE’S NEST

This Direction Must Be Set By Us

Heading for the darkest day of the year, in one of the darkest years for the fishing industry in Maine, one bright light is shining from Port Clyde. The establishment of the Midcoast Fishermen’s Association (MFA) and the Community Supported Fishery (CSF) there is the beginning of a break from the government driven policies that have dragged the industry down.

Working to develop gear that helps restore stocks and habitat, fishing in ways that sustain and grow the local marine resources, and dealing directly with local markets to re-establish the network for high quality seafood that regional communities want and need, is their basic plan.

This winter fishermen in Port Clyde have established a program to sell what is very probably the best quality, cleanest shrimp on any market in the world. In recent years market prices collapsed when processors fled regulatory cuts to the fishery. Building on the successes that community supported agriculture programs have found around the country, the CSF is starting small.

The demand for local foods is out there and growing. Food brought from across the country, and across the globe not only costs more when all the costs are calculated, it makes no sense. Consum- ing food imported from countries where there is zero oversight over production, while fresh shrimp from the cold waters of the Gulf of Maine goes unsold, is beyond ridiculous.

The government’s capitulation to corporate industrial efforts to control the nation’s marine resources, the commons, under the guise of “efficiency” is not only a betrayal of every fisherman’s right to access, but a blind refusal to recognize what must be done to end the bulldozing of the resource by larger and larger bottom line corporate profit machines.

The pay to play government policies that brought taxpayers the global financial scam, is reflected in the politics that drives fisheries consolidation here and in other countries. Token references to doing what is best for American fishing communities in the Magnuson-Stevens Act carries no weight against the corporate lobbyists in this multi-million dollar industry.

The fishermen of Port Clyde have said, “We can’t look to government for direction; this direction must be set by us.”