Once upon a far-off time, folks lived in neighborly communities where they knew each other as tinkers, tailors, soldiers and sailors, and sent their children down to the corner mom-and-pop store for eggs and milk from Farmer Brown’s chickens and cow.

Along came faceless corporate efficiency and big-box stores that swallowed up the mom-and-pops and farmed out tinkering and tailoring to China, leaving communities rootless and neighbors disconnected.

“Mom-and-pop” fishermen fear their small businesses could be swallowed up and their communities disrupted by similar corporate forces.

And many fear the federal government is hastening the process.

The analogy is inexact, but there are many small-boat fishermen who think they will be put out of business by a new management process that for the first time would allocate catch shares to individual fishermen and many fear could risk consolidation of fishing opportunities to large corporate entities.

The management process in question involves the setting of annual catch limits (ACL) and a wholesale strategy of establishing “catch shares” to ensure that limits for each fishery are not exceeded.

Many fishing interests are alarmed by a statement from NOAA that says that transitioning to catch shares is a priority. They say that catch shares should not be viewed as a panacea for fisheries management. And they say the strategy privatizes the resource and makes fishing rights a commodity that can be sold to the highest bidder, thus risking consolidation to big business and the eventual exclusion of the small-boat owner/operator fleet and the resulting demise of fishing communities.

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