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That’s Wrong



 Marine Fisheries management is difficult. The recent call for drastic cod quota cuts being proof. Managers and their scientists are not able to see the world fish inhabit, so with trickles of data from sensors dragged through the water along side a questionable trawl they judge the fish stocks.

Trawl surveys gather data to run though computer models. What comes out is the stock assessment, which is the scientist’s final word on the condition of a stock every three years. The scientists are highly trained and the modelssophisticated. But whatever they are doing in the collection of data is obviously not.

These scientists are not looking for fish, they are doing what amounts to a random trawl to see what lands in the net. Fishermen fish where they expect, from experience, to find fish. One group is trawling for data, the other trawling for fish with experiential data.

The result of sketchy surveys has been twenty years of wildly fluctuating assessments that turn the industry on it head every three years. What’s worse is that apparently there is no one other than the fishermen wants to fix it.

Federal fisheries bureaucrats with widely varying training and management experience, neither necessarily in fisheries, move thru various jobs. Which means any particular newly seated directing bureaucrat will be plugging fisheries into their government management formulas and experience.

It is the nature of bureaucracy that funding, hierarchy, politics, and protocol, which have little to do with what is going on below the water’s surface, guide judgment and decision making.

The scientists are operating in another branch of the same bureaucracy. No government scientists or bureaucrats are publicly asking why there are wild fluctuations, and what the fluctuations say about the credibility of the assessments.

These highly questionable conclusions have thrashed fishermen around for decades as they struggle to hold on to their livelihoods. Now inshore fishermen, the most vulnerable, will be hit hardest by these proposed cuts.

As the gap between bureaucrats insulated from external economic threats and institutionally protected from internal challenges and the fishermen grows, so grows the inequity of the system.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle, conservationists, twenty-year veterans of the process, and scientists are questioning this assessment.

But in spite of the pending social devastation, the sad thing is the bureaucrat’s job security will likely trump doing the right thing and that’s wrong.