F R O M   T H E   C R O W E ’ S   N E S T

Then Funding For Fishermen



The trajectory of the devastating failure of management to restore New England ground fish stocks intersected the rising star of the lobster fishery in April. Facing quota cuts of more than 70% on May 1st Maine ground fishermen were desperately looking for a way to keep their boats in the water.

Dragging the bottom for groundfish, lobster is inevitably bycatch. A bill in the Maine legislature would allow the remaining 45 Maine draggers with lobster dragged in federal waters to land them at the Portland Fish Exchange. They now steam to Gloucester where it is legal to land them.

The Portland Fish Exchange is a private and publicly owned facility. The public part meant the government could be lobbied to try to do something to pull the Portland Fish Exchange from the edge of shutting down and bring cash to the ground fish boats.

This meant the governor’s DMR Commissioner had to go along with it knowing the 6,000 licensed lobstermen in Maine would demand that the bill be defeated, which they did and it unanimously was.

Burning up profits from lobster bycatch by running to Gloucester was a legitimate economic concern. Maine lobstermen’s fears of a directed dragged lobster fishery operating without the regulations that have made the Maine lobster fishery among the best managed fisheries in the world was also a legitimate argument. Raising false hopes for ground fishermen while making threats to the foundation of Maine’s coastal economy is politics not economics.

Anyone who pays attention to the New England groundfish management process, and too few people do, knows that there is much more going on than the equitable and sustainable management of fish.

Peer reviewed alternate and more current scientific research on the resource is out there, and that’s where the agency keeps it. The process is the problem. Dragged lobster, bluefin, or whelks will not save the exchange or the groundfish fleet.

While the process lumbers along, wrestling over bureaucratic, scientific and political turf, fishermen are fighting for their lives. Billions of tax dollars have been dumped into a failed management process, but not a dime to the taxpayers who fish.

Fishing is an economic issue, not political. If the management system exists to create a sustainable wild fishery and believes it can, by definition it has to include the fishermen. Funding for managers, then funding for fishermen.