F R O M T H E C R O W E ’ S N E S T
Sound Management or Planned Ocean Resource Grab?
The process that led to the recent Gulf of Maine cod closure highlights a lack of management accountability.
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) preaches the importance of accountability. But from “trawlgate” to the NOAA enforcement extortion scandal to this controversial assessment, the comment of one veteran New Hampshire fisherman applies: “There is something rotten here. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
Fishermen work for themselves. Some fished with their fathers, who fished with their fathers. They accumulate knowledge about a world that, for the most part, can’t be seen or understood in a practical way without being in it, studying it, hearing it and hearing about it from elder practitioners.
A good fisherman is a master of the knowledge of the world he lives and works in. This is a profession conducted in a constantly changing environment, where the quarry is located using a database learned by experience and dependent on memory and the intelligence to synthesize data.
Why are fishermen not tapped for the knowledge that management scientists cannot find in their office, but desperately need? Bureaucratic turf war; standard office politics; agenda and job security flowing from the top down are a part of the reality.
But there is more at work in federal fisheries management than the bureaucratic usual.
What is known and apparent is that our shrunken world has made resources dear and the demand to consolidate and control their ownership strong. The Environmental Defense Fund has made it clear to investors it will help privatize the fisheries in exchange for financial support. This is a multi-billion-dollar, continuously renewing asset that increases in value every time a new consumer is born.
Pulling the resource from under fishermen and communities would seem to be illegal under the Magnuson-Stevens Act. But if no one sees it being done, maybe it didn’t happen that way. Fishermen are the barrier between a free common resource and a privately-owned, faceless investment scheme.
Transfer of common rights is not new. The lobbying influence on fisheries management and the threat to drag the Maine lobster fishery into the battle over control of New England groundfish should not be underestimated.
Fishermen need the legal support of Congress to level the playing field. An investigation of the financial and political influence driving fisheries management actions and policy could bring some justice to what looks like a planned ocean resource grab.
Read more industry letters and reporting on the cod closure and lobster industry involvement here.