More Than Meets the Eye in
Amendment 18, says
Portsmouth Fisherman

by Mike Crowe

In anticipation of finalizing the Amendment 18 process at the New England Fishery Management Council meeting, September 29–October 1, NEFMC arranged meetings in five towns on the New England coast in August and a webinar on August 20. The meetings consisted of a presentation by NEFMC followed by a public comment period. NEFMC’s stated goal was to “solicit public comment regarding a range of alternatives under consideration.” The webinar and one of the meetings drew no participants from the public. One of the five meetings drew only two members of the public and neither wished to comment.

At the remaining meetings, public comment from fishermen addressed consolidation in the industry and the price fishermen pay for quota under the catch share program. Large fleet owners denied that there was consolidation. The council referred to the report by an outside company that reported no significant consolidation in the New England fleet.

Critics of the process over several years have pointed to a schizophrenic posture by federal regulators who say they want to shrink the fleet, which means the small boat fleet, to make it more profitable for the remaining boats. At the same time, they are preaching fleet diversity, small boat representation and preserving fishing communities.

The response of fishermen to the August meetings has been that they are demoralized by the Amendment 18 process. They say the percentage of consolidation that will be allowed will cause catastrophic consolidation of the New England fishing fleet.

Lifetime Portsmouth, N.H., fisherman and former multi-term council member David Goethel said, “Compass, the independent group that concluded there was no significant consolidation in the fishery, used criteria that were more in line with an anti-trust action. They therefore could not detect or predict collusion among current or future fishery participants. They should have been asking, ‘What do you want the fishery and communities to look like?’ ”

Goethel said there were a number of problems with the NEFMC and the federal fisheries management system. One, he said, was that the sector system can use the protections of confidentiality acts that corporations benefit from. Therefore, problems within the sector system, such as the rising price of quota or anything else within the system, cannot be studied. Goethel said he has seen problems with Amendment 18 from the beginning. The council, he said, moved on from Amendment 16 before basic ground rules were established and now, he said, new parts are being cobbled together.

He cited from his long history with the management process an instance from the Amendment 7 process in the 1990s. Amendment 7 took out small mesh fisheries for stocks like whiting, under the rationale that bycatch exceeded 5%. At the time, he said, the National Marine Fisheries Service disregarded industry objections to this ruling on a number of occasions. “Only when a number of state congressmen threatened to have Congress question the budget of the (NMFS) agency did it bring an almost immediate response to fishermen’s objections from the regional administrator,” said Goethel.

“Because management lurches from crisis to crisis, Amendment 18 has lost its way in the process,” Goethel said. “Most fishermen have thrown in the towel and that is why there was so little attendance at the Amendment 18 meetings in August. It’s too much.”