Frank Miles of Kodiak, who made the proposal, said that grandfather/hired skipper privileges had led to widespread abuse of the 20 percent boat ownership requirement, and that the hired skipper privileges promoted leasing of quota and the common practice of charging excessive rents. Read the rest here 17:58
NILS STOLPE: The New England groundfish debacle (Part IV): Is cutting back harvest really the answer?
While it’s a fact that’s hardly ever acknowledged, the assumption in fisheries management is that if the population of a stock of fish isn’t at some arbitrary level, it’s because of too much fishing. Hence the term “overfished.” Hence the mandated knee jerk reaction of the fisheries managers to not enough fish; cut back on fishing. What of other factors? They don’t count. It’s all about fishing, because fishing is all that the managers can control; it’s their Maslow’s Hammer. When it comes to the oceans it seems as if it’s about all that the industry connected mega-foundations that support the anti-fishing ENGOs with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in “donations” are interested in controlling. Read the article here
Hopefully this becomes law in all IFQ / catch share fisheries.
Catch Shares in NE was an atomic bomb. I’d like to see all of these programs disappear. This change should have been written into these schemes from the beginning.