‘Fraught With Defects’, Connecticut Lawmakers Urge Reforms To Fishing Regulations
Connecticut’s congressional delegation is leading a renewed push for reform of federal commercial fishing quotas critics say are out of date, wasteful, fail to respond to climate change and unfair to New England fishermen. Warming ocean temperatures are pushing vast numbers of fish like black bass, summer flounder and scup farther north into New England waters, according to the delegation’s letter to federal officials, but old fishing quotas severely restrict how many of those fish commercial boats from this region are allowed to keep. The out-of-date quota system means that fishermen from North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland are allowed to take much larger numbers of those types of fish, even when they come to New England’s offshore waters to net them, according to a joint letter by Connecticut and Massachusetts members of Congress. Read the rest here 20:15
The solution should not be to take quota away from other commercial fishermen.
Greg DiDomenico
Garden State Seafood Association
That’s correct, taking fish away from anyone is certainly not the answer. Management schemes that pit fishermen against fishermen are not good for anyone involved—including the fish. What would help is some accuracy and integrity in the surveys and assessments of these stocks.
Cooperative surveys and co-management that actually reflect the irrefutable abundance experienced by fishermen, who happen to be “monitoring the stocks” every day of every season year after year, is what we need.
For years fishermen up and down the coast have been reporting more fish in more places than they’ve seen in decades. While the NGO lawsuit cowed, and politically driven fishery managers shrink the “allowable catch quotas” year after year based on stale and compromised assessments.
There are certainly reports of fish usually associated with the waters South of Cape Hatteras venturing further North in recent years; but that isn’t necessarily an indication that these same species can no longer be found on their traditional grounds as well.
It’s not really a matter of fish abandoning one area in favor of another as much as it is that the stock populations have grown to proportions that requires their spreading out in order to survive.
With surveys and assessments and quotas that connect to an ocean reality (i.e., other than the reality constructs of the Science Center’s stock populationists’ computer models), we could have productive and sustainable fisheries—no matter where the fish decide to swim!
Totally agree Dick. It’s not about taking from anyone but getting what is deserved by all after the years of sacrifice to bring these stocks back. That was the promise way back when this all started.
Well where is our reward for the decades of sacrifice? Sea bass, tautog, fluke are everywhere on the beaches of the east coast being captured and thrown away while the nation imports 93% of the seafood it consumes. Those in charge of this charade should be brought up on charges of crimes against nature
The solution has to be fishermen coming together in support of one another. Even those who the current system is working for have to recognize that if we don’t hang together, we will all hang separately. There will be plenty of fish to go around, as soon as we get the science and the government sponsored stock assessments exposed for the lies they continue to perpetuate.