Maine Voices: Plight of cod fishery should serve as wake-up call for policymakers By Peter Shelley, CLF
By Peter Shelley, senior counsel at the Conservation Law Foundation — Before New England’s most important fishery collapses completely and takes our codfish with it, solutions must start with the facts at hand: Many of New England’s groundfish, particularly Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank cod, are at historically low levels and may be in complete collapse. Read more
Not so fast, Councilor
Cod, NOAA, and Existence
Fishermen’s troubles are a direct result of mismanagement: inadequate science, unreasonable Maximum Sustainable Yield-crisis centric regulations, NOAA’s single species approach to a complex multi-species fishery, and then, of course, our beloved “returning profitability to fishermen” catch shares, a disastrous campaign to privatize and turn the fish resource into a Wall Street commodity at the expense and demise of working fishermen. Additionally, NOAA has traditionally ignored environmental factors, such as climate change, predation, and natural cycles, focusing solely on managing the fishermen, not the fish in their environment. If this cod stock is indeed “collapsing”, it is certainly not due to “over harvesting”—the groundfish managers’ Total Allowable Catch has been under-harvested for years, sometimes by 75%, but consistently underfished by at least 50%. https://fisherynation.com/dick-gracek
Leave a Reply