As of Wednesday cod quotas for Cape Cod fishermen have been slashed 61 percent on Georges Bank and 77 percent in the Gulf of Maine (north of Provincetown). The bad news is they’ll hardly notice it. “The reality is we were at those levels the last fishing year. We’ve already taken the cuts. We can’t find codfish,” observed Tom Dempsey the Policy Director for the Cape Cod Commercial Hook-fishermen’s Association. continued
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
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