BULLARD, SHELLEY, and COD: or Fish Being and Nothingness – Featured Writer Dick Grachek
“Returning Our New England Fisheries to Profitability”: “You’re doin’ a great job, Brownie” aka, Janie, Johnny, Petey. You should be proud. Mission Accomplished?
In her resignation email Lubchenco made the gravity-defying claim that she had made “notable progress” in “ending overfishing, rebuilding depleted stocks, and returning fishing to profitability”; but soon after, John Bullard “In an interview at the Times, Bullard said the telling figure was that the fleet caught only 54 percent of the allowed catch in 2012, and reasoned from that statistic that there is a dearth of inshore cod, a situation that warrants serious action to reverse.” Richard Gaines March 8, 2013 Gloucester Daily Times, “NOAA head explains stock stand”
Peter Shelley of Conservation Law Foundation explains the Cod Dilemma in a wormy little video he so humorously named “For Cod’s Sake”…..continued
In todays GDT, “Fishermen challenge stats in limit cuts”
The widely used rationale for the drastic cuts in groundfish landings — that the waters of the North Atlantic hold far fewer fish than previously thought — is being challenged by two of Gloucester’s best known fishermen, Joe Orlando and Northeast Seafood Coalition policy leader Vito Giacalone.
Orlando said the need to avoid reaching his limit on the choke stocks in his portfolio constrained his fishing for stocks of which he was granted a large allocation.
”If I’d caught all my yellowtail in June, I’d have been shut down in August,” he said. “When species had been around in the past, we pounded them. Now, we can’t. Now you have to juggle and jiggile.”
“This indicator has been completely overlooked,” Giacalone said, “by those who continue to point to the 2012 fleet under harvest of the GOM cod allowable catch as being conclusive evidence that the ‘cod are gone and therefore the science has got it right.’”
“Their argument is full of holes — and I accuse them all of being intentionally misleading with this argument because they are unwilling to offer the fact that in 2010, 2011 and even the start of the 2012 fishing year, lease costs for GOM cod averaged over $1.25. (That’s) greater than 50 percent of the average day boat price of cod to fishermen.
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/local/x701039951/Fishermen-challenge-stats-in-limit-cuts
Comments from Cohan and Grachek geordieking and cusk at the article are worth a read. BH