Restrictions delayed another five years
Area fishermen have won a decisive victory in their fight against stringent
federal regulations that many said threatened to put an end to the history of
independent commercial fishing in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
On Jan. 14, the federal agency that regulates commercial fishing signaled
that it will allow up to five additional years for some decimated fish populations
to replenish, giving New England fishermen a reprieve from the start of prohibitive
new restrictions on their livelihood.
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Fishermen here, whose families have made a living fishing cod, haddock and
flounder for generations, have in recent years questioned the accuracy of the
government’s fish stock assessments, which directly affect their livelihoods.
Without the reprieve, many fishermen say they were resigned to the prospect
of closing up their tackle boxes and selling their trawlers.
“What this does is, it’s pushing back the target date, so as long as stocks
continue to increase, the fishermen will be allowed to catch more fish,” said
David Beutel, a fisheries extension specialist at the University of Rhode Island.
“The point of the fishermen, particularly in Southern New England, is the fish
are recovering. Just go out and look at it. In my time on the water in the last
couple of years, I would agree with them. I saw more fish then I’d seen in a
long time. So I think it will have a very positive effect down here.”
The reprieve comes after a highly publicized embarrassment for the government
scientists charged with analyzing fish populations. This past fall, the National
Marine Fisheries Service caused uproar in the local fishing industry when officials
admitted that the agency’s records of seasonal fish stock might have been undercounted.
On Sept. 3, researchers aboard the agency’s research boat discovered that
the vessel’s fishing net might not have been properly aligned while being towed
in the water, possibly since February 2000. It was a major admission, because
the contentious data they compile help determine how many fish commercial fishermen
can legally pull from the ocean.
Fishermen, and their powerful lobby of advocates in Washington D.C., praised
the delay of stricter regulations.
“The fishermen have sacrificed greatly during the rebuilding restrictions
that have been put on them, and this will help to insure that we will still
have a ground fishing fleet in years to come,” Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.,
said in a statement.
For most of the last decade, New England fishers worked with restrictions
on catch, gear and where they can drop their nets. Large areas in the Atlantic
have been permanently closed to fishing, in the hope that they would serve as
fish nurseries and lead to the replenishment of groundfish.
According to fishermen that’s exactly what has happened, and for the last
several fishing seasons they have complained that fish were far more plentiful
than scientists seemed to think.
But the data stubbornly refused to show the increase, and no one in the industry
forgets the early 1990s, when groundfish stocks plunged to a third of their
level a decade earlier. Improvements in fishing technology created the fear
that fishermen had the power to fish every fish out of the sea.
In 1999 a handful of environmental groups, led by the Boston-based Conservation
Law Foundation, sued the NMFS, saying the agency was turning a blind eye toward
fishermen who were increasingly violating federal regulations restricting fishing.
A federal court judge agreed two years ago, and set a timeline for stricter
regulations.
Those rules have since been relaxed twice, most recently in December, when
U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler delayed the deadline for the new groundfish
regulations – known as Amendment 13 – from Aug. 22, 2003 to May 1, 2004.
Now regulators have moved even further in that direction, extending the deadline
for rebuilding stocks of cod and other groundfish from 2009 to 2014. Bill Hogarth,
director of the fisheries agency, said during a briefing on Capitol Hill that
he would support using 2004 as the “start of the rebuilding clock for appropriate
species.”
The NMFS has denied that its trawl error had any significant effect on fish
counts, and a spokeswoman for the agency said that Hogarth’s recent decision
was in no way influenced by the apparent fish counting gaffe on the research
boat.
“This is a legal question that’s been on the table since the lawsuit’s been
decided,” said Teri Frady, a spokeswoman for the NMFS.
Once finalized, the Amendment 13 regulations could give up to 10 years or
longer for cod, haddock, flounder and other groundfish species to regenerate.
The details will be worked out by the New England Fisheries Management Council,
which writes fishing regulations subject to review by NMFS, a branch of the
U.S. Commerce Department.
Environmental groups that sued the fisheries agency and have accused it of
bending to political pressure from fishermen have not issued public responses
to the recent decision.
“At this point it’s premature for the Conservation Law Foundation to take
a position,” said Christopher A. D’Ovidio, Rhode Island office director of advocacy
for the Conservation Law Foundation, which led the coalition of environmental
groups that sued the federal government in 1999.
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