BY TED LEONARD
PLYMOUTH, Massachusetts - "It made me sick to my stomach,"
Jerry Grillo, 49, a Gloucester fisherman, told the New England
Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) at its monthly meeting May
26. He explained how, in order to comply with federal
regulations, he recently had to throw overboard thousands of
pounds of cod snared in one hour. Under current regulations he
has to throw them back in the sea, where they will die, or he
will face a penalty.
Earlier this spring the council had recommended emergency regulations that set the catch limit for cod at 200 pounds per day in the Gulf of Maine, which stretches from Cape Cod to Maine. The U.S. Commerce Department approved the measures.
"It's morally wrong," another fisherman told the meeting. He explained that in a few weeks he will begin to fish for flounder. An indirect product of catching his limit of 1,000 pounds of flounder will be catching 2,000 pounds of cod. He too, under the current regulations, will have to throw them back in the sea or face a penalty. "You have us destroying the stock we protected for the last three years," he told the council.
Another fishermen asked the council, "How can you legally destroy fish?"
Two days before the meeting, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) issued an emergency edict that on May 28, fishermen would be limited to catching 30 pounds, or about three cod a day. In 1998 the trip limit (the amount you can catch in one day) for cod was 400 pounds and in 1997 it was 1,000 pounds.
In response to this new attack on their livelihood, some 150 fishermen crowded the NEFMC meeting, determined to be heard. Since January inshore fishermen - those who fish near the coast - in the Gulf of Maine have faced regulations that not only reduced their trip limits but also closed areas of the gulf to cod fishing and in some cases to all fishing.
The regulations hurt the small fishermen the hardest. David Marciano, a fisherman from Gloucester, demanded of one of the council members, Barbara Stevenson, what right she had to make these decisions. "You own four million-dollar boats," he declared.
Another fisherman suggested to the counsel, "We should send half of you home without paychecks and see how you survive," so they could feel what the regulations mean to small fishermen.
The emergency regulations were based on a study done last fall by the NMFS scientific center that said the cod stock in the Gulf of Maine was on the verge of collapsing. For more than six hours, one fisherman after another disputed that claim. Paul Vitale from Gloucester, pointed to what he called "my favorite chart" in the council's recently released "Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan." It showed more than twice as much cod was landed in 1998 compared to what the council projected in its "target total allowable catch."
"Where did the fish come from?" Vitale asked.
Paul Cohan, a leader of the Gulf of Maine Fishermen's Alliance, explained to the Boston Herald, "If the fishermen thought there was this level of crisis with this species we would abide by these regulations, no problem. But they are 180 degrees off what we are seeing out there on the water."
Other fishermen pointed out they had caught in four weeks one-third of the year's "total allowable catch" set by the NMFS in the Gulf of Maine. In fact the emergency edict of 30 pounds a day was triggered because of the record amount caught.
The lawyer for the NEFMC told the council they could not rescind the edict. The only thing they could do was request an emergency action by U.S. Secretary of Commerce William Daley. At the end of the day, the council reversed itself completely and voted 9 to 8 to adopt a motion requesting "emergency action to increase the daily cod trip limit to 700 pounds per day." Daley has 30 days to decide on the request.
Ted Leonard is a member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees Local 311 in Lawrence, Massachusetts.