U.S. declares disaster for fishery in Northeast – ‘This year has been the worst I’ve ever seen it’
By JESS BIDGOOD and KIRK JOHNSON
13 September 2012 BOSTON – The Commerce Department on Thursday issued a formal disaster declaration for the Northeastern commercial groundfish fishery, paving the way for financial relief for the battered industry and the communities that depend on it. To many here, the declaration underscored the urgency of a groundfish depletion that has become apparent to many scientists and some fishermen who work in New England’s waters. “Fishermen in the Northeast are facing financial hardships because of the unexpectedly slow rebuilding of fish stocks,” Rebecca Blank, the acting secretary of commerce, said in a statement. The declaration, which allows Congress to appropriate financial relief for the industry but does not guarantee any funds, comes after an assessment last year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that found that the population of Gulf of Maine cod — a critical commercial species here — was about 20 percent of its rebuilding target. Those findings increased the likelihood that federal catch-limits will be cut significantly in 2013 (regulators say cuts for some species could be higher than 70 percent), which some fishermen feel could further cripple an industry already suffering from withering stocks. “This year has been the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said John Our, who has caught only 500 of the 180,000 pounds of cod he was allotted this year and has shifted his focus to dogfish instead. “It is a disaster, I’ll give them that. I just don’t see any fish being landed.” Fishery disaster declarations are not novel for the agency — it often makes at least several per year — but are unusual for a fishery that has been actively managed for decades, according to Peter Shelley, senior counsel at the Conservation Law Foundation, which supported this declaration despite opposing previous calls for such an action. “The problem wasn’t that fishermen were overfishing,” Mr. Shelley said, “but that their limits were set too high — because of a failure to understand how the system has been changing.” The declaration comes as fishery management takes a prominent role in some of the region’s political campaigns. Senator Scott P. Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, recently released an advertisement featuring fishermen in Gloucester, Mass.; Representative John F. Tierney, a Democrat fighting a tough re-election battle in the state’s coastal Sixth Congressional District, and Representative William Keating, a Democrat who is running in the Ninth Congressional District, which includes Cape Cod, have both pushed federal regulators for the declaration. The Commerce Department also declared commercial fishery disaster relief for three regions in Alaska where Chinook salmon catches have plummeted — on the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, both of which flow into the Bering Sea off Alaska’s west coast, and in the Cook Inlet southwest of Anchorage. In asking for federal help this summer, Gov. Sean Parnell, a Republican, described a ripple effect through an outdoor economy, and the simultaneous challenges for the deeply rural communities where subsistence fishing is an element of culture and survival. The numbers indicate a sudden, stunning decline in recent years, about which scientists have not settled on an explanation. On the Yukon, for example, 1,488 pounds of salmon were harvested in 2011, down from more than 859,000 pounds in 2006, a state study found.
