Yesterday the story of New England’s cod fishery took another tragic turn when the New England Fishery Management Council voted to drastically cut catch limits for New England’s two cod stocks—Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank cod—by 77 and 61 percent, respectively.
The Council’s action follows months of scientific debate on appropriate catch limits for cod. Recent assessments showed stocks at the lowest levels ever recorded and declining rapidly:
- Georges Bank cod biomass is at just 7% of healthy, sustainable levels.
- Gulf of Maine cod biomass is at 13-18% of healthy, sustainable levels.
- The last better-than-average year for young Georges Bank cod production was 1991.
- The amount of younger fish becoming available for fishing, known as recruitment, has been at the lowest estimated levels ever for the last five years running.
Confirming this dismal outlook, fishermen have been unable to find enough cod to even come close to filling their small quotas. The fish just aren’t there any more.
Despite this grim outlook, some in the industry asked for interim measures that would allow devastating overfishing to continue for yet another year, and the Massachusetts fisheries agency representative on the Council inexplicably asked for catch levels that were higher than the highest recommendations from scientists. NOAA regional administrator John Bullard rejected these efforts as legally and biologically unjustifiable.
Bullard told the Council yesterday that the “day of reckoning” for the fishery had arrived and that further management denial about the true state of the stocks could not be sanctioned. In this context, the Council chose to cut the catch – even in the face of industry opposition.
But the action to cut cod quota did not go far enough. The options implemented by the Council are the least aggressive cuts allowable by law, and under some assessments they still authorize overfishing. They push the limits of scientific advice and put the short-term economic interests over the long-term health of New England’s cod fishery and the viability of a whole generation of groundfishermen. Years of similarly short-sighted decision-making have caused the current biological disaster.
The Council unanimously rejected a motion to shut down the cod fishery entirely—an option that the NMFS Regional Director labeled as irresponsible, but one that may be the only chance for the recovery of New England’s cod stocks.
Canada took similar action to shut down its cod fishery in 1992, when its stocks were in a state remarkably similar to New England’s current disaster. Even their action in retrospect was too little and too late to avert a social and economic calamity; tens of thousands of people were put out of work, and cod stocks have still not fully recovered.
Unlike Canada, however, New England fishing communities are unlikely to see massive disaster relief funds. The New England Fishery Management Council now owns this problem and will bear full responsibility for the long term biological and socio-economic consequences of their decision. While CLF hopes that the Council’s gamble is not reckless, decades of bad Council bets in the past and the current scientific advice do not bode well. Time will tell.
Now is not the time for denial. It is not the time for timid decisions and taking unconscionable risks. It is time to make the painful, necessary steps towards a better future for fishing in New England. Rather than arguing over the scraps left after decades of mismanagement, we should shut the cod fishery down and protect whatever cod are left.
Barkley Van Vranken
Peter,
What is the status of the legal action that the CLF has submitted to force the reopening of the fishways on the St Croix River. I can’t understand why the New England Fish Management Council and others don’t connect the collapse of the Cod Fishery in the Golf of Maine with the loss of River Herring migrations, especially the migrations in and out of the the St Croix. Sure, we have to cut back on the allowable catch to protect the few fish we have left, but that’s not really what’s going to restore a healthy fishery. Don’t we first need to restore their environment so the Cod have adequate food sources needed to procreate. Isn’t the real problem that the Cod are starving to death? Why isn’t anyone making this point? It seems so obvious and so simple to remediate. What’s happened on the Kennebec, and soon will happen on the Penobscot, is a good start. But if we act fast, we could also make a change to the St Croix so this year’s Spring migration would be releasing fry into the Golf Of Maine next year.
Peter Shelley
Thank you, Barkley, for this observation and we could not agree with you more. While we absolutely have to protect the spawning cod that are left in the ocean as the base for restoring their populations in the future, those increased populations will not materialize, particularly in the coastal areas unless there is food. As Ted Ames at the Penobscot East Resource Center has meticulously documented, the loss of coastal cod populations in Maine coincided with the loss of river herring has Maine’s great rivers were dammed for power and blocked herring migrations into and out of those rivers. And those cod never came back despite population fluctuations in the overall Atlantic cod stock. Ted fervently believes, and we believe right along with him, that if those river herring populations are restored, the predators like cod will be attracted back to their old cruising grounds and local sub-populations of cod will reform over time. We are pushing our lawsuit to remove the dam on the St. Croix as hard as the court system will tolerate and we are also supporting a bill in the Maine Legislature that would require that the dam be removed. We are also channeling money into river herring restoration projects (mostly dam removals) throughout the Gulf of Maine. As you say, time is of the essence and everyone should get behind these efforts.
Thanks again,
Peter Shelley
Tony Austin
I am 150% in favor of your suing NMFS again. Nothing but your lawsuit seems to work with these people, and what you have right now is a leaderless agency with no guts. Fact is that current fishermen know nothing about what things were at the turn of the century (last one) or earlier. This is the “gimme” generation. I’ve been a commercial fisherman since I left academia in 1970. A native of Wellfleet, I now fish in North Carolina, and had it not been for the latest iteration of the Magnuson Act we wouldn’t have anything left down here. The Council system is broken everywhere but in the Pacific NW. If dragging and gill netting aren’t stopped, nothing will come back. Seems we can’t learn a damned thing the Canadian debacle… Suggest you consider Pauly’s shifting baseline when you make your arguments… I fished out of Harwich and Chatham and Wellfleet for years. Truth is that the Southeast is not in much better shape than New England….