THE WISHES OF A FEW GREEDY OR MISGUIDED PERSONS…
… have taken precedence over an entire industry’s health and welfare.
Once their foot was in the door, with the first attempts to regulate the industry starting with closing off fishing grounds, imposing size limits and then quotas, the N.M.F.S. has been rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell and every year brings new and more ridiculous levels of government control, inept management, and downright wrongful closures and restrictions on the Gulf of Mexico Snapper & Grouper Fisheries. I’m not saying that these fisheries don’t need some sort of control. Reasonable regulation imposed in an intelligent manner for real reasons would be easy to work with while making it feasible for families who have relied on fishing as a source of income for years, or in many cases for generations, to continue to do so and to plan on being able to do so for years to come. However, when a government agency is given the amount of control that NMFS has taken on and uses that power in such a heavy handed and misguided fashion as they do, using poor science, bad statistics, and downright untruthful and/or manipulated figures to cater to the greedy or misguided agendas of a very small minority, then the ultimate result is jobless American fishermen, jobless American fishhouse workers, and American restaurant tables with imported fish dinners.
That’s just plain wrong. [Read more →]
