IFQ’s Approved By Council and Pending But Otherwise It Is Business As Usual
IFQ’s, after being approved by a huge majority of the fishermen eligible to vote in the referendum, have now been approved by the Gulf Council and sent along to the Mother Ship for approval and implementation. However. all other business proceeds as usual with the goal of the Council and the Mother Ship appearing to be more to shut down our fisheries than anything else and they are willing to do this using any sort of inexusably bad science they can get their hands on.
Everyone who goes offshore sees more red snapper than ever before everywhere we fish, yet NMFS has just coerced the State of Florida into shortening the recreational season by over two months to protect this supposedly overfished species. We are seeing apparently healthy gag populations and scientists are saying that the gag population is reproducing at a faster rate than they previously thought it would, yet the Council’s position is “Oh, we think it is overfished and we don’t know for sure that they will continue reproducing at the present level so we are going to restrict it as if what is actually happening right now wasn’t really happening at all.”
They have approved a complete de-facto shut-down of the healthy and not overfished red-grouper longline fishery with nothing more to go on than 18 turtles actually observed over the course of 18 months, despite those fantasy based and fantastic numbers that Oceana has been publicizing. They have announced plans to close the entire shallow water fishery if the gag quota is reached, despite the fact that they are supposed to be working on an implementation of an IFQ system that may (or may not?) make that sort of closure a non-issue.
There is an article about these issues in the March, 2009 National Fisherman. S.O.F.A.’s Executive Director Bob Spaeth is referred to and quoted in that article:
Spaeth doesn’t buy the argument and wants independent oversight of the NMFS science.
“Somebody from the science community needs to do a complete, independent review,” he says
That’s a great idea. We keep getting conflicting reports and seeing govenment figures that completely contradict the anecdotal evidence we all see every time we go offshore. We present reports from independent scientists that time and time again contradict or question the numbers the NMFS is using. We even see hard data from previously established programs that show one thing while the NMFS jumps right ahead and passes a rule seemingly ignoring that data. (Mote Marine tagging program shows greater mortality rates in released snappers caught on circle hooks than j hooks, yet NMFS passed a rule making circle hooks required equipment because someone told them it was a good idea.)
How about some accountability for the figures that they are using to control our industry and our lives?
As Jerry Fraser, the Editor of National Fisherman says in his latest Editorial
“What is not open to question is that the role of the Department of Commerce is fostering commerce, not reflexively opposing responsible consumption of natural resources.”
It is indeed time for some change. It is time for the nation to stop looking upon and treating commercial fishermen as if they were criminals. It is time for the Government agencies charged with regulating those fisheries to start doing it in a responsible and honest manner. And it is time for the Cabinet Department that oversees those agencies to begin carrying out its true role which is indeed fostering commerce, not attempting to shut it down over and over again.
March, 2009 National Fisherman article referred to is here.
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<editor: As always, the Fishing Fool speaks for himself, not S.O.F.A. or anyone else. Have another opinion? Share it with us here.>
