The paradox of mobility

For fishermen there is one single lesson that Federal groundfish
management has brought home loud and clear: If you want to survive in the
groundfishery you have to be mobile. You have to go to where the fish are
abundant (and get there before everyone else) and you have to run away from
the areas the fleet has flattened or that have been closed for groundfish, marine
mammal or whatever management purpose.

Staying at home is not an option, as most of the small groundfish boats in
Downeast Maine found out. They had to move to the west or leave the
groundfishery. Larger boats were faced with the same pressures, but they were
better able to change where they fished. If the surviving boats hadn’t learned it
years ago, the last few years have forcefully brought home the importance of
being mobile. (The very largest boats — most of whom are out of business —
learned a second lesson and that is that even mobility is not enough if you have
to carry high fixed expenses during periods of scarcity.)

The paradox of mobility is that while it keeps the remaining fleet alive, it
cripples that life. Every time a stock starts to rebuild, every able boat rushes to
fish that area. When that stock is flattened the fleet moves on to the next
“rebuilding” stock and then the next and the next after that, always looking for the
most abundant stock. The story is repeated time and time again, each time a
little different but with essentially the same result. First, there is optimism about
local stocks rebuilding and then “something” happens and the rebuilding stock
becomes a stock in crisis.

Sometimes management actively drives the process. In 1994 when Georges
was closed, most of the effort that was evicted moved into the Gulf of Maine or
southern New England. The cod stock in the Gulf had been rebuilding and was
claimed to be rather healthy. Within a year or two there was nothing left. In
response the Council established the 42-20 line with strict limits on “Gulf of
Maine” cod above and none on “Georges Bank” cod below. Not surprisingly,
everybody able to fish below the line did, flattening those stocks. The yellowtail
stocks in the south that were supposedly rebuilding in the late 90s fared no
better. NMFS now proposes to nearly close southern New England and Georges
Bank while at the same time increasing the cod trip limit in the Gulf of Maine. It’s
not hard to predict the future of the currently “rebuilding stocks” in the Gulf of
Maine.

In the 1960s the Soviet and other distant water fleets fished this way on a
global scale. It was called pulse fishing and it depleted our stocks on Georges
and the Gulf of Maine as well as other important stocks around the world. It
decimated our fleet and was the major reason for the 200-mile limit. Now we do
the same thing to ourselves.

The big question is how do we stop this frustrating cycle. What would appear
to be the obvious way out of the cycle is some form of area management that
requires boats to stay within a prescribed area. This would effectively stop the
pulse fishing and it would create a new mindset about management. Today if
management fails the best strategy is to move. Under area management the only
effective strategy would be to make sure management doesn’t fail. In the last
decade a lot has been learned about area management and methods of self-
governance. I’m convinced we’ve got the practical knowledge to make area
management work.

As part of the recent groundfish lawsuit, NAMA proposed an area
management approach for the Gulf of Maine. The plan contains all the elements
of good area management. It matches management areas with broad, fairly
large ecosystem areas. It restricts boats to a single ecosystem. It includes
provision for self-governance by users with oversight by broader based groups. It
creates the circumstances where those who know the resource best can set the
rules about how, when and where to fish. Most important, it gives those users the
incentive to stay home and properly manage the resource. The NAMA proposal
suggests an experiment in area management for the Gulf of Maine; it makes a
lot of sense.

But the practical problem with area management is not its long run viability;
the problem is making the transition from our current system. I think the first
reaction of most groundfishermen, especially draggers, is that you just cannot
fish with the mobility restrictions of area management. At this point in time that is
probably true; however, if you reflect back on the times when the Gulf was
healthy, it’s clear that the conditions for good fishing under area management
can exist. Unfortunately no one can afford to stop fishing long enough to let the
stocks rebuild; everybody’s mind-set, every financial plan and every fishing
strategy is finely tuned to survival in the current regime. There is no leeway for
experimentation. So we continue fishing and managing, with a little tweak here
and a little tweak there, just as it has been done for the last 15-plus years. We
continue to hope for some magical, unknown event that will bring the stocks back
and while we hope, things continue to go downhill.

I’m not usually a doomsayer, but I don’t see how we can possibly rebuild the
New England groundfishery as long as we continue pulse fishing. We need to
make the transition to sensible area management. The transition will be costly to
boats and to the supply and processing infrastructure that supports the industry.

Congress has appropriated money to help the industry through its current
crisis. Using that money to help the industry make a transition to a form of
fisheries management that might actually work would be a reasonable and
constructive way to use the taxpayers’ money.

Jim Wilson teaches in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of
Maine.