{"id":7069,"date":"2018-01-10T17:08:03","date_gmt":"2018-01-10T21:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/?p=7069"},"modified":"2018-01-12T16:18:39","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T20:18:39","slug":"rotten-gets-it-wrong-about-new-england-and-catch-shares","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/2018\/01\/10\/rotten-gets-it-wrong-about-new-england-and-catch-shares\/","title":{"rendered":"Rotten gets it wrong about New England and catch shares"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When we sat down to speak with the producers of Rotten<\/em>, a new documentary series by Zero Point Zero Production, we were hopeful they would bring a thoughtful perspective to the complex challenge of sustainable fisheries management in New England. Unfortunately, the final product released this month does just the opposite.<\/p>\n

Rotten<\/em> does little to shed new light on the challenges that many players, including fishermen, conservationists and government, have been working together to try and solve. Instead, it perpetuates myths and half-truths about the sector (or \u201ccatch share\u201d) management system implemented in the New England groundfish fishery in 2010. Furthermore, it doesn\u2019t even attempt to offer an alternative vision for how to end the tragedy of the commons that drove this fishery\u2014and many hard-working individuals who depend on it\u2014to the brink of ruin.<\/p>\n

Rotten<\/em> starts by recounting a sad history that is familiar to every New England fisherman. Oceans teeming with life were exploited intensively by foreign vessels in the decades after World War II, sharply depleting fish stocks. In 1976, Congress responded by establishing an \u201cExclusive Economic Zone\u201d of U.S. ocean territory out to 200 miles, and by incentivizing the growth of a domestic fishing sector. Over time, however, this led to a second sustainability crisis, with too many American boats chasing too few fish under a broken management system. The result was chronic overfishing and failed fishing businesses.<\/p>\n

The human and environmental tragedy of this failure is captured poignantly in the documentary by New Bedford dockworker Ian Saunders:<\/p>\n

When I was a kid we had a nice place in the west end [with a] swimming pool and all that, [but] we pretty much lost everything. My father started out as a longliner fishing swordfish, and they fished that out and there wasn\u2019t anything left, so he went scalloping, and then they fished that out, and then the regulations started. It\u2019s just been a mess my whole life.<\/em><\/p>\n

Under this flawed system, cod and other groundfish \u201cwere being drained from the sea\u201d and the industry consolidated in response, with a few big players\u2014notably New Bedford seafood magnate Carlos Rafael\u2014buying up a large number of permits from struggling fishermen who couldn\u2019t make ends meet.<\/p>\n

This all occurred, as Rotten<\/em> readily acknowledges, long before the catch share management system was implemented. These are the exact problems that catch shares are designed to fix \u2013 and have been proven to fix in fisheries throughout the United States and around the world.<\/p>\n

Yet far from focusing on solutions, the documentary goes on to promote a deeply flawed narrative about catch shares, EDF, and the New England groundfish fishery.<\/p>\n