In a movie to save depleted fish stock, managers are voting to implement a quota system for specific bottom dwelling marine species.
After years worth of rules that could only be described as lax, and practices which have wastefully led to a complete economic disaster, the managers of fisheries are deciding to adopt a completely new approach for some of the fisheries on the west coast, giving fishermen the exclusive rights to a portion of the overall catch.
There was a unanimous vote on Friday by the Pacific Fishery Management Council to make a historic shift in the strategy for fishing, encouraging cooperation instead of competition among fishermen who spend their days catching whiting, cod, rockfish, sole and flounder by dragging nets along the ocean floor. The new approach, which is often referred to as "individual fishing quotas" is going to give fishermen from the Morro Bay on the central coast of California to the Puget Sound in Washington the right to bring in their portion of the catch to command higher prices for their work.
What this is also going to do is eliminate strict rules that forced fishermen to shovel dead fish off their boats because they did not possess the necessary permits to sell certain species of fish that were inadvertently trapped in their nets.
Advocates of this particular approach to fishing, which has been shown to be successful in Alaska and other fishing states, believe that this is the necessary and logical step to turning around West Coast fisheries, which were declared formally as an economic disaster by the Federal Government in January of 2000. Since then, fishery managers have struggled to restrict catches, buying out fishing boats, but these actions have only brought a marginal amount of recovery to depleted fish stocks.
According to the Pacific Ocean policy director for the Environmental Defense Fund, Johanna Thomas, it is expected that these will become some of the best managed fisheries in as little as five to ten years' time. The quota system is not going to be implemented until 2011 because it needs to be approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is the government agency required to regulate fisheries. The shift to individual fish quotas is coming after recent studies that have showed that the system encourages fishermen to be better stewards of the resource they are responsible for. It ends the dangerous race to catch fish before other boats do, and also allows stocks to rebound in areas where fish stocks are severely depleted.
Still, a program like this cannot end up working without government intervention, as the government needs to set restrictions on all overall catches. The program is not going to address another problem, which is too many boats going after too few fish.
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