ONTHEWATERFRONTONTHEWATERFRONT Bill Kelly | Continued
An example is the red snapper fish- ery over in the Gulf of Mexico where a catch share equals one pound of fish. Tey lease the shares out at $3.50 a pound; the fisher- man sells it for $5 and then has to pay $3.50 to the lease holder, which leaves him with $1.50. He still has to cover his boat, fuel, bait, dockage and crew costs. It ulti- mately results in significant in- creases in the price of fishing, as fishermen clamor to cover the cost of leasing these catch shares to go about their business. Next year the federal government may reduce the quota on red snapper or gag grouper, in which case the fisher- men would really be in trouble be- cause they now have made these bank loans and they might not be able to afford to cover the cost of the shares they either own or lease, so they’d have to abandon it and sell it back to the actual catch share owner. Tat is how it crumbles small communities. Te commu- nity in Kodiak, Alaska, actually bought up all the available catch shares just to keep the fishermen there because their fleet was re- duced from 250 fishermen to about 50 in a couple years time.
GD Is the government starting to realize that this idea is a failure with this recent voting down of catch shares in the South Atlantic region? BK I don’t know if they are realiz- ing that it is a failure. Tey have re- cently diverted $54,000,000 in stock assessment to determine whether or not these fish are in
good condition. Tey diverted that solely for the purpose of pushing the catch shares position, and there has been an enormous outrage in that regard. If we had adequate sci- ence, we would find that most of the species that we are arguing about are not really in as bad a shape as one would expect. We are a completely different fishery here in the Florida Keys. We are sub- tropical, and you would find very few species of fish that are being under or over fished. In fact, our rebuilding efforts on snook, redfish and king mackerel have tremen- dous success stories. We see all three of these species now back in numbers that were unprecedented. We were able to continue fishing while we did a rebuilding program on these spots, controlling it with bag, size limits and things of that nature.
GDTey are talking about issuing further extensions on fish and bag limits. Are you in favor of that? BK I am very much in favor of tra- ditional methods, such as size and bag limits and spawning closures. Te issue is that if you have ade- quate law enforcement and you’re stuck with traditional methods of fishery management, you would have a much better success rate. What doomed catch shares in part is that environmental groups like EDF, which have little or no fishery management experience whatso- ever, were suddenly embraced with these national fishery programs and knew nothing about it. We tried to sit down with these envi- ronmental groups in a number of meetings, and they rejected any participation or effort on our part to mitigate these rules and regula- tions to find common ground. Tey have overstayed their wel- come and I think the council’s rejection of catch shares is going to resound throughout America’s
fisheries. e 10 KONK Life
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