July 2012 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 11. Commercial Fishing News NEWSFROMTHE DOWNEAST LOBSTERMAN ASSOCIATION
From the Executive Director – The season for meetings is coming to a slow down with the final LAC Subcommittee meeting this evening at the Ellsworth High School Cafeteria. I hope that you have had an opportunity to attend one of these meetings that is moderated by John Sauve of the Food and Wellness Group. He is also flanked by the LAC Subcommittee on marketing. The entire project is called PROJECT MAINE LOBSTER: Build Global Demand.
The Subcommittee is documenting the comments and suggestions that come in at the meetings for further work on the final draft of this work. Your voice and input is very important to the final result and outcome of our Maine marketing plan to receive a better price for our product. This will also result in the entire industry working together to the best of our ability to make our product a quality product that is worthy of a better price to the harvesters.
At this present time, there is a continued split price for lobster which is $3.00 a pound for “new shell” and $5.00 a pound for “hard shell.” This is rounded off due to your location. This may vary along the coast by $0.25 up or down.
One major topic in this plan is that we need to harvest a quality product. The new shells are reported as not having a lot of meat in them yet. I know that I mentioned this in my last report. It is possible that due to the off winter that we had, we could be dealing with a variety of lobsters this summer. Will we get two sheds or will we get one big shed and then have the run slow down as we go into fall? No one knows for sure. The overall attendance at the meetings has been very spotty. We have just over
4,200 licensed lobstermen in our fishery which is down from the 7,000+ that we had a few years ago. Between this factor and the diminishing amount of actual working waterfront access that we have on our coast line, it should be fairly obvious that we need to pay attention to these efforts that are coming forward. I believe that we had maybe 25 or so in Yarmouth, a larger number in Rockland, maybe 40, in Machias we had approximately 18 and Ellsworth had a count of 45 or more of people in attendance to offer their concerns or sentiments about the marketing plan that can possibly increase the price of our product to the fishermen. This is all food for thought for our future. The big key to this plan is to increase the demand for lobster when we are harvesting an increased amount of product. When we bring in such a large number of lobsters, we need to be reassured that we have a destination and a demand to take them to. This is planning ahead for your business, which each commercial lobster fisherman is basically an independent business entity. We need to be able to balance our supply and demand and work together with the entire chain from harvester to the retail customer or the plate in the restaurants.
The next Lobster Advisory Council meeting will be held on July 8th
. I will provide
further details on our Facebook page. The topic of this marketing proposal will be on the agenda for that meeting.
There will also be more information provided for you concerning the RFP (request for proposal) with the licensing and waiting list. We had a very good series of meetings with Penobscot East Resource Center to share information about the apprentice waiting list and the zones that they are located in.
Mike and I attended the workshop that was hosted by Governor LePage that was titled “Open for Business.” This was a very good session that was divided into three categories: Maine DMR concerns, the Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of Labor and Marketing strategies. Each session had the commissioner of their category to offer an update and to have a question and answer period. Governor LePage was also part of the discussion period. I have a booklet with all of the contacts for the commissioners and their account executives. If you need further contact information, please feel free to get in touch with me or I can also give you the number for
www.businessinmaine.com, which is 1-800-872-3838.
DELA will be holding a meeting in July so we can stay in touch with everything that is going on around us. We do not want to lose touch with one another over the summer, even though it is a very busy month.
There is a lot to consider with the changes that we are looking at for the future of our industry, so please come along to the meeting and bring along a friend. The meeting is scheduled for July 12th
in
Ellsworth. I will post the location on the Facebook site, so please stay in touch. We will be attending summer festivals and boat races, as well as just communicating with one another at the docks. We are also working on increasing our membership and scholarship fund. As a non profit association, in order to stay as independent as possible in this day and age, we appreciate your membership, gifts of donations and helpful participation at the meetings and industry functions. As time goes on, we are ever increasing your ability to have a voice in the industry that we can still call “ours.”
Be safe and see you around the dock, Sheila WANTED
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