Drastic Groundfishing Cuts Approved

[Soundbounder]

At a grim daylong session here, a deeply divided New England Fishery Management Council voted to recommend reductions of 77 percent from last year’s catch for each of the next three years for cod in the Gulf of Maine.

It also recommended cuts of 61 percent from last year for one year only to the cod catch on Georges Bank, a vast area off Cape Cod, which was named for the fish. The council’s recommendations are subject to approval by the federal government, which is expected to put them in place by May 1.

“We are headed, slowly, seeming inexorably, to oblivion,” said John Bullard, the regional administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a member of the council, as he explained his support for the catch limits. “I do not deny the costs that are going to be paid by fishermen, families, communities. They are real. They will hurt.”

The problem, he said, is not government inflexibility, as fishermen have suggested, but the lack of fish. “It’s midnight and getting darker when it comes to how many cod there are,” he said. “There isn’t enough cod for people to make a decent living.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/us...ml?ref=us&_r=0

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