King Salmon bycatch hard cap. Too little Too late?
The panel voted unanimously Monday to cap the number at 60,000, or fewer under certain conditions.
Billions of pounds of Bering Sea pollock are caught each year. But village fishermen say the pollock fleet is catching and killing far too many of the salmon that communities depend on for food and money.
Nicole Ricci, a foreign affairs officer for the State Department, told the council just before the vote that the cap wouldn't do enough to meet a treaty agreement between the United States and Canada to ensure strong salmon stocks in the Yukon River.
"I don't understand how you can call this a reduction," Ricci said. She noted that the upper limit of the cap is higher than the average bycatch over the past decade.
"This has been one of the most disappointing things that I have sat through," she said.
Under the motion approved by the council, the cap would drop down to about 47,600 salmon if the industry's salmon bycatch routinely exceeds recent averages. Those refusing to take part in incentive programs would face far lower bycatch limits.
The council, consisting of government and industry representatives, sends recommendations to the U.S. commerce secretary for approval before the new bycatch rules can take effect in 2011.
3 comments:
King salmon wastage was 121000 in 2007 and only 61000 in 2008 What a great improvement my ass. 2008 sport, subsistance and mom and pop gillnetters almost starved in western Alaska. You cant catch fish that are killed and thrown overboard the year before. Several more small time fisheries bite the dust at the hands of the NPFMC.
Several times a year the council chambers become the battleground of the commercial and guided sport halibut industries. While the commercial sector decries the ravages of uncompensated reallocation of their fish to the sport sector, charter operators espouse the economic virtues in their fishery, and the right of public access to the resources.
The bad news is that of the 11 voting members on the council only one is a sport-fish representative. To claim that the NPFMC is heavily weighted with commercial interests is an understatement. In their defense, the council spends the lion’s share of its time on commercial fishing matters from crab and pollock to endangered species mitigation and controlling by-catch, so it should be primarily composed of commercial interests. All federally-managed fisheries come under its purview and only halibut involves a conflict with sport fishing.
Stolen from Rick Bierman
"I fully recognize that this reduction is not a silver bullet," council chairman Eric Olson ( representing KWIKPAK fisheries corp.) said before the vote. "It's not going to magically make things OK in the streams of Western Alaska ... (but) even a small, incremental increase of spawners that reach the rivers is going to help the recovery.
The council, consisting of government and industry representatives, sends recommendations to the U.S. commerce secretary for approval before the new bycatch rules can take effect in 2011.
Eric Olson is a representative for Kwikpac fisheries corporation.
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