U.S. and Canadian groundfish management in the Gulf of Maine-Georges Bank region

A chain of fools: or, why it is so hard to stop overfishing

“…Until then the Gulf of Maine (GOM) was under open-access. It was used by US and Canadian fishers, but also European and Soviet fishers (Bubier and Rieser 1986;Österblom and Folke 2015). The foreign fleet increased overall fishing pressure tremendously since North-American fleets also intensified, as they were afraid to lose out in the competition with the foreigners.…”

“…These quotas were fished up rapidly and the boats were forced to stay at home by the middle of the year, which infuriated the fishers. According to their view the fishing pressure in the GOM substantially decreased with the exclusion of the foreign fleets, which accorded with the unexpectedly high landings that many experienced (Bubier and Rieser 1986). The fishers questioned the accuracy of the data that was used to set the quotas.…”

“…King and Sutinen (2010) estimated that 12-24% of its catch is illegal. Types of non-compliant behaviour include: misrepresenting catches, smuggling, misrepresenting gear use, excessive discards, not following mesh size, area or seasonal limitations (Bubier and Rieser 1986;Hennessey and Healey 2000;Brewer 2011). Weak enforcement made non-compliance a persistent structural feature of the New England groundfish fishery (Acheson 1984;Sutinen et al 1990), which in turn led to much more widespread rule breaking.…”

“…Fishers who under normal conditions would be inclined to abide by the law also began breaking rules, since "fishers who obeyed the law caught fewer fish, suffered economic hardship, lost prestige in the eyes of other fishers, and lost their credibility as effective captains (Miller and Pollnac 1978 cited in Hennessey and Healey 2000, p. 196). Another important effect of pervasive noncompliance was that it frustrated the efforts of the NMFS to acquire reliable stock assessments (Bubier and Rieser 1986).…”