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unemployment payments. Payments or not, a way of life and the seafaring 

 knowledge that went with it— a culture— is being destroyed. One fisherman was 

 quoted lamenting "The cod to us was like the buffalo to the plains Indians." 



In adjacent U.S. waters, the Magnuson Act failed to prevent a parallel 

 groundfish catastrophe. New England cod are at their lowest levels ever, and 

 drastic economic dislocation is well underway. Atlantic halibut are commercially 

 extinct. Though fishing for them is allowed, no one tries. There are so few 

 Atlantic halibut left that they do not even appear in the table of landings in the 

 National Marine Fisheries Service' (NMFS) report on the Status of Fishery 

 Resources of the Northeastern United States. Haddock are now also 

 commercially extinct in New England. They are too rare in the Gulf of Maine to 

 support directed fishing. On Georges Bank, NMFS suspended haddock fishing by 

 emergency action in January 1994 after New England landings of the 

 long-beleaguered fish plunged 66 percent in one year. The Northeast regional 

 director for the National Marine Fisheries Service told the mid-Atlantic Fishery 

 Management Council (one of eight regional councils that develop fishing policies 

 and regulations) that in his opinion the Gulf of Maine should also be closed to 

 haddock catches. In the Gulf of Maine, no haddock appear in the net in 60 

 percent of the fishing trips. An allowance of five hundred pounds of haddock per 

 trip has been imposed, not so much to protect haddock as to prevent any 

 protection of the few remaining haddock from interfering with fishing activities 

 aimed at other depleted species like cod and flounder (the New England Council 

 wanted the haddock trip limit to be 5,000 pounds, but the Secretary of Commerce 

 disapproved this measure. NMFS requested the council to consider "a meaningful 

 trip limit for haddock" and to consider whether any haddock at all should be 

 landed). NMFS' regional director believes that the five hundred pound haddock 

 allowance may help to supress recovery of the species in the Gulf of Maine. The 

 Georges Bank haddock population is now one tenth that which is required to 

 produce the "maximum sustainable yield." 



Similarly, the situation with yellowtail flounder, which was once the backbone 

 of fishing ports in southern New England, has been termed "a disaster" in that 

 region by Dr. Vaughan Anthony, chief scientist in the National Marine Fisheries 

 Service's Northeast center. In a January 1994 advisory report on the status of 

 New England fish populations, the Service stated that for southern New England 

 yellowtail flounder, "The fishing mortality rate has been extremely high... 

 currently for every 100 fish alive at the beginning of the year, only 8 survive to 

 the beginning of the next year. Spawning stock biomass [the aggregate weight of 

 the live breeding population] in 1992 was at a record low level." Unsurprisingly, 

 breeding success is "the poorest on record." With the highly unusual use of an 

 exclamation point in a parched scientific report, the Service states "The stock has 

 collapsed! Fishing mortality on this stock should be reduced to levels 

 approaching zero. This includes discard mortality." Discards of flounders 

 caught too small is at a record high. The last big year class of juvenile yellowtail 

 flounders was in 1987, and 60% of the catch of fish from this year class was 

 discarded dead, because they were too small to sell when they were caught. The 

 report also notes that "Spawning stock biomass declined 94% between 

 1989-1992." In January of 1994, Dr. Anthony told the Mid-Atlantic Fishery 

 Management Council that the allowable catch should now be zero. Yet the 

 professionals and scientists in the Fisheries Service must defer to the political 

 appointees on the fishery management councils who actually set fishing policy. 



Despite all this bad news and trouble, the New England Fishery Management 

 Council's recently adopted New England groundfish plan merely aims to halt- 

 but not to reverse— these declines by reducing fishing mortality of some species 

 over the next five to ten years (depending on species) by fifty percent. If it 



