Northeast Seafood Coalition, Glouchester, MA
Sectors are, basically, the easiest way I can describe them is a harvesting cooperative. The industry is looking at it as an opportunity to use their selectivity and skills that they’ve had over the years to avoid some stocks while targeting others and hopefully experience a higher efficiency on the allowable catch. Managers and NGOs, and folks who are concerned about the fisheries from a biological health standpoint, like sectors because basically everybody stipulates to one thing. There’s a maximum amount of fish that can be removed from each species and everyone agrees that that’s what they’ll do in a sector. So, we wanted everyone to take it seriously and that’s the main reason we got into it.
Since then of course, it’s developed with deadlines and a lot of work to do. It’s not like, "Here it is guys, this is the way it’s going to work," so we’ve been creating policy while were developing the plans that are supposed to be under those policies while we’re developing the environmental assessments of plans that haven’t even been written yet. So there are 13 sectors that the Northeast Seafood Coalition is assisting in the development of. For me it’s been a brain teaser challenge to see how we can possibly navigate all this complex stuff and allow the industry that I love to survive.
I feel like of all the groups, GMRI has reached out continuously, and asked what they can do to help us, and listened when we said what it was that we really needed. As soon as they saw that sectors were probably going to be probably the tool of choice, they began coordinating workshops which we attended that have been very helpful. GMRI came up with the idea to hire a person that would work mostly at our direction, and for that were infinitely grateful because having GMRI recognizing that to be an essential need, and an essential component of the success of the Northeast Seafood Coalition developing 13 sectors, is something we’ll never forget. 