Alaska's Halibut Fleet Asks North Pacific Council for Immediate Electronic Monitoring
SEAFOODNEWS.COM [Opinion] By John-Henry Heckendorn, Alaska Longline Fishermen's Association
The North Pacific Fishery Management Council convenes today in Seattle and will renew efforts to improve the accuracy of bycatch records. A critical piece of the puzzle is how to incorporate electronic monitoring (EM) into the Council’s fisherman-funded Observer Program.
As this week’s meetings remind us, fish stocks go up and down, but arguments about policy are inexhaustibly fertile. Pick any issue in fish politics and you’ll find a dozen competing perspectives on the origins of the problem and the coordinates of the solution.
But even the most polarized fish wonks concede that you can’t set good policies without good data. For this reason the Council is spending millions of dollars on direct monitoring of fishing boats, in an attempt to...
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