FROM THE CROWE’S NEST

Present and Future Fishermen

Our president is finally a lame duck. Hopefully he and his evil umpire will therefore be doing less damage to the nation than when they were just lame. A former Governor of his adopted state described George senior as having been born with a silver foot in his mouth. Heir to the throne, George the lesser, has in the last months of his reign of error, found his silver foot shoved in a more appropriate place. With the economy in ruins and the people’s treasury pillaged, it can at least be said that Social Security was wrenched from the clutches of his den of thieves.

The economy will recover, sometime, but it and the country will not be the same when it does. As Maine’s best-managed fishery, a model for others in the nation and the world, the lobster industry was not spared. With lobster prices at half the minimum cost for operating, there will be fall- out. Some fishermen will not make it through this. Some will lose boats, homes, trucks, and an ancestral occupation.

But the lobster fishery will also recover, sometime, and it too will likely not be the same when it does. Fishermen as survivors will find a way to do business differently. After the smoke clears this could, and may have to be, seen as a time of opportunity.

In the 1950’s, manipulated by dealers, lobstermen tied up. The legal battle that ensued strengthened the formation of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. They organized for better communication and the power in numbers.

Efforts to expand fishermen’s reach beyond harvesting to organize a system for buying and marketing their product; offsetting the soft shell/hard shell price differential; and bringing back more processing facilities to Maine, are ideas that have regularly surfaced. Some of the science that has been seen as a threat to trap limits, may in fact hold the means for doing more with less.

As part of this integration of the lobster industry would be the protection and development of bait-fish resources. This along with maintaining rights and access to ground fish, shrimp, scallops and others species will diversify an industry now dependent on lobster, and help insure a place for present and future Maine fishermen.