of the resource in the hands of a few entities, and the demise of small inshore fleets. In maritime Canada, where ITQs are an integral part of the management strategy, many groundfish stocks have continued to decline.
    However, over the last four years models for community-based management have developed in Canada as an alternative to IFQs. In the Bay of Fundy, small boat fishermen from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are taking control of their industries, and Maine fishermen are benefiting from the lessons learned across the border.
    According to Arthur Bull, of the Bay of Fundy Marine Resource Centre, fixed gear fishermen in the bay realized they were losing their share of the resource to the corporate giants that control maritime fisheries. After grassroots demonstrations in 1996, when thousands of fishermen and their families occupied Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) offices throughout the region, the Canadian government agreed to give community quotas to the inshore fleets. Local fishermen within the communities were then given the responsibility of jointly managing the quotas.
    The Canadians have a long history with ITQs, which some fisheries regulators contend provide a guarantee of manageability, and lead to a more economically efficient fishery. Quota proponents suggest that ITQs create a situation where there is incentive to manage the resource for maximum sustainable yield rather than race for the fish. In addition, quotas are billed as a surefire way to fit science with management: scientists come up with a total allowable catch and distribute it among quota holders - simple.
    But the rationale for ITQs is based on assumptions that have not always been borne out in reality. According to Digby, N.S. lobsterman Harold Theriault, highgrading - discarding less valuable species in order to stay below quotas, while catching higher value species - is now worse than ever among the offshore boats. "ITQs haven't helped anything conservationwise. The destruction still goes on, it's just more freewheeling now that they've annihilated half the fleet," he said.
    Theriault is part of the vanguard of fishermen developing community-based management in the Bay of Fundy. "It's working good here," said Theriault. "Especially with groundfish and clams, and we're working towards getting it into our lobster fishery. We meet once a month and decide what we're going to do. We have our own sanction board, but so far we've only had to sanction two boats. We had set a limit of 500 pounds of halibut a week and a fellow came in with almost double that so we didn't give him any quota for the next week."
    The sanction system that Theriault's group uses rotates members of the sanction board and identifies offenders only by a number. "The fellow being sanctioned could be my next door neighbor and I wouldn't know it," said Theriault.
    Theriault is president of the Bay of Fundy Inshore Fishermen's Association and an executive of the recently formed Bay of Fundy Fisheries Council. He expects the broad-based council to have more clout with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. "We'll point out spawning areas and get some protection so a fishery can rebuild. Right now it's yahoo western days, let'er go with the seiners and draggers. All we want is some places left alone. And we'll do what we got to do to make that happen."
    Others are less optimistic. "I don't think the council is going to be effective in dealing with local issues," said Melanie Sonnenberg, of the Grand Manan Fishermen's Association. "I think it will work for regional issues like right whale protection and such. So far we spend a lot of time just trying to decide what we're going to talk about."
    Elsewhere in Canada the idea of community-based management has met fierce resistance. "Down in Shelburne [N.S.], they're bitterly divided," said Harold Theriault. Many Shelburne fishermen fared better from the individual quota system than did Fundy fishermen, and have more to lose and far less to gain from community quotas. "We're lucky here. We don't have much quota to fight over."
    When there is something to fight over, whether the local boards will be able to make difficult decisions that will hurt some fishermen is yet to be seen, but Arthur Bull believes local control is preferable to top-down management. "We haven't had to face any really tough decisions yet, but when it does come time to make them, we'd rather do it on a local level than have something imposed on us from the DFO."
A Global Movement

    While the push for ITQs has gone on all over the world, so has the movement of small boat fishermen toward community-based management. Fishermen around the world are being faced with the destruction of their resources and they are doing what they have to do to protect them. In some places like Chilika Lake, India, where there are few alternatives to fishing, people are fighting to the death to preserve their traditional way of life.
    Last May, the fishermen of Chilika Lake demonstrated against shrimp farms that allegedly destroyed their fishing grounds. When police opened fire on the demonstrators, four were killed and twenty-five were wounded. Among the wounded was Harekrishna Debnath, organizer of the demonstration.
    Debnath and Father Thomas Kocherry, coordinator of the World Forum of Fishworkers (WFF), spent three weeks touring the U.S. and Canada last October in an effort to promote grassroots action. According to Kocherry the WFF, a global network of fishermen's groups aimed at establishing community-based management for their fisheries, already represents over 30 countries.
    Speaking at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine on October 16, Kocherry delivered a strong message calling on fishermen to acknowledge their spiritual duty. "If the society is to survive it has to be coupled with ethics," he said. Kocherry advised fishermen to adopt an attitude of cooperation over competition, and called for zero growth development, which would entail self-imposed limits on the technology fishermen used and reduction in harvesting capacity.
On the Home Front

    U.S. fishermen may not be ready to embrace all of Kocherry's message but many are on the move. New organizations such as the Stonington Fisheries Alliance and the Gulf of Maine Fisheries Alliance are regionally based and focus on issues that effect interconnected fisheries on a local scale. These local groups are in turn sometimes supported by umbrella groups such as the North Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA) and the Greenpeace Oceans Campaign. The Stonington Fisheries Alliance, for instance, had organizational guidance from NAMA.
    NAMA's policy coordinator, Craig Pendleton, is helping to coordinate an emerging system of "community-based, self-organizing, and self-governing alliances that are strategically linked in order to provide the local level participants the authority to make management decisions that affect themselves."
    Because of the diversity and overlapping nature of New England's fleets and fisheries, advocates of the current system see Pendleton's vision as an impossibility. "I think the [New England Fishery Management] Council is as close to community-based management as we can realistically get," said council member Barbara Stevenson.
    Others contend that "community" can mean many things, including a community of factory trawlers, with a host of families depending on their success.
    The larger offshore fleet that some perceive as "winning the allocation battles for the resource" here, in Canada, and the rest of the world, have their claim to the resources. The larger boat's ability to work on offshore fish stocks guarantees their place in the harvesting scheme.
    As a result, Pendleton foresees a two tier management system. "The offshore fleet, because of the history and direction the council [NEFMC] has taken recently, may be obliged to go to a quota system, while the inshore fishery practices community-based management with zones - like the lobster fishery."
    That is the scenario that appears to have developed in Canada, and while community-based management may be evolving all over the world, Maine fishermen are benefiting most from the lessons learned next door.
    "It's the same fishery," said Brewer. "There's a boundary between our the two countries, but it's one big ecosystem."
    Brewer and other members of the Stonington alliance visited Arthur Bull in Canada last summer. This month Bull, Maria Recchia, and David Coon of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, will be presenting a series of workshops on community-based management at various locations around the state, including Stonington on December 9.
    At the first workshop, held in Machias on November 29, Coon, Bull, and Recchia described the Bay of Fundy Fisheries Council process of beginning with "kitchen table meetings" where they visited fishermen at home and gleaned their views on how to manage the fisheries. They then culled the responses to find common themes. Over the course of the summer and fall they have taken the information they've gathered and reviewed it with different associations in the region, held regional meetings, taken that information back to local associations and worked with it until they came up with a set of ten principles that fishermen accepted as a guide for community-based management.
    Among the principles are calls to give fishermen a key role in management, allow fishermen to switch fisheries so as to relieve pressure on overharvested stocks, control fish catching capability, and promote owner-operators. The principles also address issues of habitat and resource preservation, but the key question is can these principles be implemented in a way that will preserve the fisheries?
    "When I look at Magnuson," says Marsden Brewer, "everything's there to manage the fishery. But the way it's being done you'd never know it." Nonetheless, Brewer agrees with Arthur Bull that the resources are safer in the hands of the fishermen, and he believes the fortitude will be there to make the tough decisions. "Allocation issues are all a matter of scale; we have to protect the resource. Without the resources we've got nothing," he said.