How Does This Float Your Boat

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 14, 2000 | by Sean Paige

Time was when the federal government was bending over backward to get folks into the fishing business. It offered new and old salts low-interest loans to buy bigger and better boats and poured millions of dollars into developing new technologies that would make American fishermen second to none in productivity. But when fishing stocks began to plummet, the panicked feds reversed themselves and offered to buy those same boats back from some of the same fisherman, as well as encourage them to take on more landlocked pursuits. That boat-buyback program has cost taxpayers $140 million since 1995.

But there's a hook, so to speak. As it tums out, the program has done little in most cases to reduce overfishing because the government, even while buying some fishermen out, was doing little to prevent new fishermen from replacing the old or to prevent those still fishing from buying bigger and better boats that catch even more fish. Nor has it done enough to ensure that a bought-out skipper in New England doesn't take his money and fish elsewhere and contribute to overfishing there.

In the New England fishery, for instance, where the government spent $24.4 million buying 79 boats out from underneath their skippers, some 62 new fishing boats took to the seas to fill that vacuum, according to a recent report from the General Accounting Office, or GAO, which lowered by two-thirds the program's effectiveness in terms of reducing overfishing.

Nine participants in the New England buyout of ground fisherman went into lobstering, further stressing that already-stressed fishery, according to GAO. And another nine seem to have used the program to trade up, using funds from the buyout to reenter the business with bigger and better boats, and nearly half the buyback-program recipients that GAO contacted remained in the groundfishing industry.

All of which strongly suggests that Uncle Sam again may have been taken in, hook, line and sinker.