"It's going to make it more and more difficult for our small-scale fishermen to get access to the fish," says campaign volunteer and Maine resident Laura Bramley. "Because our oceans are going to be privatized, and that means the big corporations will get a bigger and bigger share because they can catch more and more fish each year and the more fish they can catch the bigger share they get."

"Catch share systems lead to rapid industry consolidation wherever they are implemented and often increase bycatch," says Portland City Councilor David Marshall. Marshall says the quota system is also damaging to the environment "as the only fishing boats that remain are the ones that are the most aggressive and the most destructive.

The Fair Fish Campaign, which claims to represent over 500 Portland and Maine residents, is urging Sen. Olympia Snowe to request congressional oversight hearings on the catch share system.

Marshall claims that similar policies in Canada have destroyed the lives of fishing communities in Nova Scotia and British Colombia and hastened the rise of what he describes as "factory fishing." "Please join me in contacting Sen. Snowe and asking her to make fair fishing one of her agenda items," he said.

"This council has never been for privatizing the resource and putting small boat fishermen out of business -- that's just not been the case," says Pat Fiorelli of the New England Fishery Management Council, which oversees the marine resources of the Northeast.

Four months ago, the council voted unanimously to adopt the new system, which had already been operating in a couple of experimental sectors off Cape Cod for several years. The type of catch share system adopted in New England is known as "sector management," and Fiorelli denies that it automatically favors the bigger operators. She says sector management is a system in which fishermen bring their catch histories to a sector, or group.

"And then the group gets allocated a quota based on their catch histories, and so it goes to the group, not individuals. It includes large-scale fishermen, smaller fishermen," she says.

The new program will replace the current system, known as "days at sea," under which fishermen catching cod, haddock, flounder and other so-called groundfish, are only allowed to spend a certain amount of time at sea. The current limit is 39 days per year, and this is expected to fall by about 50 percent next year.

The underlying problem, says one industry leader, is how to rebuild depleted stocks. "We do have a situation where we have 13 out of our 19 stocks that are either overfished or there's overfishing occuring, says Pat Kurkul, Regional Administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, a federal agency responsible for the stewardship of the ocean.

Sector management, Kurkul argues, will actually help a lot of fishermen, big and small, stay in business during these tough times.
"What sectors does is provides an opportunity for vessels to pool their allocations and make a bad situation just slightly better by allowing them to be more efficient."

The New England Fishery Management Council is meeting in Newport, Rhode Island, in the middle of next month to discuss implementation of the new quota-based system.