The North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) meets on Monday and on the agenda is the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands (BSAI) Crab Rationalization 10-Year Review, released this week.
Implemented in 2005, the program allocates BSAI crab quotas among harvesters, processors, and coastal communities to address conservation and management issues.
There were problems before with reducing bycatch, discard mortality, fishermen safety in an "overcapitalized derby fishery," according to the report.
The program saw large-scale, structural consolidation and reduced in the first two seasons during the transition, but "incremental consolidation continues in both the harvest and processing sectors, with the long term trend in numbers of plants and vessels operating in the fisheries continuing to decline," according to the report.
The
