Mass. sets up $1M loan fund for fishermen
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BOSTON (AP) — Massachusetts announced Tuesday that it has set up a $1 million loan fund to help the dwindling number of fishermen with smaller businesses buy the rights to catch more fish.
The new Commercial Fisheries Revolving Loan Fund aims to help fishermen struggling after 2010′s transition to a new management system in New England, the Patrick administration said.
That new system allots each fisherman a certain catch limit of each of the bottom-dwelling groundfish species they chase, such as cod, haddock and flounder. The fishermen pool and manage those quotas in groups called “sectors.”
Through the sectors, they can buy and lease more quota of a particular species from each other, as needed.
But a problem has been that fishermen working smaller boats, with less capital, don’t always have the money to obtain a large enough portion of the catch to stay in business. Statistics from the first year of the new system indicates a contin uing trend of fewer fishermen in bigger operations catching more of the fish.
The loans aim to help preserve the state’s smaller fishing businesses, and the broader fishing communities.
”It’s a big part of our social fabric,” said Mary Griffin, the commissioner of the state Department of Fish & Game. “So there’s been a tremendous interest in not allowing the smaller fishermen to go out of business.”
Frank Mirarchi, a Scituate fisherman who serves on the board of one of the dozen regional sectors, said the loan program is a good idea.
”One of the problems fishermen are having is that they have no collateral to get loans from commercial banks, and this gives them access to loans they otherwise could not receive from normal channels,” he said.
Gloucester fisherman Joe Orlando said the fund is a tremendous boost for guys like him.
”It’s huge, especially (for) guys that are just struggling, that try to go to the bank and the bank just won’t talk to them,” said Orlando, 57, a lifelong fisherman. “I can benefit and I don’t know of anyone who couldn’t benefit, put it that way.”
Area fishermen face a host of problems – a lack of money to invest in quota is just one. The industry has been whacked by a new assessment that indicates the prized Gulf of Maine cod is in much worse shape than previously thought. Now, fishermen are facing a catastrophic cut of 90 percent in the cod catch, compared to 2010, to protect the species.
Regulators are meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., on Wednesday to discuss ways the industry can scrape by if the massive cod cuts materialize. Programs like the loan fund can only help, said U.S. Sen. John Kerry.
Kerry, Sen. Olympia Snowe and 18 other members of Congress who represent New England states wrote Commerce Secretary John Bryson on Tuesday, urging him to see that catch levels for cod be set at “a level that would allow the industry to survive.”
The $1 million was initially offered to Massachusetts by federal regulators at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Office so the state could start and manage its own fishing sector.
But Griffin said Gov. Deval Patrick didn’t want to create a sector to compete with other fishermen, and found much more support among fishermen for the loan fund.
The terms of the loans, such as their interest rates or conditions to qualify, have yet to be established, Griffin said. The loans will be structured to assist owners of small boats that leave port on daylong trips, rather than large boats that can leave port for far longer.
A maximum of $50,000 will be loaned out annually to any one boat owner. In the revolving fund, the money fishermen pay back is lent out to other fishermen seeking funds to obtain quota.
How much fish they can buy with the money depends on the species and the market. For example, Orlando said Gulf of Maine cod quota could be purchased off other fishermen for $1 a pound, and potentially sold for $2 a pound, netting a $50,000 profit.
”That makes a huge, huge difference to a lot of guys,” he said.
Griffin said the state aims to have the new program running by the May 1 start of the fishing year.
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