Dear Sir,

Fishermen have been protesting en masse against the Bermuda Ocean Prosperity Programme for more than a year now, starting with the opening of the public “consultation” last autumn. In the midst of fighting against something you know you don’t want, the closure of fishing areas, it can be difficult to articulate exactly what it is that you do want. Bearing in mind that fishermen are hardly monolithic, I hope to get to the heart of the matter.

It comes down to the past, and the future.

While no one can change the past, it must be acknowledged, and its lessons taken to heart before there can be forward movement. The BOPP proposal, with its origins in the 2019 memorandum of understanding between the Government, the Waitt Institute and the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, took no notice of the existing contentious relationship between the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the fishing industry.

I’m not going into the whole laundry list here — watch for another Letter to the Editor from the Shrill-Voiced Fishmonger’s Wife — but the decades of lack of follow-through on historical promises, particularly in the realms of meaningful enforcement of existing regulations and the licensing of recreational fishers, have led to a complete lack of trust that management decisions will be made to benefit the fishing industry, or Bermuda and its marine environment in general. Blithely forging ahead with the BOPP only adds insult to injury.

By the way, this is not to say that DENR staff, or the minister, are horrible or incompetent people. The main problems are structural: Government is siloed, resources are limited, prosecution processes are cumbersome, decent data is non-existent, political will is fickle.

As a first step in acknowledging the past, a very small start to regaining trust would be the simple public acknowledgement that the 2019 BOPP MOU, which committed to 20 per cent of Bermuda’s waters being fully protected — meaning no fishing — was signed with no consultation of stakeholders. It is simply fact that the Commercial Fisheries Council, the Marine Resources Board, Fishermen’s Association of Bermuda, no one other than the signatories was consulted or informed of that commitment ahead of time.

What fishermen want is a grown-up in the room — kudos to whichever grown-up decides to do it — to say loud and clear, “yes, the original 2019 BOPP MOU was signed with no stakeholder consultation, the input of the commercial fishing industry was not sought, and as a primary stakeholder, it should have been”. There has been too much self-justification of the consultation that took place after the fact, and this keeps getting glossed over. Admitting there is a problem is the first step to solving the problem.

And now ... to the future. In the simplest form possible, what fishermen want is meaningful enforcement of existing regulations, and to bring recreational fishers into a reporting structure with reasonable bag limits — both to be successfully implemented before any discussions of additional marine protected areas take place.

That’s it. You can stop reading now.

OK, if you want to keep reading just a little more, fishermen want a structured system of fisheries management where decisions are based on real data. In the absence of funding to obtain measured, quantitative data, they want their collective, real-life, on the water experience to be recognised as real data, even if the contributors of that qualitative data (fishermen) don’t have fancy letters after their names. They want the rationale for management decisions to be clear and applied consistently.

If the decline of the spiny lobster population is known for at least five years, have a decision-making structure clear to all so that changes to the fisheries can be known well in advance of the next season. That way, fishermen can plan their equipment investments, and they can have faith that decisions are made for real reasons based on the health and sustainability of the fishery.

Honestly, whether it was meant to be or not, making drastic decisions — about the number of licences, which was then backed off, and then the number of traps and the seasonal quota — mere weeks, in this case days, before the start of a lobster season looked awfully punitive against a group that has been publicly demonstrating against policy decisionmakers. Hardly the sort of thing to engender trust.

Likewise, Bermuda’s existing MPAs — the rockfish and hind grounds — were lobbied for by fishermen for years before they were finally implemented. We saw the need for them, and we see the rebound, in particular of the hinds, which has occurred in recent years. MPAs should be targeted to pressured species, not generic protection areas that are so interchangeable they can be implemented based on which individual fishermen can be coerced into giving feedback (divide and conquer much?). When fishermen see the clear need for an MPA, and how the fishery and general marine environment benefits from it, they are more likely to support it. The BOPP has come nowhere close to making their case in that respect.

What fishermen want is to take politics out of fisheries management decisions.

So that’s it. What fishermen want is to learn the lessons of the past, and move forward into the future. Building a culture of compliance with regulations requires that participants trust the rules, the rule makers and the enforcers. Trust will take time to rebuild ... knowing first-hand how patient (stubborn) fishermen are, it may take a long time. But this is a possible place to start.

JAMIE WALSH

Secretary

Fishermen’s Association of Bermuda

St George’s