December NPFMC meeting sets pollock harvest

摘要

When the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council (NPFMC) meets in Anchorage in early December each year, fishermen, scientists, lawyers, and lobbyists show up by the hundreds to take in the action. "What action?" a casual observer might ask. "They're just a bunch of people sitting around a table talking about fish, right?" Well, not exactly. It is, perhaps, more useful to think of them as the board of a billion-dollar conglomerate, cooking up their business plan for the coming year. Since the NPFMC was established by the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 1976 to oversee the nation's richest fisheries, the shareholders to whom they are responsible are the American public, a demanding and sometimes capricious constituency.