It's pretty clear that the formula can be rather simple. The price per pound times the catch gives you your gross income versus your costs. If you have an LFA such as LFA 25, where you have fairly high landings but you're sharing it among a lot of people, your individual catch will be low enough that your costs relevant to that will be high. So you end up needing $3.80 or thereabouts to cover your costs because you don't have a lot of catch to distribute it over. You have roughly the same number of people in LFA 34, but the catch is much greater. They have a larger volume, so the cost of catching it per pound is less.
But in all areas we've seen a race to the fish. The incentives have been the tragedy of the commons. Everybody is under pressure to fish harder and get bigger boats, bigger engines, more electronics, and bigger gear. That's a dangerous trend, because it puts more and more pressure on the stock. It also means you catch the fish a lot quicker in the season and there is only so much available in the legal-size range. If you have all that pressure you can catch it more quickly. That compresses seasons and means other structural problems for the fishery.
This works fine when you have a high price and you continue to have high volumes. We run into problems in some LFAs where there has been a downward shift in volume, like LFA 25. Everybody has seen a downward shift in price. This year access to capital by the American buyers is a real problem. Access to capital by the Canadian processors and potentially Canadian buyers is a problem, although it's perhaps less than the final market. All of that is putting downward pressure on the price, so the break-even or net income will be reduced or lost completely if the price and the catch don't add up to the cost of fishing.