Our comment referred to a comparison with other fisheries that have the same type of territory and have 10 times more harvesters and 27 times more traps in the water, and they are actually managing to foster a sustainable fishery. Of course, natural cycles in those other fisheries also have made for some difficulties in past years, but with some concessions and some progressive movement toward better conservation measures, 27 times more traps in the water in about the same territory demonstrates that that fishery is going relatively well in terms of increasing.... The problem in that fishery--I'm referring to the lobster fishery, of course--is that the economics of the fishery are really impossible for the numbers that are there.
Our argument is that in fact this problem we're witnessing in terms of the drop of biomass is actually caused by the natural cycle of snow crab. In 1995, 15 years ago, there was an increase in the number of harvesters in this new access. As a matter of fact, this cycle has gone up and down ever since.