Yes, that's true, and most of those are local people. They're suffering right now. I'm not making any accusations there. I'm just bringing up concerns and observations that we've had over the year.
There seems to be some...I call it predator pricing. In any case, there's some price manipulation taking place that is consolidating the marketing sector, in our opinion. Right now, I know there's an abundance, etc., but there are a lot of better markets out there, more markets than there ever were, but we're only getting 50% of what we were getting for lobsters 12, 13, 14 years ago. At the same time, halibut is about four times as much as what it was just five years ago.
So it's sort of inconsistent. That raises suspicions about a consolidation of the marketing sector, and the larger the players get, the fewer benefits are accruing to the fishermen down our way. We're starting to consider taking our local buyers so we can maintain our local infrastructure and sell directly to these niche markets, hopefully in Europe.
Don't take me as being too negative. I think there's some opportunity here, if we can get the right kind of mechanism in place so we can take advantage of it. But if we are going to be subject to some awesome monolithic power that's going to dominate the markets and exploit us, then we're not going to get any benefit from it. So I'd just like you to consider that when you're making your recommendations.