"After more than a decade of growing tensions with federal regulators, fishermen here and throughout New England are pushing for a new system based on group quotas that would avoid these individual restrictions.
The system calls for fishermen to band together in groups called “sectors” that would receive the right to take a set percentage of the annual catch of a variety of fish. Two sectors have been operating in Cape Cod on an experimental basis, and in April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which regulates ocean fishing, announced that it would provide about $16 million to move the rest of the Northeast toward sector fishing.
New England has submitted requests for 19 sectors, and the system could be up and running for the 2010 season, which begins next May."
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