Stripers Forever is one of those organizations that leaves
me a little conflicted.
On one hand, I have to admire the dedication of its
leadership, and can only agree with its goal of ensuring the long-term health
of the striped bass stock. On the other
hand, its emphasis on a single, politically unrealistic approach to striped
bass management—eliminating the commercial fishery—and its mixed message of
support for both conservation measures and relaxed recreational regulations
(“the minimum legal size for anglers is 28”, which puts a bass for dinner out
of reach for the great majority of rod and reel fishermen”) tends to turn me
off.
However, Stripers Forever’s recent
comments on the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Five-Year
Strategic Plan (http://www.stripersforever.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/SF-FINAL-PLAN-COMMENTS-010414.pdf)
were right on the money and demonstrate that the organization “gets it” when it
comes to the big-picture issue.
The “Executive Summary” of Stripers’
Forever’s comments includes a number of points.
However, the first point really says it all, and captures ASMFC’s core failing:
“There is no statement endorsing the health and
abundance of our marine resources as the most important management priority. The current management decisions reflect a
risky bias toward Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) to the exclusion of a true
conservation ethic.”
The remainder of the comments
merely flesh out a truth that is all too clear to anyone who has spent much
time following the decision-making process at ASMFC—that the restoration and
conservation of living marine resources takes a second seat to economic
exploitation.
I have little doubt that those who
attempt to discredit Stripers Forever’s comments will quibble with the
details. For example, there are some
ASMFC management plans—including the plan for striped bass—which adopt a target
mortality rate thought to be well below MSY.
But there are other cases—tautog is one which immediately comes to
mind—in which harvest was permitted to exceed MSY for well over a decade.
Others might take issue with
Stripers Forever’s anti-commercial fishing bias, and its repeated claims that
ASMFC doesn’t give adequate regard to the economic importance of recreational
fisheries. Such objections would be
justified, for most ASMFC commissioners clearly want both the commercial and
recreational industries to be profitable.
They care so much about the health and profitability of industry that
they justify Stripers Forever’s key contentions: The health and abundance of marine resources
is not ASMFC’s most important management priority, and the Commission does not
demonstrate anything resembling a true conservation ethic.
Stripers Forever is also correct
when it notes that the typical ASMFC management plan has “no provision for risk
reduction in the face of incomplete data.”
Instead of sharply restricting, or even prohibiting, harvest of troubled
stocks such as American shad, river herring, southern New England lobster or
northern shrimp (or American eel, southern New England winter flounder,
weakfish or, for fully 15 years, tautog) to prevent further decline, ASMFC used
uncertain or incomplete data as an excuse for delay and continued exploitation,
and in doing so rendered the recovery of such stocks a far more difficult task
than it might otherwise have been.
The Commission can get away with
that because, as Stripers Forever also notes,
“…it isn’t apparent that ASMFC is ever accountable for
anything. Members may be accountable to
their home jurisdictions, but, as a regulatory body…there appears to be no
level at which ASMFC is accountable. Are
there penalties or sanctions of some sort if a stock collapses under ASMFC
management? No…”
ASMFC’s lack of institutional accountability was confirmed in the federal
Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit) decision in New York v. Atlantic
States Marine Fisheries Commission, 609 F.3d 524 (2010),
in which the court found that ASMFC was neither a federal agency nor a “quasi-agency,”
and that its decisions were thus not subject to court review pursuant to the
Administrative Procedures Act. And
commissioners’ accountability to constituents in their home states assures that
such commissioners will elevate parochial interests—most particularly near-term
economic interests—above the common good and the long-term health of the stock.
Thus, even though ASMFC’s staff
includes a host of very competent fisheries scientists—I have known many of
them over the years, and can say without reservation that all of them had a
sincere desire to do the right thing—the Commission’s efforts to restore
depleted stocks has largely been a dismal failure. The recovery of the striped bass was the
Commission’s singular success, and that occurred nearly twenty years ago (even
there, success may be slipping away, as a shrinking biomass hovers just above
the overfishing threshold).
That is because the biologists on
ASMFC’s staff do not make the decisions.
As is usually the case in salt water fisheries management, the actual
decisions are made by a combination of state managers and the people who
actually harvest the resource.
That means that salt water
fisheries are managed very differently from deer or ducks, squirrel or
sunfish—or, in fact, any other sort of living resource. In those cases, with some limited exceptions
in a few states, decisions on how many animals can be harvested are made by
trained biologists, who may receive advice from various user groups but
ultimately have the sole responsibility for setting seasons, bag limits and
caps on harvest.
Giving state fisheries managers
and representatives of the fishing community significant control over salt
water fisheries management works at the federal level, because the Magnuson Act
makes “the health and abundance of our marine resources…the most important
management priority,” and legislatively creates a “conservation ethic” that the
economic interests of the fishermen sitting on the various regional fishery
management councils cannot override.
But as Stripers Forever observes,
no such emphasis on the conservation of healthy and abundant marine resources
is seen at ASMFC. There, the staff
scientists have no say in the ultimate management decisions, and the 17
professionals on the various management boards are outnumbered nearly two to
one by the 30 legislative and governors’ appointees, thbe majority of whom
profit in one way or another from the harvest of the same fish that they manage.
Letting the foxes guard the
henhouse is never a good idea. The
declines of so many important fish populations managed by ASMFC show us why.
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