On April 6, 2017, Rep. Garret Graves (R-Louisiana) introduced H.R. 2023, the so-called “Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management
Act.”
Rep. Graves is the same
congressman who, in the last session of Congress, introduced H.R. 3094, the “Gulf States Red Snapper Management Authority Act,” which attempted to strip the National
Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) of its authority to manage red snapper in the
Gulf of Mexico, and turn such authority over to the five Gulf states.
Representatives of the
angling industry and various “anglers’ rights” organizations, who had previously
endorsed H.R. 3094, were quick to embrace Rep. Graves’ new legislation.
Although H.R. 2023 embraces a number of bad ideas, many of the
worst appear in the section titled “Limitations to annual catch limit
requirement for special fisheries.”
The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens) requires each
regional fishery management council to “develop annual catch limits for each of
its managed fisheries that may not exceed the fishing level recommendations of
its science and statistical committee or the peer review established” by each
such council.
It also requires that every
fishery management plan prepared by such council “establish a mechanism for
specifying annual catch limits in the plan (including a multiyear plan),
implementing regulations, or annual specifications, at a level such that
overfishing does not occur in the fishery, including
measures to assure accountability.” [emphasis added]
Such accountability measures were not required prior to the 2007
reauthorization of Magnuson-Stevens. Anglers faced no real consequences when
they overfished a stock. As a result, regional fishery management councils
rarely made a real effort to impose regulations restrictive enough to prevent
anglers from exceeding their ACL.
In response, when Congress
last reauthorized the law, it required that accountability measures be imposed.
The councils were slow to embrace the new provision, but in 2014, a federal
district court decided the case of Guindon v. Pritzker, and ordered NMFS to impose
accountability measures on red snapper fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico, who had
been chronically exceeding their ACLs.
Angling advocacy groups,
which already opposed the notion of anglers being held accountable for exceeding their ACL, condemned the court
decision. Thus, it is probably not surprising that H.R 2023 contains
a provision that reads “Notwithstanding [the requirement to develop annual
catch limits for each managed species], a Council is not required to develop
annual catch limits” if certain criteria apply.
No such annual catch limits would be required for
“ecosystem-component species,” described as “(A) a stock of fish that is a
non-target, incidentally harvested stock of fish in a fishery; or (B) a
non-target, incidentally harvested stock of fish that a Council or the
Secretary has determined (i) is not subject to overfishing, approaching a
depleted condition, or depleted; and (ii) is not likely to become subject to
overfishing or depleted in the absence of conservation and management
measures.”
Such provisions would seriously impair managers’ ability to
manage fish species that might not have very much direct commercial or
recreational value, but are important to the integrity of marine ecosystems.
Clause (A) would certainly impair managers’ ability to conserve
stocks of forage fish. The saga of river herring management efforts at the
Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC) clearly demonstrates why.
In 2016, the MAFMC considered regulating river herring bycatch by making river herring “a stock of
fish” in the Atlantic mackerel fishery. As a stock in the fishery, river
herring would have been subject to science-based ACLs that would shut the
fishery down once such limits were filled. Ultimately, the MAFMC decided
against a “stock in the fishery” designation, and instead placed a river
herring catch cap on the mackerel fishery that was not based on optimum yield
or any other biological reference point.
H.R. 2023 would eliminate the need to establish ACLs for any
forage fish caught as bycatch in any fishery, condemning them all to the river
herring’s fate.
Clause (B) puts a wider variety of fish at risk, and employs
some very devious language to do so. It would eliminate the need for ACLs for
“an incidentally harvested stock of fish that a Council or the Secretary has
determined is not subject to overfishing, approaching a depleted condition or
depleted… [emphasis added]” “Overfished” stocks aren’t mentioned at all.
That’s significant, since “overfished” is a defined term in
Magnuson-Stevens, and tied directly to the sustainability of the stock, while
“depleted” is not. Thus, a regional fishery management council could adopt its
own definition of “depleted,” declare that it didn’t apply to a particular
overfished stock, and so abolish ACLs for the stock in question.
That would seem an attractive option to some snapper-grouper
fishermen, who engage in mixed-species fisheries where the risk of accidentally
catching and killing overfished (but not necessarily “depleted”) snapper or
grouper, in quantities large enough to prevent species’ recovery, can lead to
the closure of popular fishing grounds.
The South Atlantic Fishery Management Council recently addressed
just that problem.
As NMFS explained in background information supporting proposed regulations,
“For snapper-grouper species prohibited from harvest, such as speckled hind and
warsaw grouper, fish discarded due to regulations are considered bycatch.
The deep-water snapper-grouper species are further impacted due to high discard
mortality rates (low survivability due to barotraumas). The Council
concluded that prohibiting the use of certain fishing gear in specified areas
where snapper-grouper are known to occur and possibly spawn would reduce
encounters with these species and subsequently provide protection for
reproduction.”
Such closures are resented by anglers who want to be able to continue to fish on what they view as their “traditional
fishing grounds.” By allowing protected deep-water grouper to be
designated “ecosystem-component species,” H.R. 2023 would do away with the
requirement that an ACL be established for such stocks. More important to the
deep-water anglers, it would alleviate the need to impose accountability
measures should incidental mortality be high enough to exceed an ACL, since the
only accountability measure likely to be effective in such a case would be a
regional closure.
Of course, under such circumstances, the populations of
overfished grouper would suffer additional stress, but that is not an issue
that seems to concern either Rep. Graves or those who support his bill.
Another provision of H.R. 2023 would eliminate ACLs for any
stock “that has a life cycle of approximately 1 year,” unless overfishing was
occurring, even if the stock was very badly overfished. The harm such
provision could do to forage species such as squids is obvious.
H.R 2023 would also eliminate ACLs for any fish “for which
fishing mortality is below the fishing mortality target, and a peer-reviewed
stock survey and stock assessment have not been performed during the preceding
5-year time period.” Once again, the bill takes no account of whether or
not a stock is overfished and in need of strict management measures.
For example, the last
peer-reviewed assessment of the southern New England/mid-Atlantic stock of
winter flounder occurred in 2011; a stock assessment update performed in 2015 showed that
the stock was badly overfished, but that fishing mortality was well below
target. Winter flounder were once extremely abundant; in 1985, anglers in the southern New England/mid-Atlantic region
harvested more than 16,000,000 fish. In 2016, the number of
fish harvested had dropped to a little over 80,000, barely one-half of one percent of the previous landings.
Yet that is just the sort of overfished stock that H.R. 2023
would exempt from ACLs. It’s not a good idea.
It is also a bad idea to exempt stocks if “the Secretary
determines that overfishing is not occurring.” Yelloweye rockfish, managed by
the Pacific Fishery Management Council, demonstrate why.
According to NMFS’ most recent report
to Congress, the yelloweye rockfish stock is overfished, but
overfishing is not occurring. Arebuilding analysis based on the most recent stock assessment found that, if the stock is not
subject to any fishing mortality at all, it has a 50% chance of recovering by
2045. On the other hand, if fished at the current overfishing limit, the stock
would not be expected to recover in 500
years. Even so, H.R. 2023 would exempt yelloweye rockfish from ACLs….
There foregoing provisions of H.R. 2023 would be bad for the
health of our fisheries. However, a final, insidious provision could do the
most damage of all.
It would do away with ACLs “for a sector of a fishery that is
not monitored by a data collection system determined by the Secretary to be
adequate for the development, implementation and enforcement of annual catch
limits specific to that sector, based on the evaluation recommended by the
National Academy of Sciences in its report entitled ‘Review of the Marine
Recreational Information Program (2017)’ of whether the design of a Marine
Recreational Information Program for purposes of stock assessment and the determination
of stock management reference points is compatible with the needs of in-season
management of annual catch limits.”
Since the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP) is the only broad-based survey
used to gauge recreational landings, should it be deemed inadequate for
managing recreational ACLs—and neither Rep. Graves’ bill nor the report that it references provides any guidance on what
information an “adequate” data collection system must provide, so such decision
might be made on very tenuous grounds—H.R. 2023 could potentially eliminate ACLs for all recreational
fisheries, and effectively render anglers completely unaccountable for
their overharvest of any managed stock.
Widespread overfishing would be the inevitable result.
In addition, while such
provision would effectively remove all discipline from the recreational
management process, commercial fishermen, which are unaffected by MRIP, would
remain tied to strict ACLs. The combination of recreational overharvest and
commercial compliance would create an effective reallocation of fishery
resources from the commercial to the recreational sector, in a manner that the
court in a recently-decided lawsuit (also, perhaps not coincidentally, arose
out of the Gulf red snapper fishery and also captioned Guindon v.
Pritzker) found to be patently unfair.
Thus, as the above analysis makes clear, H.R. 2023 is not about
“modernized” recreational fishery management, but about taking it backward, to
the times before ACLs were required, and anglers were not held accountable when
they overfished.
Moving backward is always a mistake.
It is time for the angling rights groups, and the angling
industry, to stop longing for the irresponsible ways of their past, and to
start moving toward a future when all fishermen, recreational and commercial
alike, equitably share the responsibility for maintaining abundant and
sustainable fish stocks.
-----
This essay first appeared in "From the Waterfront," the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which may be found at http://conservefish.org/blog/
No comments:
Post a Comment