LESSONS LEARNED: THIS WEEK'S MENHADEN LOSS AT ASMFC

Let’s not try to sugar-coat things.

This week, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board handed conservation interests a significant defeat, when it bowed to the demands of Omega Protein, supported by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and failed to adopt ecosystem-based reference points for Atlantic menhaden, arguably the single most important forage species on the Atlantic coast.

Adding insult to injury, the Management Board also increased the menhaden quota by 8%, and failed to allocate an equitable share of the menhaden resource to the various coastal states, instead allowing Virginia, and thus Omega, to monopolize about 80% of the menhaden harvest.

It was clear from the debate at the Management Board meeting, and from later observations made by Management Board members and others, that the loss can’t be attributed to just one cause.  

While Omega’s ongoing efforts to preserve and enhance its income stream inspired most of the resistance to the ecosystem-based reference points, that effort was only successful because a number of factors directly or indirectly supported Omega’s position, and helped to undercut the position of the conservation community.

History always repeats itself, and more important debates, involving menhaden and many other species managed by ASMFC, loom in the future.  Thus, it is worth taking some time to dissect the factors underlying this defeat, so that the lessons learned can help conservation advocates achieve better results in the future.

1)  Change is hard

Right now, at ASMFC and at the federal level, single-species management is the norm.  Managers concern themselves solely with whether harvest is maintained at sustainable levels (“overfishing is not taking place”) and whether the stock is large enough to maximize long-term, sustainable yield the stock is not overfished”).  Even though every species is a part of and interacts with its environment, such interactions, including predator/prey relationships, are not explicitly considered.

The proposed adoption of ecosystem reference points for menhaden, whether the interim reference points rejected earlier this week or the menhaden-specific reference points that will hopefully be adopted in 2019, marks a paradigm shift for fishery management.  By placing emphasis on menhaden’s ecosystem role, and not merely focusing on sustainable harvest, ecosystem reference points would have shifted managers’ focus away from maximizing harvest—and thus profits—and toward restoring healthy and fully-functioning coastal food webs.

The possibility of such a shift frightened Omega Protein, by far the biggest player in the menhaden fishery, as it very possibly could have led to reduced landings and reduced income, and at the very least would place a low cap on how far landings could increase (the menhaden industry is alreadycomplaining that the 8% increase was far too low, and that they should havebeen allowed to kill more).  

As normally happens when corporate profits are threatened, the industry carried out an effective last-minute propaganda campaign focused on the possibility of lost jobs, rather than lost income.

No one likes to force people out of work, so that sort of campaign tends to be very effective at defeating conservation initiatives at ASMFC.  Unless the case for reducing landings is completely iron-clad, and sometimes not even then, ASMFC managers tend to avoid taking any actions that might impose economic hardship on the fishing community.  Thus, they were susceptible to Virginia’s/Omega’s arguments that the interim reference points were not menhaden-specific, and imposed inappropriate constraints on the fishery; such arguments were made more credible by an industry-funded study which questioned the need for forage fish management and cast doubt on the science supporting such reference points.

In the end, with the menhaden stock neither overfished nor subject to overfishing, the Management Board felt no urgent need to change its management approach.  

2)  The conservation community asked for too much

The management option most strongly supported by the conservation community would have established an interim fishing mortality rate target low enough to rebuild the population to 75% of the size of an unfished stock, and a fishing mortality threshold that would not have let the population slip below 40% of the size of such virgin stock.

Realistically, there was little to no chance that the Management Board would have actually set a quota that reduced fishing mortality to the proposed target rate.  The economic impact would have been far too high.  With menhaden neither overfished nor subject to overfishing, they would almost certainly have allowed the status quo to prevail, with perhaps even a slight increase in quota, and focused on preventing overfishing by maintaining a fishing mortality rate below the threshold level.  

Everyone sitting on the Management Board was very cognizant of that fact.

But while the proposed target fishing mortality rate would have called for a quota that was, from a political standpoint, unrealistically small, some at the meeting argued that the threshold fishing mortality rate would have permitted the harvest to increase substantially before overfishing occurred. 

The combination of an unrealistically low menhaden quota, if the stock was managed at the target rate, and the threat of an undesirably high menhaden harvest, if the stock was fished near the threshold rate, was enough to convince some Management Board members that the conservationists’ preferred option wasn’t a viable alternative.  An option that set a more realistic interim target mortality rate, and prevented quota from increasing much above the status quo, might have fared better, if it had been available.

3)  The Management Board is not engaged in a democratic process

Much was made, both before and after the Management Board meeting, of the fact that about 158,000 people commented on the interim ecological reference points, and that about 99% of those comments favored putting such reference points in place.

Public comment is certainly relevant to ASMFC decisions, and people should be urged to comment on any issue that they care about.  However, it’s not the Management Board’s job to count votes.  They are tasked with reviewing the biological and, yes, the social and economic information available, and making their decision on that basis. 

Hundreds of fishermen, who are active participants in the fishery and take the time to come out to hearings, submit their own comments and perhaps even show up at the management board meeting will sway some commissioners’ decisions, because they speak with some personal knowledge of all three of those factors.  Thousands of preprinted e-mails, sent by folks who have no obvious connection to or knowledge of the menhaden fishery and who failed to make the effort to come out to a hearing and speak for themselves, are a different story.  While not worthless, as a practical matter, they count for a lot less.

When faced with choices that are each supported by some valid data, a management board’s actions are often decided by interpersonal and interstate relationships that extend far beyond the issue in question.  Virginia will always walk in lockstep with Omega Protein, which has long been an economic and political presence in the state.  The current administration in Washington, which controls both the National Marine Fisheries Service’s and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s votes, will always favor short-term profit over healthy natural resources.  Few states are prone to take actions which will cause significant economic dislocation in another jurisdiction, because everyone knows that, one day, the wheel will turn again and they may be the state pleading for a little understanding.

It is clear that the great majority of people wanted to see interim ecological reference points adopted.  However, when commissioners were faced with conflicting data regarding that issue, and realized that  both federal agencies would oppose ecosystem reference points, overwhelming public comment in favor of that outcome was not enough to prevail.

While advocates should never stop seeking public involvement, they would probably do well to spend more time building personal relationships with the commissioners that will make it easier, in the future, to convey the reasons why their positions are the right ones and, in turn, understand the obstacles to those commissioners voting the right way.

4)  Commerce Secretary Ross has done severe harm to the interstate management process

Right now, Wilbur Ross has folks at ASMFC running scared.

Prior to July 2017, ASMFC had a powerful tool to keep states in compliance with its fishery management plans.  The Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act provides that, should a state fail to comply with an ASMFC fishery management plan, ASMFC can formally find that state out of compliance and forward that finding to the Secretary of Commerce.  The Secretary must then, provided that he or she both agrees that the state is out of compliance and finds that compliance is necessary for the conservation of the relevant species, shut down the fishery for such species in the noncompliant state until that state complies.

For more than twenty years, that system ensured the integrity and the effectiveness of ASMFC’s fishery management efforts, as the Secretary of Commerce never failed to support ASMFC’s findings.  

Last July, however, things changed.  The current Secretary of Commerce condoned New Jersey’s failure to comply with ASMFC’s summer flounder management plan, and overruled ASMFC’s noncompliance finding.  The precedent established by that action put ASMFC’s authority to manage coastal fish stocks in jeopardy, as states now have reason to believe that, should they decide to go out of compliance, the Secretary of Commerce will again elevate profits over the well-being of coastal resources, and overrule ASMFC.

Virginia, and reportedly New Jersey, played that card at the Management Board meeting this week, making it clear that if ASMFC took an action that they didn’t like, they would ignore it in the belief that they Secretary of Commerce would take their side.  NMFS’ opposition to interim reference points reinforced the perception that the Secretary would not uphold them if adopted by ASMFC.  That sent a message to a number of commissioners, who decided that support for the interim reference points would ultimately be pointless.  It also reportedly concerned some commissioners, primarily state fishery directors, who are concerned for the long-term survival of ASMFC and feared that another incident of the Commerce Secretary overruling an ASMFC action will put a stake through the Commission’s heart.

Faced with the likelihood of a secretarial override, commissioners accepted the inevitable and voted against the conservationists’ preferred option.

The question now is what happens in 2019, or whenever the menhaden-specific ecological reference points are developed, and are considered by the Management Board.

Omega Protein isn’t going anywhere.  There is no reason to suspect that they will endorse any ecological reference points that are adopted.  They will only change the arguments that they use to support the status quo.

The Administration in Washington won’t be going anywhere, either, at least not before 2021.  The same shark fin soup-slurping opponent of just about anything that promotes conservation will be sitting in the Oval Office, and if Wilbur Ross is no longer the Secretary of Commerce, it’s pretty certain that someone else at least as hostile to conservative, science-based fishery management, and as friendly to short-term exploitation, will be.

Which makes the menhaden’s future pretty unclear.  All that we can do is learn from this loss, and try to prepare a bit better for next time.

And hope that it pays off.