Everybody wants more
fish.
Commercial
fishermen make more money when they can harvest more product, while
recreational fishermen have long cast envious glances at the commercial
harvest, and tried, by various means, to convert
some of those commercial landings into their own.
It’s not just an
inter-sector conflict. In both commercial and recreational fisheries, there are
sub-allocations that divide up the harvest between fishermen in various states,
or those fishing from private versus for-hire vessels, or those using different
types of gear.
At the same time,
deciding who catches the fish, rather than how many are ultimately caught,
isn’t a conservation issue. A dead fish is a dead fish, no matter who lands it,
so as long as the overall annual harvest doesn’t exceed sustainable levels,
allocation has no impact on stock health.
Allocation of harvest
to the various sectors and sub-sectors is the responsibility of the various
regional fishery management councils, and of the Atlantic States Marine
Fisheries Commission (ASMFC). In making allocation decisions, fishery managers
rely heavily upon “catch history”—historical patterns of harvest—but also give
some consideration to various social and economic factors, as well as to the
distribution of fish stocks.
Once allocations are
set, they very seldom change, despite often significant changes in markets, in
the fishery, and in fish distribution.
There are a number of
reasons for that, but the biggest one is that fisheries managers just don’t
like to get bogged down in allocation debates. Such debates tend to be long,
bitter and filled with rancor, because allocation is usually a zero-sum game.
Unless some portion of the annual catch limit typically remains unused, the
only way to give someone more fish is to take fish away from someone else.
Thus, no matter what
fishery managers do, they’re going to get someone upset. Most managers, given a
choice, would rather avoid the issue.
Some of the recent
allocation debates demonstrate why that is so.
On
the East Coast, water temperatures are rising, and fish stocks are moving north in response. For fish such
as summer flounder and black sea bass, that has created a situation where
southern states hold most of the quota, but northern states host most of the
fish. As a result, southern fishermen are forced to steam hundreds of miles
from port in an effort to catch all of their quota, while northern fishermen
are forced to dump hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds of dead fish back
into the ocean because of the very small quotas assigned to the New England and
upper Mid-Atlantic states.
The current summer flounder allocations are based on landings during
the years of 1980-1989. Throughout those years, the commercial
fishery was largely unregulated, and badly overfished; the spawning stock fell
to its lowest level of abundance in 1989. Most of the fish, and so
most of the harvest was concentrated at the lower end of the species’ range. As
a result, the southernmost states of North Carolina and Virginia were awarded
27.4% and 21.3%, respectively, of the overall quota.
Today,
the situation has changed. Biologists at the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC)
recognize that “the [summer flounder’s] range may be extending
farther north. In addition, warmer water temperatures have resulted in the fish
moving to the North and the East. These changes may also be driven by a
stronger population now that the stock is rebuilt…The population itself is
likely distributed with about 50 percent North of Hudson Canyon and the other
50 percent to the South. Approximately 70% of the allocation is to the states
from New Jersey to North Carolina, which sets up a bit of an overfishing
situation in the southern areas.”
Such circumstances
seem to demand a reallocation of summer flounder quota among the states. But
reallocation, no matter how compelling the circumstances, in never a quick nor
an easy process.
At
its December 2013 meeting, the MAFMC decided to initiate a new amendment to its Summer Flounder,
Scup and Black Sea Bass Fishery Management Plan. Such amendment was to consider four issues, including the states’ commercial
allocations. However, despite the clear changes in the fishery, the reallocation idea was not well received by
commercial participants on the MAFMC’s Summer Flounder Advisory Panel.
One
advisor argued that “some states (especially New York) have been left out of
the current system,” and that as a result, “this system went against Magnuson
National Standard 8,” which is intended to protect fishing
communities. Most of the comments supported the status quo even though
conditions had changed.
Advisors argued that
“the industry…had been built on this system over the last 25 years,” and that
“changes to this system will present significant economic and management
losses.”
Not surprisingly, the
greatest resistance came from fishermen enjoying the largest shares of the
quota, who said that “The summer flounder commercial fishery is very important
to Virginia and North Carolina; it is their bread and butter fishery since they
do not have much else to target…Now interest in landing summer flounder in New
England is increasing because there is no groundfish. Virginia and North
Carolina should not be punished because of that.”
More
than four years later, the debate continues. The MAFMC
is yet to prepare a draft amendment that can be sent
out for public review.
Things are no
smoother on the recreational side.
In
2003, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) decided to
allocate recreational summer flounder landings among the states, based on each state’s landings in 1998, a year when the
stock was still overfished, overfishing was still occurring, and the
recreational sector exceeded its landings target by nearly 70%. Such allocation gave New Jersey anglers
39.09% of the recreational quota; neighboring New York, allocated 17.63%,
received the next-largest share.
But
as the stock recovered, waters warmed and summer flounder moved north, the old
allocation stopped making sense. New York anglers started encountering, and
landing, a far larger number of summer flounder than they had before. In 2009,
in order to shoehorn the state’s anglers into their decade-old allocation, New
York was forced to adopt the most
restrictive summer flounder regulations ever seen on the coast:
two fish per day, a 21-inch minimum size and a short 78-day season.
During
the same year, New Jersey anglers, who sometimes fished within shouting distance
of their New York counterparts, were governed by regulations that included a six-fish daily limit,
an 18-inch minimum size and a 103-day season, all because their state retained
their large allocation even though it no longer hosted the greatest abundance
of fish.
Although the ASMFC
was already talking about replacing the outdated allocation with a new and more
equitable approach, nothing was done for years; the states that benefitted from
the old way of doing things didn’t want to cede fish to the other states.
When
the ASMFC came up with a temporary plan in 2014, that both
reallocated some unused recreational quota from the southern states and grouped
the states into regions that shared the same regulations and a single
allocation of fish, New Jersey was strongly opposed.
ASMFC’s
temporary plan worked. Even so, after the ASMFC adopted a modified version of it in 2017, New Jersey
refused to comply, adopted its own set of regulations, and appealed to the
Secretary of Commerce for relief. The Secretary of Commerce sided with New Jersey
In 1989, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council (GMFMC) allocated 51%
of red snapper landings to the commercial sector and 49% to anglers, based on
historical landings. For many years, anglers
have been seeking to increase their share even though, because
they chronically overfish their quota, anglers usually land most of the fish. Finally, late in
2015, the GMFMC adopted Amendment 28 to its reef fish management plan (Amendment
28), which reallocated 51.5% of the red snapper to anglers, leaving 48.5% for
the commercial sector.
Such
reallocation was based on a recalculation of historical landings. It
didn’t survive very long.
Commercial
fishermen sued. In 2017 a federal court decided that the
reallocation violated National
Standard Four of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens),
which requires, in part, that any allocation be “fair and equitable to
all…fishermen.” The violation occurred because “Amendment 28 enables the
recreational sector to catch more fish in the future because they caught more
fish in the past, in excess of applicable
restrictions. [emphasis added]” The court observed that
Amendment 28 “created a system in which one sector must demonstrate an increase
in landings in excess of its quota in order to obtain an increase in their
allocation.”
Rewarding a sector
for repeatedly overfishing was clearly not acceptable policy, so the years of
work that the GMFMC spent preparing Amendment 28 ultimately accomplished
nothing.
That’s
not an uncommon outcome for allocation debates, which is another reason why
regional fishery management councils usually avoid revisiting allocations
unless there is a compelling reason to do so. Even when compelling reasons
exist, and years of work is invested in reallocation efforts, such efforts
often fail. Thus, it’s difficult not to be skeptical of legislation known as
the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act (Modern Fish Act), designated S. 1520 in the Senate, which among other
things would require the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico regional fishery
management councils to revisit allocations of all managed species two years
after such bill was enacted, and every five years thereafter.
Given
that the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council manages 75 different
species, and that the GMFMC manages at least 35, repeatedly revisiting
all of the species’ allocations would be a daunting task, one likely to devour
much of such councils’ time and resources, leaving little remaining for the
councils’ primary task of conserving and managing fish stocks.
Certainly, changing
conditions in the ocean and in our fisheries justify taking a new look at some
allocations, but creating arbitrary deadlines for allocation review guarantees
neither a good result nor any result at all.
When, and whether,
allocations should be reviewed is a matter best left up to those who know their
fisheries and their local waters best, the people who sit on the regional
fishery management councils.
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This post first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog
of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which can be found at http://conservefish.org/blog/
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