For
the past year and a half, anglers have been bombarded with press releases from various industry and anglers’ rights groups,
urging them to support two bills, H.R. 2023 and S. 1520, which are both formally titled the
“Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act,” but are better known as
the “Modern Fish Act.”
A
third bill, H.R. 200, the Strengthening Fishing Communities and
Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act, has also been referred to as a “Modern Fish Act” bill,
but such claims are deceptive; although H.R. 200 and the
Modern Fish Act legislation share a few common provisions, H.R. 200 is a much
more comprehensive, and potentially much more harmful, piece of legislation.
The Modern Fish Act
bills, as originally filed, differed in some details, but had similar goals.
Both sought to change the current recreational and commercial harvest
allocations. Both sought to create exceptions to the annual catch limit
requirements and to the deadlines for rebuilding overfished stocks. Both sought
to significantly impair fishery managers’ ability to create catch share
programs that might effectively end overfishing.
And neither one
sought to change the primary tools that managers use to control recreational
harvest, bag limits size limits and seasons.
It’s difficult to
understand how such legislation would be “modernizing recreational fishery
management,” as they are deeply rooted in timeworn management policies and
approaches. That’s too bad, because a recently released paper suggests that
recreational fishery management could use some modernization.
The
paper, titled “Status-quo management of marine recreational fisheries undermines
angler welfare,” (Paper) appeared in the respected Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America. Its authors note that “Recreational fisheries
have experienced little of the policy transformation seen in many commercial
fisheries. Most operate under regimes of nominal license fees and season, size
and retention constraints…As a result, they have done little to contain fishing
mortality in popular sport fisheries. Instead, many recreational fisheries are
caught in a spiral of shorter seasons and increasingly tight regulation…”
Such
language actually echoes that of Modern Fish Act supporters. The American
Sportfishing Association, which represents the fishing tackle industry,
has justified its support for the Modern Fish Act by saying that “The
current federal laws have never properly addressed the importance of
recreational fishing. This has led to shortened or even cancelled seasons,
reduced bag limits, and unnecessary regulations…”
But while the Paper’s
authors and the Modern Fish Act supporters might agree on some of the problems
that confront recreational anglers, they disagree on such problems’ solution.
The Modern Fish Act would not introduce any new approaches to recreational
fishery management. Instead, it strives to increase recreational landings by
reallocating commercial quota to the recreational sector, eliminating some or
all recreational catch limits, and delaying the recovery of overfished stocks.
Under such
circumstances, as the Paper notes, “anglers secure their rights at the expense
of future generations.”
The Paper, on the
other hand, suggests a truly new approach to managing recreational fisheries.
It concludes that a management approach that has already proven effective in
the commercial fishery, the adoption of “rights-based management,” more
commonly known as “catch shares,” would better maintain the long-term health of
fish stocks while also maximizing the economic value of the recreational
fishery.
Requiring anglers to
fish under such a catch share system would completely change the management
paradigm. It would certainly qualify as “modernizing recreational fisheries
management.” Even so, such a cutting-edge management approach would be very
tightly constrained, and perhaps completely frustrated by the so-called “Modern
Fish Act.”
On
the other hand, new ideas aren’t always good ones. Should recreational fisheries be managed with
catch shares?
To answer that
question, it’s probably best to go back and look at the fishery that gave birth
to the Paper, the for-hire red snapper fishery in the Gulf of Mexico.
By
2014, that fishery faced a unique, and very threatening, situation. The
recreational sector had chronically overfished its annual allocation, which led
to increasingly restrictive federal regulations. The five Gulf States failed to
conform their red snapper regulations to the federal standard, but instead
instituted longer seasons that allowed private boat anglers to fish in state
waters when the federal waters were closed.
For-hire vessels
holding federal reef fish permits did not have that option. Instead, they had
to comply with federal regulations even when fishing within state waters. Thus,
when liberal state regulations led to continued recreational overfishing, which
led, in turn, to shorter federal seasons, the for-hire boats, as well as their
customers, found themselves in a bind.
Eventually,
they convinced the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council to split the recreational sector into private boat
and for-hire components, and establish separate catch limits and regulations
for each, in order to maintain a viable for-hire fishery.
Some
for-hire vessels went even farther. A group of 17 vessels, that called itself the Gulf
Headboat Collaborative (Collaborative), obtained an exempted fishing permit (EFP) from the National
Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), that allowed members of the Collaborative to
catch red snapper and gag grouper whenever their customers chose to pursue such
species, without regard to federal fishing seasons. Federal size and bag limits
would still apply.
Pursuant to the EFP,
the Collaborative was allocated an annual harvest of 148,089 pounds of red
snapper and 42,114 pounds of gag grouper, which it allocated among its member
vessels. When any vessel caught its share of the quota for either species, it
could not harvest any more such fish unless it acquired more quota from the
Collaborative or from another vessel. Each member vessel was also required to
install vessel monitoring systems, notify NMFS before going fishing, and call
in to NMFS at least one hour before returning to the dock, so that NMFS could
inspect its catch if it so chose.
The EFP remained in
force for the 2014 and 2015 seasons. Once it expired, the Paper’s authors began
their research on the economic value of catch share programs in recreational
fisheries. They found that such programs would increase the value of recreational
fisheries by approximately $139 per angler, at least in the case of Gulf of
Mexico red snapper and gag grouper. They admitted that such estimate is
“undoubtedly crude,” but nevertheless maintained that “our analysis shows that
the status-quo policies used in most recreational fisheries may fall well short
of maximizing the net [economic] benefit of anglers.”
And in the case of
the fisheries examined, that is probably true. It is not clear that similar
benefits would accrue in other fisheries.
The fisheries
discussed in the Paper are tightly regulated; thus, the ability to catch red
snapper or gag grouper outside of the current, short fishing season has a very
real value that doesn’t exist in fisheries that enjoy much longer seasons or,
in some cases, no closed season at all. Recreational catch share systems would
probably only add value in fisheries where the annual catch limit is too small
to satisfy angler demand.
There is also the
question of whether a catch share system would have to be limited to for-hire
boats. The Paper’s authors admit that “extending these approaches beyond the
for-hire sector to encompass anglers fishing from their own vessels faces
significant practical and political challenges.”
However,
private-boat fisheries for very highly regulated species could benefit from a
catch share system, too. It is not hard to imagine such a system being adopted
for red snapper in the South Atlantic, where the 2018
federal fishing season lasted for only six days in August, with
tags issued in an automated lottery at the time anglers purchase their fishing
licenses.
Clearly, catch share
programs aren’t appropriate for every recreational fishery.
Still, they remain a
valuable tool that belongs in the tool box of any truly modern recreational
fishery manager.
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This essay 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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