The 1980s and early 1990s were a bad time for Atlantic Coast
fisheries.
While the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 had
successfully pushed most foreign fishing vessels out of U.S. waters, it failed to protect fish populations from overharvest by
the United States’ fleet, while providing domestic fishermen with financial
incentives to build larger, more efficient boats that could land even greater
numbers of fish.
As a result, the
populations of many New England groundfish, such as cod, haddock and yellowtail
flounder, continued to fall. In the Mid-Atlantic, summer flounder
abundance fell to an all-time low in 1989. All along the coast, fish
were becoming harder to find.
The Atlantic striped bass
stock, suffering from years of overfishing and unfavorable spawning conditions
in critical Chesapeake Bay tributaries, had collapsed by the early 1980s. Things had gotten so bad that
some fishermen were calling for striped bass to be listed under the Endangered Species Act, and despaired of ever seeing a healthy
population again.
However, the Atlantic
States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), newly empowered to manage the
fishery by the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act, had not given up. In a
last-ditch effort to rebuild the collapsed population, it adopted Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic
Striped Bass (Amendment 3) in 1985.
Amendment 3 was short and simple. It required all states to
protect the relatively large, if still below-average, 1982 year class of
striped bass, and all subsequent year classes, until they were large enough to
spawn at least once. The goal was to keep the annual fishing mortality rate on
such year classes below five percent.
As a result of the
ASMFC’s efforts, the striped bass population was successfully rebuilt by 1995, just ten years after Amendment 3
was put in place.
The ASMFC’s restoration of the striped bass stock was a landmark
event. At the time that it happened, it was probably the most successful
restoration of a marine fish population that had ever occurred on the East
Coast; it may have been the most successful restoration anywhere in the world.
That success convinced
Congress to pass the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act, which
gave the ASMFC the authority to manage a number of other inshore fish stocks.
Unfortunately, Congress’ faith in the ASMFC process was apparently misplaced,
as rebuilding the striped bass population was not only the ASMFC’s first, but
also its last, management victory. Since then, it has failed to restore even
one additional overfished stock. A recent benchmark stock assessment has revealed that
striped bass are once again overfished, as well.
How did the ASMFC, which
once was a leader in successful fishery management, become so ineffective? The
answer probably lies in a change that it made to its Interstate Fisheries Management Program Charter (ASMFC
Charter) soon after striped bass were restored.
Political Influence Takes
Over ASMFC Management
In 1995, the ASMFC’s
Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board looked very different than it does
today. While it was still composed of each state’s professional marine
fisheries manager, governor’s appointee and legislative appointee, only the
state fisheries managers were allowed to vote. The appointees served in a
largely advisory capacity, and did not cast individual
votes on management matters.
Thus, when the ASMFC successfully restored the striped bass
population, all of its management decisions were made by experienced fishery
managers, who fully understood, and relied on, the scientific information
provided to them.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, that structure set the ASMFC
apart from the federal fishery management councils, which were dominated by
fishermen and fishing industry representatives who tended to elevate their own
short-term interests over the long-term health of fish stocks.
In 1996, Congress cured
many of those problems when it passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act (SFA), which required, for the
first time, that federal fishery management plans prevent overfishing and
promptly rebuild overfished stocks. The new law made conservation a priority, and in doing so,
made it much more difficult for members of the regional fishery management
councils to cast votes that would benefit them, but harm the fish that they
were entrusted to manage.
Thanks to SFA, and to
later amendments to federal fisheries law, the National Marine Fisheries
Service was able to sharply reduce overfishing and fully rebuild 45 once-overfished stocks.
But at its 1998 annual meeting, the ASMFC decided to take a step
backward.
It initiated a pilot program that adopted a so-called “caucus”
voting system, pursuant to which each state would cast a single vote, which
represented the majority view off such state’s three commissioners. That meant
that the political appointees (or their proxies, who were often fishermen or
otherwise connected to the fishing industry), who typically had no formal
education in fishery management, could override the professional judgment of
their state’s fishery manager.
Thus, the science-based system that rebuilt the striped bass
population was replaced by a system largely dependent on the uninformed
opinions of political appointees and their proxies, who often had personal
motivations that caused them to vote against management measures recommended by
the ASMFC’s staff biologists.
The results were predictable: the ASMFC’s efforts to rebuild
fish stalled. Some once-healthy populations went into decline.
Surprisingly, no one at
the ASMFC seemed to have any reservations about the new system. At a 1999 meeting of the ASMFC’s Policy Board, one commissioner
noted that “The [Legislative and Governors’ Appointees] believe the program is
working very well, calling it an unmitigated success and that we haven’t seen
any downside to it at all.” Given such support, the ASMFC Charter was amended to permanently adopt caucus
voting, and so grant greater power to the governors’ and legislative
appointees.
After that, economic concerns began to dominate management discussions.
The ASMFC management boards developed a strong bias in favor of maintaining
harvest levels, and a corresponding reluctance to impose the sort of landings
restrictions that were needed to end overfishing and rebuild depleted fish
stocks.
Weak Management of
Weakfish
One of the most egregious
examples occurred in 2009, when biologists informed the Weakfish Management Board that “No
matter what threshold we use, [the weakfish stock] is at record low
levels…There is no other way to say that. At this point stock rebuilding should
be a main concern…Even with a moratorium, rebuilding would be slow…”
Given such advice, state
fishery managers from Maryland and North Carolina put a motion on the table that would have shut down both
the commercial and recreational weakfish fisheries.
That motion didn’t sit
well with the many of the appointees, who sought to protect the industry.
Foremost among them was the governor’s appointee from New Jersey, who argued against the motion, saying “I’m
looking at a solution that doesn’t basically shut down a complete fishery. You know, we also talk about we’re supposed
to build a sustainable fishery for a sustainable industry. If you start closing
down both those industries, it takes a long time for that industry to recover.
Yes, if we want to do away with the fishing industry, both recreational and
commercial, we seem to be going in the right way. The numbers are going down
whether it is a commercial fisherman, whether it is a bait shop, whether it is
a tackle shop or a charterboat or a partyboat. I mean, I think the Compact
[that created the ASMFC] says to build sustainable fisheries and fisheries that
can be sustained.”
His full comment was quite a bit longer. In it, the New Jersey
appointee expressed his concerns for the fishing industry, and his belief that
fishermen ought to have “at least…one fish to take home.”
But he didn’t express any concern for the weakfish at all.
He was not alone. The governor’s appointee from New York
remarked that
It’s interesting that with this action that we may take we will
again affect the fishermen and will only play a small role, in my mind, in
continuing to lead us toward a full demise of this specie [sic] of fish.
Similar as to winter flounder where we in New York went through
an exercise in the last couple of weeks where we almost put a moratorium on
winter flounder, we would have been one of two states that would have done
that, which would have put a further hit on recreational, commercial and bait
and tackle people and marinas and so on for those supplies.
Once again, all of the appointee’s concerns were for the fishing
industry. None were for the fish. As a result of such sentiments, no moratorium
was ever imposed. Weakfish remain very scarce.
Restoring Science-based
Management at the ASMFC
Often, instead of seeing the ASMFC commissioners arguing about
the best way to restore declining fish stocks, we see them arguing about
whether such stocks ought to be restored at all.
In 2014, after a benchmark stock assessment found that the striped bass
population had nearly become overfished, the proxy for Maryland’s legislative appointee refused to
accept the assessment’s findings. He instead argued that “At this time, we’ve
probably got more striped bass in the bay than I’ve ever seen in my life. We’ve
got so many striped bass that it has affected our crab-catching industry…When
the charterboats catch the striped bass and they clean them, you can count
anywhere from ten to forty small crabs in the belly of a rockfish. This would
also hurt our charterboat industry…”
While such arguments hardly constitute science-based management,
they’re not uncommon at the ASMFC.
As a New York striped
bass fisherman noted in a recent email to the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board,
In looking for a root cause to the problems we now have with
Striped Bass, there is compelling evidence of the need to better clarify Board
roles, in order to strengthen the overall decision-making capabilities at the
Management Board level. ASMFC Guiding Documents clearly spell out the
educational/technical qualifications for those conducting stock assessments,
and assessing management options. There does not appear to be a similar list of
qualifications for Commissioners. The end result can be (has been)
Commissioners who have the power to caucus to dismiss or veto the science, even
in the absurd case when they admit that they do not fully understand it.
To be more direct, science-based decisions on biological
reference points, or levels of fishing mortality needed to adhere to those
reference points, should not be made or influenced by political appointees who
have no relevant background or training.
It’s a valid point.
Fisheries management is a complex scientific process. Thus,
fishery management decisions should be made by scientists, not by untrained
appointees who might not understand the science, but do understand that they
have economic or other interests that will be affected by management decisions.
At the ASMFC, such appointees dominate every management board.
It’s an effective way to protect the economic interests of industry members,
but not a very good way to protect the public interest in healthy fish stocks.
Unfortunately, the current situation isn’t likely to change. The
ASMFC made a big mistake years ago when it took management decisions out of
professional managers’ hands and made them hostage to the whims of political
appointees. To correct that mistake, the appointees would have to be willing to
cede their current power and return to their former advisory role.
That’s not likely to happen in the real world.
The ASMFC finds itself in the same place that the federal
fishery management councils were caught in prior to passage of the SFA, a place
where council members voted in ways that benefitted themselves and their
industries, and did long-term harm to fish stocks.
Congress can get the ASMFC to a far better place by passing a
bill similar to SFA that limited commissioners’ discretion and required them to
adhere to science-based management measures, avoid overfishing, and promptly
rebuild overfished stocks.
If such a bill ever became law, the ASMFC could again become an
effective fisheries manager, and don the mantle of leadership that it sadly
abandoned two decades ago.
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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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