COMPETING VISIONS OF MARINE FISHERIES MANAGEMENT

 Different people have very different visions of what constitutes "good" fisheries management.

To some, fisheries managers do best when they generally leave fishermen alone, and allow them to fish as they traditionally have, taking whatever the ocean is willing to give them as they do their best to maximize harvest, regardless of its long-term impact on the stock.

Other people envision healthy and intact marine ecosystems, where fish are abundant and fishermen are constrained by regulations that best assure that fish stocks remain abundant and fisheries remain healthy throughout the foreseeable future.

Right now, in Congress, pending legislation represents both points of view.

In late December, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), Chair of the House Natural Resources Water, Oceans, and Wildlife Subcommittee, along with Subcommittee member Rep. Ed Case (D-HI), released a “discussion draft” of proposed legislation to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs all fishing in the marine waters of the United States.

The discussion draft is comprehensive.  It looks to the future, and addresses a plethora of issues that range from the impacts of climate change on living marine resources, to the need to protect forage fish stocks, to improving the process of rebuilding overfished populations.

And on January 4, Rep. Don Young (R-AK) announced that he has again reintroduced his “Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act.”

While a definitive copy of Rep. Young’s legislation has not yet been published on the congressional website, bills bearing the identical title, which failed in the 115^th and 116^th Congress, were backward-looking and sought to weaken the federal fisheries management process.  Both would have tipped the scales away from conservative, science-based management and toward a riskier management approach that intended to produce greater short-term economic returns.

The discussion draft and Rep. Young's bill, when viewed together, draw a sharp contrast between those who seek a sustainable fisheries future and those who would cling to the past.  

On one hand are likely supporters of Rep. Young’s bill, who are willing to sacrifice the long-term health of marine fisheries in order to maintain inherently unsustainable harvest levels—and the short-term profits that they generate—until the stocks themselves collapse in protest,  

On the other hand are those who understand that healthy recreational and commercial fisheries, and healthy marine ecosystems, can only survive in the long term if they are based on healthy, sustainable, and abundant fish stocks, and also understand that the short-term pain that accompanies science-based management measures is, in the end, nothing more than an investment in the future health of fish and the fisheries that they support.

Given that one of Magnuson-Stevens’ greatest achievements has been its success in rebuilding previously overfished stocks, looking at how the two proposed pieces of legislation—Rep. Young's H.R. 3697, introduced in the 116th Congress and presumably similar to his new bill, and the current version of the discussion draft—deal with the rebuilding issue shows just how different the two management approaches actually are.

H.R. 3697 proposed more “flexibility” in rebuilding fish stocks.  While, to those unfamiliar with fisheries issues, that might sound reasonable, anyone involved with the management process understands all too well that “flexibility” is merely a euphemism for “management inaction,” used by those who seek to delay needed harvest reductions and management measures until fishermen have an opportunity to squeeze the last bit of blood from the stone representing a particular stock of fish, at which point managers would be free to animate what then resembles a dry and lifeless husk.

It is a failed management strategy that has doomed a numberof once-abundant fish stocks, including Atlantic cod, yet demands for greater “flexibility” continue, driven by members of the recreational and commercial fishing industries.

Responding to such demands, H.R. 3697 sought to weaken Magnuson-Stevens’ rebuilding mandates. 

It would have allowed federal fisheries managers to ignore rebuilding deadlines for various reasons, and extend rebuilding times if events—whether natural or man-made—occurring outside of federal waters contributed to a stock’s problems, or if restrictions needed to rebuild an overfished stock could impair the harvest of a healthier stock within the same stock complex (as happens when regulations designed to reduce the catch of cod limit the ability of New England fishermen to utilize their entire haddock and/or pollock quotas).

If those exceptions weren’t bad enough, Rep. Young’s bill would allow delays in rebuilding if “unusual events” made rebuilding unlikely without causing economic harm to fishing communities.  Given the ocean’s changeable nature, “unusual events” of various sorts, presumably including the impacts of a shifting climate aren’t, in reality, all that unusual at all, and given that any rebuilding effort must reduce harvest, and so cause at least short-term economic harm, such provision would effectively guarantee that rebuilding deadlines could, in most cases, be safely ignored.

There is no discussion at all of what managers have to do if their rebuilding plan fails.

The Huffman discussion draft doesn’t abide that sort of nonsense. 

Instead, it would maintain all existing rebuilding mandates while also requiring managers to more carefully chart the progress of the rebuilding effort, using pre-established and measurable criteria.  Rebuilding progress would have to be evaluated at intervals of no more than two years, and if it appeared that the stock would not be rebuilt by the rebuilding deadline, if overfishing occured and the causes and impacts were not addressed, or if new scientific information revealed that more restrictive rebuilding measures are needed—or if other appropriate considerations arose—the rebuilding plan would have to be promptly revised to address such situations.  

Under no circumstances would managers be allowed to extend the rebuilding period.

And if, despite all of those efforts, the stock is unable to rebuild by the rebuilding deadline, the language of the discussion draft would require that any subsequent rebuilding plan must have at least a 75 percent probability of succeeding, rather than the mere 50 percent probability of success that applies to most fisheries management measures.

Should those provisions of the discussion draft survive in whatever Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization bill finally emerges from Congress, long overfished stocks that have failed to respond to half-hearted, though technically—if barely—legal rebuilding plans may finally be rebuilt, as more rigorous rebuilding plans finally impose restrictions that are strict enough to make a real difference.

The revisions to Magnuson-Stevens proposed in the discussion draft will make an already successful Magnuson-Stevens an even more effective fisheries management law, but effectiveness isn’t necessarily the criteria fishermen use to gauge legislation.  In the 115^th Congress, Rep. Young’s bill—then designated H.R. 200—drew the strong support of the recreational fishing and boatbuilding industries, along with related anglers’ rights organizations, because it would render Magnuson-Stevens less effective with respect to the recreational fishery.

Such groups were trying to get out from under the conservation burden imposed by current law, which requires regional fishery management councils to set annual catch limits for all managed species, and also requires managers to hold fishermen accountable when those catch limits are exceeded.  They sought “alternative” management measures, akin to the ineffective management measures typically adopted by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which would allow for longer recreational fishing seasons, larger recreational harvests, and higher profits for fishing- and boating-related businesses, even if those transient gains came at the expense of the health of important fish stocks.

It will thus be interesting to see how the various industry and anglers’ rights groups, which have joined together under the umbrella of the Center for Sportfishing Policy, will react to the discussion draft.  They will probably be dismayed by the generally pro-conservation stance of that proposed legislation, which would continue to hold both commercial and recreational fishermen’s feet to the fire with respect to overfishing and shouldering an equtable share of the burden of rebuilding overfished stocks. 

At the same time, they will be reluctant to give much public support to Rep. Young’s retrograde bill which, first as H.R. 1335 and then as H.R. 200, couldn’t make it through both houses of Congress, even when Rep. Young’s fellow Republicans controlled both chambers and, after the Deomocrats took over the House, died a long and lingering death as H.R. 3697.  Given the current Democratic control of both the House and the Senate, it’s pretty clear that Rep. Young’s effort to weaken federal fisheries conservation efforts won’t get off the ground in the 117^th Congress.

So it’s likely that those seeking to weaken, rather than enhance, Magnuson-Stevens will try to convince Rep. Huffman and others to remove pro-conservation language from the discussion draft, and perhaps add some weakening language in its stead.  In the 115^th Congress, they called their bill to weaken federal fisheries law the “Modern Fish Act,” as if it represented a step forward.

But it was really an effort to regain the past, a past where recreational fishermen were only seldom the target of fisheries regulations, and had little responsibility for restoring and conserving fish stocks.  It was a past where fish stocks were, in large part, much less abundant than they are today, and fisheries managers did little to address that problem. 

Contrary to what the industry/anglers’ rights coalition might try to claim, truly modern fishery management isn’t about short-term benefits, but about long-term abundance.  Rep. Huffman’s discussion draft, with its emphasis on conservation and countering the impacts of climate change, embraces that important truth.

We should all hope that it spawns a bill that keeps fisheries management moving forward, and rejects the mistakes of the past.