I was doing some research for another blog when I came
across a comment in the
transcript of a meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s
American Lobster Management Board.
The speaker, the governor’s appointee from the State of
Rhode Island, was objecting to a proposal to sharply curtail or even suspend
lobster harvest south of Cape Cod. Even
though the stock was apparently suffering recruitment failure, and the
population threatened with collapse, he objected to the only measures that
might have a hope of halting the decline, saying
“I don’t know whether you people are aware of it or not, but
if you chose a five-year fishery moratorium to keep the fishery from
collapsing, you’ve kind of jumped the shark and guaranteed that the fishery
collapses without even giving the opportunity to collapse, because there would
be no fishery left after five years.
There would be no infrastructure.
“The average age of the lobster fishermen in Southern New
England is something like 57 or 58 years; so if you take those people and you
put five more years onto their average, they’re well up into their
sixties. At that point there is no
fishery to come back, so it seems like the board would be considering an option
that it seems nice to say, oh, yes, well, we can do this, this and the other
thing and then everything will be fine and hunky dory, but there wouldn’t be
anybody to fish…”
And that is the crux of so many fishery management debates.
How do we apportion the benefits of fisheries
management?
Should we accept the risk of putting some—perhaps many—of today’s
fishermen out of business, or at the least expose them to severe economic harm,
in order to better assure that their fishery will thrive in the future? Or should we allow those fishing today to
collapse a once-vital stock, in the hopes of keeping their businesses alive for
a few more years, and let the future fend for itself?
Is it ever acceptable to risk extirpation of local stocks—or
even the extinction of a species—in order to keep businesses going for a few seasons
more?
Does a stock even have value, if no one can fish it?
And do the answers change when the science is a little
fuzzy, or suggests that even with managers’ best efforts, a stock may not
recover?
In
the case of the Southern New England stock of American lobster, ASMFC favored
the present over the future, and in doing so not only failed to begin that
stock’s recovery, but assured that it would fall
over the brink into stock collapse, as the August 2015 stock assessment now
shows.
Unfortunately, such things have happened before.
In February 2009, Dr. Steven Correia informed ASMFC’s Winter
Flounder Management Board that
“The [Technical Committee] believes the Southern New England
winter flounder is in serious trouble.
There is no evidence of any year classes coming through. Projections indicate the stock is not going
to be rebuilt for quite a bit even at very low [levels of fishing mortality]…
“The concern that comes up is that where the fisheries occur
within state waters, that they’re occurring on the spawning groups, individual
spawning groups as they’re moving in and out of the estuaries, and so the
inshore fishery could actually have a bigger impact on some of these spawning
groups because they’re getting ready to go in as opposed to the EEZ where they’re
mixed with various components…”
Faced with the dire
condition of the stock, the Management Board was contemplating emergency action
to completely close the fishery for the southern New England winter flounder
stock before any significant harvest took place in the spring. ASMFC’s Winter Flounder Advisory Panel
unanimously endorsed such closure.
However, once again, the interests of those exploiting the stock were
elevated above the health of the stock itself.
Philip Curcio, an attorney representing the United Boatmen
of New York, the New York Fishing Tackle Trades Association and the New York
chapter of the Recreational Fishing Alliance admitted that
“we have an extreme situation here,”
but objected to the emergency action solely on business
grounds. He argued that
“The gentlemen who represents New York on this panel has no
economic interest in the fishery whatsoever, and I have no doubt that he was
part of the group that opined as to the fact that there would be no economic
impact because nobody catches these fish.
I come directly against that opinion and say that even if people don’t
catch them or catch very few of them, they still do fish for them…
“Basically, you’re looking at these guys now staying tied to
the dock probably until the 1st of July or the very end of June, if
we’re fortunate enough to get away with even that situation. There are several partyboats that still make
a living at this. Even though they don’t
catch a lot of fish, they’re providing the opportunity for people to come out
in the spring and wet a line. There is
an economic impact here…”
So once again, even though the speaker knows that the fish
are in extremely bad shape, he supports further exploitation because there are
still a few dollars yet to be made.
In the end, he and folks who thought like him carried the day, and the fishery was never closed.
And some folks undoubtedly made a few dollars in the years
since, while driving the population of New York’s winter flounder so low that biologists
studying it warn that more management missteps
“may lead to decline and extinction.”
However, extinction seems to be an acceptable risk when
there is money to be made, an unfortunate truth often demonstrated at various ASMFC
management board meetings, where fishermen with direct economic interests in
the species being discussed are permitted to vote on how such species are
managed.
That may help to explain why not only southern New England
lobster and southern New England winter flounder have suffered stock collapse
while under ASMFC’s aegis, but stocks of northern shrimp and weakfish as well. It may also help to explain why, since 1995, ASMFC has failed to recover a single stock under its sole
management authority, although it has seen a number of other stocks, including but
not limited to American shad, river herring, striped bass and tautog, decline
sharply during that time.
It also demonstrates very clearly why, if fishermen are to
have voting roles on management boards, there must be laws in place that
clearly require them to place the long-term health of the stock above their own
short-term economic interests.
That is why the National Marine Fisheries Service has been
so successful in rebuilding stocks over the past fifteen year or so; the
Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act requires that NMFS must
end overfishing, and must rebuild overfished stocks as
quickly as possible.
At the August 2015 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery
Management Council, members of the recreational and commercial fishing
industries came to the podium to ask the Council not to recommend reductions
in summer flounder landings, even though the best available science indicated
that such reductions were needed. But no
matter how sympathetic fishermen on the Council might have been to such pleas,
federal law did not allow the Council to heed them; it was bound to follow the
scientists’ advice. Thus, efforts to
rebuild the stock will begin soon .
We see the same thing up in New England, where the collapse
of the Gulf of Maine cod stock has led to very severe—but very badly needed—harvest
reductions.
“a completely idiotic program…intended to kill fish and kill
fisherman,”
but the reductions are mandated by federal law, unlike the
proposed reductions in lobster harvest, and were put in place despite fishermen’s
complaints.
And that’s what makes Magnuson-Stevens such a good and
important law, and why anyone concerned with the health of America’s marine
fisheries must urge their representatives in Washington to resist efforts to
weaken the law to allow a harvest of fish that is greater than science or
common sense would allow.
For if we let Magnuson-Stevens be weakened, more fisheries
will start to look like southern New England lobster.
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