The reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery
Conservation and Management Act is beginning to gain some momentum.
On July 19, the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on
Water, Power and Oceans held a hearing on the “Successes and Challenges” of
Magnuson-Stevens. I was invited to
testify.
On August 23, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held its own hearing in Soldotna, Alaska,
which addressed Magnuson-Stevens, and plans to hold another in Washington, D.C.
in a couple of days.
So it probably makes sense to stop and take a look at what’s
going on.
Magnuson-Stevens is a comprehensive law, and a number of
issues are going to be considered.
However, the heart of the debate revolves around the conservation and
management of America’s salt water fish stocks, and the debaters break down
into two basic camps.
On one side, there are a host of conservation organizations
and conservation-minded commercial and recreational fishermen, who want to keep
the key provisions of the law, which include a strict prohibition on
overfishing and require the prompt rebuilding of overfished stocks,
intact.
On the other side are an array recreational fishing tackle
and boatbuilding groups, anglers’ rights organizations and some
less-enlightened commercial fishermen, who are willing to tolerate overfishing
and delay the rebuilding of overfished stocks, so that they can kill a few more fish
and make a little more money in the short term, and worry about the future—at some point
in the future, after they’ve sated their wants in the now.
Granted, it doesn’t
make a compelling case to say that you want to overfish a stock—or continue to
hammer an overfished stock—so that you can make a few more bucks and pile a few
more dead fish into the cooler.
For some
of the organizations involved, it’s also kind of embarrassing to be trying to
weaken provisions of Magnuson-Stevens today, when they were fighting like
demons to keep—or perhaps even strengthen—the same conservation-oriented
language in the law when it was reauthorized a decade ago.
Thus, the folks trying to weaken Magnuson-Stevens, so that
the law is more tolerant of overfishing and less insistent that overfished
stocks be quickly rebuilt, have created a whole variety of weasel-words, and
spawned a whole school of red herring, to mask the start reality of what they’re
really trying to do.
So, as the debate heats up, it’s probably time to cut
through the fog, see what each side is saying, and then figure out what it really
means.
When you look at the pro-conservation, keep Magnuson-Stevens
strong side of the equation, what you see is pretty much what you get.
One conservation group, the Ocean
Conservancy, includes the following in its public outreach materials.
“From once plentiful cod and key species of rockfish to
majestic sharks, species declined dramatically because we took too many fish
out of the water and left too few behind to reproduce. By the 1990s, many fisheries had collapsed or
were on the brink. Our country faced a
massive dilemma: change our behavior, or
continue on the same path and face unprecedented consequences…
“Over the past four decades, we’ve made real progress toward
overfishing in U.S. waters and rebuilding fish populations. And we have a little-known law with a long
name to thank: The Magnuson-Stevens
Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA).
“Since 2007, the percentage of fish populations that are
facing overfishing, or that are already overfished, has decreased—even as
catches are increasing. In 2015 alone, red
snapper quotas were raised by more than 20 percent because the population is
rebuilding, thanks to science-based management, better incentives for
conservation and accountability for management.
“This points to positive recovery for our nation’s
fisheries. It’s clear that sound science
and long term management are working for America’s fish stocks as well as our
economy.
“Here at Ocean Conservancy, we’re committed to defending the
integrity of the MSA so we can have healthy fish populations for generations to
come.”
That’s pretty straightforward. Magnuson-Stevens works. It is ending overfishing, rebuilding
overfished stocks and making more fish available to fishermen. Thus, the conservation and management
provisions of the law should not be torn apart.
Although a few of the smaller details might differ, that’s
essentially the same argument being made by all of Magnuson’s defenders.
It helps that what they’re saying is the unvarnished
truth. In
2000, 72 fish stocks were subject to overfishing, and 92 were overfished. That number has fallen sharply. Thanks to Magnuson-Stevens, today
only 30 stocks are subject to overfishing, just 38 remain overfished and 41
once-overfished stocks have been fully rebuilt.
It’s hard to argue with that kind of success.
But if you want to be able to kill more fish than the law
currently allows, you have to find a way.
That’s where the red herrings and the weasel-words come in.
They began to emerge in early 2014, when a group of fishing
industry, anglers’ rights and boatbuilders groups issued a document titled “A Vision for
Managing America’s Saltwater Recreational Fisheries,” under the aegis
of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. That “Vision” report was one of the first
public airings of the notion that recreational fishing is so different from
commercial fishing that key provisions of Magnuson-Stevens shouldn’t apply.
It alleged that
“Because it is a fundamentally different activity than commercial
fishing, recreational fishing requires different management approaches…
“From a management perspective, the Magnuson-Stevens Act
relies on limited entry and catch-share programs, along with fixed quotas that
can be managed in real time. While these
approaches work for the commercial sector where relatively few vessels are
focused on maximum sustainable yield, recreational fisheries are enjoyed by
millions of individuals with diverse goals.
Some try to catch fish for food, while others simply want to have fun
catching and releasing fish and enjoying their time outdoors. What recreational anglers want and need is
wide-ranging, dependable access to healthy and abundant fish stocks.
Like all the best efforts at misdirection, that quote contains just
enough truth to lend it credibility, then takes the reader astray. Because yes, there are a lot more
recreational than commercial fishermen.
Yes, anglers have different goals.
And yes, anglers’ harvests can’t yet be managed in anything close to
real time.
But the mention of catch-and-release anglers are a red
herring, because catch-and-release, by its very nature, isn’t affected by “fixed
quotas that can be managed in real time.”
Quotas only matter when you start killing fish and bringing them home.
The people that such quotas actually impact are those who
“try to catch fish for food,” and in those fisheries, it’s much harder to argue
that commercial and recreational fisheries have a fundamentally different
impact on fish stocks. While the
landings of individual commercial and recreational fishermen vary in scale,
they don’t differ at all with respect to the fact that both put dead fish on
the dock.
“We may agree that they have different objectives, but the
end result of both sectors is really the same—it’s the harvesting of a public
resource. I would encourage this
committee to assure that sound science and individual accountability are the
foundation of any new proposal.”
But individual accountability—making anglers responsible for
the number of fish that they harvest—is just what the folks trying to weaken
Magnuson-Stevens are trying to avoid.
Thus, the “Vision” report falls back on another old canard, that
recreational fishing’s economic
“impact is equal to or greater than the commercial industry
in terms of number of jobs provided and total economic benefits, while
accounting for only a fraction of overall landings. [emphasis added]”
Again, just enough truth to mislead…
Because yes, overall commercial landings dwarf overall
recreational landings. That’s true. But what matters, in the context of
recreational fishing, in the Magnuson-Stevens debate isn’t how many pounds of fish
the commercial fishermen land over-all—let’s face it, anglers probably don’t
care that nearly
3.3 billion pounds of walleye pollock were commercially landed in 2015—but how
many pounds of recreationally-important fish are landed by the commercial
sector.
When one looks at the relative commercial and recreational
landings of fish that anglers actually care about, it becomes clear that we’re
certainly killing our share.
A while ago, the
Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council posted a blog titled “2016’s Most
Wanted Fish,” which compared recreational and commercial landings for a
number of federally-managed species. It
turns out that anglers in the Gulf were allocated just under half of the red
snapper, and roughly 80% of the gray triggerfish, 75% of the greater amberjack,
65% of the king mackerel, 60% of the gag grouper and 55% of the Spanish
mackerel. Of the seven important species
included in the blog, only one, red grouper, was dominated by the commercial
fishery, which gets about 75% of the fish.
The trend is the same on other sections of coast. Based on the commercial
landings information provided by the National Marine Fisheries Service, as
well as recreational
landings estimates provided by the same agency for 2015, with respect to 20 Atlantic
coast species, it becomes clear that recreational fishermen are responsible for a lot more than “a fraction” of the landings of many different fish.
Anglers dominated the landings for wahoo (95%), red drum
(95%), cobia (95%), dolphin (90%), mutton snapper (89%), tautog (89%), yellowtail
snapper (86%), black drum (84%), spotted seatrout (83%), sheepshead (81%), striped
bass (77%), black sea bass (74%), bluefish (74%) and Florida pompano (70%). Commercial fishermen, on the other hand,
dominated the New England groundfish fishery, with 96% of the haddock landings,
and 89% of both pollock and cod.
Commercial fishermen also landed a substantial majority of the scup
(79%) and summer flounder (69%), and a slight majority of the weakfish (54%).
Thus, anglers don’t dominate every significant
fishery, but they are responsible for most of the fishing mortality
of many important stocks. To argue that
they shouldn’t be subject to annual catch limits—“fixed quotas”—as stated on
more than one occasion in the “Vision” statement, is just not realistic given
that unquestionable reality.
It’s just as unrealistic to suggest, as the “Vision” report
does, that the anglers who seek to bring fish home aren’t concerned with
maximum sustainable yield.
According
to The Fisherman magazine, when Commerce Secretary Ross stated that one of
his goals was to obtain maximum sustainable yield from marine fisheries, Jim
Donofrio, the Executive Director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance,
an anglers’ rights group that makes common cause with the Coastal Conservation
Association, another group with similar goals, and trade
associations such as the American Sportfishing Association and National Marine
Manufacturers Association, said
“that statement alone is a game changer.”
It certainly seems that maximum
sustainable yield mattered to him.
And
the Center
for Sportfishing Policy, an umbrella organization that includes CCA, ASA and
NMMA among its members, went out of its way to commend the Commerce Department
for reopening the red snapper season in the Gulf of Mexico even though the
agency admitted that such reopening would “necessarily” cause anglers to “substantially”
exceed their annual catch limit. So
it seems that catching maximum sustainable yield—and even substantially more
when they can—matters to those folks, too.
At heart, when it comes to
killing fish, the recreational and commercial sectors aren’t really that
different at all—at least not so different that anglers should be free of
annual catch limits/hard-poundage quotas.
“alternative management for recreational
fishing…smartly rebuilding fishery stocks, [and] establishing exemptions where
annual catch limits don’t fit…”
In other words, to allow
overfishing and delay rebuilding—because we can all be pretty sure that what
the Center considers “smartly rebuilding” a stock would be more than a little different
from how a biologist would interpret that term.
And just why are they so driven
to make such changes?
Comments
made by Nick Cicero, a fishing tackle wholesaler from New Jersey, which were reported
in The Fisherman provide some real insight into that.
“These amendments need to not only support
the existing populations of recreational anglers and fishing related businesses
but also to allow for new entrants to come into the fishery and businesses to
grow and expand…
“The law needs to recognize that in its
current form, our tradition of fishing cannot be passed on to our children
without [Magnuson-Stevens] taking away opportunity from the rest of the fishing
community.”
In other words, Magnuson-Stevens,
with its annual catch limits and rebuilding deadlines, currently forces anglers
to share.
Right now, if new anglers—presumably
but not necessarily children—come into the fishery, their catch comes out of a
common quota. It’s a zero sum game, with
clear biological limits, and every fish someone catches is a fish that becomes
unavailable to someone else.
And, based on Cicero's comments, it appears that the old guys just don’t want to share. They would rather change a good law, and put the future health of our fish stocks at risk, because the only alternative to that is for the adults—chronological adults,
at least—now in the fishery to give up some fish to their kids, and that’s
something that they'd rather not do.
And that, in the end, is
Magnsuon-Stevens “reform” in a nutshell.
When all of the fancy talk is
done, it comes down to two groups of people.
One wants a strong law, and
healthy fish stocks that we can pass down to generations yet to be born.
The other, who want to weaken the
law, already have quite a bit, want to have more, and do not want to share.
I leave it for you to decide
who ought to win, and who should get your support.
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