For more than six months, representatives of the recreational
fishing industry and various anglers’ rights organizations have been telling recreational
fishermen to support something that they call the “Modern Fish Act,” a
bill more formally known as H.R. 2023, the Modernizing
Recreational Fisheries Management Act of 2017M (Act).
Like one of those miraculous diets that are sometimes pitched on
TV, which let you eat anything you want and still lose weight, such folks have
tried to convince anglers that the Act would let them harvest more
fish, while also promoting conservation.
But just like those fanciful
diets, the Act just can’t work as advertised.
Dieters have a choice: They
can eat a lot of high-calorie foods, or they can lose weight. Anglers must make
a similar decision: They can take fewer fish home, and see greater abundance,
or they can take more fish home and see abundance decline. But they can’t have
higher kills and higher abundance at the same time. Not in the long term.
Given that choice, the Act’s
supporters choose higher kills.
That became evident last summer, after they convinced the
Commerce Department to reopen the recreational red snapper season in the Gulf
of Mexico, a move that the agency itself admitted “may
delay the ultimate rebuilding of the stock by as many as 6 years” and “will
necessarily mean that that the private recreational sector will substantially
exceed its annual catch limit, which was designed to prevent overfishing the
stock.”
Despite the fact that such reopening would lead to overfishing
and substantially delay the recovery of the overfished red snapper stock, it was praised by the Act’s
proponents. The American Sportfishing
Association, which represents the fishing tackle industry, said that
the reopening would “improve recreational access” to the red snapper fishery.
It seems that, for supporters
of the Act, “overfishing” is what happens when commercial fishermen kill more
fish than the stock can tolerate in the long term; it’s something to be both
avoided and condemned. But when recreational fishermen kill more than the stock
can sustain, it’s deemed “improved access;” it’s something to be both desired
and celebrated.
Thus, when Jeff Angers, president of the
Center for Sportfishing Policy, says that the Act “will ensure
that all Americans have fair and reasonable access to our nation’s marine
resources,” there’s reason for conservationists and responsible anglers to be
very concerned, despite his contention that “America’s
sportsmen are the original conservationists, and we fully recognize the
importance of keeping healthy, robust stocks of fish and game.”
Such concerns were justified on December 13, 2017, when the
House Committee on Natural Resources (Committee) marked up fifteen bills,
including H.R. 200, the Strengthening
Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act.
Significantly, the Committee did not schedule
a markup of the Act, H.R. 2023; instead, at the request of the Act’s
proponents, some of its provisions were instead incorporated into
H.R. 200.
That request made it
perfectly clear that the Act, and its supporters, are not concerned with
conservation at all.
H.R. 200, as originally introduced in the House of
Representatives early in 2017, is the most recent incarnation of legislation
that has been introduced in each of the last few sessions of Congress. Its most
immediate predecessor was H.R. 1335, a bill of the same
name and substantially the same provisions, which was passed by the
House in 2015, but died in committee in the Senate. Before that, there was Rep. Doc Hastings’
(R-Washington) H.R. 4742, which bore the same name as H.R. 200 and
H.R. 1335, and also shared the same goal: weakening the conservation and stock
rebuilding provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery
Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens), which
governs all fishing in the federal waters of the United States.
H.R. 4742 was so bad that it earned the nickname “Empty Oceans
Act” from those concerned with the health of the nation’s fish stocks. Alexandra Adams of the Natural
Resources Defense Council wrote that Rep. Hastings’ bill:
“would
take us back to a time before the successes of the Magnuson-Stevens Act and to
when fish populations—and the fishermen that depended on them—were in dire
straits. [It] adds loopholes, waters down legal standards, encourages costly
delays, and reduces transparency and accountability. The draft guts the
rebuilding requirements that forced managers to make tough decisions that
allowed our stocks to rebound, including by removing requirements for
rebuilding guidelines…The theme of this…bill is definitely flexibility: the
flexibility to fish until there is nothing left…It limits the authority of
scientists to set science based annual catch limits…[It] attacks vital bedrock
environmental laws, such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and
the Endangered Species Act (ESA), as well as the National Marine Sanctuaries
Act and the Antiquities Act”…Compliance with NEPA is eliminated entirely…”
Despite his approach to fisheries conservation and management
issues, the Center for Sportfishing Policy (then known as the Center for
Coastal Conservation) once named Rep Hastings its
“Conservationist of the Year,” which strongly suggests that its
definitions of “conservation” and “conservationist” fall well outside of the
mainstream.
H.R. 200, as marked up by the
committee, contains most of the same flaws as did H.R. 4742. Like
Rep. Hastings’ bill, it does away with the requirement that fish stocks be
rebuilt, if possible, in no more than 10 years; like the earlier bill, it
includes a long list of loopholes to its relaxed rebuilding timelines. Like
Rep. Hastings’ bill, it restricts scientists’ ability to set annual catch
limits and permits managers to employ “alternative” management measures that
avoid such limits altogether. It attacks a host of environmental laws, and it
eliminates the need to subject fisheries regulations to NEPA review.
In all, H.R 200 is bad enough that members of the conservation
community have deemed it “another ‘Empty Oceans Act,'” a
title that it certainly deserves.
So what did the Act’s
proponents get for supporting Empty Oceans?
They saw some provisions of
their Act incorporated into H.R. 200. A number of those provisions were related
to red snapper, particularly those in the Gulf of Mexico. One provision would
affect the data used to manage the stock; another threatens the catch share
program that successfully ended commercial overfishing of Gulf red snapper ten
years ago (while anglers continue to chronically overfish). A third would
require the National Marine Fisheries Service to regularly re-examine the
allocations of fish between the commercial and recreational sectors—but only in
the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic regions, where the red snapper live;
anglers governed by other regional fishery management councils must content
themselves with the status quo.
There were some other
provisions incorporated as well, which would provide additional exceptions to
the annual catch limit requirement, allow more and potentially questionable
data to be incorporated into stock assessments and require stocks to be
assessed more frequently—provided that there was a need and money available to
do so.
But the one thing that was
not included in H.R. 200 is anything clearly intended to promote conservation.
The bill, true to its “Empty Oceans Act” moniker, is uniquely designed to
increase harvests while reducing fishery managers’ ability to rebuild and
conserve fish stocks.
The American Sportfishing Association is calling H.R. 200 “Landmark legislation to
benefit saltwater anglers.”
The Coastal Conservation
Association concurs, while the Center for Sportfishing Policy announced, in a telling
remark, that “This is a major step forward in implementing the vision set forth
by the Morris-Deal Report for the future of saltwater recreational fishing.”
That remark laid clear what many anglers already knew, that
despite all the rhetoric, the Morris-Deal Report—formally, the report titled “A Vision for Managing
America’s Saltwater Recreational Fisheries,” and released under
the aegis of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership—was never about
conservation at all, as its authors claimed, but instead about recreational
fishermen killing more fish, and escaping the science-based regulations of Magnuson-Stevens.
Because that is exactly what
H.R. 200 is designed to let them, and commercial fishermen, do.
Thus, it was a blatant lie, and an affront to its readers’
intelligence, when an industry publication, The Fishing Wire, announced that
“Conservationists support advance of Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization,” as it
hailed the Committee’s approval of H.R. 200, since conservationists don’t
support H.R. 200 at all.
H.R. 200 is supported by the
same people who supported the Act, the same people who have long sought more
fish for themselves and fewer regulations to protect the resource.
The same people that conservationists must oppose at every turn,
if we are to have oceans that are healthy—and full.
-----
This piece first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog
of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which can be viewed at
http://conservefish.org/blog/
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