Actions have
consequences.
At least they should.
If someone does something that is contrary to the public interest, they ought
to pay an appropriate price for the harm that they do. But when it comes to
fisheries management, things don’t always work out that way.
For
a very long time, fishermen were allowed to overfish, and to deplete fish
populations, without any consequences at all. Although the law now known as
the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens)
was originally passed by Congress in 1976, overfishing
still continued for many years. It took another twenty years, and a continued
decline in the nation’s fish stocks, to convince federal lawmakers to pass
the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996 (SFA), which
amended Magnuson-Stevens by prohibiting overfishing and requiring the prompt
rebuilding of overfished stocks.
It
was an important step forward, but overfishing remained a serious problem. In
2000, a federal appellate court found that in order to
comply with the requirements of Magnuson-Stevens, any fishery management
measure must have at least a 50% chance of achieving its desired goal; anything
less would not provide the “fairly high level of confidence” that the law
required.
In response, federal
fishery management councils, which were dominated by fishermen who, prior to
the passage of SFA, spent most of their time trying to avoid adopting any
management measure that might meaningfully restrict either their landings or
the associated income, did their best to adopt rules that barely met that
minimum standard, and had no more—but also no less—than a 50% chance of preventing
overfishing or rebuilding an overfished stock within the legally-required
10-year timeframe.
As
a practical matter, that sort of precision was impossible to achieve, as there
is always uncertainty in scientific calculations. Add the
management uncertainty that arises out of landings estimates, the future
behavior of fishermen and a host of other factors, and it quickly became clear
that management measures drafted with just a 50% probability of success were
likely to miss their mark in one direction or another.
When such plans led
to lower than expected landings, little harm was done. While leaving a few
extra fish in the ocean did have mildly negative economic implications in the
short term, it still helped to assure a healthy stock, and healthy fisheries,
in the future. But when management plans weren’t restrictive enough to end
overfishing or rebuild overfished stocks, opportunities for both commercial and
recreational fishermen were diminished, and such fisheries’ futures were
dimmed.
The fate of the formerly abundant New England cod stocks
is probably the best example of how fisheries fail when overfishing continues
for years.
Yet, so long as a
fishery management measure met the 50% probability standard, and fishermen
complied with such measure, such fishermen faced no consequences, even if
overfishing continued to occur and fish stocks, rather than rebuilding,
continued to decline.
That
all changed late in 2006, when Magnuson-Stevens was reauthorized, for the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management
Reauthorization Act (Reauthorization Act) contained two key
provisions.
One such provision
required every regional fishery management council to “develop annual catch
limits for each of its managed fisheries that may not exceed the fishing level
recommendations of its scientific and statistical committee or the peer review
process established [elsewhere in the law].” That provision effectively took
away councils’ ability to mechanically adopt a 50% probability of success for
every management measure. Instead, each council’s scientific and statistical
committee was empowered to consider the nature and extent of the uncertainty
that surrounded each management plan, and recommend fishing levels that took
such uncertainty into account.
Still, a council’s
scientific and statistical committee was not legally bound to incorporate
uncertainty into every fishing level recommendation. Such committee could, if
it wished, still recommend fishing levels that merely had a 50% chance of
success. In some councils, such recommendations were frequently made.
But
the Reauthorization Act included a second provision that helped to safeguard
fish stocks from less risk-averse management plans. It required that all
fishery management plans “establish a mechanism for specifying annual catch
limits in the plan (including a multiyear plan), implementing regulations, or
annual specifications, at a level that overfishing does not occur in the
fishery, including measures to ensure accountability. [emphasis
added]”
Hard-poundage
catch limits, coupled with accountability measures, were a game-changer. It was
no longer enough for a regional fishery management council to adopt measures
such as seasons, gear restrictions, or size and bag limits, and then merely
shrug if such measures did not, in the end, prevent overfishing. For the first
time, each council was required to set a defined limit for annual landings. And
for the first time, fishermen would face real consequences for exceeding that
limit, even if they strictly complied with every
management measure that the councils imposed.
Many
fishermen were critical of such changes. The changes were particularly
unpopular in places such as New England, where the New England Fishery
Management Council had done away with annual quotas in 1982, in the forlorn
hope that the fisheries would become self-regulating. Instead of regulating
themselves, fisheries became free-for-alls that the council later tried to rein
in with so-called “input measures” such as trip limits and limits on the number
of days that a vessel could fish; still, the council eschewed annual quotas,
which had become anathema to the region’s commercial fishermen.
Without such quotas,
efforts to halt the decline of cod and some other groundfish stocks proved to
be impossible.
Annual
catch limits proved to be anathema to many recreational fishermen, too, who had
long overfished popular species such as summer flounder and red snapper, and
didn’t want to be held accountable for their excesses. With respect to summer
flounder, one perennial critic of Magnuson-Stevens complained,
“As long as we have these annual catch limits in our management plan, whenever
[the recreational landings estimate] bumps into it, the recreational sector is
going to lose. That’s why we need a full reauthorization of the
Magnuson-Stevens Act.”
He clearly hoped that
any such reauthorization would rescind the catch limit requirement.
But
it was Gulf of Mexico red snapper anglers who expressed the loudest opposition
to both annual catch limits, and to being held accountable when they
overfished—as they chronically did. Their discontent gave rise to the so-called “Modern Fish
Act” in the last session of Congress. That act, in its original form, would have allowed federal
recreational fisheries to be managed with “alternative” measures that did not
include annual catch limits, and would largely allow anglers to escape any form
of accountability, should they overfish.
Despite federal fishery managers’ success in ending
overfishing and rebuilding overfished stocks, Modern Fish Act proponents
proposed that, when managing recreational fisheries, regulators should abandon
their current approach, and instead emulate state fishery managers, who do not
impose annual catch limits and don’t hold anglers responsible for their
overages.
They suggested that
The [National Marine
Fisheries Service] should manage recreational fisheries based on long-term
harvest rates, not strictly on poundage-based quotas. This strategy has been
successfully used by fishery managers in the Atlantic striped bass fishery,
which is the most sought-after saltwater recreational fishery in the nation. By
managing the recreational sector based on harvest rate as opposed to a
poundage-based quota, managers have been able to provide predictability in
regulations while also sustaining a healthy population.
That
would have been a convincing argument, if only it had been true. But the truth
tells a very different story.
The Atlantic striped bass stock is overfished, and is experiencing overfishing. Both problems have continued for a number of years. In 2011, a stock assessment update informed fisheries managers that the stock would become overfished by 2017, but those managers declined to take any action to reduce harvest, even though they knew that the stock continued to dwindle.
They
finally tried to reduce landings in 2014, after a new stock assessment found that the female
spawning stock biomass was well below the target level, and that the fishing
mortality rate had been exceeding the target for years. But even then, while
they took steps to end overfishing, they took no decisive action to rebuild the
overfished stock, even though the management plan required that they do so.
And
when anglers in Chesapeake Bay failed to make the required 20.5% reduction in
fishing mortality, and instead caused such mortality to increase by 58%,
fishery managers did nothing to hold the anglers accountable in any way for
their actions, and instead allowed them to continue overfishing.
Far
from being a success, as Magnuson-Stevens’ critics have claimed, Atlantic striped bass management is a study in
failure. Fisheries managers allowed the stock to collapse in the late 1970s,
when there was no fishery management plan, brought it back to a full recovery
during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and saw it increase to a near-term peak
just fifteen years ago. But after that, they allowed the stock to decline and
become overfished once again, by stubbornly clinging to long-term removal
rates, that weren’t adjusted even after the stock fell into a deep, long-term
decline.
And then, when
managers finally imposed modest restrictions on the fishery, they failed to
hold Chesapeake Bay anglers accountable after they increased their catch, at a
time when they were supposed to be reducing fishing mortality.
So the striped bass
stock is again in a bad place. Because actions have consequences.
If anglers are not
held accountable, and made to face the consequences of their actions when they
overfish, then those consequences will be borne by the fish stock itself.
And, as the striped
bass has taught us, those consequences, for the stock, will not be good.
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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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