MARINE FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: YOU'RE DEFINED BY WHAT YOU OPPOSE

 

A week ago, I wrote about the pending mark-up of H.R. 4690, Rep. Jared Huffman’s Sustaining America’s Fisheries for the Future Act.  

The bill represents the first meaningful effort to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in the past 16 years, and would effect some meaningful and needed changes in the primary law governing fisheries management in the federal waters of the United States.  While some critical comments and proposed amendments were expected, the best guess of most of the folks whom I know was that the markup probably wouldn’t take more than about three hours.

That best guess turned out to be fairly bad.  By the time the smoke cleared last Wednesday afternoon, the mark-up was not yet complete—the final vote is scheduled for next Thursday—and the opposition to the bill was far more aggressive than most people had predicted.

The debate over the bill split down the usual partisan divides, with one side of the aisle emphasizing healthy ecosystems and sustainable fish stocks, while the other was more concerned with short-term economic impacts and protecting the immediate interests of various fishing-related industries.  

It was exacerbated by strong industry opposition to H.R. 4690 that was voiced in two letters, one signed by forty commercial fishing organizations of various sizes and geographic scope, the other by four large trade associations, including the National Fisheries Institute, the National Council of Chain Restaurants, the National Restaurant Association, and the National Retail Federation.

What was interesting about the two sign-on letters isn’t the arguments that they made in opposition to the bill.  Those were the same old songs that we hear sung whenever more restrictive management measures are proposed:  H.R. 4690 would

“throw the U.S. fishing and seafood sector into chaos,”

and

“be catastrophic for sustainable domestic food production and the millions of Americans who rely on U.S. fisheries for jobs and income, economic security, and affordable protein.”

In addition, if the trade associations are to be believed, H.R. 4690

“would harm American seafood consumers by constraining supply, raising consumer prices, and exacerbating the supply chain uncertainty that continues to undermine the food industry.”

So far, nothing said was particularly noteworthy.  Where things get interesting is when the trade groups begin singling out the portions of H.R. 4690 that they find particularly offensive.

“We are particularly concerned by H.R. 4690’s proposed new requirements relating to forage fish protection, essential fish habitat conservation, and bycatch avoidance.  In each case, the existing responsibility of fishery managers to balance complex competing interests would be curtailed.  Working under rigid new strictures, fishery managers—or judges responding to the claims of plaintiffs—would shut down or severely restrict some of our nation’s largest commercial fisheries to satisfy narrow legislative mandates and for reasons unrelated to marine ecosystem health.  [emphasis added]”

Let that sink in for just a few seconds.  The fishing industry opposes H.R. 4690 because it 1) extends more comprehensive protection to the small forage fish that all of the larger fish, along with birds and marine mammals, feed on, 2) would better conserve essential fish habitat, and 3) seeks to minimize the incidental catch, and associated dead discards, of non-target, non-salable fish and other components of the target species’ ecosystem.  

And then they justify such opposition by arguing that such measures are unrelated to ecosystem health.

It's hardly a persuasive argument.  Even more telling are the comments about “balance[ing] complex competing interests” and “severely restrict[ing] some of our nation’s largest commercial fisheries” for, although it remained unsaid, some of “our nation’s largest commercial fisheries” are also the fisheries that place the greatest pressure on forage fish stocks, do the most damage to essential fish habitat, and cause some of the most serious bycatch issues.

The largest commercial fishery in the country is for walleye pollock, a creature trawled in vast numbers from the cool waters of the northern Pacific Ocean.  You might not recognize the name, but if you’ve eaten a Fillet o’ Fish® sandwich, or some of the processed surimi that is often marketed as “imitation crab legs” in supermarket delis—or passed off as the real thing in cheap buffets—you’re not unfamiliar with the fish itself. 

Over the past five years, annual walleye pollock landings have averaged a little over 3.3 billion pounds per year; even if the ex vessel price was a little under 12 cents per pound in 2021, it remains a very valuable fishery.

It is also a very controversial one, as the walleye pollock fishery generates substantial bycatch, which includes a bycatch of some very valuable, and some very stressed, species.  The industry tries to downplay the amount of incidental catch that is killed, arguing that

“more than 98 percent of the catch in the [Bering Sea Aleutian Islands] Alaska pollock fishery has been pollock.”

But even if bycatch in the fishery is less than 2%, 2% of 3.3 billion pounds is a very big number—66,000,000 pounds, to be more precise—and removing 66 million pounds of various unwanted fish from the marine ecosystem each year can hardly be said to be “unrelated to ecosystem health.”

Representative Mary Peltola (D-AK), who was recently elected to fill the uncompleted term of the late Rep. Don Young, certainly doesn’t believe that such annual removals are harmless.  She is quoted in Alaska Public Media as saying,

“After 30 years of industrial fishing in the Bering Sea, where they are tossing out metric tons of juvenile crab, halibut, and salmon, it catches up with us.  And then we get to the point where people who depend on hundreds of salmon to feed their families every year are not able to even catch single digit numbers of salmon.”

Rep. Peltola is seeking to have two seats on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which governs fishing in federal waters off Alaska, reserved for representatives from the Alaska Native tribes, who are familiar with the subsistence fisheries for salmon and other species that have sustained the tribes for millennia.  As Alaska Public Media reports,

“Without those seats at the table, she argues, the fisheries management council will always be more receptive to the large trawl fleet.  They catch salmon by accident.  Peltola said this bycatch is one reason the fish don’t return to the rivers like they used to.”

It’s a problem that has led to bizarre juxtapositions of who is currently legally allowed to catch the salmon.

For more than a decade, the National Marine Fisheries Service has been conducting genetic surveys of the salmon caught as bycatch in the pollock fishery, to determine which local stocks are being affected.  In 2019, about 40% of the chinook salmon bycatch came from fish returning to coastal western Alaska; fewer than 1% of those fish were from middle and upper Yukon River runs; 23% of the chum salmon bycatch were fish returning to the Eastern Gulf of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, while 16% were returning to coastal western Alaska.

The level of bycatch is substantial.  In 2020, the pollock fleet was responsible for an incidental kill of 32,294 chinook salmon, and 320,478 chums.

In 2021, the composition of the fish killed changed.  More than half—52%--were chinook salmon returning to coastal western Alaska.  Breaking that into individual fish, the pollock fleet killed 16,796 salmon that would have otherwise returned to western Alaska rivers; 1,399 of those salmon were on their way to the middle or upper Yukon River.  Each year, the pollock fleet is permitted to kill up to 60,000 chinook salmon as bycatch, with 47,500 incidentally killed salmon deemed the “performance standard.”

And how many chinook salmon were fishermen on the Yukon River, who depend on the fish for personal sustenance and for badly-needed revenues, permitted to harvest in the directed salmon fishery?

None.  None at all.  As one erstwhile salmon gillnetter noted,

“I don’t care what the percentage of bycatch is.  If the number of Yukon salmon is 45,000 salmon caught as bycatch, that was 45,000 more than anyone on the Yukon was allowed to harvest.”

H.R. 4690 would help to correct such inequities, by requiring fishery managers to “minimize” bycatch, a change from current law, which only requires that bycatch be minimized “to the extent practicable.”  The industrial fleet doesn’t want to see the “to the extent practicable” language removed, because it provides a loophole that allows the regional fishery management councils to give an official wink and a nod to bycatch prone fisheries, without actually requiring significant change in how they operate.

Then there are H.R. 4690’s enhanced protections for forage fish, which would amend the definition of “optimum” yield to include the language

“in the case of a forage fish, [optimum yield] is reduced [from maximum sustainable yield]…to provide for the diet needs of fish species and other marine wildlife, including marine mammals and birds, for which forage fish is a significant dietary component.”

The problem is that forage fish tend to support high volume/low value fisheries.  The fishery for menhaden, the second largest commercial fishery in the United States, is a case in point.  Last year, that fishery landed slightly over 1.2 billion pounds of menhaden, that generated ex vessel income of a little more than $266 million—just under 22 cents per pound.  In doing so, it removed a substantial quantity of forage that might otherwise support everything from bluefish to bald eagles to humpback whales.

While the menhaden fishery is deemed to be sustainable, such designation does not consider the possibility of local depletion of the menhaden resource, which some individuals and organizations perceive as an issue.  Nor does it consider the impacts of any such local depletion not only on the regional abundance of predators that depend on the menhaden, but on businesses, particularly fishing and tourism businesses, that depend on the presence of predators to thrive.

Yet the fishing industry rails against forage fish protections.

It also seems to rail against provisions in H.R. 4690 that would bolster procedures intended to promote the conservation of essential fish habitat.  That seems to be a counterproductive position, as the fish on which the fishing industry depends rely, in turn, on spawning, nursery, feeding, and other habitats that support such fish throughout all of the phases of their life.  And the plain fact is that some fishing activities degrade such essential habitat.

Damage isn’t only done by large-scale operations. 

We recently saw the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council entertain a proposal to open a section of the Oculina Bank, a region of unique corals off the East Coast of Florida that provides spawning and nursery habitat for a number of important snapper and grouper species, to rock shrimp trawls, which would have threatened the reef-building corals.  Fortunately, the National Marine Fisheries Service quashed the proposal.

It is generally recognized that mobile, bottom-tending gear such as trawls, dredges, and some gill nets can alter, and so degrade, bottom habitats.  Studies have also indicated that, if the use of such devices is prohibited, such bottom habitats may at least partially recover.  Thus, mandated protections for essential fish habitat can, in the long term, benefit both commercial and recreational fisheries.

Yet many in the commercial fishing industry oppose H.R. 4690’s essential fish habitat proposals, making the incredible argument that they are “unrelated to marine ecosystem health.”

In truth, most of the arguments made against H.R. 4690 are at least somewhat incredible.  Others are somewhat reprehensible, trying to camouflage industry efforts to avoid further regulation by taking shelter behind the real problems that face lower-income people and arguing that

“legislators should be keenly aware of the relationship between food supply disruptions and the prices paid by consumers for groceries and restaurant meals.  Food costs in the United States have increased by 11.4 percent in the last year alone, the highest rate of food inflation since 1979.  This inflation is highly regressive, disproportionately harming lower-income families and in some cases limiting the seafood choices that they would otherwise enjoy.”

If they had opted to be forthright, they would have admitted that most wild-caught seafood is already priced too high for the lower-income consumer, and is at best a luxury, special-occasion food.  To put things in perspective, Wal-Mart, hardly a high-end outlet, sells wild Pacific pink salmon at 44.9 cents per ounce ($7.18 per pound), an unknown variety of flounder at $6.98/pound, tuna at $12.88/pound, and Pacific cod at $9.44/pound, compared to whole tilapia at 27.6 cents/ounce ($4.42/pound) and tilapia fillet at $6.98/pound.

If a lower-income individual was looking for affordable protein, wild-caught fish would not be the most price-effective choice.  

H.R. 4690 would have no effect on tilapia farms.

When fishing industry members argue against H.R. 4690’s provisions that would minimize bycatch, extend a little more protection to forage fish, and improve the conservation of essential fish habitat by arguing that such matters are “unrelated to ecosystem health,” the first thing that tells us is that they aren’t very committed to the truth, for each of those issues directly impacts the quality of coastal ecosystems.

When they try to promote their own economic interests by hiding behind the household issues of lower-income people, it tells us that they are willing to compromise principle in order to protect profits.

When they oppose H.R. 4690’s provisions on bycatch, forage fish, and essential fish habitat, it tells us that they would rather degrade the marine environment in the long term, in order to maintain short-term economic benefits, and that they lack the foresight to understand that, by impairing the long-term sustainability of marine ecosystems, they are also willing to put the long-term survival of their own businesses at risk.

But in the end, it also tells us that they are only human, and that is why H.R. 4690 is so badly needed, for it is human nature to focus on the short term, regardless of long-term consequences.

The United States’ fishery management system, based on regional fishery management councils peopled largely by individuals with a vested interest, usually a financial interest, in the fisheries that they manage, shouldn’t work, because people are unlikely to support management measures that reduce current profits.

And, for its first two decades, the federal fishery management system didn’t work, because the regional councils refused to take the necessary steps to end overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks.  

That’s when Congress stepped in.

It passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which for the first time created clear, legally enforceable standards that compelled the regional fishery management councils to end overfishing, rebuild overfished stocks, and base management measures on the best available science.  With that law in place, fish stocks began to recover.

The Sustainable Fisheries Act was good, but it wasn’t good enough.  While it required the regional fishery management councils to take certain actions to end overfishing and rebuild depleted stocks, it still allowed a lot of management discretion.  Neither fishermen nor the regional councils had any accountability when management measures that looked good on paper didn’t prevent annual quotas from being exceeded.  

Thus, in 2006, Congress passed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act, which sought to plug the gaps left by the Sustainable Fisheries Act a decade ago.

Still, there was room for improvement, particularly in the areas of bycatch, forage fish management, and protecting essential fish habitat, areas where the regional fishery management councils generally remained unable or unwilling to take needed action.  So Congress is preparing to intervene once again, place additional sideboards on the regional councils' discretion, and give such councils a push in the direction that they need to go.

That’s what the Sustaining America’s Fisheries for the Future Act does.

Contrary to industry claims, H.R. 4690 doesn’t curtail the regional fishery management councils’ responsibility for such critical issues.  Instead, it will compel the councils to take responsibility for those important matters, rather than ignoring them and sidestepping the controversy that additional restrictions on bycatch, forage fish fisheries, and impacts on essential fish habitat would inevitably ignite.

And for that reason alone, H.R. 4690 should become law.