THE FISHING TACKLE INDUSTRY VERSUS FISHERIES MANAGEMENT--PART I: IN THE BEGINNING

 

Ever since I began writing this blog over a decade ago, I have occasionally come back to the topic of how the fishing tackle industry attempts to manipulate the fishery management system to benefit the tackle business, whether or not such manipulations are in long-term interests of the nation’s fish stocks or even of the nation’s recreational fishermen.

In the beginning, the opposition to needed regulation was usually concentrated at the local level.

My first experience with that came in the mid/late 1970s, when I spent my summers fishing—mostly for striped bass—just about every morning and/or evening—and working in a tackle shop in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich, Connecticut during the day.  It was a time when anyone who cared to look could see warning signs coming from the Chesapeake Bay, where striped bass spawning success had declined markedly, a trend I could see illustrated every morning by a lack of smaller fish.

One day, Bob Pond, the creator of the Atom line of striped bass lures and a stark exception to the rule that the industry generally opposes regulation—he spent much of the money he made from his lure business promoting striped bass conservation—stopped by the store, and after an hour or two of conversation convinced me that there was a real need to start conserving striped bass and minimizing both the recreational and commercial kill.  So from time to time I talked to the shop’s customer’s about it, focusing on those who spent a lot of time bass fishing and were skilled enough to put some fish in the boat.

The shop’s owner quickly became angry, telling me to drop the conservation talk because it was bad for business and, when I talked about it anyway (I've never been very good at doing what my supposed superiors tell me to do), would start ranting to everyone in the store, the typical outburst sounding something like, “There’s plenty of bass out there.  Plenty of bass.  Go out there and catch them, and bring them all in to the store.  I’ll take your picture and put it up on the wall.”

Two or three years later, the striped bass stock collapsed.

But as soon as the stock was declared rebuilt in 1995—I was living here on Long Island by then—the tackle shops began calling for the least restrictive management measures that the regulators would allow, even though the vast majority of the striped bass fishermen were opposed to relaxing the rules at all.

Eventually the shops got their way; New York abandoned its 36-inch minimum size in favor of a 28-inch size limit, and while shore-based and private-boat anglers could still only retain one bass per day, those on for-hire vessels were allowed to keep two.  Five years later, I had started working with a national advocacy group that, for a while, was doing good conservation work that affected a number of important fish stocks.  The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission was drafting Amendment 6 to the Interstate FisheryManagement Plan for Atlantic Striped Bass, and one of the key issues was whether the striped bass stock should be managed for yield, with a higher annual harvest, a smaller population, and few older, larger females in the population, or for abundance and a more natural age and size distribution.

One of the folks I was working with, who served as president of the advocacy group’s New York chapter, also published a weekly saltwater angling newspaper and related website.  So he put up a poll on that website, asking whether his readers would prefer more relaxed regulations and a higher recreational striped bass harvest, or more restrictive regulations, and greater striped bass abundance.  His readers overwhelmingly supported more restrictions and greater abundance.  His advertisers—the tackle industry and for-hire fleet—did not.  They thought that it would be better for business if people could kill more bass to bring home.

So immediately after the publisher attended a hearing on Amendment 6, and told the ASMFC what his readers wanted, the industry took their revenge, pulling their advertisements and threatening the future of his newspaper.  Faced with such an attack, he was forced to back down, and end his conservation efforts.  Which, of course, suited the industry just fine.

I found myself in the industry’s sights a decade later, when I received a private Facebook message from an employee of a big New Jersey fishing tackle manufacturer/distributor.  Apparently, a casual comment I made on a Facebook thread irked some industry folks, who  seemed to find it their last straw, and so figured they’d threaten to have me blacklisted as a writer for the outdoor press.  The message read, in part,

“So how do you reconcile your stance with the advertisers who support your writing?

“…Your stance is not popular with a lot of folks on the rec side who are also well informed and whose businesses support many.

“You are certainly entitled to your position, but it galls some of us quite a bit that you promote it while being active in a recreational fishing publication.  That is not opinion, it is a fact.”

I politely informed him that I would write what I pleased, and had no intention to become a prostitute for the tackle industry.  Which, of course, eventually cost me a decent writing gig, but also distinguished me from a lot of folks who write for the saltwater angling press, and are more than happy to serve as industry whores (note that those who write for publications specializing in freshwater angling, and particularly for the flyfishing press, generally don’t face as much anti-conservation sentiment as we see in the saltwater publications, although it would still take a brave author to criticize the various professional tournament trails).

I tell these stories only to demonstrate how the industry’s arrogance, and its efforts to mold the fishery management process to its short-term economic goals, has a long history, and to show how it has accelerated in recent years.

Years ago, most fishing tackle was manufactured here in the United States by small, often family-owned companies such as Pfleuger, Shakespeare, Penn Reels, Van Staal, Fenwick fishing rods, Fin-Nor offshore tackle, and the like.  Today, as has been the case in so many industries, those companies have been taken over by corporate conglomerates, who have laid off many of their U.S. workers and moved much of the production offshore to China and various third-world nations, in order to keep costs down and boost corporate profits.

The efforts of the Amerian Sportfishing Association and other industry members, to influence the fishery management process to keep recreational harvests high and so maximize short-term sales, regardless of the long-term impact on fish stocks, is just another element of the industry's strategy to maintain, and if possible increase, the corporate bottom line.

The tempo of those efforts remains high and, if anything, seems to be increasing.

The watershed moment probably occurred in early 2014, when the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, working with a number of industry-related organizations that included the American Sportfishing Association (the primary fishing tackle industry trade association), the National Marine Manufacturers Association, and the Center for Sportfishing Policy (then known as the Center for Coastal Conservation, an umbrella group of industry organizations formed to engage in the political process) issued a manifesto titled "A Vision for Managing America’s Saltwater Recreational Fisheries,” which proposed downplaying the conservation-oriented provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in favor of a more harvest-oriented policy that

“addresses the needs of anglers and industry.”

In the eleven years since, the tackle industry has grown ever more aggressive in its efforts to push legislators and regulators, at the state, regional, and federal level, to adopt policies focused on elevating industry interests above those of the resource or the general angling public.

The second half of this essay, The Fishing Tackle Industry Versus Fisheries Management—Part II:  Current Events, will be published on Sunday, June 8.