The
Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act turned 50 years old on
April 13. At the time, when foreign factory
trawlers could still fish just 12 miles of the United States’ shores, putting
multiple fish stocks in peril, the law, as it was amended from time to time
over the intervening years, represented a revolutionary step forward in the
annals of fisheries management.
Since its passage, and particularly since it was amended by
the Sustainable
Fisheries Act of 1996 and the Magnuson-Stevens
Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006, the law
has resulted in science-based, legally-enforceable fishery
management plans for over 450 separate fish stocks. Since
2000, thanks to Magnuson-Stevens, 52 once overfished stocks have been
completely rebuilt.
Still, no law is perfect.
Problems remain. As someone who
has participated in the recreational New England groundfish fishery for
virtually all of my life, I am all too sadly aware of the collapse of the
southern New England stocks of winter flounder and Atlantic cod, collapses that
the various provisions of Magnuson-Stevens, no matter how well conceived, were
unable to prevent. I remember the vast spring
runs of Atlantic mackerel that no longer occur off my local shores; remember January
days spent on a pier, enjoying runs of Atlantic herring that have since
disappeared, and lament the loss of the inshore fishery for whiting (more
properly, silver hake) that used to fill the New York Bight with life every
winter.
Magnuson-Stevens faces challenges that were never
contemplated back in 1976, a warming ocean, and resultant shifting stocks,
probably first among them.
Thus, it may be time to consider how Magnuson-Stevens, and
the regulations promulgated thereunder, must adapt, if the statute is to remain
the most expansive and effective fisheries management law in place anywhere in
the world.
“In many ways, the [Magnuson-Stevens Act] has been a success
story, having rebuilt over 50 fish stocks and driven overfishing down to historic
lows.
“However, a lot has changed for the ocean in the last 50
years, and new challenges are developing that will push our fisheries to their
limits. From marine heatwaves to
degraded habitats, the fish and ecosystems that millions of Americans rely on
are under stress. At the same time,
management shortcomings, economic vulnerabilities, food insecurity, lower
investment in research, and technology advancements are colliding with
long-standing conservation and management challenges like bycatch and continued
overfishing.
“It’s clear that business as usual is not enough to guarantee
abundant fish populations that can support coastal communities and
fisheries. The future of fisheries—and the
health of our ocean—for the next five decades will depend on tackling the
challenges we face today.”
The Ocean Conservancy report is 28 pages long, far too long
to analyze in a single blog post. I couldn’t
even do it justice if I tried to provide a summary; you ought to just click on
the link that I provided above and read the whole thing for yourself.
Right now, I’ll just hit some of the high points.
The first section of the report is
“Failure to Rebuild Many Overfished Stocks,”
although the section’s scope is broader than that; it makes
the important point that managers shouldn’t just be focusing on recovering
stocks that have already become overfished.
Instead, they ought to
“Act early before rebuilding is necessary.”
Or course, that’s easier said than done, because as soon as
managers suggest any cuts in commercial or recreational landings to head off a
stock decline, all of the industry spokesmen turn out, as well as the
commercial fishermen, for-hire operators, and tackle shop owners, to declare
that the stock isn’t overfished yet, and that managers shouldn’t reduce
their incomes and put them out of business (“You’re going to put me out of
business” is one of the most-repeated claims at fisheries hearings; I’ve attended
such events for many decades now, and have heard the same individuals repeatedly
make that very claim, sometimes over the course of twenty years or more), to
the point that it’s often easier, and far more politically expedient, for
fisheries managers to wait until a stock really does become overfished before
taking meaningful action, and then blame the resulting harvest reductions on
the provisions of Magnuson-Stevens.
As the Ocean Conservancy observes,
“Managers are required to manage stocks to avoid the need to
rebuild in the first place but rarely take such actions. When a stock begins to decline, taking action
to halt that trend is important to avoid the complex management that rebuilding
requires.”
That’s all true and sensible, but when the debates over “my
right to earn a living” and “angler access” to fish begin, truth and common
sense quickly vacate the room. And that
leads to another issue: Even when action
is taken, whether to rebuild an overfished stock or to prevent further stock
decline, such action is often incremental, with only the minimum 50%
probability of success, in an effort to minimize the economic and social harm
to the fishing community.
Unfortunately, such minimal efforts often fail, and end up
causing more harm in the end, as one reduction in landings doesn’t get the job
done, so fishermen are forced to reduce repeated cuts to catch and income that
are never quite enough to get rebuilding underway, but erode faith in and
support for the management system.
The New England cod fishery may be the best example of that
sort of ineffective management.
For, as the report notes,
“…42 stocks remain overfished. Many of those stocks that need to rebuild are
still experiencing overfishing despite legal requirements that management
should end overfishing immediately. In a
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) analysis, 65% of stocks
in rebuilding plans had flat or decreasing population estimates. When rebuilding plans fail, stocks remain at
reduced abundance, increasing the economic strain on communities.”
The answer to that is very simple in principle although, in
practice, hard to implement due to commercial and recreational industry
resistance:
“To get rebuilding back on track, managers must act more
decisively, while accounting for climate change and human-caused impacts to
stocks, to end overfishing through improved rebuilding plans. Ultimately, rebuilt fish stocks must remain a
central goal of fisheries management in order to maintain fishing opportunities
for coastal communities.”
In that context, one big threat to rebuilding tends to fly
under the radar, at least in the minds of the public at large, and is the
subject of the report’s second section:
“High Demand from Recreational Fisheries.”
It’s not something that the public—or most recreational
fishermen—spend much time thinking about.
They picture a recreational fisherman as someone who
ventures out on his or her local waters, often with family in tow, hoping to
catch a few fish for dinner, while often catching nothing at all. That image is in sharp contrast to their idea
of commercial fishing, in which industrial-scale trawlers spend weeks out at
sea, sweeping the ocean bottom with nets that engulf and kill anything that
they encounter. In their minds,
recreational fisherman can never do the same harm to fish stocks that is caused
by the commercial fleet.
And the funny thing about that is that those mental
constructs are both completely accurate and very wrong, all at the same time.
Because it’s true that there are big commercial vessels out
there, like the
factory trawlers working off Alaska, that collectively catch not only three billion
pounds of their target species, walleye pollock, each year, but also about
of 140,000,000
pounds of unwanted bycatch, including valuable species such as halibut and
salmon, which are discarded dead and wasted. But much commercial fishing is conducted at a
far smaller scale. It’s also true that
individual recreational fishermen don’t kill very many fish on any one trip,
and often don’t kill any at all; however, those individual
anglers took nearly 195,000,000 fishing trips last year, and even if they only
took home, on average, two or three or four fish on every trip, the total
number of fish that they killed can add up pretty fast.
Plus, recreational fishermen tend to focus on a relatively
small number of species, which are often at relatively high trophic levels and
thus naturally low levels of abundance.
While commercial fleets may target things like walleye pollock, witch
flounder, yellowtail flounder, menhaden, squid, monkfish, and other species
that are not frequently caught by anglers, recreational fishermen target
species such as summer flounder, red snapper, Pacific halibut, bluefin tuna,
etc., which are also commercially important.
In some fisheries, recreational landings far outweigh commercial
removals.
Thus, recreational fishing can be a very substantial source
of fishing mortality. As the report
notes,
“managing saltwater recreational fisheries can be uniquely
challenging, especially as coastal populations have increased by 40% over the
past 50 years. The number of individual
angler trips has increased over time, anglers are geographically distributed
rather than consolidated in commercial fishing ports, and anglers’ catch heads
home in coolers instead of into a fish house.
Despite the small-scale impact of each individual angler, the cumulative
effect of recreational fishing on the health of fish stocks can be very
large. In the Southeast, recreational
fisheries are allocated more than half of the catch for many popular stocks, such
as greater amberjack (80%) and gag grouper (65%) in the Gulf [of Mexico], as
well as red snapper (71.93%), red grouper (56%) and most of the porgy complex
in the South Atlantic.
“As a result, managers struggle to sustainably manage
recreational fisheries that are largely open access, constrained only by
measures such as season length and limits on daily catch. In some fisheries, the recreational sector
routinely exceeds its annual catch limit.
Some anglers are dissatisfied with management and want more
opportunities to fish, creating pressure to allow catch above sustainable
limits.”
The latter problem has become particularly acute in recent
years, as recreational
fishing industry-aligned groups such as the Center for Sportfishing Policy,
American Sportfishing Association, and Coastal Conservation Association have
aggressively attacked the federal fisheries management system in an effort to
increase recreational landings.
The Ocean Conservancy report recognizes the need for better
recreational data collection, and better cooperation between management
bodies. It also recognizes that
“Managers must ensure that recreational fishing is managed
consistently with requirements to prevent catch from exceeding annual
sustainable limits, which means that greater consideration of precautionary
management tools—such as buffers that account for the uncertainty inherent in
managing open access fisheries—is necessary.”
Yet it is rare for managers to do so in the real world. Even though the
recreational fishing industry often complains about recreational fishing data, calling
the Marine Recreational Information Program a “suspect data system,” and
even though guidelines
adopted by the National Marine Fisheries Service call for fisheries managers to
account for such management uncertainty either when setting the annual sector
catch limit or by adopting a lower annual catch target, the adoption of
such buffers for management uncertainty is often eschewed as managers try to
placate the recreational industry by setting catch limits as high as is legally
permissible.
The
result is often landings that exceed the recreational sector’s annual catch
limit.
Few would disagree with the premise that the way to reduce both
scientific and management uncertainty in fisheries management is to improve the
level of fisheries science, and so provide better data relating to both the biology
of fish stocks and the sources and magnitude of commercial and recreational
fishing mortality. Unfortunately, the
trend has been in the opposite direction, with an administration that is actively
crippling the data-gathering process.
Thus, another one of the problems cited in the report was the
“Lack of Investment in Science, Data and Traditional
Knowledge.”
For, as the report observes,
“Since early 2025, NOAA Fisheries lost nearly 550 employees
of the approximately 3,000 that were at the agency previously, and many of
those were career scientists at the NOAA Fisheries Science Centers.”
It explains,
“The [Magnuson-Stevens Act] requires the best scientific
information available to be used to set fishing limits, which has helped to
reduce overfishing and rebuild stocks.
Conducting scientific research and data collection takes resources—people,
time, equipment and facilities—and the science supporting fisheries management
is underfunded and under-resourced. Recent…cuts,
along with long-standing gaps in support, mean that it is increasingly
difficult to deliver the core information needed to manage fisheries. This comes at a time when innovative
approaches to modeling, data collection and forecasting are all available to be
implemented but can’t get off the ground due to lack of investment. As the marine environment continues to
experience more rapid and less predictable changes, the need for investment in
science and surveys to quickly identify and respond to ecological shifts is greater
now than it has ever been.”
The problem is that the administration, and some members of
Congress, prefer ignorance to paying the costs of good science. Still, about eight weeks ago, I spent a few
days on Capitol Hill, visiting various offices and advocating for adequate
funding for fisheries management; many of those I spoke with provided a sympathetic
hearing.
We can only hope that translates into a good appropriations
bill.
But as long as we’re on the subject of political
interference with good fisheries management, we probably ought to look at one
more section of the report,
“Deregulation and Poor Governance,”
which is separate from, but closely tied to, the funding
cuts. As the report notes,
“instead of tackling the modern-day challenges, there is a
concerning trend to turn away from the best practices that we know deliver sustainable
fisheries.”
The problems stem from a couple of executive orders signed a
little over a year ago.
“commence the deconstruction of the overbearing and
burdensome administrative state.”
Needless to say, such executive order was not particularly
conservation-friendly, and did not make it any easier to adopt precautionary
management measures or rebuild fish stocks.
However, the more direct threat to fisheries was probably posed by a
second executive order, signed on April 17 of last year, “Restoring American
Seafood Competitiveness,” which railed against
“Federal overregulation [that] has restricted fishermen from
productively harvesting American seafood, including through restrictive catch
limits, selling our fishing grounds to foreign offshore wind companies, inaccurate
and outdated fisheries data, and delayed adoption of modern technology,”
and declared as policy to
“unburden our commercial fishermen from costly and inefficient
regulation.”
The combination of deregulation and defunding pose an
existential threat to good fisheries management and to fisheries that are
sustainable in the long term.
The report states that
“NOAA Fisheries and some of the [regional fishery management]
councils are now acting to remove stocks from federal management, citing time
and resource constraints. Stocks removed
from management could be handed over to the states, removed from management
protections altogether, or retained within the federal system as ‘ecosystem
component species’ that have few or no management safeguards in place.
“Moving stocks to state management comes with risk. Fish stocks that are solely managed by states
have lower management intensity, more uncertainty as to the status of stock
heath and weaker management requirements…And most [states] do not have best-practice
requirements to end overfishing and rebuild stocks.”
The report goes on to note that
“Negative perceptions of regulation, combined with the
inherent challenges of managing so many different types of fishing, have led to
efforts to add ‘more flexibility’ to fishery management or to ‘deregulate’
fisheries…Rolling back important regulations risks the long-term health of
economically important stocks.
Flexibility and deregulation also carry a high risk of unintended
consequences…”
It also offers solutions for the deregulation problem, but
we have to ask whether, in the current political climate, any such solutions would
be given due consideration; it is very possible that the essential
prerequisites for any meaningful solutions being adopted will come from the
ballot box, first in the 2026 midterm elections, and then in the general election
in ’28.
The Ocean Conservancy report also addresses other issues, including
“Persistent Bycatch,” Habitat Loss and Ecosystem Degradation,” “Changing Ocean
Conditions and More Frequent Disasters,” and “Economic Vulnerability of Fishing
Communities,” which I chose not to address in this essay, primarily because,
except for bycatch, they are symptoms of problems that extend far beyond the
fisheries management arena; they are problems that Magnuson-Stevens alone
cannot solve.
And bycatch, although within Magnuson-Stevens’ ambit, has
proven to be a pernicious problem that can only be solved with the right
combination of science, technology, and the political will to stand up to the people
doing the harm, a political will that has been notably absent on most
occasions.
I remember when Magnuson-Stevens, then merely called the
Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, was signed into law. I was in my senior year of college, heading
on to law school, and already developing an interest in fisheries management
issues. At the time, Magnuson-Stevens
held substantial promise.
It has fulfilled that promise, and perhaps done a bit better
than that, as later amendments strengthened its conservation measures. Over the past 50 years, the law has served us
well, and continues to form a firm framework to ensure healthy fisheries for a
half-century more.
But Magnuson-Stevens can’t do it all by itself. Provided that it isn’t further weakened by more
special-interest
amendments like the so-called Modern Fish Act, which serve to undercut the law’s
clear requirements for science-driven fisheries management, the next challenges
to the statute are more likely to be found not in the legislature, but in
administrative agencies that make permissive interpretations of the statute,
and issue regulations that fail to protect and restore the nation’s living
marine resources.
As is happening now.
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