Okay kids, pull up a seat and a tall glass of Cyanide Chill Kool Aid, and Uncle Haddock will tell you a story about the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. What? No, not that Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act — not the one from 1976. Uncle Haddock’s story is about the reauthorized bill that cleared Congress in 2007 — c’mon, it’ll be fun… Hey, wait, where’s every body going? Don’t you want some Kool Aid?!
I know. I know. Fisheries management is a category xfive buzzkill—on par with rapid arterial bleeding or glass shards to the cornea in terms of leisure-time fun. I know because I’ve hemorrhaged time and energy and written words into the subject for more than a decade. The bulk of this toil has been like shoveling sand into a six-knot tide—an exercise in utter futility. After considerable angst over the matter, I’ve decided that the best way to handle the unpleasant business is to weigh in only at points when an average fisherman can impact the process in significant ways.
Obviously, unless you are a lawyer with the EPA or a copywriter with the IRS, the language of fisheries management has become almost impenetrably complicated, to the extent that it’s getting damned near impossible to figure out what’s going on—much less how to feel about it. If regulators have done fishermen one wrong above all others, it has been their failure to communicate in plain language with those most affected by management actions.
That said, I have no intentions of trying to untangle ten years of communication breakdown between NMFS and working fishermen. Rather, the goal of this exercise is to explain the relatively simple root cause of most recent fisheries woes with an eye for some steps we can and should all take to minimize problems a year or five down the watery road. Again, the good news is that most of the fleet’s worst problems relate to a single piece of statute, namely the Magnuson-Stevens Act — specifically the version that came out of its legislative reauthorization in 2007, when both houses of Congress passed the bill with almost zero debate.
Ironically, many of the congress- men/women who have so publicly lamented the shabby treatment of their “heartless fishermen” by a heartless management bureaucracy are the very people — thanks, no doubt, to some heavy-handed guidance from Big Green lobbyists—who set the last seven years of fishing misery in motion.
What changed in 2007? For one thing, legislators inserted language to create so-called “accountability measures” to force regulators to more adequately account for enormous uncertainty in their march toward rebuilding fish stocks. The language has forced two real – world scenarios: First, to address the chronic uncertainty of the science — especially in fisheries like black sea bass that are considered “data poor”—it required NMFS to quantify the degree of that uncertainty in terms of percent standard error, translate that percentage into quota, and ultimately subtract that “gray area” right off the top of specified annual catch targets. In effect, it required regulators to err on the side of conservation — which sounds just fine until you start looking at the degree of doubt in the science, or, as has more often been the case, compare scientific conclusions to a whole ocean of on-water observation by fishermen.
The language mandates “accountability” in measuring how well annual regulatory efforts keep landings under quota targets. When regulations fail to keep landings in check, Magnuson 2007 requires that one year’s overages be subtracted from the following year’s allocation. This makes sense on paper, when you’re dealing with commercial landings, since that data is fairly reliable — it’s accounted for pound-by-pound on actual fish – house scales.
Unfortunately, recreational landings data has long been generated by a bo- gus dockside survey called the Marine Recreational Fishing Statistical Survey (“MRFSS”), a program devised long ago to track rough trends in recreational catch. MRFSS has long been a whipping boy for editors like me, who point to the spastic, unreliable nature of the survey work, with percent standard error ranging upwards of 50 percent in certain states, fisheries, and time periods. Some years ago, for example, the data found that around 30 winter flounder had been caught in Maine one season; another season, RI tallied less than 50 tautog on MRFSS paper (despite the fact a boat I worked on that season—and a dozen others I knew off the of my head — had been landing more fish than that each trip for more than a month). In neither case did the program count its error margin at greater than 20 percent.
To no one’s surprise, under peer review, the program was deemed “fatally flawed” — its data output problematic even as an indicator of trend, and es- sentially worthless as a measure of anything resembling real-world quota performance. Accountability measures inserted into the 2007 reauthorization have not only reaffirmed that the data should be used in a way the system’s creators never intended — as “hard” landings data—but doubled the strain the management regime asks admittedly rickety science to carry.
Even worse, in light of the financial meltdown since 2008, regulators have been working with ridiculously small research budgets. So at a time when there has never been more statutory weight placed on the fisheries science—when fisheries management is being asked to account for global warming and to work toward a whole – ecosystem approach to managing stocks (the latter another 2007 implant in Magnuson) — there has not only been no money to fund it, but the models scientists are developing to satisfy new management needs are intensifying regulatory hunger for data at an alarming rate.
Meanwhile, fishermen and regulators alike are expressing serious concerns that a growing web of statute has made it increasingly difficult — if not impossible — to tackle specific fishery problems in anything close to timely fashion. The rigid stock – rebuilding timelines that have kept most fisheries on the brink of economic death spirals have also made it impossible to answer the mandate of ecosystem-based management: Regulators cannot open fisheries that are rebuilding fast, or rein in fisheries that are headed down the biological toilet because the science is years behind or riddled with statistical uncertainty, they’re required to err on the low side of harvest every single time, and they must crunch harvest targets to keep even stocks in periods of explosive rebuilding on track to meet arbitrary rebuilding deadlines that were laid out more than a decade ago.
Furthermore, environmental activists have lashed out every time managers have tried to explore new or innovative tactics to keep the fleet alive while protecting fish. In short, the current management regime is sinking into a quicksand of excessive regulation — battered senseless by knee-jerk alarmism from Big Green—to the extent that neither regulator nor regulated can move.
Really, that’s been the net effect of the Magnuson Act since its revision in 2007. Friends and I have long argued that this version of the statute has marked a period of major backlash from an earlier time in fisheries management, when industry dominated the regulatory process and the resulting regulations failed to adequately protect fish stocks. In 2007, that pendulum snapped back the other direction and way too far — thanks, mainly, to the incredible political juice of massive environmental NGOs with bottomless pockets, good intentions, but nary a clue about fishing, fishermen, or even fish (the latter something that could as easily be said of certain parts of the larger fishing industries).
The hope is that the reauthorization this year will mark some long-overdue compromise, as we all work toward freeing up regulators and regulated to get on with it, inserting some sorely needed flexibility back into the management process, protecting fish while moving from strict single species management toward a more holistic “ecosystem” approach, making some legal room for common sense in situations where the existing science is insufficient or out- right bogus, and most importantly, in light of the last seven years, taking some steps to protect fishermen from arbitrary and punitive regulation.
To that end, now is the time to look beyond the petty squabbling recreational-against-commercial, state-against-state, gear-type-against-gear-type—that sets in when the fishermen are left to fight over the table scraps, environmental NGOs set and enforce the agenda, and we all fail to see the true root of all the micro-level problems bearing down on our number one passion and/or livelihood. Now is the time to let your congressional delegation hear loud and clear that fishing needs attention, and that you’ll be paying very close attention to how well your wishes are translated into policy by those you’ve elected to do so.
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