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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 36 Number 2
October 2008
Blame game: MSA rigidity is the problem
As the Northeast fishing industry struggles to comprehend recent stock status reports and their resulting management consequences, people are increasingly playing the blame game. They’re asking, “Whose fault is it that we’re in such a mess?”
The fundamental problem is the micromanagement now imposed by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), and the responsibility for that rests squarely on the shoulders of some of industry’s best friends – members of Congress.
Back in the early 1990s, environmental groups chose not to educate, persuade, and build consensus between themselves and fishermen but instead rode roughshod over the industry and put incredible pressure on Congress to mandate the rebuilding of all fish stocks to maximum sustainable levels.
Environmentalists took that hard-line approach because they perceived that fishermen, who had been relatively unregulated for centuries, were unwilling to conserve.
But fishermen for years now have understood the need for conservation. They are thoroughly engaged in the management process. The scientific community has come to recognize, appreciate, and encourage fishing industry involvement in science. Everyone acknowledges that the technological leaps that made it possible for fishermen to become so efficient also resulted in overfishing. To counter that, fishermen have worked with net builders, scientists, and engineers to create more selective gear that reduces wasteful bycatch and minimizes habitat impacts.
Despite these significant advancements, the management demands of the MSA have only gotten more unreasonable in recent years. And the federal fishery management process has become mired in a lumbering bureaucracy that is gridlocked by demands for precise fish counts, which scientists, working in good faith, simply cannot provide.
For groundfish, the result is that improvements in some stocks are cancelled out by downturns in others, making it highly unlikely that fishermen and American seafood consumers will be able to reap any benefit even after years of strangling restrictions.
It also means that the $25 million Loligo squid fishery is about to be sacrificed to rebuild supposedly overfished butterfish populations even though no one really knows the true condition of the butterfish stock. And it means that the ocean is literally carpeted with dogfish that fishermen aren’t allowed to catch and whose vast numbers are likely interfering with the recovery of groundfish stocks. This is a bizarre world that is completely geared toward managing for the lowest common denominator.
Frustrated fishermen have been lashing out at the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) with some justification. NMFS is in a position to provide leadership and promote collaborative problem solving. But it is so paralyzed by threats of lawsuits that it has not played that role for a long time.
Fishermen also have criticized NMFS scientists for their ever-changing, up-and-down stock assessment findings. But these scientists are doing the best they can under impossible demands for unattainable perfection when it comes to determining how many fish are in the ocean and how many there should be.
Members of the US Senate recently requested an investigation into the stock assessment process. Hopefully it will document that scientists, fishermen, and managers cannot do what the increasingly rigid MSA now requires them to do.
The MSA is the problem. Congress needs to fix the crippling provisions of this legislation. /cfn/
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