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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 34 Number 5
January 2007
MSA bill: There’s some good with the bad
Congress managed to pull off the last-minute passage of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) reauthorization bill in mid-December through several stunning acts of compromise on the part of some very hard-nosed lawmakers. As a result, we wound up with legislation that may not be as good as we wished, but it’s not as bad as it could have been either.
HR 5946, which President Bush has indicated he will sign, is a substantial bill and it will take time to sort out the details. But here’s a sample of what’s in it.
As Northeast fishermen’s representatives feared, the reauthorization does require fishery management councils to “immediately” end overfishing on a stock once an overfishing determination is made.
However, shaving some of the hard edge off, this rule won’t go into effect for awhile – not until 2010 or 2011 depending on the fishery – and the councils will have two years to develop fishery management plans once the requirement does kick in.
The legislation does not change the 10-year stock-rebuilding requirement that has driven fisheries management in the Northeast since the Sustainable Fisheries Act, the last MSA reauthorization bill, was passed in 1996. However, it does include a provision that extends the summer flounder rebuilding period by three years to 2013.
This extension, which commercial and sport fishing groups, particularly from New Jersey and North Carolina, fought hard for, gives everyone, including the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), some desperately needed breathing room.
But US Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) rightly questioned why this kind of flexibility was not extended to other fish stocks when lengthening the timeframe would not jeopardize rebuilding but would prevent the imposition of terrible hardship on fishing communities.
The bill also includes an “accountability” requirement for when fishermen exceed total allowable catch (TAC) limits in a fishery. But while the hardliners wanted to require fishermen to “pay back” any TAC overages the following year without exception, the final bill allows the councils to determine when and how those overages are repaid.
Through this reauthorization, Congress endorsed NMFS’s plan to encourage the development of “limited access privilege programs” (LAPPs). This new term replaces “individual transferable quotas” and ”individual fishing quotas,” commonly known as ITQs and IFQs, but it embraces the same idea – giving fishermen exclusive rights to harvest a portion of a fish quota.
Many people in New England have spent the last decade fighting this idea because they were convinced it would result in little guys being swallowed up by big corporations.
However, the bill’s LAPP authorization comes with a set of guidelines that: allow for the allocation of harvesting privileges to fishing communities or regional fishery associations; require “the development of policies to promote the sustained participation of small owner-operated fishing vessels and fishing communities that depend on the fisheries;” help new small vessel owner-operators get into the fishery; and prohibit “inequitable concentration of limited access privileges.”
And, at the insistence of US Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), the bill includes a provision specific to New England that requires a two-thirds majority vote among all eligible fishermen to determine whether any LAPP is adopted in the region. Frank inserted last-minute language that requires the consideration of crewmembers for participation in any LAPP referenda in New England.
The reauthorization bill also includes a directive to the secretary of commerce to produce a report for Congress on the New England groundfish fishery within 30 days of enactment.
The new law requires this report to detail the economic and social implications of Framework 42 to the groundfish plan, including: whether differential days-at-sea counting will result in a reduction in the number of small vessels actively participating in the New England fishery; how days-at-sea leasing is altering the market value for groundfish permits and days-at-sea; the effect of nonfishing factors on groundfish stock rebuilding; and whether there is a “substantially high probability” that groundfish biomass targets can actually be achieved.
This is one of the positive outcomes of the bill because it more than likely will show clearly why New England’s congressional representatives have fought so hard during this arduous reauthorization process to inject some balance into the MSA. /cfn/
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