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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 5
January 2008
10-year rebuilding mandate leads to failure
How does one become a millionaire? Well, one should have a plan – an FMP (financial management plan). To be a millionaire, one would need a million dollars. So how does one make this happen? He would start with a savings account and begin making deposits into it. In addition, he would ensure that his savings earned a return by investing them into mutual funds, deposit instruments, real estate, equities, et cetera.
Now along the way to becoming a millionaire, life happens, so one would have to occasionally skip deposits, pay service fees, switch investments because of poor returns, or even withdraw funds from the savings account.
Nonetheless, if one is conscientious about minimizing fees and withdrawals and likewise conscientious about maximizing deposits and earnings, in time, the cumulative effect will be that eventually he will become a millionaire.
Supposedly Albert Einstein once remarked that “compound interest was the most powerful force in the universe.” Hence, if you live long enough, you’ll probably have enough time to become a millionaire.
However, if one wants to be a millionaire in 10 years, then the dynamic completely changes. Suddenly, there is more stress to earn more money so as to deposit more money into savings. If the account’s investments are not earning enough return, more stress is created by having to find quicker, bigger, better returns.
Meanwhile, service fees on the savings account are multiplying and growing in size so as to erode the account’s bottom line and there is no relief from them. And, life continues to happen, creating more stress that impacts one’s economic well-being. When one looks at his account balance, he realizes that he is in the best financial shape of his life, but owing to the pressure of a 10-year deadline to become a millionaire, he is somehow reduced to a failure.
Can we say summer flounder?
No credit for success
The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council has an FMP (fishery management plan) that has put the summer flounder stock in the best shape it has been in during the past 25 years, but owing to an arbitrary yet statutory deadline, the council is being cast as a fishery management failure.
The account in our FMP is the summer flounder stock. Our deposits are the recruits into that stock. The earnings are the growth in the yield of that stock. The withdrawals are the landings that come out of that stock. The service fees are all the other sources of stock mortality.
Our account target for “millionaire” status is a spawning stock biomass of 197 million pounds. The deadline for our account to achieve its “millionaire” status is Jan. 1, 2013. We are about half way there – 93 million pounds – so, in effect, we have to more than double the current spawning stock biomass over the next five years.
We can’t make any deposits because “recruitment” is not managed nor is it controlled by us. We can’t enhance our earnings because “growth” in yield is likewise something neither managed nor controlled by us. The service fees – natural and episodic “mortalities” – are likewise beyond the council’s control.
The only control we can exercise is managing “withdrawals,” which are landings.
Being reduced to this single control mechanism is much like having only one tool in your toolbox – a hammer. The consequence of such a lack of tool flexibility is that everything looks like a nail. One has only to review recent letters to our council from senior National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) officials to confirm that our council is about to be hammered despite the greatest abundance of summer flounder in the past 25 years.
Why? Why is there no flexibility?
Third rail
In 1996 when the Sustainable Fisheries Act was enacted reauthorizing the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), language was included that required overfished stocks to be rebuilt as quickly as possible but over a period not to exceed 10 years.
This became the driving force of all fishery management. This requirement, along with the overarching requirement to end overfishing, is all one needs to know about federal fishery management in the 21st century.
There may be 10 National Standards in the MSA, but National Standard 1 – end overfishing – is not only first sequentially, it is also first among equals. In effect, it and its associated rebuilding requirement have become the third rail in the MSA.
When the act was reauthorized by the Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization Act of 2006, any attempts to create management flexibility by relaxing the rebuilding requirement were “off the table” in the parlance of lobbyists.
Summer flounder alone received some slack as the rebuilding period for it was extended by three years. Had that not occurred, it is my opinion that even with a total shutdown of the summer flounder fishery in 2008 and 2009, we would not have reached the target spawning stock biomass of 197 million pounds by 2010. And, what would the consequence of that scenario be?
Closure consequences
Presumably, the stock would be in great biological shape, but not at its target spawning biomass stock level by the required deadline – oh my!
Meanwhile, the taxpaying commercial fishermen who rely on the summer flounder stock would have derived no income from a stock that would likely be at a historic level of abundance.
And the taxpaying dealers, processors, retailers, and restaurateurs would have been looking for substitutes so as to have provided the seafood eating public with a different form of seafood.
Likewise, the recreational sector would have been shut out during this same two-year period with similar dire consequences to the taxpaying for-hire sector and its related infrastructure, and the fishing public at large would have been prohibited from enjoying one of the most popular recreational species on the East Coast.
Think about it. Does that make sense? Of course not, yet closure may still happen even with a three-year extension.
This scenario seems completely at odds with the first finding and declaration by Congress regarding the MSA that “… fishery resources contribute to the food supply, economy, and health of the nation and provide recreational opportunities.”
But unless the law is changed, we will be like Aesop’s dog in a manger, denying an abundant fish to those who seek it.*
No perfect science
What’s the fix? Congress must realize that fishery science is a lot like medical science – it’s not perfect, nor is it exact. Over 30 years ago, my mother died of a heart attack and my father died of cancer. Medical science today is greatly improved from when they died, but there is no absolute cure for these diseases, nor is there a congressionally mandated deadline as to when there should be.
Congress should own up to the fact that “best available science” (National Standard 2 of the MSA) and arbitrary deadlines have limitations and consequences that cannot and should not be ignored.
US Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) introduced and US Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) supports HR 4087, the Flexibility in Rebuilding American Fisheries Act of 2007. This bill, or similar legislation to amend the MSA so as to provide a more common-sense approach to fishery management, is needed to avoid the kind of scenario that would have happened – and still may – had Congress not provided a three-year extension for summer flounder.
Dan Furlong
Dan Furlong is the executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council.
* According to Wikipedia, this fable concerns a dog that lies down to sleep in a manger. When awakened, he ferociously barks at the cattle in the barn, preventing them from eating the hay on which he chose to sleep, even though he is unable to eat it himself. This leads an ox to remark the moral of the fable: “People often begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.”
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