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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 36 Number 6
February 2009
Don’t let groundfish action unravel industry
If the interim action rule is implemented as proposed, it will unhinge the New England groundfish industry. All of the work of recent years to realign fishing effort to better match stock size will have been for nothing.
There will be no orderly restructuring of the industry. Instead, scores of fishermen will lose their boats and be forced to give up their livelihoods. Crewmembers will be sent to join the growing ranks of the unemployed. Shoreside support businesses will falter. Seafood markets will be disrupted.
Furthermore, there will be inevitable shifts in fishing effort, the ripple effects of which will have serious consequences that have not been fully anticipated or planned for.
This predicted economic, social, and ecological upheaval is even more difficult to accept because it is happening as part of a unilateral secretarial action that, supposedly, is meant only to be a bridge to Amendment 16’s reorganization of much of the industry into sectors with hard quotas. That process, too, will require painful reductions in fishing effort, but in a more coherent way.
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) said it had no choice but to take the steps it has proposed because of the requirements in the groundfish plan developed under the dictates of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA).
Under pressure from environmental groups, the MSA has evolved into an absurdly rigid piece of legislation that allows no room for common sense. In this case, the MSA has led to an unbending schedule that requires what is almost surely unachievable – the full rebuilding of most groundfish stocks to maximum sustainable yield levels by 2014.
As we have said before on this page, Congress is responsible for the MSA rigidity problem and only Congress can fix it.
But a closer look at the proposed interim action and NMFS’s justification of it strongly suggests that NMFS went further than needed to comply with the MSA. Instead, the agency determined it couldn’t implement the council’s recommendations because of legal constraints on interim actions. And, it said, the council package was “insufficient to end overfishing.”
However, if this interim rule comes to pass – with its massive and largely inescapable differential days-at-sea counting area and the huge Southern New England Closure Area – it will undermine everyone’s collective work to break away from the failed days-at-sea model and move towards a more sensible way to regulate the groundfish fishery.
As CFN went to press, President Obama’s chief of staff issued a directive suspending all federal rule-making activities to give members of the new administration a chance to review them. The NMFS proposed interim action was officially filed just under the wire and likely will not be affected by the suspension.
But the interim action is a proposed rule. Members of Congress are trying to prevent it from going forward as written and the public has until Feb. 17 to comment. Instructions on how to do that are on page 13A.
There has to be a more reasonable way to get the industry to the next phase of groundfish management. /cfn/
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