Equity in fisheries management?

Equity in fisheries management?

Virtually all of our important fisheries, both commercial and recreational, are managed by Fishery Management Plans (FMPs). These plans, which are generally created by the appropriate regional fishery management council(s), are approved by the Secretary of Commerce before being implemented. The management measures that they institute can include limits on the number of participants in particular fisheries, on who those participants can be, on how many fish of a particular species they can catch, of how, when and where they can catch them, and on how large (or how small) they must be. Additionally, an increasing number of fisheries are being managed for the bycatch of other species.

Ultimately, in those few instances where these other controls don’t work and a commercial fishery exceeds its allowable harvest in a given year, “paybacks” are instituted. In these, commercial overages are deducted from the subsequent year’s allowable harvest. It’s important to note that such measures are seldom required because of the effectiveness of the management measures in place in controlling commercial fishing mortality,

Every FMP must be in compliance with ten National Standards, as enumerated in the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (available at http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/sfa/magact/index.html). According to the Act, “any fishery management plan prepared, and any regulation promulgated to implement any such plan, pursuant to this title shall be consistent with the following national standards for fishery conservation and management.”

Among the ten National Standards (emphasis added) are:

#1 - Conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing while achieving, on a continuing basis, the optimum yield from each fishery for the United States fishing industry.

#2 - Conservation and management measures shall be based upon the best scientific information available.

#4 - Conservation and management measures shall not discriminate between residents of different States. If it becomes necessary to allocate or assign fishing privileges among various United States fishermen, such allocation shall be (A) fair and equitable to all such fishermen; (B) reasonably calculated to promote conservation; and (C) carried out in such manner that no particular individual, corporation, or other entity acquires an excessive share of such privileges.

(It’s important to note that neither these nor the other seven National Standards differentiate between commercial and recreational fishing nor commercial and recreational fishermen.)

Primarily due to regulations imposed in FMPs to conform to these National Standards, it’s fair to say that commercial fishing is among the most heavily regulated modern industries. There is no facet of a commercial fisherman’s workday that isn’t strictly controlled by government regulation, and penalties for not abiding by those regulations are among the most onerous of any that the Federal government can impose, ranging from fines that can reach into hundreds of thousands of dollars to lifetime expulsion from the commercial fishing industry.

And then, of course, there’s recreational fishing.

While nowhere in the Magnuson Act is it stated or even implied that recreational fishermen should be excluded from the National Standards or from any of the requirements of the Act, in practice commercial fisheries are the only fisheries that it is effectively managing.

This isn’t to say that recreational anglers aren’t being managed. As a matter of fact, at times it might even seem that the management measures they are forced to contend with are verging on excessive. However, the sum total of all of these measures, in recreational fishery after fishery, still fail to add up to effective management.

Why is this so? The overriding reason is that there is no control of recreational fishing mortality. There are no controls on the number of people who can recreationally fish and there are no controls on what they can catch or when they can catch it. Some coastal states require recreational fishing licenses, but no states limit the number of recreational licenses issued. Some recreational fisheries have closed seasons, but the closures apply only to keeping fish of particular species, not to catching them. Some recreational fisheries have minimum or maximum (or both) size limits, but those size limits apply only to fish that are kept, not to those that are caught. An unlimited number of recreational anglers can fish in any area with any gear at any time, and can catch and release any number of any sized fish of any species, with no constraints imposed on them whatsoever other than those on what they can keep.

But if recreational anglers are out there catching fish, as an overwhelming amount of research in recent years has shown, then they are out there killing fish, no matter how careful they are with their catch and release techniques.

And there are never any “paybacks” for recreational overfishing.

The inability of the managers - adhering to the current philosophy of recreational fishing management - to manage recreational fisheries effectively is seen plainly in popular recreational fisheries like those for summer flounder and striped bass. In the Mid-Atlantic summer flounder fishery, every year for year after year the recreational target quota is exceeded in spite of increasingly stringent bag and season and size limits, and the excess catch is in large part due to the mortality of released fish. And in the striped bass fishery on the East coast the recreational discard mortality in recent years has exceeded the commercial harvest.

But it’s most obvious – and most serious – in the offshore fishery for highly migratory species, the so-called “big game” fisheries for tuna and billfish in which the participants venture far offshore in boats valued upwards into the millions of dollars.

The white marlin, a much sought quarry of the “big game” angler, is caught by the same techniques in the same offshore waters in the same seasons as several species of tuna and several other species of Atlantic billfish. While white marlin stocks off the East coast are severely reduced and considered “overfished,” there is absolutely no control by the National Marine Fisheries Service on recreational fishing effort. Any recreational angler who wants to (and can afford to) can go out on the ocean and catch as many white marlin as he or she wishes. In fact, every year there are NMFS sanctioned fishing tournaments up and down the coast in which white marlin are the quarry; tournaments in which hundreds of boats participate, hundreds of white marlin are caught, and the largest white marlin killed and landed can win hundreds of thousands of dollars for the angler who caught it.

The federal government’s attitude concerning protecting white marlin from the assault of those anglers fortunate enough to be able to pursue them is best expressed in a brochure titled “Atlantic Billfish – What are the regulations?” In this brochure, prepared and distributed by NMFS, we read that that agency has “established a recreational catch-and-release fishery management program for Atlantic billfish in recognition of the unique characteristics of the billfish fishery, including the conservation ethic of recreational billfish anglers which provides multiple recreational opportunities without adversely impacting the stock. Therefore, all Atlantic billfish released alive by anglers are not considered as bycatch” (see http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/sfa/hms/REC_BROCHURE.pdf.)

We presume that “the unique characteristics of the billfish fishery” include the one about the participants being very rich guys with very expensive boats who know how to push the right buttons in Washington, and that their “conservation ethic” includes the completely false assumption that every released fish will in fact survive. However, the idea of providing multiple recreational opportunities without adversely impacting the stocks – apparently a thick tongued way of restating the catch and release mantra of “live to fight another day” – is as off-target with Atlantic billfish as it is with striped bass and summer flounder.

In a recent review of the literature (currently in press), fisheries scientist Jean Cramer reports post release mortality of recreationally caught white marlin determined by Virginia Institute of Marine Science researchers John Graves and Andrij Horodysky of up to 35% (with a 95% confidence interval of 15% to 59%), which, NMFS’s and those guys’ with the real expensive boats pronouncements to the contrary, one would be hard pressed to consider as “not impacting the stock.” In fact, Dr. Cramer’s analysis reveals that “if post release mortality… is 35% or more then the removals of white marlin by the U.S. recreational fishery are, on the average, greater than the total catch of white marlin by the U.S. longline fishery.” The U.S. longline fishery, we must mention here, has long been considered – at least by the self-styled recreational fishing “conservationists” and their allies in Congress – the biggest threat to white marlin stocks. In fact there are currently proposals to amend the Magnuson Act to close longliners out of even larger areas of the Atlantic.

Of course, there are no complimentary plans to restrict recreational fishing for white marlin in these areas or anywhere else, “catch and release” and the anglers’ built-in conservation ethic supposedly being all that is required. So we have the longline fleet, composed of less than a hundred boats, which has already accepted significant restrictions for conservation including large closed areas, still being blamed for the plight of the white marlin fishery while the unlimited number of recreational anglers, who have done just about nothing to conserve these fish up until now - beyond proclaiming themselves conservationists and shifting the blame to the longliners - are expected to continue doing nothing. And this in spite of National Standards stating that “conservation and management measures shall prevent overfishing, shall be based upon the best scientific information available, and shall be fair and equitable to all fishermen.”

Unfortunately, there has yet to be any commitment from NMFS to impose the National Standards on the recreational fisheries, in spite of inarguable evidence that those fisheries, with their completely uncontrolled mortality, can and do have greater negative impacts on fish populations than commercial harvesting. Isn’t it time that the federal fisheries management establishment recognize and control all forms of fishing mortality, whether recreational or commercial?

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For more information on these issues, please visit the Fisheries Research Institute website at http://www.fisheriesresearch.org or the New Jersey Fishing website at http://www.fishingnj.org.

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Nils Stolpe/Fisheries Research Institute

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