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NEWS
| Coalition seeks to avoid fisheries management "train wreck" |
Overwhelmed agency incapable of properly implementing law
Passage of the 2006 Magnuson-Stevens Act, the overarching law that manages America's marine fisheries, revealed crippling deficiencies within the agency charged with implementing the law. Recently, a coalition of marine angling and industry groups launched an effort to improve the National Marine Fisheries Service's efforts to manage the nation's marine resources and the 13 million saltwater anglers who depend on healthy fisheries.
"We have the most conservation-oriented law we have ever had governing our marine resources, and the agency does not have the data, assessments, science or, frankly, the attitude, to adequately implement it," said Chester Brewer, chairman of CCA's National Government Relations Committee. "The result is that the agency has been reduced to managing fisheries by closure which was not the intent of the law when it was passed by Congress."
In addition to requiring an end to all overfishing by 2011, the Magnuson-Stevens Act requires that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) have a determination on the overfished status of every species under management, and have annual catch limits and accountability measures in place for them by a time certain as well.
"For far too many species, there is not any science at all to do that and to develop it will take one to three years for every single species," said Brewer. "With its startling lack of data, there is no way NMFS can catch up on decades of work and the agency will be crushed by its lack of science. The entire federal management system will be forced to ignore real conservation and management issues, and simply manage by closure. The coalition is seeking a way to fulfill the conservation tenets of the law without driving the entire process into a train wreck."
Current efforts to revise the Magnuson-Stevens Act, including the so-called "flexibility" legislation (H.R.1584 and S.1171) do not address the shortcomings of NMFS that are negatively impacting anglers and, in fact, jeopardize a number of the true conservation gains in the Act.
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| 1 Mar 2010 - 11:33 by CCA North Carolina |
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