May 22, 2015 (Saving Seafood) — The following editorial was published today by the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The newspaper takes issue with the “empty arguments” of the White House in opposition to the House Magnuson-Stevens Act reauthorization bill. The newspaper argues that the White House has “bought into a policy reminiscent of the weakly argued, ideological, biased rhetoric occasionally presented in regard to fishing policy by the less, shall we say, reasonable environmental groups.”
For the past 14 years, New Bedford has ranked first in the nation for the commercial value of fish landed. The port is home to a large segment of the Atlantic scallop fishery, the surf clam and ocean quahog industry, a significant number of groundfish vessels, and other fisheries including monkfish, red crab, lobster, skate, mackerel, butterfish, summer founder, scup and black sea bass.
Something happened Monday that made us wonder if there wasn’t finally some progress being made in fisheries management.
About 150 businesses, organizations and individuals with interests in the fishing industry on the East, West and Gulf coasts expressed their support for the U.S. House of Representatives’ Natural Resources Committee work on reauthorizing the act that regulates U.S. fisheries.
After years of losing battles with regulators, of finding too many deaf ears in Congress, of jaw-dropping incredulity over what appeared to be indiscriminate or capricious management that has decimated the Northeast groundfishing fleet, we thought it remarkable to read their letter to the committee chairman:
“This bill is the product of two years of hearings … and strikes a good balance between maintaining the essential conservation goals of the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act and improving that Act with some carefully crafted amendments to provide fisheries managers with needed flexibility. If enacted, HR 1335 will continue the rebuilding of depleted fish stocks, provide transparency, streamline the management process, and ensure that more scientific information is available to deal with data-poor fish stocks. We believe HR 1335 builds on the conservation tenets which are already part of the Act while providing economic relief to those coastal communities that have been frustrated by the rigidity of the Act.”
Now, however, we see a letter to the Natural Resources Committee from the White House stating that presidential advisers would recommend a veto of House Resolution 1335 if it were to pass in its current form.
We would suggest that the advisers who drafted this letter have either failed to do their homework, or have bought into a policy reminiscent of the weakly argued, ideological, biased rhetoric occasionally presented in regard to fishing policy by the less, shall we say, reasonable environmental groups.
We are particularly astounded by the policy statement’s assertion that: “HR 1335 would undermine the use of science-based actions to end and prevent overfishing. The current requirements of MSA are working.” Likewise, the encouragement to the committee to look back to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s proposed rule from January as being sufficient leaves us scratching our heads.
In the first case, we would point out that the current requirements of the MSA are definitely not working in the Northeast Fisheries, not by any measure that considers all 10 of the act’s national standards. Landings of groundfish diminish each year, despite the 100,000 tons of total allowable catch left in the ocean annually.
In the second case, that proposed rule of NOAA’s the advisers enthusiastically recommend notes quite clearly that 36 percent of rebuilding stocks reviewed in a 2012 report by the National Research Council “were later discovered to have never been overfished.”
Which brings us to another point: HR 1335 aims to – and must – replace the term “overfished stocks” with “depleted stocks,” because any scientific, unbiased and objective assessment of what is happening to fishing stocks must admit that there is more than fishing affecting the fish. The White House policy advisers stubbornly hold on to that term, “overfishing,” when water temperatures, salinity, natural population fluctuations, inadequate surveys and more may reasonably be assumed to be playing a more significant role in NOAA’s stock assessments.
Considerations of space prohibit further critique of this policy statement, which was delivered to Natural Resources despite HR 1335 still being far from ever making its way to the Oval Office.
In a report by Standard-Times reporter Steve Urbon this week, Conservation Law Foundation senior attorney Peter Shelley interpreted the bill as reintroducing “a lot of politics into fisheries management.” Looking at the bill and its accomplishment of making management more responsive to science, and contrasting it with the empty arguments of the White House policy statement, it seems very clear where politics fits into this.