June 26, 2018 — If you are not tracking changes to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, it’s time to put it on your radar. Washington lobbyists working for the recreational fishing industry are trying to rewrite America’s fisheries laws to serve their own interests, and commercial fishermen could be left at the dock.
Gulf Coast groups that once were grass-roots conservationists are now a multi-million-dollar advocacy business — complete with a political action committee funded by recreational marine manufacturers. This PAC is lobbying hard to change Magnuson, and the results are two new bills in Congress — S. 1520 and H.R. 200.
Among many, many changes, each of these acts “modifies the annual catch limit requirement to allow for more adaptive approaches” to “increase access” for recreational anglers. And most importantly for commercial fishermen, they allow for reallocation based on “socioeconomic benefits.” This is a zero-sum taking that will affect commercial fisheries. Eric Brazer said it well here in “Sustainability in the crosshairs” (NF Oct. 2017):
“Reallocating more fish to the recreational sector at the expense of the commercial sector does nothing to solve the fundamental problems… Nobody knows precisely how many recreational red snapper fishermen there are or how many fish they catch.”
Read the full op-ed at National Fisherman