On March 21st thousands of recreational and commercial fishermen, their families, and people in fishing dependent jobs are going to gather at the U.S. Capitol to ask Congress to put the regulatory flexibility back into the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act that was intended to be there when the Act was written.
This flexibility wasn’t there as a way to allow fishermen to get around effective management measures; it was there because the original authors realized that at the time neither the scientists nor the bureaucrats who were “in charge” possessed all of the knowledge necessary to manage the fish and the fisheries effectively. Hence they made allowances for participation in the decision making process they designed by fishermen whose on-the-water experience would help to fill in the management voids left by imperfect and/or inadequate science. They recognized at the time that informed judgment had a definite place in the fisheries management process and made provisions for it.
Since then that informed judgment has been replaced by arbitrary and often (usually?) unrealistic performance measures that the scientists and bureaucrats have neither the ability to effectively determine nor whose outcome they can reliably predict.
Ostensibly acting for the long term good of the fishermen and the fisheries, a handful of multi-billion dollar foundations and the ENGOs and fishermen’s organizations that they have used their power and their influence to co-opt have been responsible for this. Their argument is that just about every fisherman – other than those few who they are now subsidizing – has been and still is too mired in the day-to-day realities of making a living on the water to be really committed to sustainability. Accordingly they are going to force them to fish sustainably by getting rid of all of that “unnecessary” legislative flexibility, regardless of the short-term impact on jobs and investments in the fisheries.
Read this opinion piece from Fish Net USA.