January 13, 2017 — Despite tweaks to fishing guidelines in 2016 aimed at increasing regulatory flexibility, some New England groundfishermen and recreational fishermen still support a move to amend the Magnuson-Stevens Act, sources told Undercurrent News.
The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA’s) recently made changes to a guideline known National Standard One (NS1), but there will still likely be a push from east coast fishermen to amend the Magnuson-Stevens Act as Republican president-elect Donald Trump takes office.
The effort intends to bring more “flexibility” to fishery management, sources told Undercurrent News.
In October of 2016 NOAA made changes to NS1, which aims to prevent overfishing while achieving the optimum yield from each fishery.
Changes were first proposed in January 2015, and the final rule passed in October 2016 giving regional councils more latitude to set catch limits, a change that was opposed by environmental groups.
Call for flexibility
Fishermen, particularly on the US east coast, have been critical for several years of what they say are rigid timelines that give regulators ten years to rebuild stocks deemed overfished.
Some sources told Undercurrent that the lack of flexibility sometimes forces regulators to severely — and some say, unnecessarily — cut quotas when fisheries are nearing the 10-year mark. If a fishery has shown improvement and is nearing its goal, they claim, it makes no difference in the long run whether they reach that goal in the allotted ten years or sooner.
“I think that it’s possible that those new guidelines acted as a relief valve for that pressure. I don’t know that you’re going to get as much pressure to create flexibility in the act that you would get two years ago,” Shannon Carroll of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council told Undercurrent.