Fish council flounders

When Congress passed the Magnuson Act of 1976, a key intent was, in addition to reducing foreign commercial fishing activity in U.S. waters and promoting the development of a domestic fleet, to bring fishermen into the resource-management process by creating eight regional fishery councils. Amendments passed in 1996, the Sustainable Fisheries Act, refocused priorities on resource survival, charging the councils with new and crucial responsibilities in reducing overfishing and rebuilding depleted stocks. Two recent events indicate that at least one council – New England’s – has not risen to the challenge.

The first, which occurred a few days before Christmas, was a failure by the council to agree on new groundfishing rules for the new year. Faced with strong evidence that a promising rebound in cod was in jeopardy but unwilling to make tough decisions on further restricting catch limits and equipment, the New England Fishery Management Council bailed. By a 9-8 vote (with Maine’s three members joining the majority), the buck was passed to Washington; specifically to Commerce Secretary Donald Evans.

A second, a few days later, was a decision by a federal judge that the National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of Commerce, violated the Sustainable Fisheries Act by not taking sufficient steps to reduce overfishing and bycatch (the inadvertent taking of untargeted species) in the New England fishery. The law required significant improvement by 1998, the best NMFS could promise was some improvement by 2003, and the court was extremely blunt in its criticism of blatant inaction and delay. Although NMFS was the named defendant in the suit brought by several environmental groups, the unindicted co-conspirator, the originator of the flawed rules that NMFS wrongly approved, was the New England Fishery Management Council.

The problem, at its core, is that an 18-member council responsible for the care of a public resource – the ocean and the fish within – is too dominated by offshore commercial fishing interests and by state agency officials with industry backgrounds. Science and the public interest are under-represented, as are fishermen who work inshore, such as lobstermen, whose livelihoods depend upon a healthy ecosystem. Calls to restructure the council to better reflect the varied interests with a stake in the ocean have long been ignored. Now, with an embarrassing abdication of responsibility and a scathing court judgment, those calls must be answered.