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While it’s impossible to determine, it’s safe to say
that the area that New Jersey’s commercial
fishermen, discounting the far travelers like
pelagic longliners, routinely harvest covers at
least 10,000 square miles of ocean bottom. The
migratory fish that most of them target will range
over an area much larger than that. Every species
that they target is directly and/or indirectly
influenced by the wastes produced by 50 million
people and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of
commerce. Each is also influenced by natural cycles,
climatic changes, interspecies competition, local
weather and a host of other variables.
To suggest that there’s a lot going on over an awfully large
area that impacts the health of a fish stock besides
fishing would be a vast understatement. To suggest
that we have anything beyond a rudimentary
understanding of these natural or anthropogenic
processes and of how they affect the fish in our
inshore and offshore waters, would be even more of
an understatement.
Yet we have a multi-million dollar fisheries management
bureaucracy that is predicated on that assumption.
If we accept the fact that fisheries – or fishing – should
be managed, there’s nothing inherently wrong with
doing it with limited knowledge and incomplete
understanding, because we’re never going to know
everything we would like to know. The oceans are too
big, the systems are too complex and the conditions
are too variable.
When our federal fisheries management system was designed in
Washington back in 1975/76, the Members of Congress
and their staff who wrote the Magnuson Act realized
this, and they designed accordingly. They did this
by designing a significant level of flexibility into
the Act. Most notably, this flexibility was
expressed through the use of the input of informed
recreational and commercial fishermen in the
management process. Hence, each of the regional
Fisheries Management Councils had as members, along
with professional fisheries managers, private
citizens from the recreational, party/charter and
commercial fishing sectors.
These private members were to add the benefit of their years
of on-the-water experience to the statistics
provided by the federal and state fisheries
scientists, and between the two it was thought that
we would have about as good a grasp as possible,
though nowhere near complete, of what was going on
in our fisheries.
Unfortunately, in the intervening years the role of
fishermen in the management process has been
constantly eroded.
This erosion began when the fisheries managers began to
dismiss fishermen’s observations as “anecdotal,”
that is, non-scientific. Their dismissal was, of
course, based on the idea that “scientific”
observations were better and, unfortunately, was
supported by the Magnuson Act’s requirement that
fisheries management actions be based on the best
available science (though nowhere did the Act
require that the best available science be adequate
to the job it was supposed to do). The situation was
exacerbated by the development and use of computer
models, which could turn a thousand dollars worth of
scientific observations into a million dollars worth
of unproven – and not provable – fisheries
projections. If you had a desktop computer or two
and some programmers, you surely didn’t need the
insights of someone who had spent his or her life
making a living by observing what the fish stocks
were really doing.
This was the start, but things really
got going when so-called conservationists decided
that saving the fish from the fishermen represented
another avenue of exploitation for them. In the past
ten years they have mounted a reasonably successful
lobbying campaign to remove any vestiges of judgment
from the federal fisheries management process.
According to them, there should be no
allowance for informed judgment in fisheries
management and all decisions should be based on
objective science and arbitrary timelines. Of
course, the science we have is nowhere near adequate
to support multi-million dollar management decisions
and arbitrary timelines leave no room for natural
variability. In their anti-fishing zeal they’ve
covered those bases by insisting on the application
of the Precautionary Principle, which requires that
when information is lacking, management actions
should err on the side of the fish.
As I’ve written here before, because of coastal development
pressures, dramatic increases in operating expenses
and the impact of the globalization of seafood
markets, it’s the people that depend on fishing who
need protection, not the fish stocks.
Today
New Jersey’s
recreational and commercial summer flounder
fisheries and the many businesses they support are
facing the impacts of looming massive cutbacks in
allowable landings because of this inflexibility
that the anti-fishing interests deem so necessary to
the future of our fisheries. Despite a summer
flounder biomass that’s been estimated to be higher
than any ever measured, despite the fact that the
population is increasing and has been increasing for
most of the last decade, despite the fact that it is
one of the most important commercially landed
finfish and the most important recreationally caught
fish in New Jersey, and despite the fact that the
proposed regulations will inflict tens of millions
of dollars worth of damage to the coastal economy,
recent amendments to the Magnuson Act require
drastic cuts in landings.
Why are these drastic cuts required? Because without them
the summer flounder stock won’t reach an
artificially high level of abundance within an
arbitrarily decided time.
According to the statistics, after a decade of drastic
cutbacks in fishing effort there are more summer
flounder off our coast than there have ever been
before, there are more out there this year than
there were last year but less than there will be
next year, and New jersey’s anglers, New Jersey’s
commercial fishermen, New Jersey’s seafood lovers,
and all of the businesses that support them are
facing drastic reductions in landings and the
concomitant loss of income because there won’t be
enough to reach some mythical population level
within three years.
We need the flexibility in fisheries management that the
Members of Congress who wrote the Magnuson Act meant
to be there. We need the managers to be able to
exercise their informed judgment to say “enough is
enough,” as they are saying now with summer
flounder, but to have that translated into a
management action. At this point the amended
Magnuson Act won’t allow them to.
Considering all of the unknowns associated with fisheries
management, our hands can’t be tied by inadequate
science and arbitrary deadlines. As originally
written, the Magnuson Act balanced the inadequacies
of the science and protected against arbitrary
decisions by making significant provisions for the
utilization of informed judgment. Anti-fishing
activists have successfully campaigned to remove
virtually all of the informed judgment from the
process. The future of our fisheries, and of the
people who count on them for income, for sustenance
or for recreation, depends on our elected officials
putting that judgment back in. |
