Top down management

(from the Jnuary, 2008 issue of National Fisherman)

In the last couple of months we’ve seen two attempts to force major management actions with absolutely no justification in science onto commercial fishermen, one from the White House and one from Congress. In the first, President Bush made striped bass and channel bass “gamefish” on the East and Gulf coasts. In the second, New Jersey Congressman Saxton and Maryland Congressman Gilchrist are attempting to close the East coast menhaden reduction fishery down.

One would think, given the importance of each of the three gentlemen, that these important fisheries must be facing impending disaster at the hands of commercial fishermen that the existing management system wasn’t capable of handling. Otherwise, why would the President and two senior Congressmen expend the energy necessary to research and write the bass proclamation or the menhaden legislation and why would they demonstrate a complete lack of confidence in the established government entities charged with managing these fisheries?

But au contraire, folks, that’s not necessarily so. The striped bass biomass is as high as it’s ever been, channel bass are recovering from the blackened redfish craze quite nicely, and menhaden as of the last assessment (September, 2006) are neither being overfished nor is overfishing on them occurring.  Further, about 90% of channel bass landings are recreational, and recreational C&R mortality of striped bass exceeds commercial landings, so if either of these species actually needed extraordinary protection, they would have to be protected from recreational fishermen, not commercial.

Additionally, the vast majority of landings of all three species are from states’ waters. Great as the powers of the President of the United States and the U.S. Congress are, neither is likely to intrude upon the prerogative of coastal states to manage fisheries in their waters.

So why are our elected officials “protecting” three species that they have no jurisdiction over, need no protection anyway, and are at no risk from commercial harvesters? I’d like to think that it’s because they’re acting on grossly inadequate information, and that they are under the impression that commercial harvesting is posing an immediate threat to the stocks. That being the case, they are each sorely in need of some tuning up at the staff level.

Of course, the harvesting of these three fish has been the subject of public controversy for decades. It seems like there have been movements afoot to make striped bass and channel bass “gamefish” for as long as I’ve been involved in fisheries, and menhaden harvesting has been an issue as well, primarily because striped bass eat them. So the President’s and the Congressmen’s actions would, it would seem, gain the favor of the recreational fishermen.

But should they? Looked at realistically, recreational fishing is an activity that’s practiced by fewer and fewer people each year. While it’s hard to get a handle on the actual statistics, it’s safe to say that less than a tenth of the people in the U.S. are serious recreational anglers. Just as recreational fishermen outnumber commercial fishermen, the non-fishing public outnumbers recreational fishermen. Some of those non-fishermen, in fact a fairly large number of them, are seriously interested in animal rights.  Anyone who doubts this has to look no further than the changes that the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries have been forced to make over the last decade.

And they have begun to target sportsmen – hunters and fishermen – in a serious way. As an example, in New Jersey legislation has been introduced that would be the first step in turning New Jersey’s appointed Fish and Game Council from a body with the goal of protecting the citizen’s abilities to hunt and fish into one with the goal of protecting the critters that they used to hunt and fish. And this isn’t a movement limited to New Jersey.

How are they doing this? Political pressure, plain and simple, and they’re using arguments that are easy to sell to that non-hunting, non-fishing public. Fortunately, while eschewing hunting and fishing, those people haven’t given up eating fish; in fact they’re eating more per capita every year. We’re ahead of the curve on this one.

So I would think that the astute politician, if intent on protecting the fishing rights of his or her constituents, would do everything possible to “marry” commercial and recreational fishing, and to institutionalize them as sustainable pursuits through strengthening the management system we have. This isn’t going to happen by short-circuiting that system and weakening it as President Bush, Congressman Saxton and Congressman Gilchrist have just done. Go figure.

Nils E. Stolpe