Ocean Conservation Reports

Search • RSS Feed

Shell Game: How The Federal Government Is Hiding The Mismanagement Of Our Nation’s Fisheries 3/16/2006 ShellGame.pdf News Release

Executive Summary

Ocean fish are the last wild creatures that humans hunt for food on a large scale. The oceans once supplied a seemingly unending bounty of seafood, with codfish so plentiful off the coast of New England, fishermen merely needed to dip baskets into the water to catch them. Today, many of our nation’s commercially important fish populations (or what fishery managers call “stocks”) are fished at unsustainably high rates, with some, like New England cod stocks, fished down to historic lows, endangering the future of not only the fish stocks, but our nation’s fishermen.

As American seafood consumption continues to rise, we need healthy, productive fish stocks to support this growing demand. Overfishing – catching fish faster than they can reproduce – threatens the vitality of our fish stocks and the fishermen who depend on them for their way of life.

Twenty years of ineffective regulation of U.S. fisheries by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the regional fishery management councils led to fish stock crashes in New England, the Pacific, and other parts of the country, resulting in severe economic and ecological impacts. Congress recognized the threat posed by overfishing when it passed amendments to Magnuson Act known as the Sustainable Fisheries Act in 1996, requiring the regional fishery management councils, using guidance provided by the National Marine Fisheries Service, to define and eliminate overfishing and create plans to rebuild overfished populations within 10 years if possible. To track rebuilding progress, the Sustainable Fisheries Act also required the Secretary of Commerce to report to Congress annually on the status of each fish stock managed by the councils. This report analyzes data from the 2001 – 2004 “Status of U.S. Fisheries” reports (the most recent reports available) and action by the regional fishery management councils from 2001 – 2005 to assess the efforts made by fishery managers to eliminate overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks. Key findings of this analysis include:

Progress reducing the number of stocks that are overfished and experiencing overfishing is an administrative shell game. At first glance there appears to be a declining trend in the number of stocks that are overfished and experiencing overfishing. However, administrative actions, such as dropping stocks out of the count, deciding that not enough information existed so they should be moved to the “unknown” category or collapsing many stocks into one “complex,” account for most of the declining trend: 60 percent of the overfished stocks and 75 percent of the stocks experiencing overfishing between 2001 and 2004 were taken off the list due to administrative shuffling or reclassification. In a nutshell, the number of stocks that are overfished and experiencing overfishing has not appreciably declined.

By 2004, only 13 percent of the nation’s fish stocks could be considered “healthy.” The number of healthy stocks, i.e., those stocks that are both not overfished, nor experiencing overfishing, remained constant between 2001 and 2004. Not only is the number of healthy stocks very low, there has not been a discernable gain in healthy stocks between 2001-2004.

Councils have a pattern of allowing overfishing to continue on overfished stocks. Many councils allowed overfishing to continue on overfished stocks between 2001 and 2004, including New England’s Georges Bank cod, Pacific groundfish, and Gulf of Mexico red snapper. As of 2004, five councils and NMFS allowed 27 overfished stocks to also be subjected to overfishing, despite legal requirements to end overfishing.

Some councils refuse to accept scientific recommendations with disastrous results. Several councils have a history of refusing to accept scientific information that requires the adoption of strict conservation measures. It took a federal lawsuit to force the New England Council to adopt a plan to rebuild Georges Bank cod by 2026. The Gulf Council exceeded red snapper catch levels recommended by scientists by 50 percent and, as a result, does not expect the population to be rebuilt until 2032. It took a federal disaster declaration for the Pacific Council to finally take action to protect groundfish and, as a result, canary rockfish will not be rebuilt until 2074.

Ineffective management tools are common. When councils set catch levels without a mechanism to stop fishing once the level is reached, overfishing often results. Many councils continue to use these ineffective measures, even when a stock is declared overfished. Closed areas or fishing moratoria have allowed successful rebuilding of whiting and lingcod in the Pacific, and goliath and Nassau grouper in the Gulf of Mexico.

NMFS does not know if the majority of stocks it manages are overfished or experiencing overfishing. In 2004, NMFS did not know whether 70 percent of all the nation’s stocks were overfished or not. For over half of all the nation’s stocks, it does not know if they are experiencing overfishing. NMFS has worked to increase its knowledge of commercially important stocks, but knows less about so called “minor” stocks than it did four years prior.

Out-of-date data is prevalent for some councils. The variance in the availability of current data for different councils is striking. The Gulf, South Atlantic and Caribbean councils work with data that is sometimes over 5 years old. While the New England, Pacific, North Pacific, and Western Pacific councils tend to work with more recent data.

Ten years after the passage of the Sustainable Fisheries Act, efforts to prevent overfishing and rebuild overfished populations remain inadequate. Overfishing continues on overfished populations, while administrative changes to the status of the stocks reports mask the councils’ failures to control overfishing. Recent council actions to rebuild overfished populations are an improvement over past inaction, but still fall short of what is required to protect our nation’s fish. Councils need to move beyond adopting the easiest and most obvious measures, actively encourage better data collection, and utilize moratoria, long-term closures, and “hard” catch limits to provide the thorough levels of protection needed for sustaining fish populations for future generations.