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Economic, Social, and Ecological FailureUnder the 

 Magnuson Fisheries Act 



A spectacular array of fishery management failures in U.S. federal waters 

 provide many examples from which to illustrate the issue of overfishing within 

 the context of the Magnuson Act. Overfishing can be very roughly defined as 

 taking more fish than the fish population can naturally replace (this working 

 definition is very narrow, because sustainably catching the entire "surplus" 

 production of one species may have the effect of starving another important 

 species that relies on the first for food, or other ecological effects, and it assumes 

 the population has not been previously depleted to a low but stable level). Fishes 

 whose populations are at their historic lows because of overfishing include some 

 very familiar table fare: swordfish, several species of tunas, red snapper, cod, 

 several types of flounders and groupers, and others. Summer flounder, 

 yellowtail flounder, red snapper, and swordfish populations are now capable of 

 producing only 30 percent, 15 percent, 12 percent, and 40 percent, respectively, 

 of their long-term potential yield. Combined landings of reef fishes like 

 groupers and snappers fell more than 80 percent during the 1980s. While these 

 species are still available in markets and restaurants, few consumers understand 

 the shifting market or can see that their renewable resources are being mined. 

 For example, the swordfish's Atlantic breeding population has been halved since 

 the 1970s, and the average size of swordfish caught is now only about half the 

 size at sexual maturity. In other words swordfish are now typically caught 

 before they can breed. Few consumers have been brought such information, but it 

 has implications for pricing, quality, consumer ethics, and future options in their 

 marketplace. 



The Magnuson Act's failure to conserve the fish for the fishers is perhaps 

 most symbolically tragic in New England, where much of the impetus for 

 enacting the Magnuson Act originally occurred. The cost of overfishing to New 

 England was estimated by a Massachusetts task force in 1991 at $350 million 

 annually from lost potential catches, and 14,000 lost jobs. The worst fishery 

 management debacle in New England has involved a group of fish known 

 collectively as groundfish, which include such species as cod, pollock, haddock, 

 redfish, and flounders. They are called groundfish because they are found deep, 

 hugging the ground. Their name might equally apply to the manner in which 

 they have been ground down by overfishing. These fish were once so prolific that 

 their abundance helped spur European exploration and settlement of northeastern 

 North America. Explorer John Cabot described the Grand Banks around the 

 year 1500 as so "swarming with fish [that they] could be taken not only with a net 

 but in baskets let down with a stone." About a hundred years later, a colonist 

 who had come to partake wrote reverentially of the "Cod, which alone draweth 

 many nations thither and is become the most famous fishing of the world." This 

 swarming bonanza of riches has been reverse-siphoned into a welfare drain by 

 managerial negligence. 



The Magnuson Act's inability to provide an effective framework for 

 preventing the problems it was ostensibly created to prevent is highlighted by 

 comparing New England's groundfish situation with that of neighboring 

 Newfoundland. Canada lacks a law similar to the Magnuson Act, yet Canadian 

 and New England fisheries suffered a remarkably similar pattern of ills brought 

 first by the foreign fleets and then by domestic mismanagement derived from 

 denial, over-optimism, and failure to apply a margin for error. In 

 Newfoundland, the Atlantic cod is now commercially extinct. Canadian federal 

 fishery officials who for years were in a state of denial, finally closed the failing 

 fishery in 1993— an action unimaginable only a few years ago. The situation is 

 costing Canada an estimated 42,000 jobs and an estimated 1.8 billion dollars in 



