no 



works, the fishes will no longer be overfished, but neither will they be rebuilding 

 to more productive levels of abundance. In addition to fish, shellfish have also 

 been hammered. Lobsters in the Gulf of Maine are officially deemed 

 "overexploited," and NMFS says New England sea scallops are "at or near 

 all-time lows." The scallop management plan also will take years to end 

 overfishing and does not address rebuilding. As it stands, we can look forward to 

 intentional maintenance of the lowest-ever levels of these "renewable" resources. 

 The Commerce Department has recently proposed $2.5 million in assistance to 

 Northeastern communities hard hit by fishing industry problems. This first drop 

 in the fish relief bucket-- unprecedented in the U. S.~ signals the beginning of an 

 ominous siphon-like reversal in the economic contribution that fishing can and 

 should be- but is not- making to the economy of the northeast states. 



The problems are by no means confined to the northeast. The North Pacific 

 fleet of factory trawlers (sea-going factories that both catch the fish and process 

 them on board) is another severe example of fishery management failure under 

 the Magnuson Act. Encouraged and invited by the North Pacific Fisheries 

 Management Council's open-to-all-at-no-fee policy, the number of factory 

 trawlers mining the waters off Alaska grew from 12 in 1986 to 65 in 1992. 

 These ships often catch 350,000 pounds of fish in a single haul (one of the 

 trawlers reportedly can catch over a million pounds offish in one tow of its net). 

 The target fish is walleye pollock, and landings of 3 billion pounds (valued at 

 $324 million in 1992) make this the largest single-species fishery in the world. 

 This "American" fleet has been largely funded by Japanese and Norwegian 

 investments. Free and wide open access into this fishery is still allowed by the 

 regional fisheries management council. The pollock are already showing signs of 

 exhaustion, and concurrent with the development of the fishery has been a decline 

 in animals that rely on pollock for food. Sea lions, and several seabirds have 

 undergone population declines of 50 to 90 percent in the last twenty years. The 

 ultimate predator is now starving itself as well. Two of the trawlers and their 

 parent company went bankrupt in 1993. One Seattle-based trawler company 

 owner recently stated "I fear that more than half of the boats might teeter on the 

 edge of bankruptcy... taking with them 4,000 jobs. These boats were mortgaged 

 on the assumption that they would fish 10 months a year. They now fish barely 

 five." Some observers speculate that a third of the fleet would have to leave the 

 fishery before it can become economically productive again. The Council's 

 laissez-fair policy now appears to have been a "losers take all" proposition; 

 destroy the resource and put yourself out of business simultaneously. The 

 Council's open-access mentality has also resulted in a vastly overcapitalized 

 fishery for halibut. This time, in order to protect the fish as the fleet swelled 

 without control to 5,500 boats, the season was reduced to just two days per year; 

 one in spring and one in fall. During these 24-hour marathons, the quickest, 

 most hazardous, and most wasteful methods are employed to catch the fish. The 

 result: every 24-hour opening sees fatalities, sinkings, and enormous amounts of 

 spoiled fish, and consumers virtually never see fresh halibut. Now that the 

 problem has gotten out of hand, the Council plans to institute quotas, beginning 

 next year, that would allow boats to fish any time they want until they fill their 

 individual limit for the year. But in order to reach the point at which all halibut 

 boats could fish throughout the year for a profitable amount of fish, some 

 observers estimate that roughly 95 percent of the boats may have to leave the 

 fishery. 



The ongoing inability of the Magnuson Fisheries Act to provide a reliable 

 framework for preventing systematic depletion is also illustrated by Atlantic 

 sharks. Between 1976 (when Magnuson was enacted) and 1990, the authorized 

 regional fisheries management council never got around to producing a shark 



