116 



10 



stewardship. Consequently, it is virtually inconceivable that NMFS will ever rise 

 above unwanted-stepchild status in the Commerce Department. 



For years NMFS suffered from very poor leadership. It continues to suffer 

 from chronic underfunding. Compounding its budgetary inadequacy is that much 

 of its budget is a series of line items for Congress members' pet projects. This 

 has made it exceedingly difficult for NMFS to implement a vision, during the 

 relatively brief part of its history when it has had one. 



NMFS' current role is primarily: 1) monitoring, 2) enforcement, and 3) 

 consultation on habitat. Though monitoring is critical to management, inadequate 

 information is collected to determine the status of a third of our commercially 

 important marine fish. Regarding law enforcement, NMFS has never had the 

 monies necessary to ensure compliance. This gap will likely widen as more and 

 more regulations-- such as the area closures, mesh size restrictions, and turtle 

 excluder requirements, are implemented in troubled fisheries. Habitat should be 

 treasured as the no-overhead, free lunch factory for America's multi-billion 

 dollar fishing industries and coastal culture, as well as the stage for much of our 

 recreation and tourism. Yet the Fisheries Service has only a consultative role in 

 determining whether federal permits will be granted for activities that destroy or 

 degrade habitat; NMFS should have full authority, including veto power, to 

 determine the fate of permit applications that would hurt habitat. Regarding 

 actual fishery management, NMFS must generally defer to the judgement and 

 schedule of appointees of the fishery management councils. This has had 

 disastrous results. But where NMFS does have direct authority to write 

 management plans- for the Atlantic tunas, sharks, and billfishes- their budget is 

 terribly inadequate. This is a key reason, for instance, why there are no 

 management plans for any Atlantic tunas. The National Marine Fisheries Service, 

 ostensibly the nation's marine steward, has been marginalized, by inadequate 

 funding, inadequate legal authority, and a fishery management council system that 

 puts more authority in the hands of political appointees- many of whom have no 

 training in natural resource management- than in the Service' resource 

 management professionals, economists, and social scientists. 



Fixing The Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act 



A basic flaw of the Magnuson Act is its failure to define and prohibit 

 overfishing. The Act says that "Conservation and management measures shall 

 prevent overfishing while achieving the optimum yield from each fishery on a 

 continuing basis." Surprisingly, there are serious problems with this. Whereas 

 overfishing is undefined, "optimum yield," is defined as maximum sustainable 

 yield "modified by any relevant economic, social or ecological factor." Though 

 this sounds eminently reasonable, this definition can be used to justify virtually 

 any catch level, including one that exceeds the reproductive abilities of the fish 

 (constitutes overfishing). In practice, fishery managers have often subordinated 

 biological considerations to short term economic considerations. Thus the Act's 

 current wording allows, rather than prevents, the overfishing that is bankrupting 

 much of the fishing industry. 



The regional Fisheries Management Councils exert their effect primarily 

 through the development of so-called Fishery Management Plans. Nothing in the 

 law compels a council to do a management plan for any species, ever. During the 

 development of each fishery management plan, the councils are directed by the 

 Act's guidelines to quantitatively identify a level of fishing mortality that 

 constitutes overfishing, and to prepare a recovery plan when a condition of 

 overfishing exists. This sounds good. The problem here is that the guidelines, 

 which were added to the Act in the late 1980s, explicitly do not have the "force 

 and effect of law." Many fisheries remain without adequate recovery schemes or 

 even management plans. Neither the law nor the guidelines expressly bind the 



