By John Koegler
(from Jersey Coast Anglers Association -August 1995 newsletter)
The long awaited new Tuna Regulations were recently published in the Federal Register and showed us again the way the National Marine Fisheries Services operates. It became glaringly obvious that NMFS had it’s mind made up on the rules to be implemented long before the public meetings ever took place and that they had absolutely no interest in what the public had to say. The charade continues.
The implementation of day closures is indicative of the arrogant manner in which NMFS operates. The General Category Association, the group that represents commercial hook and line and hand line fishermen mostly located in New England, asked for the rules for their area only to address certain management problems that exist there. They did not ask to have these closed days implemented in any other areas.
During the New Jersey public hearing on the proposed rules, the president of the General Category Association drove down from Massachusetts specifically to ask NMFS not to impose these rules in the New York Bight area. He stated that they were unnecessary outside of New England Waters and the conditions that exist in the fishery in the New York Bight are very different. Therefore, it would seem only sensible that when a group asks for specific regulations for a well defined area, those rules would be limited only to the areas they were developed for. NMFS decided that these rules sounded like a great conservation measure, regardless of the unfair nature of implementation in areas outside New England, and they implemented them where they were not needed, in areas they were never designed for, and where they were overwhelmingly opposed by the public. This proposal will have an extremely negative impact on our party and charter boat industry in the New York Bight area.
One good point in the new regulations is that the unfair discrimination between charter boats and privately owned sport fishing boats was finally abolished. Now all sport fishermen can catch and retain two bluefin tuna per man regardless of what kind of boat they are on, and in the case of party and charter boats, the captain and mate are also allowed to retain two fish.
Under the provisions for yellowfin tuna, the 350 metric ton quota for the purse seiners was eliminated from the final rules. Many fishermen, both recreational and commercial, were unhappy that the rules failed to restrict the purse seine catch to their 10 year running average of under 60 metric tons of yellowfin. The purse seiners traditionally target immature yellowfin before they reach spawning age and they catch them by the hundreds of thousands for sale to canneries and for animal feed, a waste of a valuable resource. Purse seiners clearly represent a fishery that provides the very lowest economic benefit from a highly valuable public resource. They are detrimental to that resource, preventing more beneficial uses by other groups.
In 1996, bluefin tuna fishermen will be forced to choose between fishing under an angling category permit (limited to only small bluefin) or a General Category permit (limited to only large medium and giant tuna).
The implications of forcing fishermen to make this choice is not clear in the rules as proposed. This will impact New York Bight fishermen badly because in this region, there has been a traditional mixed size, hook and line fishery for over 100 years. This fishery will be virtually ended by this arbitrary rule. In fact, bluefin rules have been negatively impacting New York Bight fishermen with each new rule making session, but that doesn’t seem to matter to NMFS.
A new concept in fishery management is being proposed by the Highly Migratory Species Division of NMFS called "Negotiated Rule Making." The concept could be good, but there are presently few recreational fishermen who understand the fisheries management system to the extent that they could adequately represent the sport fishing community and industry. Any group assembled for this purpose will have a difficult time negotiating a favorable position for the sport fishing industry, when paired off against well prepared, well financed, salaried, full time commercial lobbyist. Many of these lobbyists have long standing ties with members of NMFS who will be heavily involved in the negotiated rule making process. The deck is already stacked against any possible fair representation of the recreational community in this process, but NMFS presses on.
We can see negotiated rule making becoming NMFS way of abdicating its responsibility to manage this resource and let the blame for their continued failures fall elsewhere.