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Fisheries Managers Criticized

Posted on: Friday, 31 March 2006, 00:00 CST

By Bo Petersen, The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C.

Mar. 30--Federal ocean fisheries managers have failed to stop overfishing and have covered up the failure with a "shell game" of changing counts, a group of environmentalists said Wednesday.

The charges were leveled in a report by the Marine Fish Conservation Network that said only 91 of 686 fish stocks managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service are known to be healthy and that number has not changed in the last five years.

In the South Carolina region where fishing rules are set by the service's Charleston-based South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, only seven of 100 stocks are known to be healthy, the report said, a number that has improved only slightly in the five years. It cites a lack of up-to-date data on the fish as the council's biggest obstacle.

The report comes with heightened conservationists' concerns that commercial and sport-fishing pressure is depleting deep-sea species following a mid-1970s explosion of technology advances. Commercial fishermen argue that tougher restrictions are driving them out of business and sports fishermen say the regulations are too strict.

It also comes as Congress debates strengthening or weakening the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the chief federal fisheries law, that essentially says fish stocks must be managed to assure a sustainable catch. It calls on Congress to strengthen the act.

"The South Atlantic Council is gambling for today's payoff and risking tomorrow's livelihoods. Continued overfishing of depleted fish is no answer. It will only slightly delay the inevitable crash. Because without fish, there can be no fishing," said Libby Fetherston, of the Ocean Conservancy.

"National Marine Fisheries needs to be more accurate, more science-based and more independent. We need to make some hard choices," said Dana Beach, of the Coastal Conservation League.

The report cited actions such as dropping fish stocks out of overfishing assessments counts, moving them to "unknown" or moving a number of species into a single count and using the numbers of an indicator species to set the rules for fishing all the fish in that group.

Bob Mahood, the South Atlantic council's director, said he didn't really disagree with the numbers or the contention that the council needs better data.

Federal fisheries managers "are not 'cooking the book." We have so many unknowns. We have some species that are overfished, but we have so many unknowns. With that shortage of information, they're just trying to express in the best way possible what's going on," he said.

"The environmentalists don't have to worry about the impact on people. The council's job is to weigh improvements against that impact. Our council, I think, has made some progress. We're trying to end overfishing as quickly as possible."

Susan Buchanan, National Marine Fisheries spokeswoman, said that species that are similar and tend to be caught together were moved into the single, overall counts last year to help address that lack of information.

"We're not funded to assess every species of fish in the ocean. It's not practical," she said.

"This report from the Marine Fish Conservation Network is based on old information that has been misinterpreted. We continue to see incremental progress in the status of fish stocks in the United States."

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Source: The Post and Courier

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