In her October 30th lecture entitled Stopping Overfishing and Rebuilding Depleted Fish Populations: Legal Requirements and Practical Challenges, Sarah Chasis provided an overview of fisheries management in the United States and insight into recent court cases establishing the authority and intent of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Act.  Setting the context for her analysis, Ms. Chasis first gave a number of reasons – including the fact that oceans contain 80 percent of life on earth, mitigate global warming, and provide healthy food sources for a growing world population – for why we should care about ocean health.  She then pointed to an expanding body of evidence suggesting that oceans are on the verge of collapse, as a result of destructive fishing practices, pollution, coastal habitat loss, and ineffective government regulations that fail to manage marine resources in a coherent and ecosystem-based fashion.  Overfishing, according to Ms. Chasis, is the largest overall threat to worldwide ocean health, as two and a half times more fish than the ocean can produce are currently being caught and technological advances give those fish that remain little chance of escaping an ever-increasing fleet of fishing boats.

After establishing the case for declining ocean health, Ms. Chasis moved into an analysis of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Act, the primary law regulating fisheries in waters of the United States.  Though the Act was initially passed with the intent of driving foreign vessels out of U.S. coastal waters, its purpose shifted in later years to rebuilding overfished stocks and eventually maintaining those stocks at Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY).  While the Act’s rebuilding provisions were added in 1996, a recent evaluation of its results concluded that 45 percent of stocks subject to the rebuilding plan are experiencing overfishing, 77 percent of stocks are still classified as overfished, and only three stocks have recovered.  Some stocks that are overfished or experiencing overfishing are no longer in decline – as they were in 1996 – but the lack of recovery to MSY suggests that alterations to the Act may be necessary in the future.

Several cases between 2000 and 2005 provide insight into Magnuson-Stevens’ interpretation by federal courts.  The first case presented, NRDC v. Daley, focused on catch levels that were determined by the courts to have been set too high – at an amount that had only an 18 percent chance of stopping overfishing – while the second, NRDC v. NMFS, focused on a rebuilding plan determined by the courts to have set too long a timeframe for stock recovery.  Both cases suggested that the courts would interpret Magnuson-Stevens’ rebuilding provisions as requiring a conservative, “play-it-safe” approach to setting catch levels and timeframes for stock recovery.  A third case, (Oceania v. Evans) however, showed that wording in the Act could also be interpreted as not specific enough to require stock rebuilding plans to be implemented immediately.  The New England Fisheries Management Council wrote a plan allowing overfishing on several stocks to continue until 2009 – at which point rebuilding efforts would begin – and the courts ruled that simply setting a timeframe for implementation of a rebuilding plan was sufficient under the Act, even if rebuilding efforts did not begin right away.

Largely as a result of the latter case, reauthorization of the Act in 2006 included a provision requiring that plans to end overfishing be implemented immediately for stocks managed under the Act.  According to Ms. Chasis, however, problems with the Act continue.  These include the efficacy of key management measures – such as keeping close track of commercial catches while recreational catches are largely unknown – quantifying bycatch, and issues with scientific and advisory committees being “captured” in at least some areas by commercial and industrial interests.  Possible solutions include setting catch quotas conservatively to account for scientific uncertainty; gathering better information on stock status and fishing impact of recreational anglers; reducing the capacity of fishing fleets through buyouts and fishery quotas; and providing transitional assistance to fishers impacted financially by new regulations.  As long as principles of adaptive management are built into fisheries regulation, the opportunity to learn from and correct past mistakes provides hope that depleted stocks of fish can be rebuilt and communities that depend on them maintained.