Marine Fisheries Initiative

Challenge:

Our ocean and coastal resources are being inadequately managed, and the growing number of proposed activities and pressures facing ocean areas and resources – including proposals for wind and wave energy, liquefied natural gas, gas terminals, desalinization plants, oil exploration, aquaculture, recreation, shipping and commercial fishing – have resulted in more concern on how to effectively manage these multiple and competing uses while conserving the resource.

National policy has been 30 years of commercial exploitation of the nation’s marine resources, developing where commercial fishing needed and sustaining where already developed. This policy has led to constant boom and bust cycles in the federally regulated fisheries of the coastal states. The one constant in all these fisheries has been the continued and persistent federal policy of sustaining economic activity at the expense of the fish. The implementation of this policy can be seen in the drive for Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQs), bailouts for disaster relief, buyouts of parts of different fisheries, federally financed cooperative research programs used to support commercial fisheries and static allocations based on historic catches and the continuous effort by fishery managers to exploit the resource at its maximum annual level of abundance.

Strategy:

The TRCP has brought together a group of national, regional, and local organizations and business associations under the banner of the Angling 4 Oceans Coalition to help guide public policy surrounding saltwater angling and marine fisheries conservation. That group produced a report, titled Navigating a Future for Saltwater Fishing which laid out the four tenets – the SALT principles – that were most important to those in the partnership. The joint recommendations are unprecedented for the recreational fishing community as it is the first time that so many members of this community have coalesced around a uniform message to develop sensible solutions for protecting oceans and coasts, while still allowing for recreational use of those resources.

The Angling 4 Oceans Coalition recognizes the need for both renewable and nonrenewable domestic energy production from the Outer Continental Shelf. Yet the group believes strongly that energy development can and must be conducted responsibly to conserve the nation’s fish and wildlife legacy for the benefit of all Americans. Currently, there is increased pressure to find more close-to-home energy sources, including oil and gas, as well as renewable supplies of wind and wave energy from our nation’s coastal waterways. The Angling 4 Oceans coalition has developed the CAST Principles to help federal decision makers protect fish and wildlife resources as they look to the oceans for sources of energy.

Action:

This phase of MSA provided the TRCP with an opportunity to highlight public policy within the new law, including NOAA’s Marine Recreational Information Program. This program -- a key recommendation within our SALT Principles -- was created to better assess how many trips recreational anglers take within a season, what types of fish they are catching, and where that fishing is taking place. Gathering this data will help NOAA better allocate fish stocks so that the economic impact of all sectors – including commercial, recreational,and charter fishing – and not just the historical catch is considered in determining harvest limits for each fishery.

In order to get recreational anglers more engaged in this implementation phase, the TRCP published Are You a Saltwater Angler? as a guide for getting involved. The decisions made by federal regulators can, with the twist of one word or a sentence, either reflect the intent of the legislation or undermine it. The recreational fishing community plans to be part of the process of designing the regulations so that the SALT principles are not lost in the implementation of the law. For more specific information on our marine fisheries actions, please visit our campaign website: Angling4Oceans.org

For more information about our marine fisheries initiative, contact Tom Franklin, senior vice president.