SEAFOODNEWS.COM [Editor’s View] by John Sackton January 5, 2016
The Alaska Supreme Court decision preventing a ballot initiative to ban salmon set nets in parts of Cook Inlet last week allowed the seafood industry to heave a sigh of relief.
But like any complex mechanism, the system of fish management that has created sustainable seafood harvests in the US must be constantly attended if it is to survive into the future.
The ballot initiative by sport fishing interests would have overturned allocation on scientific and management principles. If allowed on the ballot and passed, it would have taken salmon from multi-generation fishing businesses and reallocated it to suburban anchorage weekend fishermen.
But this is not the first and by no means only attempt to subvert basic fishery management principles for the gain of one particular group.
The ten year fight over charter halibut is another example where the simple principle of living within the fish limits for your sector was challenged over and over.
The recent Council decisions on halibut and salmon bycatch are a counter example, showing how resource allocation can work in complex fisheries even when it is difficult and costly for users, and no single user group gets their entire wish list.
Environmentalists who support fish conservation generally fail to credit the US management system with its true role in actually achieving sustainable harvests, not just calling for them as an aspirational goal.
The system works through a very convoluted series of checks and balances, and divided authority. It is a very American system, the opposite of a top down Ministerial decision system in place in Canada and Europe.
One part is based on the Magnuson Stevens Law, and the authority of NOAA fisheries and the Dept. of Commerce to require management actions on both the state and federal level be consistent with Magnuson, for all stocks that occur in both state and federal waters.
A second part is the decentralized decision making done through regional management councils, generally made up of representatives of various interests, who develop management plans and actions for specific stocks and areas. During the roughly 35 years the councils have been operating, they have built up a solid system of administrative procedures, which though cumbersome, have stood the test of time.
In a nutshell, actions have to have a defined purpose, various options to meet this purpose have to be considered, and the entire process must be transparent, open to the public, and based on the best available science.
In Alaska, whose fishery management system pre-dates Magnuson, many of the principles were enshrined in the state constitution through the establishment of the Board of Fish.
All of this would have been at risk if the Set Net ban ballot initiative had been allowed to proceed.
The greatest risk to science based fisheries management does not come from those within the system, no matter how angry they get about particular allocation decisions that can cost businesses and livelihoods. Everyone involved with fishing knows that it is a very risky business with huge variations from one year to the next. Just ask any Bristol Bay sockeye fisherman, for example.
But those risks are not caused by management. And for the most part those suffering from low allocations due to small chinook runs, fishery closures on the Yukon, delayed copper river openings etc., recognize that they are part of the risks inherent in fishing.
Of course, sometimes management decisions are disastrously wrong, or needlessly punitive. But the record on the whole speaks for itself: it is sustainability success for commercial harvests matched no where else in the world.
So long as all the fights about management, allocation, and resources are kept within the system—including the court fights as well — the management system will continue to work.
But when a disgruntled user group goes outside, and seeks to overturn the system because they did not win an internal battle, they put the whole structure at risk.
Because Alaska is such an icon of success in fisheries management – despite the short term problems in salmon and halibut – a ballot fight would have unraveled the management structure.
The Governor’s office and attorney general recognized this, and that is why they refused to certify the ballot initiative in the first place. But then an appeals court stepped in, creating a crisis. We are lucky the supreme court restored the balance.
That is why we have dodged a bullet here.
http://www.seafoodnews.com/Story/1004192/Editors-View-Alaska-Steps-Back-from-the-Brink