The top government official for the nation's fisheries today announced a new policy on catch shares, a kind of fisheries management that, recent scientific analyses show, perform significantly better than conventionally-managed fisheries. The announcement was made by Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boston, MA, before a committee of the New England Fishery Council. The full text of the speech can be found here: http://blogs.edf.org/edfish/
Catch shares are a fishery management system that gives fishermen the flexibility to determine how and when to best meet scientific catch targets. Recent research published in the journals Science and Nature shows that catch shares can stop, and even reverse the collapse of fisheries worldwide while increasing the abundance of fish that can be caught.
Dr. Lubchenco's recommendations closely mirror those of the Oceans of Abundance working group which delivered recommendations on fishing policy for the Obama administration in November of 2008.
"This is a giant step in the right direction for the nation's fishing industry and oceans," said Diane Regas, managing director and vice-president of EDF's Oceans program. "Dr. Lubchenco today set the right course for fishing policy and backed it up with the means to get it done."
Dr. Lubchenco said that NOAA would move "forward to implement more catch share programs" and that "all of the (fishery management) councils will see increases in their allocations in the 2010 (budget) request" for catch shares. She also announced a new task force to develop a nation-wide catch share strategy.
"The oceans desperately need this policy shift," said Elliott A. Norse, President of Marine Conservation Biology Institute. "We've been saying for years that overfishing is one environmental crisis that can be solved in the near-term and now the nation is taking the necessary steps to do just that. It's going to take a big change because our current fishery management system has shown that it can't stem the dramatic decline of the nation's fisheries and the results can be seen in nearly every fishing port in the country."
In her speech, Dr. Lubchenco called catch shares "the best way to manage fisheries to both meet (legal) mandates and have healthy profitable fisheries that are sustainable." She highlighted the red snapper fishery in the Gulf of Mexico that recently moved to catch share management. In just the first year of the catch share, the fishermen got 25 percent more for their fish at the dock and discarded 70 percent fewer fish.
"Today's announcement will reverberate around the world because ending overfishing and stabilizing the free-fall of the fishing industry is a global concern," said Kim Davis, deputy director of the Marine Fisheries Program at World Wildlife Fund. "Overfishing has placed the food supply of one billion people in jeopardy, along with 200 million associated jobs worldwide. Catch shares have been shown to prevent and even reverse the collapse of fisheries, and they could be used to improve the economic incentive systems of fisheries around the world."
Science-based catch shares, wherever implemented, make fish more abundant and fisheries more profitable. Catch shares also protect ocean productivity and diversity more effectively than traditional management. Economists at the University of California, Santa Barbara estimate that catch shares will easily double the value of U.S. fisheries.
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