American fishermen are reacting with skepticism, concern and frustration at the latest murky steps to prevent fishing in vast tracts of the Pacific. The proposed expansion was announced along with other White House ocean conservation initiatives on June 16.
July 11, 2014 โ The following is an excerpt from a story originally published on FoxNews.com. The full version can be read here.
Additional coverage from THE WASHINGTON POST:
"Pacific fishing interests oppose Obama's plan to expand marine reserve"
(Fox News) American fishermen are reacting with skepticism, concern and frustration at the latest murky steps to prevent fishing in vast tracts of the Pacific. The proposed expansion was announced along with other White House ocean conservation initiatives on June 16, as the kickoff to a two-day State Department conference aimed at greater international coordination to overcome a variety of ocean ills, including not only overfishing, but marine pollution and ocean acidification โ the last linked by conservationists to global carbon emissions and "climate change."
When it comes to providing input to the administration's expanded preserve plans, however, a number of important stakeholders have already spoken โ against them.
"All of this is a terrible, terrible abuse of power," charges Doc Hastings, the chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources. "The president is ruling by executive order, by fiat. Policy on oceans should come through Congress. This is really an example of the administration simply not giving information on what it is doing."
The proposed restrictions are "unnecessary," and enforcing them would be "overstepping currently managed sustainable management regimes, reducing US fisheries competitiveness, and yielding few, if any, ecological benefits," according to a report issued two weeks after the State Department conference by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council โ a group created by the federal government itself.
The group also declared that the administration "failed to consult the [Council] about the true economic and environmental impacts of its plan to expand the Monument," which overrides existing fishery management legislation.
The fishermen also charge that the expanded preserves will almost entirely affect U.S. fishing vessels, which they argue are already the best managed and most supervised in the world, even though any overfishing in the vast Pacific involves a variety of international fleets, and notably these days a rapidly increasing flotilla from China.
The target for much of the fishing effort are tuna and mackerel and their kin, high-value food sources that are not heavily fished in the waters that would suddenly join the expanded preserve areas, but could become much more productive in future years, when El Nino currents change Pacific warming patterns and push fish stocks further into the reserve waters. But even then, U.S. fishing vessels are likely to honor the no-go areas, and others may not.
Moreover, according to Ray Hilborn, a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at University of Washington and a renowned authority on global fish populations, the marine preserves embody a zoological contradiction. They are supposedly intended to protect fish such as tuna that are "highly migratory" and travel thousands of miles during their life-span.
"The areas proposed are too small to impact the stock status of large tuna populations that span the Pacific Ocean," he told Fox News. "These are token closures and will have no real impact on the fishes of the ocean."
Read the full story at Fox News