September 23, 2012 — While plenty of countries are guilty of relentless over-fishing—southern Europe and China often get mentioned as key culprits—there are several nations that have worked hard to improve their fisheries management practices over the years. Iceland. New Zealand. Australia. And the United States. “The U.S. is actually a big success story in rebuilding fish stocks,” says Ray Hilborn, a marine biologist at the University of Washington.
One place to see that progress is in a new annual report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which found that the U.S. seafood catch was at a 17-year high last year, thanks to policies to rebuild domestic fisheries. Commercial fishermen caught 10.1 billion pounds of fish and shellfish, up 22.6 percent from 2010. That haul was worth $5.3 billion. NOAA cited the increase as evidence that U.S. fish populations were slowly recovering.
It’s not all good news. Progress has been uneven. A large fraction of the overall catch increase came from menhaden in the Gulf of Mexico, pollock in Alaska, and hake in the Pacific. At the same time, other U.S. fisheries have been declared disaster zones—particularly the cod fisheries in New England and oyster and crab fisheries in the Mississippi. Populations in those areas haven’t been recovering as expected, and the Commerce Department will likely have to impose stricter catch limits for 2013. In some areas, that will hit fishing communities extremely hard.
Yet despite the ups and vicious downs, recent trends in the United States have been encouraging, say scientists. Many fisheries appear to be strengthening. For that, much credit goes to recent efforts to tighten the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act, says Steve Murawski, a former scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service. In 2006, Congress moved to end over-fishing by requiring strict new annual catch limits at all federally managed fisheries by 2011. “That tightening of the screw has been the single most important factor in the relative success of the U.S.,” Murawski said in a recent interview.
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