February 19, 2025 — For almost 50 years, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act has governed sustainable fisheries all around the United States. It supports 1.6 million jobs and tens of thousands of small businesses. It also supports one of the most enduring and effective economic opportunity programs in America, the Western Alaska Community Development Quota program, or CDQ.
The Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, as Magnuson-Stevens was originally known, is known globally for creating the “exclusive economic zone,” which gave the United States control of natural resources from 3 miles (the end of state waters) out to 200 miles from its shores. The law evicted foreign fishing fleets from the bountiful fishing grounds of the Bering Sea, reserving it for a small but growing fleet of American fishing vessels. The Act also directs that local stakeholders appointed to regional fishery management councils decide how the fisheries should operate. Their decisions are made within firm statutory guardrails that mandate sustainability, minimize bycatch, and protect fishing communities.
America’s Bering Sea fleet was originally based in, and owned by, Seattle companies. When Congress updated Magnuson-Stevens in 1996, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens added the CDQ program into federal law, setting up a mechanism that would slowly shift ownership of the fleet from Seattle to Alaska. CDQ began at the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in 1992, the brainchild of western Alaska advocates who saw that most Bering Sea communities did not have an economic stake in the Bering Sea. The program sets aside ten percent of the fish harvests for a small percentage of the pollock harvest for 65 Bering Sea communities, most of which are majority Alaska Native. The communities are grouped into six regional non-profit entities. These “CDQ groups” harvest the fish on their own vessels or sell the harvest rights to fishing companies, then use the revenues to invest in the Bering Sea industry and fund economic development in one of America’s poorest regions: coastal western Alaska.