October 24, 2014 — The full plate awaiting the next Congress includes a heaping side of fish.
After they convene in January, lawmakers will have to write new rules for catching grouper, snapper and dozens of other overfished species that are bouncing back to health.
Like most other substantive issues lawmakers are wrestling with, rewriting the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act won't be easy.
Environmental groups want to keep most current regulations intact, saying they've been crucial to reviving once-depleted fishing stocks. They'd like the revised law to safeguard ocean habitats by requiring more ecosystem planning and by finding ways to protect smaller fish that are important to marine food chains but are inadvertently caught and destroyed.
The recreational and commercial fishing industries want to relax the rules, contending many stocks have rebounded to the point where the current law is beginning to strangle fishermen and the coastal communities whose economies depend on them.
First passed in 1976 and last updated in 2006, the law has worked well to protect stocks in federal waters that were — and in some cases, still are — in danger of being overfished, according to industry, environmental and government groups. The law officially expired last year, but it remains in effect until lawmakers pass a new version.
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