This MSA reauthorization builds on the 1996 bill, called the Sustainable Fisheries Act, which established precedent-setting conservation requirements to minimize wasteful fishing practices, protect important fish habitat and prevent over-fishing. The new legislation ends over-fishing that has continued in some regions and improves science-based decision-making by requiring that fishery managers adopt catch limits that do not exceed those set by their science advisors.
The bill also establishes guidelines for “limited access privilege programs” (LAPPs) ensuring that fishery managers consider the needs of coastal communities and independent fishing families, an important feature as the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council struggles with Gulf of Alaska groundfish rationalization.
The guidelines require that fishery managers take into account fishing opportunities for active participants in the fishery — including small boat fishermen and new entrants to a fishery — to prevent access privileges from becoming consolidated in the hands of fewer and fewer people with the capital to accumulate quota to fish. It also guards against absentee ownership of fishing privileges by investors disconnected from the resource.
Original drafts of the bill included provisions for processor quotas, something absent from the final bill that has been sent to the White House for the president’s signature. The guidelines allow fishery managers to allocate quotas only to harvest fish, not quotas for seafood processors to buy fish after they are delivered to the dock.
“This is a critical positive dimension of the bill — and one that AMCC fought hard for,” explained Dorothy Childers, AMCC program director. “Authority to allocate processing quotas would have been tantamount to eliminating market competition and giving away control of Alaska’s fisheries to large companies much like the effect of agribusiness on the family farm.”
Originally passed in December of 1976, the MSA extended the nation’s jurisdiction from 12 to 200 miles offshore. Prior to its passage, foreign fishing fleets freely harvested huge volumes of groundfish like pollock and sole from those waters. The 200-mile limit allowed this large scale fishery to be “Americanized” and Alaskans jumped at the opportunity. The Alaska pollock fishery is the largest fishery in the nation and Alaska accounts for over half of America’s seafood landings.
Cristy Fry has commercial fished in Homer since 1978. She also designs and builds gear for the industry. She currently longlines for halibut and gillnets salmon in upper
Two Alaska-based marine conservation groups, the Marine Conservation Alliance (MCA) and the Alaska Marine Conservation Council (AMCC) have both praised the bill.
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