By Stephen Rappaport

Now, the law that controls the nation’s fisheries is up for reauthorization, and some Maine fishermen worry that a quota system called for in the new law could destroy the state’s traditional fishing communities.

“If you want to keep vibrant, small fishing communities alive ... it’s the best safeguard to be protected against the negative impacts of quotas.” — Michael Crocker, Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance

“There’s more at stake here than just the economic efficiency of the fleet,” said Michael Crocker, communications director for the Portland-based Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA), a regional fishermen’s organization that promotes cooperative scientific fisheries research and opposes consolidation of the fishing industry

The Magnuson-Stevens Act created a system of regional fisheries management councils that were supposed to use the “best available science” as the basis for decisions controlling what species fishermen could pursue and how and where they could pursue them.

In 1996, Congress passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act (SFA), extending the life of the earlier law for 10 years, and placing even more emphasis on conservation.

Magnuson radically altered the way the commercial fishing industry did business and, according to many in the conservation community, largely failed in its announced goals of preventing overfishing and rebuilding depleted fish stocks.

The Sustainable Fisheries Act imposed more restrictions on the industry. In New England, some fishermen quit the industry altogether, while many more gave up groundfishing and switched to lobstering.

At best, SFA had mixed results. In the ocean, many of the nation’s fish stocks remain in trouble. On shore, the legislation engendered tremendous rancor among fishermen, fishery regulators and environmentalists.

In the Northeast, and elsewhere, the law also engendered a tremendous amount of litigation in the federal courts, with environmental groups charging the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the regional councils with failing to end overfishing and rebuild depleted fish stocks. The result, in many instances, was to force federal judges to become fishery managers.

In early November, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced legislation to extend the Magnuson Act, which expires in 2006, for another six years, through fiscal year 2012. The reauthorization bill contains several provisions aimed at improving the scientific basis of fisheries’ management decisions.

The legislation also aims at strengthening international compliance with fishery management and conservation regulations and reducing unreported fishing for seriously threatened species, such as the Patagonian toothfish — sold in high-end restaurants and fish markets as Chilean sea bass.

As now proposed, the legislation would have a significant impact on the domestic fishing industry. Among other provisions, it would require fishery management councils and NMFS to set annual total allowable catch limits (TACs) for each managed fish stock.

The TACs would be based on the best available science. They would also have to be reduced for the following year by the amount that the harvest in any year exceeded that year’s TAC.

One issue of critical interest to Maine fishermen is the bill’s effort to establish uniform national guidelines for what the legislation refers to as “limited access privilege programs” (LAPPs). Among the LAPPs addressed in the legislation are individual fishing quotas (IFQs).

Traditionally, limited access, and the use of IFQs in particular, has been highly controversial among Maine fishermen. It is only in the last several years that the lobster industry has accepted limited access through a system that involves both an apprenticeship before a fisherman can obtain a lobster license, and a limit on the number of new licenses that can be issued. That limit, which ties the number of new licenses issued each year to the number of licenses that are retired, is separately determined by each of the state’s eight (including Swans Island) regional Lobster Zone Management Councils.

Snowe’s bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), calls for establishing a set of national guidelines for any LAPPs created by the regional fishery management councils. The bill would also allow fisheries’ quotas to be assigned to fishing communities or regional fishery associations. Currently, quotas are assigned to individual vessels or vessel owners.

Under the bill, only fisheries that had operated under some form of LAPP for at least a year would be eligible to be considered for a new LAPP. The LAPPs would also have to be reviewed every five years to ensure their effectiveness and compliance with the Magnuson Act’s conservation goals.

The LAPP provisions have exposed a split among fishermen. Big-boat owners with “deep pockets” generally favor them, Crocker said. Individual fishermen with small boats, the vast majority of the Maine fishing fleet, worry that the LAPPs could force them off the water.

Rep. Tom Allen (D-Maine), who represents the state’s First District, and two colleagues from Connecticut and Massachusetts have introduced legislation in the House of Representatives that would, Allen said, address those concerns.

In a statement released by the congressman, Allen said his bill would “establish safeguards to protect the livelihoods of fishing families and sustain the economies of fishing communities in Maine and throughout the U.S.”

According to Allen, the bill would accomplish those goals by giving fishermen a strong voice in the creation of any quota system and in the allocation of quotas. The bill also includes language aimed at preventing excessive concentration of quotas in a few hands, and calls for the quotas to be reviewed periodically.

Crocker said NAMA, which represents mostly individual, small-boat fishermen supported Allen’s bill.

“If you want to keep vibrant, small fishing communities alive,” and insure access to the fisheries for future generations, he said, “it’s the best safeguard to be protected against the negative impacts of quotas.”

NAMA also opposes the idea that quota allocation should be based solely on prior fishing history. According to Crocker, basing quotas on prior catch history contravenes good fisheries management by rewarding the boats “that have killed the most fish.”

That view is hardly universal. Dick Allen, a Rhode Island fisherman and a vocal participant in fisheries management discussions, considers the philosophy behind Rep. Allen’s bill as seriously flawed.

He argues that capping quotas would hurt fishing families that might want to buy a boat for a member of a younger generation and that the bill’s “sunset” provisions make it difficult to plan a business.

The Senate Commerce Committee has already held its first hearings on the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 2005. It is possible that Congress could enact legislation reauthorizing the nation’s fisheries management structure, something it has failed to address in several prior sessions, sometime next year.