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Ending Overfishing: The Magnuson-Stevens Act
The Magnuson-Stevens Act of 1996 (popularly known as the “Sustainable Fisheries Act”) limited the allowable catch to maximum sustainable yield (MSY), disallowed overfishing for economic or social reasons, required each Fishery Management Plan (FMP) to specify criteria for measuring overfishing, and required managers to rebuild overfished stocks. Yet overfishing has persisted in many of the nation’s fisheries right up to the present: fully one in five of the 230 major stocks in the Fish Stock Sustainability Index (FSSI) that were assessed for overfishing in 2008 were classified as subject to overfishing, based on the National Marine Fisheries Service’s most recent Status of Stocks report to Congress.
Annual Catch Limits: New Rules for Ending Overfishing
Under the reauthorized Magnuson-Stevens Act of 2006 (MSRA), Congress adopted key recommendations from the report of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy (2004) aimed at ending overfishing in U.S. fisheries, the most notable being the requirement for each council to set annual catch limits (ACLs) no higher than the allowable biological catch (ABC) determined by its Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC). The law requires that ACLs must be set a level such that overfishing does not occur in the fishery, accompanied by measures to ensure accountability. FMPs must meet this requirement by 2010 for fisheries subject to overfishing and by 2011 for all other fisheries.
National Standard 1: Implementing Annual Catch Limits
The recently revised National Standard 1 (NS1) guidelines outline a regulatory framework for implementing ACLs and accountability measures (AMs) in every U.S. fishery which will entail modifications to virtually every FMP in the country. At least seven of the eight regional fishery management councils are currently preparing or considering amendments to some or all of their FMPs to comply with new provisions in the MSRA and the new NS1 guidelines. For more information on what regional fishery managers are doing to amend their FMPs to comply with the new overfishing rules, see the regional links below:
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