Hoping to draw conclusions from the American experience when the EU forms a new Common Fisheries Policy, a comprehensive study looks into the US management system, partly much more ambitious and successful in fighting overfishing and rebuilding depleted stocks.
The study, commissioned by the Pew Environment Group, focuses on how the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) approach has been applied under the American Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), as compared of the EU system of letting fisheries ministers decide catch quotas (on average 48 percent higher than what scientists had advised).
MSY is a measure of how much fish can be caught on an ongoing basis, without risking recruitment.
“The MSA can provide useful lessons on how to manage fisheries more sustainably through more conservative targets as well as clearly defined triggers and time frames. While this might entail lower catches in the short-term, it provides greater environmental, economic and social benefits in the medium- to long-term”, the report says.
After claiming its 200-nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in 1976, in order to rebuild and stabilise fish stocks with no foreign fishing presence in the EEZ, the United States introduced legislation where management was based on the MSY concept.
A sweeping set of amendments 20 years later, in 1996, strengthened the MSY focus, as well as created a list of overfished species and required that most of those stocks be rebuilt within ten years. After another decade, in 2006, additional amendments sought to close some by then apparent loopholes.
Despite some shortfalls, the 1996 amendments have “helped stabilise and prompt the beginning of recovery of many US fishery resources”, the Pew study concludes.
Although expressing some reservations concerning the MSY concept as such, the report lays the main responsibility for inadequacies in US fisheries management on failures by government agencies to forcefully implement MSY limits, rather than on the concept.
“In fact, implementing and enforcing fishing management measures that use MSY as a limit, and allowing fishery resources to rebuild to population levels that would support MSY, would be a vast improvement in the United States and elsewhere”, it states.