Committee Approves Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act

May 29, 2014   National

Today the House Natural Resources Committee approved H.R. 4742, the Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act by a bipartisan vote of 24-17. This legislation would renew and amend the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (last reauthorized in 2006 and expired in 2013) to ensure that this  fundamentally sound legislation works in the best interest of both fish and fishermen. Read more here 14:56

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4 Responses to Committee Approves Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act

  1. borehead says:
    May 29, 2014 at 3:08 pm

    Specifically, this bill makes the following improvements to the Act:

    Provides science-based flexibility measures for fishery managers when rebuilding depleted fisheries

    Provides common sense flexibility measures for fishery managers when setting annual catch limits

    Provides more transparency for fishermen and others in both science and management

    Provides a schedule for obtaining better fishery dependent and fishery independent data especially for data poor fisheries and provides greater protection for confidential information submitted to regulatory agencies

    Encourages and promotes cooperative research projects where scientists work with fishermen to develop sound scientific information

    Allows fishery managers to take environmental conditions and economic impacts of their decisions into account when establishing harvest levels

    Allows fishermen in regions where catch share programs have been controversial to have a say in whether a new catch share program will be implemented and to be provided better information when considering such a program

    Requires NOAA to provide better accountability on how fees are collected and used

    Clarifies the role of the Magnuson-Stevens Act in relationship to other Federal statutes

    Authorizes appropriations for an additional five fiscal years at current funding level

    Reply
  2. borehead says:
    May 30, 2014 at 9:04 am

    Submitted:
    Thanks for alerting us. I have — in vain — tried to join the conversation on your website.

    You may be interested to read what I have sent out:

    Dear Chairman Hastings,

    Your work on the revision of the Magnuson-Stevens Act is clearly painstaking. However, IMHO it does little to address the core of the issues.

    As I have stated many times in many places, including comments to your committee, NOAA should be encouraged to perform two tasks only, tasks that can be done well: NOAA should regulate the operations of large national and international corporations (leaving the family fishing fleet well alone to design its own regulatory measures); NOAA should also be encouraged to learn everything possible about natural predator/prey cycles (and encourage fishermen to harvest predators and leave depleted prey species well alone).

    Thank you for your consideration of these two recommendations.
    Carmine Gorga, Ph.D.
    President
    The Somist Institute
    87 Middle Street
    Gloucester, MA USA 01930
    Political democracy is empty without economic democracy

    http://www.thepetitionsite.com/325/007/323/a-patriotic-reform-of-the-fed/

    http://www.thepetitionsite.com/29/a-petition-to-stop-noaa-now

    http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/241380953

    Reply

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