The Alaskan subsistence fishing community wants to alter the country’s principal fishing law to clamp down on the unintentional catch of salmon caught by fishermen on the Bering Sea’s trawl boats. Changes to the law are looking more and more unlikely, but there may be a better way.
Congresswoman Mary Peltola focused on revisions to the Magnuson-Stevens Act since the start of her campaign. But she claimed there’s no chance of doing it at the moment.
“I think everyone knows that there’s a small possibility that Magnuson Stevens will be granted in the coming year” or the following year, Peltola said in a recent video conferencearranged through a government relations company called Ocean Strategies.
Instead of changing legislation, the current approach is to modify some guidelines for the law already in the law.
It’s a fallback option. It’s unlikely to produce rapid results. However, the year ahead will be a bleak one for chum and chinook runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Peltola along with other salmon advocates believe it’s crucial to take actions now to ensure the possibility of returning to a healthy population of salmon.
Magnuson-Stevens is a complicated law. It contains 10 standards for national use which are similar to fundamental management guidelines. They state that things like allocations to fish should be “fair and equitable” and bycatch should be kept to a minimum “to the greatest extent possible.” These guidelines further refine the requirements of those standards.
The last week it was announced that the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that it had begun reviewing three of its guidelines, which address fairness as well as the dependence of communities on fish, and reducing bycatch.
Peltola is able to see an opportunity. She refers to it as”a “workaround.”
“If the one change we could make within the current 120th (current) Congress is to review these standards for national use, we’re going to have to make it happen. We have to act right now,” Peltola said.
In one way or the other, she and others hope to reign the trawl boats that travel across oceans. The trawlers capture thousands of chum and king salmon from the Bering Sea using their nets as a bycatchinadvertently — as they hunt for pollock.
In the meantime, on the Yukon, Alaska Native communities who depended upon salmon over the years were not permitted to catch one chinook to dinner this year or prior to. 2023 is expected to be a terrible year for subsistence chum or chinook fishing in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers.
The process of tackling the issue through a change in the rules will be “totally unwieldy” and could take quite an extended period of time, said Hannah Heimbuch, a commercial salmon fisherman as well as a consultant with Ocean Strategies.
According to how Heimbuch says the procedure allows for the possibility of a “conversation” regarding bycatch as well as other issues. The new guidelines she proposed could alter the priorities for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to be more responsive to nearby shore as well as in-river fishers.
“I believe that this is an opportunity to openly discuss certain aspects of how management plans, as they are now cannot deal with bycatch in a way that’s sustainable in the long run,” she said.
Brett Paine, executive director of United Catcher Boats, believes that the emphasis on the trawl fleet to be the main culprit isn’t justified.
“The quantity of salmon in terms of numbers in comparison to the amount of pollock that we capture is negligible,” he said.
His group is comprised of around 70 trawlers throughout the Bering Sea as well as the Aleutians and Gulf of Alaska. He believes that Bering Sea fleet is already successful. Bering Sea fleet is already effective in limiting bycatch.
“For us to be able to capture 1.2 million tonnes of pollock and only catch six (thousand) to 9,900 chinook, I would say that we’ve accomplished a decent job,”” He said.
Paine admits that a bycatch of 6,000 chinook is an awful lot in the eyes of Yukon River fishermen who can’t capture all. But he cites studies showing that the majority of those fish weren’t destined to in the Y-K Delta, and not every fish would last to the end of its lifespan. He believes that bycatch from trawls isn’t to blame for the decline of Western Alaska salmon runs.
Salmon advocates claim that a variety of causes are affecting the population of salmon particularly climate change. They say this is why it is even more crucial to take action whenever feasible, such as against bycatch.
The National Marine Fisheries Service is open to public input on its new guidelines until September. 12.
