Tide turns for fishing enthusiasts
Trump lifts restrictions imposed under Obama
WASHINGTON – President Trump is known for hitting the golf course, but his administration is putting the power of the presidency behind another favorite American pastime: fishing.
The president has promoted the multibillion-dollar recreational fishing industry that felt marginalized under the previous administration. President Obama routinely sided with environmental advocates concerned about long-term damage from overfishing, but Trump, the father of two avid anglers, has tacked in a new direction.
“President Donald Trump was the best thing that ever happened to fishermen,” said Jim Donofrio, executive director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, which fought the Obama administration to overturn limits on what private anglers could catch in federal waters. “Some of them don’t realize it, but they will.”
Almost from the beginning, Trump made it clear the ocean was a frontier to be used not only for its energy potential but also for recreation and food.
“The fisheries resources of the United States are among the most valuable in the world,” he declared last year when designating June 2017 as National Ocean Month. “Growing global demand for seafood presents tremendous opportunities for expansion of our seafood exports, which can reduce our more than $13 billion seafood trade deficit.”
A proclamation by Obama in 2016 warned of “jeopardizing marine populations and degrading oceanic habitats.”
The Trump administration increased recreational fishing access to three fish stocks protected under catch limits.
❚ Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross approved a plan in June extending the recreational fishing season for red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico from three to
42 days even though his own agency warned it would lead to overfishing.
❚ In July, Ross sided with New Jersey to loosen restrictions on the harvest of summer flounder, known as fluke, over the objections of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. Commission Chair Douglas Grout said he was “very much concerned about the shortand long-term implications of the secretary’s decision on interstate fisheries management.”
❚ In the fall, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, working closely with the Trump administration, allowed recreational snapper fishing from Jupiter Inlet Florida to the North Carolina-Virginia border for the first time since 2014. Kellie Ralston, Florida fishery policy director of the American Sportfishing Association, called it a victory for anglers while environmentalists warned of the risk to the red snapper.
This year, the biggest overhaul of fishing laws in more than a decade could land on the president’s desk after a Senate committee’s approval last month.
If the Senate bill passes, it probably will have to be ironed out with broader legislation that passed the House Natural Resources Committee in December. That House bill would expand access to recovering fish stocks and require regional councils that set catch limits to give weight to fish counts provided by saltwater anglers when assessing the health of a particular fish stock.
Advocates for recreational fishing expect Trump will sign the most ambitious overhaul of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in more than a decade
That has environmental advocates fearful.
“U.S. fisheries are truly at a crossroads,” said Chris Dorsett, vice president for conservation programs at Ocean Conservancy. “A key question is whether the Trump administration’s decisions last year to override certain science-based fishing regulations were isolated actions or the new norm.”
For environmentalists who found a soulmate in Obama, Trump has proved to be everything they dread.
He announced June 1 that he was pulling out of the Paris climate change agreement, and he is moving ahead to scrap the Clean Power Plan, both part of Obama’s agenda to curb carbon emissions. He ordered the rollback of dozens of Obama-era regulations aimed at protecting public health and wants to open more offshore oil and gas drilling. He proposed deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency. And he stocked his administration with businessfriendly appointees eager to accelerate economic growth.
In 2015, when the GOP-controlled Congress moved ahead with a rewrite of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the Obama White House threatened a veto, saying the measure “would impose arbitrary and unnecessary requirements that ... would undermine the use of sciencebased actions to end and prevent overfishing.” The bill died.
The industry and the environmental community agree catch restrictions and other management changes imposed by Magnuson-Stevens were instrumental in rebuilding 43 depleted stocks since 2000, including Atlantic sea scallops, pacific canary rockfish and Atlantic scup, also known as porgy.
Though few dispute the stock of the red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico has made tremendous gains since strict catch limits were imposed over the past decade, there’s sharp disagreement over whether it has rebounded enough to warrant increased fishing. Environmentalists say no based on their analysis of the red snapper’s lengthy reproductive cycles; anglers say yes based on personal observations of plentiful fish during their excursions.
Last year, the Commerce secretary overruled the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council and gave recreational fishers more time on the water.
“The decision to extend the Gulf of Mexico red snapper season and allow overfishing was a drastic change from the tried and true practices that have brought our fisheries back from the brink,” Dorsett said.
Donofrio said Trump understands that no one is more interested in the health of marine life than the people whose livelihoods depend on it.
“All of us want long-term sustainability. All of us want long-term rebuilding,” he said. “But right now, it’s so rigid.”