Obama Fishing Ban, What is next.

[Aquaviolator]

Delay sought on snapper ban
By DINAH VOYLES PULVER , ENVIRONMENT WRITER
March 11, 2010 12:05 AM 10 Comments Vote 0 Votes

Posted in East Volusia - Fishing
Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum voiced concerns Wednesday about a controversial ban on red snapper fishing in the Atlantic Ocean, saying current science doesn't justify such an extreme restriction.

Speaking by phone in Daytona Beach, McCollum called on federal officials to reverse or delay the ban and funnel more money to fisheries research to support its decision-making in the Southeast.

"To have this wide of a restriction just seems to be excessive," McCollum said.

McCollum also sent a letter Wednesday to U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. He joins thousands of fishermen and many elected officials who also oppose the ban.

The ban is one of several measures being considered by federal regulators to rebuild red snapper populations in the Atlantic, which they say are a fraction of what they were 60 years ago.

The ban is widely expected to have a devastating impact on Florida's multi-billion dollar recreational fishing industry. A dozen local fishermen traveled to Washington, D.C., last month to join thousands protesting similar closures across the nation.

The South Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the National Marine Fisheries Service face a short deadline for acting to rebuild snapper populations. Under the federal Magnuson-Stevens Act, the agencies must respond this year to a 2008 stock assessment that found red snapper in serious decline.

The closure and the stock assessment have been widely and hotly debated for nearly two years. Fishermen are especially worried the agencies could close vast areas of the Atlantic to bottom fishing as an additional measure to limit the snapper catch.

McCollum called on Florida's congressional delegation to press for more money for the Southeastern Fisheries Science Center, which collects data for the federal agencies.

"We need to adequately fund the Southeastern Center and let them take more samples on a regular basis to make these conclusions," McCollum said. "There has to be enough hue and cry, outrage if you will, that there is a sense that this goes to the head of the line as the top priority."

The center oversees scientific research for the Gulf, Caribbean and Southeastern Atlantic regions, with responsibility for 41 species. They include 34 species considered overfished. The science center's 19 stock assessment scientists update four or five stock assessments each year and conduct four or five new assessments, said center director Bonnie Ponwith.

The center collects and uses two kinds of information, one depending on information collected from fishermen and the other collected by scientists, based on strict scientific principles. Both methods are considered essential to producing strong, science-based results.

It's the latter, more independent, science-based research that is sorely needed, said Dick Brame, Atlantic States fishery director for the Coastal Conservation Association, a national group representing recreational fishermen. The center received authorization to hire an additional seven scientists this year and also received an additional $1.5 million from Congress for data collection.

But that new information may not come in time to benefit the new snapper assessment the center will launch this fall.

dinah.pulver @news-jrnl.com
Tagged:snapper ban
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Fishermen taking snapper ban fight to Washington

 

[Aquaviolator]

The above was in the Wednesday edition of The Daytona Beach News Journal...

 

[drbill]

Not going to read the whole thread.... would be a waste of my time. If people are going to run with nonsense like this, makes you wonder how much other nonsense they take at face value. Use your heads folks.

 

[Doc Harry]

Capitalism made this country great, socialism will bring it down.

Captron, you are sadly mistaken. Unbridled capitalism will bring down this country. We are heading the way of ancient Rome, thanks to morons who think that corporations should be allowed to rape and pilage at everyone else's expense.

 

[fstbttms]

If people are going to run with nonsense like this, makes you wonder how much other nonsense they take at face value.

There's a reason Rush, Hannity, Beck and the Bush Crime Family can make a living- people are idiots.

 

[deeper thoughts]

By Patrik Jonsson Patrik Jonsson – Tue Mar 9, 6:17 pm ET
Atlanta – The Obama administration has proposed using United Nations-guided principles to expand a type of zoning to coastal and even some inland waters. That’s raising concerns among fishermen that their favorite fishing holes may soon be off-limits for bait-casting. In the battle of incremental change that epitomizes the American conservation movement, many weekend anglers fear that the Obama administration’s promise to “fundamentally change” water management in the US will erode what they call the public’s “right to fish,” in turn creating economic losses for the $82 billion recreational fishing industry and a further deterioration of the American outdoorsman’s legacy. Proponents say the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force established by President Obama last June will ultimately benefit the fishing public by managing ecosystems in their entirety rather than by individual uses such as fishing, shipping, or oil exploration. “It’s not an environmentalist manifesto,” says Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University in North Carolina. “It’s multiple-use planning for the environment, and making sure various uses … are sustainable.” (Amateur outdoorsmen have been fighting for their rights for years, as the Monitor reports here.)

New way to manage marine resourcesFaced with the prospect of further industrialization along America's coasts and the Great Lakes (wind turbines and natural-gas exploration, for example), the task force is charged with putting in place a new ecosystem management process called marine spatial planning. Marine spatial planning (MSP), according to the United Nations, is “a public process of analyzing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine areas to achieve ecological, economic, and social objectives that usually have been specified through a political process." That kind of government-speak scares Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs at the reel-and-rod maker Shimano. Mr. Morlock points to references by the ocean task force to “one global sea” as evidence that what’s really being proposed are broad changes to America's user-funded conservation strategy, potentially affecting even inland waters. “I suggest that the task force recommend our model to the United Nations rather than us adopting the United Nations model,” he says in a phone interview. “The American model is the best in the world, so our question is: Why seek the lowest common denominator?”

Protections for recreational fishermenMr. Obama has said he will not override protections put in place by Presidents Clinton and Bush that established recreational fishermen as a special class.

But critics still worry about the Obama administration’s ties to environmental groups that espouse “anti-use” policies that put some habitats out of reach even for rod and reel fishermen, who take only 3 percent of America’s landed catch every year. “Angling advocates point out that senior policy officials on the task force seem inclined to ally themselves with preservationists and environmental extremists who want to create ‘no fishing’ preserves, with no scientific justification,” writes ESPN.com’s Robert Montgomery. On the other hand, nonpartisan experts say the task force has already made strides in better recognizing various stakeholder groups, including recreational fishermen, and that it doesn’t intend to undermine the ability of states to manage their natural resources, as many fishermen fear. “There’s been huge progress by the task force in terms of being more inclusive in thinking about economic, ecological, social, and political concerns,” says Mr. Crowder at Duke. “The paranoia – and there is paranoia on all sides – is that the process will be captured. My hope is that mutual concern gets people to the table.” The final report of the task force is expected in late March. Congress will decide its fate, unless Obama issues an executive order establishing MSP as the law of the water.


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[Hank49]

How stupid do you have to be to think the President of the United States is trying to ban an industry that generates millions in revenu and is enjoyed by a huge section of the population?

One would hope that he isn't that stupid. But the decisions made in these issues aren't always based on what's scientifically correct or beneficial for the Fisheries. A case in point, although it's the opposite direction of this decision: in 2003 or so, Gulf shrimp trawlers received subsidies because they couldn't compete with the low cost, imported shrimp from Asia and Central America.
Who benefitted from this? Only the Gulf shrimpers.
I don't have a lot of faith in politicians. It's even worse here in Belize.

 

[deich]

How stupid do you have to be to think the President of the United States is trying to ban an industry that generates millions in revenu and is enjoyed by a huge section of the population?

Or, we could say this one and the one about the guns may not have been true... but all the rest of the republican hysteria over the last year has definitely been right on the mark.

Grow up people.

Wow... Keep drinking the cool-aid

 

[deich]

There's a reason Rush, Hannity, Beck and the Bush Crime Family can make a living- people are idiots.

Ahhhh... this little gem of a post coming from the land of Pelosi...

Please....

 

[awakefie]

Off Topic and uncalled for, My Apologies