Fishing Communities all on Biden-Harris Administration to Update National Standard Guidelines

By Aubrey Church, Linda Behnken, Theresa Peterson

We have a simple message: it’s time for the Biden-Harris Administration to update the National Standard 4, 8, and 9 guidelines. The next step is to publish the Proposed Rule developed by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to update the guidelines. The Administration should move this forward as soon as possible.

Across the country, fishermen are grappling with shifting stocks, collapsing markets, and vanishing opportunity. It’s not all doom and gloom, but there’s plenty of both to be found walking the docks in 2024. What we see on the water and in our communities makes clear that the ways federal fishery management allocates access to resources, treats communities, and stops bycatch in one fishery from impacting another must be modernized.

To build climate resilience and ensure that coastal communities maintain access to their local fisheries, action is needed now. As a recent study from the Government Accountability Office (the leading federal watchdog) points out, there’s a serious need to build in measurable goals and objectives for bycatch accountability, with enforceable timelines for their achievement. And as we have emphasized to NMFS, updating the National Standard guidelines represents a key opportunity for substantial progress. Congress has explicitly authorized NMFS to make these updates, and the agency must take the opportunity.

In the face of everything we know and have been through as fishing community members, anything short of meaningful progress on each of these issues would be a disaster. Some welcome incremental changes have been made by the Biden-Harris Administration in the last 3 and a half years, such as the adoption of an Equity and Environmental Justice (EEJ) strategy and a draft Ecosystem-based Fishery Management roadmap . These are promising building blocks with potential for success, but the Administration should intensify efforts to achieve more substantial progress, or the challenges our communities face could become overwhelming.

read more at nationalfisherman.com.