Longline debate far from over
Industry plan was self-serving and illegal
| • | Solution must apply to all within the fishery |
By Paul Achitoff
Managing attorney of the Hawai'i office of Earthjustice
More than two years ago, The Center for Marine Conservation and Turtle Island Restoration Network filed a lawsuit seeking a ban on longline fishing in waters around the Hawaiian Islands.
Advertiser library photo • June 29, 2000
The suit was filed because we believed the National Marine Fishery Service had known for a decade that such longlining was snagging hundreds of turtles each year that are classified as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Even after a federal judge's decision, the fishing industry feels threatened by restrictions on its activities.
The service had refused to take any steps to reduce the number of snagged animals, or even prepare a proper analysis of the problem as the law required.
In response to the lawsuit, NMFS and the longliners insisted that NMFS was doing a perfectly good job of managing the fishery and the court ought to do nothing.
The taxpayer-subsidized sea-food industry lobby known as the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council shrilly denounced the court's painstaking efforts to limit the fishery's impacts on the endangered animals until a proper analysis could be done.
In cynical advertisements, op-ed pieces, and orchestrated demonstrations, the longliners claimed the injunction would destroy the entire fishing industry, leaving us all eating "cheese and crackers" instead of sashimi.
Industry's self-serving and illegal plan was, in effect, (and still is) "Let us keep killing endangered turtles until every other country fishing in the Pacific Ocean stops doing it, or the turtles go extinct, whichever comes first."
Now, the Fisheries Service has released its final environmental impact statement on its proposal for managing the Hawai'i longline fishery. The plan calls for a complete ban on swordfish longlining and closing some of the more distant tuna grounds during April and May of each year. One out of every five tuna boats will carry an observer.
The two types of fishing are done differently and in different areas; swordfish longlining is more likely to catch turtles (and seabirds such as albatross) than is tuna fishing.
Judge David Ezra, who had issued an injunction restricting longlining until the EIS came out, immediately modified his injunction to conform it to the new government plan reflected in the EIS. The court order had allowed unlimited tuna fishing and limited swordfish fishing until March 15, when a provision closing both parts of the fishery for two months became effective.
The change in the injunction therefore reopened tuna longlining in some waters after a two-week closure.
So, was our lawsuit a complete success? No.
While the new plan will reduce the deaths of endangered turtles, it still allows the tuna fishery to catch more turtles than the species can sustain. Merely slowing the pace of extinction doesn't comply with the law.
Moreover, NMFS, bowing to industry pressure, is now poised to reopen the same swordfish fishery it just closed by characterizing it as "experimental." It will argue that the fishery can be used to develop methods to longline for swordfish without catching turtles, and these new techniques can then be exported to other longlining nations.
Still, the lawsuit accomplished several things:
We learned that commercial fishing practices are helping to push all of the world's sea turtles — as well as some marine mammals and even commercially valuable fish — into extinction.
In conjunction with the EIS, the fishery service prepared a biological opinion that officially acknowledged, for the first time, that the Hawai'i longline fishery was killing six times the number of leather-backs the service had previously claimed, and was alone threatening to wipe out a species that has been on earth for 200 million years.
And we learned to take the fishing industry's claims of impending disaster with a large grain of salt. Not once did the repeated prophecies of skyrocketing fish prices and lowered quality prove true.
Most important, NMFS was finally forced to do the job Congress directed it to do: develop a way to manage the fishery that would not keep pushing the turtles toward extinction.
It's worth noting that although NMFS and the longliners argued that the court's injunction was wrong-headed, the plan NMFS came up with is remarkably similar to the one Judge Ezra fashioned, and it's based on information NMFS had in its possession even before the lawsuit was filed.
The EIS vindicated the court's conclusion not only that the law required changes to the fishery, but that banning swordfish longlining had to be part of the solution.
One would like to think that the suit also established that it doesn't pay for NMFS to cater to those advocating the pursuit of short-term industry profits at the expense of sustainable ecosystem management. Unfortunately, it seems that NMFS hasn't learned this lesson.
The goal of developing turtle-safe fishing methods is laudable. Unfortunately, not a single hook, bait, deterrent, or fishing method has been shown effective in catching swordfish but not turtles, and Hawai'i's waters are not the place for such basic research. Killing critically endangered animals on the very brink of extinction with unproven gear just to keep the swordfish fleet in Hawai'i afloat is senseless and illegal.
The longliners aren't willing to wait for NMFS to reopen the swordfish fishery, however. To gut the injunction, and to avoid Judge Ezra or any other local judge, the longliners on April 10 filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., asking the court to let them keep fishing near Hawai'i without meaningful restriction, regardless of what NMFS and its scientists, or Judge Ezra, have said. And so the litigation continues.
