The Water, Oceans, and Wildlife subcommittee held a legislative hearing on H.R. 59, which would amend the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to provide for flexibility for fishery managers and stability for fishermen.
Congressman Don Young has made effective fishery management a priority and discussed the importance of the bill. He told KSRM:
“There’s a lot of oversight by the federal government. Anytime you’ve got the federal government involved, you’re going to have problems. They really, I don’t think, want to manage fish. They want to say, ‘no, you can’t do it.’ That’s one of the issues. We have a big industry in the state. More than 60% of the fish in the world provided by the state of Alaska. We do have some changing times; you notice the chairman talked about climate change, but the effect of what they’re trying to say is they’re trying to say climate change is changing the fishery and I may not, I won’t disagree with that to that extent, but what do you do? Do you exclude the human factor? I’ve been down in the Appalachian region where we stopped mining coal supposedly for the climate and we put thousands of American people out of work. I’m saying we have to be very careful when we talk about climate change because it really affects the less fortunate, the ones who don’t have as much and the high elite has start talking about. That’s one of the issues in this bill I’ve mostly emphasized on climate change.”
One of the proposals within the bill is that the fishery management council will be given authority to consider changes when establishing annual catch limits. Young said:
“It’s always been a challenge. To somebody, the ecosystem part of it is more important than the economics of it. that’s where we have to sit down and say which side gets which. People have never really totally studied the aspects of what has happened to our salmon and where and why. They always point the finger to bycatch, or they point the finger to this. It could be predators. In Kodiak, we have 19 whales out there swallowing all the little salmon coming that out of the rivers. Maybe it’s competition within the species themselves.”
