Recommended Goals & Principles to Guide the Development & Implementation of a Restructured Marine Fisheries Management System in Rhode Island

RIDEM

Revised Draft -- October 2001

A. Biological Goals:

1. Managing for the sustainability of the resource should be the common goal of both managers and the fishing community.

2. Conservation programs and management measures should be designed to prevent over fishing and to maintain self-sustaining stocks of marine fishery resources. In cases where stocks have become depleted as a result of over fishing and/or other causes, programs should be designed to rebuild and restore such stocks to a sustainable biomass level.

3. Fisheries management should occur at the individual stock level, taking account of the migratory behavior of the stocks and multispecies interaction. The management framework must be capable of responding quickly to changes in stock abundance.

4. Conservation programs and management measures should minimize bycatch and to the extent bycatch cannot be avoided, minimize the mortality of such bycatch and regulatory discards.

5. Conservation programs and management measures should take into consideration essential fish habitat.

6. Water quality standards in coastal and estuarine waters must be maintained as a basis for sustaining healthy populations of marine fish stocks.

7. Fisheries management decisions must be grounded in good science and based on accurate and timely data regarding important management variables, including fishing effort and fishing mortality, both targeted and incidental. Wherever possible, a cooperative approach to data collection/management and research should be employed to maximize the quantity and quality of information used for fisheries management decisions.

B. Socio-Economic Goals:

1. Fisheries management decisions must be sensitive to their social and economic consequences and must be based on a careful assessment of those consequences.

2. Fisheries management decisions must fairly and equitably distribute the burdens of management as well as its benefits among all participants in the fishery, including recreational, full and part-timers, and those employing differing gear types.

3. Fisheries management decisions must minimize economic burdens, maximize economic benefits, and encourage economic efficiency, viability and stewardship, consistent with achieving biological sustainability.

4. The ability of fisherman to move between various sectors of the fishery should be protected, consistent with preventing overfishing.

5. Restoring overfished stocks requires reducing fishing effort. There are many strategies available to achieve this objective as it relates to individual fishers or vessels. However, in order to reduce overall effort it may become necessary to limit or even reduce the total number of participants in a fishery. Limited entry schemes raise issues involving fairness/equity, tradition, access and recruitment of new entrants, which while controversial and difficult to resolve must be resolved for this strategy to be considered as part of a fair and effective management regime.

6. Fisheries management efforts at the state level must respect national and regional management schemes, which in many cases are controlling, and should be coordinated to the maximum extent possible with the efforts of neighboring states to promote consistency.

C. Licensing & Data Collection Goals:

1. A licensing/data collection system must be capable of generating accurate, complete, and timely data on fishing effort and fishing mortality on a stock-specific basis. This must include data on bycatch and discard mortality.

2. Data and statistics should be collected, managed, and disseminated according to the coastwide standards and protocols of the Atlantic Coastal Cooperative Statistics Program (ACCSP). The purpose of the ACCSP is to coordinate and standardize the collection, processing, and storage of all marine statistics, resulting in a coastwide program that is timely, and credible, ensures compatibility, and eliminates duplicative reporting.

3. Data generated must be easily accessible to all users, including managers, scientists, fishers, and the public.

4. The best technologies available should be used to collect, manage, and disseminate data.

5. The paperwork burden on fishers and dealers should be minimized.

6. Data collection must include information on the biological, social and economic parameters of managed fisheries.

7. Fees generated by the licensing of commercial fishers and, if enacted, by the licensing of recreational fishers, should be dedicated to increasing fishing opportunities, improving depleted stocks, and supporting management efforts, including enforcement.