In the 1990’s many U.S. fisheries found themselves in crisis. The fish they relied on were deeply depleted from decades of getting caught faster than they could reproduce. After years of bitter argument and concerted conservation-group efforts, Congress in 1996 passed a sweeping set of amendments to the federal fisheries law, including a mandatory end to overfishing and mandatory recovery of depleted fish populations. Now, those legal mandates are bearing fruit in the form of dozens of rebuilding fish populations in U.S. waters.
By the early 1990s, fishermen and coastal communities had suffered large economic losses. In New England waters, populations of cod, haddock, flounder, and many others had collapsed; leaving fishermen with few fish to catch. Other U.S. regions faced similar situations. In the mid-Atlantic, high fishing levels had reduced popular fish species, like summer flounder and scup, to low abundances. And in the Pacific, numerous populations of rockfish had also collapsed.
So in 1996, to fix the nation’s widespread fisheries problems, congress passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act, amending the U.S. Fisheries Law [The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act]. The new law required that we rebuild depleted fish populations to sustainable abundance levels as quickly as possible.
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