Help the fishermen, but the issue is the fish

Unless this country acts strongly to rebuild its ocean fisheries, including West Coast salmon, no amount of federal and state aid will be enough to rescue the fishing industry and coastal communities.

We're strongly behind the full-court press Oregon and California elected officials are making in Congress and state legislatures to get disaster relief to the commercial salmon industry. Yet there needs to be much more attention, and money, given to reversing the decline in Klamath salmon and many other fish stocks.

While all the shouting you hear now is about disaster relief for the West Coast salmon fleet, Congress is quietly debating a much more important long-term issue, the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act that governs ocean fisheries. The Senate has approved a better, stronger version of Magnuson-Stevens, but the House is considering proposals that would weaken a law that already is failing to address many ailing stocks of ocean fish.

In fact, a new study by the Lenfest Ocean Program, a private nonprofit that supports marine research, found that only three out of 67 ocean fish stocks identified as "overfished" have been rebuilt in the past decade. More than 80 percent of fish stocks that need rebuilding are either still below healthy levels or are continuing to be overexploited, the study found.

The West Coast has reported some successes -- Pacific whiting and lingcod are among the species that have largely recovered. But in many cases the nation's fisheries laws and the regional councils that implement them have not done what is necessary for fish populations to rebound. The Lenfest study contends that nearly half of fish stocks under rebuilding plans today are still fished so heavily that they cannot possibly recover.

Magnuson-Stevens includes language requiring that fish populations be rebuilt in 10 years or less except in specific circumstances. However, the Lenfest study found that more than half of the 67 recovery plans have time frames of more than 10 years, and some as long as 90 years.

The demise of the Klamath chinook is not primarily a result of overfishing, but the events playing out on the West Coast, and in Washington, demonstrate the same kind of short-term thinking that interferes with the recovery of ocean fish stocks. The Klamath run has been crippled by dams, irrigation diversions, habitat loss and warm, polluted water. Everyone can see that, yet there's no sign that Congress or the Bush administration is prepared to fix what's wrong on the Klamath.

In fact, the Bush administration has even proposed that Oregon and California shift the few million dollars they have received in federal grants to help recover salmon into disaster aid for salmon trollers. In other words, the administration continues to operate as though this is all about the fishermen, not the fish.

There is a disaster here, and we support the effort to provide relief for the salmon industry and coastal communities. But it is a disaster that will be repeated again and again until the hard choices are made, and the hard work is done to restore ocean fisheries, including Pacific salmon, to healthy, sustainable levels.