MANY tributes have been paid to United States Senator Ted Stevens who was killed in an air crash last week for his work in promoting sustainable fisheries.
Ironically, the 86 year old Word War Two veteran was on a fishing trip in Alaska when the light aircraft came down. Five of the nine people on the plane died in the tragedy.
Senator Stevens was the man who helped introduce the now highly acclaimed 1976 Magnuson - Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act. Some commentators believed this act could become a model for the European Union when reforming its controversial Common Fisheries Policy.
Essentially, his legislation enabled the introduction of 200 mile fishing limit and exclusive economic development zone to help rebuild fishing stocks and stop foreign vessels plundering its fishing grounds.
The Pew Environment Group recently published a study of the American management system, particularly the Maximum Sustainable Yield approach introduced in the Magnuson-Stevens Act, as a valuable source of experience when building a new Common Fisheries Policy for the EU.
This was a senator who wrote laws that singled-out fishing vessels by name to be bought up and removed from U.S. waters like so many chess pieces. In Stevens’s hands, the Labour Department’s dislocated worker program became a way to bring Russians to Alaska for training in oil field work —back in Russia. And when Ted Turner and TBS needed help in a Senate licensing fight in the early 1980s. Stevens’s Capitol whip office was available; after all, the Atlanta Braves were the only lower-48 team whose broadcasts then reached Eskimo villages.
Stevens, a Republican, served in the US Senate between 1968-2009. His partner in working out the 1976 legislation was the Washington Senator Warren Magnuson (1905-89), a Democrat. Tributes have come from US politicians on both sides of the House and from fishing conservation groups.
Should fisheries be closed during breeding time to allow stocks to reach more sustainable levels?
