Friday September 30, 2022
Seafood Source —
The U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife has passed H.R. 4690, the Sustaining America’s Fisheries for the Future Act, the latest attempt to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA).
The bill was approved by the committee on Thursday, 29 September, in a party-line vote. U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Arkansas), the committee’s ranking Republican member, and his fellow Republicans on the committee opposed the bill, citing objections from fishing, seafood, retail, and foodservice industry groups.
The MSA was last updated 16 years ago, and U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California) has led an initiative over the past two years to reauthorize it. Huffman began his effort with a series of town halls in 2019 before submitting a draft to reauthorize the MSA in 2020, which failed, suffering a similar fate as multiple previous attempts to pass some form of MSA reauthorization.