Government mismanagement, which allows overfishing, destructive fishing practices, and wasteful killing of non-target ocean life resulting in Bycatch (Bycatch is the indiscriminate catching and killing of fish species and marine wildlife other than those a fishing vessel is intending to capture. Shrimp, swordfish, and tuna fisheries have particularly high amounts of bycatch), is putting America's ocean fish at risk of extinction. Combined with new, sophisticated fishing technologies humans can now catch far more fish every year than what our oceans can produce.

The problems with mismanagement must be solved now if we want our ocean fish to be around for future generations. Instead of managing our ocean resources primarily for extraction we need to put conservation first. The collapse of many of our ocean fish populations has had a devastating impact on our marine ecosystems, our fishermen and fishing communities, and all those that depend on fish as a food source.

We can stop overexploiting our ocean wildlife by passing federal laws, such as the Fisheries Recovery Act of 2001 that makes conservation a top priority. Congress will hold a legislative hearing on this legislation to address these problems on April 25, 2002.