Stop Deadly "Dirty Fishing"

Dear Representative,

The President has submitted his budget for the next fiscal year to you and your colleagues in Congress. It includes roughly $25.992 million in funding for National Marine Fisheries Service’s observer programs and the Bycatch Reduction Initiative.
As concluded by the President’s Commission on Ocean Policy, the use of fishery observers are critically important to bycatch reduction efforts.

While I also endorse the use of observers, I believe the level of funding is far from adequate to significantly reduce the environmental damage that commercial use of unselective fishing techniques does to marine mammals, fish, sea turtles, sea birds, and marine habitat.

It is estimated that over 300,000 marine mammals including dolphins, whales, and porpoises are needlessly killed each year. The death toll across species is so large that is can not be counted in individual lives. It is estimated that 16 billion pounds of sea life is destroyed annually. This unfathomable amount of bycatch is devastating the delicate ecological balance of our marine heritage. This wasteful killing threatens the health of the entire ocean ecosystem and the coastal economies that depend on it.

For these reasons, I urge you to double the funding for observer programs from roughly $26 million to $52 million in order to begin stemming the tide of needless killing and marine habitat destruction.

Sincerely,


[your name]