The letter, addressed to the executive secretary of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), was short. Dated January 27, 2026, it read:
This letter is to acknowledge that the Western Bluefin Recommendation 22-10 does not require Western harvesters to count their recreational catch of Bluefin toward their quota. As such, beginning January 1, 2026 and henceforth, the United States will continue to report its recreational catch for management purposes but will not count its recreational catch toward its current quota of 1572 mt, which will be solely allocated to its commercial catch.
It was signed by Andrew “Drew” Lawler, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, NOAA International Fisheries.
Follow on Substack
In those few lines, the United States had effectively announced that it intended to exceed its 2026 Atlantic bluefin tuna quota, as established by ICCAT, by about 341 metric tons (751,776 pounds), 22.6% of its 2026 bluefin quota.
There seems to be no legal basis for the United States’ action.
ICCAT’s Recommendation 22-10 states that “an annual [total allowable catch], inclusive of dead discards, of 2,726 [metric tons] is established for 2023, 2024, and 2025…” Recommendation 25-05, adopted at ICCAT’s 2025 annual meeting (and probably the recommendation that Mr. Lawler should have referenced in his letter), employed similar language, but raised the total allowable catch for the years 2026-2029 to 3,081.6 metric tons, and increased the United States’ quota to 1,509.98 metric tons.
Nothing in either recommendation suggested that ICCAT intended to establish a total allowable catch for Western Atlantic bluefin tuna which included dead discards, but excluded all bluefin killed in the United States’ recreational fishery.
To the extent that the recommendations address the recreational fishery for bluefin tuna at all, it is only to require that “[Contracting Parties and Cooperating non-Contracting Parties, Entities, and Fishing Entities (CPCs)] shall prohibit fishermen from selling or offering for sale recreationally harvested fish of any size,” and “CPCs will encourage their commercial and recreational fishermen to tag and release all fish less than 30 kg or, in the alternative, having a fork length less than 115 cm and report on steps taken in this regard in their Annual Report.”
Recreationally-caught bluefin were thus clearly governed by the recommendations, and since the only mention of “commercial” fishermen in either recommendation was in the previously quoted sentence relating to tagging and releasing small fish, there seems to be no textual support for the United States’ argument that Recommendation 22-10 required it to count only commercial, and not recreational, landings against its quota. That matters, because in ICCAT’s parlance, a “recommendation” is not merely a suggestion that a Contracting Party take a particular action. It is a mandatory fishery management measure that all Contracting Parties must adopt.
Other ICCAT members have taken strong exception to the United States’ position.
In a letter to ICCAT’s executive secretary, dated February 11, 2026, Mark Waddell, Canada’s Head of Delegation to ICCAT, wrote,
Canada does not have the same interpretation as the United States of Recommendation 22-10, which is replaced by Recommendation 25-05. Canada’s interpretation is that catches from recreational fisheries shall count against a CPC’s annual allocation. When the western Bluefin measure grants differential treatment to recreational fisheries, it does so explicitly, as is the case in paragraph 11 of Recommendation 25-05 [which prohibits the sale of recreationally-caught fish]. Therefore, short of an explicit exemption for recreational fisheries in allocation-related provisions, the measure cannot be interpreted as excluding recreational catches from the annual [total allowable catch] set out in the measure…
There is nothing in the western BFT Recommendation (22-10 nor 25-05) that would allow some types of fishing mortality (commercial) to apply to a CPC’s allocations of the [total allowable catch] while allowing other types of fishing mortality (recreational) to be excluded from compliance totals…
In developing the management procedure, the [management strategy evaluation] assumed the total fishing mortality for Atlantic bluefin tuna would reflect all sources of mortality, whether commercial or recreational, landed or discarded. Not accounting for the significant mortality arising from recreational fisheries would be outside the framework of the management procedure and would invalidate all of the testing results provided during the [management strategy evaluation]…
The European Union took a similar position, in a February 23, 2026 letter which stated, in part,
The EU would like to recall that the annual Total Allowable Catch (TAC) was determined based on a Management Procedure that considers the total fishing mortality of Western Atlantic bluefin tuna, encompassing removals from recreational fisheries as well, and represents the maximum amount of fishing mortality that can be applied each year…
Should the US not account for recreational catches within the bluefin tuna quota it has been attributed, the EU is of the position that:
–Exceptional circumstances would occur for the Western stock and that would require the [Standing Committee on Research and Statistics] to evaluate whether a change in the advice is necessary and could lead to a situation where ICCAT would have an obligation to adjust the TAC for the Western stock.
–The US would be bound to pay back next year any bluefin tuna caught in excess of its quota this year…
Japan also submitted an objection on February 23, arguing that
the management procedure was developed based on the total fishing mortality for Atlantic bluefin tuna by taking into account all sources of removals, including both commercial and recreational fisheries. Counting no recreational catches against the national annual quota is therefore inconsistent with the scientific assumptions underpinning the stock assessment and the Management Procedure agreed to by the ICCAT. Also, there is no specific text in the Recommendation that excludes recreational catches from the national catch amount, which shall be within the quota.
In the past several years, United States’ recreational catches of Western Atlantic bluefin tuna reached over 200 metric tons, and was 451 metric tons in 2024. Exclusion of such amount of recreational catches from the catch amount against the quota may result in actual removals exceeding the level assumed under the management framework. Such a situation would trigger conditions comparable to those envisaged under the [exceptional circumstances] provisions of the Management Procedure. The fishing mortality would deviate substantially from the assumptions on which the Management Procedure is based and provide adverse impacts on the stock.
If the total catch of the United States including recreational catches exceeds its quota, the amount of overharvest shall be deducted from the next year’s quota in accordance with paragraph 8 b) of Recommendation 25-05…
The environmental community in the United States has also challenged the nation’s new position on recreational Atlantic bluefin landings, with three organizations — Earthjustice, Wild Oceans, and the Safina Center — sending a joint letter to Mr. Lawler outlining their objections. While much of that letter reiterates points already made in the documents quoted above, the environmental groups also question whether NOAA Fisheries could legally alter its past practice of counting recreational landings against the United States’ bluefin quota without first going through a formal rulemaking process as described in the federal Administrative Procedures Act, something that was not done prior to Mr. Lawler sending his letter to ICCAT, although it is likely that such a rulemaking process will be initiated in the near future.
The joint letter also noted that the failure to count recreational bluefin landings against the quota could have real, adverse impacts on the United States’ bluefin fisheries.
In addition to the significant conservation concerns associated with exceeding the ICCAT quota, this action could also have serious commercial ramifications. Exceeding the ICCAT quota triggers a payback requirement in subsequent years, as high as 125% if the quota is exceeded in two or more consecutive years. And by violating ICCAT terms and agreements regarding catch accounting, this action could subject U.S. commercial fishermen to trade penalties that would prevent them from exporting the bluefin they catch.
So far, neither objections from other fishing nations nor the threat of ICCAT sanctions have dissuaded NOAA Fisheries from leaving recreational bluefin landings out of its 2026 quota calculations. An ICCAT panel that met early in March 2026 had the issue on its agenda, but the report of that meeting has not yet been released.
Unless NOAA Fisheries has a belated change of heart and returns to counting recreational landings against the United States’ Atlantic bluefin quota, it is likely that such quota will be exceeded, probably by a substantial amount. The United States’ action could also threaten ICCAT’s ability to effectively manage highly migratory species, for if the United States can ignore an ICCAT recommendation with impunity, then other contracting parties may well become reluctant to comply with recommendations that negatively impact those parties’ fisheries.
An even greater threat could emerge should the United States, by omitting recreational landings from its bluefin quota, end up substantially exceeding that quota. In that situation, should ICCAT impose the appropriate sanctions, it is very possible that the current U.S. administration, in a fit of pique, would respond by pulling out of the underlying treaty. While such unilateral executive action would probably run afoul of the Atlantic Tunas Convention Act, which states that “The Secretary [of Commerce] as authorized and directed to administer and enforce all of the provisions of the [emphasis added]” treaty which created ICCAT and its management authority, the administration might not pay much regard to such legal niceties.
And should the United States, the predominant tuna fishing nation in the western Atlantic, withdraw from ICCAT, it would cripple the international management of highly migratory species like bluefin tuna and tempt other parties to fish outside of the ICCAT framework.
Hopefully, things won’t get to that point.
Hopefully, perhaps after encountering significant resistance during the rulemaking process, NOAA Fisheries will reverse course and continue to count recreational bluefin landings against the United States quota.
While the ICCAT process has sometimes been flawed, for the past 50 years the Commission has served to coordinate international management of not only Atlantic bluefin tuna, but also of other tunas, swordfish, marlin, and some sharks, including the depleted shortfin mako. It has had some notable successes in the recovery of bluefin tuna and swordfish populations, while still having much work to do to rebuild and effectively manage other species. But, even with that work yet undone, ICCAT has, on balance, had a very positive impact on highly migratory fisheries management in the Atlantic.
Both highly migratory species and the Atlantic fishing nations would suffer should ICCAT’s impact be lessened by the ill-considered actions of the United States or other contracting party.
Top photo: Pacific Bluefin Tuna, via NOAA.
