Trump vetoes Calif. fishing bill over seafood trade deficit
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump vetoed a bill Friday that may have progressively ended the usage of large-mesh drift gillnets deployed completely in federal waters off the coast of California, saying such laws would enhance reliance on imported seafood and worsen a multibillion-dollar seafood trade deficit.
Trump additionally mentioned in his veto message to the Senate that the laws sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., “will not achieve its purported conservation benefits.”
Trump vetoed the fishing bill because the Republican-controlled Senate adopted the Democratic-led House and voted to overturn his earlier veto of the annual protection coverage bill, enacting it into regulation regardless of Trump’s objections.
The fishing bill’s sponsors mentioned large-mesh drift gillnets, which measure between 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) and 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) lengthy and may lengthen 200 ft (60.9 meters) beneath the floor of the ocean, are left within the waters in a single day to catch swordfish and thresher sharks. But they mentioned at the least 60 different marine species — together with whales, dolphins and sea lions — may also turn out to be entangled within the nets, the place they’re injured or die.
It is unlawful to make use of these nets in U.S. territorial waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, and off the coasts of Washington state, Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii. They stay authorized in federal waters off California’s coast.
In 2018, California handed a four-year part out of large-mesh drift gillnets in state waters to guard marine life.
The bill Trump vetoed would have prolonged related protections to federal waters off California’s shoreline inside 5 years and approved the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to assist the business fishing trade change to extra sustainable varieties of gear.
Trump mentioned the West Coast drift gillnet fishery is topic to “robust legal and regulatory requirements” for environmental safety that equal or transcend environmental protections utilized to overseas fisheries.
He mentioned Americans will import extra swordfish and different species from overseas sources with out this fishery.
