“It allows U.S.-flagged vessels to fish commercially within 50 to 200 nautical miles of the PRIMNM’s boundaries.”
Aren’t they already allowed to fish right up to but not within the 200 nautical mile boundary?
Does that mean closer to the center of the existing 200 mile limit, i.e. less than 200 miles from the beach or does it mean as close as 50 miles outside the existing 200 mile circle? That reads as if it were written to enable instant backpedaling when the outrage gets too loud for the misadministration to ignore.
If it opens the area to virtually unlimited fishing, it will lead to even greater loss of fish stocks and increased environmental damage. After all who is going to patrol that large an area now that NOAA and the NMFS have been depopulated in the interest of “efficiency”? It will just mean another huge swath of overfished water filled with Chinese and Russian fishing boats and dead coral.