April 1, 2013 — Where have the fish gone? Unsurprisingly, scientists, regulators, and fishermen all have their own hypotheses. Some claim that climate change has pushed the schools into deeper water; others say that predators like seals and dogfish have devoured the cod; still others claim that large boats have been hammering spawning aggregations and preventing the fish from breeding. Whatever the case, cod are few and far between in the once-fecund waters that lured Europeans to the New World. “There’s been an extreme contraction of the resource,” says Aaron Dority, director of the Downeast Groundfish Initiative, a project to rebuild Maine’s groundfish stocks. “You can’t find Gulf of Maine cod outside of a few select areas.”
Utter collapse wasn’t what regulators expected back in 2010, when the New England Fisheries Management Council implemented a catch shares system for the region’s groundfish industry. Catch shares are a form of fisheries management that turn public fish into private property, by splitting up a fishery’s scientifically determined “Total Allowable Catch” into exclusive slices of a pie. Each fisherman is granted a slice of the pie, and fishermen are allowed to buy, sell, or rent their slices (Read “Net Benefits,” the Journal’s earlier report on the system).
Catch shares have been credited with restoring fisheries from Alaska to New Zealand, and at their best they can be a boon to fishermen by promoting flexibility. If, say, one boat-owner is looking to scale up his operation while another has a herniated disk that’s keeping him off the water, catch shares allow the laid-up fisherman to rent or sell his share to the ambitious one. Today, 15 different US fisheries are governed by catch shares, and several more programs are in development. (While most catch share programs allot fishermen “Individual Transferable Quotas,” or ITQs, New England’s system organizes fishermen into cooperatives called sectors, which distribute shares among their members.)
Yet while catch share programs hold promise, they are not without problems. Foremost among these is determining how large a slice each fisherman should receive. Most catch share systems — New England’s included — use historical catch data to determine allocations, a method that some call “rewarding the pigs.” The fishermen most responsible for historic overfishing are grandfathered into the lion’s share of future fish. Meanwhile, younger fishermen without extensive catch histories receive comparatively tiny slices, and are forced to supplement their shares by leasing quota — often from “armchair fishermen” who keep getting paid to rent out their shares even after they’ve retired.
For those fishermen who weren’t fortunate enough to get their allotment for free, renting the right to fish can excise a huge chunk from their bottom lines. One study of British Columbia’s halibut fishery found that fishermen who were forced to lease large amounts of quota tended to be “less viable or marginally viable.” In New England, where the Total Allowable Catch was set at an extremely low level, the divide between the haves and the have-nots was especially stark. “If you’re fortunate enough to be granted sufficient initial allocation to fish, then you’re at a significant advantage relative to a fisherman who’s been granted a far lower initial allocation,” says Dority.
As these unlucky lessees quit fishing, and armchair fishermen discharge their quota to the highest bidder, access to fish often ends up concentrated in the hands of the fishermen with the most buying power. According to a NOAA review released in December 2012, that appears to be what has happened in New England’s groundfisheries since the inception of catch shares. In two years, the total number of vessels regularly catching groundfish dropped from 601 to 450, a loss of 25 percent of the fleet, and trips to sea taken by crewmen declined by 11 percent. Meanwhile, the number of boat owners with three or more vessels increased by a third, and over 85 percent of groundfish revenues piled up in the hands of just 20 percent of vessel owners. In all, there are now fewer fishermen in New England than when catch shares began, and the ones left standing are catching a larger share of the fish.
Read the full story at Earth Island Journal