Catch shares are a double-edged sword to be used with caution and a good deal of forethought, expert participants agreed at the start of a high-level workshop on the preferred tool of the Obama administration to modernize the regulation of fisheries across America.
To Ed Backus, vice president of fisheries for Ecotrust, a West Coast nonprofit agency that innovates capital strategies for fishing communities, the distinction is between economic "efficiency" — a goal of catch share advocates — and economic "effectiveness" — a broader measure of the social impact — is everything.
The West Coast experiments have produced inflated values in quota, eight times dock value, with multiple harmful social effects including sale of equity to non-fishing outsiders and discouraging generational continuity in fishing, Backus reported.
"When quota becomes a mobile asset, it may be well and good for the asset’s value," he said in an interview. But that’s not so good for the community where the asset had been based, he emphasized.
At the morning session of a two-day retreat to the west side of Mount Washington, in the elegant Mount Washington Hotel, Backus joined two others from the Pacific coast experiments in catch shares, which began in the 1990s and continue.
His co-group leaders were Wes Erikson, a fourth-generation British Columbian fisherman, and Steve Minor, an Alaskan industry veteran and leader.
Erikson described the pre-catch share halibut industry as a wild and dangerous "derby," the proverbial race to the last fish that catch share advocates like to invoke.
"We were over-harvesting, landing all the fish at once," he said, before the commonwealth was divided up. He said the impetus was a government order to "clean up or we’ll shut you down."
So well behaved and organized did the British Columbian fishermen become that "now all species are accounted for, and we trade quotas at the dock," he added. He said they practice "avoidance fishing" of undesired species, adding that fishermen’s logbooks turned so reliable that they are used by scientists.
Since 1990, the crazy, pre-catch share world of the British Columbian ports have become sane but also much smaller, and culturally weaker.
In answer to a question, Erikson said catch shares have meant the size of the fleet has been more than halved — the 435 halibut vessels are down to 200.
More to the point, he said, "Communities have shrunk and not as prosperous as they used to be."
Minor’s story working in Alaska crab fisheries was much the same as Backus’ perspective from Oregon’s.
There, he said, about 260 boats and high lease rates on quota — the stuff of catch shares — "became barriers to entry" into the fishery. He, like Backus, urged the catch share makers of New England to look carefully at preserving community access to catch shares.
At another seminar a few doors down the corridor, officials from the Pacific Fishery Management Council said they were in the sixth year of a seven-year process of converting the ground-fishery to catch shares and that the transformation was easier said than done.
Merrick Burden, a government economist, developed models to put smaller boats into co-ops and larger vessels into a quota system. Burden, too, said the idea was fleet consolidation — from 100 to 50 vessels — but annual wages would rise from $45,000 to $300,000. He said the expected effects included such "non-market mechanisms" as set-asides, commercial fishing associations and adaptive management.
"Market efficiencies can lead to social consequences," Burden said, adding that the fleet consolidation results in a high cost of entry into the fishery for the second generation.
Don Hansen, a former high official of Pacific fisheries, said that in reaching the goals, the problems included that "some ports could be wiped out."