July 7, 2014 — Fishing quotas were meant to conserve stocks and support fishing communities. But they have achieved the reverse – rewarding the most rapacious fishing enterprises and leaving small scale fisherfolk with nothing.
The UK's fisheries quota system, introduced in 1999 and comprising the creation of a private market for the right to catch fish, has been called "the biggest property grab since the Norman invasion".
The UK government use the quota system to control how many fish can be taken from the sea. It does this by dividing up the right to catch fish between a limited number of companies, and then allowing this right to be bought and sold.
This privatisation of the produce of the sea has many parallels with the parliamentary enclosure of land in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the press, the quota system is often unquestioningly presented as a conservation measure: a means by which governments can limit the catches of fishermen and protect fish stocks. Policy documents and academic literature tell a different story.
Enclosure: efficiency, or dispossession?
Here, the argument for fisheries quotas closely echoes the economic improvement justifications of enclosure, and is based on those classical Ricardian principles formulated in England during the era of the Enclosure Acts: it is a way to increase the efficiency of the industry, and a means to capture untapped resource rent.
The quota system, which was implemented gradually between 1980 and 2000, has led to widespread dispossession.
This is in part because of what is widely considered a calculative error on the part of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA – previously MAFF) that led to the small boat fleet (made up of vessels under ten metres long, and the vast majority of British fishermen) being allocated less than 5% of the right to fish.
It is also because of the 'grandfathering' nature of rights allocation to larger boats, which implicitly favoured high-catching vessels. Larger vessel owners were given property rights over fish based on their historic catches.
The proportion they took of the total recorded catch then remained stable as the overall amount fluctuated, meaning the same amount of quota would allow the right to (as an example) 3% of 100 tonnes of cod in 2003, and 3% of 25 tonnes of cod in 2005.
Applying Hardin's tragedy of the commons analogy, this system is akin to tackling overgrazing by allocating property rights based on the number of cattle someone owns. It rewards overexploitation, and penalises restraint.
Read the full opinion piece at The Ecologist