SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton (News Analysis) – Nov 4, 2009 – With the imminent release of the Obama Administration’s catch shares task force report for public comment, various groups have been weighing in on the merits, or lack of merits, for catch shares.
Yesterday, the Pew Environmental Group, the favorite bogey man of the Gloucester Times, weighed in with a presentation that should go over well in Gloucester.
The basic message was that catch shares can work, but should be only considered as one tool along with measures such as adjusting the length of the fishing season, refining areas that are opened or closed to fishing, restricting gear to protect fish habitat and limiting catch size.
Above all, Pew argues that no strategy can succeed without scientifically based catch limits, adequately enforced.
With catch shares, they also call for time-limited allocations, such as ten years, along with opportunities to modify the program over time. Other features they support include ownership caps, and equitable allocations.
Listening to their conference call, I was struck by the fact that most of the issues raised by their panel, which included Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, Paul Parker, one of the founders of the Cape Cod Hook Fishermen’s Association, and now manager of a community based fund trying to purchase fishing permits, Linda Behnken, executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, and a representative from the recreationally focused anti-commercial group Coastal Conservation Association, were all issues that are addressed in creating the existing catch share programs.
Grader, Parker, and Behnken all have extensive experience with the issues at stake, and strong views on how management measures should be approached in relation to catch shares.
The critical issue is one of restructuring. Behnken said that even with a requirement that halibut quota holders be actively engaged in the fishery, and a ban on selling quotas to corporations unless those corporations were grandfathered in the original allocation, the fleet shrunk by 1/3 shortly after the program started.
Grader said that the consolidation of the fleet on the West Coast, which came about partly due to buy-outs of permits by the nature conservancy, collapsed some of the shoreside support once those permits were removed from the industry. He made the point that the inshore fleets and their service providers such as fuel docks, ice houses etc., are actually an intricate web of economic relationships, and privatizing a portion of that can rip the entire fabric apart.
All speakers were concerned about the propensity of catch share programs to result in concentrated allocations among a few large holders.
Where the crab rationalization program was discussed, it was mostly based on misinformation. The myth is that the rapid consolidation caused huge job losses. In fact, the jobs were not full time, but seasonal jobs lasting only a few weeks a year. Contrary to what most people believe, the consolidation of the crab fleet has dramatically increased the percentage of Alaskan ownership over the past five years – which flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that many owners are now off the water, living in LA and Las Vegas.
The upshot was that a lot of the issues raised by the panel are exactly the issues that need to be addressed in designing a good catch allocation program. Behnken also said that catch shares were in fact a good mechanism to compensate those who left the fishery as a result of consolidation.
Left unsaid among the suspicion over catch shares is how else a hard fisheries quota can be implemented in an economic fashion. Quota problems are not the result of too little fish, they are the result of a mismatch between fishing capacity and a finite resource. When overcapacity exists, economic incentives force overfishing to occur – either through pressure to set quotas that allow overfishing, or through illegal landings.
Catch shares are the tool that makes adherence to hard quotas possible. That is the basic reason they are being pushed as a primary management tool. The Pew Group has acknowledged this, but wants to make sure the implementation also captures the full suite of fishery needs – from fleet diversity to lack of consolidation to healthy communities, and new entrants coming into the fishery, and also to avoid creating a permanent group of holders of quotas. All of this is great, but the practical issue is ending overfishing – and any effort to hold catch shares to a standard that does not exist anywhere in the real world is actually a way to undermine trust in catch shares.
The panel assembled by PEW is well aware of the trade-offs, and all have different approaches to solving these problems. But the participants who lack experience in the fishery and are coming at this from an academic or ideological perspective need to avoid pie-in-the-sky thinking to constructively contribute to building better US fisheries and fishing communities.
John Sackton, Editor And Publisher
Seafood.com News 1-781-861-1441
Email comments to jsackton@seafood.com