January 20, 2015 — Although catch shares are promoted as a means to protect the fish and small-scale fishermen, the new system has had a devastating effect on the latter. Individual fishing operators, the small businesses of many coastal areas, were turned from entrepreneurs and business owners into sharecroppers and day laborers. All but the largest and most “efficient” operators were beached.
For years, many of the world’s wild fish stocks have dwindled as we pursued too many fish in the effort to feed growing populations. The North Atlantic cod is close to extinct from a commercial standpoint, and Atlantic oyster production has fallen 99 percent from its high in the 1920’s.
This type of problem is well known to economists as the so-called “tragedy of the commons,” first recognized in England in the early 1800s. Too many sheep were let loose on public land, and their overgrazing ruined the fields for all. Since then, policymakers have struggled to devise solutions for managing shared resources – grazing lands, forests, fisheries, air and water – to preserve their value for future generations. Sometimes, seemingly good solutions backfire.
Until a few decades ago, fisheries were managed on the principle of “first come, first served.” Catches weren’t managed or limited, and some fisheries were decimated. Then an approach called “Individual Transferable Quotas” was implemented. Under this approach, each fisherman was awarded the right to catch a certain percentage of the total annual allowable catch, which was set each year. The idea was that if each fisherman owned a percentage share of the total, they would have a strong incentive not to overfish and destroy the fishery, since that would of course destroy the value of what they owned. This was supposed to protect the fishing ground, and also protect the economic security of individual fishing operators.
Read the full opinion from US News & World Report