Fishing about and about fishing

FAO STUDIES FISH QUOTAS: THE PROS AND THE CONTRAS – HOW RIGHT ARE THEY ?

 

Published in WORLD FISHING, Aug. 2002, as:

 “The FAO and fish quotas”.

 

During the last 2 decades, some countries (Iceland, New Zealand, U.S.A., Canada, E.U., Australia, S.Africa, and Chile) introduced individual transferable quotas (ITQ, IVQ, IFQ, etc.). This arose a dispute between two “parties”: large scale fishery industries and vertically integrated enterprises, as well as many economists and government fishery biologists and managers, on one side, and smaller scale fishermen, skipper-owners and their crews, fishery-dependent enterprises in coastal communities, as well as some social scientists, fishery ecologists, and oceanographers, on the other.

 

Their partisans claim that (i) by becoming shareholders in the resource, ITQ quota owners would fish more rationally and hence prevent overfishing; (ii) ITQs increase fleet economic efficiency, lessen overcapitalization, rationally distribute landings over time, and do away with “derby”-type fisheries; (iii) improve safety, by reducing risky competition among fishermen for a share in total quota (TAC). 

 

ITQs critics question or refute (i) and (iii), and raise the question of socio-economic displacement of small owners, fishermen, and skippers resulting from shrinking fleets, and from quota concentration, which, where in hands of vertically integrated companies, have hurt whole coastal communities and their fishing-related industries.

 

In 2001, FAO Fisheries Department published a FAO Fish.Tech.Pap. (412), edited by Ross Shotton (Ross.Shotton@fao.org) with16 case studies from 7 countries on the effects of transferable fishing rights (licenses and quotas) on fleet capacity and concentration of quota ownership. The editor wished to shed light on their effects “to partly remove the excuse for… non-substantiated claims” of quota monopolization and exclusion of small operators from fisheries.  In my opinion, however, this point has been hardly proven, because most of the studies do substantiate such claims.

 

In the main, introduction of transferable fishing rights have caused fleet reduction and, although not everywhere, also reduction in fishing effort. One exception is New Zealand, where quota ownership “provided a significant boost to the rapidly expanding export-oriented industry led by the major companies”.

 

Although a few of the papers, for lack of appropriate data, are vague or not focusing on this subject, the drift of fishing rights in the direction of bigger owners appears to be a general feature, the N.S.Wales abalone fishery being the only exception. This trend has been evident even where the system has existed for only a few years, Also, prices paid for transferable quotas, licenses, or any other unit of fishing right have been continually raising. In one case, that of the U.S. wreckfish, the ITQ system failed on both accounts: the fishery collapsed, while during the less than 2 years that it functioned “share-consolidation had certainly taken place”.

 

In some cases, local restrictions limit the accumulation of quota and licenses by a single person or enterprise. The character, implementation, and enforcement of such limits vary. In some cases, there are gaps between the official records and the realities, because of the use of “silent partners”, fictitious owners, etc.  It seems that the only case where transferable rights resulted in the reduction of the number of large (company) owners in favour of private owners is the Northern prawn fishery of Australia… not managed by quotas, but by input (effort) units.

 

Robin Connor, who authored the New Zealand study, wrote on the Internet discussion list, FISHFOLK: “under well-founded quota rights systems, larger operations (in the sense of bigger companies) are always likely, even if they’re not fishing more efficiently”. I’d add one reason for the above: when quotas are too small for individual vessels for feasible operation, and too expensive for their owners to acquire more, the only way the quotas may go it is the big business.

 

One example of dubious claims in favour of the ITQ came from Iceland. The economists-authors wrote under the heading “Results of the ITQ system”:    "ITQ system in the herring fishery has been very successful. Since 1975 herring catches have increased almost ten-fold. …Catch-per-unit-effort … roughly ten times higher than it was at the outset of the vessel-quota system… The herring-stock biomass is now greater than at any time since the 1950s”. But, they missed (or disregarded) information from an earlier FAO study by L.Klyashtorin on climate change and long-term fluctuations of commercial catches and the possibility of forecasting, published in the FAO Fish.Tech.Pap. (410).

 

‘If you look into the Klyashtorin's forecasts on pages 54 and 55 – says Dr.Gary Sharp of Monterey, Calif., a biologist-oceanographer and a former FAO fishery resources specialist  –you’ll see that his Atlantic-herring biomass projection based on climate index fits the picture very well.  The economists can carry on about ITQs' blessings for another 20 years or so, till a reverse shift when the herring crashes again, and cod dominates for another 30 or so years. Herring biomass fluctuations and hence landings are as good a climate index as anything else we measure - and better than most. Lauding ITQs for a tenfold increase in the catches of Atlantic herring is all but ridiculous if not a fallacy”. 

 

The influence of the ITQ system on fleet safety is debatable, in spite of a lot of wishful thinking. Although, in the Alaskan halibut and sablefish fishery the number of search-and-rescue missions have dropped, the number of lives lost declined only slightly, while the number of sinkings had increased before it returned to the pre-ITQ level. In the U.S. East Coast mollusks dredging fishery the transition to ITQs hasn’t done any good at all, and some blame ramifications of the ITQ system for increasing hired skippers’ motivation to take bad weather-related risks. 

 

FAO and Ross Shotton should be complimented for producing an informative and important volume. Its contents do not refute the claims of socially adverse effects of marketable rights, and indicate that not in all cases they represent a stock-saving medicine. I strongly recommend it to all those involved in fisheries management in general, and in the ITQ dispute, in particular. I think that FAO’s next ITQ study ought to be explicitly devoted to the social effects of the system.