Fishing about and about fishing

 

 

Here, in World Fishing, we have often brought up opinions questioning the on-going fishery management methodology and management by quotas, as well as the underlying science, including the issue of relationship between the size of spawning stocks (SSB) and recruitment, the consequences of sustained size-selective fishing, and the validity of stock-assessment models that ignore non-fishing (man-made and climatic) factors and the dynamics of natural mortality. Such scepticism has been recently reinforced on two fronts.

 

Non-fishing factors. The influence of climatic factors was dealt with in two FAO reports (by G.Sharp and L.Klyashtorin, respectively), and by L.Klyashtorin and A.A.Lyubushin in their ground-breaking book, recently published also in English, entitled: “Cyclic Climate Changes and Fish Productivity” (VNIRO Publishing, Moscow, 2007), and reported on in our Dec. 2006 issue (“Enlightenment from Russia”). 

 

All this had little effect either on the institutional fishery science, (see “Voices in Wilderness” World Fishing, Sept. 2007), or on the industry, which mainly limited itself to the annual wrangle over TACs.  Now a scholarly article entitled: “Cyclic changes of climate and major commercial stocks of the Barents Sea”, by L. B.Klyashtorin, V. Borisov & A.A. Lyubushin.  (Marine Biology Research, May 2009, p. 4-17), concludes that  "the influence of climatic fluctuations is a predominant factor in stock size changes”. 

 

Management by quotas.  This came in wake of the pretentious insistence that property rights, characterized by security of title, exclusivity, permanence, and transferability, are a must in fisheries for maximum benefit, and for financial efficiency and rational of resource exploitation. This has led to individual quotas (IFQ/ITQs) and mere "fishing rights" have become "private property rights”. 

 

ITQs are shares in the total allowable catch (TAC). They are bad for the weaker vessel owners, because significant TAC and hence ITQ reductions force them either to sell their quotas (often along with their boats) to stronger stakeholders or buy quotas from others, which  in most cases they can’t afford. Quotas and, hence, fishing rights once gone from a fishing community, take along all the associated jobs, services, and income. Only a wide social opposition prevents a worldwide adoption of ITQs and, thus, concentration of fishing rights in the hands of a few, mostly either specialized fishing companies, or large holding corporations. 

 

Denials notwithstanding, ITQs lead to "privatization by stealth", and to various social, economic, and political consequences in favour of large-scale business at the expense of local fisheries and processing industries, and of small-scale operators, even where legislation is limiting quota holdings. They favour the financially strongest and invariably lead to a gradual displacement of artisanal and small-scale individual and family-owned fishing enterprises, exclude part-timers and disregard crewmembers. Hence, managing by ITQ reflects political and social attitudes of the respective governments. 

 

In spite of criticism, even by such outstanding fishery economists as Prof. Parzival Copes of Canada, and of ITQ’s evident failures in achieving their proclaimed targets of stocks recovery and conservation, and their role in “criminalization” of fishing operations, they’re obstinately propagated.

 

Now, ITQs-skeptics got reinforcement from an American economist, Prof. D.W. Bromley (www.aae.wisc.edu/dbromley) who in his testimony submitted to the Pacific Fishery Management Council in October 2008 and in an article in FISHERIES, Vol. 34 (4), 2009, says that “the advocacy of IFQs, (the American version of ITQs – MB-Y) as a management tool rests on six erroneous views of economic theory and the law of property. Under normal circumstances these conceptual confusions ought to be sufficient to disqualify IFQs as a coherent policy option for fisheries. Unfortunately, the confusions have been repeated so often that the truth about IFQs lies buried under an accumulation of deceits”. 

 

Prof. Bromley notes that the term IFQ comprises the following attributes: 

 

1. Catch shares—portions of a fixed TAC—are given away to members of a fishery based on certified catch history; 

2. This is a gift in perpetuity and the gift may be sold to others; 

3. Holders of IFQs do not pay for the fish they land and so there is no capture of the resource rent in a fishery. 

 

According to Prof. Bromley, six confusions about IFQs erroneously underwrite advocacy for an IFQ-run fishery management:

1. Overfishing occurs because no one owns the fish until they are captured by a vessel;  Wrong; The fish in the EEZ are already owned by the citizens of the United States and managed by law by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS);

2. Private property rights (also known as full ownership) conduce to the stewardship of assets—but especially of natural resources;  Wrong; they create no such incentive. Would it be true, then there’d be no need for legislation forcing landowners to re-plant trees, and for the Soil Conservation Service, created because farmers—obviously the owners of the land they farmed  were destroying their top soil by bad practices. Sometimes owners may decide to exhaust the natural resource they own, and invest elsewhere.

3. IFQs are private property rights; Wrong;  American law is clear that an IFQ, however tradable is a not a property right;

4. IFQs conduce to stewardship of fishery resources; Another deceit: if IFQs were such a powerful force for stewardship why is it necessary for a management authority to set any TAC at all and strictly control the ITQ owners’ operations?

5. Efficiency occurs when resource rents in a fishery are maximized; This deceit based on a bogus model repeatedly presented as “rationalization”; these rents are in fact quasi-monopoly profits accruing to those surviving under  the IFQ system; 

6. IFQs must be of infinite duration and tradable to bring about efficiency; IFQs are not a property right, they don’t induce stewardship, and represent a share of a fluctuating TAC, hence no long-term value, and no basis for the claim that they must have an infinite life. 

 

So far learned opinions from Russia and America. There’re many more.

Recently Mr. Borg, the EU Commissioner for Fisheries declared that the EU’s common policy must be reviewed. How about digging a bit deeper this time?