Valley Morning Star
Harlingen, Texas
December 23, 2004

IFQs might end fishery chaos

Editorial

A textbook example of what economists call "the tragedy of the commons" is unfolding on the fishing docks of San Francisco, as a glut of Dungeness crab generated by the early season rush — a glut processors can’t handle — has led to thousands of pounds of otherwise valuable catch being dumped in the bay.

"The people of the Bay Area need to be outraged because a lot of their winter crabs have been taken and wasted," said a spokesman for the San Francisco Crab Boat Owners Association. "The crabs are getting harvested too fast. It’s greed out of control."

But greed alone can’t be blamed for the situation. American commercial fishing practices often lead to such events, in part attributable to the tragedy of the commons. Short fishing seasons, more or less open access to a commonly shared resource (in this case, crabs) and no direct ownership stake in the fishery creates an incentive to plunder, rather than conserve, ration and sustain the resource.

The situation has been aggravated by the "law of unintended consequences." Much of the overharvesting is being done by boats from Oregon and Washington state — craft purchased, ironically, with the proceeds of a federal fishing boat buy-back program aimed at curbing the depletion of groundfish stocks along the Pacific coast. Instead of retiring, many of the captains who sold their fishing boats to the federal government turned around and invested in crab boats, joining the lucrative chase for Dungeness in California. So the taxpayers helped finance the waste of ocean resources now unfolding.

One promising solution to the tragedy of the commons in a commercial fishery is the use of individual fishing quotas, which grant established captains a guaranteed and transferable share of allowable catch in a given fishery. This decreases the incentive to plunder, and increases the incentive to manage the fishery for maximum long-term sustainability.

It also permits fishers to catch their quota at their own pace, instead of participating in the mad crush that ensues during fishing season. This means seafood will be fresher for distributors and consumers throughout the year, and earn higher prices for the commercial fisher. As it now stands, the glut of product generated during a brief fishing season brings down the price fishers get for their catch.

"Where these quotas have been adopted around the world, from halibut in Alaska to the snapper in New Zealand, they have transformed fishing," according to Donald Leal, a senior associate with the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Mont. Leal has authored a book, "Fencing the Fishery: A Primer on Ending the Race for Fish," published by PERC (www.perc.com). "These quotas give each fisherman a right to a specified amount of the total allowable catch. The fisherman can take time to obtain the catch, so the frantic and devastating race ends. If the fisherman wants to get out of fishing, the individual quota can be sold to someone else."

Politically powerful fish processors aren’t crazy about the concept of IFQs, however. They much prefer the status quo, because they can hire temporary staff during the peak weeks of a fishing season and underpay captains desperate to unload their catch before it spoils. But IFQs have shown promise in the fisheries where they’ve been tried.

"In Alaska, for example, the halibut season had fallen to two or three days a year, and fishermen were hammered by lower prices because of the glut of halibut caught during that time," according to Leal. "After IFQs were adopted in 1995, the halibut season was extended to 245 days a year. Fishermen received higher prices because they could deliver fresh halibut through much of the year. Less gear was lost, and fishing was safer. And harvests no longer exceeded managers’ goals."

U.S. experimentation with IFQs has not been without snags. In order to placate the big Alaskan fish processors, IFQ holders were restricted in who they could sell to. That leaves commercial fishers too much at the mercy of processors and curtails their ability to shop around for the best price for their catch. Such protectionist practices must be stopped if IFQs are to work to the fullest benefit of captains and consumers.

Critics fret that such innovations will lead to the "privatizing of the oceans." We just don’t see that as a major threat. All IFQs do is grant commercial fishers a temporary and transferrable ownership stake in the fishery. And, as experience shows, pride of ownership and a long-term personal stake in the health of a resource naturally make most people better stewards.

IFQs are among the fishery policy changes under review by a White House Ocean Policy Committee established by President Bush last week. Sounds like this is an idea that could finally be catching.