National Fisherman
April 2009

May I quota you?

Management regime shift

By Hoyt Childers

At the end of2008, three years after Gulf of Mexico fishermen approved individual fishing quotas for ted snapper, they OK'd a groupertilefish IFQ program by a similar, overwhelming margin, and the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council has now approved it.

Individual fishing quotas are still hotly debated, and plenty of fishermen still favor open access, but fishery management in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be on a new heading.

Well-positioned IFQ advocates, several of whom are management council advisory panel members, are hoping to bring the entire reef fish complex under individual quotas, and political momentum appears to favor them. The council has, in fact, voted to explore a comprehensive reef fish IFQ, by some accounts the first effort of its kind anywhere.

Despite nagging concerns, some fishermen see IFQs as a way - perhaps the only way - to secure a future through and beyond regulatory nightmare. It is not uncommon to find former opponents who have become supporters some reluctant, some enthusiastic.

Three years ago, Madeira Beach fisherman Dean Pruitt didn't want to hear about IFQs.

"I tore them apart," Pruitt said during a recent interview. "We absolutely didn't want to have nothing to do with them." Seeing a successful quota program firsthand changed Pruitt's mind.

In May 2007, Pruitt was among participants in a British Columbia trip organized by Environmental Defense to allow fishermen to observe groundfish IFQs.

"They flew us to British Columbia to talk to fishermen for three days," Pruitt said. "The fishermen in Btitish Columbia turned us around.We liked what we saw up there."

Ever since Aransas Pass, Texas, red snapper fisherman Felix Cox teamed up with Pam Baker of Environmental Defense more than 10 years ago, the organization has actively promoted sharebased management, a perfect fit with its market-based-solution guiding principle.

But involvement by NGOs worries some fishermen. For example, when red snapper fishermen crafted their IFQ plan, in order to gain enough support for passage they had to include a provision that allows entities outside the fishing community to purchase shares after five years.

Mike Athorn, an Apalachicola, Fla., fisherman and boat owner, worries what will happen to the fishery when that provision takes effect in 2012.

"It can eventually put control of the fishery in the hands of people who have never participated in the fishery," Athorn said. "There is nothing to stop these environmental groups from stepping in, buying them up, and putting them in the drawer somewhere."

Fishermen are also concerned about fairness.

Martin Fisher, a Madeira Beach fisherman who was recently named to NMFS' MAFAC and sits on the advisory panel that helped design the grouper-tilefish program, was uncomfortable with the final product.

"If ratified in its present form... a lot of people are going to suffer because of implementation ofthis program," he had said during a December interview, when the grouper IFQ referendum was still in progress. "There weren't enough tools in the toolbox to create a program where there won't be any losers."

The qualifying years for a particular IFQ are critical. For the grouper-tilefish IFQ, the council picked 1999-2004, giving the fisherman the option of dropping the least productive of the six years. But this will be no help to the fisherman who mortgaged his home to buy a grouper boat and reef fish permit in 2005 or the fisherman who diversified into multiple fisheries in the 1990s.

A new shareholder's organization ad~ vocates longer qualifYing periods, said Panama City fisherman Donnie Waters.

"The opinion of the shareholders is that they should use a 10-year qualifYing period, a longer history to try to get a better picture," said Waters, who is president of the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders' Alliance, formed in May of last year.

A primary goal of the alliance is the effort to bring all commercial reef fish under an IFQ system, Waters said. Since one fisherman's bycatch is another fisherman's target fish, shareholders could trade fish and shares and minimize discards and release mortality.

"It would make perfect sense if we could trade these fish amongst each other so that each and every one ofus could land everything that we caught,"Waters told the Gulf council last June when he introduced the shareholder's alliance.

Another fishery that may be on the IFQ fast track is king mackerel.The king and Spanish mackerel advisory panel also has endorsed exploration of a king mackerel IFQ.

If fishermen tend to be conservative in matters of safety, finance and maybe even politics, they are also gamblers. No matter the adequacy of preparation, venturing onto the ocean is always a gamble.Taking the time and burning the fuel to make just one more set is a gamble. So, too, has management become a gamble. Pondering events in the Gulfof Mexico during the past four years, especially recent actions of the Gulf council, one could conclude that it's high time to I place one's remaining chips on IFQs.