Shifts of Fishing Access Criticized at Danish Conference
Fishermen’s Voice Staff
The European Union held meetings on renewing Community Fishing Policy at the Danish Parliament building in August. The 10 year cycle this year addressed Transferable Fishing Concessions (TFC) This new term represents a new policy being proposed. That policy would mandate that all EU member states pre-assign catches to vessels. The entities which are assigned catch can then lease to others to catch.
In a talk entitled The Effect of TFCs on: The Nation, Communities & Future Generations, Seth Macinko, Scientist and lecturer at the Southern Massachusetts Institute of Science and Technology argued that the inherent problems with TFCs are not being discussed in nations where this policy is being instituted.
In the United States a similar fisheries management policy is called catch shares or Individual Fishing Quota.
Macinko, in an interview with the Fishermen’s Voice said he was not arguing against catch shares, per se, but against the transfer of ownership. He was opposed to the privatization of the public resource in a way that hands over access to the resource to individuals in perpetuity. Owners can be from any country in the world and pay fishermen to catch the fish for them.
The result of this public policy will be the loss by the public to access to the publics marine resources. These rights access are rights embodied in laws of the commons. Groups who want to privatize, own and trade these rights have criticized their current management. However, professionals who have studied resource management have pointed out centuries of continuous commons management that rapidly failed when the commons were privatized. Others have noted the impact of industrialized fishing with large ships that has undermined the resilience of the resource. They point out that consolidation of ownership will increase the scale of industrialized fishing and further threaten the marine resouce.
Macinko cited places in the world where this transfer policy has taken hold, ITQs and IFQs and said 30% to 80% of the total value of a fishery goes to the owners of the quota (Sometimes referred to as slipper skippers). The Austrialian abalone fishery in the state of Tasmania moved to ITQs. Very quickly 60% of the abalone quota was owned by one absentee American who gleaned 85% of the value of the fishery.
Macinko said his interest was in promoting a discussion of what is really happening when quota is transferred in this way. What privatizing the resource in this way means to fishermen, future fishing generations and fishing communities.
TFCs, IFQs and ITQ are being promoted by some groups as a means of reducing over fishing. But, said Macinko, the private ownership policy equals the giving away of public wealth. He said he not so much opposed to assignment of catches as the giving away of quota with no financial return to the public which owns the resource under the commons law. “We would never do this in a natural resources like oil or timber which are auctioned to the highest bidder”, said Macinko.
Macinko argues, “If fishermen are paying to fish in a public resource, who should they be paying.” Currently it is public policy that quota is arbitrarily given to the lessee for free and that that lessee can then sub lease the quota to someone else to catch. In the process the arbitrarily selected first lessee picks up about 80% of the quota’s value. In the U.S. oil and timber on federal property a Royalty Lease Auction is held where prospective lessees bid against each other in a structured federally regulated process.
Macino said he would like to see more of the public involved in the discussion regarding public policy in fisheries management. Groups like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) have argued for the establishment of ITQs and IFQs, claiming these mechanisms are a way to reduce fishing effort. However, EDF has at the same time presented itself to investors as a promoter of privatizing marine fisheries quota as an investment instrument. Quota could be traded as are commodities such as grain, hogs and cattle.
Many are concerned that as TFCs and ITQs are traded and ownership consolidated fishermen would become employees who harvested the corporation’s fish. Thereby eliminating the ancient rights and opportunities to those who would fish and the communities dependent on these rights to the marine commons.
See Macinko’s address to the Danish Conference at: