SavingSeaFood - Catch Shares, Consolidation and The Tipping Point

Catch Shares, Consolidation and The Tipping Point

Proponents claim Catch Shares will stop overfishing, restore the stocks, create high paying quality jobs, and make the fishermen profitable and safe. A closer look at Catch Share programs in place for decades shows no data to support these claims.

Further consolidation or reduction of the commercial fishing fleet, a known consequence of Catch Shares and stated by NOAA during their push for implementation, will take the independently owned at sea fishing vessel operations and the dockside support businesses beyond their financial “tipping point”. This will cause the small, family owned, independent fishing businesses and their communities to collapse.

The New England Fishery Management Council is in the process of installing the Amendment 16 management scheme of Catch Shares or Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQ’s), or Individual Transferrable Quotas (ITQ’s). The various terms and acronyms for the program can all be defined by the concept of owned percentages of the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) by individuals, or groups, or corporations, or organizations, or cooperatives. A “Sector” is a cooperative of Catch Share holders.

This Catch Share management approach is actually an idea of economics, claiming production efficiency, and not one of fishery conservation. It is the private ownership of the shares of a natural resource. Catch shares are an extension of the faulty deregulated free market theories of economists such as Milton Friedman, which in this case have evolved into the concept of Free Market Environmentalism which is the approach of …ownership equals responsibility; or render a commodity profitable enough and somehow the owners and the mechanism of market capitalization will automatically stabilize and sustain that resource or industry.

Read the complete story at Ahab's Journal.

EDITORIAL: Three months in, new fishing rules bring disarray

The catch share system was rolled out prematurely without the level of analysis, planning, budgeting, and community dialogue that would be expected to be associated with a major federal action.

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