May 30, 2017 — Over the holiday weekend, a national magazine and two conservation organizations slammed Louisiana’s plan for a pilot program that would give 150 recreational anglers the right to harvest 25,000 pounds of red snapper.
In a column published on sportfishingmag.com, Sport Fishing Editor Doug Olander called the program “a solid bitch-slapping to the recreational-fishing community.” Olander said the plan is a step toward “catch-shares,” in which individuals are awarded a percentage of the overall quota and are allowed to harvest their fish without restrictions until they reach their specific quotas.
A similar system exists for the commercial sector of the red snapper fishery, and in the column, Olander acknowledged that catch-shares are sometimes the best way to protect the interests of commercial fishers. For the recreational sector, however, Olander says the catch-share system “fits about as well as a ballerina’s tights on a sumo wrestler.”
One of Olander’s problems with the concept is no one has offered a reasonable and equitable method for applying it. If tags are involved, anglers would have to either purchase tags or be awarded them through a lottery. Either technique would lock certain anglers out of the fishery, awarding a public resource to the wealthy or lucky.
That’s what has happened on the commercial side, where so-called Sea Lords who own large percentages of the quota lease it out to fishers, who actually go out and harvest the fish. Many of the Sea Lords stay on dry land earning massive paychecks from a public resource.
The American Sportfishing Association also blasted Louisiana’s proposal, sending out a Friday news release stating it was “deeply concerned with the long-term ramifications of the pilot program that the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries unveiled on May 25, to the surprise of the entire recreational fishing community.”