The BBC had a fascinating story a few
days back about small-scale fishermen in Cumbria and the new regulations
that are threatening to do them in. The fishermen, known as haaf netters, stand
in the Solway Firth in water up to their
armpits, scooping up fish with a net that hangs from a pole across their
shoulders. They then kill the fish by whacking them over the head with a wooden
mallet. They've been doing this since the Vikings were around, but lately
they've been catching more fish than the recreational fishermen upstream would like.
So, over the past years, they've been subject to increasingly strict regulations
about when they can fish—regulations they say are putting them out of business.
These regulations are a good example of the most common—and most inefficient—strategy
for preventing commercial overfishing: making it harder to fish. Sometimes
this takes the form of equipment restrictions—say, a requirement to use smaller
nets. Sometimes it takes the form of a shortened fishing season. Either way,
it doesn't work. Commercial fishing boats that are forced to use smaller nets will generally
just stay out longer, burning more fuel and taking up more crew time but coming
back with the same amount of fish. A shortened fishing season just motivates fishermen
to fish more intensely while they can—buying bigger, more powerful boats
so they can get to the fishing grounds more quickly and catch more fish once
they get there. This arms race—which often results in further reductions to the
fishing season that, in turn, leave the powerful new boats sitting in port—benefits
nobody.
The better strategy is to limit each fisherman to a certain amount of fish per
year and not worry about how or when he goes about catching it. This is usually
done by giving out tradable permits that represent a fraction of the total
catch allowed each year in the fishery. New
Zealand and Iceland
regulate most of their fisheries with quota systems, but for some reason they
haven't caught on in the United States.
In the main place quotas have been adopted—in Alaska, to regulate the halibut fishery—the
fishermen seem to consider
them a success. Perhaps the 50-odd remaining haaf netters should take their cues and start campaigning for a quota system that would allow each of them
to bop x number of fish over the head each year.
--Rob Inglis, High Country News