What a great idea!  

The proverbial pink elephant in the room, that this author does not mention, is that Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ) programs are schemes to privatize a public resource. Fisheries resources in the United States are a public resource. Although the Magnuson Stevens Act (the federal law that governs fisheries) explicitly says that limited access privilege programs (fisheries legal jargon for quota programs) do not confer property rights, they do in practice act like property. In fact just two weeks ago in Canada, which has similar laws governing fisheries except that the Crown owns the fish, the Supreme Court ruled during a bankruptcy proceeding that a fishermen's creditors could force the sale of his quota valued at around $600,000 in order to collect his debt. The hapless fisherman had argued that his fishing quota only allowed access to fish not ownership. The Court found otherwise. Quota can be seized in divorce or bankruptcy proceedings, used as collateral for loans, and more often than not end up in the hands of people who do not participate in the fishery, which gets at the heart of the problem of IFQs

In short what ends up happening in IFQ fisheries is that a few fishermen or processors win big and the rest lose. There are a number of measures that can be added to IFQ fisheries to mitigate against too much consolidation. For instance, you can limit how much quota share a fishermen can acquire or you can require that the quota holders participate in the fishery. The model IFQ fishery (that proponents of IFQs refer to ad nauseum) is the Alaskan halibut/sablefish fishery which has owner/operator requirements - meaning that in order to hold quota you have to participate in the fishery either as crew or captain. This IFQ program astonishingly has no such requirement. This is the surest way to see the value of the fishery leave fishing communities. Additionally, the amount of quota that fishermen are allowed to hold under this program is far too high and is going to lead to excessive consolidation of the industry along the coast. Indeed the Environmental Impact Statement for this IFQ program predicts that the trawl fleet for the entire West Coast will shrink from around 130 boats to around 40 boats! The processing sector is expected to consolidate into a handful of the larger ports leaving smaller ports and fishing communities in the lurch.

As for the much touted conservation benefits that are supposed to accrue from IFQs, traditional fishery management tools such as time and area closures, size limits, limited entry programs, and Total Allowable Catch work just as well. In IFQ programs that have been established, it is other fishery management tools used in the program that provide the conservation benefits - such as having a firm Total Allowable Catch based on solid science that the industry can not go over. Catch shares (which is just a percentage of Total Allowable Catch) can be an effective tool to manage fisheries. You can cut up a TAC anyway you want, but if catch does not exceed TAC there will be no fishing assuming the TAC was based on sound science. It's really that simple. However, giving fishermen or other entities quasi-ownership rights in perpetuity over portions of a public resource is the wrong way to go about it.

A new idea that has been emerging in fisheries management (the real cutting edge of fisheries management) is to assign communities rather than individuals quota. In fact a Government Accountability Office study of IFQ programs found that the easiest and most direct way to protect the economic viability of fishing communities is to assign quota directly to fishing communities and let them decide how to use it. In this scenario the value of the fishery cannot leave the fishing communities. Interestingly, the Magnuson Stevens Act already allows for fishing communities to receive quota under the LAPPs provision. Congress ordered the Pacific Council to consider a community quota program as an alternative to Individual Quotas. The Council failed to do this. Community quota programs have already proven successful in Alaska and are being tried in Maine and other parts of the country. The most successful example to date is a group of fishermen on Cape Cod who've pioneered community approaches to fishing.

If you are still not convinced that IFQ programs are privatization schemes designed to consolidate the value of a public resource into a few hands, consider this: A few large processors originally asked the Council for 50% of the harvesting quota. (Harvesting share typically goes to fishermen in these schemes and a request for harvesting share by processors was highly unusual.) That number was later ratcheted down to 20%. Three processors currently handle 80% of the groundfish that are caught on the entire West Coast. A UC Davis economist estimated the value of that 20% of quota share to be worth $100 million. At a time when many West Coast fishermen are struggling (although not just because of historic overfishing - think habitat loss and mismanagement) the vulgarity of a $100 million give-away to the most powerful processors on the West Coast was too much for even the Pacific Council. They voted it down.

This IFQ program is a boondoggle being sold as cutting edge management. Scratch the surface and you can see it for what it is: a resource grab and fisheries managers divesting themselves of actually managing the fishery. The old industrial model of low value high volume has failed this fishery and led to overfishing. No one disputes that. However, IFQs are just a way to prolong this failed model. The fishery needs to move to a high value low volume artisanal model of community fisheries that sell their product locally, use less destructive gears such as vertical hook and line, longline, and traps, and spread the catch along the entire West Coast. That will truly benefit fishing communities, attract new participants into the fishery, and assure the longterm health of the fishery.