Ecotrust Testimony on Fisheries Catch Shares
Last week, my Ecotrust colleague Ed Backus, Vice President of Community Ecosystem Services, testified in a Congressional subcommittee on fisheries catch shares. Catch shares are a type of individual fishing quota, a means of regulating or managing access to a fishery.
From his testimony:
I am the Founder/Chair of the North Pacific Fisheries Trust, a $6M community quota revolving investment fund.
We are working with longline fishermen in Southeast Alaska on the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust, working with many communities in the Community Quota Entity program in Gulf of Alaska, and community fishing associations in Port Orford, Oregon, San Francisco and San Diego, California.
Our finance activities are but tailpipe solutions that struggle to work as a result of some weak policy choices that have been made in existing catch share programs. Choices that we are on the verge of repeating in the pending Pacific trawl IQ program on the U.S. west coast.
Catch shares (known as limited access privilege programs in the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act) are a good tool for establishing individual vessel accountability in a fishery with a clear Annual Catch Limit, can stop the “race for fish” thereby increasing the safety of fishing and fishing fleets, and creating a more even flow of fresh, higher value seafood products to consumer markets.
But catch share programs also generate powerful financial incentives that can warp the long-term outcomes and success of such programs. These effects are growing stronger and in some cases just manifesting themselves.
Catch share programs need to be carefully designed need to address long term issues in community stability, economic viability, and intergenerational processes. We call this the 3E’s: ecosystems, economics, and equity. Fisheries are a public trust and community economic development asset and should remain as such. In October 2007, Ecotrust developed a Market Design Workshop for Limited Access Privilege Programs in U.S. Fisheries at the Harvard Business School. Many new markets have been created from public trust assets. Catch share programs in fisheries should learn from these experiences.
Recommendations
NOAA needs to strengthen the new policy on Catch Shares to set the following required standards of U.S. fishery management councils if and when they undertake catch share programs:
- Create catch share design pilot programs with fixed terms for quota ownership, periodic auctioning of all or part of the catch shares, triple bottom line (ecological, economic, social) performance based allocations, and other strategies to understand the effects of quota programs on long-term sustainability.
- Mandate direct allocation of quota shares to community entities.
- Mandate community ownership of at least 10-25% of all quota shares in each fishery management council region.
- Require the development of Community Fishing Associations, Regional Fishery Associations and other community structures now authorized in the Magnuson Stevens Act as enacted.
- Initiate a national quota share trading registry to promote ownership, transaction and pricing transparency.
NOAA should also act to:
- Fund the National Fisheries Innovation Fund of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for the support of community entities interested in participating in catch share programs.
- Review existing catch share programs in terms of their performance to date, to determine what those experiences can offer for the design of new programs, rather than putting in motion a set of parallel efforts that are not informed by what has happened on the ground/dock/ocean already.
More information:
- Full testimony (pdf)
- Video of testimony (on YouTube)
- A cautionary tale about ITQs (individual transferable quotas)
