If you care about eating fresh fish or about having fishermen support your community economy, then please read this.
One of the tragedies of fisheries management is that it is so complicated that it alienates the people who should be the most involved. In this column I attempt to explain one way of understanding what is happening.
It is April, and I am boarding a 35-foot lobster boat built by R.P Boat Shop in Steuben, Maine, but I am in Morro Bay, California. Even more odd to me, the fishing vessel Dorado is rigged to jig for groundfish. Roger Cullen captains the Dorado, and is a member of the Central Coast Sustainable Groundfish Association.
Sustainable in this case cuts a couple of different ways. He moved to a lobster boat from a larger trawler to cut fuel costs. He soaks his gear for short periods, two to six hours at a time, and also uses fish traps to bring up fish that are sold into California markets. He is a part of a move toward more surgical fishing and he has recapitalized his business in response to the dramatic shift toward privatizing access to fish along the Pacific coast.
The Dorado demonstrates how far some fishermen are going to stay financially viable while the fisheries management system they participate in reorganizes in ways that could lead to their demise. The disorienting experience of being on a Maine boat in California is relevant to recent groundfish management changes here in Maine, and has its roots in a history of fisheries management decisions that assume markets are the most efficient tools for managing public resources. Most importantly, this experience raises questions about the compatibility of community-based and market-based approaches to fisheries management that are important to answer if we are to retain a small-boat fishery in Maine.
What are catch shares?
Today, market-based fisheries management schemes are termed “catch shares.” A few fishermen like catch shares, most are seriously concerned about them, and still others become downright livid upon hearing the words uttered.
Catch shares at the most general level grant individual fishermen pounds of fish that they can catch, sell, lease or trade when and how they like. On the West Coast, the predominant management scheme allots quota to individuals or corporations that can fish or lease their quota as desired. In New England, fishermen can fish their allocation of fish, but only if they cooperate with other fishermen in what are called “sectors.” Sectors shift the emphasis of management away from individuals and create a framework for fishermen to work together, something that is more aligned with the culture of fishing communities on the coast of Maine. They are cooperatives (501c5) organizations, where a board of fishermen set the rules for how a larger group of fishermen will fish, and in some cases, where.
In Maine we have three sectors, one based in Stonington, another based in Port Clyde and another based out of Portland. Although these sectors are based in specific communities, they have fishermen participating in them from many different ports. For example, the Port Clyde sector contains about 30 boats under 65 feet that fish out of Maine ports, some with gill-nets and others with otter-trawl gear. The Portland and Stonington based sectors have fishermen from throughout New England. The primary bond for proponents of catch-share schemes nationally is the belief that markets can best manage fisheries.
This transition toward privatizing the ocean’s fish has been underway for a long time. It started with the creation of the New England fishing territory. When the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone was enacted by the U.S. Government in 1976, primarily as a means to exclude foreign fleets, it also raised the prospect of how to count fish and manage fishermen in this territory. A grid was placed over the territory to ease the counting of fish. Through counting fish biologists could estimate how many groundfish are in the New England region. The science behind the total number of fish in the ocean informs the total allowable catch (TAC) that can be extracted from the territory. You need this type of cap on the total number of fish that can be caught in order to divide up the fish among individual fishermen. Just to be clear, I am not saying that the creation of territory was a deliberate part of a long-term plan to make privatization possible. I am only suggesting that a TAC is one of the components of a management system that is necessary to privatize fish.
With a territory in place, a guiding philosophy has to be adopted for managing the territory. The concept of “bioeconomics” became the means for achieving this extension of governance. Bioeconomics uses economic models to study the dynamics of living resources. It makes specific assumptions about fishermen’s behavior. The field was founded by a guy named H. Scott Gordon, who, in 1954 outlined how fishermen are driven to overexploit as long as fisheries are treated as a commons, where common property resources are defined as “free goods for the individual and scarce goods for society.” For Gordon, the ultimate question of fisheries management “is not the ecology of life in the sea as such, but man’s use of the resources for is own (economic) purposes.” What solution might North American economists (Gordon was Canadian) have for this drive to exploit? Deploy market forces.
Limiting entry to the groundfish fishery would be one of the first market-based mechanisms debated for creating conservation in fisheries management. In 1977, within months of the creation of the New England Fisheries Management Council, councilors were unable to get a handle on how many fish were being taken from the ocean. Two observers at the time, Spencer Apollinio and Jacob Dykstra explained the debate this way “no management proposal aroused so much anger and so much opposition from the fishing industry and from many members of the council as any suggestion of limiting entry … While the management problems they had confronted with quotas made the debate on the variety of limited entry possibilities very reasonable, political opposition made such a dialogue virtually impossible.” Limited entry was ultimately dismissed in favor of many, many other management options that were tried over the first dozen years of the council’s existence.
How a fishing permit becomes a commodity
By late 1991/early 1992, 18 years after the creation of management councils, overfishing was still a problem. Conservation organizations sued the federal National Marine Fisheries Service for this oversight. This lawsuit pushed the councils to accept limited entry access to the groundfish fishery by 1994.
Based on this decision a marketplace for permits was established. Here is how a piece of paper, a fishing permit, becomes a commodity
It starts with an assumption about a link between human behavior and markets called rational choice. Rational choice implies an inherent ordering of the value of things. Item A, is preferred to item B, which is preferred to item C, therefore item A is preferable to C, if we are making rational choices. If item C is preferable to item B, then the market would respond to this irrational choice.
Two common assumptions underlie this theory of preference. First, a series of agreed-upon measuring rods (money) have been established and people prefer to use these measuring rods as an abstraction that allows them to come to a price for things (fishing permits). Second, rational choice assumes that people order, arrange, and measure in advance of trading (a permit broker might help with this by assigning values to permits based on the pounds of fish or the number of fishing days allotted to the permit by the government).
Before 1994, fishing permits were paper that anyone could purchase. If you wanted a groundfish permit, you paid a fee and applied for one. After this point in time, those who already had permits found themselves with an asset that had been granted through an act of the federal government at the recommendation of the council. The value ascribed to the permit was based on the number of days granted for fishing. The 88 days at sea (DAS) awarded to existing permit-holders became the measure by which one permit could be measured against another. When the government capped the number of permits and the resultant fishing days available in New England, they created a new measuring rod by which people could value permits. The permit, itself a piece of paper, had no inherent value, but the council process and the New England fisheries region brought a market for fishing permits into being.
Yet cranking down days at sea under this limited access program did not solve the problem of overfishing. By the 2009-2010 fishing year many fishermen only had 39 days to fish. Stock assessments introduced during 2009 suggested that the amount of days available to fish might be cut an additional 50 percent. The days at sea system was going to break many fishermen’s backs, and it was unclear if this management scheme was going to conserve the resource, so the New England Fisheries Management Council needed to respond. The outcome was to create sectors.
Anchor fish quotas in communities
Many people talk about sectors as a half measure, but halfway to what? I see two possible outcomes. One answer is half way to individualized quota management. The move toward individual quota types of catch shares clearly creates winners and losers. In 2005, a decade after after National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) implemented catch shares in Alaska in the form individual fishing quota, NMFS published a study documenting a 25 percent consolidation of ownership of their groundfish fishery, out of small ports, and into larger ports. A second possibility is that we deploy the cooperative aspects of sector management to anchor quota in communities as a way to ensure long-term access to the resource. In Morro Bay, fishermen have largely lost their access to the fish, but some fishermen are now working with The Nature Conservancy to see if there is a way to transfer trawl quota owned by the conservancy to their community. Most of Maine’s access to the groundfish fishery had already been lost before sectors were enacted. We can’t afford to lose any more. Like the fishermen in Morro Bay, we need to be working to anchor quota in Maine’s fishing communities so that as groundfish stocks rebuild, which we all believe they will, Maine fishermen will be able to go and catch the fish.
Banking permits for Maine communities is one answer to this challenge. The state of Maine may receive up to $2.9 million in federal funds to buy permits for rural communities (with populations less than 30,000) with small boat fleets (boats under 45 feet). The Island Institute is working with The Nature Conservancy and Penobscot East Resource Center to determine how we might compliment this effort by purchasing additional permits and allocating them through Maine sectors.
Market-based fisheries management continues to cascade into fisheries management in new and unpredictable ways. In 2009, opening day fishing prices were approximately $1 per pound for haddock in Maine. Today, fishing under far more stringent conservation measures, opening day garnered only 20 cents per pound. This price for haddock has not been seen in 20 years. The price at our local stores has not changed. Fish buyers are now creating a huge challenge to the success of this new management paradigm.
The fish used to belong to the people, but they increasingly belong to fishermen, nonprofits, and others who have the ability to buy up the resource. This trend toward privatizing the ocean’s fish has caused some fishermen to be very creative in order to survive, as evidenced by Captain Cullen’s boat. Cullen’s vision is similar to that of many folks in Maine: figure out how to anchor the benefit of fishing jobs in rural ports while make more money catching fewer fish. This begs a rethinking of the role of markets in fisheries management. Why can’t we also consider the economic benefits to a community and conservation outcomes, as a different kind of market-driven efficiency?
Successful fisheries management needs to be understood as far more than economic efficiency where the fewest number of boats catch the optimum number of fish. Instead we need to manage for optimum participation, whereby the maximum number of fishermen can participate, contributing to their communities’ economic wellbeing while rebuilding and retaining healthy fish stocks. It is urgent that a solution is found that merges community-based and market-based management so that we stop the loss of fishermen and fishing communities from the coast of Maine coast.
Rob Snyder is vice-president of programs at the Island Institute.