Use of CFA should be explored for quota distribution Letter to the Editor, Kodiak Daily Mirror by Charles McCallum Sep 20, 2013 Many Kodiak residents remember with pain and regret the negative impacts of Bering Sea crab rationalization. Many are also aware of the negative community impacts from the rationalizing of fisheries in Iceland, New Zealand, and our own East Coast. Past experience tells us that when catch share programs (rationalization) are put in place, communities suffer significant negative impacts. The City and Borough of Kodiak are to be commended for their foresight in forming the Kodiak Fisheries Workgroup and dedicating time and resources to engaging as a full participant at the North Pacific Fishery Management Council with regard to how community interests are best protected if the Central Gulf trawl fleet is transitioned to a catch share system. Prior to just a few short decades ago there was no such thing as “catch shares.” Catch share programs emerged as an application of property rights in fisheries on the theory that giving rights to the fishermen would increase their buy-in and commitment to long-term sustainability and address undesirable outcomes that result from the race for fish: wasteful bycatch is one of the most pressing of those issues in the policy debates before us now. Typically, when we as a nation decide to distribute a public asset, such as forest resources or mining rights, we sell it to the highest bidder. While many economists believe this is the best idea for fishing rights, standard practice to date in the U.S. has been to simply give quota away to the historical participants in the fishery. Thus the fishermen who receive free catch share quota are protected but the fishery dependent community is not protected from the consequences of capital flight; rapid consolidation, loss of crew jobs, high lease rates; and ultimately, in the long run, the loss of residents who are prosperous individual fishermen with the attendant loss of business income throughout the community including fishery support businesses. Many economists argue that strong, fully transferable property rights are necessary to achieve the benefits of a catch share program. But Seth Macinko and Daniel Bromley and others make a very important point that to stop the race for fish and provide the tools necessary to reduce bycatch only one thing is really needed — and that is that the fishermen should have only the right to fish a set quota of fish. That’s it. The ability to buy and sell the catch share quota is not necessary to stop the race for the fish or provide the tools to stop wasteful bycatch. Additionally, for full community protection, the community must have some way of ‘anchoring’ the fishing activity of boots on deck fishermen in Kodiak so that forty years from now you still have a vibrant fishing community where prosperous individual fishermen walk the docks, streets, and boat decks of Kodiak. Henry Hazlitt, a famous free market economist, once said: "While certain policies would, in the long run, benefit everybody, other policies benefit one group at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently, It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible." Those who stand to receive another financial windfall if a traditional catch share solution is implemented will have many plausible sounding explanations for why their latest ‘tweak’ to their catch share proposal will fully protect the community but the community should be skeptical and keep an open mind regarding new approaches. One solution that absolutely must be fully explored would provide that 100 percent of the quota is allocated directly to the community via a community fishery association (CFA) for the purpose of creating fair and equitable fishing opportunities to historical participants while providing greater stability for the processors, local support businesses, and the community in general than past catch share programs have done. If this sounds radical, I would ask you to consider that it should sound radical that we should purposely choose a program that we KNOW will severely damage the community if we have not given a full and genuine effort to find a community based solution that works for fishermen, processors, local businesses, and the community of Kodiak as a whole while achieving the goal of ending the race for fish and reducing bycatch. Charles McCallum is executive director of the Gulf of Alaska Coastal Communities Coalition and the fisheries adviser to the Lake and Peninsula Borough. He lives in Anchorage, Alaska.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 17:17:22 +0000
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