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ENVIRONMENT: Fishers Learn to Share Shrinking Catch

Stephen Leahy

SAN DIEGO, California, Feb 10 2009 (IPS) - With the oceans in crisis, where will our fish – an important source of protein for billions of people – come from?

Innovative new fisheries management tools called "catch share" have begun in recent years and promise to keep fish on the menu for future generations, according to experts at the recent Seafood Summit in San Diego.

"Adaptation is the key – adaptation and innovation," Kristjan Davidsson, former CEO of Iceland Seafood International, told over 450 conference attendees last week.

"It is not hard to see that sustainability is the way to go but that requires collaboration with all sectors," Davidsson said.

The summit brought together fishers, fish farmers, multinational seafood corporations and seafood buyers, along with conservationists and scientists, to debate and find common ground on how to create a sustainable seafood industry and protect the oceans.

Fish account for 28 percent of the animal protein consumed in Asia and 16 percent globally. North America is at the low end of the scale, with fish accounting for just 6.6 percent of animal protein, according to data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation.

It is widely known that in the majority of fisheries there are too many boats vying with each other to catch fewer and fewer fish. Fish quotas just mean that hundreds of boats fish intensively and indiscriminately to get as many fish as possible before the total quota is reached and the fishery closed.

"The government rules didn't work," said Wes Erikson, a fisher and restaurant owner from British Columbia (BC).

"We had just six days to grab all we could," Erikson said.

That hyper-competitive situation was dangerous for fishers, gear was lost, bycatch was extremely high, and they caught more than they should, he confessed. Instead of continuing along this path, local fishers created an integrated groundfish vessel catch share system.

Individual fishers are each allowed to net a designated percentage of the total amount for each of 60 ground fish species set aside for fishing annually. The total cap on each fish type is adjusted yearly by the government according to how the well the species is doing.

In an equal share fishery, 50 boats equally divide up a 100 tonne quota of halibut so each is allowed to catch two tonnes. Shares could be traded as well. This "ownership" over the stock provides a financial incentive to grow it.

The key to making it work is each vessel must account for everything they catch. Detailed logs are backed up by a video system that automatically records every fish caught. The logs and videos are audited by a third party and the data is considered so accurate that it is now used by scientists, Erikson said.

"We removed the competition at sea by working it out on shore," he said

Setting the original quotas was very difficult and involved long and loud arguments between governments, scientists, conservationists and fishers. But the hard work was more than worth it, he said. "We under-fish now and get better quality. And we can fish any time of the year."

"If catch share fisheries were in place in the early 1990s, only a few fisheries would have collapsed," said Kate Bonzon of the Environmental Defence Fund, a U.S.-based NGO.

Bonzon said that is the implication of a 2008 study by resource economists at the University of California that compared data from fisheries around the world. It showed that fish stocks where there were catch share fisheries had reversed their stock declines and were growing.

On North America's west coast, studies showed that fisheries that switched to catch share ended the chronic and massive overfishing and dramatically reduced bycatch. The number of fishing boats also declined, but those that remained made more money at a lower cost, Bonzon said.

"The fact is there are simply too many fishing vessels, period," she said.

Most of the boats that left the BC groundfish catch share were what Erickson calls "bad actors" who simply switched to non-catch share fisheries or sold their allocation and made a lot of money. "Each community can design their system to meet their local needs," he said.

Can this work for the rest of the world?

Not every fishery needs to have hi-tech automatically triggered video cameras, said Bonzon. There are other ways of doing catch share which some countries are employing. Some fisheries in Chile have catch share and Peru's huge anchovy fishery is going that way this year.

"BC's wild salmon fishery refuses to consider it even though they are in deep trouble," said Erickson.

A similar culture and tradition of opposition exists in the North American east coast fisheries, acknowledged Bonzon. But stocks are so low now that some New England fishers are desperate enough to try it, she said.

It takes time to put in the rules and costs money to reduce the overcapacity of a fishery, but the data shows "catch share aligns resource sustainability and fishers' economics", Bonzon concluded.