What do you guys think of catch shares?

N.H. conference zeroes in on fishing 'catch shares'
By Richard Gaines
Staff Writer



For the next two days, the 55 or so officials, appointed part-time legislators, scientists and staff who preside over the New England fishery will assemble in Bretton Woods, N.H., to examine in great detail the new fishing economic system known as catch shares — a system they have already approved for the groundfishery next year.

Otherwise known as individual tradeable quotas — or ITQs — fishermen's catch shares would convert the swimming common property of the nation's 200-mile exclusive economic zone into negotiable catching rights, thus converting public property into assignable private commodities. And the new system already approved by the New England Fishery Management Council has drawn growing concern from the fishing industry in Gloucester, throughout New England and in other fishing communities around the country and the world.

Rarely in American history has a new economic system created on a drawing board been installed to replace a pre-existing system, especially one that has been working. Indeed, while many of America's economic sectors faltered badly in the general market malaise last year, fisheries seemed barely affected.
But that is what is happening now. Not only are catch shares coming to the New England groundfishery, but it is projected in a different form to rationalize the closely-related scallop fishery — the nation's most lucrative — and, as a matter of de facto policy, the Obama administration, through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is pushing hard to engineer catch shares as the fishing regulatory format to be used everywhere as soon as possible.

Resistance to the approach is now wide and deep. Wherever catch shares have been imposed here in places and in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Iceland, the one universal impact of ITQs has been to radically consolidate fishing capacity in a small number of hands. A larger number of smaller fishing boat businesses become a smaller number of larger fishing boat businesses.
Jane Lubchenco, President Obama's oceans and fisheries administrator, is not scheduled to be a party to the New England council's conference held this week at the Mount Washington resort hotel at Bretton Woods, where an international conference was held in 1944 to reorganize the global financial system. But her virtual presence will be palpable.

Developed and championed by the Environmental Defense Fund, where Lubchenco was then a board member, the new economic concept was converted into policy with Obama's selection and appointment of Lubchenco as the head of NOAA this past spring.
Lubchenco made no secret of her commitment to catch shares and essentially privatizing the fisheries, and she participated in an elaborate campaign to introduce catch shares as the salvation of the fisheries in the transition from President George W. Bush to Obama.

Lubchenco did not make it clear to the Senate Commerce Committee at her confirmation hearing that ending the traditional concept of wild fish stocks as public property and converting into a commodities market was her primary mission. Still, the drum beat for catch shares by the alliance of the Environmental Defense Fund, which minted the idea, and the Pew Environment Group, which financed elaborate and fiercely disputed scientific studies intended to make the case for the need for the regulatory shift, has continued, and Lubchenco has pursued the change with single-minded determination.

Although cautionary tales about catch shares have been arriving regularly — Ecotrust Canada issued one in June — Lubchenco and the alliance of ENGOs or environmental non-government organizations have ignored most of the warning signs.
EDF went so far as to publish on its Web site an analysis of the EcoTrust critique that made it seem that the two organizations agreed on the merits of ITQs.

"...Your blog posting makes our report sound like a glowing reference for ITQs and minimizes our critique of some fundamental problems as experienced in British Columbia, Canada," EcoTrust Canada shot back in response. "We are also not in agreement that catch shares alone will conserve fish stocks: other factors, like restricting destructive gear, ensuring proper enforcement and stock assessment, are perhaps even more important. In fact, we have seen fish stock declines in catch share fisheries in BC, including abalone, halibut and hake."

EDF was at it again last week. It posted a comment about the work of newly named Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom that presumed her work — which urges local management of common resources, and is being widely viewed as critical of the catch share format — was the foundation of its conception of catch shares. A number of counter comments on the EDF Web site guffawed at the stretch.
EctoTrust Canada will have a representative at the conference in Bretton Woods. Fisheries officials from the few places where catch shares or ITQs are in place are also flying in.

The conference participants will have much to ponder.
After working on a catch share system that reorganizes local fishermen into cooperatives known as sectors, the council in June complied with Lubchenco's challenge to vote in a catch share system without delay.

But in September, recognizing flaws in the design, the council voted to re-engineer some changes in the catches allowable to those fishermen who have elected to stay out of the catch share/sector system and instead fish in a common pool under the old style effort controls, which limit fishermen's days at sea and access to specific fishing grounds at various times. By contrast, the catch share system sets limits on the fishermen's allowable catch.

The co-sponsor of the Bretton Woods conference with the New England Fishery Management Council is Duke University's Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at the Nicholas School of the Environmental and Earth Sciences. Those organizations have a financial relationship with EDF and Pew, which has distributed many millions to support academic schools and research reports that share the general goals of the funding organization.

Pew and EDF share the drumbeat for extreme measures to halt allegedly rampant "overfishing," but the science they've cited to make their case has come under a mounting number of credibility questions. Lubchenco, for example, participated in writing a policy paper sponsored by EDF to convince Obama of the need for catch shares, but cited a report funded by Pew grants that without catch shares or the like, the next generation would have little to catch except jellyfish; that report has been highly disputed sat by scientists.
The conference keynote speaker tomorrow will be Monica Medina, the former chief counsel for NOAA in President Clinton's administration who shifted to Pew before returning to government as a member of the Obama transition team.

After the transition team brought Lubchenco to the president, Lubchenco brought Medina back to NOAA on a $100,000 plus contract to head a catch shares task force, which is due to report back to Lubchenco before the end of the month.

A former Pew scholar while at Oregon State University, Lubchenco hired Justin Kenney from Pew to be NOAA's director of communications. Kenney's wife, Amy Schick Kenney, is heading the delegation from Duke's Nicholas School.
The conference is open to the public, but has not been geared toward the public's edification. The staff of the council said the goal is to give the government officials the best understanding of the catch share system.


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