Sharing the catch is good for fishermen -- and fish

[n2doc]

By Kenneth R. Weiss, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 19, 2008
DUTCH HARBOR, ALASKA -- After years of dismal reports about collapsing fish stocks and failed fisheries management, scientists will report today that they have discovered how to reverse the trend: Give fishermen exclusive rights to a portion of the catch.

The approach runs contrary to prevailing notions of cutthroat economic competition evident in, for example, "Deadliest Catch," the TV series about fishermen braving rough seas to catch as much crab as they can in just a few days. But a team of ecologists and economists say that sharing, rather than competing, can make fishing safer, preserve fish populations and even help stocks recover.

"It's good for the fish, it's good for the fishermen, but it's not so good for TV shows," said Steven D. Gaines, a marine ecologist at UC Santa Barbara.

The Alaskan king crab fishery switched over to "individual fishing quotas" several years ago, following the success stories of Alaskan halibut and pollock and other fisheries in New Zealand and Iceland -- where shares of the catch have been parceled out to existing fishermen, permitting them to fill their quotas in a more rational way.

Today, Gaines joins a pair of resource economists, who analyzed fisheries around the world, in publishing a study in the journal Science that shows how these quotas granted to individual fishermen or fishing cooperatives appear to be working.

The team studied more than 50 years of catch data from 11,135 fisheries worldwide that another team of scientists had compiled to show that nearly a third of the world's commercial fisheries have collapsed, including the cod fishery off New England and many bottom-dwelling rockfish fisheries off California.

Scientists predicted that if overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction continued unabated, all of the world's fisheries would collapse by 2048. A fishery is considered collapsed if catches fall to 10% of historic highs.

But the small fraction of those fisheries -- 121 to be exact -- that switched to individual quotas were only half as likely to collapse, according to the study led by Christopher Costello, a resource economist at UC Santa Barbara.

more:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fish19-2008sep19,0,4419776.story

[Phoonzang]

1. What's this? Sharing you say?

Smells like communism.