Are individual transferrable quotas (ITQs) really the best tool for fisheries management, or have they just become a one-size fits all solution?
This was the question pursued in a paper released this summer by the University of Alaska Fairbanks entitled Moving beyond panaceas in fisheries governance.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the paper reflects a discussion by social scientists from around the world at a workshop hosted by the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College in 2016.
The article “is a look at the disproportionate impact theses policies have had,” said co-author Courtney Carothers, Ph.D. Associate Professor at the University of Alaska’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences in an interview.
“These polices are often promoted as a panacea to solve all fisheries management problems and yet most of us in the room had been studying the social and community negative impacts” of ITQs.
“There’s really consistent findings that rural communities, indigenous communities, low income fishermen and younger, next generation fishermen have all been negatively impacted by these policies. It’s not really a surprising finding. The wealthy fishermen are the ones who purchased the rights.”
Carothers said she works a lot with fishermen in Alaska.
“Some of these ITQ systems went in 20 years ago, but people are still pretty upset about that shift in terms of the individual gifted those rights, people who were given those rights and are charging the next generation access. It doesn’t seem fair.”
Carothers said she thinks there’s a common perception or trend of fishermen being discontented in many countries when it comes to ITQs.
“Yes, it’s supposed to be a public resource, but its treated like private property and you have to pay lease fees oftentimes to go fish for a public resource and then there’s a company or individual profiting off of that. It seems to cause a lot of discomfort for fishermen.”
It also raises some legal questions.
“In the U.S., the legal provisions are very specific. An ITQ is an access right to the fish, not ownership of the fish themselves. The fish are a public resource, but access rights are treated as commodities. There are some legal questions around that because the rights to those fish can be revoked. Does that mean the person that owned the rights should be compensated?”
Initially, ITQs were introduced as a management tool to “promote economic efficiency for the whole fleet. The efficient users would buy out the inefficient users and that’s really shifted,” said Carothers. “Now, ITQs are talked about as this whole panacea for safety and environmental conservation. All of these different goals that really don’t have anything to do with the market-based tool of allocating the right to fish through a commodity.”
Carothers said the common view that ITQs are a great policy tool for all sorts of fisheries is picked apart and analysed in the paper, which also offers “a diagnostic toolkit for managers and others to use” when creating a fisheries management plan.
“The Environmental Defense Fund is really promoting these policies across the globe and we’re trying to bring attention to the fact that they tend to create a lot of social upheaval and equity concerns,” said Carothers.
“It’s really important to evaluate why they’re being proposed and what sort of goals they’re serving. Many of these goals in our toolkit that we’re inviting people to look at more closely would not prescribe an ITQ but would prescribe a different type of tool.”
The full text of the paper is available online at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/22/1716545115
