Island Free Press ...Fishing

A new report on U.S. fisheries management has Outer Banks commercial fishermen wondering whether their small businesses will be swallowed alive in a system designed to shrink America’s fishing fleet.

The report, called “Oceans of Abundance,” asks President-elect Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress to mandate the use of “catch share” programs in most fisheries.

“Catch-share” is a relatively new name for rationalization plans, also called individual fishing quotas or limited access privilege programs.

Under these systems, the total harvest quota for a fishery is divided into shares that the government allocates to individual fishermen or corporations, usually on the basis of the number of fish they caught in past years. The fishery then undergoes rationalization as fishermen allocated small shares stop fishing and sell or lease their shares to other fishermen, leaving a smaller, more efficient fleet.

Advocates say conservation goals are more easily achieved with catch share programs because individual fishermen are held to individual harvest limits.

Advocates also say it offers economic stability for the commercial fishing industry.

But on the Outer Banks, where most fishermen captain small boats and often work single-handedly, fishermen worry that they’ll be squeezed out of the fisheries they depend on to pull in a year-round income from fishing.

With the rich, biological diversity of species found off the Outer Banks, captains fish in a variety of fisheries, leaving them vulnerable in a management system where they’d be competing for shares with fishermen who concentrate on one particular species.

Fishermen worry that they will face strong marketplace competition from corporations with large bankrolls when they try to buy or lease shares. They foresee the demise of the family-owned and family-operated fishing businesses that have been the hallmark of the Outer Banks fishery.

“The highliners in a fishery will be the only beneficiaries. Everyone else will be starved out,” predicts Jeff Oden, a commercial fisherman in Hatteras.

Catch share programs aren’t a new idea. Individual fishing quota systems have been used in a several U.S. fisheries, including the Bering Sea crab fishery, the surf clam and quahog fishery, and the Alaska halibut-sable fishery. And, President George W. Bush made rationalization a cornerstone of his ocean policy.

Still, “Oceans of Abundance” is likely to propel catch share programs to the forefront of management initiatives. The report recommends that all management plans be evaluated for catch share management by 2012, and that catch shares programs be used in at least 50 percent of plans by 2016.

Two-dozen politicians and scientists, including former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, former Commerce and Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, and former director of the Environmental Protection Agency Christine Todd Whitman, helped develop the recommendations.

The Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropic foundation controlled by the children and grandchildren of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, funded the report.

And, fishermen see great irony in money from the Goliath retailer, often criticized for laying waste to small, locally-owned Main Street stores, supporting a system that could strike another serious blow to local, coastal economies.

The Walton Family Foundation gave $242 million in grants in 2007. Most of the money went to charter schools and school voucher programs, but about $33 million went to environmental projects, including $3.6 million to promote rationalization of the fishing industry.

Environmental Defense Fund, one of the organizations that helped put together the group that developed “Oceans of Abundance” received $1.5 million in 2007 and $3.5 million in 2006 from the foundation, and opened an office in Bentonville, Arkansas, the hometown of Wal-Mart, last year.

“Environmental Defense talks about how catch share programs will result in vibrant fishing communities, but big business is going to end up controlling not only processing but also harvesting, and the local, independent small businesses will be gone,” says Oden.

The most recently approved catch share program in the U.S. allocates 20 percent of the West Coast hake harvest to processing plants and allocates the groundfish harvest quota to qualifying boat captains.

Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, called the plan “a massive give-away of a public resource that will lead to consolidation and ownership by a few large processors creating a plantation-style fishery, turning fishermen into sharecroppers.”

Grader and others have urged fisheries regulators to allocate catch shares to fishing communities that would then decide how to use the shares to protect local jobs and fish houses. Federal regulators have that authority, but have not formally considered an option to individual shares.