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August 6, 2009
Hatteras commercial fishermen are uneasy about catch-share programs
By SUSAN WEST
Hatteras
Island fishermen say catch-shares, an up-and-coming fisheries
management system pitched as the last hope for the U.S. commercial
fishing industry, could sink their small-boat fleet.
“I’ve seen the future, and it’s not us,” said
Hatteras charter-boat captain and commercial fisherman Ernie Foster
after a trip last year to British Columbia where 11 fisheries are
managed under catch-share programs.
That catch-shares -- also called individual fishing quotas, limited
access privilege programs, or rationalization -- would substitute a
more orderly structure for the free-style competitive essence of
fishing is certain.
What isn’t so clear, however, is the fate of fishing communities
such as Hatteras Island that are made up of fishermen who own and
operate small boats.
“We’re sitting at the precipice of a period of governmental
innovation and entrepreneurship that is as significant as changes
FDR pushed through in things like Social Security,” said David
Festa, West Coast operations vice-president for Environmental Defense
Fund, a non-profit heavily engaged in promoting catch-shares as a
solution to overfishing, in April.
Festa spoke during a session called “Innovative Funding for
Sustainable Fisheries and Oceans” at the 2009 Milken Institute
Global Conference in Los Angeles.
The annual conference draws financial consultants, business leaders,
philanthropists, and others interested in finding investment
opportunities in solutions to problems in health care, education, and
the environment, according to the conference Web site.
Festa told the audience that catch-share programs result in better
compliance with conservation measures, higher revenue for fishing
boats, and more stable communities.
He said one reason catch-shares haven’t been used in more U.S.
fisheries is that fishermen, particularly in smaller communities, often
don’t have the capital resources to “cross this valley of
death between the current system and the promise of a better
future.”
Capital resources are important because catch-shares convey the right to land fish and that right has a marketable value.
Under most catch-share programs, the government allocates initial
shares, or percentages, of the total harvest quota for a fishery to
individual fishermen, corporations, or fishing associations, using a
formula usually based on past landings. Larger shares go to the
bigger boats that landed more fish.
After the initial allocation, shares can be sold, bought, or leased,
allowing the marketplace trade in shares to sort out who gets to fish.
Hatteras fishermen say they’d be competing with larger corporate
fishing operations in the initial allocation and then again later in
the market for shares.
“It is alarming to me and to many other watermen in our coastal
communities how the race seems to be on to flush the last vestiges of
our trade down the toilet along with our heritage and replace it with a
corporate mindset that will essentially be a token of what our fishery
was in the past,” wrote commercial fisherman Jeff Oden in a
recent letter to a federal panel.
Hatteras fishermen say they’ll be hard-pressed to come up with
enough money to buy or lease enough shares to keep their businesses
afloat.
Festa from Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) thinks financial investors
could help fill the gap in capital resources available to commercial
fishermen.
“There is a significant business opportunity here,” he told the audience at the Milken conference.
He said a four-fold increase in the value of catch-shares over time is common.
Larry Band, a consultant to EDF who also participated in the Milken
conference, said the value has increased by as much as 10 or 20 times
in some fisheries.
Gulf of Mexico red snapper shares are reported to be selling for $20 to
$25 per pound this year. Alaska halibut shares were selling for
as much as $18.50 in 2006, the most recent information available from
the federal fisheries agency.
Band told the conference that besides investments in catch-shares,
financial opportunities exist in the data management, catch monitoring,
and brokerage systems used in catch-share management.
Returns could come from catch-share sales or auctions, landing fees, or
ownership of any future increases to total harvest quotas, according to
conference participants.
“It’s not telecom money, but it’s real money,” Festa said during the session.
Foster, the Hatteras fisherman, says there is a real sense of unease on
the docks that without safeguards to protect small-boat fleets, entire
fisheries could be owned by large corporations and outside investors.
“We’ve been told that fisheries are overcapitalized, yet
here we are talking about using a system that would infuse more capital
into fisheries,” Foster said.
A federal task-force is expected to issue this month a draft policy
report that would guide fisheries managers as they consider and
implement more catch-share programs in U.S. fisheries. A period
for public comment will be announced after the draft document is
released.
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