Pro: Individual Fishing Quotas

Individual Fishing Quotas are critical to sustain the fishing industry – Iceland and New Zealand prove solvency

Vince, Gaia. Science writer and broadcaster 2012. He is particularly interested in how humans are transforming planet Earth and the impacts our changes are having on societies and on other species "How the World's Oceans Could Be Running out of Fish." BBC Future. Smart Planet, 21 Sept. 2012. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120920-are-we-running-out-of-fish Web. 30 June 2014. CS

Clearly, industrialised countries are not about to return to traditional methods. However, the disastrous management of the industry needs to be reformed if we are to restore fisheries to a sustainable level. In the EU alone, restoring stocks would result in greater catches of an estimated 3.5 million tonnes, worth £2.7 billion a year. Rather than having a system in which the EU members each hustle for the biggest quotas – which are already set far beyond what is sustainable – fisheries experts suggest individual governments should set quotas based on stock levels in their surrounding waters. Fishermen should be given responsibility over the fish they hunt – they have a vested interest in seeing stocks improve, after all – and this could be in the form of individual tradable catch shares of the quotas. Such policies end the tragedy of the commons situation whereby everyone grabs as much as they can from the oceans before their rival nets the last fish, and it’s been used successfully in countries from Iceland to New Zealand to the US. Research shows that managing fisheries in this way means they are twice as likely to avoid collapse as open-access fisheries. In severely depleted zones, the only way to restore stocks is by introducing protected reserves where all fishing is banned. In other areas, quota compliance needs to be properly monitored – fishing vessels could be licensed and fitted with tracking devices to ensure they don’t stray into illegal areas, spot-checks on fish could be carried out to ensure size and species, and fish could even be tagged, so that the authorities and consumers can ensure its sustainable source.

Pro: Individual Fishing Quotas

Catch share programs have been successful- they create financial incentives for fisheries to adopt sustainable practices, and give fisheries the flexibility in their approach to fishing

DAVID FESTA, DIANE REGAS, and JUDSON BOOMHOWER Issues in Science and Technology 2013, Festa is director, Diane Regas is managing director, and Judson Boomhower is a fellow of the Oceans Program at Environmental Defense in Washington, DC, Sharing the Catch, Conserving the Fish, Issues in Science and Technology, http://issues.org/24-2/festa/

In 1995, regulators changed the rules of the game and implemented a catch share program—one of the first in the United States. Under this system, fishermen can catch halibut nine months a year—as long as they catch only their share of the total allowable catch. Compliance with catch limits is now nearly 100% for individual fishermen, and overall the fishery usually winds up erring on the safe side and is under its catch limits. The success of the halibut catch share system has inspired others; there are now nine catch share programs in the United States. Experience in other publicly owned natural resources areas, such as national forests, the atmosphere, and the electromagnetic spectrum, demonstrates that resource stewardship improves when regulators include some form of incentive-based management that better aligns the economic incentives of the users with the public policy objectives, including conservation, that must go hand in hand with granting private access to that resource. In the case of fisheries, catch limits, bycatch controls, and habitat protections—the traditional management tools—must continue. But these controls work better to promote sustainable fisheries when fishermen are accountable for catching only a dedicated percentage of the catch. Further, the value of the catch goes up when a fisherman can take his boat out when the price is right, rather than when every other boat goes out. Worldwide, programs that incorporate a right to a share of the catch have been implemented in various guises for more than 30 years, under names such as individual fishing quotas, individual transferable quotas, and territorial use rights in fishing. Their key feature is that fishermen (individually or in cooperatives) are assigned either a percentage share of the total allowable catch or of the fishing concessions in a given bay, bank, reef, or other ocean area (a system referred to as “territorial use rights for fishing”). Where such programs are used—in most fisheries in Iceland and New Zealand and in some fisheries in Australia, Canada, Mexico, Chile, and the United States—compliance with key limits improves and fishermen have been able to make a better living. In places where catch shares have been used to address overfishing, stocks have improved. As with some traditionally managed fisheries, catch share fisheries have a cap—the total allowable catch—that is based on a scientific assessment of the sustainable yield from the fishery. Fishermen are each allocated a specified percentage of the allowable catch, and their take is monitored. The catch shares are usually tradable, with some restrictions. Because the value of the percentage shares increases when stocks improve and managers raise the total allowable catch, catch shares create an incentive for fishermen to steward the resource. Equally important for conservation, especially in the near term, these approaches give fishermen a way to benefit financially immediately from fishing “cleaner”; that is, with less impact on the ecosystem. Consider bycatch, for instance. Bycatch saps profits. It is expensive to buy, deploy, and retrieve gear. The greater the ratio of target to nontarget species is, the higher the profits. When fishermen are not fishing against the clock, they can, and do, take the time to figure out how to increase that ratio. This is good for their bottom lines and for the marine ecosystem.

Con: Individual Fishing Quotas

The US is already taking steps to save the fish and the 2048 fishing collapse timeline is way too pessimistic

Washington Post 2006. "World's Fish Supply Running Out, Researchers Warn."Washington Post. The Washington Post, 03 Nov. 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110200913.html Web. 01 July 2014.
Some American fishery management officials, industry representatives and academics questioned the team's dire predictions, however, saying countries such as the United States and New Zealand have taken steps in recent years to halt the depletion of their commercial fisheries. "The projection is way too pessimistic, at least for the United States," said Steven Murawski, chief scientist for the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "We've got the message. We will continue to reverse this trend." The National Fisheries Institute, a trade group representing seafood producers as well as suppliers, restaurants and grocery chains, said in a statement that most wild marine stocks remain sustainable. The group's spokeswoman, Stacey Viera, added that because the global demand for seafood has already outstripped the amount of wild fish available in the sea, her group's members are meeting the need in part by relying on farmed fish. "To meet the gap between what wild capture can provide sustainably and the growing demand for seafood, aquaculture is filling that need," she said. But several scientists challenged that prediction and questioned why humanity should pay for a resource that the ocean had long provided for free. "It's like turning on the air conditioning rather than opening the window," said Stanford University marine sciences professor Stephen R. Palumbi, one of the paper's authors. Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco said the study makes clear that fish stocks are in trouble, even though consumers appear to have a cornucopia of seafood choices.

There is no fish depletion crisis—species are rebounding due to strict catch limits not catch share programs

Suzanne Rust The Bay Citizen. 13, “Catch shares leave fishermen reeling”, The Bay Citizen, https://www.baycitizen.org/news/environment/system-turns-us-fishing-rights-into-commodity-sque/)
Fish populations around the nation are rebounding. But it’s not because of catch shares. Nearly half of the 128 fish populations that have been subject to overfishing since 2003 now are thriving, having been fully rebuilt over the past decade, according to government records. Five of those populations have been rebuilt under catch-shares management – the St. Matthew Island blue king crab, snow crab, Pacific coast widow rockfish, Gulf of Mexico red snapper and Atlantic windowpane flounder, according to Connie Barclay, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Barclay said it would be hard to attribute rebuilding to catch shares in any of those cases. Crockett, director of federal fisheries policy for the Pew Environment Group, agrees and credits the rebuilding to strict catch limits, which the government began to institute in 2006. The difference between catch limits and catch shares “is a distinction I think that is often deliberately conflated” by the government and groups advocating for the new system, Crockett said. And despite the government’s claims that catch shares can eliminate overfishing, nine of the 15 fisheries now in place were put in fisheries that were not overfished and where overfishing was not occurring. Scientists are not surprised. “Catch-share proponents say the system can improve the health of fisheries,” said Tim Essington, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “But that’s not what our research showed. They generally don’t lead to more fish to catch.” Essington’s work, and other academic research on catch shares, shows little evidence that the system will rebuild fish populations. “Catch share programs have been implemented in a variety of fisheries for diverse reasons,” Barclay said. “The main objectives have been to address overcapacity and to improve economic and ecological sustainability.”

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