Tag Archives: Lion Capital

Untangling catch shares with Lee van der Voo – Catch shares have changed fisheries and fishing communities across the U.S.

I recently saw some great reporting by the New Bedford Light and ProPublica about how the billionaire Dutch family that owns Blue Harvest Fisheries has emerged as a force in groundfish fishing off the coast of Massachusetts. These are very wealthy, powerful equity groups and corporations that are acquiring access to the fisheries and passing the cost of owning them and fishing them onto fishermen. There’s been profound disenfranchisement of people who used to have a more personal stake in fishing and seafood. Everyone from indigenous communities in Southwest Alaska whose history with halibut goes back to the beginning of time to small-boat, family operations around the United States everywhere have been losing access. Whole communities have fallen apart over that. >click to read< 08:15

Catch Shares: Investment Firms are taking over the Fishing Rights

10172769-largedinkWhat does it take to buy a share of the American ocean? Policymakers assured the nation that fishing rights would never migrate out of U.S. control through catch shares or end up as properties of investment firms. Environmental groups have similarly touted catch shares as a tool for communities and fishermen and overlooked the role investors can and do play. As the Snow’s deal now makes clear, those pacifications are baloney. Read the rest here 22:29

Fish and Ocean Grabbing: The Case of Commercial Fisheries

10172769-largeOn April 8, 2009, a story in the New York Times quoted the administrator of NOAA (the federal agency in charge of managing OUR oceans) as saying that was “taking preliminary steps toward privatizing fisheries” (in New England). We submit that if the director of the Forest Service or the National Park Service, or the Bureau of Land Management was quoted as saying those agencies were taking preliminary steps towards privatizing public forests, national parks, or public rangelands, that there would be an immediate outcry from “the left.” And yet, there was no outcry whatsoever. Read more here 16:38:46

Fish and Ocean Grabbing: The Case of Commercial Fisheries – prepared by Seth Macinko and Brett Tolley

On April 8, 2009, a story in the New York Times quoted the administrator of NOAA (the federal agency in charge of managing OUR oceans) as saying that NOAA was “taking preliminary steps toward privatizing fisheries” (in New England). We submit that if the director of the Forest Service or the National Park Service  or the Bureau of Land Management was quoted as saying those agencies were taking preliminary steps towards privatizing public forests, national parks, or public rangelands, that there would be an immediate outcry from “the left.” Read more here 17:04

The Big Fish Win Again

What does it take to buy a share of the American ocean? For Lion Capital, a British private equity firm, the price is less than $980 million. Now, every time you sit down to a bowl of clam chowder in the United States, you’re probably padding profits for British investors. Over the long term, it means that costs will rise. Fishermen will earn less, their profits halved and quartered by the rental payments they’ll have to make to people in suits just to go fishing. Yet consumers will pay more. Investors will be getting rich off of resources that used to belong to you. Read more here. Its enough to make you sick. 14:25