Catch shares are the best solution to dwindling fish stocks. They provide for more stable consumer prices, prevent overfishing, empower fishermen and reduce inefficient government regulation. Read more here
NILS STOLPE: The New England groundfish debacle (Part IV): Is cutting back harvest really the answer?
While it’s a fact that’s hardly ever acknowledged, the assumption in fisheries management is that if the population of a stock of fish isn’t at some arbitrary level, it’s because of too much fishing. Hence the term “overfished.” Hence the mandated knee jerk reaction of the fisheries managers to not enough fish; cut back on fishing. What of other factors? They don’t count. It’s all about fishing, because fishing is all that the managers can control; it’s their Maslow’s Hammer. When it comes to the oceans it seems as if it’s about all that the industry connected mega-foundations that support the anti-fishing ENGOs with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in “donations” are interested in controlling. Read the article here
Yet another know it all who has failed to do research into these destructive plans.
This writer, Joseph Brannon, is with Frontiers of Freedom, a public policy institute, fronting for corporate manipulations.
Frontiers of Freedom does not disclose its financial backers, but the Wall Street Journal reported in 2001 that the organization’s main contributors were corporations such as Philip Morris, ExxonMobil and RJ Reynolds Tobacco.[38] At the time, Frontiers of Freedom lobbied heavily against environmental regulations designed to reduce global warming,[39] and also railed against plaintiffs who sued the tobacco companies after contracting lung cancer from smoking.[40]Find this info on:
http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=1498627
No need to argue with corporate shills like this guy. But I will just a bit:
Catch shares management is an economic confidence game.
It has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with conservation.
The catch shares scheme has everything to do with the privatization, consolidation, financialization, and industrialization of a publicly owned resource, for the fun and profit of a few investment moguls who would be Fish Kings.
Catch shares only enrich a few holders of fishing conglomerates such as the China Fishery Group as they gobble up quota worldwide and destroy small boat fishing operations.
There’s no upside to catch shares, no “strengths”. When the fish are separated from the fishing license and thus from the fishermen, ultimately big money will come in and dissolve any “accumulation caps”; then the well capitalized “free-market” companies will buy up groundfish quota, now a commodity up for grabs to the highest bidder, and move in with factory trawlers making frozen product and destroying the health of the stocks. The price of allocation skyrockets and local small boat independent fishermen are priced out of their own business because of catch shares: Yellowtail Flounder allocation is priced at over $1.70 per Lb. and only brings $.80 to $1.00 to the fishermen landing them at the dock. Is this what the author of the above article calls “empowering fishermen”?
This market capitalized ownership and industrialization denigrates the fish stocks, the fishing communities, and the fish product. This is a loss already evident in local fisheries, in fact, the New England fisheries now in their third year of catch shares management have been officially declared a disaster. The total allowable catch of Cod and several other groundfish species has been ut by 50%-70%.
Catch shres are destructive to the fish, the fishing communities, and to the source of local fresh affordable fish for the consumer.
I still have no idea how so many supposedly ‘free-market’ people look to catch-shares as the way to solve the problem. It’s not free market in any way, its completely pro-corporation, pro-big business. These public/private partnerships are total failures and only make things worse. The only real free market solution would be something along the lines of creating fish ‘herds’ in a sense, like with ranching, where people actually capture and tag instead of branding them, and then letting the fish go free. While obviously not perfect, the legal system would hopefully protect these claims.