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Privatization Didn't Work for Rangelands and It Won't Work for New England Fisheries By Paul W. Parker A group of businessmen are hard at work trying to privatize the oceans. They want to lift the moratorium on Individual Transferable Quotas, which give the holder exclusive rights to catch specific types of commercially valuable fish. But before we foolishly parcel out the oceans, we ought to consider the evidence from 70 years of experience with another form of allotment. The grasslands of Arizona may seem a long way from the blue waters of Cape Cod, but the West bears the scars of a wrong-headed attempt to protect a similarly precious and threatened resource. Established in 1934, grazing allotments were intended to end over-grazing of the range by giving farmers the right to graze livestock on sections of publicly owned land. The number of cattle permitted per area depended on how many the government thought the land could support. This, in turn, was determined by the variety and quantity of edible plants growing on the range. Allotments were intended to make ranchers better stewards of the land through ownership. By all accounts, grazing allotments have been a dismal failure. At the last official survey of rangeland in 1980, only 15 percent of the land could be classified as good. The overwhelming majority was fair to very poor, meaning that of all potential plant species once present, up to four-fifths of them had vanished. And so it will be with New England fisheries if Individual Transferable Quotas become a management tool. Like grazing allotments, quotas will effectively divide up the fish in the ocean among a handful of commercial operators. They or their agents will have exclusive rights, forever, to take their share of the ocean's resources. This privatization scheme will only hasten the decline of fish stocks. Many species are vanishing because habitat is being degraded by heavy equipment dragged across the seabed. By permitting this gear, we are preventing breeding areas from recovering, and fish stocks will never rebuild to plentiful levels. Privately held quotas will not restore habitat. The stocks in coastal waters are also declining from bycatch, which are fish caught indiscriminately along with the intended species. New England fisheries lack an effective program of paid observers who keep track of everything caught aboard each fishing vessel. So instead, landings are used to estimate fishing mortality. The absurdity of this approach was highlighted last May, when the limit for cod in the Gulf of Maine was reduced to 30 pounds a trip. Such a draconian measure did not help reduce mortality; it only generated more dead and wasted discards, as operators culled their nets for the most marketable cod. Transferable quotas will actually make the problem of bycatch worse. In other fisheries, operators often high-grade their landings. This is the practice of discarding all but the largest fish. Faced with scarcity of their allotted species, individual quota holders in the Northeast could take months, even a year, to reach their limit by keeping only the choicest specimens, leaving in their wake tons of dead and dying fish. Individual Transferable Quotas also spell doom for our fishing communities. In recent times of uncertainty, fishermen have been advised to shift their focus from groundfish, like cod or halibut, to dogfish, a type of shark. We have been told to sell back our boats. Today, many inshore fishermen can't make a living pursuing groundfish because the stocks have moved too far off shore. So while we wait for species to recover, we support ourselves as painters or construction workers. But when the quotas are handed out, the fishes in the Gulf of Maine and on Georges Bank will be divided up among corporation-based fleets. Many of the quotas will go to foreign-based companies operating through domestic fronts. Others will be bought by private investors, hoping to make a quick buck by exploiting a scarce commodity. Individual Transferable Quotas will no more save New England's fishing industry than the grazing allocations saved western grasslands. Besides, the present Sustainable Fisheries Act provides the basic tools we need to rebuild sustainable resources. By enforcing its provisions, we can protect habitats for spawning, feeding, and shelter. Furthermore, this law enables us to establish and enforce limits on bycatch by forcing owners to acknowledge their impact on species other than their target fish. Both of these measures will work, but not overnight. We need to renew our commitment to restraint. Above all, in our impatience, we must not repeat the mistakes of grazing allotments and condemn our livelihoods to extinction. Paul W. Parker is a commercial hook and line fisherman from Chatham, Massachusetts, executive director of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen's Association, and serves on the Board of the Marine Fish Conservation Network. Paul received a B.A. in Biology from Cornell University and a Masters of Environmental Management from Duke University. This op-ed first appeared in The Boston Globe in May 2000. |