Tag Archives: individual fishing quotas

Fisheries innovations credited with West Coast groundfish recovery

The dramatic recovery of many groundfish species along the West Coast is a testament to the innovation, cooperation and persistence by fisheries managers and fishermen alike under the landmark Magnuson-Stevens Act of 1976.

Pacific whiting, sorted by size
Photo: National Marine Fisheries Service

One of the latest innovations, formally approved last month by the National Marine Fisheries Service, is “electronic monitoring,” which allows the use of video and other equipment in place of the human observers needed to ensure the accuracy of harvest reports.

The faster-then-expected recovery of depleted populations — including canary rockfish, bocaccio, darkblotched rockfish, and Pacific Ocean perch — has led to dramatically increased harvest limits this year. NMFS estimates that increased fishing will add 900 jobs and $60 million in income this year alone. Recreational anglers are expected to go fishing an additional 219,000 times, mostly in California with some of those outings in Oregon and Washington, according to a news release.

Going from a federally declared disaster in 2000 to today’s recovery of most stocks was the result of a monumental change in fisheries management and fishing culture. One of the biggest changes was a shift to “catch shares,” in which each commercial fisherman receives a percentage of the allowable harvest each year, an issue I first wrote about a decade ago (Water Ways, Dec. 11, 2009).

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‘Catch shares’ catching on among fishing groups

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released a national policy supporting the use of “catch shares” — a management approach that numerically divides up the allowable harvest of fish among commercial fishermen.

<em> Catch share quotas have been in place for halibut fishing in Alaska for more than a decade</em><br><small>NOAA photo</small>
Catch share quotas have been in place for halibut fishing in Alaska for more than a decade
NOAA photo

Instead of a race to catch the most fish in the shortest time, operators are allowed to choose when to fish, taking into account safety and market conditions. For harvest managers, the process provides greater control over the total annual catch.

Phil Anderson, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me his agency is generally supportive of this kind of management. The Pacific Fishery Management Council, which governs fisheries on the West Coast, will launch catch shares in 2011 for groundfish.
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Fishermen will share bottom fish through individual quotas

In a dramatic shift in management policy, the Pacific Fishery Management Council has adopted a new fishing regime for groundfish, such as whiting, cod, rockfish, flounder and sole.

This new approach for the West Coast, called individual fishing quotas, is said to encourage cooperation instead of competition, because each entity involved in the fishing industry will be given a portion of the allowable catch. That way, fishing boats can go fishing when the fish are abundant. They won’t be encouraged to go out in bad weather before the overall quota is reached.

Fishers won’t be forced to dump their dead bycatch, which are fish taken incidentally to the harvest of targeted stocks. Instead, the dead fish will be tallied and counted against any quota for the nontarged species, which will ultimately increase the ability of fishery managers to measure the impacts on all stocks.

The action was taken Friday by the PFMC, which issued a press release today (PDF 156 kb) explaining the action.

You’ll find more about groundfish management on the council’s Web site.

Individual Fishing Quotas seem like they have been waiting a long time for action in this region, and they still won’t go into effect until 2011.

IFQs have been encouraged by diverse groups, including the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, which released a chapter in its 2004 report (PDF 1 mb) that recommended something like IFQs but with a new name: “dedicated access privileges” (see page 289).

The conservative Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) has been pushing for IFQs for since 1996. See “Community-Run Fisheries: Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons” and the recent “Beyond IFQs in Marine Fisheries: A guide for federal policy makers.”

Some environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, have embraced this market-based approach.

The most controversial aspect of the council’s decision on Friday was to allocate 20 percent of the Pacific whiting harvest to processors. The processors said they needed the quotas to protect local business and existing jobs from the prospect of fishermen shipping their catch out of the region.

Pete Leipzig, executive director of the Fishermen’s Marketing Association, has raised moral, legal and practical objections to giving quotas to processors. See Leipzig’s letter to the PFMC.

As he told Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton, “The council moved in the right direction, but they are still making a terrible mistake.”

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