Greg Redden shovels clams aboard the Sea Quest in Ocean City, Md. Fishers there are much happier after the advent of a revolutionary quota system that protects both fish and fishers. As one clam fisherman put it, 'We have our freedom, and it feels good for a change.'

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Day Eight:
Sunday, March 31, 1996

Old fishing ways going under

Quotas may save both fish and fishers

Bold new 'chaos theory' says fishery experts way off track

Editorial: Leadership can save our fisheries

OCEAN CITY, Md.

For years, surf clam fisherman Mike Garvilla was forced to shuffle paperwork under a bewildering array of regulations designed to protect the species from overfishing.

But six years ago, Garvilla, 36, became a rare phenomenon in these days of vanishing fish and eroding fishing jobs: a happy fisherman.

Now he fishes whenever and wherever he wants. He takes his boat, the Betty C. II, about 15 miles due east of Ocean City — an easy two-hour trip. He drops the stern-mounted, 22-foot dredge with a built-in hydraulic pump, blasts clams out of the sand and into the metal cage, then hauls them to the surface with electric winches. He’s back by mid-afternoon.

‘‘It’s a completely different situation,’’ he said. ‘‘We have our freedom, and it feels good for a change.’’

Garvilla is part of a management experiment that could revolutionize fishing around the world by establishing property rights for fishers over the animals they catch for the first time in history.

The program, proposed for the Gulf of Mexico red snapper, is called an Individual Transferable Quota. It would assign each certified fisher a share of the year’s preset total catch. He could fish any time he wanted to fill that quota, or sell or lease his share to someone else.

The change would be this century’s version of fencing the open range — a government-sanctioned takeover of an open resource — all in the name of saving it.

The theory is alluring: Giving fishers a direct financial stake in the resource would encourage conservation and end the mad rush to outfish rivals, a competition that has depleted many fish populations.

But the reality would mean painful trade-offs.

‘‘There is a tradition of wanting all fisheries to have open access. That’s a cultural thing,’’ said Carolyn Creed, a fishery anthropologist who co-authored a Rutgers University study of the several ITQ programs, including surf clams. ‘‘But the history of open access is pretty grim. So we’re forced into the hard choices.’’

If they are widely implemented as some experts predict, ITQs would transform commercial fishing in the Gulf into something unrecognizable. Only certified ‘‘professional’’ fishers could work. The lucky ones, however, would probably be better off.

Creating property rights over fish would turn fishing into something closer to farming, with the crop effectively owned by the people who bring it in.

ITQs are supposed to bring the free market to bear on fishing fleets, where normal market forces have been distorted by subsidies, overinvestment and the unconventional economics of a resource owned by no one.

In some places, they have had positive results. New Zealand has ITQs for 32 species of fish, part of a coordinated fishery development and management program. Fishing employment and ownership of quota shares has risen in the past 10 years, cutting against the trend of economic collapse elsewhere in the world.

ITQs address the problem of overbuilt fleets by strictly limiting who may fish — usually those with a documented history of catching the fish being regulated.

Managers assign a fraction of an annual quota to each fisher — or in some cases, each boat or fishing enterprise. The fisher must stop once the quota is reached.

That eliminates the short seasons and derby fishing found in many fisheries, including the red snapper. Instead of seeing prices drop when everyone sells their catch at once during a derby, landings would be spread over time and the price would remain stable.

Finally, the T in ITQ means they can be transferred, creating a marketplace for the shares, a policy designed to consolidate them in the most economically efficient hands.

Transferability would accelerate the slow shakeout of boats and employment occurring around the world, almost instantly creating winners and losers. And in many places, the losers would greatly outnumber the winners.

Revealing experiment

The surf clam fishery was ideal for the ITQ experiment in ways many others are not. Boats sell only to a few companies that make processed fish products. The fleet size — about 135 boats — made it easier to arrive at a consensus among boat owners.

Still, its lessons are dramatic.

Before the ITQ system took effect, the fleet was in bad shape.

‘‘Expenses had gone up, the fleet had become old, boats were unsafe, they’d lost people at sea. There was a knowledge that as things stood, many were going to go out of business. It just wasn’t working,’’ Creed said.

With an overall catch capped to preserve the stock, boats could fish only once every two weeks, for six hours. In Garvilla’s case, it was every other Tuesday, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

If the weather on the designated day was bad, fishers could make it up the next day. But if bad weather continued, they had to wait another two weeks. That, and other mishaps such as engine trouble, often left them losing money.

When the ITQ program started in 1990, after a period of meetings and consensus-building among the boat owners and managers of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, most boat owners ended up with small quotas.

‘‘I did not have enough allocation to make a living at it,’’ said Joe Garvilla, Mike’s father, who owns the Betty C. II along with his son. ‘‘If the quota is divided up properly at first, everybody is going to be unhappy. So when you come up with an ITQ plan, you’ve either got to buy or sell.’’

Over the next five years, the fleet size dropped by about 100 boats as their owners sold or leased their shares. Most of the boats ended up junked.

Many people lost their jobs when companies and individuals consolidated their shares, though the number of jobs was shrinking even before the program began.

But ITQs also provide a means for struggling boat owners to get out, something not easily accomplished before.

‘‘It allows them to leave the fishery with some resources,’’ said Rutgers fishery anthropologist Bonnie McCay, who collaborated on the ITQ study with Creed. ‘‘If you quit farming you can sell the farm and move to Florida. In fishing, that’s not the case because your boat has depreciated.’’

With the experimental system, fishers have their quotas to sell.

But ITQs have sparked bitter opposition. Opponents say transferability would allow large entities to come in and dominate small operators — in effect eliminating the freedom that defines fishing, turning fishers into little better than sharecroppers.

Even before the ITQ process started, big companies combining all the elements of seafood production — fishing, processing and marketing — dominated the surf clam fishery. ITQs accelerated the process.

Without limits on shares, critics say, ITQs could allow companies to corner a market and set the price, leaving consumers at their mercy. Proponents say the rules can be written to prevent concentrating too many shares in too few hands.

Managers like the quota system because it’s simpler than the current snarl of regulations.

But whether it promotes conservation is unclear. McCay and Creed’s study, for example, showed that in one Canadian fleet, it tended to increase the capture of bigger fish to ensure the largest profit margin — a practice that removes the best breeders from a stock.

And under the U.S. system, the overall quotas would still be set by the regional Fishery Management Councils, which have often caved in to industry pressure to relax or delay conservation measures.

Meanwhile, Congress has gotten jittery on the issue. It appears poised to put off new ITQ programs for five years so they can be studied further, which may increase pressure on fish stocks.

‘‘There will be a mad rush by assorted fishing interests to acquire catch histories during the period of the moratorium so that they will be in a position to claim shares when it ends,’’ said international fishery consultant Francis Christy, who is credited with introducing ITQs. ‘‘It will be the trumpet call for the start of a massive derby.’’

ITQ proponents say it’s transferability that makes the system work. Without it, they say, there is no way to consolidate shares, but also no incentive — and perhaps no way — for small operators to make their enterprises more profitable or even to get out of the business.

‘‘Without transferability, this is a crock,’’ said Louisiana red snapper fisher Ron Anderson, who supports the ITQ snapper program, which was set to start this year but is now in political limbo.