Kvótakerfið og fiskveiðar, umræða í Kanada

Dálkahöfundurinn Jeffrey Simpson hefur í dag og gær fjallað um sjávarútvegsmál í Globe and Mail.  Þó að sjávarútvegur skipi ekki sama sess hér í Kanada og á Íslandi, er umræðan hér mikil, Kanada hefur jú lengstu strandlínu allra ríkja og hér þekkja menn hrun fiskistofna betur en margir aðrir.

En greinarnar má finna hér og hér.

Í fyrri greininni má lesa m.a.:

"Boris Worm of Dalhousie University created tidal waves among fisheries scientists two years ago. He and other researchers published a paper in the journal Science predicting that, at current harvesting rates, all of the world's commercial fisheries would collapse by 2048. Imagine, all commercial fisheries gone in four decades.

Impossible, sniffed critics. Wrong methodology, said others. Instead of using catch rates and defining collapsed fisheries as those with yields less than 10 per cent of historical maximums, Prof. Worm and his colleagues should have focused on biomass.

Prof. Worm's work spawned lots of other inquiries. If commercial fisheries around the world are in danger of collapsing, what might save them?

Three American researchers bent their efforts to that task."

"They discovered that one way to lessen the chance of a fisheries collapse is to use individual transferable (or catch) quotas for fishermen rather than the prevailing Canadian system of a common property resource fishery. They looked at 121 fisheries using the catch quota system and learned that only 14 per cent had collapsed, compared with 28 per cent without them. In other words, the prevailing Canadian (and world) method of allocating fish is twice as likely to lead to collapse as the catch share system. "Switching to an ITQ not only slows the decline toward widespread collapse, but it actually stops this decline," they wrote in Science.

Canadians know, tragically, about collapsing fisheries. One of the world's greatest fisheries - the cod fishery off Newfoundland - collapsed in the 1990s. Another cod fishery, this one in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, is heading toward the same fate. Canada has mismanaged both to complete or looming extinction, and other fisheries remain precarious on both coasts.

The reasons for fisheries collapsing are complicated, but at the heart of the collapse is a simple maxim: more fishing than the stock can take. Too many boats and/or fishermen pounding the stock.

The common property approach - the one preferred in Canada, used around the world and now shown to be less environmentally vigilant - is based on the proposition that the fish belong to everyone."

"Where the catch quota leads is a consolidation of the fishery - that is, fewer fishing interests, be they co-operatives, companies or individuals. That can be managed by limits on what any entity can own of a given stock.

The international (and limited Canadian) experience says the "catch quota system" is better. Prof. Worm supports it, having examined the state of stocks around the world. Will Canada apply the system to more fisheries? Probably not, the status quo being so strong in so many places."

Og í seinni greininni:

"Earlier this year, scientists in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans again told minister Loyola Hearn that cod were disappearing fast in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Their findings were posted on the department's website. "The stock is headed to extinction," they warned. If the minister allowed a catch of 2,000 tonnes a year, the stock would be gone in 20 years.

As a result, the fishery was closed. But not for long. The fishery was reopened for a 2,000-tonne catch, exactly the size of catch that the scientists had warned would extinguish the stock.

We have seen this movie before. It's called the tragedy of the commons, wherein a common resource gets fished to extinction because no one owns it except the Crown, whose minister is pushed and pulled by vested interests and individual fishermen, and who is, therefore, prone to put short-term employment first and conservation second."

"Fishermen, fishing companies and, quite often, provincial governments advocate for greater access to the stock. They want income, jobs, tax revenues. Provinces have licensed too many fish-processing plants. Those plants desperately need fish to process, so employees can get enough work to qualify for unemployment insurance.

Two fundamental changes would help. The country could accept the emerging international evidence that the common property regime actually imperils conservation and switch to individually owned quota shares, as in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Iceland. More important, Canada needs to overhaul the legislation that gives so much discretion to the minister.

Jeff Hutchings of Dalhousie University recently delivered a wonderful overview of Canada's fisheries failures in a lecture titled Lament for a Nation's Oceans. "The Fisheries Act has failed to provide for and protect fisheries," he argued. "It's been under the auspices of the Fisheries Act that fishery declines took place."

Under the act, he continued, the fisheries minister has "arguably the greatest discretionary power of any minister of the Crown." The department exists both to promote the industry and to conserve the resource. The objectives are often in conflict."