For each fisherman, a share of the catch

Posted: 11-Nov-2005; Updated: 05-Mar-2007

Some years ago, Texas Governor George Bush wrote Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to promote a new approach for protecting Gulf Coast fisheries. “Catch shares” would grant each fisherman the right to harvest a given percentage of the total allowable catch, a total that would increase as a fishery recovers. “Importantly, this tool vests fishermen with an incentive to conserve the fishery,” wrote Bush. “I join...Environmental Defense” in supporting this market-based management approach.

Last month, President Bush repeated that endorsement: His secretary of commerce, Carlos Gutierrez, asked Congress to amend the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to spell out the rules governing catch shares, and support doubling the number of catch-share programs nationwide.

The benefits of these programs for both ecosystems and fishermen have been demonstrated in Alaska and New Zealand. We provided the White House with advice and analysis, drawing on our years of experience developing catch share systems in the Gulf of Mexico, Cape Cod and the Pacific. We also brought an insider’s knowledge: five years ago, our oceans program director David Festa was the top policy adviser to the commerce secretary.

Catch shares are the wave of the future, the best way to save both fisheries and fishermen. Instead of limiting the days fishermen can operate, catch shares give them the flexibility to decide when market and weather conditions are right. That means safer fishing, reduced costs, fresh fish year-round and big reductions in the killing of unwanted bycatch.

Until now, it made economic sense for fishermen to deplete fisheries and hurt ecosystems. Catch shares change that: if a fishery recovers, each share becomes more valuable, so fishermen gain a direct financial benefit from protections for nurseries and fragile habitat. As Festa told The Washington Post, this is “probably the single largest change we can make to advance conservation.”

From the November-December 2005 Solutions newsletter [PDF file]