Choosing Winners and Losers in Alaska’s Crab Fishery
May 4, 2022 6:35 AM Subscribe
You don't expect to run a car for ten years without an oil change. You can't run a market for ten years without a re-set of shares.
We should be doing this with land and financial debt, as well, as is tradition. But you know, ideologically that is unimaginable under capitalism. I'm just glad that, as terrestrial creatures, humans seem constitutionally incapable of owning the seas. Until some Sea Captain Elon Musk decides to experiment and create water-breathing humans, the sea will remain ungovernable as property.
posted by eustatic at 8:00 AM on May 4, 2022
We should be doing this with land and financial debt, as well, as is tradition. But you know, ideologically that is unimaginable under capitalism. I'm just glad that, as terrestrial creatures, humans seem constitutionally incapable of owning the seas. Until some Sea Captain Elon Musk decides to experiment and create water-breathing humans, the sea will remain ungovernable as property.
posted by eustatic at 8:00 AM on May 4, 2022
That sounds very similar to Iceland's fisheries policy, which seems to have been very successful in terms of stabilizing their fish stocks.
But it seems like these quotas are permanently ownable property, and there isn't really a way for new entrants into the market to gain their own portion of the quota, so eventually one company is going to own everything and 100 people will have jobs on a factory ship and what will everyone else do? Sure, the people who sold up got a lump sum payment, but if that money runs out, then what?
There should be a mechanism -- lottery based? -- that returns a certain percentage of the quota each year to people who will actively fish it themselves -- possibly over a period of X years in order to then have it converted to a more permanent form of quota. It would gradually erode the value of the existing quotas to the armchair fishers and large corporations and give it over to those who are doing the work.
Or provide quotas each year that are somehow divided based on the people who fished in the previous seasons and not to the corporations involved in the fishing. So then there's an incentive among the corporations to treat their employees well, or perhaps the fishers will form worker-owned cooperatives rather than working for corporations. Again, you would want to have some quota set aside for new entrants into the field.
But, all this typing aside, I am a complete non-expert on this issue and so my ideas might be stupid or stupidly complicated.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:00 AM on May 4, 2022 [2 favorites]
But it seems like these quotas are permanently ownable property, and there isn't really a way for new entrants into the market to gain their own portion of the quota, so eventually one company is going to own everything and 100 people will have jobs on a factory ship and what will everyone else do? Sure, the people who sold up got a lump sum payment, but if that money runs out, then what?
There should be a mechanism -- lottery based? -- that returns a certain percentage of the quota each year to people who will actively fish it themselves -- possibly over a period of X years in order to then have it converted to a more permanent form of quota. It would gradually erode the value of the existing quotas to the armchair fishers and large corporations and give it over to those who are doing the work.
Or provide quotas each year that are somehow divided based on the people who fished in the previous seasons and not to the corporations involved in the fishing. So then there's an incentive among the corporations to treat their employees well, or perhaps the fishers will form worker-owned cooperatives rather than working for corporations. Again, you would want to have some quota set aside for new entrants into the field.
But, all this typing aside, I am a complete non-expert on this issue and so my ideas might be stupid or stupidly complicated.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:00 AM on May 4, 2022 [2 favorites]
I'm reminded of NYC taxi medallions, pre-ridesharing.
posted by aramaic at 9:37 AM on May 4, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by aramaic at 9:37 AM on May 4, 2022 [3 favorites]
It seems like there are multiple questions at stake, including the sustainment of fish stocks, the economic well-being of individual fishers, and the economic sustainability of local fishing industries. The quota system is an aspect of responding to the perceived tragedy of the commons, but the Nobel-winning work of Elinor Ostrom on common resource management is part of what led to stuff like the Alaska situation. For a really smart look at the debates over what and who the quota system should help, and how, Kevin St. Martin's 2001 article "Making Space for Community Resource Management in Fisheries" (Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91[1]) is worth checking out. From the abstract:
The dominant discourse of fisheries science and management, bioeconomics, places the benavior of individual fishermen operating on an open-access commons at the center of its understanding of fisheries resources and the fishing industry. Within this discourse, fishermen are the sole actors and the fishery is the fixed stage for an inevitable "tragedy of the commons." Starting from these particular assumptions of both subject and space, bioeconomics proposes solutions to fisheries crises that differ sharply from fishers' perceptions of the resource and their desires for management. These divergent understandings of both the natural and social environments are reflected in the maps produced by fisheries scientists/managers and those produced by fishers themselves. Remapping fisheries in terms of fishers perceptions and scales of operation reveals diverse natural landscapes and communities in which the dominant discourse charted only quantities of fish and individual fishermen. The landscape of fishing communities, once made visible, suggests an opportunity for forms of area-based management that might facilitate community development
rather than just individual prosperity.
posted by vitia at 12:42 PM on May 4, 2022
The dominant discourse of fisheries science and management, bioeconomics, places the benavior of individual fishermen operating on an open-access commons at the center of its understanding of fisheries resources and the fishing industry. Within this discourse, fishermen are the sole actors and the fishery is the fixed stage for an inevitable "tragedy of the commons." Starting from these particular assumptions of both subject and space, bioeconomics proposes solutions to fisheries crises that differ sharply from fishers' perceptions of the resource and their desires for management. These divergent understandings of both the natural and social environments are reflected in the maps produced by fisheries scientists/managers and those produced by fishers themselves. Remapping fisheries in terms of fishers perceptions and scales of operation reveals diverse natural landscapes and communities in which the dominant discourse charted only quantities of fish and individual fishermen. The landscape of fishing communities, once made visible, suggests an opportunity for forms of area-based management that might facilitate community development
rather than just individual prosperity.
posted by vitia at 12:42 PM on May 4, 2022
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The policy wonks pushing these reforms say that consolidation is not the goal, but the claims are not believable.
Most fishermen will think consolidation is the point of the reform. Consolidated fisheries appear, to the scientist-managers in government, easier to regulate.
Until the company managers figure out that Citizens United exists and that Consolidated fisheries, Inc can just buy the legislators.
Without a regular 'Jubilee', or re-set of the quota shares, consolidation will happen, and armchair fishers are going to happen. We've known about the need for Jubilees for thousands of years, so we should not be surprised that consolidation happens without a re-set mechanism for ownership of shares.
posted by eustatic at 7:50 AM on May 4, 2022 [1 favorite]