Cover Story
Fisheries Forum
The Political Economy of Natural Resource Uses:
Lessons for Fisheries Reform
Mountain Sky Guest Ranch,
Emigrant MT
May 7–10, 2009
"The Political Economy of Natural Resource Use: Lessons for Fisheries Reform" is the topic of a forum hosted by the Property & Environment
Research Center (PERC) under the direction of Don Leal, with the support of the World Bank’s sustainable fisheries program (PROFISH).
The purpose of the forum is to bring together a group of two dozen distinguished academics and practitioners to focus on a broader
understanding of the institutional foundations necessary to promote efficient resource use and long-term economic growth.
Background
The world's ocean fisheries are in crisis because of the ongoing failure to manage the economic wealth inherent in a naturally productive resource.
The World Bank study "Sunken Billions" estimates that the world's fisheries squander an estimated $50 billion a year from overfishing because
of poor governance in managed fisheries as well as illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing.
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Economist
September 19, 2008
A Rising Tide
Scientists find proof that privatising fishing stocks can avert a disaster
For three years, from an office overlooking the Atlantic in Nova Scotia, Boris Worm,
a marine scientist, studied what could prevent a fishery from collapsing. By 2006 Dr Worm
and his team had worked out that although biodiversity might slow down an erosion of
fish stocks, it could not prevent it. Their gloomy prediction was that by 2048 all the
world’s commercial fisheries would have collapsed.
Now two economists and a marine biologist have looked at an idea that might prevent such
a catastrophe. This is the privatisation of commercial fisheries through what are known
as catch shares or Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs).
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What's Happening
National Fisherman Journal
April 2009
May I Quota You?
Management Regime shift
At the end of 2008, three years after Gulf of Mexico fishermen approved individual fishing quotas for red snapper,
they ok'd a grouper fish IFQ program by a similar, overwhelming margin, and the Gulf of Mexico Fishery
Management Council has now approved it.
Nonindividualistic fishing quotas are still hotly debated, and plenty of fishermen still favor open access, but
fishery management in the Gulf of mexico appears to be on a new heading.
Well-positioned IFQ advocates, several of whom are management council advisory panel members, are hoping to bring
the entire reef fish complex under individual quota, and political momentum appears to favor them.
The council has, in fact, voted to explore a comprehensive
reef fish IFQ, by some accounts the first effort of its kind anywhere.
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