Houston Chronicle
December 9, 2007

Gone fishing

    It’s time for a new conservation model on the Texas Gulf Coast, one
    that’s good for fish and fishermen

Conservationists, supported by federal rule-making, believed that the best way to reduce overharvesting of many types of fish was to impose limits: on the size and number of fish that could be caught, and on the total number of days in any given year’s harvest. But those seemingly logical rules have caused great harm in the Gulf Coast — to the red snapper they are supposed to protect, and to the fishermen who make their living by them.

Now, Environmental Defense, along with commercial fishing interests and other coastal businesses that depend on a healthy Gulf and robust fish stocks, says the time has come to adopt individual fishing quotas, a new and better model for ensuring a sustainable fishing industry.

Under the old model, the rules created a raft of unintended consequences without preventing overfishing.

Limits on the number of fish that could be hauled in on a single trip kept fisherman closer to shore so that they could make as many trips back and forth as quickly as possible. They threw back a tremendous number of snapper that didn’t meet size restrictions, but it was wasted effort because those fish were dead or dying. This “fish derby” was dangerous to the commercial fishermen and the recreational fishers with whom they were competing in shallower waters.

Rules limiting the number of days in a fishing season intensified the need for speed. The fish had to be brought in fast so that each fishing boat could get as much out of the ocean as possible during the prescribed fishing season. Meanwhile, the allowable number of fishing days continued to shrink as fishermen reached the annual quota earlier each year. No fisherman had any incentive to limit his catch because if he didn’t take the fish, one of his competitors would.

Over the past year, commercial fishers have been trying a new tack with the red snapper catch, with welcome success. An individual fishing quota, or IFQ, imposes a catch limit to the snapper fishery overall — but no size or trip limits — and then allocates a percentage of the total to individual fishing enterprises. IFQs can be traded, a feature that acts as a buyout system that reduces overcapitalization in the Gulf. Fewer boats equals bigger profits.

More important, IFQs end the need for speed fishing. And they permit year-round fishing so that fishermen no longer have to take their boats out in bad weather to maximize their take over the few days of the fishing season. Fishermen can fish in response to market pricing, maximizing their revenue. Also, IFQs reduce waste from catch-and-release practices that returned tons of size-limited dead fish to the sea.

Conservation efforts should never be undertaken without ongoing evaluation to ensure those efforts are achieving the intended effect. Old fishing limits might help rebuild depleted fish stocks but at a very high cost to Texas Gulf Coast fishermen. By contrast, the IFQ experiment with popular and tasty red snapper seems to have been working well — for the fish and the fishermen. Gone fishing It’s time for a new conservation model on the Texas Gulf Coast, one that’s good for fish and fishermen.