(Con):...I want to
touch on two examples of good practice from around the world that
emphasise individual as opposed to national quotas. The first is
the Falklands, which fortunately has something to
do with this country, where the squid fishery was a free for all
from 1986; by 2007, it was decided to impose individually
transferable quotas, whereby each vessel bought a proportion of a
total quota and was able to transfer it through sale. Since it
was a proportion, it could increase in total tonnage. Therefore,
they had skin in the game—they had the right incentives, and they
were interested in policing the management of the fishery
themselves. It has turned into a highly sustainable and
successful fishery, economically and ecologically; it is very
productive, and it deals with the problem that is rightly
addressed in the report, that of shared stock. In this case, it
deals with the illex squid, which come in from Argentinian waters
at a certain time of year. Likewise, a similar system is working
extremely well in South Georgia.
The other system, which is slightly different, is in the Faroe
Islands, at the other end of the Atlantic, which regulates
fishery by days at sea—by regulating effort rather than catch—and
insisting that all catches be landed on shore so as to be able to
check that there is no bad practice going on at sea. Again, it is
crucial that those days at sea are transferable between vessels;
in a sense, you can sell your days at sea.
In both cases, the Falklands and the Faroes, real-time
information is being used to manage the fisheries. Instead of
politicians sitting around a table in Brussels at two o’clock in
the morning using two year-old data to decide a quota, in
the Falklands there is live transmission of
data overnight on what each boat is catching. Any vessel taking
on too much by-catch is moved on the next morning. Iceland does
the same thing at an hour’s notice. So technology has brought
great improvements as a management tool, with transponders on
vessels and things like cameras on nets...
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