From the BBC:
The High Court is being asked to make a judgement over the question of who owns the fish in the sea.(1)
The government wants to reallocate unused quota worth more than £1m from big firms to small-scale fishermen. But the UK Association of Fish Producer Organisations says the government cannot do this without its consent. It is asking the High Court to rule on whether the allocation of a quota confers a permanent right to fish yet to be caught.(2)
Fishing quotas are a licence to make a living from the seas. Without them you cannot legally catch and sell fish. UKAFPO members, mainly large-scale fishermen, currently control more than 90% of the overall fishing quota for England and Wales.(3)
And small-scale fishing round Britain's traditional ports has suffered because crews have been unable to negotiate control of enough of the quota to stay in business.(4)
1) That's easy, the fish belong to everybody and nobody.
Clearly fish have commercial value but there is also such a thing as over-fishing (usually blamed on the EU, Spanish fishermen etc, probably quite rightly) so somebody somewhere has to impose upper limits, and it is only a government which can do this (because they are the only ones who can enforce it and can take an objective view). Don't give me that crap about "private ownership", if there is a dispute between competing interests, the injured party will go running straight to the government to ask them to enforce their "property rights", as in the instant case.
2) The UK government, in the past, might or might not have allocated fishing licences to certain people, and these licences clearly have value (or else people wouldn't be fighting over them)...
3) ... and like all government-protected monopolies, they appear to have become concentrated in very few hands. This system clearly benefits some people at the expense of others, so why shouldn't the beneficiaires pay the government for the value of the protection?
4) So, having decided what a sensible upper limit is to prevent over-fishing, what's wrong with the government just auctioning off time-limited licences/quotas?
If the government is feeling lazy, they can just auction off the entire quota to the highest bidder (even though running an acution with only one potential bidder is a bit stupid), so the UKAFPO consortium ends up paying a lot and owning the lot. It's then up to UKAFPO to decide whether to catch that extra 800 tons or not, or indeed sub-licence them to smaller operators. Perhaps it's better if they stay in the sea?
Or the government can auction off per-single-boat licences with an upper quota for each so that it's easier for the little guys to get a look in. It's all just a question of maximising the auction proceeds , so the quotas will have to be valid for a reasonably length of time, five years or something. A bit like the 3G auctions or "Land Value Tax for the oceans..."
I don't see any big moral difference between the big guys and the little guys here, they use the same kind of boats and fishing techniues, if ten of them end up clubbing together to have a consortium with ten boats, that might lead to a more efficient operation overall, I do not know.
Five years on, what will happen to our Brexit benefits?
12 minutes ago
17 comments:
Or Greenpeace could always buy the lot to save the little fishes.
I'd donate to that cause. Fish should have rights too, you know?
Auctioning licences seems an obvious thing to do. Why don't they already do it? It must have of occurred to them surely?
BJ, exactly, like people who buy (or are fooled into thinking they are buying) a few bits of rainforest, or sponsoring a goat in Africa, or paying for trees to be planted and so on.
If "saving the north sea fish" is what makes people happy and what they are prepared to pay for, great.
If there's anything to gain by giving out "ownership", maybe it is, maybe it isn't, fish can be destroyed as opposed to land, you can do that too with auctions. First, either auction or grandfather in "ownership" (as a percentage of total annual maximum catch), and the right to collect, say 25% of the annual quota value (75% goes into the treasury). Then you could have some incentives, the quota holders get a discount of 25% on all bids, and can flogg off their quota if they can't/won't catch anything, and they'll get a loss/gain depending on how the stock is doing. Maybe they won't be so reckless with throwing stuff over the sea, and be vigilant against illegal fishing.
Kj, I don't see why the quota holders should be given any advantages (or a discount in the auction process).
The value of that quota is only because other people are prevented from catching fish.
If it turned out there was no over-fishing, that there is plenty of fish out there and no reason to limit the amount which people can catch, then the government could say "OK, anybody can go and catch as much as they like, no charge, no taxes."
Would the existing quota holders be able to complain? No.
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The thing with people throwing less valuable fish back into the sea is a different topic. You can't police it anyway.
Fair enough. I remember reading a research report that suggested that collecting the full value of fisheries may have negative consequences, that's all.
The bycatch problem isn't easy no. If there's some of the bycatch species that have some value, maybe it'd help to have a liquid market for small amounts of quotas for potential bycatch species.
There'd still be some arbitrage opportunities with full-value auctions though. If someone comes over a motherlode, it'd be worth a bit extra to be able to fill up on the one trip, and the ship would be interesting in paying a bit over the regular quota value. Which is a good thing for efficiency.
Kj, I think the most important thing is "prevent overfishing".
The experts must know what the upper limit is, we knock 20% off that for safety, and then auction off licences for the amount of fish which are left.
And the quotas can be adjusted up or down every couple of years, if the fish stocks increase, then the next round of quotas goes up a bit, and so on.
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The other approach is to get rid of quotas and to make people pay for how much fish they land.
So if you catch nothing, you pay nothing. If you hit the motherlode, you pay a lot when you get back to harbour.
The advantage here is the the government can change the price much more quickly, so if fish prices go up the landing price goes up. And if fish becomes scarce, the price goes up.
Anything must be better than handing out permanent quotas and then letting people buy and sell the quotas between themselves.
"Buying and selling quota's" - how much corruption and fraud sits behind that 4 word phrase, I wonder. And I don't just mean Fish.
BE, in principle, it is 100% fraud and corruption, as it is private profit for the seller arising from government restrictions placed on the purchaser. Like land.
Anything must be better than handing out permanent quotas and then letting people buy and sell the quotas between themselves.
Agreed, at least as for handing out every penny's worth of economic rent to boat-owners. It's ridiculous, as it is now, boats are being traded with quotas (they belong to the boat), and every penny of economic rent in fisheries, is ofcourse capitalized into huge prices. Windfall gain for those who have a quota, used as collateral for buying larger boats, or used as retirement when not wanting to fish anymore.
The argument of the UKAFPO is the same as for any KLNs, have got "capital", don't want it to go away.
The most sensible fisheries policy would be to auction off sections of the seas to private companies and individuals. This would stop overfishing as it would not be in the owners interests to deplete stocks to a level where it became no longer commercially viable to fish. So quotas would be no longer necessary and conservation and husbandry would automatically be incorporated into the management of the fishing areas.
Kj, agreed. As usual :-)
Anti, nope.
a) Fish have the habit of swimming around over large areas, so you can overfish on your patch and you'll benefit from underfishing in neighbouring patches.
b) No government has the right to give away "freeholds" of anything, not land, sea or air. Selling off leases for x years, where x is the number of years needed for to amortise the capital costs (building 30 years, oil rig, 20 years, satellite 15 years, or whatever) is sort of acceptable.
What's wrong with have "landing charges", so you pay £x for each ton of fish you land (where £x might be different for different types of fish, and a very low figure for "bycatch")?
Anti: the large catch fish species are mobile, and you'd have to own the whole habitat area, to have an incentive to manage a specific stock long-term.
Compare game-management in most western countries. You can own areas, but it's never been practical (except in feudal times), to own entire species that move over large areas. Coordinated management is what we've got, for better or worse.
Any such venture, capitalising economic rent that isn't produced will inevitably just lead to financialisation of it as an asset, reducing it from "sustainable management" to getting as much capital gains as possible.
In small support of Anti, I read somewhere that this is excactly what someone did in Africa (or somewhere). They 'privatised' - probably as in made local people responsible for - the resource (bison? Wildebeest?) which had been over-hunted and because they yokels had a secure interest in it the 'resource' recovered. I think the same thing was done sucessfully with rogue elephants (I must admit - just typing that made me giggle at the mental image...) but you can see my meaning.
Lola: they've had great success with private game stocks, including raising endagered species, in South Africa, but they are fenced in on game reserves.
But yes, I also remember reading about this and that project in eastern Africa where they're giving local people a piece of the pie in income from game, in exchange for not poaching for food or tusks, which is an obvious improvement from having all income sucked away by incompetent leaders and never being able to eat meat I guess. But these are not privatisations as in ownership, it's just common sense IMO.
We've got sort of the same system here, where on large public lands, local residents are given preferrential quotas at lower prices than townies for stalking. Which is a political necessity in rural areas.
L, as Kj says, that's land we are talking about, where much simpler rules apply (i.e. ordinary LVT).
We know that the food grown per acre on allotments in Soviet Russia was vastly more than food per acre on large or collective farms (same in Prussia, same in the UK, same everywhere).
Much the same applies in Africa. Police protect land users from poachers, land users pay for the benefit of that protection. If the government gets too greedy and ups the rent, the land users slaughter or sell their animals or take them elsewhere.
Why would it not work?
MW - I am still trying to recover from the mad elephants as a source of income mental image...so not able to think straight...
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