Candy Catch Shares and Baby Fishermen
It seems like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) can’t get enough of belittling our nation’s fishermen. In a recent Seattle Weekly blog entitled, “New Study Sounds Rare Optimistic Note in Sustainable Seafood Conversation,” an EDF staffer compared “fishing management strategies to a parent’s handling of the situation that unfolds after a piñata’s broken at a child’s birthday party,” further adding that traditional fisheries management (focusing on rules that regulate boat size, gear type, and calendar date), “is analogous to a parent trying to slow a candy rush by insisting each child only use one hand.”
In EDF’s piñata candy analogy, our fishermen are compared to greedy candy-hungry children, and the federal government is portrayed as, not merely paternalistic, but actually the parents of these little children. This is coming from the same group whose west coast vice president famously described fishermen as “unskilled, unprofessional,” and prone to “high drug use,” at a conference to woo private investors into a scheme to privatize our fisheries (Page 7).
So what’s the purported solution to solve the crisis of the split piñata? Just like at the investor conference: privatizing our nation’s fisheries with catch shares. As EDF puts it, “You can each get 10 pieces of candy. You have to stay within your limit or find someone willing to give you [their] candy. Go after sugary candy, go after chocolate candy, go after whatever you like.”
Apart from being condescending, this analogy is overly simplistic and completely inaccurate. If these kids were under a “candy catch shares” regime, they would soon come to a rude awakening.
First, they would discover that not every kid is given the same 10 pieces, because in the real world, not every kid is treated equally. Some kids get preference because of who their parents are, because they’re popular, etc. Next, they would discover that they are not allowed to go after whatever candy they like—they have to pick the same kind of candy every year because the quota is species – er, candy-type specific. That means if their candy type isn’t even in the piñata that year, they don’t get any candy. Finally, the “smaller” children would soon witness how the big bullies acquire the bulk of the candy by teaming up on the little ones to force them out of the room.
As the icing on the birthday cake, the parents might even ask one of the bigger children how the piñata party went, to which he would cheerfully reply in chocolate-stained teeth, “Great! Let’s have another!”
The list of flaws with the candy analogy goes on, but one thing remains clear. Candy catch shares don’t work, and neither do real-life catch shares on our nation’s fisheries.
Its always almost heartbreaking to see the myopic attitude of some of the environmental organizations. And among other things your article underlines an elitism that is very painful.
Do they really not understand what they are buying into. I’m involved in a Conference titled:
Rethinking Invasive Species/Environmentalism Gone Awry. It always shocks me when environmentalists talk about problems with invasive species and seem to accept the use of pesticides as a method to deal with them. As it is there is growing sentiment for looking at invasive species as mother nature intervening to correct what we have done to our poor planet and the concerns related based on very shabby science. In our conference we are hoping to connect the dots between gmos, climate change,ocean health, and invasive species policies.
As an active participant in the Gulf of Mexico fishery i can tell you Catch Shares do work very well in our commercial fishery! As all the other fishery managment plans seem to be failing the stakeholders and the resource further exploration of catch shares only make sense. Calm Seas…Capt. Scott Hickman Galveston Texas
I think Mr. Hickman’s teeth are stained with chocolate!
Share the Catch-Abolish Catch Shares. Catch Shares are bad for fish, fishermen, consumers & our communities.
Mr Hickman is part of 2 very small fishing groups (CFA and SOS) that Enviormental Defense Fund has funded to promote Catch Shares being pushed into the recreational Sector. Executives of those groups also have extensive ties and holding in Commercial IFQ’s (Catch Share programs). The hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars invested and continuing to be thrown at Catch Shares so that a very small number of fishermen can profit has nearly bankrupted fisheries managers budget from fishery science and research, which would collect needed data to sustainable manage with. Catch Shares fisheries allows the public resource to be “Gifted” to a small number of fishermen, who in turn profit greatly without having to pay the public trustee back! The money spent buying or leasing “Shares”of the public resource does not go back to the public, but to a few private shareholders! Yet the public still pays for their program. Its time for this subsidy program to stop, and the hundreds of millions spent on a failed system invested into real science to manage our fisheries with! Remember Catch Shares do not change the number of fish caught, so its not a conservation tool….It only eliminates competition, allowing a much greater ‘share’ of the pie to be split among a small handfull of fishermen, all at the expense of the majority eliminated from the fisheries, and at the expense, great expense to the American public.