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Private Ownership of Fisheries May Shore Up Stocks

Giving people ownership rights in marine fisheries — in a way, privatizing the fish — can halt or even reverse catastrophic declines in commercial stocks, researchers in California and Hawaii are reporting.

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The idea goes against the grain among people who believe that anyone with grit and skill can get in a boat, put to sea and make a living fishing. But that approach, even with licensing requirements and other restrictions, has produced fishing efforts so intense that by some estimates, the world’s commercial stocks will collapse in a few decades.

By contrast, the researchers write in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, allocating ownership shares of a particular fishery to individuals, cooperatives, communities or other entities gives them a reason to nurture the stock. In this arrangement, scientists set acceptable catch levels and other authorities allocate shares, species by species, region by region.

As a local stock grows, shares in it — called catch shares or individual transferrable quotas — become more valuable, just as shares of a company’s stock become more valuable as the business prospers. Those who have shares in a catch have a powerful incentive for doing everything they can to protect the stock.

“You get this very positive, very striking result,” said Christopher Costello, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the lead author of the report.

Benefits of the approach have been seen before. In Alaska, a catch-share system adopted in 1995 has transformed an intense race to catch the last allowable fish into a sustainable and profitable fishery. But the researchers said their study was the first global assessment of this kind of rights-based management.

Other researchers said the new study was likely to be influential as officials who manage fisheries around the world considered how to stave off disastrous declines.

Ray Hilborn, a fisheries expert at the University of Washington, praised the new work but said “there is nothing surprising in it. A lot of us have been arguing that various forms of catch shares or dedicated access is essential.”

Dr. Costello and his co-authors, Steven D. Gaines, an ecologist at Santa Barbara, and John Lynham, an economist at the University of Hawaii, looked at data from more than 11,000 commercial fisheries around the world, of which 121 had established ownership share systems between 1950 and 2003. Collapse rates were so much lower in the share systems, they concluded, that they saw “the potential for greatly altering the future of global fisheries.”

Giving people ownership rights in marine fisheries — in a way, privatizing the fish — can halt or even reverse... more