West Coast Communities and Catch Shares: The Early Years of Social Change

ABSTRACT

The Pacific Coast Groundfish Trawl Fishery transitioned to a catch shares program in January 2011. The Pacific Coast Groundfish Fishery Social Study was designed to measure associated social changes and impacts on individuals and communities. Selected survey and interview data from the baseline data collection in 2010 and the first supplemental data collection effort in 2012 are aggregated at the community level and analyzed for initial signs of social change.

Communities are sorted into top-, mid-, and low-tier communities based on the percentage of quota share (QS) permit owners that live in each community. A higher number of QS permit owners in a place is expected to result in relatively greater benefits to those communities. Questions analyzed include percent of income from fishing, multiple jobs worked, job stability, job satisfaction, standard of living, and how individuals were personally affected. Significant results for TOP-tier communities include increases in working multiple jobs, which may be negative or positive depending on the respondent, and improvements in job satisfaction. LOW-tier communities indicate significant improvements in standard of living. MID-tier communities appear to be in the middle, with no significant changes. Interview data indicate variation between owners, where some can fish their allocations and others need to lease more to fish.

KEYWORDS:

• catch shares
• fishing communities
• Pacific Coast Groundfish Trawl Fishery
• quota systems
• social impacts

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the study participants for their time to participate in this study. Thanks to all those who reviewed the survey instruments and questions from both the industry and agency perspectives. This effort was only achieved through the work of many field researchers to include Tiffany Wilson, Monica Galligan, Hunter Berns, Stacey Miller, Jason Davis, Karma Norman, Melissa Stevens (Mahoney), Brian Carter, Ruby Moon, Sara Wise, and Keely Kent. To our academic colleagues and advisors Dr. Flaxen Conway (OSU) and Dr. Carrie Pomeroy (UCSD), our appreciation is extended for your guidance and contributions. Many thanks to NMFS S&T, Rita Curtis and all the staff that is responsible for funding this research. Thanks to Sarah Towne, Steve Freese, Jamie Goen, and Kevin Ford and others at NOAA's West Coast Regional Office for their assistance with permit data and other contributions to this research. This research was initiated under the guidance of Mark Plummer and will be continued in his memory. We miss you.

Notes

1. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Catch Share Policy defines the term “catch share” as “a general term for several fishery management strategies that allocate a specific portion of the total allowable catch to individuals, cooperative, communities, or other entities….”

2. http://www.westcoast.fisheries.noaa.gov/fisheries/groundfish_catch_shares/quota_share_permits_accounts.html, accessed 4/2/2015. A caveat to this information is the level of accuracy of address information provided for permits may be variable and may represent business locations and not permanent residence. However, it is the closest measure of QS location for comparative purposes available.

3. Gilden (1999) defines a community of place as “geographic areas where people live,” and community of interest to be: “based on the common interests of their members. For example, fishing communities reside within larger communities of interest and place.” NRC (1999b) further describes the community of interest as a narrowly defined group of fishers who share a common interest in a particular management regime and are granted some exclusivity with respect to the resource.”

4. These tests were performed using a Pearson chi-square.

5. Likert ratings were consistently numerically coded for statistical tests where poor = 1, fair = 2, good = 3, and excellent = 4. Mann Whitney U tests were run for all Likert scale questions.