Hog Daddy and the Walls of Steel: Catch Shares and Ecosystem Change in the New England Groundfishery

Abstract

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration implemented market-based fishery management in the New England groundfishery as catch shares, controlling aggregate harvests through tradable annual catch quotas allocated to fishing groups called sectors. Policy supporters assert that resulting markets raise conservation incentives. In compliance with the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, species assessments permit catch shares to replace more spatially and temporally specific constraints on fishing gear, time, areas, and daily harvest limits. Qualitative evidence from field interviews and participant observation questions the efficacy of catch shares. Fishing industry members observe that increased presence of large trawl vessels in previously protected areas damages fish subpopulations and benthic habitat. Regulatory bioeconomic models fail to consider these lay observations. The consequent inability of quota markets to recognize the materiality of human–environment relationships at the spatiotemporal scales of fishing activity, and to internalize associated externalities, may have devastating consequences for the fishery.

Keywords:

• benthic habitat
• cod (Gadus morhua)
• environmental markets
• fish population dynamics
• fishing gear impacts
• Gulf of Maine
• haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus)
• LEK
• Massachusetts
• privatization

Acknowledgments

I am greatly appreciative of the generous encouragement and critiques offered by the journal editors and anonymous reviewers. This research would not have been possible without anonymous informants who demonstrate trust in the ethics and progressive vision of the scientific process by sharing their personal observations.

Notes

The vast majority of New England fishers are male, and most female fishers call themselves fishermen, so the terms fisherman and groundfisherman are used here.

Many interviewees who buy or lease quota have larger financial investments at stake than at any time in the past. Those investments are at unprecedented immediate risk to the actions of other boats on the water, other quota holders in quota markets, other sector members and managers in sector decision processes, and other interests involved in regulatory arenas. To protect confidentiality, I provide only minimal details about each interviewee, such as home port, gear type, fishing experience, or boat size category. I generally distinguish smaller from larger boats at roughly 70 ft in length, based principally on criteria offered by fishermen themselves.

Trawling is often called dragging, but drags also include gear made of metal rings interlaced to form net-like bags for harvesting scallops and other shellfish.

Fishery management literature borrows the terminology of inputs and outputs from bioeconomic models of industrialized agriculture (Finley 2009).

Daily species limits are not a perfect management tool. Like other kinds of catch quotas, they can lead to the discarding of already-dead fish.

Mobile gear is moved by boats, including trawls, drags, and other nets. This contrasts with fixed gear, which boats set in a one place at a time and includes hooks, gillnets, and traps.

Jigs and longlines are hook fishing technologies.

While huge harvest-processor vessels from several European and Asian countries fished within sight of U.S. coasts in the 1970s before “Americanization” of U.S. waters, Cold War tensions lent particular drama to the frequent presence of Soviet-bloc boats among them.