Another opinion on IFQs
At the suggestion of Glen Brooks, the President of the GFA, who is currently very actively campaigning for IFQs in the Gulf of Mexico grouper fishery, I visited the web site of an association that calls themselves “Food & Water Watch” this evening.
Apparently Mr. Brooks didn’t look too far into the site before suggesting people visit it because I found this opinion of his group’s main focus…
Our oceans and marine resources in the EEZ are public property –– meant to be shared by and used to equally benefit all U.S. citizens. Unfortunately, recent trends have been toward management that gives exclusive access to parts of our oceans or certain resources in them to private entities for economic profits.
For example, many of our popular seafood choices, like red snapper, are depleted and have too many people trying to catch too few fish. Our federal fish managers have developed a new system to control how many red snapper get caught each year and which people do the catching. But the system they put in place tends to reward those that can catch more fish quickly (like large companies rather than small scale and perhaps more sustainable community-based fishing), because the right to fish is often granted based on how much fish an individual (or company) caught in recent years.
That seems like a well thought out and reasonable opinion to me. Might go a long way toward pushing me off the fence I’ve been on regarding the issue.
