ITQs and Pigs

Manfield contends that ITQs “encourage further consolidation of fishing into the hands of the wealthy, and therefore increase inequality”. I find this statement puzzling: do ITQs necessarily create more inequality? What is wrong with setting a maximum catch (“dividing the commons”), issuing shares over the maximum catch, and distributing them among actors? Are free market environmentalists determined to make poor fishermen poorer?

First, rent-seeking behavior in the initial distribution of shares is a big issue. I agree! Powerful fishermen would naturally lobby their government to receive more ITQs and concentrate as many shares as they can. They would try to influence to use the most favorable set of rules when distributing shares (historical catch, size of vessels, investment-backed expectations, etc.). In this line of reasoning, Ruhl and Salzman claim that historical baselines used in Administrative Law (but also in treaties such as Kyoto, i.e. Russia “hot air”) “mask more than they reveal, creating opportunities for rent seeking by interest groups” (2011).

Second, ITQs can exclude the poor and the weak; that is to say, the voiceless in our society that cannot lobby the government or block this legislation. This happened in Iceland, as Sam reminded us in our last class, where indigenous peoples alleged that Iceland’s ITQ system violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights because the system forced them to pay money to the owners of fishing quotas, in order to pursue their occupation.http://www.worldcourts.com/hrc/eng/decisions/2007.10.24_Haraldsson_v_Iceland.htm And more recently in Canada, where the Supreme Court found that the indigenous peoples Lax Kw'alaams did not have a constitutional right to create their own commercial fishery system. http://www.bclocalnews.com/news/133748418.html

Hence, what can ITQs do for sustainable fishing, if anything? Can we set a fair, equitable distribution of shares? Can we grandfather indigenous peoples so that they are entitled to fish without being excluded? Can we set antitrust rules to prevent a single company from taking over the 100% of ITQs? Would that be enough? I am not interested in ideology, so I don't find it troublesome to agree with free market environmentalists in the powerful incentives that private property creates on owners of something (who washes a used car anyway?). What is more, I also agree with them that regulatory approaches of fisheries have failed in many places. For me the problem is not the privatization of the commons as an idea, but rather the corruption implicit in human, imperfect systems to distribute those rights among social actors.

Another controversial claim is Manfield’s overestimation of small-scale fishing. “It is not poor fishers with their small boats who cause the majority of overfishing, but rather these fishers are harmed by depletion they do not themselves create”.

First, this statement is in contradiction with scientific literature that contends that we simply don’t know the real impacts of small-scale fisheries (Worm et al 2009). Are 300 small boats better than 5 large vessels?

Second, claiming that poor fishermen are harmless to the environment and are basically “victims” of commercial fisheries is not true. In Paracas Reserve, South of Peru, artisanal fishermen use explosives to catch fish, despite it being obviously illegal; in the Peruvian Amazon, people fish Paiche (arapaima), despite it being an endangered species; in Lunahuaná, South of Lima, fishermen capture shrimp/prawn during close season. In other countries, poor fishermen have depleted coral reefs and many other species, knowingly of the damage they cause not only to the resource, but also to their livelihood and future! All these examples show that artisanal fisheries are not always innocuous to the environment, as Manfield so naively claims. Artisanal fishermen use forbidden methods to catch fish and ignore close season rules. These examples also reveal that many fishermen are indeed rational, self-interested men who care about exploiting the commons in haste for immediate cash, before others get in and take the resources.

Eden discusses the concept of “distancing from production”, that is to say, due to geographical or social reasons, consumers have to rely on secondhand information about products. People who live in cities don’t visit farms anymore, she claims, even if they live close by. Do they consciously avoid visiting farms or is it just a consequence of our frantic, urban lifestyles? But even if we wish to visit them, it is interesting to notice, as Emel and Neo point out, how livestock producers have kept a complete closure, hiding their impacts from consumers. In the pigs’ case, this has allowed companies to run semi-clandestine operations and, it seems, with total impunity in the exploitation of human workers, animal cruelty, and deplorable sanitary conditions. In fact, none of these two articles discuses why the government has been so lenient with livestock producers. Or why social movements have failed in closing them down. If we were to visit their facilities, what we would see would surely be repulsive to anyone’s eyes. Yet, would we stop buying those goods? Are we willing to change our consumption patterns, our taste for certain food, in the name of sustainability? How many people would stop buying Peruvian asparagus if they knew the working conditions (and salaries!) of women in Ica, South of Peru, who work in lands destined for exportation?

Environmental knowledge is inaccessible to “consumers” in other circumstances. What about industries where pollution is invisible to the human eye? In these cases, visiting a factory is an ineffective way of measuring compliance. We therefore rely on our politicians and government agencies to bridge that knowledge gap and, when they fail, we rely or NGOs and social movements. It is them who should tell us what’s going on within those companies so we can choose not to buy their products. This is a case where geographic, social, but also technical barriers impede us from making the right choices in our consumption patterns. These barriers make us ignorant and perpetuate the social wrongs in livestock production, but in many other markets too. Some mining activities in Peru, who face fierce opposition by locals and NGOs, are implementing “participatory monitoring techniques”, that is, allowing communities to participate in the monitoring, sampling, and supervision of their polluting industries. This is certainly shorting the information gap and, wherever there is real environmental compliance, to demonstrate that their operations are not responsible for environmental maladies downstream.

Ruhl, J.B. and J. Salzman (2011). “GAMING THE PAST: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HISTORIC BASELINES IN THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE” (manuscript, 2011)

Worm, B., et al. (2009). "Rebuilding Global Fisheries." Science 325