Individual fishing quotas – divvying up an allowable catch of a particular species among established participants in that fishery – have been a controversial conservation tool since first introduced on a limited basis in three fisheries by federal regulators in 1990. A congressional moratorium on new IFQ programs expired last September, making this controversy one the new Congress must settle.

The record of IFQs in the three fisheries – Alaskan halibut and sablefish, wreckfish in the South and surfclam-ocean quahog in the Mid-Atlantic – is good on matters of conservation and safety; this management practice largely has ended the expensive and sometimes dangerous rush to catch as many fish as possible as quickly as possible. On the other great problem with IFQs -the consolidation and even monopolization that can occur when a public resource is converted into private property – the record, as described in a new General Accounting Office study, is troublesome.

The study was ordered by Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and John Kerry of Massachusetts last fall as the moratorium failed to gain renewal. The information and suggestions it contains will serve their Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere and Fisheries well as it takes up this issue, either in the re-authorization of the broad Magnuson-Stevens-Sustainable Fisheries Act or in stand-alone legislation.

The GAO found consolidation to varying degrees in all three fisheries, but in all to a greater extent that had been previously supposed. Further, the consolidation – big fish gobbling smaller fish – occurred not just in harvesting, but also in processing. Further, and especially worrisome to Maine and the rest of the Northeast, these consolidations had the most negative impacts on local economies where fishing and processing is done by small owner-operators rather than large corporations.

The underestimation of the amount of consolidation is substantial. The National Marine Fisheries Service, the agency charged with managing the industry, maintained, for example, that the number of surf clam quota holders had declined modestly from 59 to 42 in 12 years under the IFQ system. This assessment, however, failed to take into account that one person or corporation can hold quotas under different names – GAO found one entity controlled quota under 12 names, accounting for 27 percent of the industry-wide surf clam allocation. Similar aggregation was found by GAO in the other fisheries, as was evidence of significant foreign ownership involvement of which NMFS was unaware.

The effects on processors is even less known, but a study conducted by the state of Alaska found small halibut processors suffered a 56 percent loss in gross profits as the result of corporate fleets buying up quota and taking the harvest to corporate-owned plants. That the damage was especially severe to processors in the more remote areas without access to modern highways and major airports should be of particular concern to the Northeast, where many small, remote communities depend upon fishing and processing for their survival.

Fortunately, the two leaders of the subcommittee are from the Northeast, and their recent role reversal as chairman and ranking minority member will not change their priorities. The lifting of the moratorium and the record IFQs have in conservation and safety make the expansion of this management practice inevitable. What is needed first is better data collection and analysis by NMFS, a better definition of when consolidation becomes excessive and damaging, and legislative authority for the eight regional management councils to adopt IFQs that fit local conditions.