This is the VOA Special English
Agriculture Report.
Too
much fishing has reduced many fishery populations by ninety percent or more
from their highest recorded numbers. Some fishing seasons last only a few days
because the catch limit is quickly reached.
Two
years ago, a Canadian scientist, Boris Worm, predicted the risk of a worldwide
fishery collapse by two thousand forty-eight. But a new study says a management
system called "catch shares" could offer a solution.
It divides the total permitted catch in
a fishery into shares. These are bought and sold like shares of stock in a
company. Shareholders in the fishery are each guaranteed a percentage of the
catch.
Catch share systems are common in
Australia, New Zealand and Iceland. And they have been gaining popularity in
the United States and Canada.
Systems
differ from place to place. But in general, experts set yearly limits, or
quotas, on a fishery. The number of fish that each company or individual may
catch is usually based on past averages.
Shares
become more valuable as fish populations increase. With more fish in the
fishery, catch limits also increase.
Human nature would tell us that
shareholders are more likely to think about the long-term health of the fishery.
They have a greater interest to protect the supply than in traditional, open
access fisheries. But does that really happen?
Researchers
looked at more than fifty years of records from eleven thousand fisheries
worldwide. They compared open access fisheries with one hundred twenty-one
fisheries that use catch share systems.
The
study found that almost a third of the traditional fisheries have collapsed.
But the number was only half that for the catch share fisheries. The findings
appeared this month in the journal Science.
Researchers
from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Hawaii
did the study. The economist who led the research, Christopher Costello at
Santa Barbara, called the results very hopeful. He says the system can improve
the world's fishing grounds and rebuild collapsed fisheries.
Still,
not everyone likes the idea. Some environmental activists say the catch share
system makes a public resource into a private enterprise. Generally speaking, anybody
can work a traditional fishery. There is no need to organize into a group or
company. Yet if scientists' warnings are correct, those fisheries may not have
many fish left to catch by the middle of the century.
And that's the VOA Special English
Agriculture Report, written by Jerilyn Watson. I'm Bob Doughty.
