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OPINION PIECE RECREATIONAL FISHERS SHOULD FEAR THE QMS BY R LEA CLOUGH I read Gareth Morgan and Geoff Simmons' article, Is Our QMS Really a World Beater (January/February), alternating between "Right on!" and "No. Wrong!" It reminded me of a comment I once heard to the effect that the quota management system was devised by a genius and put into practice by idiots. As a founding member (my quota registration number or QRN starts with 84), I saw much of what happened. I objected – and still do – to the comment that we were "given quota". We earned it because we had been making our living from it. To arbitrarily confiscate it and charge us to continue would have been unjust. We also surrendered the right to expand our catching unless we paid for it. We got considerably less than we should have. My 19 tonnes of paua quota shrank to 14. M and S correctly state that we fought for quota, but they did not identify the innate weakness of the initial appeal and subsequent litigation procedures, when earlier bureaucratic incompetence and quite blatant bullshit stories resulted in allocations of quota to people who had no right to it – at least in the minds of those of us who were actually working in the industry at the time and were familiar with the circumstances. It resulted in one catch history being used twice and an allocation to someone who was not even in the country during the criteria years. Readers can no doubt remember similar anomalies in their sectors and areas. To restore the total allowable commercial catch, or TACCs, to the recommended levels, everyone else had their quotas cut. M and S, further, correctly state that a public asset ended up in the hands of a few large companies. Whether deliberately or through negligence, these assets were issued with no mechanism to ensure their collateral value. Small fishers simply could not raise sufficient finance to ensure a retiring fisher could sell to his (small) successsor. Hovering like a vulture would be the company representative with chequebook at the ready, hence the current corporate ownership of nearly all the quotas. The idea of the QMS as ensuring fish are an asset for fishers, ensuring its protection, may have been feasible initially, but the separation of catchers from ownership negates that. M and S correctly identify that in their subsequent comment that fishers have no incentive to look after the stocks. I detect an attitude of transience these days – gouging their annual catch entitlement, or ACE (M and S refer to it as quota rent) prices by quota holders mean that not only do fishers have no incentive to look after the resource this year, but also they may not be here next year, anyway. So, why bother? There is minimum wage legislation to protect workers, but self-employed fishermen have no such protection, leaving them prey to exploitation. An absolutely brilliant suggestion by M and S is worth including in fisheries legislation: "Quota owners should underwrite any penalties". At present, a fisher who overfishes has to pay the penal deemed values charges, but the processor still gets the fish and doesn't have to provide ACE to cover it. This encourages a company to starve a trawler operator of ACE for one species, knowing the unavoidable bycatch has to be landed to them and that they will profit from it. Repeat this for different species for different boats and the company gets landings well beyond its quota portfolio. Making the company, rather than the fisher, pay for this would be a major step forward. CREW VOLUNTEERS WANTED Help keep the call of the by-gone era of steam alive. We are looking for enthusiastic volunteers, men and women, to join our crew so the old hands may pass the skills of yesteryear to the next generation of guardians of our heritage steam tug William C Daldy. No experience necessary. Are you interested in working boilers, steam engines or just being on deck to learn new skills or refresh the old, be it steam, engineering or seamanship? Do you enjoy making new friends and the camaraderie of the sea? If you answer yes, then please contact: Alex Franklin, 027 568 8623 or Bevan Tinker, 021 801 402 www.daldy.com 60 Professional Skipper March/April 2012 Another good idea, which readers should not dismiss out of hand, is that of 100 percent observer coverage on inshore vessels via video surveillance. Some years ago I reported on a presentation by an American fisherman of such a system at a conference of the New Zealand Federation of Commercial Fishermen. A mast-mounted video-camera system covering the working area of the deck of every vessel, coupled with electronic tagging of pots, was used in the Dungeness crab fishery on the western coast of the United States. It was not too expensive, there were tremendous savings in compliance costs and it prevented illegal lifting of other operators' pots. It also produced perfect catch/effort data. Oddly, M and S do not mention the good ideas that went by the board. One was aggregation limits. Admittedly, they were difficult to apply, but they provided some protection to the small operators in that they were an anti-monopoly device. Another was by-catch trading – whereby operators could surrender quota in some species to cover excess catches in others. VIP.S84