Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

<em>Abstract</em>.—Federal restricted access management plans for Alaska’s fisheries have resulted in Bering Sea/Aleutian Island crab fisheries rationalization implemented in 2005. While rationalization of fisheries addresses problems of overcapitalization and inefficiencies in the industry, it does not explicitly address equitable distribution of shares to local communities or provide for the future participation of these communities. The Bering Sea/Aleutian Island crab rationalization program establishes a new precedent in rights-based fisheries management schemes by privileging processors with quota share. Through considerable and historical processor influence over local, state, and federal political processes, processor quota share was freely allocated to eligible processors because of the industry’s claim to a long-standing and capital intensive investment in crab fisheries. Processor parent companies can rely on diversification of their investments, and their stake in the industry is protected through direct processor quota shares. Local income diversification strategies diminish, however, with the passage of each restricted-access management program and the currently identified protections for local communities are inadequate to ensure their participation in the crab fisheries of the future. As a complement to the aim of achieving economic efficiency, the social context of fisheries needs to be considered in the design of rationalization programs for local fishermen and communities who too have a long-standing investment in Bering Sea fisheries resources.

Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

<em>Abstract</em>.—This chapter explores the relationship between state discourses and policies of marine enclosure and fishing livelihoods in remote coastal villages in the Kodiak Archipelago. The framing of fisheries access privatization as “rationalization,” the natural commonsense ideology of neoclassical economics, prioritizes goals of economic efficiency and aggregate profit maximization. These economic theories of disconnection (Taylor 2006) miss the important social and cultural attachments to place, identity, and lifestyle that characterize many fishing livelihoods. Based on ethnographic research in three Alutiiq fishing villages, I explore how privatization policies have constrained flexible, kinbased fishing economies and have caused disproportionate reductions in fisheries participation. Related social changes, including the emergence of a lost generation that has few social, cultural, or economic ties to commercial fishing, pose challenges for community sustainability. The discourses and realities of rationalization are remaking the relationship between fishing communities and the resources on which they depend. Place-based, collective fishing lifestyles are being replaced by individual private fishing rights for the elite. With the continued enclosure of fisheries access comes both a normative reframing of just outcomes and a material permanency of resource access and ownership, both of which are becoming increasingly difficult to dislodge.

Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

<em>Abstract</em>.—This paper situates the claims of the Stó:lō Nation, a First Nation of British Columbia, in the context of conflicts over the conservation and allocation of salmon. I address two major contestations and discuss how concepts of privatization permeate both. The first contestation is between aboriginal and nonaboriginal fishers, a conflict with a high degree of racialized tension. In this conflict, the Stó:lō have obtained recognition to participate in the commercial fishery of British Columbia as a community, holding a communal fishing license. Their community quota represents a new kind of thinking in fish conservation and allocation, a variation on a trend toward individual quota allocations that has developed in recent years, a trend called privatization. The second contestation pits salmon farming against fishing, with farming positioned as a solution to market demands and economic uncertainties, a new and powerful form of privatization. In this contestation, culture wars do not concern race, ethnicity, or historic links to land. They involve a variety of new discourses that discuss the character of salmon and construct salmon as a product to be desired more than a resource to be sustained. The paper concludes that the Stó:lō model of a community quota may stand as a beacon for rethinking and renegotiating salmon fisheries in the region. At the same time, new cultural constructions may need to emerge that make salmon fishers more visible to consumers, lest the current marketing images of salmon obscure the economic and ecological threats to salmon as a resource.

Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

<em>Abstract</em>.—By the 1990s, widespread fisheries restructuring triggered by the implementation of the individual transferable quota (ITQ) system and market-derived impacts of globalization had occurred in most aspects of the Icelandic fishery sector. The consequences of privatization of fishery resources have transformed management in regulating access to the resource, processing, corporate ideology, and the reproduction of labor. Economic rationality, marketability, efficiency, and managerial innovations in effect are both the mantra and imperative accompanying concentration and consolidation. Social and environmental costs are widely observable in many coastal communities that were the former lifeblood of the Icelandic economy. This chapter presents an account of the policy implications of cutbacks in Atlantic cod <em>Gadus morhua </em>allocations and discusses their effect on coastal communities around Iceland. It will focus on the response of fishery companies to a changed structural environment, as well as their role in shaping the new sector with special emphasis on the economic rationale of leading seafood companies. In this context, this chapter explores the impact of the transformation in the fisheries sector on effects of the ITQ system on stocks; on fishing and fishers; on the processing sector; on labor, particularly that of women; and on communities.

Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

<em>Abstract</em>.—In 1995, the harvestable quotas for Pacific halibut <em>Hippoglossus stenolepis </em>and sablefish <em>Anoplopoma fimbria </em>in the Gulf of Alaska were fully privatized primarily as individual fishing quotas. By 1999, initial quota held by rural, predominantly Alaska Native fishermen resident in the region had declined dramatically. Recognizing that quota loss posed a serious threat to the viability of the villages and small communities, a coalition of Alaska Native villages developed and submitted a proposal to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to establish a community fisheries program for Gulf of Alaska villages. While partially designed along the lines of the Community Development Quota program in the Bering Sea, one of the features of the Gulf of Alaska program was the requirement that the community-based groups, known as community quota entities, would have to purchase quota on the market from other holders. This paper provides background to the emergence of the program, placing it in context of other Alaskan fisheries rights programs; discusses the diversity in the communities across the region; and considers a number of factors that contribute to the problems of implementation. The paper concludes that there are serious barriers to the successful fulfillment of the program’s goal of local community ownership of halibut and sablefish quota as it is currently constituted. Achieving that goal will require significant policy changes or new programmatic initiatives.

Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

<em>Abstract</em>.—Since 1986, New Zealand has implemented individual transferable quotas in nearly all its commercial fisheries under its quota management system. New Zealand was among the first to pioneer this market-based approach to fisheries management. This management revolution came about in response to changes in national economic policies, economic and inshore fisheries crises, and a desire to develop valuable deepwater fisheries. After 20 years, resource sustainability, maximizing export values, and economic efficiency continue to be primary goals. The fisheries quota management system appears quite compatible with current market-based economic policies of the New Zealand government. This chapter summarizes some of the key findings of a nearly 20-year longitudinal (1987, 1995, 2005) study of a sample of Auckland region fishermen and fishing businesses. The purpose is to learn how fisheries participants respond under this market-based fishery management system. I focus on the perceptions, attitudes, and actions of these original fishery participants over the 20-year study period. In addition, I present the findings of interviews in 2006 with new entrants in the Nelson region. While the original quota management system participants were gifted with quota shares in 1986 based on their catch history, new entrants have to come up with enough capital and knowledge to enter and compete. I wanted to find out about the issues facing new entrants. I conclude by discussing the results and describing a few key lessons from New Zealand’s experience. Hopefully, these lessons will be useful to others designing limited access privileges in fisheries elsewhere.

Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

<em>Abstract</em>.—New schemes of proprietary control are being considered to recover and improve Alaska’s salmon industry, even though the industry is already structured through the nonquota permit-based regulatory regime of limited entry. Most U.S. fisheries are currently being evaluated for new restructuring and privatization plans, which forever change the fisheries and the fishermen. The socioeconomic fates of many coastal indigenous peoples are being determined without finer understandings of potential benefits and ramifications of such policies. The tortoise pace of anthropology will almost certainly never catch up with the rapid policymaking process, but more than three decades of the Limited Entry Permit Plan can provide a useful means of evaluating the lasting effects of programs already in place and predicting future effects of new policies. Based upon multiyear ethnographic fieldwork and quantitative data acquired in four eastern Aleut fishing communities, this paper summarizes and critically examines long-term effects of Limited Entry on the culture and society of Aleut people. From the social structure before Limited Entry through permit allocation to the current fisheries system, this plan was a defining moment for modern social relations and ultimately exaggerated as well as generated other social, economic, and political limited entry systems in Aleut society.