Total Allowable Catch
The Total Allowable Catch (TAC) is the number of fish that is deemed appropriate to remove from a fishery in a given time frame. In assigning a Total Allowable Catch, the fishery can manage precisely how many fish are caught. Establishing a TAC, which is essentially a quota on the fishery as a whole, is not a management tool that can be used alone; in 1996, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development declared that 16 of the 22 fisheries managed by TAC had failed. Studies have shown that upon realizing that there was only a limited number of fish available to catch, fishermen became competitive and raced to claim as large of a portion of the TAC as possible.
A general problem with setting a TAC is it's inflexibility. If the TAC is set too high, as is the case in many countries, the fishery temporarily undergoes a stock decline. This is largely due to insufficient information about the resources available in the fishery. It is essential that the TAC be set by an authority that involves both the government, which provides the legislative power, and the industry, which has the appropriate knowledge about the fisheries.
The implementation of a TAC poses another issue. Using TAC works well in single-species fisheries with simple fishing technology, but given the complexity of many fisheries, particularly ones in Europe, that call for the management of multiple species and thus multiple TACs, it is difficult to monitor illegal landings and bycatch.
Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQ)
Many countries use a system in which the TAC is divided into Individual Transfer Quotas for each fishing vessel operator. ITQs assign property rights to fishing companies so that fishermen have ownership to certain parts of the ocean and thus have a greater incentive to take care of it and engage in sustainable fishing.
This ownership can be bought and traded, which means fishermen new to the industry would have to buy their way in.
This is advantageous for larger fishing companies, which have high profits and can afford to purchase more ITQs; critics say this will lead to monopolies in the industry, but it may be a good thing for the environment, since owning more of the "ocean" leads to more efforts to keep fishing sustainable. On the other hand, large fishing companies tend to be more destructive and produce more pollution and damage with their large fleet than local fishermen, who tend to be more sustainable but will not be able to compete with the larger companies.
Problems with ITQs
- discourages local sustainable fishermen
- companies still more focused on the short term profits instead of long term consequences
- quota is for one year, so if companies overfish, instead of stopping, they try to buy more quotas
- companies tend to throw away unwanted fish
ITQs are used in New Zealand, Australia, Iceland, Canada and the U.S.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1995/04/mm0495_04.html
(second article)
Morgan, G. (1997). "Individual Quota Management in Fisheries - Methodologies for Determining Catch Quotas and Initial Quota Allocation." FAO Fisheries Technical Papers.