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 (Morgan, 1997). 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 often inflexible; if the TAC is set too high, as is the case in many countries, the fishery temporarily undergoes a stock decline. This is largely , because the fish will be removed at a rate that is higher than _. An inappropriate TAC is often 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 : 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.
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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.
References
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. Retrieved on November 18, 2007.
http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/003/W7292E/W7292E00.HTM