Conservation benefits from an individual fishing quota (IFQ) system implemented by a local fishery cooperative are giving momentum to a push for privatization of community fishing rights in Japan.
In the fall of 2011, local fishery cooperative members on Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture were looking at ways to restore declining sweet shrimp stocks. At the suggestion of Masayuki Komatsu, who was then a visiting senior research fellow at Japan’s Fisheries Agency, and with the consent of Niigata Governor Hirohiko Izumida, they agreed to allocate individual quotas. The allocation was set at a few percentage points less than the average catch for each fisherman for the last five years.
The system was combined with a conservation measure of increasing the mesh size of nets to allow escapement of small shrimp. Higher value large shrimp, which previously made up only 20 to 30 percent of the catch, now make up about 70 percent.
Rather than a short-season derby, the season was extended through the summer, when demand is high. During the August “Obon” holiday, many Japanese who have migrated to the cities visit their rural hometowns to visit family gravesites and take part in festivals. Those returning to Niigata now take the opportunity to enjoy fresh local shrimp.
These positive results have produced favorable media coverage of IFQ programs, and have given impetus to wider implementation of this system, which has not been previously employed in Japan.
Komatsu, who introduced the concept, is a former head of the Fisheries Research Institute. This June, he launched the Study Group on Fisheries Resources inside the Fisheries Agency to promote expansion of IFQs. “This offers a chance to break away from subsidized management of the fisheries administration to full commitment of fishermen to improvement of the resource,” he said.
The Fisheries Agency has already decided to introduce an IFQ system over a wide area for the first time this fall, for offshore mackerel fishing in the Pacific Ocean from the Kanto to Tohoku regions.
In the hopes of revitalizing the industry, and with the support of corporate lobbying groups, the Fisheries Agency has been whittling away at Japan’s normal coastal fisheries management system set down in Japan’s Fisheries Act, under which the coastal fishing rights to a specified area based on a local port are to be granted with priority to the Fisheries Co-operative Associations (FCAs), whose members are fishermen from communities within the area. These FCAs then have responsibility for co-managing the area. The fishing rights cannot be transferred to others; only members of the FCA can fish in the area.
The benefits of the system are that the resource is tied to local port towns so residents of those towns can expect to the fishery to contribute to the local economy, and it protects small owner-operators, which in a vertically integrated corporate-dominated system would become mere employees. However, it also has drawbacks. In practice, the right to join the association and operate a vessel can be passed on within families, so that it is not easy for new entrants to participate in the fishery. The result is a lack of younger fishermen and a lack of new investment in the industry.
On the other hand, U.S.-style IFQs, while giving fishermen a payout for selling out their access and an incentive for conservation, also privatize a public resource, create a financial barrier to new entrants, encourage monopolies and may eliminate the access of smaller fishing communities to the resource if shares are sold by local vessel owners to larger vessels operating out of larger ports.
On the national level, there is pressure from business associations to amend the Fisheries Act to open the sector to private investment and ownership. Other pilot programs have also been implemented.
Also in 2011, the Miyagi prefectural government designated Marine Produce Industry Special Zones for Reconstruction within which businesses could acquire fishing rights on an equal footing with cooperatives. An oyster-farming venture was granted the right to aquaculture sites under this emergency exemption, over the opposition of cooperative members who decried the loss of their priority access. The company’s business model is to integrate production, processing and sales.
The Japan Economic Research Institute, a business federation-funded think tank, published proposals for fishery reform in 2007 and again in 2011 that proposed abolishing any impediments to entry into aquaculture and set-net fishery, and introducing the Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) system under which IFQs could be traded as a commodity. These recommendations appear to be the blueprint for the current reforms.
