This plan is designed to reduce many of the incentives that lead fishermen to overfish, thereby conserving fish stocks, ensuring the survival and profitability of the fishing industry, and driving down the costs of fisheries management for the American taxpayer. We do not claim that this plan will solve all ocean problems or even stop all overfishing. Enacting this plan would be a major improvement over the status quo, however.

Elements of the Plan

In particular we propose to:

I. End subsidies and tax breaks which encourage overinvestment in the commercial fisheries and keep inefficient operations in business.

When the Magnuson Fishery Act was ennacted, America's fisheries were thought to be an inexhaustible and underdeveloped resource. Fishermen were given tax breaks and subsidies to attract more of them to the industry, and to encourage them to fish more often. The result has been a rapid growth in the nation's fishing fleets and a rapid decline in the nation's fish. Scientists now know that America's fisheries were never as abundant in the 1970s and 1980s as people thought. Fisheries were not "underdeveloped" then, and they certainly are not today. The case for subsidies is not supported by science or economics; thus they should not continue. The Affirmative therefore proposes that the federal government:

• Stop giving money to fishermen to purchase boats and other equipment.

• Stop providing tax breaks to increase fishermen's incomes.

• Stop providing price supports to increase the market value of fish stocks.

• Stop providing rebates on fuel and equipment.

• Stop giving money to ports for the construction of docks and other harbor facilities.

To avoid the sudden shock to the industry of removing these supports cold turkey, the Affirmative proposes a gradual phase-out of existing supports.

Removing subsidies will help to make fishing an economically healthier industry. It is important to bear in mind that a large percentage of the current fishing community would not be in the business at all if not for the government, because they would not be able to make a profit on the dwindling fish stocks. For those inefficient fishing operations, the removal of subsidies will remove the incentives to continue building boats and hiring deck hands and will replace them with incentives to operate more efficiently or look for employment elsewhere. For already efficient fishermen, the removal of subsidies will help to remove their less efficient competitors and allow them to expand their operations.

II. Replace the current command-and-control system approach with a system of property rights.

While removing subsidies is an important step in restoring our fisheries, it will not achieve its full potential unless the larger regulatory system of which it is a part is also changed. Even if subsidies are removed, the fishermen that remain will still have incentives to "race to fish" as long as they are competing for access to a resource that they cannot own. We therefore propose that the government treat fish in the same way that it treats animals like cattle, sheep, chickens, and hogs - as private property. There is not one uniform way of applying property rights to all marine resources. We have identified four approaches that will serve as a good starting point for managing many of the country's most important marine resources:

• Allowing ownership of shore land that is covered with water at high tide as a way of managing clams, mussels, and oysters.

• Allowing ownership of parcels of the ocean floor, so that individuals can create artificial reefs.

• Allowing individuals to "fence off" areas of the ocean as a way of managing migratory fish.

• Creating tradable rights - Individual Transferable Quotas - that entitle fishermen to a certain portion of the catch.

In each case, the goal will not be to apply an inflexible, prefabricated management technique to all types of resources, but rather to experiment with property rights and find techniques best suited to individual resources. For those types of fish that have been successfully privatized in other countries, the U.S. should adopt similar methods for the same fish species in its own waters. For example, the U.S. should implement an ITQ system for lobster fisheries along the Eastern seaboard like the ones used in Australia and New Zealand. For fish like tuna, which move in large schools, the U.S. should use fenced off, Australian-style fish farms. For other types of fish that have not been privatized elsewhere, the U.S. should experiment to find property rights systems that are suited to each species' habitat, migratory patterns, etc. In every case, the principles guiding U.S. fisheries policy should be experimentation and innovation.

III. Encourage other countries to cut subsidies and adopt similar property-based fisheries policies.

The problems facing marine resources are not limited to American fisheries. Instead, they are part of a larger global trend of declining fish stocks, reflecting decades of regulatory mismanagement by governments around the world. Unlike herds of cattle or flocks of chickens, schools of fish move in and out of the jurisdictions of different countries. Their population levels in various fisheries are interconnected. This means that effectively managing fish with property rights in one locale will not always work unless other countries follow suit. Otherwise, some fish species will thrive in American waters, only to be overfished when they migrate into Canadian, Latin American, or European fishing grounds.

While the U.S. needs to act even if other countries do not, we propose that the U.S. encourage countries in these and other regions to abolish their own fisheries subsidies and adopt property rights-based systems. Taken together, the implementation of these two measures abroad will help to ensure that (a) de-subsidized American fishermen are not put at a disadvantage by having to compete against government-supported foreign competitors in international seafood markets and that (b) fish will have protectors and defenders wherever they may go. This can be accomplished through both bilateral agreements with individual states or through multilateral international conventions. The prospects for international cooperation on this score are good. In terms of subsidies, an international movement is already underway to reduce subsidies from their current level of $20 billion worldwide. In terms of property rights, 17 countries already have such systems in place, and the United Nations recently gave its endorsement to tradable quotas as a strategy for alleviating world hunger.

Funding for the Plan

The costs of a property-rights system will be significantly less than those of the current regulatory approach. The American public will no longer bear the burden of subsidizing unprofitable firms and ocean resource destruction. In addition, monitoring costs would be much lower since holders of ITQ's or property rights in marine resources will have an incentive to protect its value. In this was property rights will become an effective weapon against poaching, overharvest (i.e., people without a use right taking the resource and/or rights holders taking more than they are allotted under their ITQ), and damage to the resource from pollution, recreation and other outside factors.

Much of the plan can be made self-financing by, for example:

• Docking fees and/or fuel taxes charged at ports for port upkeep and the monitoring of daily catches.

• Charging a one time fee for or auctioning off ITQs.

• Leasing the exclusive rights to exploit marine resources in select areas of the ocean to fisheries entrepreneurs who would enhance the resource by, for example, fertilizing the ocean and monitoring pollution. Fees could be charged on a square mile basis or based on a percentage of the value of the catch (see Backgrounder VII. Case Studies in Property Rights, D. Ocean Farming, Inc).

Enforcement

Enforcement is needed to protect rights, not fish. As such, protection of rights to use marine resources is similar to the protection of rights on land. And law enforcement will be aided by self-interested owners of ocean property rights.

We propose the following enforcement mechanisms:

• Increase penalties for poaching from privatized marine areas (e.g., oyster beds, salmon farms, reefs, etc.).
• Establish criminal and civil penalties for fishing without a liscense/ITQ and for catching a greater amount of fish than allowed under ones ITQ, which could include:

1. Loss of ones ITQ or a percentage of such.
2. Loss of ones fishing boat and equipment.
3. Fines and/or imprisonment for repeat offences
4. Treble damages for civil penalties - with damages to be divided amongst the remaining ITQ holders.

• Mandatory daily weigh-ins at controlled landings with officially approved scales at ports with data transmitted to the NMFS to establish when overall species and individual quotas are met, with data reported to all ports and ITQ holders.
• Shifting the U.S. Coast Guards role in monitoring fishing from stopping illegal fishing practices (using the illegal devices or the wrong type of boat, or fishing out of season, etc.) to establishing that fishermen have a license/ITQ or that those harvesting marine resources in a particular area such as oysters hold or lease the right to harvest the resource in that area.

Advantages

There Affirmative plan offers a number of significant economic and environmental advantages over the status quo - not only for the U.S. but for the world as a whole.

1. Economic Advantages

According to the Federal Accounting Office, rebuilding currently overfished stocks and preventing overfishing in other fisheries could double U.S. fisheries revenues - from $3 billion to about $6 billion a year.

Worldwide, the FAO estimates that, if fishery resources were sustainably managed, harvests could increase by 10 million metric tons, adding about $16 billion to fishing revenues every year.

The removal of subsidies would also bring a number of benefits. Currently, worldwide fisheries revenue is about $70 billion, while the cost of operating the world's fishing fleets is about $85 billion. This means that the international fleet operates on a $15 billion deficit. This is an inefficient use of resources that eliminating subsidies would help to change.

2. Environmental Advantages

Evidence from the areas that have privatized their marine resources indicate that with fishermen no longer facing the perverse incentive to deplete fish stocks, populations should rebound. Additionally, property rights holders will have the incentive to reduce the catch of sexually immature fish to ensure future populations, to reduce by-catch since the harvest and disposal of non-commerical fish waste time and resources and can detrimentally affect the ecosystem and, where possible, enhance the marine environment to increase fish stocks.