Fishers’ opinions on marketization of property rights and the quota system in France

Abstract

After many years of Common Fisheries Policies in the European Union, 88% of stocks are still being fished beyond their Maximum Sustainable Yield. While several Member States and the European Commission are moving toward Individual Transferable Quotas as a solution, France has declared its opposition to such marketization of fishing access rights and a national law has classified fisheries resources as a collective heritage. This paper discusses the evolution of the French system, principally its distribution of access rights by the Producer Organizations instead of the market. However, the Producer Organizations, which are more linked to the industrial fleet organizations, have not always modified their sharing formulae to include small-scale fisheries, resulting in a demand for more transparency and equity. Highlights ► Collective decisions were made against privatization of fishing rights. ► Co-management of subquota allocation occurs within Producer Organizations. ► There are sometimes inclusive policies towards SSFs by POs and authorities.

Assessing countries’ social-ecological resilience to shifting marine commercial species

“…In the EU, quotas can be swapped at the country level in a process that involves fishers’ organizations 47 . This system often creates impacts in small scale fisheries and regional conflicts within and between countries 63 , and the degree to which it confers resilience in the fishery system is under debate. Another factor that we highlight here is fleet mobility.…”

Making space for plural ontologies in fisheries governance: Ireland’s disobedient offshore islands

“…This analysis has relevance beyond the Irish fisheries context as the challenges faced by Ireland's small-scale fishing industry have much in common with small-scale fisheries globally. Shared challenges include difficulties accessing fishing opportunities (in particular, valuable quota controlled stocks); competing with the more powerful medium and large-scale industrial interests for fish stocks and markets; obstacles to participation in fisheries governance (for example, through fish producer organisations who mainly represent medium to large-scale fleets); difficulties making their voices heard in systems that value and privilege high economic output (although small-scale fisheries generally represent the majority of their national fleets in terms of numbers of vessels and fishers, their economic output is dwarfed by that of the larger-scale members of the fleet whose power affords them seats at decision-making tables such as those that manage quota allocations); and being adversely impacted by policies that are designed around the fishing practices and management of larger vessels (Linke and Jentoft 2014;Frangoudes and Bellanger 2017;Pascual-Fernández et al 2019;Pascual-Fernández et al 2020;Percy and O'Riordan 2020).…”

Oceans and Coastal Policy

“…They have been most vigorously adopted in tandem with the privatization of other common assets as a part of broader neoliberalist trends (Pinkerton 2017) -for example, in the United States of America(Porcelli 2017), Australia(Steer and Besley 2016;Emery et al 2017), Argentina(Bertolotti et al 2016) and Chile(Wiff et al 2016), in addition to other countries listed above. Norway(Hannesson 2013;Hannesson 2017), Sweden(Waldo et al 2013;Stage et al 2016;Blomquist and Waldo 2018) and Denmark(Merayo et al 2018) have seen more cautious adoption of ITQs, and other jurisdictions, such as France(Frangoudes and Bellanger 2017), have seen marked opposition. While several developing countries have shown interest in ITQs, they have not seen widespread adoption there, for various reasons that include concerns about economic participation, a backlash against 'privatizing nature', or the recognition that ITQs require sound stock assessment and reliable catch monitoring (see below).…”