Those are two good questions.
You are from Montreal and you are learning a lot about fishery. The same goes for me; I do not know French well since I am from Newfoundland and Labrador.
How can the third model be a better model of sustainability as compared with the quota model? Number one, we wouldn't get rid of the quota model. We would always have quotas. We have to do the science and we have to ensure that the level of fishing mortality, what we call “F” in fishery science, is the sustainable level for removals. You never take more than the stock is able to reproduce—all things being equal, based on ecosystem management—so that you ensure an ongoing sustainability. The benefit of the third model, I think, and even the second model, is that you're deriving more value per kilo from the catch.
To make it simple, instead of having to catch 10 fish and get $1 per pound for $10 in return, let's catch five fish but get $5 per value from the marketplace—through pharmaceuticals, binary processing systems, or whatever—and produce $50 worth of landed catch value in the marketplace, so we have to take less fish.
The challenge in our model, which we hear all the time and are familiar with, is that every time the challenge of declining quotas presents itself based on the science, the outcry of industry—because we're on that thin knife edge of economic viability—is “You can't. The consequences are too grave. The impacts will be too severe. Too many people will be impacted.” That is real, and we should be concerned, but is the model to ask the fish to pay the price? Why not ask the marketplace? Why not change the model and produce greater wealth so that we can be more sustainable on the front end? I think that answers the first question.
Regarding the difference in the value- versus market-driven model, I can provide you with some information. In fact, if you're interested, there will be a professor of business from the University of Akureyri from Iceland in Ottawa later this week. I head to Ottawa tomorrow for the Fisheries Council of Canada annual meeting. He'll be presenting at the luncheon on Wednesday. He first defined these three models.
I would say that the market-driven model simply asks what the consumer wants—the head on, gutted, or raw? As we know, lobster goes live. The idea is to just focus on the market consumer, but that might not be the best value.
There is another model. In this one, we ask as an industry what we want from the resource. Well, we want higher value so that we can take less fish from the water. We ask what the market wants. The market will still be buying our products, but now let's consider leather coats from cod skin. I've seen that in Iceland. Let's consider the enzyme extractions. Let's consider the skin grafts, which are about $500 per kilo. Don't quote me on the math, but it's high value.
We just focus on the fillet. If you're Alaska, 70% of your pollock goes to China for processing. If you're Norway, it's 70% of your groundfish. That's a volume model. Is that the model we want? Are we going to go back to that? Once we lose workers, which we are now losing because we've had a certain model, there is nowhere else for it to go. We have to do something better, I think.
