Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to the committee. It's a real privilege to be here.
The chairman gave my present position at the University of Rhode Island. I had a slide show, but I guess that's been circulated to some of you. Hopefully I'll get around to explaining the title—it's inspired by a very famous paper by a very famous Canadian fishery biologist. I thought I'd start with seven slides. Math isn't my strong suit. I listened to all of the previous testimony, and a lot of people try to talk really fast, so I thought, if I just use seven slides, I think I can do it.
First, I'll talk about my background. Almost 40 years ago now, I dropped out of college to join a modern-day gold rush. The first picture is there in the upper left. I was with the crab boats out in Unalaska—or as some people know it, Dutch Harbor. At the top right, that's me. We're joking around, trying to signal to the skipper that it's a little too rough to fish. We didn't really wear a mask and a snorkel.
We wiped out the crab, and they closed the crab fishery for two years in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. At the bottom left is another picture. I switched to shrimp fishing around Kodiak. We wiped those out, so it was two for two. I decided I had to do penance to the universe, and I went back to school. I got my undergraduate degree in England, and ultimately my Ph.D at the University of California, Berkeley.
I ended up working back in Alaska for the State of Alaska, and in the fourth picture there, that's the Anchorage Hilton. I like to show that especially to students. All fisheries management is about conservation and/or allocation, and usually it's about the former disguised as the latter. That's the place where most fish in the United States is caught—the Anchorage Hilton—because that's where they do the allocation. For over 20 years, I was on the Scientific and Statistical Committee, which is the mandatory advisory body to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. I just ended that service last year.
One of the things that really motivated me throughout, certainly in my graduate studies but also the rest of my professional life, is on the next slide there. This was a question that was asked by the then mayor of Kodiak, Alaska, who was also a fisherman, when they were proposing the forerunner of what we now know as the ITQ program in halibut and sablefish. Not many people know it, but there was an attempt to talk about that even earlier, in the early 1980s. Here's the mayor asking what the effect would be on the coastal communities. That single idea has followed me for the rest of my professional life.
Thinking about that, the effect on these coastal communities.... On the next slide, at the top left is a little place called Craig on Prince of Wales Island. Dr. Pinkerton just mentioned the CDQ program. I was on the National Research Council committee that reviewed the CDQ program. There's a little map of the communities. At the top right, that's what it looks like to fly out to Little Diomede, which is on the dateline. You land on the sea ice, and that's open water at the end of the runway, which is scraped on the sea ice. In addition to this interesting concern about communities.... The bottom right is where I tug on your heartstrings: the next generation. I'll come to that in just one second.
My background, all of my thinking, all of my concerns about this have taken place where there's been one dominating idea that's ruling our management philosophies all around the world, and that's the push to privatize. On the last slide, you see a very well-known textbook by a Norwegian fisheries economist, and next to it you see a report by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Prince's Charities—that's Prince Charles. It's a rather interesting title that I think bears some relevance to our subject here today.
That's just a quick background on me. Let me go back to my slides.
The second slide that I would have shown you was my summary of listening to all that has transpired. I went on your marvellous website and either listened to the testimony or read the transcripts. Here's a little summary: stick boats, foreign investors, 80% lease rates, prohibitive entry cost to youth. What I didn't put on that slide, and should have, is what I heard at least one of you ask: How did we get here? The other thing that is just startling is this stark difference in the policy results between Atlantic Canada and British Columbia.
Number three follows from that. There's nothing new here. One of your witnesses said it's a worldwide problem, and it really is. Everything you're hearing in your hearings is being replicated around the world, where this push for privatization has occurred.
I'll just give you a quick story. Talk about stick boats.... Well, in Denmark, they have a famous case of an eight-foot dinghy that has over a million euros in quota shares stacked on it.
I put Tasmania in my speaking notes. I was in Tasmania about 10 years ago. They have an ITQ fishery there for abalone. At that time, approximately 60% of the quota was held by a single individual, an American. They invited me back five years ago. One of my first questions was, “Hey, does the American still own all the quota?” They laughed and said, “No, he sold it to the Chinese.”
This is what I mean. What you are seeing is not an accident. It's a worldwide pattern.
Number four, my fourth slide.... I've come to the conclusion now that you can sum up modern fishery management with the catchphrase, “Make feudalism great again.” I heard it in the testimony of previous witnesses. People we used call fishermen now refer to themselves as sharecroppers.
The other way of summarizing what you're dealing with is my other little phrase: “Stealing from the future”. I had my wife help me translate this into French. She's French. She originally came back with “stealing the future”. I said, “No, I want 'stealing from the future'”, because that's what I think is going on.
Number five is that this is not an accident. It's not an unintended consequence. It's the intended result. In the speaking notes, which I've circulated, there is a guide to a film by a Danish filmmaker called The “T” in Fish: Reform of the EU CFP. In that little film, they interview the architect of the Danish ITQ system. He summarizes the pattern we're talking about—concentration, high cost—and he says, looking straight into the camera, “This is a result of the regulation, and this is the intended result.” Then he's followed by the Danish minister of fisheries, and she says, “We don't want to interfere in the free market.” This is what I call market fundamentalism, and that supports what Dr. Pinkerton was talking about. These are intended consequences that we're witnessing. I commend that film to you.
I showed you the cover of the Prince Charles and EDF report. What's really interesting is the title of the first chapter in that report: “Introducing fisheries as investable propositions”. That's where we're going, worldwide, with this privatization logic. Bring in Wall Street. That's what you're hearing testimony about.
Number six is the slide that I put in to answer the question, “How did we get here?” We got here following an ideology masquerading as science, and what I call a failure to distinguish the tool from the ideology. This is all coming out of fishery economics. A large portion is coming out of the University of British Columbia. We've been going down this road for 65 years, ever since the famous paper by Scott Gordon.
My title is inspired by a 42-year-old paper by Peter Larkin, in which he said there are two extreme paths that could be followed for fisheries, which both rely on an underlying political philosophy. The extreme path we've been going down is the privatization path. The failure here is to distinguish the tool. The tool is just pre-assigned catch. That's all it is. You could do this through a public leasing model. All of this talk about rights-based fishing and property rights—that's the ideology.