I've been watching this for over 40 years. I see this a little differently than some of my friends in the fish-harvesting industry and so on. I believe that the biggest driver of licence and quota price increases is the value of the fish in the water. There is a rising global demand, and the opening of markets and the free trade agreements that we've seen over the last 20 or 30 years have created a whole new fishing economy, in which we now have fairly effective conservation regimes in most of our important commercial fisheries.
That means the supply of fish to the market is not going to grow dramatically, because we try not to threaten the sustainability of stocks. We have a fixed quantity of product, generally speaking. There are some ups and downs with different species, but we have a fixed quantity of seafood that goes to a market in which there is rising demand. There is significant growth in the number of consumers and in the willingness of consumers to pay for seafood becoming a high-quality food product and becoming, in many environments, a luxury food. We've all heard about the expanding middle class in China and all of these factors.
The fundamental is that the fish in the water is more and more valuable. That, in turn, has generated the interest of speculative investors to try to get control of an asset that's going to keep growing in value. When you take a long-term view.... We're going through a tough year right now, and people can say, “oh, we're in big trouble”, etc., but when you look at it over 20 or 30 years, it's a really good investment to own access to a fish quota or fish licence. Anybody would want to do that if they're a small investor.
The whole process of keeping licences and quotas in the hands of working harvesters faces a whole lot more challenges than it did 20 years ago, when people didn't see the fishery as a growth sector. It's a time in which I think we—