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Icelandic ex-fisherman here: Iceland‘s fisheries are controlled by what we call quota-kings. They are extremely rich owners of fishing quota (similar to USA’s
by runarberg 1mo ago
Icelandic ex-fisherman here:
Iceland‘s fisheries are controlled by what we call quota-kings. They are extremely rich owners of fishing quota (similar to USA’s oil barons) who are increasingly anti-social and obviously very unpopular among Iceland’s general public.
Iceland’s fishing system is kind of feudal in nature. People are allowed buy and trade and even rent fishing quotas. This means that the quota has accumulated into fewer and fewer hands of extremely rich individuals. The quota is then trickled down to fishing companies, and finally to fisherman, who have to spend a lot of money to rent the quota before they are allowed to fish.
This is a terrible system, and obviously the EU loves it (it even tried to copy it to solve the climate-crisis; and failed obviously). It fits smack into EUs neo-liberal trajectory. I don‘t think it is a fantasy at all the EU would adopt Iceland’s management policy at all. Nor do I think Iceland’s workers (including fishermen) have anything to worry about inside the EU. Trading ownership from our own feudal overlords to European bureaucrats would be a net positive in my books, however unlikely I find it.
That said I think it is unlikely Iceland will join anyway. Even if ‘yes’ wins. Iceland’s politicians have a history of ignoring the results of a national referendum if they don‘t like the results. They did this back in 2012 when the nation voted in favor of a new constitution (which relevantly would have actually transferred ownership of the fisheries to the Icelandic nation). A new government came to power and simply decided to ignore the results because their loved quota-kings would have lost power. I think something similar is likely to happen again.
- ViewTrick1002 1mo agoShared usage of a limited resource is a hard problem to solve. Given the current system maybe the most honest one would be if the state ”owns” all the quota and then let fishermen bid for fishing rights. But I have a feeling that will quickly become politicized with strange carve outs benefiting a few.
- inigyou 1mo agoBidding for rights is basically an ownership system already. Once you win a bid for a right, then you own the right.
- ViewTrick1002 1mo agoEven if time limited? So you bid for 5, 10 years or whatever becomes a good balance between stability to invest in the business and an agile market.
- inigyou 1mo agoYes, then you become a landlord for 5 or 10 years. Once the rights are given out by whatever method and set for 10 years, then anyone else who wants one in the next 10 years has to buy or rent one from whoever has one. That's landlordism.
- ViewTrick1002 1mo agoBut that would trend to cutting out the middle man due to the inefficiencies they create. Middlemen will only work if either these middlemen make the utilization more efficient or you make the requirements to bid so onerous that only these specialized middlemen have the competency to do fulfill them.
- inigyou 1mo agoNo, middlemen would happen if it's profitable to be a middleman. Extreme case: one person bids just enough to get all the rights, then charges double that to fishermen to use them.
- ViewTrick1002 1mo agoWhich means in the next bidding round the fishermen would bid somewhere between the double they were charged, and could still apparently have a working businesses with, and what the middleman bid. All it means is that they were expecting too large profit margins and someone called their bluff.
- inigyou 1mo agoHas this been tried? It's been tried with housing (that's the current housing system).
- runarberg 1mo agoMy personal opinion is that trawling should be banned. Without trawlers shoveling up entire populations and destroying the ecosystem around it, a lot of these issues will solve them selves.
- mike_hearn 1mo agoThe problem is enforcement. The EU system doesn't work because it's not properly enforced. Spanish fishing fleets would regularly fish in British waters and Britain wasn't able to stop them, despite the rules. This is a general pattern. The EU has many rules that are supposed to be enforced by its own institutions. But the attitude is very much to decide what rules to enforce based on ideological and political concerns, so the laws are largely meaningless.