DATE: Tuesday, November 25, 1997            TAG: 9711250007

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: BY MICHAEL DE ALESSI 

                                            LENGTH:   80 lines

ANOTHER VIEW: VIRGINIA HAS A SENSIBLE PLAN FOR SAVING ROCKFISH

No one denies that the recovery of the striped bass (rockfish) in the Chesapeake Bay has been anything short of miraculous. The waiting list for these profitable fishing licenses is more than 600 grumbling people long. By comparison, there are only about 500 people in the fishery. Accusations are flying that some part-timers don't deserve licenses. Add to that the popularity of rockfish with the sport fishing crowd, and as the numbers of rockfish surge to record highs, so has political wrangling over who gets to catch them. This could all end when the Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC) meets today.

Virginia does not set the overall catch limits for striped bass; those numbers are handed down from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC). But how those fish are allocated is another story. Figuring out a way to end this annual bickering that accommodates watermen and benefits the resource might just be harder than bringing back the fish ever was, but Virginia seems to have hit upon the plan.

The state's plan is to introduce some form of ownership over the rockfish resource. That may sound like a radical new plan, but in fact it is long-overdue. Fisheries and other natural resources frequently suffer for the exact reason that no one owns them, so no one can benefit from conserving them - someone else will simply catch that fish. In the Chesapeake, this lack of ownership translates into an adversarial relationship between watermen and regulators, with the resource the inevitable loser. To remedy this, the proposal creates tradable harvest rights to a percentage of the catch allotted to Virginia by the ASMFC. This would ease entry into the fishery, create an asset for watermen to stabilize their livelihoods and encourage stewardship of Virginia's beloved rockfish.

The program would begin to take politics out of the allocation process. Currently the rockfish quota is split between commercial and recreational interests. Then the quota is divided again among the watermen by gear type, based on historical catches since the 1970s. These splits are uneasy truces at best. Watermen are chomping at the bit to increase their shares, and up until now the only way to do this was at someone else's expense. On the other hand, trading quotas to increase catches could occur only if both parties benefited.

A tradable system is often touted for its benefits to the watermen, but anglers may benefit as well. Under the state's plan, trades initially will be allowed only between registered commercial watermen, but in the future these trades could potentially be opened up to anglers. This would stave off another nasty political fight that elsewhere the anglers have been winning - witness the net ban referenda that have passed in a number of states recently. In New Jersey, the striped bass is a sport-only fish.

The current system is cumbersome. It encompasses five commercial gear types, although most of the quota goes to only two groups - gill netters (two-thirds) and pound netters (one-fourth). Under the current system, each licensed waterman gets an individual quota that is not tradable, and every fish sold commercially must have a special tag.

Tradable rights to the fish would clear all of this mess up shortly. Different tags could be issued for different gear types that corresponded to different weights. This would eliminate not only the confusing scenario above but also get rid of any gear restrictions, the annual permit application process, a lengthy special-exemption evaluation process and the dreaded waiting list.

Opponents of these innovations often simply do not like the idea of divvying up a natural resource that has traditionally been managed as a ``public'' asset. But in other places where this system has taken root (Alaska and New Zealand, for example) the result has been an increase in the availability of fresher, better-quality fish, an increase in the welfare of the people catching the fish and an improvement in the system for getting into the fishery.

If this proposal does receive the attention it deserves, no doubt there will be a lot of clamoring to place restrictions on the quotas, but this misses the point. Every restriction imposed from outside the fishery lowers the value of the fishing rights and, therefore, the benefits of creating them in the first place. The closer a tradable right is to real property, the more encouragement there is to steward the resource, and even to invest in improving the fishery. This has been the case in New Zealand, and it is a laudable goal in Virginia as well.

The VMRC would do well to keep this in mind. MEMO: Michael De Alessi is coordinator of the Center for Private

Conservation, a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in

Washington, D.C.

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