Reykjavík Grapevine - 27.07.2007, Page 20

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Icelanders’ allotted cod quota was recently cut
by a third, which is more than ever before since
Iceland won the cod wars with Great Britain in
the 1970s and expanded their territorial waters
to 200 nautical miles. The cutback is also the
biggest in cod fishing since the Icelandic Gov-
ernment legalised their quota system (the ITQ
system) in 1985. That was done at the behest
of biologists and marine biologists in order to
protect the stock against over-fishing and to
establish a self-sustainable fishing industry.
The cutbacks will primarily affect the third
of the nation that lives by the island’s coasts.
There the main industry consists of fishing,
processing, and exporting fish products. The
exceedingly high exchange rate of the Icelandic
dwarf-Króna has the effect that the two-thirds
of the nation living in the greater Reykjavík
area do well by importing various consumer
goods, while their export-industry cousins by
the seaside face an increasingly grim real-
ity. Capital dwellers take fancy in trailing the
country’s highways with the world’s biggest
trailers in tow to find out how the cod quota
cutbacks are affecting the folks in the villages
on the shoreline, those that earn their keep
by means of export.
Thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that
Iceland is evolving into a sort of city-state,
where a government that’s pointedly unin-
terested in any sort of regional development
policy has stood by as two out of every three
Icelanders now populate the same spot. How
would the English or French like it if the popula-
tion numbers of London or Paris reached 35–40
million? How would the Swedish government
like if six of their nine million Swedes resided
in Stockholm?
What’s worst is the ever-present doubt.
How do the marine biologists know that cod
fishing needs to be cut down so drastically,
while haddock and herring fishing doesn’t?
Aside from that, the quota-isation of the vari-
ous species of fish results in as much cod and
haddock being caught throughout the next
fishing-year. Every fisherman and those who
have studied nature know that no known
fishing implement can catch one haddock for
every cod. The nature of the ocean deems that
for every haddock caught, you will catch three
to four cod.
The honest shipowner is then left with a
single choice. If he is allowed catch 100 tons
of haddock, he must own at least 200 tons
of cod quota. If that isn’t enough, he can
either throw away the cod that exceeds the
aforementioned ratio, or he can illegally unload
the cod outside of the heavily regulated quota
system. Can it be that a quota system that goes
against nature will produce criminals?
Around 13 years ago, marine biologists,
economists and other specialists sat down and
made a definitive rule that would become the
dominant paradigm for the government and the
Marine Research Institute (MRI). It states that no
more than 25% of the estimated stock of fish
may be caught at a given time. For example, if
marine biologists estimate the cod stock within
Iceland’s territorial waters at one million tonnes,
they allow 250,000 to be caught.
These same specialists claimed at the time
that if their 25% rule were maintained, cod
fishing would be self-sustainable and growing
within the decade.
The exact opposite has happened. Marine
biologists now demand that the standard to be
lowered to 20% or less. Minister of Fisheries
Einar Kr. Guðfinsson has nothing to reference
their claims by, as the only accepted marine biol-
ogy exists within a single foundation (the MRI)
and is interwoven with the quota system and
with the shipowners’ interests. The Minister of
Fisheries didn’t dare to ignore the MRI’s advice,
and thus cut the cod quota down from 190,000
tonnes per fishing-year to 130,000 tonnes.
Marine biologists have responded to criti-
cism by saying that the government and fisher-
men have never followed their advice, and that
at least one million tonnes of cod have been
caught in excess of their advised numbers.
Is this believable? Isn’t it reminiscent of a
meteorologist blaming car-owners for his failed
five-day forecast?: That they emit so much
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with their
cars that there’s no way to predict weather
five days into the future. Twelve years ago, the
MRI’s marine biologists clearly promised that
Icelanders would reach the land of milk and
honey within a decade by following their 25%
rule.
Recently, Einar Oddur Kristjánsson, the Inde-
pendence Party’s MP for the Westfjords, passed
away suddenly. The North-Atlantic’s richest cod
fishing grounds are located by the Westfjords.
Kristjánsson had criticised the MRI for years. He
believed that establishing competition within
the MRI’s field of science – one so important
for this nation of fishermen – was absolutely
essential. The absolute last-word power of the
MRI could establish the same kind of Lysenko-
ism abundant in the Soviet Union of yore. Trofim
Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who maintained
a biological theory that, among other things,
refused to acknowledge Mendelian genetics.
The Soviet Communist Party made Lysenko’s
science a state one, declaring his critics to be
heretics and enemies of the people. Soviet biol-
ogy didn’t recover from Lysenko-ism until the
1960s.
Illugi Gunnarsson, a young Independence
Party MP with strong ties to the Westfjords,
has backed up Kristjánsson’s criticism. He says
– 15 years after the fact – that it was in hind-
sight unfortunate to make the only scientific
institution in the field, the Marine Research
Institute, into a sort of scientific beacon and at
the same time the sole scientific justification
for the quota system. This has had the effect
that those who present objective criticisms of
the theories and calculations of the MRI are at
the same time stigmatised as opponents of the
quota system.
The quota system is the legitimate offspring
of libertarianism and ‘marketisation’ within the
fishing industry, where the policy’s alpha and
omega are handing rights to uncaught fish in
the ocean directly to shipowners. Everybody
knows the reasoning behind these actions. It has
for long been preached to the world from the
pulpit of the International Monetary Fund.
Indeed, Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson,
Iceland’s foremost libertarian missionary (and
Independence party ideologue), wrote in an
article for the Wall Street Journal published
January 29, 2004, that Iceland’s success with
the “libertarian experiment” far surpassed that
of Pinochet’s Chile and Margaret Thatcher’s
Britain. The only remaining task was to privatise
Icelanders’ natural resources, such as energy
and fish.
Text by Jóhann Hauksson
Is it here to stay?
EKG: “Everything indicates that it’s not likely
to change in principle in the foreseeable fu-
ture. It is clear that the industry needs stabil-
ity, more than anything. Uncertainty can have
very bad effects. It also seems to me that the
system is less disputed than often before.”
BJ: “The quota system is far from perfect,
just as any other known regulation system,
and this needs to be constantly kept in mind.
One can argue that under certain conditions,
the likelihood of small fish being thrown away
increases. Hence, this calls for efficient control
and enforcement system. I see no other sys-
tem that would be more efficient. The Faeroe
Isles tried a different system and are now fac-
ing a fishing crisis.”
GA: “Discontinuing it now would be hard, as
a lot of honest, hard working people have in-
vested a lot of their capital in the system. But
we could change some of its tenets, and bring
a greater emphasis on eco-friendly fishing,
the smaller vessels that use less oil and don’t
damage the ocean floor. That would become
a great commodity in the long run.”
HH: “They’ve all but nailed it down. The banks
have pawned all the fish in the ocean, a lot of
ill-gotten money is at stake, so escaping this
foul system will take years. At the same time,
its clear that this course is leading us to squa-
lor, yet the government refuses to reconsider
even the worst aspects of it. We are currently
firmly entrenched in the clutches of capital.
My only hope is that we’ll someday have the
good fortune to join the European Union so
that us outside of Reykjavík will stand a fair
chance once again, but that isn’t likely to hap-
pen anytime soon.”
HHG: “Yes, and in other countries too. There
is no other way of efficiently limiting access to
a limited good.”
Should it be used to influence Iceland’s
regional development?
ÞÓ: “No.”
HH: “That was the idea, but it’s never been
put to action. You can’t restrain the free
enterprise. It could have been done and it
should have been done, we suggested that
the quota should be tied to specific regions,
and that places in need of quota could access
it from the state. But the government doesn’t
interfere now, out of fear of angering the free
trade apostles.”
HHG: “The fish stocks should be harvested
from the places from which it is most efficient
to harvest it. This is not something that the
planners would know. This emerges through
market transactions. The highest bidders are
the most efficient ones, in the long run.”
EKG: “Yes, it should, using some of the means
I mentioned earlier. We decided to take a
considerable part of the quota and allot it to
smaller vessels that belong to smaller commu-
nities, that was a political decision to use the
system to influence and help development in
those places. The same thing applies to the
line concessions and the regional quotas we
distribute every year.”
BJ: “I don’t know what you mean by this
question. However, society will always adjust
to the system that is used. This means that if
fishing and fish processing is now done more
efficiently than before, this will influence peo-
ple. Fewer people are needed to do the same
amount of work and it is done better than
before. It should be mentioned that fish pro-
cessing is now done mostly by workers origi-
nating from foreign countries. This started in
the 1990s and may have been the beginning
of the drift of Icelanders away from fish pro-
cessing.”
GA: “It’s a tough subject, but yes. The indus-
try should be kept where it’s most logical to
keep it – Bolungarvík has been bustling fishing
station for the last thousand years, and that’s
no co-incidence. It simply makes more sense
to catch the fish and process it where it has a
potential for self-sustainability and access to
it is easiest. Harvesting fish from Reykjavík, or
even Ísafjörður, doesn’t make much sense.”