Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.10.2014, Qupperneq 20

equation, everything becomes more
volatile. Elís Pétur Elísson is a fisher-
man and community activist who lives
in Breiðdalsvík, a village to the north-
east of Djúpivogur on the Ring Road.
According to his account, there were
around 1,500 tons of fishing quota lo-
cated in Breiðdalsvík as recently as
1996. Vísir bought the majority share
in the company that owned this quota
in 1998, however, and
relocated it to Djúpiv-
ogur, effectively
draining Breiðdalsvík
not only of its fish-
ing industry, but of its
very ability to support
a fishing industry.
The ramifications
for the village were
severe: the local fish
factory closed, the
economy suffered and
the population shrank.
Today Elís Pétur sees
the same cycle about to
repeat itself in Djúpiv-
ogur. “In recent years Vísir has been
buying up smaller fishing companies
throughout the country,” he said. “And
now they’re taking the quota, which
is the main source of income for these
villages, and leaving for Grindavík.”
To add insult to Breiðdalsvík’s his-
torical injury, there are plans afoot to
possibly compensate Djúpivogur for
the quota Vísir is moving back west—
to the tune of 400 tons for three years.
This irks Elís Pétur not only because
Breiðdalsvík was left empty-hand-
ed by the government back in 1998,
but primarily because the quota for
which Djúpivogur would be compen-
sated wasn’t all originally located in
Djúpivogur: just under half of it, by
his count, actually belonged to boats
in Breiðdalsvík. “If the government
does distribute quota to compensate
Djúpivogur, I just hope it’s spread
around,” he said.
Recently, Elís Pétur and a few oth-
er fishermen in Breiðdalsvík started
working together and pooling the
profits earned by fishing their small
individual quotas. They used the mon-
ey to open a new fish factory in the
village, which is owned collectively by
the people of Breiðdalsvík. Instead of
selling their catch to other factories,
these fishermen are trying to process
it themselves. “That way we keep the
income and the jobs in Breiðdalsvík,”
Elís Pétur said. The group has sought
government support to help make the
factory more stable and to employ
more people, but according to Elís
Pétur the authorities
have been tight-fisted.
He doesn’t know for
sure why they were
unsuccessful in their
petitions, but he has a
hunch. “It’s all politi-
cal,” he said. “I think
it’s mostly because
we’re not friends with
people in high places.”
As to the quota
system itself, Elís Pé-
tur is at once prag-
matic and highly criti-
cal. Like many other
small-scale fishermen,
he sees some form of quota as a neces-
sary means for regulating the amount
of fish—something long thought of as
the common property of all Iceland-
ers—that are taken from the sea. In
1990, however, revisions to the law
made quota a commodity that could
be bought and sold on a free market.
At this point it began concentrating
in the hands of a smaller and smaller
number of fishing companies mostly
headquartered in Reykjavík, morph-
ing the fishing industry into what Elís
considers essentially a mafia. “The
few companies that own the quota can
buy out anyone they don’t want in the
industry,” he said. “They can gamble
with it. They can go to the bank and
take a huge loan, and the loan is sup-
ported by quota that they own.”
The way to fix the quota system,
according to Elís Pétur, is to tie fish-
ing quota to a particular geographic
location. “If the government is going
to take care of these different villages,
they have to support the villages,” he
said. “That means some of the income
has to come from the quota being left
in the villages, not only with these big
companies in the Reykjavík area.”
Gauti echoed this opinion when
discussing the plight of Djúpivogur.
“I think there is a consensus in the
country that we want to maintain the
smaller fishing villages and the people
living there,” he said. “The easiest way
to do that is to make sure people can do
what they’ve been doing throughout
the years: fishing. It’s a political deci-
sion that has to be made.”
On the question of whether Djúpiv-
ogur might eventually suffer the same
fate as Breiðdalsvík, Gauti grew sol-
emn. “I would never dare to think like
that,” he said. “I’m not going down
that road. It’s that simple.”
Combining forces
One of the most important issues
raised by Vísir’s withdrawal from its
factories in Þingeyri, Húsavík and
Djúpivogur is the distance to which
Icelandic politicians and the public
are willing to go to preserve smaller
fishing villages. Gauti and Elís Pétur
both support the idea of tying quota to
particular fishing villages, so it can’t
be sold to a new company on the other
end of the country—or even, presum-
ably, on the other end of a fjord. Elís
Pétur goes even further in his recom-
mendations, advocating for a partial
nationalization of quota. “A large part
of the entire quota each year could be
owned and rented out by the govern-
ment, instead of rented out by rich
people in Reykjavik,” he says. “It’s cra-
zy how much money these companies
are making just by renting out quota
and not fishing themselves.”
These ideas might indeed provide
some relief to residents of smaller
fishing villages, but if the price of
this relief is forced inefficiency in the
fishing industry, it could prove to be a
Faustian bargain. Pétur sees techni-
cal progress behind all the strain be-
ing put on villages like Djúpivogur and
Breiðdalsvík, especially when they
find themselves in too close proxim-
ity—and therefore competition—with
each other. “With all the advanced
modern equipment used to process
fish, you only need twenty or thirty
people today to do the things that used
to take many more people,” he said.
“So it has nothing to do with the quota
system. It’s just the technology.”
Gauti was of a different mind about
what role the quota system, particu-
larly the geographically unspecified
nature of fishing quota, played in the
plight of his village. “What the quota
system does is make the villages very
vulnerable,” he said. “We’re a vil-
lage where the number of inhabitants
has been growing. We have all these
children, we have the school which is
getting bigger and bigger. And up un-
til this all happened, we did not look
at ourselves as a vulnerable village at
all.”
Though stopgaps might be found in
tourism or fish farming or any number
of other sectors, Gauti maintained that
the easiest, simplest and most effec-
tive solution for Djúpivogur’s economy
was also the most traditional. There is
plenty of room for development in the
fishing industry, he said, but this de-
velopment has to happen where the
boats dock and where the fish fac-
tories are located. “We are, first and
foremost, a fishing village,” he said.
“We have been a fishing village for
hundreds of years, and until otherwise
proven I like to think we will be a fish-
ing village into the future.”
20
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 16 — 2014
TVEIR HRAFNAR listhús, Art Gallery
Baldursgata 12 101 Reykjavík (at the corner of Baldursgata and Nönnugata, facing Þrír Frakkar Restaurant)
Phone: +354 552 8822 +354 863 6860 +354 863 6885 art@tveirhrafnar.is www.tveirhrafnar.is
Opening hours: Thu-Fri 12pm - 5pm, Sat 1pm - 4pm and by appointment +354 863 6860
TVEIR HRAFNAR
listhús, Art Gallery
offers a range of artwork by
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Óli G. Jóhannsson
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Also works by:
Guðbjörg Lind Jónsdóttir
Hulda Hákon
Sara Oskarsson
Kristján Davíðsson
Nína Tryggvadóttir
– among others
“I think there is a
consensus in the
country that we
want to maintain
the smaller fishing
villages and the
people living there.”