Privatising Fish quotas ….. surely not. July 15, 2011
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Economy, European Politics.Tags: Irish Politics
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I’m by no means an expert on fishing . I know the basics in that its an industry in decline because of stocks dwindling, SuperTrawlers and the Quota system. So reading Yesterdays Irish Times a headline lept out at me.
Coveney opposes fish quota privatisation
Privatising Fish quotas? surely not.
THE EU’s plan for the mandatory privatisation of fish quotas across Europe has been criticised by Minister for the Marine Simon Coveney, who warned that this could allow international companies to take over family-owned fishing fleets.
So Privatising Fish Quotas … but how?
Mandatory privatisation would see national fish quotas allocated in Brussels but then sold off to the highest bidder. It could lead to a situation where a country might lose all control of the fish stocks within its own waters…
So who would benefit from this?
The Federation of Irish Fishermen warns that quota privatisation would “benefit those with the most capital”….
Isn’t this a bit like adding a market onto an area where there’s already a market? Isn’t it simply absurd?
It’s adding a layer of market, which is the purpose of a lot of privatisation / marketisation maneuvers – look at the the HSE/NHS reforms, for instance. Potential benefits for the monopoly / cartel middle men (the holders of the private fish quotas) are obvious.
This is a typical stroke from the unelected powned-by-corporate-interests European Commission. Luckily it’s only a proposal as yet and is part of the realisation of just how screwed up fisheries management are in Europe. There are some good things in the proposals. Specifically the criminal discarding of so much edible protein is thrown away, dead:
This is a truly vital commons we are talking about, and it can be managed. (I’m assuming optimistically that we are not at the point of marine ecosystem collapse, due to warming, acidification and overfishing yet.) The Norwegians paid their cod fleet to go into mothballs for nearly a decade, if I remember rightly, and now have a reasonably stable resource.
More from the EUObserver.
Doubtless ‘a lot of discussions’ with corporate lobbyists went on as well.
You’d sort of wonder where the concentration of wealth into corporate hands will end up in terms of land. I was briefly looking into Land Value Tax recently for example. One of the benefits of such a tax is that it more or less forces productive use of land, i.e. the unproductive asset becomes a current liability (loose use of accounting phraseology here I know) due it being taxed. It would act against property speculation to some extent, but it would also act against small and uneconomic farms. While it sounds progressive at one level, it could have the effect of concentrating land ownership amongst “those with the most capital”. Agri-food MNCs in this case. How long to the next Land War I wonder?
Monopoly capitalism at its finest.
LeftAtTheCross suggests that a Land Value Tax might concentrate land ownership among “those with the most capital”. However history demonstrates exactly the opposite effect. To take just one example, The imposition of an LVT in California to fund irrigation districts during the early 20th century led to the landownership pattern in those districts changing from a few large landowners to many small landowners. There are other examples from history of this effect if anyone cares to do some research.
However it’s not clear to me that this “privatisation of quotas” is actually similar to LVT, so I am not sure why he brought the topic up.
Hi Derek, I brought it up only because I’m living out in a rural area and it sort of hits me in the face every day that there’s a massive economic asset out there (land) which to date is largely outside the scope of corporate ownership. Given the economic / political trajectory which we’re on at present, where capital is intent on reclaiming ownership and rental opportunity in areas which it has to date overlooked, it’s clear that land is as asset which will come increasingly on the radar for discussion. And more so as population growth and climate change force the issue of global food security. We’re already seeing “the markets” focusing on food as a speculative commodity. I don’t see food, and land, becoming less important in the future. I take your point about the Californian experience. Whether it translates wholesale into the European situation, where there is a tradition of land ownership which stretches back to feudal times, and where the EU’s common argicultural policy has to some extent bridged a transition from the pre-modern era into the present, one would wonder how a post-CAP agri’-food sector would look? So back to your question, it was just the link between the gift of nature (fish/land) and the opportunity for profit.
I was told thbat a FF minister was conned into giving away part of teh quota on a promise (never fulfilled) of a processing facility in Kinsale.