The first time someone asserted the right to fish over another, it was an act of rationalization. The first person to rationalize a commercial fishery in Alaska was the one who erected and operated a salmon trap.

At first, owning a trap just required enough money to construct one. But soon there were too many traps, and competition for the best locations became fierce. Allocation of trap locations and trap licenses began.

Even with limited licenses to control the number of traps, harvests were uncontrollable because fishermen continued to improve catching efficiencies.

The salmon fishery might have been completely destroyed. When Alaska achieved statehood and fish traps were outlawed, purse seine and gillnet usage expanded dramatically. By the early 1970s salmon harvests were again becoming uncontrollable.

The State of Alaska stepped in again, reasserted the public interest and rationalized the commercial fishery, this time with the Limited Entry Act.

Limited entry permits control the input of effort into a fishery. The number of limited entry permits given was based on the effort of the fleet and the known harvesting capacity at the time of issue, balanced with the availability of the resource at that time.

Initially this allowed for better management of the salmon resource, but fishermen are smart and were able to improve their harvest capacity. Even though the number of licenses was limited, the catch efficiency of each unit of gear was not. Boats and gear got bigger, wider, deeper, faster and management could not keep up. This led to more input control restraints like vessel size limits, gear limits, trip limits, fishing zones and corridors to be imposed to keep the fisheries manageable.

In the late 1970s, the Magnuson-Stevens Act rationalized the 200-mile groundfish fisheries by kicking out the foreign fishing fleets.

The new fishing opportunities created by MSA rationalization of the foreign groundfish fishery, combined with the new collateral associated with limited entry permits, fueled a tremendous expansion in Alaska fisheries. New wealth financed new and bigger boats that could tender salmon and herring, fish for crab, trawl for groundfish and longline for halibut and sablefish. The fishing industry boomed.

By the late 1980s, crab fisheries had collapsed, halibut and sablefish longline fisheries were derbies, and the groundfish industry was becoming overcapitalized. By the early 1990s, when salmon and herring began to reel from a faltering Japanese export market, halibut and sablefish seasons were lasting days or in some cases just hours.

There were so many participants in those fisheries already that limited entry was not seen as a viable solution. Individual fishing quotas (IFQ) emerged as the rationalization program for longliners.

IFQs licensed each eligible harvester with a transferable right to harvest a specific amount of fish. Not all licenses were equal like limited entry permits.

IFQ is an output control management plan, as opposed to an input control plan like limited entry. With IFQ output control, there is little incentive to expand harvesting capacity, so further limitations are not needed. The derbies are over. IFQs are easy to manage, they are very predictable, and they are easy to tax.

Input controls like limited entry are already in place for federal groundfish fisheries. But even with input controls in place, the harvesting capacity available today makes many of these fisheries virtually unmanageable.

The answer to our overcapitalized groundfish fleet is not to impose more limitations; they are beyond the point where input controls like trip limits and landing limits would have any beneficial effect. Instead these limits would shrink the already thin profit margins and risk putting these boats out of business.

This has already been seen in the New England groundfish and West Coast rockfish fisheries, where these fisheries are experiencing severe economic distress and have the worst stock conservation records in the nation.

Input control limitations offer no solution to conservation challenges, but only encourage regulatory discards and the race for bycatch allocations.

Federal groundfish fisheries are more complicated and have more regulatory requirements than other fisheries. The federal groundfish fleet harvests multiple species, and must fish outside closed areas for Steller sea lions and essential fish habitat, while also operating under mandates to minimize bycatch and improve retention.

Groundfish rationalization needs to come in a form that will dependably control the harvest and various environmental interactions. A comprehensive output control approach provides the needed flexibility to balance catching capacity and sustainable fishing practices while promoting a viable fishing economy.

Joe Childers is the director of the Western Gulf of Alaska Fishermen’s Association, an association of pollock and Pacific cod trawlers who work out of Sand Point, King Cove and Adak. He has been actively involved in rationalization efforts at the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and the Board of Fisheries for the past six years. He has been a fisherman and fisheries consultant continuously since 1966. He owns and operates a salmon troller and is part owner of two longline/pot vessels active in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea Aleutian Islands.