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Fishing
Commercial fishing takes place in the fertile fishing grounds in the 200 nautical miles extensive Exclusive Economic Zone and it is the most important economic sector in Iceland. The fishing rights are allocated as Individual Transferable Quotas, ITQs, to fishing firms, i.e. owners of fishing vessels. This can, and has been, characterised as partial property rights in fish stocks. Each holder of an ITQ owns a right to harvest a given percentage of the total allowable catch, TAC, in a given fishing season, and he can buy and sell such ITQs at will. New Zealand has adopted a similar system of ITQs, and it is also in operation in some fisheries in the U.S., Canada, Chile and other countries.
Three of the speakers at the MPS regional meeting have published books on the Icelandic quota system: Hannes H Gissurarson, Rognvaldur Hannesson and Ragnar Arnason.
Gissurarson’s book, Overfishing: The Icelandic Solution, can be downloaded in a pdf format from the Internet.
Recreational fishing is popular in Iceland. There are many freshwater rivers where salmon is caught in the summertime. The fishing rights belong to farmers who form river associations and rent out ”rods per day”. In economic terms, those are effort quotas, whereas the ITQs in deep-sea fisheries are catch quotas.
More information about the ITQ system can be found here: http://www.fisheries.is/managem/index.htm.
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