Donald R. Leal

Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQs), the permission to catch a percentage of the scientifically determined total allowable catch (TAC) in a fishery, are the best solution to the problem of overfishing, argues Donald R. Leal in the following viewpoint, originally given as testimony before the House Subcommittee on Fisheries Conservation, Wildlife, and Oceans. IFQs safeguard each fisher’s allocation of fish each year, thus discouraging the “race for the fish,” which promotes wasteful and often dangerous fishing strategies. Establishing fair methods for allocating how much fish each fisher can catch each year will help make IFQs an accepted strategy to promote sustainable fishing. Leal is a senior associate at the Political Economy Research Center in Bozeman, Montana.

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