Next-level management reform required a new tool to facilitate smooth quota trade and transparency: FishRight was the Swedish fleet’s answer.
Fishing in Sweden has been evolving. From the first mention of the Landing Obligation, fishermen understood change was coming, and getting management right would be crucial to making this sea-change policy workable for their different fleets. Innovation would be the way forward for ensuring fishing businesses stayed afloat; and that innovation would need to be underpinned with new, wheelhouse-accessible technology that could help deliver a flexible, adaptive – and discard-ban ready – fishery.
From 2015, fishermen and the Swedish Marine and Water Agency (SWaM) worked alongside each other, participating in an effective and communicative co-management process to re-imagine Swedish demersal fishing for future generations.
Spearheaded by the Swedish Fishermen’s Producer Organisation (SFPO) and supported by Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Europe, this collaboration delivered a new way of managing Swedish demersal fisheries, which hit the water in January 2017. Central to management reform was the ability to trade individual quotas within the fleet and within the R03;year: helping fishermen in both large and small-scale vessels (the latter protected by a quota pool, specifically for the inshore fleet) quickly cover their catch, and bringing new flexibility into the system.
This is where the tech comes in. This core component – of swift, transparent quota transfer – was already central to the country’s pelagic fleet, which has worked with transferable quotas since 2009. For the pelagics, quota trade (helping them cover their full catch, including any risky discard or choke species) was carried out through a new, 24-hour system developed by SWaM with flexible inter-vessel trade and the discard ban in mind: FishRight.
With the introduction of the new demersal management system, and still keen to ensure that management evolution didn’t create additional administrative burdens for busy fishermen, access to the FishRight system was opened to all demersal license holders from January 2017.
Check out the full story in the April issue of Hook & Net….
