Russia and the United States share fish
Between the Russian Federation and the United States quotas for fishing in the Bering Sea. 80% of the total, or 1.4 million tons per year, probably went to the fishermen. Now the Federal Agency for Fishery will give 50% of the quota to industry companies, which will allow them to double their catch. But market participants took the idea skeptically. They return to the catch volume for the US without increasing them for the Russian Federation, as there are fewer and fewer large fish in the sea.
As several large fish producers told Kommersant, on March 23, about a meeting with the presidential envoy in the Far Federal District Yuri Trutnev, the head of the Federal Agency for Fisheries, Ilya Shestakov, proposed revising the rules for keeping fish in the Bering Sea of the Russian Federation and the United States. The production area was divided between the countries back in 1990 by an agreement signed by the then Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevard and US Secretary of State James Baker. This document delimited economic zones between the USSR and the USA on the continental shelf in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Later, Russia, as the legal successor of the USSR, became an external party. In the end, the fishermen got about 20% of the Bering Sea, or 400 thousand tons per year. The remaining 80%, or 1.4 million tons, began to be developed by American fishermen.
Mr. Shestakov suggested increasing the total allowable catch (TAC) for Russian fishermen, or completely expressing their desire for a conditional quota, distributed by Kommersant’s interlocutors. According to them, in turn, Yuri Trutnev proposed using the parity of TAC volumes, fixing them for Russian and American companies at the level of 50% to 50%. This, as Kommersant’s interlocutors convey the words of the plenipotentiary, “would allow public fishery operators to increase production by 2–2.5 times.”
Trutnev’s office declined to comment. The Federal Agency for Fishery confirmed that the study of a possible increase in the volume of TAC in the Bering Sea and its results will be sent for environmental review. In purchasing agencies, the question of the complete abolition of quotas is not currently on the agenda. This is dangerous, since the interruption of the environmental state expertise, and therefore, inevitably reduces the efficiency of fishery management, warns the director of the WWF Russia program “Regulation of environmental protection and nature management” Tatyana Shuvalova.
In recent years, there are fewer large fish and more juveniles in the Wing Sea, Alexei Ositsnev, head of the Berladel Vessels Association of the fishing fleet. According to him, for the meeting of the Russian-American Commission on Fisheries, it is necessary to achieve a beautiful TAC for the United States, and not to supply volumes for the Russian side. Although he considers such a scenario unlikely due to the observed conflict between the Russian Federation and the United States.
After the increase in the volume of TAC for Russian fishermen in the Bering Sea or the abolition of quotas for the company located, those wishing to catch additional volumes are no doubt the head of the Association of Fishing Enterprises of Primorye Georgy Martynov. But a sharp increase in income could lead to a fall in prices for basic consumption resources, which “critically unstable” is growing. The new redistribution of volumes may also violate the rights of participants in the first wave of investment quotas, who received the right to catch pollock in this area, Aleksey Buglak, the president of the Association of pollock hunters, warns. The Federal Agency for Fishery found out that in the case of quotas in the Bering Sea, the right to receive an additional resource of a company that is already fishing in this area.
According to Mr. Bulgak, already in 2023 the volume of TAC for Russian fishermen in the Bering Sea increased to 450 thousand tons. In addition, in the West Bering Sea subzone, Russia annually allocates quotas for catching mines from China and South Korea under interstate agreements in the amount of up to 60,000 tons. But the central region of the Bering Sea, where fishing has not been carried out since 1994, may become promising. Previously, up to 1.4 million tons of mines were mined there every year, the expert concludes.