Mark Soboil
The implications of ITQ and the creation of Aquaculture Zones as an optional planning tool within NZ legislation
Job Title: General Manager
Employer: Aotearoa Fisheries
Biography
Mark L. Soboil is the Manager of Fisheries Development at Aotearoa Fisheries Ltd, the largest Maori-owned fisheries company in New Zealand; and a former fisheries economist at the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries. He completed a Bachelor of Science at the University of Washington, majoring in Fisheries Science; and in 2004 he completed a PhD in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at the University of Rhode Island, USA.
Abstract
There are extant property rights in the form of Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) covering every conceivable potential site for aquaculture in the New Zealand Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Exclusive rights to coastal space to carry out aquaculture in these sites can only be granted by processes that extinguish, expropriate or purchase all of the ITQ rights that exist there. In other words, one commercial fisheries right (an aquaculture right) has to displace other commercial fisheries rights (ITQ). Where the displacement is total (generating the opportunity for an exclusive fisheries right) the only process consistent with maintaining the integrity of ITQ as a property right and the integrity of the Maori Fisheries Treaty Settlement is one of negotiation and trade.
