Licenses must be area and ground-specific, and time limited. The explicit control and prescription of catch species is impracticable.

Species target-catching must take the place of such existing policies: licences must be annual only, or otherwise time-limited. The granting of licence must be the lending of a right to the use of a specific resource for a specific time. Licences and quotas must not be permanent. They must not be tradable as they are at present.

The ability to effectively and dynamically control, on an ongoing basis, the use of the resource upon which they survive, must be returned to local communities. And the value of that natural resource untapped, must be returned to those same communities, with rents used for local public purposes.

SUCH POLICIES, which flow from the insights of thinkers like Henry George, are beginning to be applied in modern political and socio-economic policy thinking relating to our use of the sea. Resource licensing and renting offers the only sustainable future for the fishing industry.

Control of local fisheries must indeed be vested in the local communities who rely on them for their livelihood. Management must be guided by the advice and regulation of higher government, such as the scientific, economic and technical advice of Scottish Natural Heritage and the relevant Scottish Executive departments. In terms of macroeconomic policy, ecological well-being, wider national social policy, and so on, the hand of national government must bear on local fishing policy.

But it is those individuals and groups, whose lives are most directly and closely dependent on nature�s resources, that must have directing control of them, and so of their own futures.

Responsibility for our future, properly informed and enlightened, indeed rests at home.

Above all, the value which is created, not by any one fisherman or group, but by the benevolence of nature, and the economic and dietary need of the community, must be caught by that community, and reserved for its social needs. It cannot, if our fisheries are to have a sustainable future, be allowed to remain privatised. The rental values of our living marine resources must not be left in those private hands who have, over the years, accumulated quota, increased their licence, speculated on the increasing value of what they were foolishly and wrongly �given� in the first place.

Licence to fish for a living is, in a developed society and economy, a privilege and not a right. The wielding of that privilege has a very real cost to the rest of society: for one skipper to go to sea in an industrial boat, others must tie up. For one boat to land a hold of cod at market, another boat with its crew cannot, and other employment must be found. We must ask: what price monopoly access to the sea? Local control must not mean merely management control of fisheries: it must include control of the rental income stream that flows from the naturally abundant resource that is the seven seas of the world.

After all, who is the sea for, if not for the people?

Peter Gibb is Executive Director of Land Reform Scotland.

�from Land & Liberty, Summer 2001