If you join the EU you will lose control of your fisheries and have worse management policies pushed on you. Fantasy to think it will be any other way.
Iceland‘s fisheries are controlled by what we call quota-kings. They are extremely rich owners of fishing quota (similar to USA’s oil barons) who are increasingly anti-social and obviously very unpopular among Iceland’s general public.
Iceland’s fishing system is kind of feudal in nature. People are allowed buy and trade and even rent fishing quotas. This means that the quota has accumulated into fewer and fewer hands of extremely rich individuals. The quota is then trickled down to fishing companies, and finally to fisherman, who have to spend a lot of money to rent the quota before they are allowed to fish.
This is a terrible system, and obviously the EU loves it (it even tried to copy it to solve the climate-crisis; and failed obviously). It fits smack into EUs neo-liberal trajectory. I don‘t think it is a fantasy at all the EU would adopt Iceland’s management policy at all. Nor do I think Iceland’s workers (including fishermen) have anything to worry about inside the EU. Trading ownership from our own feudal overlords to European bureaucrats would be a net positive in my books, however unlikely I find it.
That said I think it is unlikely Iceland will join anyway. Even if ‘yes’ wins. Iceland’s politicians have a history of ignoring the results of a national referendum if they don‘t like the results. They did this back in 2012 when the nation voted in favor of a new constitution (which relevantly would have actually transferred ownership of the fisheries to the Icelandic nation). A new government came to power and simply decided to ignore the results because their loved quota-kings would have lost power. I think something similar is likely to happen again.
Given the current system maybe the most honest one would be if the state ”owns” all the quota and then let fishermen bid for fishing rights.
But I have a feeling that will quickly become politicized with strange carve outs benefiting a few.
So you bid for 5, 10 years or whatever becomes a good balance between stability to invest in the business and an agile market.
Middlemen will only work if either these middlemen make the utilization more efficient or you make the requirements to bid so onerous that only these specialized middlemen have the competency to do fulfill them.
All it means is that they were expecting too large profit margins and someone called their bluff.
15 year contracts when large investments are required. Otherwise 5-10 years.
And you get a ”quota” for a guaranteed traffic to run for that period based on the requirements in the contract.
Just took the same idea and applied to fishing, to prevent the ”legacies” from monopolizing it while giving the public the income of their shared resources.
What’s the difference between a ferry and a fishing boat?
You can imagine on popular routes where you get to keep the proceeds that you instead pay for the right to operate it.
What’s the difference to paying for being allowed a quota to fish in the waters said ferry service runs a passenger service in?
Either way it is a public resource. On one side access to a countries fishing grounds to make money from it. On the other side access to a countries tax money to make money from it.
I get a feeling that you think fishermen should have some special heritage rights guaranteeing large profit margins rather than having to pay the public for the access to a shared resource.
If you introduce capitalism into the equation you are just opening the doors for the rich to exploit the workers in a systemic manner, and the workers in this case are fishermen.
Just do a standard fishing license you apply for and pay a nominal fee which can be refunded after some conditions are met, and then hand out quota evenly (or based on capabilities, history, etc.). Iceland already has a system similar to that called Strandveiðar for small fishing boats during a small window.
OR (and I like this better) ban trawling.
Without trawlers shoveling up entire populations and destroying the ecosystem around it, a lot of these issues will solve them selves.
This is a general pattern. The EU has many rules that are supposed to be enforced by its own institutions. But the attitude is very much to decide what rules to enforce based on ideological and political concerns, so the laws are largely meaningless.