Last week's two-day seminar on the dynamic potential in transforming the commonly owned resources of the sea into private, tradeable catch shares produced many concerns and worries.

But only one voice was heard against the transformation already underway in New England — and that voice was muted and constrained at that.

Food & Water Watch was the conference contrarian. A Washington-based, non-profit, consumer group, Food & Water Watch has staked out a lonely position in unequivocal opposition to privatizing common wealth and the creation of a limited-access commodities market in fisheries. That's the expressed top priority of the Obama administration for reinventing fisheries conservation through catch shares, industry management and product availability on the world market.

The Food & Water Watch organization opposes the privatization of the common fishing resource, not the allocation of catch shares themselves.

In a six-page policy paper sent in August to Monica Medina, chairwoman of a federal Catch Share Task Force, Food & Water Watch argued against the "privatizing and commodification of access to U.S. federally managed pubic trust fisheries."

The organization sent a representative to the conference at the Mount Washington Hotel & Resort in Bretton Woods, N.H. Ben Bowman, a fisheries analyst, was allowed to speak briefly — but after being directed by Amy Schick Kenney, lead facilitator at the conference, not to argue or debate the issue.

Bowman's brief comments from the audience Wednesday, the second day of the conference, highlighted some problems. He noted, for example, that a conversion to regulatory catch shares invariably reduce the size of the fleet and eliminate jobs.

Bowman also made passing reference to the United Nations Human Rights Committee's condemnation of the catch share program in Iceland.

In all, the only opponent to the program was allowed perhaps five minutes in the two days to provide an alternative perspective.

Food & Water Watch's detailed take on catch shares was available at the table at the entrance to the seminars on Wednesday — but the papers were removed on Tuesday. Bowman said the organizers of the conference agreed to return them to the materials' table after he complained.

Bowman shrugged off the incident.

The two-page flier argues that, "when the government establishes catch-share systems, they are often poorly designed and can grant private businesses almost complete control over access to the public's fish. Catch-share systems designed in this way are more accurately titled 'fishery privatization programs.'

"Fishery privatization starts when the government distributes catch shares for free," the flier continues. "The government gives away the valuable catch shares to businesses that have been involved in the fishery in the past. Allocations are made in proportion to each participant's past 'catch history.'

"While this may sound like a means to divide up fish," the organization contends, "this often rewards those that fished the fastest and hardest, had the least concern for the environment and lobbied hardest for privatization and personal gain."

Food & Water Watch said experience with what it calls "access privatization ... destroys small coastal communities and displaces independent fishermen and related small businesses that provide local jobs."

Catch shares have been created in 10 U.S. fisheries and are also used in New Zealand and British Columbia, Canada. Those experiences were outlined by experts brought to the conference by the sponsors, the New England Fishery Management Council and a bi-coastal forum co-sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund.

With the election of President Obama and his selection of Jane Lubchenco, an academic scientist, to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last April, catch shares became a formal policy priority.

The Obama administration picked up the idea from Environmental Defense, which lauds the concept as a way to end overfishing, revitalize the industry and provide windfall profits for investors.

David Festa, an EDF vice president with a $325,559 salary in 2007, according to the organization's tax records, advised investors in a presentation he made last spring that early entrance to the still-forming commodities market could provide returns in excess of 400 percent. Another EDF official at the same investors' conference suggested that level or profit from catch shares was conservative.

At Bretton Woods, there was little discussion of the investment aspect of creating a new government-controlled commodities market in fresh fish, but Ed Backus, a vice president of fisheries for Ecotrust, a West Coast nonprofit that innovates capital strategies for fishing communities, noted that West Coast catch share systems have rapidly produced inflated values in quota — the catch shares — as much as eight times dock value.

In a report released over the summer, Ecotrust Canada found that in the British Columbian fishery catch shares created "huge market distortions," according to Eric Enno Tamm, the organization's communications manager. He was responding to comments posted by EDF on its Web site. Tamm complained that EDF was distorting Ecotrust's message.

Lubchenco, a former EDF vice chairman before joining the Obama administration to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has pushed hard for converting the New England fishery from a regulatory system based on effort controls — such as limiting fishermen's days at sea and access to specific fishing round — to catch shares, which is based on hard limits for specific fish stocks.

She effectively ordered the New England council to finalize its engineering of a catch share program for the groundfishery, which includes fishermen out of Gloucester and all other ports throughout the region.

In June, the council — with one dissenting vote — agreed to institute the catch share concept next year for newly forming fishing cooperatives known as sectors. Fishermen not joining sectors will fish under modified effort controls.

Medina, a former chief counsel for NOAA in the Clinton administration was counsel for the Pew Environment Group, another advocate of catch shares when Lubchenco chose her to head an ad hoc national Catch Share Task Force. Medina was keynote speaker at the catch share conference.

The public was not invited, but could not be turned away from a government sponsored event. Few members of the public and almost no fishermen made the long to the White Mountains to hear testimonials to catch shares mixed with admonitions that the tool was powerful and potentially dangerous to fishing communities.

EDF did not send advocates to Bretton Woods Conference, but the ENGO or environmental non-government organization, is a sponsor of the Fisheries Leadership and Sustainability Forum, which was asked by the council to organize the conference and create a roster of experts on catch shares.

In its August letter to task force Chairwoman Medina, Food & Water Watch argued that a better system involved "a cap-and-rent approach, whereby the government rents fishery access units directly and captures the rental revenue for public purposes."

The organization argued that such a system would serve "as a tangible acknowledgement of public trust ownership equity."

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com