Handbook of Marine Fisheries Conservation and Management

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Author: R. Quentin Grafton | Ray Hilborn | Dale Squires | Maree Tait | Meryl Williams

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HANDBOOK OF MARINE FISHERIES CONSERVATION AND MANAGEMENT

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HANDBOOK OF MARINE FISHERIES CONSERVATION AND MANAGEMENT

Edited by R. Quentin Grafton Ray Hilborn Dale Squires Maree Tait Meryl J. Williams

1 2010

3

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Handbook of marine ﬁsheries conservation and management / edited by R. Quentin Grafton . . . [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-537028-7 1. Fisheries. 2. Fishes—Conservation. 3. Fishery management. I. Grafton, R. Quentin, 1962– SH331.H27 2010 338.3'727—dc22 2009003976

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Quentin, Dale, and Meryl are especially grateful for the support and forbearance of Carol-Anne, Ariana, and Brecon; Shirin, Haleh, and Phillip; and Bill Hansen, to whom we dedicate this book.

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Preface

This book has its origins in Canberra in 2006 when Dale visited Quentin on a trip from Malaysia to the United States via Australia. They shared a vision to bring together in a workshop ﬁsheries managers, policy makers, researchers from various disciplines, and key individuals from nongovernmental organizations and international organizations to address the challenges facing the marine environment. As the vision developed, they were joined by Ray and Meryl, and the four of them, with the assistance of Maree Tait, have worked together to edit and put together this unique handbook. Collectively, we as the editors of the handbook set the goal to provide a framework or blueprint for understanding and overcoming the critical determinants of the decline in ﬁsheries, degradation of marine ecosystems, and poor socioeconomic performance of many ﬁshing communities. To help achieve this ambitious goal, we were generously funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and conducted a ﬁve-day workshop, chaired by Meryl, at the Rockefeller facilities in Bellagio, Italy. The workshop brought together 23 individuals from a dozen countries with a wide range of expertise and experience. This aim of this group was to provide (1) a framework for understanding the causes of marine ecosystem decline, (2) a set of innovative policy instruments to get the right set of incentives for ﬁshers and other stakeholders,

and (3) a plan of action, especially for developing countries and their vulnerable ﬁshing communities, to avoid past management mistakes. Some of the vision at Bellagio has been realized in a joint journal publication by the Bellagio attendees and several other individual and joint papers at professional conferences since Bellagio. However, even before the workshop concluded, it was agreed that that the scope of the marine challenges could not possibly be covered in one, or even several articles. Fortunately, while still at Bellagio, Quentin and Dale were able to connect to Peter Prescott of Oxford University Press, who was visiting the facility as a scholar in residence. Peter immediately recognized the importance of the workshop and provided key support to us to realize the vision that has culminated in this handbook. Going far beyond the original Bellagio workshop participants, we sought contributions from the world’s leading marine researchers and practitioners. Although no single book can address every issue, the end result is the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary work on marine conservation and ﬁsheries management ever written. An outstanding feature of the book is the detailed case studies on conservation practice and ﬁsheries management from around the world. These case studies are combined with nine “foundation” chapters that provide an overview of the state of the marine world and many innovative and far-reaching perspectives

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Preface

about how we can move forward to face present and future challenges. Whether you are student wanting to learn about the many problems in marine conservation and ﬁsheries management, or a practitioner seeking

solutions, this handbook has a great deal to offer. We believe that, collectively, the handbook’s many valuable contributions offer a way forward to both understanding and resolving the multifaceted problems facing the world’s oceans.

Acknowledgments

This book was made possible through the many valuable contributions of the chapter authors. To them, as editors, we owe our greatest appreciation. We also acknowledge all those who depend on the world’s marine ﬁsheries, to those who take on the responsibility from their communities and governments to help conserve and manage the resources, and to our ﬁsheries colleagues in many countries for their commitment to understanding and ﬁnding solutions to the improved management of our oceans and ﬁsheries. We offer our special thanks to those people whose names do not appear in the book as either an editor or author but who nevertheless greatly assisted us in its completion. We thank especially Noel Chan and Sally Carlin for providing help well beyond the call of duty to keep track of the deliveries of chapters and the long review process. We are also grateful for the assistance of Hayley Thorpe, Ben Grono, and Tamara Perry, who, at the very end and at short notice, helped us to edit the many chapters to ensure the consistency required by the publisher. Our thanks also go to Peter Prescott and Tisse Takagi at Oxford University Press. We are especially

grateful for Peter’s support for our vision. His enthusiasm allowed us to “think big” and helped us to make the handbook such a unique collection. Dale Squires is grateful to the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service for supporting the research and generously providing time to work on the book. Dale in his capacity as a visiting fellow, and Quentin and Maree, who are based at the Crawford School of Economics Government at the Australian National University, are especially grateful to the school’s director, Andrew MacIntyre, for his support. Finally, we wish to acknowledge the early support of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the February 2007 Conference on the Bellagio Blueprint for Sustaining Global Fisheries. That conference, held at the beautiful Bellagio Center on Lake Como, Italy, was the genesis of the concept for this edited volume. With one exception, all of the attendees at the Bellagio Conference are also authors of one or more of the papers herein. Their contribution has been greatly added to by the many contributors to the book who did not attend the Bellagio conference.

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Contents

I Overview

1. Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management: At the Crossroads 3 R. Quentin Grafton, Ray Hilborn, Dale Squires, and Meryl J. Williams 2. Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries Rolf Willmann and Kieran Kelleher

20

3. Biodiversity, Function, and Interconnectedness: A Revolution in Our Understanding of Marine Ecosystems and Ocean Conservation 43 Wallace J. Nichols, Jeffrey A. Seminoff, and Peter Etnoyer 4. Aquaculture: Production and Markets Frank Asche and Trond Bjørndal

60

5. Gender Dimensions in Fisheries Management Meryl J. Williams

72

6. Governance, Science, and Society: The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Serge Michel Garcia 7. A Review of Fisheries Subsidies: Quantiﬁcation, Impacts, and Reform Anthony Cox and U. Rashid Sumaila 8. World Fish Markets 113 James L. Anderson, Frank Asche, and Sigbjørn Tveterås 9. Climate Change and Fisheries Management Keith Brander

123

87 99

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Contents

II Ecosystem Conservation and Fisheries Management

10. Conservation of Biodiversity and Fisheries Management Jake Rice and Lorraine (Lori) Ridgeway

139

11. Minimizing Bycatch of Sensitive Species Groups in Marine Capture Fisheries: Lessons from Tuna Fisheries 150 Eric L. Gilman and Carl Gustaf Lundin 12. One Fish, Two Fish, IUU, and No Fish: Unreported Fishing Worldwide 165 Kaija Metuzals, Rachel Baird, Tony Pitcher, U. Rashid Sumaila, and Pramod Ganapathiraju 13. Ecosystem Modeling and Fisheries Management Anthony D.M. Smith and Elizabeth A. Fulton

182

14. Conservation of the Leatherback Sea Turtle in the Paciﬁc Peter H. Dutton, Heidi Gjertsen, and Dale Squires

195

15. Conservation of the Vaquita (Phocoena sinus) in the Northern Gulf of California, Mexico 205 Jay Barlow, Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, Carlos Muñoz-Piña, and Sarah Mesnick 16. Conservation of Cold-Water Coral Reefs in Norway Jan Helge Fosså and Hein Rune Skjoldal

215

17. Conservation Investments and Mitigation: The California Drift Gillnet Fishery and Paciﬁc Sea Turtles 231 Chuck Janisse, Dale Squires, Jeffrey A. Seminoff, and Peter H. Dutton

III Case Studies in Governance

18. Southeast Asian Fisheries 243 Meryl J. Williams and Derek Staples 19. West African Coastal Capture Fisheries Benedict P. Satia and Alhaji M. Jallow

258

20. Coastal Fisheries in India: Current Scenario, Contradictions, and Community Responses 274 D. Nandakumar and Nalini Nayak 21. Japanese Coastal Fisheries Mitsutaku Makino

287

22. Property Rights in Icelandic Fisheries 299 Thorolfur Matthiasson and Sveinn Agnarsson 23. Economic Instruments in OECD Fisheries: Issues and Implementation Lorraine (Lori) Ridgeway and Carl-Christian Schmidt 24. The Chilean Experience with Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries 324 Gustavo San Martín, Ana M. Parma, and J.M. (Lobo) Orensanz 25. Australia’s Commonwealth-Managed Fisheries Richard McLoughlin and Nick Rayns

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310

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Contents

26. Evolving Governance in New Zealand Fisheries Robin Connor and Bruce Shallard 27. Norwegian Fisheries Management Stein Ivar Steinshamn

347

360

28. Fisheries Management in the United Kingdom Sean Pascoe and Diana Tingley 29. Governance of Fisheries in the United States Daniel S. Holland

370 382

30. Canadian Marine Fisheries Management: A Case Study L. Scott Parsons

393

31. Shared Rules for a Shared Sea: Multilevel Fisheries Governance in Italian Fisheries Management 415 Massimo Spagnolo 32. Red Sea and Gulfs Fisheries 426 Elie Moussalli and Izzat H. Feidi 33. The Challenge of Fisheries Governance after UNFSA: The Case of the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission 443 Hannah Parris, Andrew Wright, and Ian Cartwright 34. Salmon Fisheries of British Columbia 458 Diane P. Dupont and Harry W. Nelson 35. European Union Fisheries Management Hans Frost

471

36. International Organizations and Fisheries Governance Lorraine (Lori) Ridgeway and Jake Rice

485

IV Policy Instruments and Perspectives

37. Fisheries Buybacks 507 Dale Squires, Theodore Groves, R. Quentin Grafton, Rita Curtis, James Joseph, and Robin Allen 38. Corporate Governance of Jointly Owned Fisheries Rights Ralph E. Townsend

520

39. Managing Small-Scale Fisheries: Moving Toward People-Centered Perspectives Patrick McConney and Anthony Charles 40. Measuring and Managing Fishing Capacity John Walden, James Kirkley, and Rolf Färe

546

41. Strategic Behavior in Fisheries 556 Lone Grønbæk Kronbak and Marko Lindroos 42. Principal-Agent Problems in Fisheries Niels Vestergaard

563

43. Allocation Issues in Rights-Based Management of Fisheries: Lessons from Other Resources 572 Gary D. Libecap

532

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Contents

44. Harvest Control Rules and Fisheries Management André E. Punt

582

45. Complexities in Fisheries Management: Misperceptions and Communication Erling Moxnes

595

46. Seafood Ecolabeling 608 Trevor Ward and Bruce Phillips 47. Can Voluntary Programs Reduce Sea Turtle Bycatch? Insights from the Literature in Environmental Economics 618 Kathleen Segerson 48. Fisheries Management Science 630 Robert L. Stephenson and Daniel E. Lane 49. Challenges in Marine Capture Fisheries Colin W. Clark

638

50. The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and Beyond: The Next 25 Years Gordon R. Munro

646

51. Bioeconomic Modeling of Marine Reserves with Environmental Uncertainty 659 Tom Kompas, R. Quentin Grafton, Pham Van Ha, Nhu Che, and Long Chu 52. Privatization of the Oceans Rögnvaldur Hannesson

666

53. Fisheries Co-management: Improving Fisheries Governance through Stakeholder Participation 675 Svein Jentoft, Bonnie J. McCay, and Douglas Clyde Wilson 54. Stakeholder Involvement in Fisheries Management in Australia and New Zealand Alistair McIlgorm and Daryl R. Sykes 55. Managing World Tuna Fisheries with Emphasis on Rights-Based Management Robin Allen, James Joseph, and Dale Squires 56. Research Priorities for Marine Fisheries Conservation and Management John Annala and Steve Eayrs

Contributors Index 741

725

713

687

698

I

OVERVIEW

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1 Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management: At the Crossroads R. QUENTIN GRAFTON RAY HILBORN DALE SQUIRES MERYL J. WILLIAMS

consume (FAO 2006). However, many of the highly valued aquaculture species depend on ﬁsh protein from capture ﬁsheries to provide the bulk of their feed. Until alternative feeds are readily available, the ability of farmed ﬁsh to replace wild harvest will be constrained by the state and productivity of the world’s oceans. Given that the world’s population is expected to rise a further 2 billion this century, this is a major concern, especially as ﬁsh provide upwards of 15.5 percent of the animal protein intake by humanity (FAO 2007), and almost the entire animal protein consumed in many poor and ﬁshing-dependent communities. The potential for decline in marine capture ﬁsheries also poses major dilemmas for the 200 million or so ﬁshers and others employed in ﬁsh supply chains that, along with their families, depend directly on them for their livelihood. Managing ﬁsh stocks and conserving the marine environment on which these communities depend represent the greatest human challenge facing ocean management. This challenge will not be solved by a “one-size-ﬁts-all” approach and will require tailor-made solutions that account for the prevailing institutions and hierarchies, resilience of ecosystems, the multiple private and public beneﬁts, and the distribution of beneﬁts across stakeholders. The difﬁculties of managing ﬁsheries extend well beyond concerns about overﬁshing and include environmental, ecological, and biodiversity considerations (Grafton et al. 2008; Squires

1.1. INTRODUCTION Marine ﬁsheries conservation that involves both the biological and physical conservation of oceans habitats and ecosystems, and ﬁsheries management that focuses on harvested species, are at a proverbial cross-road. The past ﬁfty years has seen a massive expansion in ﬁshing capacity that has overexploited many ﬁsheries1 to the point that reducing ﬁshing would increase overall proﬁts from harvesting (Grafton et al. 2007), perhaps by as much as US$50 billion (109) per year (World Bank 2008). About a quarter of the world ﬁsheries are also overexploited in the biological sense that current harvests are less than what they could be if ﬁshing effort were reduced and stocks were allowed to increase (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] 2005; Hilborn et al. 2003). Fishing has also changed the age structure and stability of ﬁsh populations (Anderson et al. 2008) and the trophic level of exploited species (Pauly et al. 1998) and has altered the species composition of ﬁsh communities (e.g., Silvestre et al. 2003), and destructive ﬁshing has damaged marine ecosystems. The impact of these changes over recent decades is evident. The world harvest of capture ﬁsheries reached a plateau in the early 1990s at about 85 million metric tons (see ﬁgure 1.1), and much of the future supply of ﬁsh will come largely from aquaculture (Delgado et al. 2003). Aquaculture already supplies about half of the ﬁsh people directly 3

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Overview Reported Global Marine Capture Production 1950–2006 120

Million tons

100 80 60 40 20 0

FIGURE 1.1 Global marine ﬁsheries catch (1950–2006). (Data from FAO Fish Stat “Capture Production,” www.fao.org/ﬁshery/statistics/software/ﬁshst)

2009). Overlaying these challenges is international trade that allows high-income nations to potentially export their marine conservation problems to other, often lower-income nations while importing their ﬁsh to consume. A key issue is how to develop the appropriate mix of private beneﬁts (that accrue solely to their user) from ﬁshing with the environmental, ecological, and public good beneﬁts (that are available to all and are nonrivalrous) aspects of the marine environment to achieve the most socially desirable outcome. This requires design mechanisms to elicit public preferences for the public goods that, unlike private goods, do not have commercial values and are not traded on markets. Developing such mechanisms are made more difﬁcult with transboundary resources and ecosystems and when accounting for international trade. When public goods exist, all countries enjoy their beneﬁts whether they contributed to their supply or not (Barrett 2007). Although public goods are to be desired, they are often underprovided, underprotected, and underconserved. This is because clear incentives exist to catch a “free ride” from the efforts of others, contributing to their undersupply. The “free-rider” problem is more difﬁcult with “global” public goods that are enjoyed universally, or by many nations. Insufﬁcient scientiﬁc knowledge and public understanding of the contributions made to social welfare and ecosystem functioning and biodiversity of these public goods also contribute to their underprovision. In an increasingly interconnected world, conservation and management issues extend beyond the boundaries of a single nation, including the

high seas. Conservation and management issues of transboundary resources face an additional issue: how to achieve the cooperation of multiple nations when each country wishes to preserve its own sovereignty and freedom of action. Such cooperation must also be self-enforcing because there is no supranational authority, or world government, to provide enforcement (Barrett 2003). The challenges of overﬁshing and conservation are exacerbated by global dilemmas such as climate change (see chapter 9). Acidiﬁcation of the world’s oceans, rising sea levels, changes in salinity and water temperature, and increased variability of ocean currents associated with climate change all represent risks that must be effectively managed to ensure the sustainability of the world’s ﬁsheries. In all likelihood, effective mitigation on anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases is decades away (Anderson and Bows 2008), so we must prepare for and adapt to an increasingly uncertain ocean environment. The best way to face these global challenges is to resolve present-day problems that have remedies. To change what can be changed, to understand how we arrived at the current state of the marine environment, to comprehend the importance of ﬁsheries to coastal communities, to appreciate the constraints that prevent us from moving forward (and how they can be overcome), and to present innovative ideas and thinking on marine conservation and ﬁsheries management are the goals of this handbook. It brings together a comprehensive and multidisciplinary perspective of the world’s marine ﬁsheries and their conservation. Without such a

Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management: At the Crossroads perspective, it is impossible to resolve the complex problems that beset our ocean world. Part I of the handbook provides overviews of the key issues: economic trends in world ﬁsheries, biodiversity of marine ecosystems, aquaculture, gender dimensions of ﬁsheries, governance and the ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries, subsidies, world ﬁsh markets, and climate change and ﬁsheries. They provide the foundation for understanding the key global trends in marine conservation. Part II includes detailed case studies of marine conservation and implications for ﬁsheries management. Part III presents case studies in ﬁsheries governance, which seek to answer the following questions: What are the key challenges in management? What can be done to improve outcomes? And what are the constraints (institutional, economic, etc.) that may be preventing managers from achieving these goals? The case studies provide the practical insights needed to put in place management that promotes sustainable ﬁsheries and good governance. Last, part IV of the handbook is a compendium of perspectives from some of the leading thinkers in global marine conservation and management about how to change current practices for the better. Despite their importance, we unapologetically do not examine what we call the “terrestrial drivers” of marine ecosystem decline. The key drivers that, in part, come from a growing world population include the intentional discharges of pollutants, the unplanned run-off of sediments and nutrients from land-based activities, habitat damage from coastal development, and the diversion of freshwater from streams and rivers that compromises the health of estuaries. By focusing on the “marine drivers,” we believe we offer a guide to both understand and resolve those problems that can be “ﬁxed” by those working in the marine environment. The myriad of problems that spill over from the terrestrial to the marine environment are no less important, but they are beyond the boundaries of what we consider to be an already ambitious goal—to provide the deﬁnitive guide to marine conservation and ﬁsheries management. It is our view that, collectively, the 56 chapters in this volume provide the ideas to understand both where we have come from and where we should be going in terms of marine ﬁsheries conservation and management. It is our fervent hope that this work will be the guide to many practitioners and others

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who, like ourselves, want our oceans to sustainably provide for our planet, today, and into the future.

1.2. THE NATURE OF FISHERIES Marine ﬁsheries exist in hugely different habitats that range from polar seas to tropical coral reefs. Some ﬁshed species are sedentary, at least in their adult forms, such a shellﬁsh, while others migrate thousands of kilometers every year, as with some species of tuna. Even ﬁnﬁsh exhibit large differences in their biology and life histories, as well as being caught and consumed in a great variety of ways. Demersal species, such as cod and snapper, are caught close to the seaﬂoor. Such species are frequently harvested using trawl gear with nets towed behind vessels. Pelagic species, such as salmon, tuna, and sardines, are found in midwater and near the surface and can be caught using purse seines that “scoop” schools of ﬁsh from underneath, by baited hooks and lines, and also by towed and set nets. Some ﬁsh species are very important for recreational purposes (e.g., salmon, rockﬁsh, snapper, marlin, and other big game ﬁsh), while many species are harvested primarily to sell to others. Even for traded ﬁsh, the ﬁshers who exploit them operate in a great variety of ways. In poorer countries, ﬁshers harvest not only to sell their catch but also to feed their families directly, while in many countries much of the ﬁshing is undertaken as part of a business and operated with modern technology and as a modern commercial activity with a high rate of international trading. Although almost all ﬁshing activity is “targeted” such that ﬁshers wish to catch a particular set of species with certain characteristics, other ﬁsh, mammals, invertebrates, and even reptiles may also be caught in ﬁshing gear. The unintentional harvest is called bycatch and that includes many species that have a high rate of mortality when returned to the sea. The quantities of the various types of bycatch are often left unrecorded, making the management of incidental catch a particularly difﬁcult challenge. Today most of the world’s capture ﬁsheries are located in the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs) established by the United National Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that was signed in 1982 and became international law in 1994 (Churchill and Lowe 1999). This has given nation states property rights over the harvesting

6

Overview

of the ﬁsh in their nearby waters. Although some countries, such as Iceland and New Zealand, have used these acquired powers to rationalize their ﬁshing industry to increase proﬁtability, not all countries have made this choice. Some have used the opportunity to displace foreign ﬁshing by their own nationals and provided large subsidies to expand their domestic industry and increase domestic employment. Unfortunately, this has led to overexploitation in many ﬁsheries. Despite UNCLOS and the 1995 United Nations Agreement for the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, highseas ﬁsheries still remain mainly outside of national jurisdictions. Fortunately, in some of these ﬁsheries there is a degree of national control as a number of species in some locations cannot be proﬁtably harvested unless access is also provided to coastal EEZs and ports for ship servicing and landing of product. For highly migratory ﬁsheries, especially tunas, management is also shared between coastal states and distant-water ﬁshing nations in what are called regional ﬁsheries management organizations, which provide a form of collective management over the stocks (see chapter 55). The world’s marine ﬁsheries catch is made by large-scale commercial mechanized operations in both developed and developing countries and by many small-scale operators mainly in developing countries. Most of the world’s ﬁshers are employed or self-employed in artisanal and smaller scale ﬁsheries (FAO 2007). The incomes of ﬁshing operations cover a huge range. Large, purse seine vessels in tuna ﬁsheries can generate millions of dollars in earnings annually, while a small wooden-hulled vessel using hand lines may be lucky to harvest a few hundred dollars worth of ﬁsh per year. Within many countries, there are both industrialized ﬂeets and small-scale artisanal ﬁshers. This contrast between the “haves” and “have nots” is reﬂected by conﬂicts between small ﬁshers and larger scale operators in some parts of the world. These “ﬁsh wars” are symptomatic of overuse and misuse of resources and a lack of accepted and enforceable property rights over the oceans and catches. The many differences across ﬁsheries, ﬁsh stocks, and their habitats, however, obscure the commonalities across the world’s oceans. Four key traits shared by almost all ﬁsheries in terms of their characteristics, and why many ﬁsheries are overexploited, offer insights into the way forward to implement effective marine conservation.

1.2.1. Fisheries as Common-Pool Resources Fish stocks are common-pool resources where (1) catches are rivalrous, and (2) it is costly to effectively control the access and the harvest from them (Grafton et al. 2004). The ﬁrst characteristic means that ﬁshing by one person reduces the catch available to others. In the absence of property rights over the right to catch ﬁsh and effective control of ﬁshing effort, this means that individual ﬁshers will catch too many ﬁsh because they will fail to consider the costs they impose on others from their own actions. This is not because ﬁshers do not care about sustainability of the stocks on which they depend, but because conservation efforts by any one individual will simply end up beneﬁting someone else in the absence of effective collective management and control. The second characteristic of a common-pool resource is that it is difﬁcult and expensive to control or limit ﬁshing effort by centralized governments or international bodies. This is because harvesting occurs at sea, often by many different individuals. In contrast to terrestrial environments, ﬁshers are difﬁcult to monitor and ﬁsheries regulations are difﬁcult to enforce. The complexity is compounded with transnational ﬁsheries and highly migratory species when harvesting takes place by individuals from many different nations. Adequate observer program, and other means, to see what, when, and where ﬁsh are caught are affordable only in highvalue ﬁsheries. In the absence of such coverage, managers must infer what is happening at sea. The difﬁculty in implementing adequate monitoring, control, and surveillance is one reason that in many ﬁsheries the incentives do not exist for ﬁshers to behave in a way that promotes both their own individual long-term interest and the sustainability of the resource. This problem is compounded for highly migratory and transboundary species such as tunas, swordﬁsh, sea turtles, sea birds, dolphins, and whales. In such cases, self-enforcing agreements and cooperation among nations are required because of the absence of an enforcing supranational authority.

1.2.2. Fisheries in an Uncertain World The second important feature of ﬁsheries is that their populations are subject to large, and

Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management: At the Crossroads sometimes unforeseen, ﬂuctuations. For example, ocean currents may shift direction in one year that result in the collapse of populations that depend on the nutrients that these currents provide. The difﬁculties and costs of continuously monitoring the marine environment, and the complex interactions across species in marine ecosystems, present challenges in measuring current stocks. These difﬁculties are compounded when predicting future levels of ﬁsh stocks. The existence of numerous genetic substocks of a species and multiple year classes of ﬁsh, the numbers of which vary from year to year, create further complexity in ﬁsh stock abundance and behavior. In other words, there are inherent uncertainties in marine capture ﬁsheries that will never be overcome (Ludwig et al. 1993), and much of the ﬂuctuations in ﬁsh stocks are results of environmental changes over which we have no control. Thus, effective management of ﬁsheries requires explicit recognition of these uncertainties. This not only demands “robust” methods of management that offer a degree of control under different conditions but also makes resilience, or the ability of marine ecosystems to “bounce back” in response to negative shocks, an important goal of ﬁsheries management. Uncertainty about the current and future state of ﬁsheries and the marine environment requires management approaches that can formulate different actions for different scenarios. This is a form of “management strategy evaluation” (see chapters 13 and 44) that was originally developed to assess the consequences of different harvest strategies on whale populations in the absence of adequate information on the levels of catches and stocks (Kirkwood 1993). Unfortunately, many ﬁsheries managers, whether in national government agencies or locally based, lack the capacity and resources to fully model and consider a full range of scenarios and different states. In these situations, and as an alternative, knowledgeable stakeholders can be recruited to provide ongoing information on sustainability of stocks and habitat, while community and traditional management structures can be supported to limit ﬁshing effort on vulnerable locations and species (for an example for sea cucumber ﬁsheries, see Friedman et al. 2008). Although modeling is helpful to ﬁsheries managers, it is not a prerequisite to implement adaptive management that can be described as a situation whereby managers have quantiﬁable goals and objectives, monitor outcomes as best they can

7

and, where necessary, both learn and adapt their strategies depending on the states of the world (Walters and Hilborn 1976). Given the prevailing uncertainties, adaptive management is necessary for successful marine conservation in the long run because simply setting regulations on “auto pilot” and hoping for the best cannot be the best strategy in every state of the world.

1.2.3. Fishers before Fish As incongruous as it seems, putting ﬁsh before ﬁshers has contributed to the current problems of overﬁshing (Larkin 1978). This is because many regulations and approaches to management are ﬁrst designed around achieving levels of ﬁshing mortality with little consideration as to how these levels of harvest can realistically be achieved. For example, managers may restrict the number of ﬁshing vessels allowed into a ﬁshery. However, in the absence of controls on these vessels, ﬁshing effort will continue to expand if it is proﬁtable to do so. Subsequently, managers may also limit the length of vessels permitted to ﬁsh, but as long as ﬁshers ﬁnd it in their ﬁnancial interest, they will substitute to other inputs (Squires 1987; Wilen 1979), such as increasing the width or volume of their vessels or switching to gear that is unregulated (Kompas et al. 2004). In other words, a failure to understand the incentives of ﬁshers and appreciate how ﬁshers respond to regulations will likely lead to poor outcomes in terms of marine conservation (Hilborn et al. 2005). An alternative to a top-down approach to ﬁsheries starts with understanding ﬁshers, the most important all predators. It recognizes that approaches that help to ensure that the individual incentives of ﬁshers coincide with the overall interests of the ﬁshery will be much more successful than approaches that force ﬁshers to act in ways that are contrary to their interests (Grafton et al. 2006). These incentives-based approaches share a common feature: they allow ﬁshers, either individually or collectively, to have “catch shares” or rights over particular ﬁshing locations. By providing ﬁshers with the long-term incentive to conserve ﬁsh stocks, managers can change the dynamic of ﬁshing behavior from one of racing to catch the ﬁsh before someone else, to one of minimizing harvesting costs and protecting the future returns from ﬁshing. Part of this bottom-up process recognizes preexisting ﬁsher institutions and community property

8

Overview

rights, that is, recognizes customary marine tenure. Considerable insights have already been gained into the conditions for successful collection customary ﬁshery conservation and management (Baland and Platteau 1996; Cinner 2005; Ruddle 1994). We know, for instance, that common property and customary management institutions are not always resilient to the expansion of market forces, technical change, and integration into modern states and forms of property. Practical and conceptual differences between customary and contemporary conservation and management have often led to failed attempts to hybridize modern and customary conservation and management (Cinner and Aswani 2007). When the differences between these approaches are understood and acknowledged, there is the potential to develop adaptive management systems that are highly ﬂexible, are able to conserve resources, and promote community goals.

1.2.4. Fishing, Fisheries, and Marine Ecosystems Fish stocks are part of marine ecosystems. These ecosystems are complex and involve a myriad of interactions across species. Some of these interactions are direct in that big ﬁsh eat small ﬁsh and are part of the many food webs linking phytoplankton up to the largest predators. Fishing often targets only a few components of ecosystems, primarily, but not exclusively, the larger predators. This affects not only the targeted species but also, through the complex interactions across species and their habitats, inﬂuences other parts of the marine environment. Recognition of the impacts of ﬁshing on marine ecosystems has led to the development of ecosystem approaches to ﬁsheries management (Garcia et al. 2003; Pikitch et al. 2004). Such approaches take a broader perspective that goes beyond the sustainability of targeted ﬁsh stocks and tries to account for the overall ecosystem health. These approaches are precautionary and seek to promote resilience of ecosystems and the sustainability of ﬁsheries. The ecosystem approach is in contrast to what has been viewed as a “single-species management” whereby ﬁshing on speciﬁc target species is regulated with little consideration of the effects of harvesting on other species or habitats. The challenge with ecosystem approaches is to understand the species interactions well enough to improve on existing practice, and then to translate

this understanding into management strategies that result in better outcomes. This is a difﬁcult enough task in rich countries with strong research capacity and well-developed management. It is impossible in the national ﬁsheries of many developing countries, where even single-species management is not done effectively. This suggests that bottomup approaches that provide incentives for ﬁshers to sustain marine ecosystems, and not just the ﬁsh on which their livelihood depend, will be critical to achieving the worthy goals of the ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries.

1.3. A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE To better understand the nature of ﬁsheries, and also to have a richer appreciation of where we are going in marine conservation and ﬁsheries management, it is instructive to brieﬂy the review the history of exploitation of three very different marine ﬁsheries: commercial pelagic whaling, the cod in the northeastern Atlantic, and the mixed species and mixed scale ﬁsheries of Kerala on the southwest coast of India.

1.3.1. Exploitation and Conservation of Whales The history of the exploitation of cetaceans provides sobering lessons of the consequences of overharvesting, but also the potential to turn around a seemingly hopeless situation and to successfully conserve rare and endangered species. Whales have been harvested for many centuries in coastal waters. In some locations substocks were extirpated even before the industrial revolution. However, it was only at the end of the 18th and the early 19th century that improvements in navigation, cartography, and shipbuilding allowed whalers to “go global” and actively hunt whales in almost all of the world’s oceans. These whaling operations are staggering in their scope even from the perspective of the 21st century, with voyages of three to four years’ duration. Such trips were made, despite the considerable physical risks, because of the potentially large ﬁnancial rewards available to whalers from the sale of whale oil that, until the mid-19th century, had very few substitutes. The high returns available to those fortunate to return home fully laden with whale oil encouraged

Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management: At the Crossroads a virtual feeding frenzy of whaling activity. As the coastal stocks disappeared in European and North American waters, whalers searched farther aﬁeld to Arctic waters and the Paciﬁc and Indian Oceans. By the time Charles Darwin arrived in the Galapagos Islands in 1835, whalers were already using it as a base for their operations in the Paciﬁc, and there were many hundreds, if not thousands, of whaling vessels operating all over the world (Roberts 2007). Declining stocks in one location prompted further exploration in other areas and a shift to species that were less valuable or more difﬁcult to catch. The more valuable, slower moving species closest to the home ports of the whalers were the most vulnerable. Consequently, some species such as the Atlantic gray whale were hunted to extinction. Although whalers recorded their concerns for the viability of the stocks on which they depended, they lacked the means to conserve whales. No one owned the whales until they were harpooned. Any whale left by one vessel was likely to be taken by another. This open access led to overexploitation as whalers lacked both the legal means and the capacity to limit the total harvest. Any whalers tempted to reduce their own harvest and conserve the stocks for the future would have realized that their conservation would simply end up beneﬁting others. Modern industrial whaling using steam-powered and later diesel-powered vessels allowed whalers to catch hitherto unavailable species that were too fast to be caught by sailing ships and rowing boats. Larger vessels also enabled whalers to harvest their prey in their last refuge—the waters of the Antarctic. The shift to onboard rather than land-based processing created pelagic whaling by giving even greater freedom of movement to follow whales and harvest in previously inaccessible waters. Modern harpoon cannons dramatically increased the destructive power and reduced the physical risks to whalers. Whalers progressively decimated whale species, beginning with the largest-sized species, then harvesting the next largest, and so forth (with progressively increasing costs and lower oil content), leaving only smaller species such as minke whales (Baleanoptera acustorostrata) with relatively intact populations. As early as 1928, scientists at the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea voiced their concern about the overharvesting of whales in the Antarctic. This common concern led to the 1931 Convention on the Regulation of Whaling, which was the forerunner of the International Whaling

9

Convention (IWC). In 1945 a limit was placed on whale harvesting deﬁned in terms of blue-whale units and set at a maximum of 16,000. The global limit was subsequently reduced, falling to 14,500 in 1955 in response to concern over the sustainability of the stocks, but then was raised to 15,000 to avoid some countries leaving the IWC altogether. Continuing declines in the stocks, however, forced further reductions in the overall IWC quota. It eventually fell to 2,300 units in 1971. By this time, commercial Antarctic whaling was probably no longer proﬁtable. In 1982, after many years of negotiations, the three-quarters majority of the IWC needed to impose an indeﬁnite suspension on all commercial whaling was achieved despite objections from Norway, Japan, and the USSR, although Japan and the USSR subsequently withdrew their objections, leaving them legally obliged to follow the moratorium (Gillespie 2005). Although international whaling agreements undoubtedly contributed to the current stable stock levels, market forces leading to reduced catch were already in place well before the agreements took hold (Schneider and Pearse 2004). Catches were, in part, destined to decline as whale products ceased to be commercially attractive on a large scale. Since the moratorium on commercial whaling, “scientiﬁc” whaling has occurred. Many of the targeted whales for scientiﬁc purposes are minke whales. Since the commercial moratorium was instituted in 1982, the cumulative catch of all whales has been upwards of 30,000. Fortunately, rare and endangered whale species, such as blue whales (Baleanoptera musculus), have been left to recover free from both commercial and scientiﬁc whaling. The IWC declared the Indian and Southern oceans to be sanctuaries. The past two decades has also seen a shift in the value afforded to whales. Where once whales had worth only in terms of their commercial value, there are now important nonconsumptive use values for whales. In 1999, some 9 million people were recorded as whale watching, which generated sales in excess of $US 1 billion, and the numbers are growing at more than 10 percent per year (Hoyt 2001). Additional nonuse values from whales include their existence value to people from simply knowing they are alive and exist in the world’s oceans. The trend of increasing recreational and nonuse values also exists for other species and marine habitats, creating mixed goods or impure public goods, combining private and public consumption and market and nonmarket values. This

10

Overview

poses an important challenge to traditional ﬁsheries management that has focused on regulating the commercial harvest from the marine environment.

1.3.2. Northern Cod Fishery The groundﬁsh ﬁsheries of Atlantic Canada, and in particular the northern cod ﬁshery (Gadus morhua) of Labrador and Newfoundland, were for centuries one of the world’s most important. Shortly after John Cabot laid claim to Newfoundland in 1497 in the name of the King of England, reports of vast numbers of ﬁsh attracted the attentions of ﬁshers from Spain, Portugal, France, and Britain. Cod was either salted on board or dried on land and provided the main meal on Fridays for Roman Catholic Europe. By the mid 1700s, the total catch averaged more than 50,000 metric tons per year (Cushing 1988). Although the largest ﬁshery in the world by this time, the northern cod ﬁshery was able to withstand much greater levels of ﬁshing. Harvesting remained sustainable up to the 1950s, when large trawlers begin arriving. By contrast to the Canadian ﬁshers, who were mainly small scale and who undertook their ﬁshing in the summer months inshore, the large foreign-owned trawlers were able to harvest cod offshore in winter months. Catches increased dramatically, to a peak of at least 810,000 metric tons in 1968. Unable to withstand this increased ﬁshing pressure, the stocks declined from a high of about three million metric tons. The harvest fell correspondingly, reaching 173,000 metric tons in 1977, while the stock was a quarter of its former size a decade earlier (Grafton et al. 2000). Following Canada’s declaration of a 200-nautical-mile EEZ, foreign ﬁshing pressure was reduced dramatically. The lower catches allowed the northern cod stock to more than double in size between 1977 and 1984. Unfortunately, Canadian governments viewed the ﬁshery as an underdeveloped resource and provided subsidies and grants to assist in the growth of a Canadian-owned trawler ﬂeet. By 1987, inshore ﬁshers were raising concerns about the excessive level of harvesting, although at this stage, some scientists could not support this claim because their models at the time incorrectly overestimated the stocks. As a result, catches were set at too high a level, but when scientists did provide evidence of sharp declines in the stocks, the total harvest was still set at too high a level. This is because successive ﬁshery ministers instituted

a harvesting rule that reduced catches by a lesser amount than that recommended by scientists so as to avoid increasing unemployment in ﬁshingdependent communities. By 1991, the situation was critical and in the summer of 1992 a harvesting moratorium was declared as the stocks collapsed. At the end of the ﬁrst decade of the 21st century, the northern cod stocks still remain at a fraction of their previous depleted level in the 1980s. The costs to the ﬁshers and their communities have been enormous despite billions of dollars in transfers from the federal government of Canada under the guises of various “adjustment” packages. Equally important, it appears that past overexploitation has helped shift the ecosystem into a different state that may have prevented a recovery of cod stocks despite very little ﬁshing since 1992. The northern cod ﬁshery provides important lessons about ﬁsheries management. First is the importance of acting in a precautionary way and the need to reduce catches when stocks reach their limit reference points beyond which urgent action is required to avoid going beyond critical thresholds. Second is the recklessness and wastefulness of subsidizing ﬁshers to catch ﬁsh from a common-pool resource. Third, many ﬁshers lacked individual or collective property rights over the right to catch and thus had no assurance that reductions in catches today would beneﬁt them in the future, should the stocks recover. Consequently, at least among ﬁshers who were able to maintain their catches, there was little support for reducing current harvests even when evidence was presented that the stock was being exploited unsustainably.

1.3.3. Kerala Fisheries in India: Many Species, Mixed Fishing Scales In India, Kerala State has the second largest number, after Tamil Nadu, of ﬁshers and ﬁsheries-dependent households and workers, reporting 140,000 active ﬁshers, 602,000 total “ﬁsherfolk population,” and 29,000 ﬁshing craft of all sizes (Government of India 2006). According to the Kerala state government, 61 percent of ﬁshers live below the poverty line (www.ﬁsheries.kerala.gov.in/faq.htm). In 2006, 22 percent of the total Indian marine catch was landed in Kerala (www.cmfri.org.in/html/cmfriDATA01.html). The nutrient-enriched coastal ﬁsheries of Kerala extend from the inland tidal lagoons and backwaters

Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management: At the Crossroads at the foot of the Western Ghats mountains to mangrove, sandy beach, and rocky coasts out to the limits of the Indian EEZ. The ﬁsheries resources abundance of Kerala have been noted in historical documents from at least the ﬁrst through fourth centuries a.d., and over at least three thousand years, people from many different cultures visited, inhabited, and made their contributions to Kerala society and therefore to the exploitation of its ﬁsheries (Kurien 2000). The seasonal composition of ﬁsh assemblages and their abundance are driven by seasonally reversing wind patterns, namely, the northeast (November to March) and southwest (May to September) monsoon seasons, upwellings, and ocean productivity. During the southwest monsoon, a unique feature is the extensive alongshore suspended mudbanks, which create calm and productive waters (Vivekanandan et al. 2003a), locally called chakara (Kurien 2000). Fish landings are highest during the southwest monsoon and in the postmonsoon season (collectively, May to December). Most ﬁshing occurs within the 70-m depth contour (Vivekanandan et al. 2003a). More of the landings are from pelagic species (59 percent) than from demersal species (23 percent); crustaceans and mollusks make up the balance. Shifts in species of demersal ﬁsh landed occurred during the 30 years from 1970 to 2000, with catﬁshes, goatﬁshes, rays, threadﬁns, silverbellies, and whiteﬁsh declining in the catch, and ﬂatﬁsh, pomfrets, and lizardﬁsh increasing. Pelagic ﬁsh assemblages off Kerala are dominated by the oil sardine (Sardinella longiceps), referred to in the local language as the “family provider” (Kurien 2000). Despite this dominance, the pelagic ﬁsheries are also highly multispecies, including such other groups as sardines, sharks, barracudas, and mackerels (Vivekanandan et al. 2003a). Based on preliminary estimates, the trophic level of the Kerala ﬁsheries reﬂects the predominance of pelagic species that feed lower in the food web (Vivekanandan et al. 2003b). The modern development of Kerala marine ﬁsheries has been traced to the period of the early 1950s. A coincidence of factors inﬂuenced their development: the drive to export shrimp, stateand private-sector-driven modernization of the ﬁsheries hoping to create more uniform and economically efﬁcient ﬁshing units, and the conduct of the ﬁrst ever development assistance project by the United Nations, Norway, and India, called the

11

Indo-Norwegian Project for Fisheries Development (Kurien 1985, 2000). Small-scale ﬁshing has persisted since mechanization began in the 1950s, but it has become increasingly modernized and, in the case of ﬁshing craft, motorized. From 1980 to 2005, the number of trawlers in Kerala grew from 745 to 3,982, a more than fourfold increase; nonmechanized boat numbers shrank from 26,271 to 9,522 (Government of India 2006). Nevertheless, much of the labor in ﬁshing is provided by those working for others and in the postharvest, services, and marketing sector. In recent times, mechanized ﬁshing boats and gear such as bottom trawlers, gillnets, and purse seines have greatly intensiﬁed ﬁshing while displacing, though not replacing, the older ﬁshing methods such as that done from catamarans, dugout canoes, plank-built boats, and the shore with set nets, seines, and small versions of the offshore gear (Vivekanandan et al. 2003b; see also chapter 20). Kurien (2000) notes, however, that the diversity of traditional gears has been reduced through mechanization and motorization of artisanal vessels and gear. The density of inshore ﬁshers has increased from 3.6 to 8.5 ﬁshers per square kilometer in the last four decades (Vivekanandan et al. 2003a). Despite the several-fold increase in ﬁshing effort in Kerala, the total catch, with ﬂuctuations, has been on a plateau of approximately 600,000 metric tons since the mid-1980s (www.cmfri.org.in/html/ cmfriDATA01.html). Off Kochi, Kerala, demersal ﬁsheries biomass shrank by nearly half between the early 1970s and 1980, and many demersal and some pelagic stocks are now overﬁshed, especially in inshore ﬁsheries (Silvestre et al. 2003; Vivekanandan et al. 2003b). Despite the greater standardization of vessels and gear, demersal and pelagic ﬁshing are still executed by many different types of mobile and ﬁxed gears, causing conﬂict among gear types and ﬁshers. In many coastal communities, traditional “sea courts” handled ﬁshing conﬂicts, but these have been challenged by the technological change and government-sponsored ﬁsheries institutions, such as cooperatives (Kurien 2000). Growing government regulations have sought to reduce the conﬂicts by zoning the coast by depth and distance from shore, with vessels being permitted in each zone according to their size and status, such as artisanal vessels and mechanized vessels of <25 or ³25 gross registered metric tons (Silvestre et al. 2003).

12

Overview

Starting in 1988, and at the urging of traditional ﬁshers and their grass-roots organizations, the Kerala state government introduced a seasonal trawl ban of 45 days during June through August. Initially opposed to the ban, in recent years the mechanized sector has sought to a more comprehensive ban to include other types of ﬁshing. Indian national ﬁsheries legislation is weak on ﬁsheries conservation, and in 1980 the Kerala state government was the ﬁrst of several Indian states to develop its own ﬁsheries legislation. However, this legislation has done little to stem the tide of overﬁshing or to bring prosperity to its many ﬁshers. The problems of poverty in the Kerala ﬁsheries sector have many dimensions, including their impacts throughout the supply chain and on gender. Kerala’s overexploited ﬁsh stocks have driven households to diversify out of ﬁsheries, along pathways that depend on their speciﬁc assets, their members’ education levels, and events in the general economy. Fishing households, however, still rely on ﬁsheries and increasingly on women’s as well as men’s work, which are interdependent (Hapke 2007). The effectively open-access nature of the Kerala ﬁsheries, coupled with high population density and population growth and a strong demand for marine products, has led the ﬁsheries to a situation where all subsectors are performing in a suboptimal way. The many small-scale operators, laborers, and traders throughout the supply chain are competing in an environment of increasing scarcity. The larger operators are also trying to maximize their gains from the same and overlapping resources. Economic and ecological improvements cannot be made unless attention is paid to relieving the social pressures surrounding ﬁsheries.

1.4. MARINE CONSERVATION AND FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: ACHIEVING AND MEASURING SUCCESSES AND FAILURES A useful starting point in terms of where marine conservation and ﬁsheries management should be going should be a review of what works and what does not. Parts II and III of the handbook provide detailed reviews of individual ﬁsheries. In this chapter we provide our own perspective on marine conservation and ﬁsheries management.

1.4.1. Measuring Success A common cause of debate between managers and scientists is the benchmark that should be used to measure success. Should it be deﬁned by the ability to provide the maximum number of jobs? Or the maximum net returns over time? Or should it be the traditional goal of ﬁsheries, to maximize the sustained yield or catch? Recently, the objectives have broadened to also include consideration of nonmarket values for biodiversity conservation and ecosystems and their services. Not surprisingly, different goals lead to different outcomes and generate different sets of beneﬁts (Hilborn 2007). Understanding that goals differ provides a way forward to understanding why some governments continue to subsidize their ﬁshers. For instance, maintaining employment by subsidizing ﬁshing in an economically depressed coastal community may be viewed as a successful outcome to a ﬁsheries minister but to ﬁsheries scientist this would be reckless, especially if it depletes stocks to below a minimum biological reference point. Similarly, continuing to ﬁsh while inﬂicting irreparable damage to the ecosystem or severely depleting biodiversity may temporarily provide food, jobs, and foreign exchange earnings but at an uncounted cost for the present and future generations. Rather than debating what goals should predominate in management of the world’s oceans, we note that countries have agreed to a common set of principles. These principles were developed by the FAO (1995) and are called a Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Below are some of the key general principles relevant to marine conservation and ﬁsheries management.

1.4.2. Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries 6.1 States and users of living resources aquatic resources should conserve aquatic ecosystems. The right to ﬁsh carries with it the obligation to do so in a responsible manner so as to ensure effective conservation and management of the living aquatic resources. 6.2 . . . Management measures should not only ensure the conservation of target species but also of species belonging to the same ecosystem. . . . 6.3 States should prevent over ﬁshing and excess ﬁshing capacity and should implement management measures to ensure that ﬁshing effort is commensurate with the productive

Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management: At the Crossroads capacity of the ﬁshery resources and their sustainable utilization. 6.5 States and subregional and regional ﬁsheries management organizations should apply a precautionary approach to conservation, management and exploitation of living aquatic resources. . . . 6.8 All critical ﬁsheries habitats in marine and freshwater ecosystems . . . should be protected and rehabilitated as far as possible and where necessary. (FAO 1995) We know of no coastal state that is meeting these general principles in full for all its ﬁsheries. This is not for want of trying by many ﬁsheries managers. The sad reality is that the problem lies not only with differences in goals but also with failures in the means or the instruments to achieve these worthy ends.

1.4.3. Instruments Marine conservation and ﬁsheries management uses a mix of regulations and practices to achieve a desired set of objectives. We contend that top-down approaches to management that focus on prohibitions and direct constraints on ﬁsher and stakeholder behavior will, in general, not be successful unless combined with bottom-up approaches that try to match individual and community interests with broader societal goals. This is not to argue that enforceable rules and technology standards such as the banning of drifts nets and the use of dynamite or cyanide to catch ﬁsh are not desirable, but simply that if ﬁshers can be given the incentives to act for the common good while also pursuing their individual interest, management regulations will be much more effective. Recent commentaries on the state of the world’s ﬁsheries emphasize the failures in past management. These “prescription-and-prediction” reviews stress that past management has focused in single-species management and has generated poor outcomes in terms of the sustainability of ﬁsh stocks. Although we may disagree about whether the “glass is half full or half empty,” our principal concerns with these commentaries include our disagreement with the view that single-species management is the primary cause of the problem and that the solution lies in top-down controls, albeit practiced with an ecosystem approach, and our observation that many projections fail to adequately account for human

13

behavior in their predictions. It is our view that the problem lies less with the single-species nature of past management, although this is certainly an issue, but rather with its top-down approach that views ﬁshers as levers that can be moved up and down via commands from on high. Thus, in our view, ecosystem approaches that fail to put ﬁshers ﬁrst in management design and also use a bottomup approach, and establish clear incentives aligning private behavior with social goals are likely to be subject to the same failures as past single-species management. To illustrate our differences to the prescriptionand-prediction commentaries, we observe that Pauly et al. (2003) favor a ‘sustainability-ﬁrst” scenario for the future of ﬁsheries that would require a “value system change” and “involve creating networks of marine reserves and careful monitoring and rebuilding a number of major stocks” (1361). We know of no one who would argue against the notion of sustainability ﬁrst, including ourselves. We also agree that many ﬁsh stocks do need rebuilding and that marine reserves (see chapter 51) are an important component of this approach. However, in their simulations of the sustainability-ﬁrst scenario, Pauly et al. (2003) fail to explain how ﬁshing ﬂeets would be restructured to rebuild the biomass of long-lived organisms in marine ecosystems, and what instruments would be used to reduce ﬁshing effort by 20–30 percent. As discussed in chapter 37 of the handbook, buybacks of ﬁshing vessels to reduce ﬁshing effort are doomed to failure without changing the underlying incentive structure of the “race to ﬁsh.” Our point is not to criticize a worthy endeavor to document the long-term global prospects of marine ﬁsheries, but to emphasize that any future for ﬁsheries must include a detailed understanding of how ﬁshers act under different policies. Without such a discourse and also analysis of ﬁsher incentives, behavior, and impact on target and bycatch species and habitat, there will continue to be a bleak future for ﬁsheries and marine conservation. Projections are notoriously difﬁcult in any discipline, and especially so given the inherent uncertainties in ﬁsheries. One highly cited study by Worm et al. (2006) extrapolates the current trend in ﬁshery collapses to predict that all ﬁsheries will be collapsed by 2048. Notwithstanding difﬁculties in measuring when a ﬁshery collapses (Murawski et al. 2007) and taking account of recovering stocks, the principal problem with such a projection is the

14

Overview

failure to understand that how ﬁsheries are managed determine future outcomes. In other words, the key to effective management is how ﬁshers are regulated. Using the same data as Worm et al. (2006), Costello et al. (2008) show that if the world’s ﬁsheries had provided individual ﬁshers with deﬁned catch shares in 1970, only 9 percent of the 11,135 ﬁsheries would have collapsed (deﬁned as when catches fall in any year to 10 percent or less of their historic maximum) versus the 28 percent that did, in fact, collapse (Costello et al. 2008). Moreover, with catch shares, the proportion of collapsed ﬁsheries would remain steady thereafter and would not decline further. The analysis of Costello et al. (2008), supported by further analysis by Heal and Schlenker (2008) using the same data, shows that by putting ﬁshers ﬁrst in terms of how ﬁsheries are managed offers beneﬁts not only to ﬁshers but also the stocks on which they depend. Such beneﬁts for target species can be expanded to bycatch species, ﬁshery habitats, and marine ecosystems, provided that ﬁshers have the appropriate incentives to act in the long-term interest of society, and not just their own interests. There is a wealth of evidence from meta-studies, individual case studies, and analyses to support our contention that if ﬁshers are provided with a longterm stake in a ﬁshery in the form of well-deﬁned and enforceable individual or community property rights, as either a catch shares or territorial rights, then their individual incentives will much more closely match societal interests (Grafton et al. 2006). Given the appropriate incentives, ﬁshers are prepared to support measures to reduce catches and to invest in the long-term sustainability of the species that they target. We would argue that this incentive-based approach to sustainable ﬁsheries needs to be expanded to include bycatch species and also the overall health of marine ecosystems and conservation of marine biodiversity. The structure of incentives for the provision of these public goods poses its own unique set of challenges that can differ from those required for the conservation and management of common ﬁsh resources. These incentive-based approaches include customary marine conservation and management and common property (Baland and Platteau 1996; Cinner and Aswani 2007). Such approaches are outlined in several chapters within this handbook.

1.4.4. Public and Private Beneﬁts Traditional measures of ﬁsheries success have focused on the beneﬁts that primarily accrue to

the ﬁshing industry from harvests of common ﬁsh stocks, be it employment, the total catch, or total value of the catch. The 21st century will require that marine conservation take a much broader view of the beneﬁts to include aesthetic and amenity values of biodiversity and habitats and the range of ecosystem services provided by the world’s oceans. Not surprisingly this environmental or holistic view of marine conservation is already generating conﬂicts among stakeholders, especially ﬁshers, in terms of how ﬁsheries should be managed. Although trade-offs exist between private and public beneﬁts, we contend that in many cases the two sets of beneﬁts are complementary. For example, ﬁgure 1.2 illustrates some of the public and private beneﬁts following the introduction of individual harvesting rights in the British Columbia halibut ﬁshery in 1991. These harvesting rights made season-length restrictions redundant, which in turn allowed ﬁshers to catch halibut at more opportune times and avoid congestion, gear loss, and bycatch that prevailed under the “race-to-ﬁsh” management regime. As a result, public beneﬁts increased. At the same time, ﬁshers also realized private beneﬁts because they could now sell their harvest as a fresh and higher priced product over most of the year. In this case, developing management controls that helped to ensure a healthier marine ecosystem also provided substantial private beneﬁts to ﬁshers and other stakeholders. Generating greater public and private beneﬁts is likely to require a “mixed-use” rather than a “single-use” approach to ﬁsheries. For example, Australia has designated about one-third of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park free of ﬁshing but allows some ﬁshing (with restrictions on ﬁshing gear) in permitted areas for either recreational purposes or commercial harvesting, or both. A review every ﬁve years of the park’s zones provides the opportunity to change the mix of public and private beneﬁts as the environment and circumstances change. Such spatial approaches can be developed elsewhere along with incentives that couple private with public interests. One of the key issues will be valuing public beneﬁts and designing the most effective mechanism to elicit the public’s preferences for these goods. Another challenge will be to establish the incentives to supply these public goods and their beneﬁts, and the temptation of a “free ride” (Barrett 2007). These issues will be compounded when the public goods and their beneﬁts extend beyond a

15

Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management: At the Crossroads

Public benefit (season length in days)

300 2004 250 1991

200

150

100 1980 50

0 0

10,000,000

20,000,000

30,000,000

40,000,000

50,000,000

60,000,000

Private benefit (landed value in CAD$) FIGURE

1.2 Public and private beneﬁts in the British Columbia halibut ﬁshery. (Grafton et al.

2008) single nation, requiring the cooperation of multiple countries. Individual or bottom-up incentives can also be highly effective in promoting public beneﬁts. One successful example has been the use of a form of rights-based management, dolphin mortality limits in the eastern Paciﬁc Ocean that has reduced dolphin mortality by more than 75 percent when catching yellowﬁn tuna (Hedley 2001). In this approach, all vessels that exceed their annual dolphin mortality limits must stop ﬁshing, a rule that is enforced by on-board observers on vessels larger than 400 tons. In other ﬁsheries, it may be possible to “tax” ﬁshers to fund conservation investments that “offset” the consequences of their bycatch to conserve biodiversity while continuing to ﬁsh, creating a double-dividend environmental tax. Consumers of seafood and ﬁshers might also voluntarily fund conservation investments that mitigate their actions, that is, provide public goods that “offset” public bads. Providing that the offset more than compensates for the consequences of the ﬁshing and consumption of the seafood, both public and private beneﬁts can be preserved. For instance, ﬁshers that incidentally catch turtles, and also consumers that eat the ﬁsh that generate turtle bycatch, can help fund the protection of important breeding sites. Such approaches, along with technical and gear developments that allow ﬁshers to better

target species, offer the real possibility of sustaining both public and private beneﬁts. Transboundary sea turtles also illustrate the importance of cooperation among multiple nations because unilateral conservation by shutting down harvesting simply shifts the sea turtle mortality to other nations, with no net gain in conservation, and perhaps even a net loss (Rausser et al. 2009).

1.4.5. Distribution of Beneﬁts The ﬁnal and often forgotten dimension to measuring success is how the beneﬁts are distributed. In other words, how the “pie” is sliced may be as important to stakeholders as how big is the pie. Conﬂicts over goals in ﬁsheries management are often as much about how beneﬁts are distributed as they are about what these beneﬁts might be. For instance, increasing the proﬁtability from ﬁshing may not be viewed as socially desirable if the beneﬁciaries are “well-off” commercial ﬁshers and the losers are impoverished ﬁshing communities. The distribution of beneﬁts becomes even more complex and critical when international cooperation among multiple nations is required to manage transnational ﬁsheries and conserve biodiversity, such as tunas, dolphins, sea birds, or whales (Barrett 2003). Realizing such cooperation and reducing “free riding” may require transfers

16

Overview

of beneﬁts from those parties that clearly beneﬁt to those parties that do not. Creating property rights in ﬁsheries may also unfairly remove the traditional, de facto rights of access of existing communities (Platteau 1989). In such cases, the expected gains from better structured property rights may be completely offset by infractions and poaching by traditional owners and the costs of monitoring and enforcement. Wilson (2007) uses an example from Madagascar’s shrimp ﬁsheries to show how parts of the coast were leased to industrial ﬁshing companies that paid for this privilege. Unfortunately, such leases removed smallscale ﬁshers from a productive resource and the payments for the leases that could have been used to assist in economic development were diverted for other purposes, along with “informal” payments provided to those with the power to cancel the leases. In other instances, weaker state-sanctioned rights that replace customary management institutions and collective rights of traditional ﬁshers may increase ﬁshing pressures (Cinner 2005; Platteau 1989). The distribution of beneﬁts from the marine environment is equally important at the micro level as at the macro level. In many ﬁshing-dependent communities, entire families are involved in the activities. Successful marine conservation requires understanding “who gets what” to ensure the appropriate mix of private and public beneﬁts. For instance, in some communities, women play an important role in marketing ﬁsh most likely caught by men, but sometimes from their own or other women’s efforts. However, if traditional resource management institutions deteriorate such that women are no longer able to market ﬁsh, they may be forced to alternative activities to generate income (Nayak et al. 2006). This reduces the stakeholder interest in maintaining the marine ecosystems and may, given the lack of ﬁnancial resources, also redirect people into alternative activities that may even be harmful to long-term sustainability of marine ecosystems.

1.4.6. Blockages to the Transition to Sustainable Fisheries Although the basic elements of successful marine conservation and ﬁsheries management are well recognized, the changes needed are implemented far less often than they should be. Too little attention has yet been paid to what blockages stand

in the way of the transition to greater public and private ﬁsheries beneﬁts. Four types of blockages have been identiﬁed (Grafton et al. 2008; Williams et al. 2008). The ﬁrst is the inability or unwillingness to deal with short-term political and social costs and their distribution. The political reality of difﬁcult changes, such as removing ﬁshing capacity, creates management incentives to leave the status quo in place, regardless of the longer term consequences. The second blockage can be when the stakeholders disagree on how to best achieve long-term sustainability. All stakeholders and groups judge the proposed changes from their own perspectives on gains and losses. The third blockage comes from communications and knowledge gaps of the managers, leaving them short of information to make decisions. Decision making can freeze up in the face of uncertainties and complexities within the ﬁsheries sector and many factors outside ﬁsheries, such as markets and fuel prices. The fourth blockage concerns the need to use a broad policy toolkit in addressing the change when the ﬁsheries manager has no control over key options. For example, the transitions to greater beneﬁts will usually require signiﬁcant ﬁnance, and the necessary funds will likely be the prerogative of the ministry of ﬁnance and planning, not the ministry of ﬁsheries. Unless means are found to overcome the four types of blockages, then no progress can be made toward achieving greater public and private ﬁsheries beneﬁts.

1.5. THE WAY FORWARD Collectively, the many chapters in this handbook offer a guide to the best practices and the approaches needed to promote resilient marine ecosystems, sustainable livelihoods, and viable communities from the world’s oceans. The path ahead is difﬁcult, but we are hopeful. Fisheries management can generate amazing turnarounds in the sustainability of ﬁsh stocks when ﬁshers are considered to be part of the solution, and not just viewed as a problem that can be regulated out of existence. The insights from the successes and failures in marine conservation and ﬁsheries management show that if best practices were implemented today, there would be enormous gains in both public and private beneﬁts. Please join us and the many contributors to this handbook on this journey to make this vision a reality.

Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management: At the Crossroads Note 1. Unless otherwise speciﬁed, ﬁsheries in this chapter refer to marine capture ﬁsheries. We use the following deﬁnitions, derived from the FAO Fisheries Glossary (http://www.fao.org/ﬁ/glossary/ default.asp): Capture ﬁshery (plural ﬁsheries): The sum (or range) of all activities to harvest a given ﬁsh resource. It may refer to the location (e.g., Morocco, Georges Bank), the target resource (e.g., hake), the technology used (e.g., trawl or beach seine), the social characteristics (e.g., artisanal, industrial), the purpose (e.g., commercial, subsistence, or recreational, or the season (e.g., winter). Marine capture ﬁsheries: Activities that harvest ﬁsh and other aquatic life from natural stocks in marine waters (along coasts and in seas and oceans). A wide range of sizes and types of ﬁshing vessels and ﬁshing equipment (termed ﬁshing gears) are used to capture the many different types of ﬁsh, crabs, prawns, squid, and other marine life. Other terms used in this chapter: Fish: Used as a collective term, includes mollusks, crustaceans, and any aquatic animal that is harvested. Finﬁsh: aquatic vertebrates that have ﬁns as limbs. Fisher: A gender-neutral name for a person (male or female) participating in a ﬁshery (FAO Fisheries Glossary)

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Barrett, S. (2007). Why Cooperative? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Churchill, R.R., and A.V. Lowe (1999). The Law of the Sea. 3rd ed. Manchester, U.K.: Juris Publishing, Manchester University Press. Cinner, J. (2005). Socio-economic factors inﬂuencing customary marine tenure in the IndoPaciﬁc. Ecology and Society 10(1): 36. Cinner, J., and S. Aswani (2007). Integrating customary management into marine conservation. Biological Conservation 140: 201–216. Costello, C.S., D. Gaines, and J. Lynham (2008). Can catch shares prevent ﬁsheries collapse? Science 321: 1678–1681. Cushing, D.H. (1988). The Provident Sea. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Delgado, C.L., N. Wada, M.W. Rosegrant, S. Meijer, and M. Ahmed (2003). Fish to 2020: Supply and Demand in Changing Global Markets. Worldﬁsh Center Technical Report No. 62. Joint Publication of the International Food Policy Research Institute (Washington DC) and the Worldﬁsh Center (Penang, Malaysia). FAO (1995). Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2005). Review of the State of World Marine Fishery Resource. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 457. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2006). State of World Aquaculture: 2006. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 500. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2007). State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2006. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Friedman, K., S. Purcell, J. Bell, and C. Hair (2008). Sea Cucumber Fisheries: A Manager’s Toolbox. Monograph 135. Canberra: Australian Center for International Agricultural Research. Garcia, S., A. Zerbi, C. Alliaume, T. Do Chi, and G. Lasserre (2003). The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. FAO Technical Paper 443. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gillespie, A. (2005). Whaling Diplomacy: Deﬁning Issues in International Environmental Law. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar. Government of India (2006). Marine ﬁsheries census—2005. Part I. New Delhi: Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairy and Fisheries. Grafton, R.Q., W. Adamowicz, D. Dupont, H. Nelson, R.J. Hill, and S. Renzetti (2004). The Economics of the Environment and Natural Resources. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing.

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Management Procedure of the International Whaling Commission. CM 1983/N:11. Copenhagen, Denmark: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Kompas, T., N. Che, and R.Q. Grafton. (2004). Technical efﬁciency effects of input controls: Evidence from Australia’s banana prawn industry. Applied Economics 36: 1631–1641. Kurien, J. (1985). Technical assistance projects and socio-economic change: Norwegian intervention in Kerala’s ﬁsheries development. Economic and Political Weekly 20: 70–88. Kurien, J. (2000). Factoring social and cultural dimensions into food and livelihood security issues of marine ﬁsheries: A case study of Kerala State, India. Working Paper 299. Thiruvananthapuram, India: Centre for Development Studies. Larkin, P. (1978). Fisheries management—an essay for ecologists. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 9: 57–73. Ludwig, D., R. Hilborn, and C. Walters (1993). Uncertainty, resource exploitation, and conservation lessons from history. Science 260: 36. Murawski, S., R. Methor, and G. Tromble (2007). Biodiversity loss in the ocean: How bad is it? Science 316: 1281. Nayak, N., D. Nandakumar, and A.J. Vijayan (2006). Coastal Population Dynamics and Ecosystem Changes. Thiruvanathapuram, India: Protsahan. Pauly, D., J. Alder, E. Bennett, V. Christensen, P. Tymers, and R. Watson (2003). The future for ﬁsheries. Science 302: 1359–1361. Pauly, D., V. Christensen, J. Dalsgard, R. Froese, and F. Torres, Jr. (1998). Fishing down marine food webs. Science 279: 860–863. Pikitch, E.K., C. Santora, E.A. Babcock, A. Bakun, R. Bonﬁl, D.O. Conover, P. Dayton, P. Doukakis, D. Fluharty, B. Herman, E.D. Houde, J.Link, P.A. Livingston, M. Mangel, M.K. McAllister, J. Pope, and K.J. Sainsbury (2004). Ecosystem-based ﬁshery management. Science 305: 346–347. Platteau, J.-P. (1989). Penetration of capitalism and persistence of small-scale organizational forms in third world ﬁsheries. Transformation of Third World Fisheries, Development and Change 20(4): 621–651. Rausser, G., S. Hamilton, M. Kovach, R. Stifter (2009). Unintended consequences: The spillover effects of common property regulations. Marine Policy 33(1): 24–39. Roberts, C. (2007). The Unnatural History of the Sea. Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books. Ruddle, K. (1994). A Guide to the Literature on Traditional Community-Based Management in the Asia-Paciﬁc Tropics. FAO Fisheries

Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management: At the Crossroads Circular 869. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 114. Schneider, V., and D. Pearce (2004). What saved the whales? An economic analysis of 20th century whaling. Biodiversity and Conservation 13: 543–562. Silvestre, G.T., L. R. Garces, I. Stobutzki, M. Ahmed, R.A.V. Santos, C.Z. Luna, and W. Zhou (2003). South and South-east Asian coastal ﬁsheries: Their status and directions for improved management: Conference synopsis and recommendations. In: G. Silvestre, L. Garces, I. Stobutzki, M. Ahmed, R.A. Valmonte-Santos, C. Luna, L. Lachica-Aliño, P. Munro, V. Christensen, and D. Pauly (eds). Assessment, Management and Future Directions for Coastal Fisheries in Asian Countries. Penang: WorldFish Center Conference Proceedings, 67: 1–40. Squires, D. (1987). Public regulation and the stricture of production in multiproduct industries: An application to the New England trawl industry. Rand Journal of Economics 23: 221–236. Squires, D. (2009). Opportunities in social science research. In: R.J. Beamish and B.J. Rothschild (eds). The Future of Fisheries Science in North America. Fish and Fisheries Series 31. Springer Science, chapter 32. Vivekanandan, E., M. Srinath, V.N. Pillai, S. Immanuel, and K.N. Kurup (2003a). Marine ﬁsheries along the southwest coast of India. In: G. Silvestre, L. Garces, I. Stobutzki, C. Luna, M. Ahmad, R.A. Valmonte-Santos, L. LachicaAliño, P. Munro, V. Christensen, and D. Pauly (eds). Assessment, Management and Future Directions for Coastal Fisheries in Asian Countries. Penang: WorldFish Center Conference Proceedings, 67: 757–792. Vivekanandan, E., M. Srinath, V.N. Pillai, S. Immanuel, and K.N. Kurup (2003b).

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Trophic model of the coastal ﬁsheries ecosystem of the southwest coast of India. In: G. Silvestre, L. Garces, I. Stobutzki, M. Ahmed, R.A. Valmonte-Santos, C. Luna, L. Lachica-Aliño, P. Munro, V. Christensen, and D. Pauly (eds). Assessment, Management and Future Directions for Coastal Fisheries in Asian Countries. Penang: WorldFish Center Conference Proceedings, 67: 281–298. Walters, C.J., and R. Hilborn (1976). Adaptive control of ﬁshing systems. Journal of Fisheries Research Board of Canada 33: 15–159. Wilen, J.E. (1979). Fisherman behaviour and the design of efﬁcient ﬁsheries regulation programmes. Journal of Fisheries Research Board of Canada 36: 855–858. Williams, M., L. Ridgeway, R.Q. Grafton, and D. Squires (2008). Positioning ﬁsheries in a changing world. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, July 22–25, 2008, Nha Trang, Vietnam: Achieving a Sustainable Future: Managing Aquaculture, Fishing, Trade and Development (compiled by A.L. Shriver). Corvallis, Ore.: International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade [CD ROM]. Wilson, J.R. (2007). Challenges and opportunities for ﬁsheries managers in developing countries: A case for economic eclecticism. International Journal of Global Environmental Issues 7: 206–220. World Bank (2008). The Sunken Billions: The Economic Justiﬁcation for Fisheries Reform. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Worm, B., E.B. Barbier, N. Beaumont, J.E. Duffy, C. Folke, B.S. Halpern, J.B.C. Jackson, H.K. Loetze, F. Micheli, S.R. Palumbi, E. Sala, K.A. Selkoe, J.J. Stachowicz, and R. Watson (2006). Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. Science 314: 787–790.

2 Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries ROLF WILLMANN KIERAN KELLEHER

The focus on the declining biological health of the world’s ﬁsheries has tended to obscure the even more critical deterioration of the economic health of the ﬁsheries, which stems from poor governance that is both a cause and a result of the biological overexploitation. Economically healthy ﬁsheries are fundamental to achieving accepted goals for the ﬁsheries sector, such as improved livelihoods, food security, increased exports, and the restoration of ﬁsh stocks—a key objective of the Plan of Implementation endorsed by the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Anonymous 2002). This chapter reviews the salient trends in the world’s ﬁsheries with a focus on productivity and economic performance indicators and makes the case for comprehensive reform of ﬁsheries governance to capture the large net economic beneﬁts that currently are lost. It complements ecological and conservation arguments further emphasizing the urgency to improve the management of the world’s capture ﬁsheries.

2.1. INTRODUCTION Fisheries are an underperforming global asset. A recent study by the World Bank and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (World Bank and FAO 2009) indicates that the difference between the potential and actual net economic beneﬁts from marine ﬁsheries is on the order of $50 billion (109) per year. Improved governance of marine ﬁsheries could capture a substantial part of this $50 billion annual economic loss. Reform of the ﬁsheries sector could generate considerable additional economic growth and alternative livelihoods, both in the marine economy and in other sectors. Long before the fuel price increases of 2008, the economic health of the world’s marine ﬁsheries has been in decline. The buildup of redundant ﬁshing ﬂeet capacity, deployment of increasingly powerful ﬁshing technologies, and increasing pollution and habitat loss have depleted ﬁsh stocks worldwide. Despite the increased ﬁshing effort, the global marine catch has been stagnant for more than a decade, while the natural ﬁsh capital—the wealth of the oceans—has declined. At the same time, the margin between the global costs of catching and the value of the catch has narrowed. In many cases the catching operations are buoyed up by subsidies, so the global ﬁshery economy to the point of landing (the harvest subsector) is in deﬁcit. The cumulative economic loss to the global economy over the last three decades is estimated to be on the order of 2 trillion dollars.

2.2. OVERVIEW 2.2.1. The Deteriorating State of the Marine Fishery Resources The crisis in marine ﬁsheries has been well documented in biological terms. One-half of the marine capture ﬁsh stocks monitored by the FAO 20

Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries are designated as fully exploited, producing at or close to their maximum sustainable yield. Another 25 percent of the marine ﬁsh stocks are overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion and are yielding less than their maximum sustainable yield (FAO 2007a). The remaining 25 percent of the marine capture ﬁsh stocks are underexploited or moderately exploited, and while this implies that more could be produced, many of these underexploited stocks are of low-value species or species for which harvesting may be uneconomical. Global production of seafood from wild stocks is at or close to its long-run biological maximum level. Globally, the proportion of fully exploited and overexploited, depleted, or recovering ﬁsh stocks has continued to increase from just above 50 percent of all assessed ﬁsh stocks in the mid-1970s to about 75 percent in 2005 (FAO 2006). This indicates that, in economic terms, more than 75 percent of the world’s ﬁsheries are underperforming, or subject to economic overﬁshing. In 1974, about 40 percent of the assessed stocks were rated as underexploited or moderately exploited. By 2005 this percentage had fallen to 25 percent (FAO 2007a). Figure 2.1 indicates that the reported global marine catch has stagnated at a level of 80–85 million tons since 1990. This stagnation hides several underlying trends in the composition of the catch as described below. Between 1950 and 1970, the recorded catch of both the demersal species (bottom-dwelling) and pelagic species (species that live in the upper layers of the sea) grew considerably (ﬁgure 2.2). Since

1970, demersal ﬁsh catches have stabilized around 20 million tons, while pelagic catches grew to a peak volume of almost 44 million tons in 1994. Since then, pelagic catches have ﬂuctuated between 36 and 41 million tons. Thus, the global ﬁsh supply from marine capture ﬁsheries increasingly relies on lower value species characterized by large ﬂuctuations in yearto-year productivity, concealing the slow degradation of the demersal high-value resources (FAO 2007a). This change in the species composition of the catch is commonly referred to as “ﬁshing down marine food webs” (Pauly et al. 1998). The stagnant level of production is thus maintained by the relatively higher growth rate of a higher proportion of smaller ﬁsh species lower on the food web and a likely decrease in the average age of the catch, both of which maintain ﬁsh biomass. In some ﬁsheries, the targets of ﬁshing have also expanded to cover an entire spectrum of species in the ecosystem, or “ﬁshing through the food webs” (Essington et al. 2006). The changing patterns of discards (unwanted ﬁsh caught and dumped at sea) also suggests that the global catch now comprises substantial quantities of lower value, previously discarded ﬁsh, as the amount of ﬁsh discarded may have decreased by more than 10 million tons between 1994 and 2004 (Kelleher 2005). For example, the quantity of so-called “trash ﬁsh” used for aquaculture feed is estimated to be 5 million to 7 million tons (Tacon 2006). There is also growing evidence that the biomass of large predatory ﬁshes has declined

95 85

Million tons

75 65 55 45 35 25 15 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

2.1 Reported global marine catch 1950–2006 (million tons). (Data from FAO FishStat database)

FIGURE

21

22

Overview 45 Cephalopods Crustaceans Demersal Marine Fish Pelagic Marine Fish Others

40 35

Millions

30 25 20 15 10 5

0 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 FIGURE 2.2 Catch of selected species groups in marine ﬁsheries (million tons). (Data from FAO FishStat)

substantially from preindustrialized levels in many regions (Ahrens and Walters 2005; Myers and Worm 2003), although this may not hold true for all ﬁsheries (Sibert et al. 2006). Climatic variability has always been a signiﬁcant determinant of ﬁsh stock growth and decline, and response to climate variability is part of the daily business of ﬁshing. However, climate change, as described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Pachauri and Reisinger 2007), is placing additional stress on already stressed

ﬁsheries. While recent studies on coral reefs (Baird et al. 2007) and reviews of impacts in the North Atlantic provide important guidance on trends, the impact of changes in sea temperature and ocean acidity on ﬁsh stocks remain largely undetermined at the level of developing countries. Similarly, the impact of sea-level rise and erratic climatic events on the community and household wealth of coastal ﬁshing populations remains largely uncalculated. These additional ecological, environmental, and economic stresses caused by climate change add to

100 90

Inland Marine Aquaculture

80 million tons

70 60 50 40 30 20 10

2006

2002

1998

1994

1990

1986

1982

1978

1974

1970

1966

1962

1958

1954

1950

0

FIGURE 2.3 World marine and inland capture and aquaculture production, 1950–2005. (Data from FAO FishStat)

23

Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries the urgency and economic justiﬁcation for restoring the resilience and health of ﬁsh stocks (FAO 2008c).

2.2.2. Proﬁle and Trends in Global Fisheries Production In 2006, total reported world ﬁshery production1 reached almost 160 million tons (ﬁgure 2.3), of which 53 percent originates from marine capture ﬁsheries. Over the last twenty years the continued growth in world ﬁsh production is largely attributable to aquaculture (ﬁgure 2.3). China is the largest

Rest of the World - Aquaculture China - Aquaculture Rest of the World - Capture China - Capture

150 120 90 60 30

0 1950 1956 1962 1968 1974 1980 1986 1992 1998 2004

2.4 World capture and aquaculture production, 1950–2005. (Data from FAO FishStat [FAO 2008a])

FIGURE

producer, contributing 49 million tons in 2005, of which 32 million tons are from aquaculture (ﬁgure 2.4). Developing countries have contributed more than one-half of total capture ﬁsh production since 1990 (ﬁgure 2.5). This share has reached more than two-thirds in 2005, a development largely driven by Asian aquaculture production.

2.2.3. Trade and Fish Consumption Rising demand for ﬁsh has been a major driver of increased ﬁshing effort. Spurred by the globalization of markets for ﬁsh, some 37 percent of global ﬁsh production is traded internationally, making ﬁsh one of the most traded “agricultural” commodities and accounting for up to 13 percent of global “agricultural trade.” The beneﬁts of increasing globalization in ﬁsh trade have nevertheless been reduced by growing overexploitation, as ineffective governance of ﬁsheries allowed the depletion of ﬁsh stocks—the natural capital, or ﬁsh wealth. In 2006, total world trade of ﬁsh and ﬁshery products reached a record value of $86.4 billion (export value), more than a tenfold increase since 1976, when global ﬁsh trade statistics ﬁrst became available. The share of developing countries in total ﬁshery exports was 48 percent by value and 57 percent by quantity. Growth in aquaculture production

90 Developed countries or areas Developing countries or areas Total marine capture

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1950

1955

1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

FIGURE 2.5 Total recorded marine capture production by economic group (million tons), 1970–2005. (Data from FAO FishStat [FAO 2008a])

2005

24

Overview

Africa Asia Europe

20.0

12 10

6.0

8 6 5.0 4 2 0 1980 1983 1986 1989 1992 1995 1998 2001

4.0

Fish supply from capture fisheries Fish Supply from aquaculture Population

2.6 World population (billions) and global ﬁsh supply (million tons), 1970–2003. (Data from FAO FishStat; World Bank 2006)

FIGURE

demand for aquaculture and livestock feeds based on trash ﬁsh and low-value species has a negative potential impact on the availability and accessibility of these products for direct human consumption (Asia-Paciﬁc Fishery Commission 2006).

South America Asia excl. China Global average

16.0

12.0

8.0

4.0 1961 1964 1967 1970 1973 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1997 2000 2003

2.7 Regional trends in annual ﬁsh supply per capita (kg), 1961–2003. (Data from FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets [faostat.fao.org/default.aspx])

FIGURE

Population (billions)

Per capita supply (kg)

has been an important factor for the global expansion of seafood trade. The growth in reported global ﬁsh production has more than kept pace with population growth (ﬁgure 2.6). Based on the reported global ﬁsh production, the total amount of ﬁsh available for human consumption in 2005 is estimated to have reached 107 million tons, thereby providing an average global per capita ﬁsh supply of 16.5 kg, but with large differences across regions and countries as well as within countries (FAO 2007a). These global values may not, however, capture important local subsistence ﬁsh consumption. Rising demand in Asia—especially in China— and in Europe has largely driven the increase in average global per capita ﬁsh consumption (ﬁgure 2.7). This global increase was particularly pronounced in the 1980s and 1990s but has stabilized at around 16 kg/capita per year (FAO 2007b). Per capita consumption of ﬁsh in South America is stabilizing after a peak in 1995. Per capita consumption in Africa and South America remains low (ﬁgure 2.7). In both regions, but especially in sub-Saharan Africa, low animal-protein intake is believed to be a result of low per capita incomes. Traditionally, low-value ﬁsh and ﬁshery products provide cheap protein to the poorer populations in these regions as well as in Asia. The increased

25

Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries

2.2.4. The Economic Performance of World Marine Capture Fisheries 2.2.4.1. Value of Production and Global Fish Prices The economic performance of global marine capture ﬁsheries is determined by the quantity of ﬁsh caught, the price of ﬁsh, the harvesting costs, and the productivity of the ﬁsheries. In 2004, the total value of reported global ﬁsh production was estimated at $148 billion at the point of ﬁrst sale. Capture ﬁsheries was $85 billion and aquaculture was $63 billion. The total estimated value of the reported marine catch of 85.7 million tons was $78.8 billion2 (FAO 2007a). The average ex-vessel price (or price at ﬁrst sale) was $918 per metric ton for the reported marine catch and $666 per ton for the reported inland (freshwater) catch. The average farm gate price (or price at ﬁrst sale) for cultured ﬁsh was $1,393 per ton. The higher unit price for aquaculture products is due to the production of high-value species (e.g., shrimp and salmon). The ex-vessel prices are considered to be conservative and close to true market prices, being relatively free of taxes, subsidies, and other market distorting inﬂuences. Global ﬁsh price data sets are relatively incomplete at the global level: the only available long-term

price data series is the ﬁsh export unit value derived from trade statistics from the FAO’s FishStat database (ﬁgure 2.8). The unit value of exports may underestimate the global trend in real ﬁsh prices. On one hand, higher value ﬁsh products tend to be exported. On the other hand, aquaculture has a growing share in world ﬁsh trade, and prices of many cultured species have tended to decline from the initial elevated price levels. Because of the changing product composition of exports, the above values are indicative only of the price trends, but nevertheless show several interesting features (ﬁgure 2.8). There was a signiﬁcant decline in ﬁsh prices between 1978 and 1985, followed by a strong price rise from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, a gradual decline until 2001 and a recovery in prices during the most recent years. The real unit value of exports in 2004 was no higher than in the late 1980s. This strongly suggests that the global price of ﬁsh in 2004 was not signiﬁcantly different from that in the late 1980s. Setting aside numerous supply-driven ﬂuctuations, until late 2007, the real prices of many ﬁsh commodities have seen little change since 2004 (Josupeit 2008). Fillet and product yields improved, wastage reduced, and supply chains shortened, making downstream industry increasingly more efﬁcient. Tuna and some whiteﬁsh

75

3,000 Real export unit value (US$/tonne) Nominal unit value (US$/tonne) Total nominal export value (right axis)

2,500

65

US$/tonne

2,000

45 35

1,500

25

1,000

Millions US$

55

15 500

5

80 19 82 19 84 19 86 19 88 19 90 19 92 19 94 19 96 19 98 20 00 20 02 20 04

19

19

19

78

–5

76

0

2.8 Fishery products nominal export value and nominal and real export unit value. The deﬂator used for real values is the U.S. producer price index for all commodities, base year 1982 (Delgado et al. 2003). Values exclude aquatic plants. (Data from FAO FishStat [FAO 2008b])

FIGURE

26

Overview

prices have increased while supplies from aquaculture have dampened prices. The notable exceptions are increased ﬁsh meal and ﬁsh oil prices driven by higher demand for meat and aquaculture products. Thus, while the unit value of the aggregate reported catch has remained relatively constant, the higher proportion of relatively lower value “trash ﬁsh” and small pelagic species is buoyed up by the increasing scarcity value of species higher on the food web, for example, lobster or grouper. The scarcity of some higher value species has created opportunities to ﬁsh in deeper waters, often at a higher cost per unit of catch and also at a cost to the relatively unknown biodiversity of the continental slopes. Growth in demand for ﬁsh is concentrated in developing countries, where populations and per capita incomes show strong growth. However, survey data from China in the period 1980–2000 indicate only slight real ﬁsh price increases (Delgado et al. 2003). Recent studies show substantial increases in Chinese seafood consumption with increases of more than 100 percent in lower income households and more than 150 percent for higher income families between 1998 and 2005 (Chenjun 2007). Demand has continued to grow in the United States, and real prices of fresh ﬁsh show a long-term increasing trend, while the price of the traditional frozen products and particularly canned products has declined during the last 30 years (ﬁgure 2.9). However, more recently, the economic downturn

2 1.8

weakening U.S. dollar exchange rate and consumer spending may be contributing to a decline in U.S. shrimp imports, a key seafood indicator (Seafood International 2008).

2.2.4.2. Cost Trends in Global Marine Capture Fisheries No global data set is available on the costs of ﬁshing. However, costs and earnings studies are available from a number of countries and ﬁsheries. Fishing costs vary greatly by type of ﬁshery and locality; for example, many smaller vessels are nonmotorized. In general, the major cost factors, as percentage of total costs, for most ﬁsheries are as follows: Labor 30–50% Fuel 10–25% Fishing gear 5–15% Repair and maintenance 5–10% Capital cost, such as depreciation and interest 5–25% The trends in the costs of each of these factors of production are of relevance not only for an understanding of the historical trends in ﬁsheries but also to provide a basis for future projections, for example, the effect of rising fuel prices. Cost data must be treated with some caution because the true cost data tend to be confounded by taxes and subsidies.

Canned and cured seafood Frozen packaged fish and seafood Fresh packaged fish and seafood

1.6 1.4 1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 1950 1954 1958 1962 1966 1970 1974 1978 1982 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006 FIGURE 2.9 United States producer real price indexes for ﬁsh and seafood products, 1947–2006. This is an update of ﬁgure 3.2 in Delgado et al. (2003). (Calculated from data obtained from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [www.bls.gov/])

27

Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries

2.2.4.3. Fuel Prices and Productivity The cost of crude oil not only directly relates to fuel costs but also indirectly affects the cost of ﬁshing nets and lines and the cost of vessel construction and repair. Figure 2.10 shows an index of the real price of crude oil and an index of the real material costs in U.S. shipbuilding. For comparison purposes, the index of the real unit value of ﬁsh exports is also illustrated. It shows that until about mid-1980 real unit export value rose faster than crude oil and unit material costs, and since the late 1980s price and cost trends were fairly similar but with the crude oil price depicting a steeply rising trend since 2000. Since 2000, fuel subsidies have probably played an important role in supporting the ﬁnancial viability of ﬁshing operations in some countries. Such fuel subsidies (mostly foregone taxes) to the ﬁshing sector by governments globally are estimated to be in the range of $4.2 billion to $8.5 billion per year (Sumaila et al. 2008). In the absence of productivity gains, ﬁgure 2.10 strongly suggests that the economic performance of global marine ﬁsheries is unlikely to have improved since the early 1990s. Several factors continue to

undermine productivity and proﬁtability. These include rising oil prices; rising costs of ﬁshing gear and vessels, often compounded by unfavorable exchange rates; an increasing regulatory burden; and depletion of inshore stocks causing ﬁshers to travel farther to ﬁshing grounds. On the other hand, motorized ﬁsheries; ﬁsheries that use passive gear (such as traps), which use relatively less fuel; and ﬁsheries with ready access to export markets, may have seen an improvement in proﬁtability in this period. Technology has also driven productivity gains. Using sophisticated ﬁsh ﬁnding equipment tuna purse seiners in the Indian Ocean can now harvest three times the annual catch of seiners operating in the mid-1980s. New designs of trawls reduce the engine power and fuel consumption by 33 percent or more (Richard and Tait 1997). Electronic sale of ﬁsh while vessels are still at sea is reducing transaction costs, helps prevent loss of product quality and value and makes markets more efﬁcient (Jensen 2007). However, as these innovations are adopted throughout a ﬂeet, then productivity falls and the intramarginal rents generated are not maintained. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that at the global level productivity has further deteriorated, especially in recent years, as the majority

250 Real crude oil price index 230

Real material cost index

210

Real export unit value index

190 170 150 130 110 90 70 50 1978

1981

1984

1987

1990

1993

1996

1999

2002

2005

FIGURE 2.10 Real trends in crude oil price, vessel material costs, and ﬁsh export unit value (indices, 1998 = 100), based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; deﬂator used for real values: U.S. producer price index for all commodities, base year 1982 (Delgado et al. 2003). (Data from authors’ calculations, FAO FishStat [FAO 2008a, 2008b]; U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration [www.eia.doe.gov]; and www.coltoncompany.com/ shipbldg/statistics/index.htm)

28

Overview 140

140

Food price index Fish export price index

120

imputed (r2=0.97)

130

120

100

110

80

100

60

90

40

US$/barrel

food/ fish price indices

Fuel price

20

80 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

FIGURE 2.11 Trends in ﬁsh, food and fuel prices. The imputed ﬁsh price index for 2006 and 2007 was derived from a correlation with the FAO Food Price Index. (Data from authors’ calculations; FAO FishStat, U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration [www.eia.doe.gov])

of producers incur higher ﬁshing costs while the global catch has remained stagnant. At the global level, on average, each ton of ﬁsh landed required nearly half a ton of fuel. In value terms, production of a ton of ﬁsh worth $918 required $282 worth of fuel, or 31 percent of the output value in 2004. There is considerable variation in fuel consumption across different ﬁshing methods, types of ﬁsheries, and fuel efﬁciency of engines. The recent (2007–2008) doubling of fuel prices is brieﬂy addressed in section 2.2.5.3, and the overall trend in ﬁsh, food, and fuel prices is illustrated in ﬁgure 2.11.

activities, and a high proportion of these workers are women. Many countries do not separate capture ﬁsheries and aquaculture employment data. Based on available ﬁsheries labor statistics, the number of capture ﬁshers accounted for three-quarters of global employment in ﬁsheries. While employment in capture ﬁsheries has been growing steadily in most low- and middle-income countries, ﬁsheries employment in most industrialized economies has been declining. This decline can be attributed to several factors, including the

During the past three decades, the number of ﬁshers and ﬁsh farmers has grown at a higher rate than the world’s population growth rate (ﬁgure 2.12). Fishing and ﬁsh farming activities provided livelihoods to an estimated 41 million people in 2004, working either on a part-time or full-time basis. Applying an assumed ratio of 1:3 for direct employment (production) and secondary activities (postharvest processing, marketing, distribution), respectively (FAO 2007c), about 123 million people are conservatively estimated to be involved in secondary

Global population (billions)

2.2.4.4. Trends in Employment, Labor Productivity, and Fishing Incomes

6

Population Fishers

30

5

25

4

20

3

15

2

10

1

5

0

0 1970

1980

1990

Total number of capture fishers (thousands)

35

7

2000

2.12 Global population growth (billions) and trend of total number of capture ﬁshers (thousands). (Data from FAO 1997: 1970, 1990 data; FAO 2007a: 1990, 2000 data; FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Information and Statistics Service [FAO 2008a, 2008b])

FIGURE

29

Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries relatively low remuneration in relation to often high-risk and difﬁcult working conditions, growing investment in labor-saving onboard equipment (FAO 2007a), and a failure to attract younger workers. Increased ﬁsh production is not the only cause of the increase in the number of ﬁshery workers in developing countries. For some communities, ﬁshing is a growing poverty trap and, in the absence of alternatives, a livelihood of last resort. Asia has by far the highest share and growth rate in the number of ﬁshers and ﬁsh farmers (ﬁgure 2.13). In this region, the number of ﬁshers increased threefold over the three decades from 1970 to 2000, reﬂecting both a strong increase in part-time and occasional employment in capture ﬁsheries and the growth in aquaculture activities. In Africa, growth was more moderate until 1990 but has accelerated sharply since then.

3 2.5 2

An indicator of labor productivity is the output per person measured either in physical or in value terms. Figure 2.14 shows the average output per ﬁsher valued at average ex-vessel prices in 1998–2000. Average output per ﬁsher ranged from a high of just above $19,000 in Europe to about $2,231 in Africa and $1,720 in Asia, about a tenfold difference. The low labor productivity in Africa and Asia reﬂects low ﬁshing incomes in most countries in these regions. Average labor productivity is higher when only full-time ﬁshers are considered, but it would still be signiﬁcantly below labor productivity ﬁgures in other primary sectors of the economies. For example, the estimated average gross revenue per full time ﬁsher in India’s marine ﬁsheries was $3,400 in 2004. The ﬁgure for small-scale ﬁshers was $1,870 and for ﬁshers on industrial vessels was $5,490 (Kurien 2007).

35

Africa North and Central America South America Europe Oceania

Asia Rest of the world Total

30 25 20

1.5 15 1

10

.5 0

5 1970

1980

1990

0

2000

1970

1980

1990

2000

2.13 Total number of capture ﬁshers by region (millions). (Data from FAO 1997: 1970, 1990 data; FAO 2007a: 1990, 2000, 2004 data)

FIGURE

20,000

US$

15,000 10,000 5,000 0 South America

Europe

North and Central America

Oceania

Africa

Asia

FIGURE 2.14 Average gross revenue per marine and inland capture ﬁsher ($), 1998–2000. Data for South America have been adjusted to take into account low-value ﬁsh for reduction. (Data are based on authors’ calculations and FAO 2002, 2006; FAO FishStat)

30

Overview

metric tons per fisher per year

There is both hard and anecdotal evidence of low levels of crew remunerations in many of the world’s marine ﬁsheries. For example, Vietnamese workers on third-country ﬁshing vessels operating in South African waters receive a monthly pay of $150 to $180, and working conditions include 16–18 hour workdays. A signiﬁcant share of crews on Thai industrial ﬁshing vessels are from Myanmar and Cambodia, two countries with widespread poverty and average incomes some eight times lower than those of Thailand. Based on average country poverty data, some 5.8 million, or 20 percent of the world’s 29 million ﬁshers, may be small-scale ﬁshers earning less than $1 a day (FAO 2004). The strong growth in capture ﬁsheries employment (i.e., ﬁshers operating full time, part time, occasionally, or with unspeciﬁed status) has not resulted in a commensurate increase in recorded inland and marine capture ﬁsheries production. As shown in ﬁgure 2.15, the average harvest per capture ﬁsher has declined by 42 percent from more than 5 tons annually in 1970 to only 3.1 tons in 2000. The signiﬁcance of this decline in average output per ﬁsher has to be seen in the context of the enormous technological developments that have taken place in the world’s capture ﬁsheries during this period, including large-scale motorization of traditional small-scale ﬁsheries; the expansion of active ﬁshing techniques such as trawling and purse seining; the introduction of increasingly sophisticated ﬁshing-ﬁnding and navigation equipment; and the growing use of modern means of communication. While this technological progress has increased

5.5 5 4.5

labor productivity in some ﬁsheries, in aggregate at the global level, the resource constraint, in combination with the prevailing open access condition, has prevented an increase in average labor productivity in the world’s capture ﬁsheries. On the contrary, productivity has signiﬁcantly declined, a decline caused by a shrinking resource base and a growing number of ﬁshers. Because the number of ﬁshing vessels has also grown greatly during this period, as we show further below, at the global level the productivityenhancing investments in capture ﬁsheries have on average yielded small returns and have stymied growth in labor productivity and incomes in the sector.

2.2.5. Fishing Effort and Fishing Fleets Fishing effort is a composite indicator of ﬁshing activity. It includes the number, type, and power of ﬁshing vessels and the type and amount of ﬁshing gear. It captures the contribution of navigation and ﬁsh ﬁnding equipment, as well as the skill of the skipper and ﬁshing crew. Effective effort is difﬁcult to quantify even in a single ﬁshery, and there is considerable uncertainty about the current level of global ﬁshing effort. Given the multiple dimensions of ﬁshing effort, it is understandable that there are no global statistics available. The primary factor inﬂuencing ﬁshing effort is the size of the global ﬁshing ﬂeet as characterized in terms of vessel numbers, tonnage, and engine power and type of ﬁshing gear as described in the following section. In biological terms, ﬁshing effort equates to ﬁshing mortality. The functional relationship is determined by the catchability coefﬁcient. This coefﬁcient is a measure of both the level of harvesting technology and ﬁshing skill and the relative ease of harvesting the ﬁsh stock in terms of its distribution and abundance.

4

2.2.5.1. Development in the Global Fishing Fleet

3.5 3

1970

1980

1990

2000

2.15 Annual catch (marine and inland) per capture ﬁsher (tons), 1970–2000. (Data from FAO FishStat; FAO 2002, 2007a; FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Information and Statistics Service)

FIGURE

The reported global ﬂeet has increased numerically by about 75 percent over the past 30 years, to a total of approximately 4 million decked and undecked units in 2004 (FAO 2007a; ﬁgure 2.16). The number of decked (motorized) vessels more than doubled in this period, and the average age of the global ﬂeet of

31

Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries undecked

decked 1,400

3,000

1,200 2,500 1,000 2,000

800

1,500

600

1,000

400

500

200

0 1970

1975

1980

Asia Africa North America

1985

1990

1995

1998

0 1975

1980

1985

Asia Europe North America

South America Oceania Europe

1990

1995

1998

South America Africa Oceania

FIGURE 2.16 Total number of undecked and decked ﬁshing vessels per region (thousands), 1970–1998. (Data from FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Information and Statistics Service; FAO 1999)

2000

30000 25000

1500

20000 1000

15000

500 0 1945 1965

)

35000

10000 1985 2005

Fleet size (

New registrations(

)

1975–85 Oil crisis 2500

5000 2025 2045

FIGURE 2.17 Estimated number of new ﬁshing vessels built and total registered ﬂeet size (vessels exceeding 100 gross tons/gross registered tons). (Figure from Garcia and Grainger 2005)

large ﬁshing vessels has continued to increase. Asia accounts by far for the highest number of vessels, both decked and undecked. FAO data on national ﬁshing ﬂeets is derived primarily from administrative records, which may not always be current. For example, national ﬁshing vessel records may include vessels that are currently not operational and frequently omit large numbers of unregistered small-scale ﬁshing vessels (FAO 2006). A further difﬁculty in maintaining a consistent data set results from the change in the measurement of vessel size from gross registered

tonnage to gross tonnage and the reﬂagging of vessels to ﬂags of convenience. For large vessels, the Lloyd’s database of vessels (Lloyd’s Register—Fairplay 2008) provides a relatively complete global data set for ﬁshing vessels above 100 gross tons. However, coverage is incomplete. While FAO ﬂeet statistics show an increase in global ﬂeet size since the early 1990s, the Lloyd’s Register shows a decline in the number of ﬁshing vessels larger than 100 gross tons in recent years (ﬁgure 2.17). This divergence in trends can be explained partly by the evolution of the Chinese ﬂeet, which is incompletely listed in the Lloyds Register3 because it is domestically insured. For this ﬂeet and for smaller vessels, FAO statistics are used which have been compiled from national data. In 2002, China adopted a ﬁve-year program to reduce its commercial ﬂeet by 30,000 vessels by 2007 (7 percent). However, the numbers of commercial ﬁshing vessels reported to FAO in both 2003 and 2004 are greater than the number reported as being in operation in 2002 (FAO 2007a).

2.2.5.2. Development in Fishing Capacity and Fleet Productivity Fishing capacity is the amount of ﬁshing effort that can be produced in a given time by a ﬁshing vessel or ﬂeet under full utilization for a given ﬁshery resource condition (FAO 2000).

32

Number of decked vessels (million) Fleet capacity index (fishing power) (million)

3.5 3.0 2.5

140

Decked vessels (number) Fleet capacity index (fishing power)

120

Catch per vessel (tons) Catch per unit capacity (tons)

100

2.0 80 1.5 60

1.0

40

0.5 0.0 1970

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

20 2005

Catch per vessel/Catch per unit capaity (tons)

Overview

FIGURE 2.18 Fleet productivity development (total decked vessels). (Data are based on authors’ calculations; Garcia and Newton 1997; FAO FishStat; FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Information and Statistics Service)

The increase both in vessel numbers and in vessel technology has enhanced the capacity of the global ﬂeet and facilitated access to an expanding range of marine ﬁshery resources and more efﬁcient use of these resources. Fitzpatrick (1996) estimated that the technological coefﬁcient, a parameter of vessel capacity, grew at a rate of 4.3 percent per annum from 1965 to 1995.4 Assuming that this trend has continued, growth in technological efﬁciency coupled with growth in the number of vessels suggests a steeply rising global ﬂeet capacity. The capacity index shown in ﬁgure 2.18 is a multiple of the total number of decked vessels and the technological coefﬁcient.5 The trend line of the catch/ capacity index demonstrates that the global harvesting productivity has, on average, declined by a factor of 6. The exploitation of a growing number of marginal ﬁsh stocks partly explains this decline, but the buildup of ﬁshing overcapacity is clearly a major contributing factor. Thus, the gains from technological progress have generally not been realized because the limited ﬁsh stocks call for a concomitant reduction in the number of vessels to allow for improved vessel productivity. The decline in physical productivity is compounded by the decreasing spread between average harvesting costs and average ex-vessel ﬁsh prices, causing depressed proﬁt margins and reinvestment.

While this has a dampening effect on growth in ﬂeet capacity, depressed ﬂeet reinvestment may retard a shift to more energy-efﬁcient harvesting technologies and a reduction in the carbon footprint of the ﬁshing industry. Many countries have adopted policies to limit the growth of national ﬁshing capacity, both to protect the aquatic resources and to make ﬁshing more economically viable for the harvesting enterprises (FAO 2007a). This has proven difﬁcult and costly to implement in many instances, and even where numbers of vessels have been successfully reduced (Curtis and Squires 2007), the reduction in ﬁshing effort has been considerably less than proportional, because the less efﬁcient vessels tend to exit the ﬁshery and expansion in technical efﬁciency counters the reduction in vessel numbers. The global ﬂeet has attempted to maintain its proﬁtability by reducing real labor costs, by ﬂeet modernization and by introduction of fuelefﬁcient technologies and practices, particularly in developed countries. Vessels are also reported to remain in harbor for increasingly longer periods of the year, focusing harvesting on peak ﬁshing seasons. The receipt of government ﬁnancial support has also assisted both vessel operators and crews, for instance, through income compensation for crews. Subsidies in the world’s marine ﬁsheries have

Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries received growing attention in recent years and are discussed further below.

2.2.5.3. The Effects of Volatile Fuel and Food Prices The impact of volatile fuel and food prices on marine capture ﬁsheries is becoming clearer. The effect depends on the interplay between (1) the impact of the fuel price change on the level of ﬁshing effort, (2) the price elasticity of demand for ﬁsh in economies where the cost of the entire food basket increases, and (3) the changes in per capita gross domestic product that underlie the demand for ﬁsh. The outcome of this interplay is likely to be speciﬁc to the economy of individual ﬁsheries and the markets for the products of that ﬁshery. Fuel price increases may • Reduce ﬁshing effort as a result of higher costs • Reduce ﬁsh supply and drive ﬁsh prices higher • Change ﬁshing patterns to less fuel intensive modes • Result in higher fuel subsidies Food price increases may • Either increase or decrease ﬁsh prices as a result of change to household food basket and resulting change in demand • Redirect forage ﬁsheries (ﬁsh meal) catches to higher value human food products • Allow aquaculture products to permanently capture market share from marine capture ﬁshery products • Stimulate increased ﬁshing effort if prices increase A number of fuel-intensive ﬂeets had ceased to operate by mid-2008; others beneﬁted from subsidized fuel to stay operational. The past trend to replace labor with capital is likely to slow or reverse as labor-intensive ﬁsheries become relatively more viable. Products from less fuel intensive aquaculture may also capture markets. Reduced ﬁshing effort may result in recovery of some ﬁsh stocks. Meanwhile, the economic hardship offers an opportunity for measures to bring ﬁshing capacity into balance with resources.

33

2.2.6. Subsidies and Other Costs Many subsidies in the ﬁsheries sector are pernicious as they foster overcapacity and overexploitation of ﬁsh stocks. By reducing the cost of harvesting, for example, through fuel subsidies or grants for new ﬁshing vessels, subsidies enable ﬁshing at previously uneconomic levels. Subsidies effectively counter the economic incentive to cease ﬁshing when it is unproﬁtable (box 2.1). Several estimates of subsidies and ﬁnancial transfers to the ﬁsheries sector have been made (Millazo 1998; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 2006; Sumaila and Pauly 2006) and several attempts have been made to classify ﬁsheries subsidies in relation to their perceived impact on the sustainability of ﬁsheries and on international trade. For example, the United States delegation to the World Trade Organization Negotiating Group on Rules proposed a “trafﬁc lights” scheme of classiﬁcation.6 Recent discussions have also focused attention on both the social rationale and potential negative impacts of subsidies on small-scale ﬁshing (Schorr and Caddy 2007). An updated estimate of global capacity enhancing subsidies is shown in table 2.1 for both developing and developed countries. More than $10 billion in subsidies that directly affect ﬁshing capacity and foster dissipation of economic rents were provided in 2000. Close to 80 percent of the total global subsidy is provided by developed countries. Transfers of public funds and supports to the fisheries sector are directed at a spectrum of goods ranging from the purely public to the purely private. The issue of subsidies is closely linked to the policies and principles underlying fiscal regimes for fisheries, which in turn is related to weak property rights prevalent in most fisheries.

2.2.6.1. The Costs of Fishery Management Fisheries management incurs cost to both the ﬁshers and the public sector. These costs are signiﬁcant, ranging from 1 to 14 percent of the value of landings for monitoring, control, and surveillance activities alone (Kelleher 2002). Enforcement is a major cost component of ﬁshery management, accounting for more than 10 percent of

34

Overview

BOX

2.1 What Are Subsidies?

There is a wide range of deﬁnitions of subsidies. The most precise is probably that of the World Trade Organization, which can be summarized as follows: “a ﬁnancial contribution by the public sector which provides private beneﬁts to the ﬁsheries sector, whether direct or indirect (e.g. foregone tax revenue), or whether in terms of goods, or services, or income or price support, but excluding general infrastructure, or purchases goods.” Common ﬁsheries sector subsidies include grants, concessional credit and insurance, tax exemptions, fuel price support (or fuel tax exemption), direct payments to industry (e.g., vessel buyback schemes), ﬁsh price support, and public ﬁnancing of ﬁsheries access agreements. In addition to the extensive catalog of public supports, subsidies have variously been considered to include government ﬁsheries extension and scientiﬁc research services. Policy changes, such as relaxation of environmental regulations governing ﬁsheries, or special work permits for migrant ﬁshworkers (crew) can also reduce costs in the sector, and such distortions have also been regarded as a form of subsidy. The justiﬁcation offered for subsidies ranges from protection of infant industries, through national food security and prevention of ﬁsh spoilage, to social rationale, such as preservation of livelihoods and poverty reduction. Fuel subsidies are an example of transfer that reduces the cost of ﬁshing. The reduced costs restore proﬁtability and create perverse incentives for continued ﬁshing in the face of declining catches. The result is overﬁshing, ﬂeet overcapitalization, reduced economic efﬁciency of the sector, and resource rent dissipation. Source: Schrank (2003), and authors.

TABLE 2.1 Estimate of ﬁsheries subsidies with direct impact on ﬁshing capacity per year ($ billion—year 2000)

Subsidy Types Fuel Surplus ﬁsh purchases Vessel construction, renewal and modernization Tax exemption programs Fishing access agreements Global total

Developing Countries

Developed Countries

Global Total

% of Global Total

1.3 0

5.08 0.03

6.4 0.0

63.5 0.3

0.6 0.4 0 2.3

1.30 0.34 1.00 7.75

1.9 0.7 1.0 10.05

18.9 7.3 9.9 100

Source: Compiled from Milazzo (1998), with updated information from Sharp and Sumaila (in press), Sumaila (2007), Sutinen and Andersen (1985).

management costs in many jurisdictions and imposing a substantial burden on international ﬁsheries management processes (High Seas Task Force 2006). The generation of scientiﬁc advice and the process of management also represent signiﬁcant costs.

2.2.6.2. The Costs Associated with Illegal, Unreported, and Unregistered Fishing The International Plan of Action on Illegal, Unreported, and Unregistered (IUU) Fishing

Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries (FAO 2001) bundles the impacts of three related activities. Illegal ﬁshing can be considered as additional effort that takes place at a lower cost than legitimate effort. However, the production from this illegal effort may be recorded or included in the estimates of catches, or landings. For example, the catch from use of an illegal type of net may be indistinguishable from that from a legal net. Illicit catches are frequently misreported, for example, ﬁsh under a legal size limit, or catch in excess of quota. The resulting inaccuracies in catch statistics are an important source of uncertainty with respect to scientiﬁc advice on ﬁsheries management (FAO 2002; Kelleher 2002; Pauly et al. 2002), and the depletion of many stocks has been attributed partly to the inaccuracy of the historical catch data. The parallel markets for illicit ﬁsh set a discounted price for ﬁsh, not only directly though illicit landings but also by avoidance of sanitary controls or rules of origin regulations, such that compliant ﬁshers may be forced to revert to illicit activities to remain solvent. There have been numerous national and international efforts to combat IUU ﬁshing and several initiatives on the economics of illegal ﬁshing to help design appropriate and cost-effective measures (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 2006; Sutinen and Andersen 1985).

2.3. ECONOMIC LOSS IN THE GLOBAL MARINE FISHERY A recent joint World Bank and FAO study estimated the loss of potential net benefits from

TABLE

35

marine capture fisheries, expressed as foregone rents or economic profits, to be on the order of $50 billion in 2004 (World Bank and FAO 2009). Based on the declining state of the world’s fish stocks as reported by FAO at various intervals since 1974, the real cumulative global loss of wealth over the last three decades was estimated to be on the order of $2.2 trillion. To maximize sustainable rents from the global fishery, the study suggests that fishing effort should be reduced by between 44 and 54 percent, giving sustainable marine fishery harvests on the order of 80 million tons per year. Table 2.2 provides a summary table of various estimates of these economic losses.

2.3.1. Case Studies A range of case studies strongly indicate the potential for substantial increases in rents and net beneﬁts from ﬁsheries. Table 2.3 demonstrates that these potential rents are a signiﬁcant fraction of the current ﬁshery revenues.

2.3.2. Linkages to the Broader Economy 2.3.2.1. Contributions to Economic Growth and Gross Domestic Product The ﬁsheries rents that are generated may be invested in productive physical, human, or social capital, and the net gains from these investments can subsequently be reinvested. Thus, generating ﬁsheries rents allows ﬁshing economies to choose a higher economic growth path. For countries that are highly dependent on ﬁsheries, harnessing

2.2 Estimates of the economic losses from global marine ﬁsheries

Source

Estimate of Losses (US$)

Primary Focus/Drivers

FAO (1993)

Open access, subsidies

Garcia and Newton (1997)

$54 aggregate loss, or approximately 75% of the gross revenue $46 billion deﬁcit

Sanchirico and Wilen (2002)

$90 billion (future projection)

Wilen (2005) World Bank and FAO (2009)

$80 billion $51 billion

Overcapacity, loss of high-value species Rents in ITQ ﬁsheries approach 60–70% of gross revenues Secure tenure Comprehensive governance reform

36

Overview TABLE

2.3 Illustrative rent losses in major ﬁsheries assessed with the model used in this study

Fishery Vietnam Gulf of Tonkin demersal multigear Iceland cod multigear Namibia hake demersal trawl Peru anchoveta purse seine Bangladesh hilsa artisanal multigear

Base Year 2006 2005 2002 2006 2005

Base Year Harvest (thousand tons) 235 215 156 5,800 99

Base Year Rents Loss as Revenues Percentage of (million $) Revenues 178 775 69 562 199

29% 55% 136% 29% 58%

Source: Case studies of rent losses applying a common modeling methodology developed by Ragnar Arnason (for a detailed description, see Arnason 2007; World Bank and FAO 2009).

the potential economic growth effects of ﬁsheries rationalization can substantially improve general economic welfare. The upstream and downstream economic linkages, or “multiplier effects,” add signiﬁcantly to the contribution of the ﬁshing industry to the gross domestic product and wealth creation, because the ﬁshing industry is a base industry that supports economic activity in other sectors of the economy, including services (Agnarsson and Arnason 2007; Arnason 1995). In addition, the ﬁshing industry is a disproportionately strong exchange earner in many developing countries, and to the extent that the availability of foreign currency constrains economic output, the economic beneﬁts from the sector may be greater than is apparent from the national accounts. For example, the contribution in the Paciﬁc Islands has been estimated to be some 30 percent higher than usually presented in national accounts (Gillett and Lightfoot 2001). An efﬁcient and stable harvest subsector forms a basis for maintaining the sector’s contribution to gross domestic product. However, the seafood industry (including aquaculture) is a $400 billion global industry. The marine capture component accounts for an estimated $212 billion, of which 65 percent, or $140 billion, represents the postharvest economy (Davidsson 2007, as cited in Valdimarsson 2007). The downstream beneﬁts from a more efﬁcient harvest sector are considerable, as illustrated by the examples below. The upstream beneﬁts are less evident, though ﬂeet and processing plant modernization can contribute to wealth and

economic growth (box 2.2). For example, in the United States, the total national economic impact from commercial ﬁnﬁsh ﬁsheries is 28.5 percent of the impact created by marine recreational ﬁsheries (Southwick Associates Inc. 2006), and in the case of the striped bass resources, which is shared between the commercial and recreational sectors, anglers harvest 1.28 times more ﬁsh, yet produce more than 12 times more economic activity as a result (Southwick Associates Inc. 2005). Healthy coral reefs provide another example. In addition to the lost beneﬁts from ﬁsheries, destruction of coral reefs results in an estimated net present loss to society of $0.1 to $1.0 million per square kilometers of reef (Cesar 1996). The depletion of global ﬁsheries cannot be attributed solely to ﬁshing. Pollution, destruction of wetlands and coastal zones, invasive species, climate change, and mineral extraction all play a role. However, ﬁshing is considered the greatest single cause of such depletion (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005).

2.4. THE WAY FORWARD Marine ﬁsheries reform can recapture a substantial proportion of the economic losses. Rather than being a net drain on the global economy, sustainable ﬁsheries can create an economic surplus and be a driver of economic growth. The wealth generated can be the basis for creating alternative livelihood opportunities. Fisheries reform is a long-term process and requires political will founded on a consensus vision

Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries

BOX

37

2.2 Downstream Efﬁciency Gains in Alaska and Peru

The Bering Sea Pollock Conservation Cooperative did not operate under an individual transferable quota (ITQ) system but created the incentives to generate substantial additional rents. This was done by removing the less efﬁcient vessels, extending the ﬁshing season, and allowing the operators to concentrate on product quality. The yield per ton of ﬁsh increased by approximately 10 percent, and recovery of by-products such as high-value ﬁsh roe increased by 22 percent. The increased beneﬁts occurred in the postcapture operations, but as a result of a more rational harvest regime and investments in the postharvest phase. The estimated loss of rents in the harvest sector of Peru’s anchoveta ﬁshery is in excess of $200 million per year. Fleet capacity is some 2.5–3.4 times the capacity required to harvest the total allowable catch set as a function of the maximum sustainable yield. However, the capacity of the ﬁsh meal plants is some 2.9–3.8 times that required to process the catch. The ﬁshing season in the world’s largest ﬁshery has been reduced to less than 60 days per year, with substantial loss of quality and wastage. If, under a rationalized and modernized postharvest sector, the current production of lower grade ﬁsh meal graduated to higher grade ﬁsh meal and greater recovery of ﬁsh oil, the additional net revenues would be on the order of a further $228 million per year. Source: Paredes et al. (2008), Sutinen and Andersen (1985)

built through broad stakeholder dialogue. Reforms mean reduction in ﬁshing effort and ﬁshing capacity. Reforms will incur social and economic costs to provide for social safety nets and alternative economic opportunities for affected ﬁshers. Successful reforms will require strengthening of marine tenure systems and more equitable sharing of beneﬁts from ﬁsheries. Reforms also require investment in good governance, including measures to reduce illegal ﬁshing and pernicious subsidies. The alternative course of action—business as usual—will result in a continued decline in global ﬁsh wealth; harvest operations that, despite technological ﬁxes, become increasingly inefﬁcient; growing poverty in ﬁshery dependent communities; increased risks of ﬁsh stock collapses; and compromised marine ecosystems. Business as usual means increasing political pressure for subsidies that carry the risk of enhancing redundant ﬁshing effort and ﬁshing capacity, growing public expenditure on ineffective ﬁshery management and enforcement, and a sector that, rather than being a net contributor to global wealth, is an increasing drain on society. Global ﬁsh capital has been depleted, but can be rebuilt.

Most marine wild ﬁsh resources are considered to be the property of nations. Governments are generally entrusted with the stewardship of these national assets, and their accepted role is to ensure that these assets are used as productively as possible, both for current and for future generations. The depletion of a nation’s ﬁsh stocks constitutes a loss of national wealth, or the nation’s stock of natural capital. Similarly, the depletion of global ﬁsh stocks constitutes a loss of global natural capital. Annual global losses, conservatively estimated to be on the order of $50 billion, justify increased efforts by national economic policy makers to reverse this annual hemorrhage of national and global economic beneﬁts. The rents may not be fully recoverable, and efforts to rebuild global ﬁsh wealth incur economic, social, and political costs. Nevertheless, the sheer scale of the rent drain provides ample grounds for economic policy makers and planners to direct their attention to the rebuilding of national, regional, and global ﬁsh capital. Rising food prices, a growing ﬁsh food gap for more than a billion people dependent on ﬁsh as their primary source of protein, and the ungainly carbon

38

Overview

footprint of some ﬁsheries adds to the rationale for reversing the rent drain.

2.4.1. Subsidies The increasing prices of fuel and food in 2008 combined to strengthen pressure for subsidies. Such pressures stem not only from the harvest sector but also from the upstream and downstream economy dependent on the sector, and from consumers in countries where ﬁsh is a staple component of the national diet. The World Bank has recently addressed the subsidies issue. The World Bank does not advocate subsidies as a response to recent food and energy price increases but, rather, careful analysis, monitoring, and balancing of competing needs for energy and food security (World Bank 2008). The World Development Report 2008 (World Bank 2007) poses two questions with regard to input subsidies: “Do the economic beneﬁts exceed the costs of subsidies?” The evidence presented in this and other studies show that, in the case ﬁsheries, the answer is almost invariably “no”, and that the negative environmental externalities generated by input subsidies are considerable. The second question is, “Are input subsidies justiﬁed on social grounds?” The answer depends on whether the alternatives are more cost-effective. In the case of ﬁsheries, subsidies often constitute a politically expedient means of sidestepping the challenge of addressing the alternatives, including the challenge of helping ﬁsher households to take up other gainful economic opportunities. Often conceived as a short-term intervention, subsidies tend to become entrenched at high cost to society and frequently confer greater beneﬁts on the more afﬂuent (e.g., vessel owners) rather than the targeted poor (e.g., vessel crew). By creating perverse incentives for greater investment and ﬁshing effort in overstressed ﬁsheries, input subsidies tend to reinforce the sector’s poverty trap and undermine the creation of surplus that could be invested in alternatives, including education and health. The World Bank has suggested that if input subsidies are to be used, they should be temporary, as part of a broader strategy to improve ﬁsheries management and enhance productivity. The World Bank has emphasized investment in quality public goods, such as science, infrastructure and human capital, improving the investment climate and

access to credit, and strengthening governance of natural resources, including through secure user and property rights and in collective action by a strengthened civil society (World Bank 2008).

2.4.2. Net Beneﬁts and Tenure It has long been understood that because the beneﬁts of use are individual, but costs are shared, the net beneﬁts from use of common pool resources, such as ﬁsh stocks, will tend to dissipate (Gordon 1954). The nature of the rights over the resources plays an important role in determining the extent of that loss of net beneﬁts, and it is suggested that, in general, the more clearly deﬁned and enforceable the rights, the less the beneﬁt loss (Scott 1955). In many countries marine ﬁshery resources are considered to belong to the nation, and governments are charged with the stewardship of this public trust. In some instances, this has undermined the traditional rights systems observed by local communities and led to a de facto open access condition. Because the public or common pool character of marine ﬁsh resources is often deeply embedded in law and practice, strengthening marine ﬁsheries management is often a complex undertaking that faces political, social, and legal challenges, requiring a good understanding of traditional rights systems, accepted practices, and culture. Nevertheless, in order to increase the net beneﬁts from ﬁsheries, the issue of tenure must be addressed (de Soto 2000). Sustainable ﬁsheries are primarily a governance issue, and the application of ﬁshery science without addressing the political economy of ﬁsheries is unlikely to rebuild marine ﬁsh wealth.7 Restoration of marine ﬁsh wealth and rebuilding the ﬂow of net beneﬁts imply ﬁsheries governance reforms with an increased emphasis on the economic and social processes, informed by, rather than centered on, biological considerations.

Acknowledgments This chapter draws heavily on the World Bank and FAO “Sunken Billions” study, which was co-authored by the authors with Ragnar Arnason, who developed and undertook the modeling work underlying the US$50 billion resource rent loss estimate and provided scientiﬁc oversight of the ﬁshery case studies (Arnason 2006). We acknowledge the assistance of Nicole Franz (consultant) in the statistical analysis, Steafania Vannucinni (FAO) in preparation of the statisti-

Economic Trends in Global Marine Fisheries cal materials presented, and the ﬁnancial support of the World Bank’s PROFISH program. We also acknowledge the advice and help by Andy Smith and Serge Garcia in the analysis of various ﬁsheries data.

Notes 1. Excluding aquatic plants. 2. Estimate provided by FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Information and Statistics Service. All values exclude marine plants. The unit values from “FAO World Fishery Production Estimated Value by Species Groups” were weighted by the quantity of the respective marine catches in 2004. Discards are assumed to have zero value. 3. The International Labor Organization of the United Nations recently adopted a comprehensive new labor standard, the “Work in Fishing Convention” and the recommendation will come into effect when ratiﬁed by 10 of the International Labor Organization’s 180 member states, of which at least eight are coastal states. The convention seeks to ensure decent working conditions of ﬁshers on board ﬁshing vessels, including accommodation and food, occupational safety and health protection, and service conditions such as medical care and social security. 4. For 13 different vessel types (from canoes of 10 m up to supertrawlers of 120 m), the coefﬁcient increased on average from 0.54 in 1965 to 1.98 in 1995, or by about 366 percent in 30 years. 5. In some managed ﬁsheries, increase in technological capacity has been limited by gear regulations and other ﬁshery management measures. 6. The “trafﬁc lights” system classiﬁes subsidies into the three colors of trafﬁc lights: red stands for forbidden subsidies, green for permitted subsidies, and amber for subsidies that might be subjected to a complaint on the basis of their adverse effects on trade. Subsidies that can cause an expansion of ﬁshing effort and/or ﬁshing capacity are usually classiﬁed as red, while those that help in the management of ﬁsheries are usually classiﬁed as green. 7. The Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries provides an overarching framework for sustainable ﬁsheries (FAO 1995).

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3 Biodiversity, Function, and Interconnectedness: A Revolution in Our Understanding of Marine Ecosystems and Ocean Conservation WALLACE J. NICHOLS JEFFREY A. SEMINOFF PETER ETNOYER

We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel and understand, love or otherwise have faith in. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Over the past several decades, technology and interdisciplinary research have led to a vast expansion of our understanding of the diversity of life in the ocean, the importance of the ocean to life on Earth, and the interconnectedness between terrestrial and marine ecosystems. With this new knowledge and several critical new paradigms, we are better able to understand the ocean, manage ﬁsheries, restore ecological functions, and respond to the challenges to the ocean that lie ahead.

hydrothermal vent on the deep seaﬂoor for the ﬁrst time (ﬁgure 3.1). This discovery literally changed our understanding of what’s possible for life on Earth. In more recent decades, our collective understanding of the ocean has shifted in both drastic and subtle ways, while our appreciation of the consequences of the human footprint on the marine environment has deepened (Halpern et al. 2008). The ocean was once described as a mosaic of adjacent but discrete habitats. The deep sea was characterized in the mid-19th century by Edward Forbes as an “azoic zone” (Gage and Tyler 1991) abounding with mysterious, deep, dark, and supposedly barren regions. The shallow coastal waters were the opposite, teeming with an inexhaustible abundance of life. The ocean seemed such a great expanse that it was deemed ever ready to absorb our ﬂowing streams of waste. This fertile, unfamiliar, and forgiving expanse was the ocean of all previous recorded history (Patton 2006). The ocean we know today is complex and interconnected (Church 2007). Transoceanic migrations of animals (ﬁgure 3.2) and people bring distant shores closer together with shared habitats, species, enterprises, and resources. Today’s ocean is far less mysterious than the one of Forbes’s era, yet many mysteries remain to be solved. Coral reefs are one

3.1. THE PAST: A DISCONNECTED, MYSTERIOUS, BOUNDLESS OCEAN In the Age of Exploration, voyagers set forth from Portugal in the early ﬁfteenth century to ﬁnd new lands and new routes of trade. Two hundred years later, navigators sailed competently along these routes throughout the world (Cooke 1712/1969). So, it is remarkable that today 90 percent of the ocean still remains to be explored. New marine species are still discovered regularly, even entirely new mechanisms for life. One the most important scientiﬁc discoveries for marine biodiversity occurred late last century, in 1977, when the submersible Alvin encountered chemosynthetic life forms at a

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44

Overview

3.1 Alvin submersible. (Courtesy of Dr. Thomas Shirley, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi)

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of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet, but new reef species continue to be discovered at an exponential rate. Species accumulation curves for ﬁsh (Mora et al. 2008), crustaceans (Martin and Davis 2006), and corals (Cairns 2007) exhibit no sign of an asymptote (ﬁgure 3.3). Even in well-known groups such as ﬁshes, one in ﬁve species remains to be discovered (Mora et al. 2008). Discovery rates are high, but at the same time, commercial ﬁsheries are collapsing worldwide. It seems a paradox—the ocean remains a boundless source of novelty and resilience, but ocean resources are dwindling and are clearly exhaustible. The modern ocean can be characterized as abundant in life, within a framework of limited resources in a highly variable climate affected by clear anthropogenic insults linked to ecosystem function. What we have taken out and put into the ocean, combined with our ability to reengineer coastal waters and lands, has resulted in a transformation of marine ecosystems on a global scale (Gibbs 2000; Schlacher et al. 2007). Many ﬁsheries are at or beyond capacity, target species are largely extirpated, and bycatch endangers nontarget species (Jackson et al. 2001). In many places the ocean has reached its capacity to break down our waste, or the composition of our waste, in the form of plastics and man-made chemicals, has overridden its natural assimilative abilities. Development and increasing population pressures, intensive aquaculture,

FIGURE 3.2 First transoceanic satellite tracking of a sea turtle (Caretta caretta, 368 days, ~12,000 km), 1996–1997. (Data from Nichols et al. 2000)

and bottom trawling have ﬂattened or destroyed marine ecosystems, particularly near the coast. In the United States, 79 percent of coastal resources are classiﬁed as threatened or impaired (U.S. EPA 2005). The human ﬁngerprint can be detected in virtually every corner of the world ocean (Halpern et al. 2008).

Biodiversity, Function, and Interconnectedness

of “men walking across their backs,” “pushing the bow through their schools,” and “scooping them into the boat with buckets.” Whether spawning salmon, foraging sea turtles, or aggregating cod, the stories were the same (Aiken et al. 2001). Our perception that this bounty was endless, bottomless, and resilient is understandable. Until a century ago, our ability to access these resources was limited, as our range was short and our ﬁshing gear was primitive. But our skill at catching these animals, the demand for their oil, ﬂesh, and skin, and the technology used to ﬁnd them soon outpaced our understanding of their capacity to regenerate (Roman and Palumbi 2003). Worsened by degradation of their habitat, the result has been ecological and commercial extinction for many species and a global rescue effort involving scientists, governments, citizen groups, and businesses. Endemic species, such as the totoaba in Mexico’s Gulf of California (Cisneros-Mata et al. 1995), have been ﬁshed to ecological extinction (ﬁgure 3.4).

1600

Number of Recent Valid Species of Scleractinia

1400

All Scleractinia (1482) Zooxanthellates (776.5) Azooxanthellates (706.5)

1200

1000

800

600

400

1999

1979

1959

1939

1919

1899

1879

1859

1839

1819

1799

1779

1759

200

0

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FIGURE 3.3 Cumulative number of recognized (valid) zooxanthellate, azooxanthellate, and total scleractinian species from 1759 through 2004. (Reprinted with permission from Cairns 2007)

Briggs (1974) described the greatest marine obstacle to the dispersal of shallow-water organisms—5,400 km of uninterrupted deep water between the central and eastern Paciﬁc he called the Eastern Paciﬁc Barrier (EPB). We now know that animals regularly migrate and disperse across entire ocean basins and that numerous species are now shared on both sides of the EPB. These “transpaciﬁc” species are considered evidence of invasions through the barrier. Though the EPB is an important obstacle to dispersal for some taxa, gene ﬂow does occur across the barrier (Lessios et al. 1998). A growing list of ﬁsh and marine megafauna, including sharks, sea turtles, billﬁsh, sea birds, and marine mammals, have been found to utilize vast areas, often entire ocean basins, and multiple ecosystems during their developmental and reproductive migrations (Hodgson et al. 2006; Nichols et al. 2000; Shaffer et al. 2006; Shillinger et al. 2008). Past accounts of ﬁsh and megavertebrate abundance (Jackson et al. 2001) are rife with depictions

3.4 Fishers hauling in a catch of totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi) along the shores of the Gulf of California in 1937. Endemic species such as the totoaba have been ﬁshed to ecological extinction in many areas worldwide. (Photo courtesy of J. Seminoff)

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46

Overview

FIGURE 3.5 Transformation of coastal habitat via accumulation of plastic debris on a beach in the Philippines. (Photo courtesy International Coastal Cleanup)

Furthermore, there’s no doubt that most every edible species in the ocean was once far more abundant in number and larger in size (Pauly 1995). We are now aware that the cost of this miscalculation and ignorance has been the loss of ecological, social, cultural, and economic capital on a global scale (Costanza 1999). For most of human history, societies operated as if the ocean could assimilate all of our waste, washing it away. “Dilution is the solution for pollution” was the mantra, and the ocean eventually became the ultimate downstream recipient, or sink, for all liquid, solid, chemical, and biological efﬂuent. The ancient Greeks believed and Euripedes wrote that “the sea can wash away all evils.” A wide range of cultures adhered to the belief that the sea makes life on land possible by making it “pure” (Patton 2006). Until the birth and rise of the modern petroeconomy over the past century, the strategy of “cleansing by the sea” was mostly successful. But proliferation of petroleum-based fuels (e.g., gasoline, kerosene, liqueﬁed natural gas, and fuel oil), plastics (including precursors benzene, ethylene, propylene, toluene, and mixed xylenes), and other products (asphalt, tar, parafﬁn, and lubricating oils) has overwhelmed the ocean’s capacity for biodegradation, inﬂicted a wave of new, deadly threats to

marine life, and transformed life in many parts of the sea (ﬁgure 3.5). These include spills, ingestion, entanglement, dead zones, disease, and climate change. Petrochemicals and fuels, in their current form and at present scales, are not compatible with life in the ocean. Accumulation of these substances over the past century is harming the health of the ocean and ocean-based commerce in ways we are only beginning to understand (Sheavly and Register 2007).

3.2. THE NEW TOOLS In the last few decades, submersible and satellite technologies have developed to the point where we stand at the threshold of a new modern age of ocean awareness. Space-borne satellites transmit global sea surface temperature, ocean color, and sea surface-height data in such volumes that the only observable limit to our understanding is manpower (Ducet et al. 2000). Hurricanes can be detected and their trajectories projected for weeks in advance of a storm’s landfall. Autonomous vehicles can map the seaﬂoor and the water column. Drifting instruments can map the plankton and the ocean currents. Coordinated international programs help to organize and

Biodiversity, Function, and Interconnectedness evaluate this information. New technologies such as these can open the doors of scientiﬁc discovery, but at the same time they place the sea in jeopardy. Commercial ﬁsheries now rely on satellite and sonar data (Etnoyer et al. 2004), and they are ﬁshing deeper than ever before (Roberts 2002), so ﬁsh have fewer places to hide. Our ocean resources were once considered inexhaustible, but the data indicate most populations are in decline (Myers and Worm 2003; Worm et al. 2005), the average size of tuna is decreasing (Golet et al. 2007), and humans are ﬁshing down the food chain (Pauly et al. 1998; Myers et al. 2007). The largest animals have already gone to market. Global demand for seafood is also driving habitat destruction on a monumental scale. Mangroves are converted to shrimp farms (Barbier 2000; Barbier and Cox 2004), deep-sea coral beds are ﬂattened by bottom trawlers (Roberts 2002; Watling and Norse 1998), and coral reefs are decimated by bomb ﬁshing and are shifting to algae as herbivores are extirpated from these ecosystems (Hughes 1994; McManus and Polsenberg 2004). It is sobering to think that unknown species of animals may be lost to these ﬁsheries before they have been discovered (Jones et al. 2004). Pelagic ocean animals such as tunas, sharks, sea turtles, and marine mammals have historically been

47

difﬁcult to study due to their vast movements and large body size. The development of small microprocessor-based data storage tags that are attached, implanted, or satellite-linked provide a novel way to study the animals’ movements, behavior, and physiology in the wild (Block 2005). When data acquired from tags are combined with remotely accessed deep-sea data, satellite-derived sea surface temperature, and ocean color data, the relationships among movements, behaviors, and physical ocean environment can be examined. Furthermore, animals carrying tags act as oceanographic sensors providing data wherever their dives and migrations take them (Block et al. 2005; Fedak 2004). This “biologging” science is providing new insights into movements, habitat use, reproductive behaviors, and population structures of marine animals. The data also describe migration corridors, hot spots, and physical oceanographic patterns that are important to understanding how organisms such as loggerhead and leatherback turtles (Benson et al. 2007; Etnoyer et al. 2006; Godley et al. 2008; Peckham et al. 2007; Shillinger et al. 2008) use and connect open ocean and coastal environments (ﬁgures 3.6 and 3.7). Understanding the factors inﬂuencing animal movements and ocean health on large geographic

3.6 Spatial footprint of STAT (Satellite Tracking and Analysis Tool; see Coyne and Godley 2005) turtle-tracking projects. Circles denote the launch point of marine turtle tracking with data managed within the STAT system. (Data from Godley et al. 2008)

FIGURE

48

Overview

3.7 Leatherback turtle tracks passing through the exclusive economic zones for U.S. territories, Hawaii, and the Papahanaumokuakea National Monument. (Data from Benson et al. 2007, unpublished data)

FIGURE

scales is often intractable, as is learning the broadscale impacts from anthropogenic actions. In recent decades, and especially in the last ﬁve years, use of remotely sensed (i.e., satellite-derived) ocean data has increased. This has been made possible through more user-friendly dissemination tools (see NASA’s PO.DAAC OceanESIP Tool [POET] and NOAA’s Coastwatch; D. Foley, personal communication), and a greater commitment on the part of data users to integrate various data sets to gain a better understanding of ocean processes. For example, the oceanic movements of a variety of marine megavertebrates such as sea turtles, large migratory ﬁshes, and marine mammals have been increasingly tracked through satellite telemetry, and these tracks have been integrated with a variety of ocean data (Etnoyer et al. 2004, 2006; Kobayashi et al. 2008; Polovina et al. 2006).

Basic environmental features such as bathymetry, surface currents, sea surface temperature, sea surface height, chlorophyll, and primary productivity have been standard products from satellites for decades, but only recently have these ocean data sets been used to describe the mechanisms underlying animal movements and habitat use. For example, dynamic mesoscale processes such as sea surface temperature and chlorophyll fronts—areas of interface between two dissimilar water masses— are known to strongly affect water column primary and secondary productivity (Olson et al. 1994; Palacios et al. 2006), and their status as prey aggregation zones indicates they provide food and thus inﬂuence movements of large marine organisms such as large whales (Doniol-Valcroze et al. 2007), sea turtles (Kobayashi et al. 2008; Polovina et al. 2006; Seminoff et al. 2008), and commercially

Biodiversity, Function, and Interconnectedness targeted species such as tuna and swordﬁsh (Fiedler and Bernard 1987; Podesta et al. 1993). Biologists are only beginning to grasp the full potential for the integration of shared biological and oceanographic data through open distribution networks, but oceanographers have been using these tools for decades (Poiani et al. 2000; Tsontos and Kiefer 2002). This is due partly to the representative scale of their investigations. Physical oceanographers require data across broad geographic scales to forecast hemispheric and basin scale phenomena like El Niño–La Niña Southern Oscillation. Beginning with archives of ship drift data, the historical data management scheme was a broad network of data acquisition, in recent times using shared instrumentation such as the TAO/TRITON array of equatorial buoys funded by international cooperation. Twentieth-century biologists have had less incentive to cooperate. Biologists are also more accustomed to working at the scale of a coral reef, estuary, or rocky shore. They generally work alone or in small groups. But the scale of interest is now beginning to overlap between these disciplines. Biologists are “scaling up” their studies to the extent of species migrations, while oceanographers seek ﬁner resolution in thermohaline structure, for example, and other oceanographic phenomena. A middle ground is emerging. Advances in computing power, communications, and ship-borne and satellite remote sensing have made the dissemination of animal tracking and oceanographic data easier, more cooperative, and more accessible to everyone.

3.3. DESCRIPTION OF MAJOR OCEAN ECOSYSTEMS An ecosystem is a functional unit comprising all the organisms in a particular place interacting with one another and with their environment, interconnected by an ongoing ﬂow of energy and a cycling of materials. It includes the physical and climactic features and all the living and dead organisms in an area that are interrelated in the transfer of energy and material functioning. As an ecological unit in nature, this deﬁnition of ecosystem requires assumptions of energetics, ecological interactions, and species adaptations. However, strictly deﬁning an ecosystem can be challenging on land, and perhaps more so in the ocean. The hallmark of ecology is its encompassing

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and synthetic view of nature, rather than a fragmented view (Odum 1977). Marine ecosystems are a part of the largest aquatic system on the planet, covering more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface. Extending from the deep, open ocean, landward the major ocean ecosystems include the oceanic (deep sea), neritic (open waters), high-energy (intertidal), low-energy (mangroves, marshes, and estuaries) and supratidal (beach strand zone) systems. There are many different ways of describing ocean ecosystems. They may be deﬁned by size: the whole ocean may be regarded as one giant ecosystem. On a smaller scale, separating the coasts and oceans into 64 large marine ecosystems, 200,000 or more square kilometers and associated with 95 percent of the ﬁsh and shellﬁsh yield of the world, has been useful in the global effort to better manage the ocean (ﬁgure 3.8; Duda and Sherman 2002). On an even smaller scale, vegetation units such as an individual mangrove forest ecosystem would be in the range of 10 m2 to 100 km2. A primary producer such as sea grass, kelp, mangrove, or coral reef frequently deﬁnes ocean ecosystems. The boundaries of these systems are taken as the boundaries of the vegetation type. Ecosystems may also be deﬁned by geographical and geological boundaries such as wet coastal, intertidal and littoral, estuaries and enclosed seas, coral reefs, continental shelves, and deep ocean. Marine ecosystems are important to the overall health of both marine and terrestrial environments. Coastal systems alone account for approximately one-third of all marine biological productivity. Estuarine ecosystems (i.e., salt marshes, sea grasses, mangrove forests) are some of the most productive regions on the planet. Marine ecosystems such as coral reefs host some of the highest levels of marine diversity in the world. The diversity and productivity of the ocean are also critical to human survival and well-being. These ecosystems provide us with a rich source of food and income and support species that serve as animal feed, fertilizers for crops, additives in foods, and a wide diversity of consumer cosmetics. Mangroves, reefs, and sea grass beds provide protection to coastlines by reducing wave action and helping to prevent erosion, while areas such as salt marshes and estuaries have acted as sediment sinks, ﬁltering runoff from the land (Kathiresan and Narayanasamy 2005). Whichever scheme is used to deﬁne marine ecosystems, they are all connected by the common

50

Overview

3.8 Large marine ecosystems are areas of the ocean characterized by distinct bathymetry, hydrography, productivity, and trophic interactions. They annually produce 95 percent of the world’s ﬁsh catch. They are national and regional focal areas of a global effort to reduce the degradation of linked watersheds, marine resources, and coastal environments from pollution, habitat loss, and overﬁshing. (Courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

FIGURE

medium of seawater. This dynamic interconnectedness has driven the evolution of life in the ocean and in more recent times has led to its decline. A combination of shipping, platforms, canals, aquaculture, ﬁsheries, and climate change has resulted in a breakdown of the natural barriers in the sea, increasing numbers of introduced species and a profound alteration of the structure, composition, and function of marine ecosystems. Ships and platforms in particular provide settlement substrate to pelagic larvae that would have otherwise met their limits of dispersal. This allows exogenous species to invade new habitats, and the species become predominant because their natural predators are absent (Heithaus et al. 2008). Despite the importance of marine systems to our life and economy, increased human activities such as overﬁshing, coastal development, pollution, and

the introduction of exotic species have caused signiﬁcant damage and pose a serious threat to marine biodiversity and the global ocean ecosystem.

3.4. THREATS TO OCEAN ECOSYSTEMS Despite the expansion of technology and the revolution in our understanding of the sea, threats to ocean ecosystems remain and must be addressed accordingly. A summary of threats, organized into three main groupings along with representative examples, follows. Too Much In: The term represents ocean pollution in its various forms. Pollution enters the marine environment as chemicals, runoff, oil spills, noise, debris, heat, sewage, efﬂuent, and pesticides,

Biodiversity, Function, and Interconnectedness among others. As the number and volume of these substances increase, the ocean’s ability to assimilate them has been overrun, the symptoms of decreased ocean health have become more obvious, impacts on some ocean ecosystems have reached irreversible stages, and negative impacts to human health are increasingly clear (Aguirre et al. 2006; Domingo et al. 2006; Fleming et al. 2006; Jackson 2008; Mozaffarian and Rimm 2006). Unlike the obvious and highly visible effects caused by oil and debris, some chemicals have invisible but long-term and far-reaching effects on the marine ecosystem. They can be persistent, transported great distances, pass easily through barriers, and accumulate in the marine food chain from prey to predators to humans (DeWailly and Knap 2006). The behavior and effects of persistent pollutants on marine animals (invertebrates, vertebrates, ﬁsh, mammals, reptiles, and birds) and people are receiving increased attention (Fleming et al. 2006). For example, increasing incidence of exposure to heavy metals and other contaminants in the marine environment is of serious concern. Contaminants such as PCBs, mercury, copper, and other metals have been found in tissues of a variety of marine species from numerous areas (Lewis 2006). Although their explicit effects on marine ﬂora and fauna have yet to be determined, such exposure may lead to immunosuppression or other hormonal imbalances (J. Keller, personal communication, 2006). Many of these agents also diminish the health of coastal marine ecosystems, which may in turn adversely affect the species that inhabit these areas. Researchers have long suspected that runoff of fertilizer from big farms can trigger sudden explosions of marine algae capable of disrupting ocean ecosystems and even producing “dead zones” in the sea. A study by Beman et al. (2005) presented the ﬁrst direct evidence linking large-scale coastal farming to massive algal blooms in the ocean. This agriculture-to-ocean impact is an increasingly common occurrence around the world and is a key stressor on ocean ecosystems, with dead zones reported from more than 400 systems, affecting an area of more than 245,000 square kilometers (Diaz and Rosenberg 2008). Marine debris, especially in the form of plastics, is one of the most widespread pollution problems facing the world’s oceans (ﬁgure 3.5). Nets, food wrappers, cigarette ﬁlters, bottles, resin pellets, and other debris items can have serious impacts on

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wildlife, habitat, and human safety (Sheavly and Register 2007). Marine debris can lead to injury and mortality and reduce food intake and digestive capacity of marine animals (Bugoni et al. 2001). Successful management of the problem requires a full understanding of both marine debris, toxicology as well as animal and human behavior. Education programs, strong, progressive laws and policies, and governmental and private enforcement are needed for a successful marine pollution prevention initiative. Industry also has a role to play in searching for technological mitigation strategies and engineering of bioplastics and systems to reduce waste altogether. Too Much Out: This term encompasses overﬁshing, overhunting, and bycatch. The grim reality is that even if pollution in the seas were eliminated, the rate of extraction from the sea would remain at a devastating level. Overﬁshing occurs in artisanal and industrial ﬁsheries and includes illegal hunting of megavertebrates such as sea turtles and sharks as well as widespread piracy (Berkes et al. 2006; Heithaus et al. 2008). Commercial algae harvesting operations also threaten the integrity of coastal habitats (Pacheco-Ruiz and Zertuche-Gonzalez 1996). Fisheries bycatch in artisanal and industrial ﬁshing gear has a major impact on large, slowgrowing species such as marine mammals and sea turtles (Crouse 2000) as well as sea birds, ﬁsh, and invertebrates (Pauly 2007; Peckham et al. 2007). The ﬁsheries responsible include those using drift nets, long-lines, set nets, pound nets, and trawl gear. Their adverse impacts on sea turtles have been documented in marine environments throughout the world (National Research Council 1990). Bottom trawling, the preferred gear used by shrimpers around the world, is perhaps the least efﬁcient and most destructive (ﬁgure 3.9; Harrington et al. 2005; Watling and Norse 1998). Although the full impact from these ongoing and proposed human activities is difﬁcult to quantify, the burgeoning ﬂeets around the world and pending human population expansion is reason for major concern. For example, the removal of top predators appears to have greater ecological impacts than previously understood (Heithaus et al. 2008). Destroying the Edge: This term describes human population, habitat conversion, coastal development, and mining/dredging. In addition to the intentional exploitation of marine species, a variety of direct and indirect impacts also affect the oceans.

52

Overview

3.9 Bycatch on the deck of a shrimp trawler, South Carolina, USA. (Photo by C. Saﬁna)

FIGURE

This is underscored by the fact that over the next few decades the human population is expected to grow by more than 3,000,000,000 people (~50 percent increase; United Nations Educational, Scientiﬁc, and Educational Organization [UNESCO] 2001). By the year 2025, UNESCO (2001) forecasts that population growth and migration will result in a situation in which 75 percent of the world human population will live within 60 km of the sea. Such a migration undoubtedly will change coastal landscapes and nearshore waters that, in many areas, are already suffering from human impacts. The problems associated with development in these zones will progressively become a greater challenge for conservation efforts, particularly in the developing world, where wildlife conservation is often secondary to other national needs. They underscore the need to develop and implement management strategies that balance human population growth, development, and economic activities with the needs of ocean ecosystems. Structural impacts to coastal habitats include the construction of buildings and pilings, beach armoring and renourishment, and sand extraction (Bouchard et al. 1998). In addition, coastal development is usually accompanied with artiﬁcial lighting, which is detrimental to sea turtle hatchlings as they emerge from their nests. One of the most widespread indirect habitat modiﬁcations within coastal foraging areas has

occurred due to the vast depletion of green turtles. The associated loss of ecological function has negative implications for the maintenance of both marine and terrestrial ecosystems (McClenachan et al. 2006). As large herbivores, green turtles affect sea grass productivity and abundance (Bjorndal 1980; Zieman et al. 1984) and continue to represent an essential trophic pathway over expansive coastal marine habitats (Thayer et al. 1982, 1984; Valentine and Heck 1999). Through egg deposition on beaches, sea turtles act as biological transporters of nutrients and energy from marine to terrestrial ecosystems (Bouchard and Bjorndal 2000). Thus, with most green turtle stocks substantially depleted relative to historic levels, it is likely that today’s coastal marine and terrestrial systems are dramatically modiﬁed (Jackson 1997, 2001). The fact that the total adult green turtle population for the entire pre-Columbian Caribbean population ranged from somewhere between 16 million and 660 million turtles (combined estimates from Jackson 1997; Bjorndal et al. 2000) and were regulated by the availability of turtle grass (Thalassia testudinum) underscores just how much the current green turtle population, and coastal habitat, has changed. There are several additional factors that are global phenomena, and though their effects may presently be subtle, the long-term implications are devastating. The impacts from global warming,

Biodiversity, Function, and Interconnectedness while not necessarily major today, are likely to become more apparent in future years, especially when they coincide with pollution and overﬁshing (Nordemar 2004). As global temperatures continue to increase, so will sand temperatures, which in turn will alter the thermal regime of incubating sea turtle nests and alter natural sex ratios within hatchling cohorts. The pending sea-level rise from global warming is also a potential problem, as this will inundate coastal sites and decrease available habitat for nesting turtles as well as haul-out pinnipeds such as seals and sea lions (Baker et al. 2006; Daniels et al. 1993; Fish et al. 2005). Additional factors affecting marine species and their coastal areas, albeit more localized than those mentioned above, include boat trafﬁc and its modiﬁcation of the behavior of a variety of species such as dolphins, sea turtles, sea birds, and pinnipeds in coastal areas. To summarize, the cumulative impact of putting too much in, taking too much out, and destroying the edge of the ocean is that we have fundamentally altered the global marine ecosystem (Halpern et al. 2008) and will continue to transform it in ways that negatively effect us economically, socially, and physically, into the foreseeable future (Worm et al. 2006).

3.5. SUSTAINING WHAT REMAINS, RESTORING WHAT’S BEEN LOST If the transformation of the world’s ocean is described as having put too much in, taken too much out, and destroyed the “edge,” a general call to action would include initiatives focused on putting less in, taking less out, and instituting measures to protect portions of the “edge,” where biodiversity and productivity are high (Gray 1997). Our success at restoring and sustaining the ocean depends entirely on the ability of scientists, managers, industry, and stakeholders to collaborate and communicate. For researchers, it is increasingly clear that an interdisciplinary approach that takes full advantage of modern sharing and conferencing technologies is emerging. Symposia that engage stakeholders are increasingly common and the products of such collaborations are often rapidly disseminated. Such efforts are under way in the form of global biodiversity mapping initiatives, Duke University’s Project GLOBAL and OBIS-SEAMAP, the

53

Consortium for Ocean Leadership’s Census of Marine Life, regional, national, and international accords aimed at reducing marine debris and ocean pollution, and various collaborative networks advancing ocean science and the establishment of marine protected areas. New technology can help practitioners expand network building and strategic communication as central rather than subsidiary parts of the conservation mosaic (Nichols 2006). Accompanying this is the need for changes in the way agencies conduct themselves, including enhanced negotiation, communication, and greater ﬂexibility (Mahant 2002). Scientists have described and advocated ecosystem-based management. A politically and administratively feasible method for translating this concept into an operational management practice has been elusive. Place-based management (PBM) of marine ecosystems calls for integrated management of human activities occurring in spatially demarcated areas identiﬁed through a procedure that takes into account biophysical, socioeconomic, and jurisdictional considerations (Mace et al. 2006). PBM offers a way to minimize the costs of obtaining the feedback required to manage complex marine systems sustainably and offers a practical way to solve this problem by taking a comprehensive and integrated approach to managing the human activities in a place rather than dividing management according to individual sectoral themes (Young et al. 2007). The management of ocean ecosystems, marine megavertebrates, and sea turtles particularly is facilitated by cooperation through a number of regulatory instruments at international, regional, national, and local levels (Hykle 2002). As a result of these designations and agreements, many of the intentional impacts directed at these species have been lessened. Similarly, marine mammals are protected by a variety of treaties, and the International Whaling Commission limits the direct harvest of these species (Hamazaki and Tanno 2001). The harvest of sea turtles, for example, has been slowed at several areas through nesting beach conservation efforts, and an increasing number of community-based initiatives are in place to slow the take of turtles in foraging areas (Fleming 2001). Moreover, there is now a more internationally concerted effort and multisector cooperative research to reduce sea turtle interactions and mortality in artisanal and industrial ﬁshing practices by using time-area closures, gear restrictions, technical ﬁxes, refuges, and marine protected areas (Lewison et al. 2004; ﬁgure 3.7).

54

Overview

Experience with protected areas on land demonstrates that they are generally too small to curtail the decline of most species they seek to protect. Species decline continues in these areas because reserves are not big enough to encompass ecosystem processes, such as interdecadal variability, dispersal, and succession. Larger protected areas maintain ecosystem level processes better. For example, seabirds in the central Paciﬁc forage in association with tuna schools (Jaquemet et al. 2004). Large, continuous protected areas encompassing foraging areas, breeding grounds, and the routes in between can help safeguard these types of processes. Despite these advances, human impacts on the environment continue to expand throughout the world. The lack of effective monitoring in pelagic and near-shore ﬁsheries operations still allows substantial direct and indirect mortality, and the uncontrolled development of coastal and marine habitats threatens to destroy the supporting ecosystems of long-lived marine species. Although several international agreements provide legal protection for marine species, additional multilateral efforts are needed to ensure they are sufﬁciently implemented and/or strengthened, and key nonsignatory parties need to be encouraged to accede. Each has pros and cons, but it is believed that an institutional mosaic, facilitated by advances in information and communication technology, will be the only way to provide broad protection to marine resources. Building diverse, collaborative networks of managers, academics, producers, and the public will allow for new information to be shared and will permit new “best practices” to be implemented, crucial to restoring and maintaining ocean health. As such, dissemination theory, communication sciences, and information systems design can combine to advance ocean management and to build a stronger constituency. Lessons from the marketing and media sectors can also be applied to more effectively describe the problems and solutions to our ocean crisis to the minds of billions of people.

3.6. THE NEW PARADIGM: ONE OCEAN, INDIVISIBLE, ESSENTIAL TO LIFE Breathing. Eating. Most people do not think of the ocean when they do these things. From the Iraqi desert to the San Francisco Bay, our air, food, and climate are the products of an oceanic life support

system reaching across every manmade political boundary. A U.S. senator and governor, Gaylord Nelson, once famously noted, “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around” (Nelson 2002). Ecological thinkers understand that the engine of this global economy runs on saltwater. Plankton in the Mediterranean may be providing the oxygen in the air that ﬁlls our lungs. Ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream may control our weather and dictate our shipping routes and make or break ﬁshing seasons, and the ocean is the ultimate heat sink—a buffer against rapid global warming. The ocean is home to some 80 percent of the world’s creatures, and these animals respect no political boundaries. Consider that a single molecule of seawater can circulate through the great ocean “conveyor belt” in one thousand years (ﬁgure 3.10). Unavoidably, how we live in one place matters to people living on another coast half a world away. Sea turtles, whales, tuna, and sharks weave together the ocean world with their thousand-mile migrations. A sea turtle born in Mexico is not a “Mexican turtle” when it grazes on a coral reef in Hawaii or plucks jellyﬁsh from Indonesian seas. Thanks to the work of many organizations and agencies, a broad movement is under way to secure our coastal waters and safeguard our ocean (Chaloupka et al. 2007). Politicians courageously defend healthy ocean systems in nonpartisan efforts by supporting coastal protection, ﬁsheries management, and scientiﬁc research. But a productive and abundant ocean will require more than strong nationalistic protections. Our efforts must be broad and deep—oceanic in nature. We need multiple, independent, overlapping sets of observations of ocean processes from space, the ocean surface, and its depths so that we can create long-term records and have conﬁdence that they are accurate. We need integrated theories about how the parts of the ocean system are related to each other so that we can make sense of our observations. We need robust, adaptive models to help us see into the future. Most urgently, we need immediate and revolutionary changes in our ﬁsheries, agricultural practices, and emissions of greenhouse gases on a global scale, and we must exemplify the changes we hope for (Bearzi 2009; Jackson 2008). Echoing Aldo Leopold, thanks to exploration and technology, we are now able to “see and feel” much more of the ocean than we were even a few

55

ATLANTIC OCEAN

WAR M

CO LD

Biodiversity, Function, and Interconnectedness

PACIFIC

OCEAN

INDIAN

WARM

OCEAN

COLD

3.10 This conceptual illustration of the ocean conveyor belt circulation illustrates the 1,000-yearlong cycle. Warm, shallow water is chilled in the far North Atlantic, grows saltier, and sinks. The cold, salty current ﬂows south near the bottom, creating a northward surface layer ﬂow of the warm, less salty water. (Courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory)

FIGURE

decades ago. The question remains, will we “understand, love or otherwise have faith in” the ocean’s central role in our lives, change our destructive behaviors, and learn to sustain the abundance and evolving diversity of the seas? To take on the pressing issues facing our ocean planet, we need creativity, innovation, and resolute people who understand that it is one ocean, indivisible and essential, after all. As Aldo Leopold observed in A Sand County Almanac (1948/1987), “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

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4 Aquaculture: Production and Markets FRANK ASCHE TROND BJØRNDAL

the only reason why global seafood supply has continued to increase since 1990. Moreover, the increased production has been sufﬁcient to not only maintain but also to slightly increase global per capita consumption of seafood. When it comes to seafood for direct human consumption, aquaculture has even greater importance, primarily because signiﬁcant quantities of wild ﬁsh are used for purposes such as reduction into ﬁsh meal and oil. In 2007, the per capita consumption from aquaculture was 8.1 kg, while the per capital consumption from wild ﬁsheries was 8.5 kg (Lem and Einarson 2008). If the current trend continues, in 2009 aquaculture will be as important as wild ﬁsheries as a provider of seafood for human consumption. Given the status of global ﬁsheries, with a majority of ﬁsh stocks being either fully exploited or overexploited, aquaculture has to provide growth if the seafood sector is to be able to maintain or increase its global seafood supply per capita. Fortunately, the aquaculture sector seems well positioned to succeed in this respect. Aquaculture is distinguished from other aquatic production such as ﬁshing by the degree of human intervention and control that is possible (Anderson 2002; Bjørndal 1990). Aquaculture can be deﬁned as the human cultivation of organisms in water. As such, it is in principle more similar to forestry and animal husbandry than to traditional capture ﬁsheries. In other words, aquaculture is stock raising rather than hunting. The production process

4.1. INTRODUCTION Aquaculture is a production technology with its origins in Egypt and China thousands of years ago. However, aquaculture was not very important in terms of quantity produced until the 1970s. Then, a signiﬁcant change took place as better control of the production process enabled a number of new technologies and production practices to be developed and implemented. This improved the competitiveness of aquaculture products both as a source of basic food and as a cash crop. The competitiveness of aquaculture has further been increased by the product development and marketing that was possible with a more predictable supply. The combined effect of productivity and market growth has made aquaculture the world’s fastest growing animalbased food sector in recent decades (FAO 2006). Since 1970, aquaculture production has grown from being an insigniﬁcant source of seafood to an important provider of protein for human consumption (ﬁgure 4.1). In 1970, aquaculture production was still rather miniscule with a produced quantity of about 3.5 million metric tons, representing 5.1 percent of total seafood supply. In 2006, aquaculture accounted for 41.8 percent of total seafood supply with a production of 66.7 million metric tons. Fisheries production, on the other hand, has ﬂuctuated between 90 and 100 million metric tons in annual landings, with no particular trend. The increased production in aquaculture is accordingly

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Aquaculture: Production and Markets 180

Fisheries Aquaculture Total

160 140 Mill. tonnes

61

120 100 80 60 40 20

90 19 92 19 94 19 96 19 98 20 00 20 02 20 04 20 06

88

19

86

19

84

19

82

19

80

19

78

19

76

19

19

72 74 19

19

19

70

0

FIGURE 4.1 Global production of seafood, 1970–2006 (million metric tons). (FAO 2008)

in aquaculture is determined by biological, technological, economic, and environmental factors. However, the key factor is that many aspects of the production process can be brought under human control. This control makes innovation possible and is, accordingly, essential for the rapid technological development that has fueled production growth since the early 1970s. In the 1970s, what is sometimes labeled as the “blue revolution” began as humanity’s accumulated knowledge of aquaculture allowed for the introduction of semi-intensive and intensive farming practices. As a result, producers were able to inﬂuence the growing conditions of the ﬁsh through feeding, breeding, and so forth, and the production cycle was closed for an increasing number of species. The increasing control of the production process enabled a number of productivity-enhancing innovations to take place. Improved productivity resulted in a reduction in production costs, and with a given price, this led to more proﬁtable production. High proﬁts were the market’s signal to increase production, and this led to both existing producers producing more and new producers entering the industry. To sell the increased production, one needed to give the consumers a reason to buy, and in general the most important incentive was a reduction of the price. A substantial part of the savings due to productivity increase was accordingly passed on to the consumers. This can clearly be seen in the price development for most successful aquaculture species. Hence, one can sum

up the most important drivers in the development of modern aquaculture as follows: Control of the production process allowed technological innovations that reduced production costs. This made the product more competitive and the industry more proﬁtable, which led to increased production and lower prices for consumers.

4.2. PRODUCTION METHODS A number of species are being farmed in all parts of the world, in freshwater and saltwater. Moreover, a number of different production techniques are being used, adapted to different species, environments, and economic conditions. These techniques include ponds, pens, raceways, ropes, cages, tanks, and closed circulation systems. Cultivation of a new species typically starts by catching wild juveniles and feeding them in a controlled environment. As more knowledge is gained, the degree of control with the production process increases and the farmers can increase their inﬂuence on growth and reproduction. The degree of control is often categorized by the intensity of the aquaculture operation. Traditional aquaculture varies between extensive and semi-intensive farming practices. Mussel farming is an example of an extensive method used around the globe, whereby the farmer provides a rope or a stake for the mussel fry to fasten to and undertakes some culling so that the density does not get too high, but otherwise leaves the mussels to grow

62

Overview

without further interference. Ocean ranching can be regarded as an extensive form of aquaculture in which a body of water is stocked with ﬁsh that feed on natural food. The small ponds used in Chinese aquaculture were traditionally operated on an extensive basis, because the farmer did little to control growth and biomass. While this system is still common, many farms have become semi-intensive as farmers actively feed their ﬁsh to enhance production and also undertake other productivity-enhancing measures, including higher density farming.1 In recent years, one can also observe a growing number of large intensive facilities in China. In intensive aquaculture, the production system is closed so that one does not depend on wild ﬁsh for reproduction. Fish are reared in conﬁned areas, and the farmer controls most aspects of the production process, such as farm size, stocking, and feeding of ﬁsh. While the intensity of aquaculture production depends on the degree of control, in reality there is a continuum of operation modes. In fact, Anderson (2002) argues that the main difference between ﬁsheries and aquaculture is the degree of control, and that the degree of control in ﬁsheries depends on the regulatory system. He therefore argues that the continuum of production modes stretches from a high degree of control in intensive aquaculture to basically no control in unregulated ﬁsheries. The argument is persuasive because it is at times hard to draw a clear distinction between aquaculture and ﬁsheries.2 What matters is, of course, the control of the production process. It is this control that enables innovation and systematic gathering of knowledge that creates further growth. As such, it is the transition from extensive to semi-intensive farming in Southeast Asia, and in particular the feeding of the ﬁsh, that is the most important factor for the growth in aquaculture production. As species with highly intensive production systems lead the way, the production process is likely to become even more intensive in most places.

4.3. AQUACULTURE PRODUCTION A large number of species are currently being farmed. Table 4.1 shows production according to ISSCAP (International Standard Statistical Classiﬁcation of Aquatic Animals and Plants) groupings, in which aquatic plants have been excluded.

4.1 Aquaculture production by species, 2006 (thousand metric tons)

TABLE

Species Carps, barbels, and other cyprinids Freshwater ﬁshes Oysters Clams, cockles, arkshells Shrimps, prawns Tilapias and other cichlids Salmons, trouts, smelts Mussels Scallops, pectens Marine mollusks Total

Quantity

Percent

20,526 4,916 4,714 4,310 3,164 2,326 2,143 1,890 1,408 1,256 51,569

40% 10% 9% 8% 6% 5% 4% 4% 3% 2% 100%

Source: FAO (2008).

Herbivore species such as carps, barbels, and other cyprinids account for a major part of global aquaculture production in terms of volume, making up 40 percent of the total. This is followed by the miscellaneous group of freshwater ﬁshes, oyster, clams, and other mollusks. With 5 percent and 4 percent of total production volume, respectively, shrimp and prawns, on the one hand, and salmon and trout, on the other, account for a modest share of aquaculture production. It is clear that aquaculture produces large quantities of a substantial variety of species, with carps, shellﬁsh, shrimps, and ﬁnﬁsh species on the top 10 list. Quite a different picture emerges when we look at the ranking of species in terms of value (table 4.2). The group including carp is still the largest, but with 24 percent of the total value it accounts for a considerably smaller share than production in terms of volume. Although eight of the groups on the “volume” list are still on the “value” list, shrimp and prawns have moved from ﬁfth place to second, and salmon and trout from sixth place to third. Jointly, the two groups account for 29 percent of the total value. Hence, the most intensively produced species are also among the most valuable. These are also some of the species with the highest export shares, with their major trade ﬂows from Southeast Asia, Chile, and Norway to the European Union, Japan, and the United States. However, the production of these species is not increasing signiﬁcantly faster than other species, suggesting that production costs associated with these species are declining at a similar rate as those of other species. Aquaculture is a truly global production technology, with close to 180 countries reporting some level

63

Aquaculture: Production and Markets TABLE 4.2 Aquaculture production by species, 2006 (million US$)

Species Carps, barbels, and other cyprinids Shrimps, prawns Salmons, trouts, smelts Miscellaneous freshwater ﬁshes Freshwater crustaceans Clams, cockles, arkshells Oysters Miscellaneous coastal ﬁshes Tilapias and other cichlids Scallops, pectens Total

Value

Percent

18,838 12,486 9,892 7,932 4,715 4,054 3,188 3,083 2,777 2,159 78,737

24 16 13 10 6 5 4 4 4 3

measured by volume and 79.6 percent by value. All the other regions have a higher value than volume share, because they produce higher value products. This is particularly true for South America. China is by far the largest producer country, with a value share of more than 50 percent and a volume share of 70 percent. Measured by value, Chile, India, Vietnam, Japan, Norway, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, and South Korea are the other top 10 producing countries. Egypt is the largest producer in Africa and is ranked number 13 on the list. Hence, aquaculture is clearly strongest in Southeast Asia and is primarily conducted in developing countries.

Source: FAO (2008).

4.4. INCREASED PRODUCTION AND LOWER PRICES

4.3 Production shares by region

Region

Percent Quantity

Percent Value

92.0 3.3 3.2 1.1 0.2

79.6 9.8 8.2 1.6 0.9

Asia Americas Europe Africa Oceania Source: FAO (2008).

of aquaculture production. However, as shown in table 4.3, there are substantial regional differences. Asia makes up about 92 percent of the production

The increased production from aquaculture has a signiﬁcant market impact for successful species. A substantial increase in production usually results in a signiﬁcant drop in the price of the species. Shrimp and salmon are good examples of species where production increases have been accompanied by signiﬁcant reductions in price. Figure 4.2 shows the global production of farmed shrimp and the real price for the period 1984–2006. Production in this period increased from 72 thousand metric tons to 3.1 million metric tons. The real price started at US$16.40 and then fell consistently, to US$7 in 2006. A similar

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4.2 Global aquaculture production of shrimp (thousand metric tons) and real U.S. import price (US$/kg), 1984–2006 (2006 = 1). (FAO 2008)

FIGURE

1000 tonnes

TABLE

64

Overview 1800

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4.3 Global aquaculture production of salmon (thousand metric tons) and real Norwegian export price (NOK/kg), 1981–2006 (2006 = 1). (Norwegian Seafood Exports Council 2008)

FIGURE

trend is seen for salmon over the period 1981 to 2006 (ﬁgure 4.3). Production of salmon (Atlantic, coho, and salmon trout) increased from about 20 thousand metric tons in 1981 to about 1.65 million metric tons in 2006, and the price (for Atlantic salmon) declined from a high of almost 90 NOK/kg in the mid-1980s to about 22 NOK/kg in 2004. It is a similar story for sea bass, sea bream, catﬁsh, and tilapia, although the strength of the price decline varies (Asche et al. 2001). It is worth noting that the price reductions are not necessarily immediate. When the aquaculture species is ﬁrst introduced, there is often an early period when demand is increasing faster than supply and prices are actually stable or even increasing. This is because a stable supply of high-quality ﬁsh presents market opportunities that have not existed for the wild supply of similar ﬁsh. For instance, there will be no price pressure if the farmed ﬁsh is sold in periods when there had previously been no supply of similar wild-caught ﬁsh, due to seasonality. Moreover, demand can increase when the logistical systems can operate with a stable and relatively predictable supply. Somewhat simpliﬁed, one can say that there are two main marked structures that an aquaculture producer or country can face following an increase in their production. If the market size is limited and there are few other species or products from which one can win market share, prices will decline rapidly.

If, on the other hand, there is a large market where the producer in question produces only a miniscule share, there may be no or only a weak price effect. There is, of course, a continuum between these two extremes, and the main reason for shrimp prices declining at a lower rate than salmon is that the global production of shrimp is substantially larger. A closer look of the shrimp producers shows that there have been substantial changes in the top 10 list of producing countries within short time periods (Anderson 2003), illustrating how little effect each of the large producer countries has on the price. The larger the market, the weaker the effect of any single country’s production on the price and the more exposed that production will be to the impacts of changes in other parts of the world. The production and price of Egyptian tilapia presents another interesting case. Egypt is the world’s second largest producer of tilapia after China, but Egypt imports and exports very little. Hence, one can say that tilapia producers in Egypt serve a market of limited size—the domestic Egyptian market. As shown in ﬁgure 4.4, the period 1995–2005 saw an increase in production from 22 thousand metric tons to about 217 thousand metric tons, and a halving of the nominal price of Egyptian tilapia. The observed price decline would be even stronger if adjusted for inﬂation. Hence, the same economic forces that inﬂuence the global market for salmon and shrimp also work in the domestic market for tilapia in Egypt.

65

Aquaculture: Production and Markets 12

250

Price Quantity

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EGP/kg

8 150 6 100 4

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FIGURE 4.4 Egyptian production (thousand metric tons) and real wholesale price in Egyptian pound (EL/kg) for tilapia, 1995–2005 (2005 = 1). (Norman-López 2008)

4.5. PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH With the signiﬁcant reduction in price as production increases, it is natural to wonder how the industry can sustain the high growth. We will try to clarify this issue by looking more closely at salmon, because this is one of the species with the most data available. For any product, the production volume over time is determined by the producers’ proﬁtability, with production tending to increase if it is very profitable. On the other hand, production will decrease if other uses of capital and labor are more proﬁtable and if producers are losing money. The decline in the price of salmon (and other aquaculture species)

has been necessary to induce greater consumption of the product. For this to be proﬁtable, production costs must also have been substantially reduced. This has indeed been the case (ﬁgure 4.5). The main factors behind reduced production costs are productivity growth and technological change. Figure 4.5 shows real production cost and export price for salmon in Norway. Both variables have a clear downward trend, and the gap between them is consistently small. The average price in 2003 was about a quarter of the price in 1985, and the reduction in production cost was of the same magnitude. The important message here is that there is a close relationship between the development of

100 90

Price Cost

80 NOK/kg

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1985

1988

1991

1994

1997

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4.5 Real production cost and producer price for Norwegian salmon (NOK/kg), 1985–2006 (2006 = 1). (Norwegian Seafood Exports Council 2008; Norwegian Directorate for Fisheries 2008)

FIGURE

66

Overview

productivity and falling export prices. Productivity gains are therefore able to explain a great deal of the decline in farmed salmon prices, as the price has been moving down with the production cost, keeping the proﬁt margin relatively constant. This is also to be expected in a competitive industry, since high proﬁtability is the market’s signal to increase production. As the cost reduction has been translated into lower prices, it is also clear that the productivity gains have been passed on to consumers. The main effect for the producers is that they become larger and hence earn a higher proﬁt due to the larger quantities produced. The reduction in production costs is due to two main factors. First, ﬁsh farmers have become more efﬁcient, so they produce more salmon with the same input. This is normally referred to as the ﬁsh farmers’ productivity growth. Second, improved input factors (e.g., better feed and feeding technology and improved genetic attributes due to salmon breeding) make the production process less costly. This is due to technological change for ﬁsh farmers and productivity growth for the ﬁsh farm suppliers. This distinction is often missed, and the productivity growth for the farmers, as well as for their suppliers, is somewhat imprecisely referred to as productivity growth for the whole industry. In addition, while the focus is on the production process, productivity gains in the distribution chain to the retail outlet are equally important. The most important input in salmon farming is the salmon feed, which represented around 57 percent of operating costs during in 2006. Other inputs are smolts (11 percent cost share), capital (5 percent), labor (10 percent), insurance (1 percent), and other costs (16 percent). The share of feed has been increasing (from about 25 percent in the mid-1980s), making the production process more feed intensive. Because feed is the factor most closely related to the production volume, this development indicates better exploitation of the capital and labor employed at each farm. This can be explained to a large extent by increased production on each farm. Several studies using data from the 1980s found that substitution was possible among feed, capital, and labor. For instance, hand feeding was at the time more efﬁcient than machine feeding. However, with the increased cost share of feed, these substitution possibilities have been reduced. Guttormsen (2002) suggested that they had largely disappeared in the 1990s. This implies that salmon production now, after investments in capital

equipment have been made, can be characterized as a technology with a close to ﬁxed relative factor share in the production process. The production process then becomes one of converting a cheaper feed into a more desirable product for the consumers. So, even if the substitution possibilities between capital, labor, and feed are limited, the farmers can substitute between different types of feed. The composition of input use varies over time, suggesting that the production technology is changing. This is certainly an important factor in explaining the productivity growth. Tveteras and Heshmati (2002) found that technical progress at the farm level explains only about one-third of the reduction in production costs, with the remainder accounted for by reduced prices for input factors, or technological innovations among the suppliers of input factors. Tveteras and Heshmati (2002) also found that productivity growth was anything but smooth, indicating that technological progress at the farm level and among the suppliers comes in leaps and is unpredictable. With the long production time in salmon farming, this can create cycles in proﬁtability as production costs decline, since lower production costs initially give higher proﬁts, which induce farmers to expand production. The expanded production then drives the prices down, reducing proﬁts. While we do not have data to conﬁrm that cost has been reduced in a similar way for other species, economic theory indicates this must have occurred (Asche and Bjørndal 2010). It is only if the industry is proﬁtable that production will continue to grow. Hence, we can deduce that a similar productivity growth where quantity has increased and prices have been reduced has occurred not only for salmon, but also for other species.

4.6. THE SUPPLY CHAIN In the majority of cases price is the most important argument with respect to which products a retailer will stock, while total production cost will be the main factor explaining which aquaculture products will be produced. Total production cost means the supply cost, that is, the total cost of bringing the product to the consumer, which then includes transportation and processing costs. The fact that the aquaculture producer has greater control over the quality of the product and when to harvest it also gives an advantage compared with other seafood

Aquaculture: Production and Markets suppliers in the supply chain. The control allows more predictability and better capacity utilization. It also enables exploitation of economies of scale and scope in distribution and marketing. The most extreme example of an efﬁcient supply chain is the “just-in-time” logistics systems for supply of salmon to processors in Europe. This has allowed the processors to avoid the cost of keeping a raw material inventory. However, a number of other similar examples reduce cost in the distribution of aquaculture products. It also makes aquaculture products more interesting for processors, and the introduction of salmon sausages, shrimp burgers, and numerous other lower value-added products in addition to high-end products such as loins, are indications of how this leads to greater product diversiﬁcation and targeting of more market segments. The growth of the big supermarket chains has been beneﬁcial for aquaculture producers. In the late 1980s, seafood was sold in a number of outlets, and the supermarket chains’ market share was less than 20 percent. By 2005, most ﬁshmongers had disappeared in many major markets, and in places like France and the United Kingdom, the market share of the supermarket chains is now more than 80 percent. Because efﬁcient logistics and marketing are important elements in the success of the supermarket chains, their business model ﬁts aquaculture better than wild seafood. As mentioned above, the control of production allows more efﬁcient logistics but also higher reliability and more stable quality. Aquaculture can also supply other product attributes, such as traceability, less costly than can wild ﬁsheries. Finally, aquaculture products lend themselves more easily to marketing, because one can plan a campaign three months in advance (and book news or TV slots) and know that there will be product to sell when the campaign is running.

4.7. AQUACULTURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT While the development of new technology has signiﬁcantly increased the production potential of aquaculture, the increased production has also raised questions about the environmental impact and the sustainability of aquaculture. This is certainly an issue because aquaculture, like other biological production processes, interacts with the surrounding environment.3 Moreover, for some

67

species there is a global supply network because ﬁsh meal and ﬁsh oil are used in the feed. The environmental challenges appear as two distinct but important issues: increased ﬁshing pressure on species harvested for aquafeed, and local environmental carrying capacity.

4.7.1. The Fish Meal Trap The “ﬁsh meal trap” is a hypothesis that aquaculture is environmentally degrading because increased demand for feed leads to increased ﬁshing effort and thereby threatens the viability of wild ﬁsh stocks (Naylor et al. 2000). Moreover, it follows from this hypothesis that the availability of marine feed will put a limit on how much the aquaculture sector can produce, given that the availability of wild ﬁsh is limited. While the ﬁsh meal trap is mentioned in relation to aquaculture in general, it is clear that it is a serious issue only in some forms of ﬁnﬁsh farming and does not apply to farming of seaweeds and shellﬁsh. Furthermore, it will apply only to species that are fed with feed using primarily marine inputs. This is a substantial part of the sector, because this applies not only to carnivorous species, such as salmon and sea bass, but also to omni- or herbivorous species because the use of feed increases the growth rate. There are, however, some conditions that must be fulﬁlled for the ﬁsh meal trap to occur (Asche and Tveterås 2004; Kristofersson and Anderson 2006). The ﬁsh meal trap raises two key environmental issues: the regulation of capture ﬁsheries and the market for protein meals. The extent to which increasing demand for ﬁsh meal leads to greater ﬁshing effort is related to the management regime in operation for the ﬁshery in question. With a properly working management system, increased demand for the species in question cannot threaten the ﬁsh stock. Hence, the issue of whether growth in aquaculture production can lead to unsustainable capture ﬁsheries is primarily a ﬁsheries management problem. However, as the track record of many ﬁsheries management systems is not good, this can be a real problem. Yet, in order for increased demand from aquaculture to have an impact, aquaculture growth must increase total demand for ﬁsh meal. Traditionally, there has been a strong link between the market for ﬁsh meal and the market for other vegetable meals as different users substitute among the different types of meals, depending on price. This has kept price development closely

68

Overview

aligned (Asche and Tveterås 2004; Vukina and Anderson 1993). This also implies that ﬁsh meal has not been demanded for its unique properties. Because ﬁsh meal production has not increased during the last 30 years in which industrialized aquaculture has expanded, evidence indicates that the ﬁsh meal trap has not been an issue. In 1999 the stable relationship between ﬁsh meal price and vegetable meals ended (Kristofersson and Anderson 2006), and from early 2005 to mid-2006, ﬁsh meal prices have more than doubled to a record high level. This indicates that ﬁsh meal is now demanded due to its unique attributes. Still, it seems that growth in aquaculture production is fairly independent of the cycles in the ﬁsh meal prices and of the availability of ﬁsh meal. There is a very strong growth in total aquaculture production, while the supply of ﬁsh meal is relatively stable (ﬁgure 4.6). Hence, the variation in ﬁsh meal price does not seem to have a strong impact on aquaculture production, and most aquaculture producers do not seem to require ﬁsh meal in large quantities. Accordingly, for most aquaculture species, ﬁsh meal does not seem to be an essential feed ingredient, and even when ﬁsh meal is demanded primarily for its unique attributes, aquaculture does not seem to be the main force in the increased demand. However, to the extent that there are species that require sufﬁcient quantities of ﬁsh meal, producers of these species will ﬁnd that feed costs will become more volatile, and if the price continues to increase, it may also be a problem for the proﬁtability of the operation.4

Since productivity growth is the main engine of growth in aquaculture, the increased ﬁsh meal price would prevent further growth for species that are highly dependent on marine sources for food. The commercial breakthrough of cod aquaculture, for example, will probably be constrained if ﬁsh meal prices are to remain at high levels. Hence, scarcity may constrain growth of high-priced carnivore aquaculture species, especially in the short run when feed technologies are given. Most aquaculture species, however, are herbivores, and even salmon has become semivegetarian, so in terms of volume, ﬁsh meal required in aquaculture should have at most a limited impact on the ﬁsh stocks used.

4.7.2. Local Environmental Issues Whenever the environment interacts with a production process, the production process has the potential to damage the surrounding environment. The potential damages include destruction of natural habitat and pollution from the production process that inﬂuences habitat and wildlife around the site. The two most successful aquaculture species, salmon and shrimp, are also the species that have received most attention with respect to their environmental impact (Naylor et al. 2000). The main issues in salmon farming are pollution from organic waste and the interaction between wild and farmed salmon. Farmed salmon may transmit diseases and parasites to wild salmon. An increased number of sea lice parasites on wild salmon has

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60 50

Fish Meal Aquaculture

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05 20

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FIGURE 4.6 Annual aquaculture and ﬁsh meal production (million metric tons), 1980–2005. (FAO 2008)

69

Aquaculture: Production and Markets been associated with escaped farmed salmon. Farmed salmon may also attempt to spawn in rivers and may affect the genetic pool. Shrimp farming has received even greater negative publicity than salmon farming regarding its detrimental environmental effects, such as destruction of mangroves, salination of agricultural areas, eutrophication, and disruptive socioeconomic impacts. The environmental issues in intensive salmon and shrimp farming must be seen in relation to the introduction of a new technology that uses the environment as an input. The greater the production at any site and the more intensive the process, the greater the potential for environmental damage. However, the greater degree of control within the production process in intensive aquaculture also makes it easier to address these issues. Like all new technologies, there will be unexpected side effects, and there will be a time lag from when an issue arises until it can be addressed. First, the impact and the causes must be properly identiﬁed. Second, the solution to the problems will require modiﬁcations of existing technology or perhaps entirely new technology. In both cases, pollution reduction implies some form of induced innovation. Tveterås (2002) argues that industry growth has a positive effect on pollution in line with the environmental Kuznets curve, which refers to an empirical observation that pollution tends to increase with economic growth up to a certain point, after which growth will reduce pollution. This gives the pollution proﬁle over time the shape of an inverted U. Use of antibiotics in Norwegian aquaculture is a good example (ﬁgure 4.7).

The industry addresses environmental effects for two main reasons: (1) the effects reduce productivity and therefore proﬁts, and/or (2) government regulations force the industry to do so. Industry size contributes in the sense that a large industry allows larger investments and thereby more efﬁcient innovation of abatement technologies. Detrimental environmental effects of aquaculture not accounted for in market prices are negative externalities. Internalization of the externalities can explain why some of the major environmental issues have been resolved in aquaculture. The arguments are as follows: Production cost and productivity in aquaculture depend on an environment where farmed ﬁsh are raised. Fish farms with environmental practices that harm the local environment will experience negative feedback effects such as poorer growing conditions, and this will reduce on-farm productivity. The result is reduced biomass growth due to poor ﬁsh health and, in the worst case, disease outbreaks that wipe out entire on-farm ﬁsh stocks. Hence, farmers are concerned with cultivating management practices that avoid such negative repercussions on productivity. If there is no negative feedback on expected proﬁtability, however, it is unlikely that the industry will internalize detrimental environmental effects. In this case, the government has to regulate the industry if the effects are to be avoided. The rapid growth of global aquaculture has represented an environmental challenge for authorities. First, knowledge about the environmental effects of aquaculture has been limited or, at worst, lacking. This has called for extensive research to identify

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4.7 Use of antibiotics (kg) and Norwegian salmon farming production (thousand metric tons), 1980–2004. (Norwegian Directorate for Fisheries 2008)

FIGURE

70

Overview

cause and effect. Second, in many places local governments do not have the resources to implement and enforce regulations. There are a number of examples of poor environmental practices in aquaculture (as in agriculture). However, that does not make the production method inherently unsustainable; there are a number of examples of sustainable aquaculture. Still, intensive and particularly large-scale intensive aquaculture has a larger potential to produce detrimental environmental effects than do other technologies. The higher the degree of control with the production process does, on the other hand, give these farmers a better opportunity to control the negative effects of their production.5 Thus, there is no doubt that aquaculture can be carried out in a sustainable manner, independent of the level of intensity. Therefore, the real issue with aquaculture and sustainability is whether farmers choose to use sustainable practices. This will be an issue primarily of local regulations and governance, but may also be inﬂuenced by consumer initiatives and ecolabels.

reductions in production cost due to productivity growth, the competitiveness for aquaculture will continue to improve. The continued growth in aquaculture will create environmental challenges. However, these can be met, and the real issue is whether the farmers have incentives to take the environmental impacts into account. Local governance is therefore very important to ensure sustainable aquaculture, and the negative environmental impacts should be balanced against the positive aspects. In particular, higher food production from aquaculture will reduce the pressure on marginal land used for food production and lead to a reduction in deforestation.

Acknowledgments We thank Sigbjørn Tveterås for helpful discussions, Chrisopher Martin for assistance with the manuscript, and the Norwegian Research Council for funding. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

4.8. CONCLUDING REMARKS Aquaculture’s role as a food production technology changed signiﬁcantly in the 1970s, with the introduction of semi-intensive and intensive farming practices. Producers then started to inﬂuence the growing conditions more actively through feeding, breeding, and so forth. The increased control of the production process allowed a number of productivity-enhancing innovations to take place. A signiﬁcant increase in productivity has reduced production costs substantially in intensive and semi-intensive aquaculture production. This gives strong incentives for existing producers to increase production and for new producers to enter the industry. Large increases in the production of species such as salmon and shrimp, but also tilapia, pangasius, sea bass, and so on, have led to reductions in price, making the products more affordable to consumers and more competitive in relation to other food products. There is no doubt that aquaculture production will continue to grow. Delgado et al. (2003) indicates that demand for seafood will grow due to increased economic growth and an increase in the global population. This provides an environment where growth is possible provided that aquaculture products are competitive. With continued

1. An interesting consequence of this is that the share of the revenue paid to the ﬁshermen hired to harvest from the pond has declined from the traditional 50 percent to 25–50 percent to compensate the farmers for their increased effort. 2. For instance, how much effort must an oyster ﬁsherman put into the maintenance of his oyster beds before it becomes aquaculture? 3. Holmer et al. (2008) provide a number of examples of environmental challenges in aquaculture. 4. While aquaculture expansion may have inﬂuenced recent price development, the main cause of the dramatic price increase seems to be the economic growth in China. The Chinese income growth has led to an increased demand for animal proteins, and in China ﬁsh meal is widely used in animal feeds such as for poultry, in addition to aquaculture. 5. The most intensive operations, closed-cycle systems where all emissions are cleaned, may be the most environmentally friendly systems of all. Proponents of such systems claim that clean water is the only emission.

References Anderson, J.L. (2002). Aquaculture and the future. Marine Resource Economics 17(2): 133–152.

Aquaculture: Production and Markets Anderson, J.L. (2003). The International Seafood Trade. Cambridge, Mass.: Woodhead Publishing. Asche, F., and T. Bjørndal (2010). The Economics of Salmon Aquaculture. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Asche, F., T. Bjørndal, and J.A. Young (2001). Market interactions for aquaculture products. Aquaculture Economics and Management 5(5/6): 303–318. Asche, F., and S. Tveterås (2004). On the relationship between aquaculture and reduction ﬁsheries. Journal of Agricultural Economics 55(2): 245–265. Bjørndal, T. (1990). The Economics of Salmon Aquaculture. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Delgado, C.L., N. Wada, M.W. Rosengrant, S. Meijer, and A.M. Ahmed (2003). Fish to 2020: Supply and Demand in Changing Global Markets. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute. FAO (2006). The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2006. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2008). FISHSTAT Plus: Universal Software for Fishery Statistical Time Series. Version 2.3. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Fishery Information, Data and Statistics Unit. Guttormsen, A.G. (2002). Input factor substitutability in salmon aquaculture. Marine Resource Economics 17(2): 91–102. Holmer, M., K. Black, C.M. Duarte, N. Marba, and I. Karakassis (2008). Aquaculture in the Ecosystem. Berlin: Springer.

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Kristofersson, D., and J.L. Anderson (2006). Is there a relationship between ﬁsheries and farming? Interdependence of ﬁsheries, animal production and aquaculture. Marine Policy 30(6): 721–725. Lem, A., and G. Einarson (2008). Globalization and the dynamics of international seafood trade. Paper presented at International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade 08 in Nah Trang, Vietnam. Naylor, R.L., R.J. Goldburg, J. Primavera, N. Kautsky, M. Beveridge, J. Clay, C. Folke, and J. Lubchenco (2000). Effects of aquaculture on world ﬁsh supplies. Nature 405(29): 1017–1024. Norman-López, A. (2008). World Production and Market Analysis of Tilapia with a Particular Attention to Egypt and the US. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Portsmouth, U.K. Norwegian Directorate for Fisheries (2008). www. ﬁskeridirektoratet.no. Norwegian Seafood Exports Council (2008). Personal Communication. Tveteras, R., and A. Heshmati (2002). Patterns of productivity growth in the Norwegian salmon farming industry. International Review of Economics and Business 49(3): 367–393. Tveterås, S. (2002). Norwegian salmon aquaculture and sustainability: The relationship between environmental quality and industry growth. Marine Resource Economics 17(1): 121–132. Vukina, T., and J.L. Anderson (1993). A state-space forecasting approach to optimal intertemporal cross-hedging. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 75: 416–424.

5 Gender Dimensions in Fisheries Management MERYL J. WILLIAMS

postharvest processing, and marketing. Finally, I challenge the beliefs surrounding gender roles in ﬁsheries and suggest some gender-sensitive measures to track public and private ﬁsheries management beneﬁts.

5.1. GENDER DIMENSIONS MISSING IN FISHERIES MANAGEMENT Marine ﬁsheries are commonly held to be the domain of men. When only considering ﬁshing, men are indeed dominant, but women also ﬁsh. Considering ﬁshing communities and the whole ﬁsh supply chain reveals that women and even children make enormous, often unpaid, contributions to ﬁsh supply by providing ﬁshing support services such as net making and bookkeeping, and by processing and marketing ﬁsh. Since ﬁsheries management and its costs and beneﬁts affect the whole ﬁsh supply chain, management actions thus need to account for gender. A social construct, gender is only one of the social and cultural dimensions that inﬂuence ﬁsheries management and its beneﬁts. Other dimensions, such as age/life stage, social status, economic class, ethnicity, religion, and health status also inﬂuence how ﬁsheries beneﬁts are distributed, interact with gender factors, and also are rarely explicitly addressed in ﬁsheries management. In this chapter, reference is made to these dimensions as they interact with gender. This chapter begins with exploring the paucity of gender information for ﬁsheries and the trends and slow changes that are now giving gender dimensions more attention and examines gender participation in ﬁsh supply chains, that is, in ﬁshing, ﬁshing-related activities such as services,

5.1.1. Paucity of GenderDisaggregated Fisheries Information Whether examining gender roles in productive enterprises such as supply chains or, more broadly, gender relations as they satisfy human needs, gender-disaggregated information is essential (Razavi and Miller 1995). In the ﬁsheries sector, most countries and ﬁsheries lack comprehensive gender-disaggregated data. Compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) from country information, regular global ﬁsheries statistics contain no information on gender participation, although the FAO (2003) referred to broadening the scope of statistics to include, among others, social and economic information. In the FAO’s State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture reports, published biennially since 1996, the word “women” appeared only 1, 2, 11, 3, 8, and 36 times in the respective years 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006. Most of these references were associated with ﬁsh processing and HIV/AIDS in ﬁshing communities (2002 onward). 72

Gender Dimensions in Fisheries Management Two recent statistical collections did contain gender-disaggregated ﬁsheries employment data: the 2005 Indian Marine Fisheries Census (Government of India 2006) and a European review (Salz et al. 2006). Both indicated that women’s participation increased greatly when ﬁshing-related activities were included, but even these studies overlooked unpaid women’s and men’s support work. In 2005, India conducted a full census of coastal ﬁsheries, ﬁshing communities, and ﬁsheries-associated jobs (Government of India 2006). The census included gender-disaggregated information, a feature welcomed by activists (Sharma 2007). Aggregated across all coastal Indian states, within the ﬁshing communities women were 48.6 percent of the population, slightly higher than the all-India population ratio of 48.3 percent. However, in Kerala, the sex ratio of women in ﬁsheries households was 49.5 percent, lower than the state ratio of 51.4 percent women; similarly, in West Bengal, the ﬁsheries households had 47.3 percent women, compared to the state ratio of 48.3 percent (Sharma 2007). Low ratios of women are interpreted as indicating low social standing of women. Of the women living in Indian coastal ﬁshing communities, 21 percent (365,463 women) participated in ﬁshing and ﬁshing-related activities, representing 10.2 percent of the total marine ﬁshing workforce (Kuriakose 2007). In the ﬁshing-related activities, nearly half (48.3 percent) of the workers were women. Women were the majority of workers in marketing and processing of ﬁsh, comprising 73.6 percent and 75.7 percent, respectively, of workers. For women, marketing (41.8 percent) was the most common activity, with labor (18.4 percent) and curing/processing (18 percent) next most common (Government of India 2006). The European Union study found that, in 2002– 2003, one-third of 405,000 persons working in coastal ﬁshing and related activities were women. Most of the women worked in ﬁsh processing; only 4 percent of the active ﬁshers were women, compared to 56 percent of the ﬁsh-processing workers. The percentage of women actively ﬁshing was highest in Greece, Italy, and Portugal—6 percent, 8 percent, and 14 percent, respectively. In other countries, typically about 1 percent of ﬁshers were women (Salz et al. 2006). The European data did not enumerate the work of women in the business side of household and larger enterprises, such as managing ﬁnances, vessel maintenance schedules, and keeping current with ﬁsheries regulations.

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5.1.2. Toward a More GenderAware Fisheries Agenda Two trends affecting ﬁsheries management are gradually bringing gender into view: (1) ﬁsheries and development approaches are becoming more inclusive, and (2) activists and researchers have raised the proﬁle of the issue.

5.1.2.1. Changes in Fisheries Management and Development Approaches The gradual evolution of broader and more inclusive ﬁsheries management and human development approaches ﬁnally are bringing some attention to gender in ﬁsheries. Nevertheless, in developed and developing countries, current ﬁsheries management is concerned predominantly with the catching sector and with ﬁsh stocks. Management has been shaped by technocratic models for national and economic development that prevailed from the 1950s and 1960s (Choo et al. 2008), and earlier in the industrialization of ﬁsheries. Men were seen as the productive agents. Often, women who had traditionally ﬁshed were excluded from new ﬁshing technology and training—the “women don’t ﬁsh” syndrome. Globally, ﬁsheries mechanization and the demands of international trade have altered the locus of women’s and men’s work in the supply chain; for example, much postharvest work has moved from households into factories. Although the environment and concern for people’s basic needs entered development approaches in the 1970s and 1980s, these concerns were slow to catch on in ﬁsheries until confronted with stock collapses. In the later 1980s, community-based management experiments began in ﬁsheries (Dietz et al. 2003), but even today these more inclusive management approaches often ignore gender. By the 1980s, women became better acknowledged in society and the economy, including in ﬁsheries. General development discourse focused on “women in development,” and efforts were made to include women in development programs, mainly to increase their economic contributions (Bennett 2005). However, in the 1980s, a conceptual shift began, moving beyond the focus on women to that of “gender,” including men and boys and incorporating life-stage considerations and relationships. This changed the emphasis from one of production (“in development”) to wider societal roles (“and

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Overview

development”) (Razavi and Miller 1995). This change reached ﬁsheries (Williams et al. 2002a) and “gender and ﬁsheries” is now widely used as a more inclusive concept. However, not all experts accept the change. Some argue that the wider focus reduces prospects of more rapid progress in achieving equality for women. In addition, because gender roles are socially constructed, they cannot be easily generalized across cultures and households (Bennett 2005; Razavi and Miller 1995). In 1995, the Beijing Declaration on “equal rights . . . of women and men,” developed at the Fourth World Conference on Women, resonated with many ﬁsheries agencies, as did the 2000 commitment to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. In line with the Millennium Development Goals’ focus on gender and its links to poverty, ﬁsheries researchers have examined poverty–gender linkages, noting the predominance of women among the rural poor, hence also among those in coastal ﬁsheries communities. Gender can be one mechanism for marginalization and hence poverty in ﬁsheries (Bene 2003). Harrison (2000), however, cautioned against conﬂating poverty and gender, as social arrangements underlying gender inequality and poverty are distinct, even if they can reinforce. Development assistance agencies, guided by their own gender policies, have supported some gender and ﬁsheries work in developing country projects, for example, Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Project of FAO, U.K. Department of International Development, and 25 west and central African countries (Sustainable Fisheries Livelihood Program 2007). Even so, gender has been slow to enter mainstream ﬁsheries norms. The leading international normative ﬁsheries document, the 1995 FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, does not contain the words “women” or “gender.” Programs implementing the Code have focused on mainstream ﬁsheries concerns, such as ecosystem affects of ﬁshing, illegal ﬁshing, and improving statistics. In October 2008, however, the FAO Global Conference on Small-Scale Fisheries will include deliberations on the role of women.

5.1.2.2. Proﬁle of Gender and Fisheries Raised by Activists and Researchers National policies covering ﬁshing rarely address gender, and nor do policies for other segments of

the ﬁsh supply chain, which may be the responsibility of ministries such as agriculture, trade, ports, environment, welfare, and science. Despite the tendency to overlook gender, activists and researchers, through their advocacy and research insights respectively, have helped raise the proﬁle of gender and ﬁsheries. Often, activists and researchers have collaborated over themes such as globalization and ﬁsheries (Neis et al. 2005). Numerous but isolated studies of men and women in ﬁshing communities are found in the anthropology literature, but Nadel-Klein and Davis (1988) were ﬁrst to challenge, through case studies from around the world, the invisibility of women in ﬁsheries. Since then, a growing body of gender and ﬁsheries research is slowly building the proﬁle of gender in mainstream ﬁsheries knowledge, and much of the information in the following sections relies on research ﬁndings. Fisheries activist organizations, such as the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers formed in the 1980s, have highlighted the needs of women and disadvantaged groups such as small-scale ﬁshers. For example, Indian ﬁshworkers’ movements included action on women’s rights (Nayak and Vijayan 2006).

5.2. A GENDERED LOOK AT FISH SUPPLY CHAINS As the limited statistical and research information indicates, gender contributions differ along the ﬁsh supply chain. The following section examines the diversity in gender participation in the supply chain, referring only to marine ﬁsheries. If marine and inland aquaculture and inland ﬁsheries were to be examined, women would be seen to play somewhat more active roles, especially in aquaculture, but the overall conclusions regarding decision-making power, rights, and inclusion would still hold.

5.2.1. Fishing All over the world, the business of catching ﬁsh from the wild is dominated by men. This includes the owners of the means of production—the ﬁshing vessels and ﬁshing gear—and the labor hired or self-employed. However, women also ﬁsh, by working as ﬁshing crew, occasionally as vessel owners and masters, and, more commonly, using their own small-scale, inshore ﬁshing methods and gear.

Gender Dimensions in Fisheries Management The pattern of women’s participation is evolving as ﬁsheries circumstances change. In Asia, women’s ﬁshing is typically secondary to that of men, but women do ﬁsh, more so in some countries than in others. For example, in Vietnam marine ﬁsheries, women are only 1.4 percent of the at-sea laborers (Ruckes and Dang 2004). In the 1995 Philippine census, only 8.3 percent of ﬁshers were women; in the 1998 Japan census, 16.8 percent of ﬁshers were women, many of them wives working with their husbands to compensate for the dearth of young men joining the industry (Siason et al. 2002). However, lack of gender-disaggregated data often obscures Asian women’s participation; for example, the Indian Marine Fisheries Census assumed that the ﬁshers were male, and no genderdisaggregated information was collected for this part of the supply chain work (Sharma 2007). Asian women in coastal ﬁshing families and those living on islands in archipelagic countries such as Indonesia and Philippines are most likely to be active in ﬁshing, including estuarine bag net ﬁsheries (Bangladesh) and shore-based ﬁshing, such as ﬁsh fry and shrimp postlarvae collecting (Siason et al. 2002). In the Philippines sapyaw (a type of seine) ﬁshery, women take active though low-ranking jobs at sea (Sotto et al. 2001). In China, Wang and Zhou (2008) reported that, in some ports, women represent about 30 percent of crews on ﬁshing vessels. These are mainly middle-age women, as older women have left such jobs and young women are not attracted to them. Men also dominate ﬁshing participation in Africa, although in countries such as Senegal and Ghana powerful women ﬁsh traders have direct but not absolute power over ﬁshing operations through ﬁnancing vessels and operations. As in Asia, African women take a more active part in inshore and coastal lagoon ﬁsheries (Bennett et al. 2004). In Koko State, Niger delta, Nigeria, women are particularly active in ﬁshing from boats using a variety of nets and traps, especially in the rivers and lagoons, and less active in the open sea (Williams 1996). In South Africa and other African countries, superstition, onshore family commitments, and perceived physical weaknesses traditionally prohibited women from going to sea. In 1999, however, women made up approximately 20 percent and children 15 percent of small-scale informal ﬁshers along the South African coast. The women were

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more likely to be involved in collecting and ﬁshing for invertebrates for home consumption (Branch et al. 2002). In 2005 South Africa implemented a new ﬁshing rights system (the Long Term Rights Policy), which gave more women access to ﬁshing rights, including for highly traded species such as rock lobster (International Collective in Support of Fishworkers [ICSF] 2006). However, women and other small-scale ﬁshers generally lacked the skills, credit, organization, and information to participate (Isaacs 2006). African women’s resource access can be fragile. In the Kilwa district of Tanzania, women traditionally trapped octopus using simple equipment and netted small, intertidal ﬁsh for home consumption and sale (Porter et al. 2008). From the mid-1990s, octopus gained value on seafood markets, setting off a chain of events whereby global markets reached to Kilwa’s octopus resource and the ﬁshery transformed into a men’s dive ﬁshery, attracting additional outside ﬁshermen and overturning the traditional and seasonal conservation measures practiced by the women. In the Middle East and North Africa, little information is available on the role of women in ﬁshing, but their role is likely to be small. In Europe, women’s participation in ﬁsheries varies with country and ﬁshery. Portuguese women, and sometimes children, ﬁsh on family boats, undertaking day trips and carrying out many of the ﬁshing tasks; and some French women also ﬁsh on their husband’s boats (Frangoudes and O’Doherty 2006). In France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, women collecting shellﬁsh from the shore outnumber those ﬁshing from boats (Frangoudes and O’Doherty 2006). In Norway, few women ﬁsh or own boats (Gerrard 2005). Migrant labor from fellow European countries is also thought to be a feature of ﬁshing and ﬁsh processing, but only a few countries record information on foreign workers. Spain, Netherlands, and France record 8–9 percent foreign ﬁshing labor on vessels (Salz et al. 2006). In North America, ﬁsheries from Hawaii to Newfoundland are diverse and so too are the gender patterns of participation. For the United States, little information is available on women’s participation, but clearly women also ﬁsh; for example, women made up 14 percent of ﬁshing crews in Alaskan ﬁsheries (Sepez et al. 2005). Many traditional ﬁshing communities of indigenous or more recent European, Japanese, and Chinese descent live on

76

Overview

the margins of mainstream economies, such as in the Paciﬁc Ocean, in the U.S. state of Alaska, and in the Canadian northeast, northwest, and Arctic. Inuit women in Nunavet, Canada, ﬁsh in artisanal ﬁsheries but as yet have low representation on ﬁsheries co-management boards overseeing commercial ﬁsheries development (Kafarowski 2006). In South America, women’s ﬁshing is mainly unpaid family labor in ﬁshing operations (Josupeit 2004; Pereira 2002). Women’s actual work in ﬁshing is often not recognized as such, especially by their families, who consider this part of “housekeeping.” For example, in Para State, Brazil’s largest ﬁsh-producing state, women are about 10 percent of ﬁshers, working mainly inshore and in estuaries with small traps for shellﬁsh (Maneschy and Alvares 2005); in San Felipe, Yucatan, Mexico, women catch shellﬁsh and small ﬁsh, some of the former used as octopus bait, but have been virtually absent from consultations on protecting the resources (Savard and Fraga 2005). Little is known about women in Caribbean ﬁsheries (Grant 2004). A review of the literature and a survey of national ﬁsheries experts revealed that ﬁshing was dominated by men in all countries but that women ﬁshed in 10 of the Caribbean countries, but not in two other countries, Guyana and Nevis. In all but three countries, women’s ﬁshing was thought to be “occasional”; in Antigua, Barbuda, and St. Kitts, women were more commonly involved in ﬁshing, especially in beach seine, gillnet, line, and trap ﬁshing (Grant 2004). Women’s marine ﬁshing is probably proportionally greater in the Paciﬁc island countries than in any other region. Women make large but unmeasured contributions to inshore ﬁsheries production, of which 80 percent is consumed in households and 20 percent sold in markets (Lambeth et al. 2002). In Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, women use a wide range of techniques for inshore and lagoon ﬁshing, usually deploying simple ﬁshing gears and rarely going to sea in boats. Some societies prohibit women going to sea. Women’s ﬁshing is sometimes a social activity, for example, in Tuvalu (Lambeth et al. 2002). Women, rather than men, may sometimes be responsible for providing daily seafood for the family, for example, if men go farming away from the main home (Lambeth et al. 2002). On remote Tobi Island, Palau, food production was shared. Women farmed taro and collected invertebrates and turtles from the lagoon and shore, and men ﬁshed offshore. Fish and taro

were then symbolically exchanged in transactions more complex than needed to satisfy people’s basic food needs (Black 1981). In the Paciﬁc, communal and family ﬁshing are also common. For example, in Fiji, communities cooperate using large beach seine and drag nets (Vunisea 1996). No formal statistics are maintained on women in Australia’s commercial ﬁsheries. A survey of women in the ﬁshing sector revealed that many were owner-operators of commercial vessels and their main tasks were managing ﬁnances and administering the businesses, including attending meetings (Aslin et al. 2000). Even in remote areas, women make up a small percentage of ﬁshing crew, but their numbers are not available. Recreational and tourism-based ﬁsheries are also signiﬁcant in Australian ﬁsheries, especially in the Northern Territory and Great Barrier Reef, but gender-disaggregated information is not available. Australian coastal aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities rely on local seafood, and women have long held important roles in shorebased ﬁshing (Lambeth et al. 2002; National Oceans Ofﬁce 2004). In New Zealand, men dominate the ﬁshing sector, but women are also more frequently going to sea on family boats, including second-generation offspring (Lambeth et al. 2002). Women also fulﬁll many shore-based functions for family ﬁshing businesses, as in other parts of the world. Under national ﬁsheries quota arrangements, Maori control more than half of the commercial ﬁshing quota, but little is know of the role of women in these operations (Lambeth et al. 2002). As ﬁsheries change, the changes often affect women and men differently. In Canada, the industry restructuring and welfare policies to handle the collapse of the northeast groundﬁsh ﬁsheries systematically disadvantaged women in ﬁshing-dependent families (Binkley 2005; Power and Harrison 2005). Since the crisis, more women now go to sea on family vessels to keep the reduced takings in the family (Grzetic 2004). In the Paciﬁc, the commercialization of more ﬁsheries and human population growth is changing gender participation. Commercial ﬁsheries often seek the same resources that women exploit, foreign interests enter the ﬁsheries and marine resources become overexploited. In some places, women have extended their ﬁshing into activities formerly only undertaken by men; in others, men

Gender Dimensions in Fisheries Management enter previous women’s domains. Management, in the past the mandate of hereditary chiefs, has become more complex and necessarily intrusive, for example, restricting ﬁshing areas and seasons (Novaczek and Mitchell 2006). On Lelapa Island, Vanuatu, women and male youth, key ﬁshing groups, were not consulted when protected areas were established to rebuild resources, but the protected sites inconvenienced women and threatened social harmony when the youth rebelled and disregarded the rulings (Tarisesei and Novaczek 2006). Boys and girls also labor in ﬁsheries, but child labor statistics are scarce. International Labor Organization data for Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ghana, and Philippines showed that child labor in ﬁsheries contributed from 2.5 percent (Ghana) to 5.2 percent (Philippines) of national child labor totals. For these countries, between 86 and 91.3 percent of the child ﬁsheries laborers were boys (Iversen 2006). Loss of men’s lives and health dangers at sea are gender issues. Fishing’s poor safety record directly affects the men through injury, death, and poor atsea working and living conditions, and also affects their families. Poorly educated young Asian men often supply the underpaid labor on offshore and distant water ﬁshing vessels, working in dangerous, sometimes fatal, conditions and with few rights. To improve living and working conditions aboard small- and large-scale ﬁshing vessels, the International Labor Organization passed the 2007 Work in Fishing Convention. Countries are now encouraged to sign and implement the convention.

5.2.2. Postharvest Processing and Marketing Women participate much more in ﬁsh postharvest processing and marketing than in ﬁshing but, with some notable exceptions, their power is still not equal. In larger scale processing plants, women dominate the workforces as laborers who nevertheless require skills and knowledge critical to product quality and thus market access, but women are rarely supervisors and managers. In small-scale ﬁsh supply chains, processing, marketing, and distributing the catch require access to ﬁsh that is commonly mediated by ﬁnancial, kinship, and other social relations. Access to ﬁsh is also subject to large changes as demand and trade shift and people in the postharvest sector have had to adjust their practices to secure the ﬁsh.

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In small-scale ﬁsheries, women often dominate postharvest processing and marketing activities in ways mediated by cultural, economic, and religious factors. For example, in Vietnam in the Mekong River Delta, women are nearly 90 percent of the intermediaries in the marketplace (Ruckes and Dang 2004). Women in India are active in ﬁsh marketing (Government of India 2006). Even in some predominately Islamic countries, for example, Indonesia and Malaysia, where religion encourages home-based women’s roles, women from lower socioeconomic groups are active in marketing. In other Islamic countries such as Bangladesh and in the Middle East, marketing is still more a male domain (Siason et al. 2002). In some West African countries and ethnic groups, for example, Ghana (Tetteh 2007), women, such as those from the Fante ethnic group, provide not only the labor but also the capital and support services for conveying ﬁsh from boats to processors and markets. Women in Senegal often supply credit to male ﬁshers and own the ﬁshing vessels and ﬁsh processing and trading equipment, for example, ﬁsh drying ovens and vans for transport (Ndiaye 1996; Sy 1996). In other West African countries such as Benin, Cameroon, and Ghana, women tend to have more limited ﬁnancial resources, and their ﬁshing relationships with men are of dependence and partnership (Satia and Wétohossou 1996). In Gambia, men control most operations, even buying dried ﬁsh back from their wives at minimal prices for sale (Satia and Wétohossou 1996). In east Africa, women ﬁsh traders and processors are only starting to gain greater status, for example, Zanzibar (ICSF 2006). In South America, women process and sell ﬁsh and provide support services such as net weaving to small-scale and family ﬁshing operations (Maneschy and Alvares 2005). In Uruguay, half the smallscale ﬁshmonger stalls are run by women, but men dominate in street selling (Josupeit 2004). In all 13 Caribbean countries surveyed, women retailed ﬁsh and, in nine countries, sold ﬁsh wholesale (Grant 2004). In small-scale and subsistence ﬁshing in the Paciﬁc Ocean, women handle and market the catch, often through poor market facilities. For example, on Tarawa, the main atoll of Kiribati, women work in substandard market and roadside conditions and have poor access to education and little say in ﬁsheries decisions (Tekanene 2006). Competition for ﬁsh has intensiﬁed as demand has grown and supply in many places has declined.

78

Overview

Thus, how women obtain ﬁsh to process and sell on has also had to evolve. A common trend due to increased trade and development of more distant markets has been for ﬁsh landings and processing to move to central, larger, more modern and higher standard facilities. This change has taken some ﬁsh out of the hands of women in ﬁshing communities but created factory jobs for other women (as described below). Some women have responded by creating new local market niches, such as taking lower value ﬁsh and bycatch from central ports to local markets. These local small-scale supply chains are complex and difﬁcult to track. For example, in Chennai, India, at least three categories of women ﬁsh marketers were identiﬁed: the young, and poorest, “head loaders” selling small quantities of ﬁsh to inland villages, the petty ﬁsh traders with more means and better links to the centralized markets, and the better-off dry ﬁsh traders who purchase larger quantities of ﬁsh (Post Harvest Fisheries Project, Department for International Development n.d.). All these traders were negatively affected by modernization and centralization in ﬁsh handling resulting from strong domestic and international trade. In African waters, legal and illegal European and Asian vessels compete for ﬁsh resources and ﬁshing space and have altered access to ﬁsh (Bennett et al. 2004; ICSF 2006). In Ghana, some women processors responded by obtaining trawler bycatch through social and innovative business links with foreign trawler company staff (Overa 2005). In a Benin study, 90 percent of transactions between the genders over ﬁsh, for example, when women obtain ﬁsh from male ﬁshers to process and sell, may have involved “transactional sex” (reported in Allison and Seeley 2004). Transactional sex is probably traded for tuna bycatch in Papua New Guinea (Anonymous 2008). “Fish for sex” needs to be understood in its wider social context, however, and seems to be more common in certain cultures, especially in inland African ﬁsheries, than elsewhere, where it has been revealed since 1997 due to attention to risk factors for HIV/AIDS (Bene and Marten 2008). In the case of ﬁsheries business development, in Taiwan, where women make up more than 33 percent of enterprise owners in all industries, some of the most innovative and largest ﬁsheries enterprises are owned by women (Chao et al. 2006). Domestic and foreign markets have helped create many jobs in the larger scale ﬁsh processing

factories, but these jobs typically offer low pay and are carried out in poor working conditions. In India, seafood processing plants in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, and Tamil Nadu states employed mainly young (21–30 years), unmarried migrant women from Kerala State, who receive few beneﬁts such as health care (Nishchith 2001). In African ﬁsh processing plants, workers, many of them women, also are rarely protected by labor rules and regulations (ICSF 2006; Okali and Holvoet 2007). Women were 83 percent of prawn processing plant laborers in factories surveyed in Sri Lanka (De Silva and Yamao 2006), and 90 percent of factory ﬂoor staff in a large Shanghai seafood plant (Wang and Zhou 2008). Yet, few women were supervisors or managers. Under these conditions, factory ﬂoor workers are difﬁcult to retain and keep motivated. Most are educated women whose skills are critical in quality control. In Sri Lanka, fair management practices were strong determinants of women’s work commitment (De Silva and Yamao 2006). In Argentina, southern Brazil, and Uruguay in South America, the majority of industrial-scale factory ﬂoor workers are women, but men outnumber women 10:1 among managers. Women’s positions are tenured, and they are preferred for quality control work (Josupeit 2004; Pereira 2002). In Chile, most factory ﬂoor workers are young to middleage women. Women’s occupational health risks are not adequately addressed, especially women’s special needs in the reproductive years and concerning family commitments (Savard and Fraga 2005). In a signiﬁcant number of cases, for example, in Region X, Chile, half the ﬁsh factory women workers are household heads (Savard and Fraga 2005), and in other countries one-quarter or more of the factory workers were the main family income earner, a higher rate than the 10 percent average among artisanal ﬁshing women (Josupeit 2004). In smallscale ﬁsh processing plants in Patagonia (Argentina), however, men outnumbered women nearly 2:1 (Josupeit 2004). In the Paciﬁc countries, women are rarely involved in tuna ﬁshing, but tuna processing factories have created many low-skilled women’s jobs. In the early 2000s, canneries provided about 5 percent of the total paid women’s employment in the Paciﬁc (Lambeth et al. 2002). In developed countries, women are also the main factory ﬂoor employees, but few are managers, even in countries with high gender equality

Gender Dimensions in Fisheries Management ratings, for example, Norway (Husmo 2005) and New Zealand (Lambeth et al. 2002).

5.2.3. Households, Society, and Rights Kinship, religion, and social and economic status all affect gender roles and relations and access to assets and inﬂuence, including in ﬁsheries management. Fishing and ﬁsheries associated people are often distinct from other sectors of society. Although their lives are linked to the mainstream society and economy, they may also be driven by the peculiarities of the resource and sector. Many ﬁshing families intermarry, linking men and women in ﬁshing and family relations. The extent of inﬂuence these family relations have on ﬁsheries transactions in the family and community varies greatly among cultures and families. Commonly, such as in West Africa, women’s labor is used in family enterprises (Okali and Holvoet 2007). For example, the Fante undertake international ﬁshing migrations as families and can cover Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire, Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria. In the last century, the migrations were even more extensive (Marquette et al. 2002). However, gender-disaggregated and other information is lacking for these ﬁsheries migrations, hindering understanding of their economic and social roles (Randall 2005). In Senegal and in some ethnic groups in West Africa, women and men have ﬁshing business relationships and mutual responsibilities that need not align with household and family ties and women can be organized into business interest groups such as federations (Satia and Wétohossou 1996). Many small-scale ﬁshing enterprises are family operations. Even women working in ﬁsh processing factories tend to come from ﬁshing families, for example, in Argentina and southern Brazil (Josupeit 2004). In many coastal-ﬁsheries–dependent households, all members rely on the ﬁsheries resource. In east coast Malaysia, more than 80 percent of women spouses of ﬁshers had no paid outside employment (Yeo et al. 2007). Religion can strongly inﬂuence gender roles in ﬁsheries. In Kerala State, India, Christians are more prevalent in ﬁsheries communities than in the population at large: 42.4 percent of ﬁsheries communities versus 19 percent in the state (Government of India 2006). The Indian census results indicated that Muslim women participate little in ﬁsh marketing,

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compared to the high rates of Hindu and Christian women (Kuriakose 2007). In Sri Lanka, Buddhist women rarely take part in ﬁshing and related activities, whereas Muslim and Christian women are active in ﬁsh drying, grading, and marketing (De Silva and Yamao 2006). Even though West African women tend to have good access to ﬁsh, capital, and equipment, they still lack inﬂuence over how the resources are managed (Bennett et al. 2004). In Japan, men usually own the titles to vessels and memberships of the ﬁsheries cooperative associations, and thus they have the access to loans and assistance from the associations and a say in policy making. Only 5.9 percent of association members are women (Siason et al. 2002). Women’s and minority rights in ﬁsheries are often nominally foreshadowed in national laws. The Mekong and Southeast Asian countries give women equal rights in national law, although many are silent on women’s rights in ﬁsheries (Siason et al. 2002). In South Asia, women’s rights are less well framed. Indian women have had to struggle to be included (Nayak et al. 2006). Also in India, ﬁshing communities fear that the new coastal management zone notiﬁcation, now in draft form from the Ministry of Environment and Forest, will threaten their informal rights to resources and living space, although, as written, the draft notiﬁcation protects these rights. In South America, women’s key social roles are conceived as those of mother and wife. Even unpaid ﬁshing work is branded “housekeeping” by family and society (Savard and Fraga 2005). Qualifying as a bone ﬁde member of a ﬁshing union, always decided by a man, makes ﬁshers eligible for government social security and is a valuable entitlement rarely extended to women (Maneschy and Alvares 2005). More commonly, women are the unpaid support operators, managing the ﬁnances and license bookwork and arranging ﬁsh sales. Despite European Union council directives starting in 1975 addressing equality between women and men, unpaid ﬁsheries work has largely escaped action. In 1998, France established the status of “collaborating spouses” for women (Frangoudes and Keromnes 2008). The new status gives wives access to social security and also co-ownership of vessels (Frangoudes and Keromnes 2008). However, lack of knowledge of the provisions and husband’s resistance has slowed uptake.

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Household assets—a measure of socioeconomic status—inﬂuence women’s most likely ﬁsheries activities. In India, women in households owning several ﬁshing craft were more likely to market ﬁsh and less likely to labor in ﬁsheries than were women in households with fewer or no craft (Kuriakose 2007). In Asia, the low socioeconomic status of much ﬁsheries work, including much unpaid labor, limits the beneﬁts of the work to the women (Siason et al. 2002). In effect, many poor women are subsidizing the ﬁsheries with their labor (Choo 2005). As in any sector of society, the wealthier actors in the ﬁsh supply chain have the necessary power, regardless of gender and ethnicity, to dominate, to the detriment of the poorer people (Okali and Holvoet 2007). Gender roles in society and ﬁsheries are not static. They are affected by social and economic changes for the individual, family, and community. In the indigenous Btsisi’ households of west Malaysia, environmental degradation from encroaching development destroyed natural resources, limited ﬁshing, and changed the traditional equitable relations between men and women (Nowak 2008). Iceland, recognized as a world leader in implementing individual transferable quotas, has experienced some negative social and economic impacts in those ﬁshing villages that have lost their quota through outward transfers. Women have lost unpaid and paid employment, and villages have lost ﬁsh processing industries (Skaptadottir and Proppe 2005). In the Miniocy Island tuna ﬁshing community of the Lakshadeep islands, India, gender roles changed as tuna market price, ﬁshing technology, and landing volumes changed (Ramchandran et al. 2007). Making dried tuna loins, hikimas, was originally an onerous but proﬁtable women’s job in this matrilineal society. In 1969, the practice was superseded by a tuna cannery, and then restarted in the 1990s to use surplus tuna after ﬁsh-aggregating devices increased the catch beyond cannery capacity and when hikimas prices rose. The women welcomed the return of their lucrative ﬁsh drying work, despite its drudgery. The female “talking space” around the work led to a whispering campaign that introduced compulsory HIV/AIDS testing for men as a condition of marriage. The disease was introduced through work on commercial tuna boats (Ramchandran et al. 2007). Indeed, men in ﬁsheries communities in many countries have among the highest HIV/AIDS rates,

due to their mobility, engaging in multiple sexual relations including paid sex, and lack of access by the men and their communities to health education and services (Kissling et al. 2005). The ﬁsheries gender bias persists in this problem, as well, as most studies only address men’s disease rates and not also those of women (Williams 2008).

5.2.4. Gender in Fisheries Institutions Institutions and organizations supporting ﬁsheries management, research, stakeholder representation, and advocacy are slowly achieving more inclusive and gender-balanced membership and stafﬁng. Examples of statistics on women’s stafﬁng levels show variations in central ﬁsheries management agencies: • Philippines Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (2000)–48 percent in central ofﬁce, 44 percent in regional ofﬁces, and 50 percent of executives (Siason et al. 2002) • Indian state ﬁsheries departments (2003)—15.4 percent women in southern states, 7.6 percent in northern states with variation among states (5.5–23.8 percent) (Nandeesha 2006) • U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (2002)—38 percent women permanent employees, 25 percent females in executive positions (www.nmfs.noaa.gov) • Europe (2000)—government and producer organizations, trade unions, scientists, trainers, and ﬁsheries nongovernmental organizations have 39.3 percent women staff members (Frangoudes and Mitchell 2006). Government management committees and councils frequently deﬁne their stakeholder representation but rarely include women’s interests or specify the committees’ gender compositions. For example, in the United States in 2006, where “fair and balanced” membership of ﬁsheries management councils is required by Congress, only 15 percent of members were women; in Norway in 2004, only 15 percent of the Norwegian and Russian members of the Norwegian Russian Fisheries Commission were women (Gerrard 2005). In research organizations and tertiary education, women sometimes fare better than in management agencies and committees/councils, for example, parity rates with men in South America (Josupeit 2004), or no worse, for example, 13.8 percent of

Gender Dimensions in Fisheries Management ﬁsheries college graduates and 16.4 percent of scientists in the central government research system in India (Nandeesha 2006). Gender participation often mirrors gender roles in ﬁsheries; for example, in University of the Philippines in the Visayas, men make up 100 percent of faculty in the Marine Fisheries group, and the sex ratio is almost reversed in the Institute of Fish Processing Technology (Siason et al. 2002). In 2001, women were 22 percent of all Asian Fisheries Society members. For Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan members, women were less than 10 percent; and for Brunei, Hong Kong, and Philippines members, women were more than 20 percent for each (Siason et al. 2002). A few ﬁsheries agencies have created special gender and ﬁsheries bodies. The Mekong River Commission (Mekong River Commission 2006) created a Network on Gender and Fisheries and gave it representation on the policy development committee, the Technical Advisory Body for Fisheries. Over the last 12 years, the Asian Fisheries Society, a mainstream ﬁsheries professional body, has hosted dedicated women and gender symposia in its triennial forums (Choo et al. 2006, 2008; Williams et al. 2001, 2002b). Women’s ﬁsheries support groups are being created, often by women themselves, to explore and promote women’s interests in ﬁsheries and in gender research, for example, Latin America and Caribbean (Pereira 2002), West Africa (Bennett et al. 2004), Europe (Frangoudes and Mitchell 2006), and Australia (Aslin et al. 2000).

5.3. GENDER IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BENEFITS OF FISHERIES MANAGEMENT To convince stakeholders and policy makers to embark on transitions to sustainable ﬁsheries, credible and measurable human dimensions of public and private beneﬁts are needed. Three common beliefs on gender in ﬁsheries have to be challenged in order to arrive at gender-sensitive beneﬁts measures: (1) that “women don’t ﬁsh,” (2) that recognizing the rights of the male household head will create sufﬁcient “trickle down” of beneﬁts to all household members, and (3) that the transition to modern ﬁshing and ﬁsh trading creates good work opportunities for women. Each of these beliefs is now addressed and means of creating more gender-sensitive measures of public and private beneﬁts suggested.

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5.3.1. “Women Don’t Fish” Women clearly do take part directly in ﬁshing, especially in inshore and shore-based ﬁshing. In some settings, such as in island and coastal ﬁsheries, women are very active, but their work is often considered just an extension of “housework.” They also commonly directly support ﬁshing by working on nets and keeping the boat’s books and maintenance schedules. As resources deplete, women sometimes take a greater part in ﬁshing than previously. Women’s direct employment in ﬁshing, currently nearly invisible in all countries, and all men’s employment should be deliberately counted in ﬁshery and national statistics. Explicit lists of ﬁshing activities to be covered may be needed to stimulate inclusion of all ﬁshing types. Only an explicit decision to collect gender-based, and also age-based, data will highlight the extent of use of resources that needs to be tracked. With respect to all employment in ﬁshing, good statistics should be maintained on morbidity and mortality rates of all ﬁshers, especially the most dangerous at-sea activities. A reduction in such rates would be a major private beneﬁt from management changes.

5.3.2. Recognizing Rights Most societies give explicit ﬁshing and membership rights ﬁrst to men, for example, Japan’s Fisheries Associations’ rights, and only recognize women under special conditions. Recognizing women’s roles and rights and including women in management decision making are important in creating greater gender equality. With few women members, key management bodies may not be sensitive to policies and practices that enable or disable women’s participation and formal and informal rights. Creating more equal representation not only satisﬁes social justice concerns but also could lead to better economic beneﬁts. Men and women behave differently in discharging their family obligations. Extensive research in rural communities has shown that households do not act as one in making decisions. Firth (1966) described the separate household budgets managed by ﬁshing household members in her study in the east coast of Malaysia. In agricultural areas, when resources controlled by women increase, the family beneﬁts more (Quisumbing and McClafferty 2006). Assuming this also applies in ﬁshing communities, empowering women should help lift household economies.

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Measures of private beneﬁts should include gender-disaggregated information on rights and formal committee/council memberships.

5.3.3. Opportunities for Women Among Modern Fish Supply Chains Women certainly participate strongly in ﬁsh processing and marketing, but they often work under poor conditions and have little say in management. Declining ﬁsheries resources and shifts to more centralized factories and markets have all altered labor and relationships in the supply chain. Major transitions to more sustainable ﬁsheries will create further transformation that needs to be tracked if the complete beneﬁts and costs are to be estimated. This will mean helping many people, including many women, get out of ﬁsheries altogether or reduce their dependence, and reducing catch in the ﬁrst instance. In addition to detailed participation rates in the ﬁsh processing and marketing sectors, measures of private beneﬁts should include the status and quality of jobs, and key gender-disaggregated health statistics, for example, body mass index, blood vitamin A levels, morbidity/mortality rates, and HIV/AIDS rates. Public supply chain beneﬁts could include a decline in the level of crime, domestic violence, and exploitation of workers in the ﬁsh supply chain. In tracking public beneﬁts from ﬁsheries, additional measures that should be considered are gender-disaggregated literacy and education rates and population sex ratios, as social equity indicators. These rates would need to be compared with reference rates in the society at large. Transitions to sustainable ﬁsheries present many challenge to ﬁsheries management. As the transition progresses in any ﬁshery, society will be looking for expected beneﬁts. Each society will have its own views of how the environmental, economic, and social beneﬁts balance. This chapter has drawn attention to the gender dimensions in marine ﬁsheries and challenged the view of the sector as being mainly a male domain. By indicating how a more gender-sensitive understanding of participation throughout the ﬁsh supply chain gives a better picture of the sector, I have suggested some gendersensitive indicators to track the public and private beneﬁts of ﬁsheries management.

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Neis, B., M. Binkley, S. Gerrard, and M.C. Maneschy (eds.) (2005). Changing Tides: Gender, Fisheries and Globalization. Halifax, Canada: Fernwood Publishing. Nishchith, V.D. (2001). Role and status of women employed in seafood processing units in India. In: M.J. Williams, M.C. Nandeesha, V.P. Corral, E. Tech, and P.S. Choo (eds.). International Symposium on Women in Asian Fisheries: Fifth Asian Fisheries Forum, pp. 127–135. Asian Fisheries Society, 13 November 1998, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish Center and Asian Fisheries Society. Novaczek, I., and J. Mitchell (2006). Constructing realities: Documenting women’s ﬁsheries in the Paciﬁc Islands. In: P.S. Choo, S.J. Hall, and M.J. Williams (eds.). Global Symposium on Gender and Fisheries, pp. 15–20. Seventh Asian Fisheries Forum, 1–2 December 2004, Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish Center and Asian Fisheries Society. Nowak, B. (2008). Environmental degradation and its gendered impact on coastal livelihoods options among Btsisi’ households of peninsular Malaysia. Development 51: 186–192. Okali, C., and K. Holvoet (2007). Negotiating Gender Changes within Fisheries Development. Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Programme. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Overa, R. (2005). When sisters become competitors: Coastal women’s innovative utilization of trawler by-catch in Ghana. In: B. Neis, M. Binkley, S. Gerrard, and M.C. Maneschy (eds.). Changing Tides: Gender, Fisheries and Globalization, pp. 136–151. Halifax, Canada: Fernwood Publishing. Pereira, G. (2002). Women in ﬁsheries in Latin America. In: M.J. Williams, N.H. Chao, P.S. Choo, K. Matics, M.C. Nandeesha, M. Shariff, E. Tech, and J.M.C. Wong (eds.). Global Symposium on Women in Fisheries: Sixth Asian Fisheries Forum, pp. 175–180. 29 November 2001, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Penang, Malaysia: World Fish Centre and Asian Fisheries Society. Porter, M., R. Mwaipopo, R. Faustine, and M. Mzuma (2008). Globalization and women in coastal communities in Tanzania. Development 51: 193–198. Post Harvest Fisheries Project, Department for International Development (n.d.). Small-Scale Fish Marketing in Tamil Nadu—An Alternate Fish Container for Women Petty Fish Traders. Information Bulletin 13. Chennai, India: Post Harvest Fisheries Project, Department for International Development. Power, N., and D. Harrisson (2005). The power of gender ideology in the face of resource

Gender Dimensions in Fisheries Management decline in Newfoundland, Canada. In: B. Neis, M. Binkley, S. Gerrard, and M.C. Maneschy (eds.). Changing Tides: Gender, Fisheries and Globalization, pp. 229–242. Halifax, Canada: Fernwood Publishing. Quisumbing, A.R., and B. McClafferty (2006). Food Security in Practice: Using Gender Research in Development. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute. Ramchandran, C.N., S. Rayappan, S.K. Puradam, and A.I. Muhasin (2007). Gendered spaces, technological change and sustainability: A comparative analysis of women in two ﬁsheries contexts. Paper presented at the second Global Symposium on Gender and Fisheries, eighth Asian Fisheries Forum, 21 November 2007, Kochi, India. Randall, S. (2005). Review of Literature on Fishing Migrations in West Africa—from a Demographic Perspective. Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Programme. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Razavi, S., and C. Miller (1995). From WID to GAD: Conceptual Shifts in the Women and Development Discourse. Occasional Paper 1. Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development United Nations Development Programme. Ruckes, E., and N.V. Dang (2004). Fish marketing in Viet Nam: Current situation and perspectives for development. In: A. Lem, U. Tietze, E. Ruckes, and R. Anrooy van (eds.). Fish Marketing and Credit in Vietnam, pp. 29–104. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 468. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Salz, P., E. Buisman, J. Smit, and B. de Vos (2006). Employment in the Fisheries Sector: Current Situation (FISH/2004/4). Wageningen, Netherlands: LEI BV and Framian BV. Satia, B.P., and C.Z. Wétohossou (eds.) (1996). Report of the Working Group on Women’s Key Role and Issues Related to Gender in Fishing Communities. IDAF/WP/79. Cotonou, Benin: Programme for the Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. Savard, K., and J. Fraga (2005). A bottom-up approach to the creation of a marine protected area in San Felipe, Mexico: Gender relations, governance mechanisms and globalization. In: B. Neis, M. Binkley, S. Gerrard, and M.C. Maneschy (eds.). Changing Tides: Gender, Fisheries and Globalization, pp. 169–181. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Sepez, J.A., B.D. Tilt, C.L. Package, H.M. Lazrus, and I. Vaccaro (2005). Community Proﬁles for North Paciﬁc Fisheries–Alaska. NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-AFSC-160.

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Seattle, Wash.: U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service. Sharma, C. (2007). Getting the count right. Yemaya 24: 2. Siason, I.M., E. Tech, K.I. Matics, P.S. Choo, M. Shariff, E.S. Heruwati, T. Susilowati, N. Miki, A.B. Shelly, K.G. Rajabharshi, R. Ranjit, P.P.G.N. Siriwardena, M.C. Nandeesha, and M. Sunderarajan (2002). Women in ﬁsheries in Asia. In: M.J. Williams, N.H. Chao-Liao, P.S. Choo, K. Matics, M.C. Nandeesha, M. Shariff, I. Siason, E. Tech, and J.M.C. Wong (eds.). Global Symposium on Women in Fisheries, pp. 21–48. Sixth Asian Fisheries Forum, 29 November 2001, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish Center and Asian Fisheries Society. Skaptadottir, U.D., and H. Proppe (2005). Global processes, localities and gender identities: A feminist perspective on changes in Icelandic ﬁsheries. In: B. Neis, M. Binkley, S. Gerrard, and M.C. Maneschy (eds.). Changing Tides: Gender, Fisheries and Globalization, pp, 152– 166. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Sotto, F.B., C. Laron, M. Lim, and T. Heeger (2001). Women’s participation in sapyaw (haul seine) ﬁshery on the eastern coast of Barangay Sillon, Bantayan Island, Cebu, Philippines. In: M.J. Williams, M.C. Nandeesha, V.P. Corral, E. Tech, and P.S. Choo (eds.). International Symposium on Women in Asian Fisheries. Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish Center and Asian Fisheries Society. Sustainable Fisheries Livelihood Program (2007). Gender Approach Training Manual for Community-Based Organizations in Fishing Communities. DFID-FAO GCP/INT/735/UK. Cotonou, Benin: Sustainable Fisheries Livelihood Program in West Africa. Sy, M.S. (1996). Women’s role in the ﬁshing community of Joal in Senegal. In: B.P. Satia and C.Z. Wétohossou (eds.). Report of the Working Group on Women’s Key Role and Issues Related to Gender in Fishing Communities. IDAF/WP/79. Cotonou, Benin: Programme for the Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. Tarisesei, J., and I. Novaczek (2006). Gender and generation: Crucial aspects of local ﬁsheries management on Lelepa Island, Vanuatu. In: P.S. Choo, S.J. Hall, and M.J. Williams (eds.). Global Symposium on Gender and Fisheries, pp. 43–50. Seventh Asian Fisheries Forum, 1–2 December 2004, Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish Center and Asian Fisheries Society. Tekanene, M. (2006). The women ﬁsh traders of Tarawa, Kiribati. In: P.S. Choo, S.J. Hall, and M.J. Williams (eds.). Global Symposium on

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Gender and Fisheries, pp. 115–120. Seventh Asian Fisheries Forum, 1–2 December 2004, Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish Center and Asian Fisheries Society. Tetteh, A.S. (2007). Women’s Activities in the Ghanaian Fishery: The Role of Social Capital. Master thesis, Norwegian College of Fishery Science, University of Tromsø, Norway. Vunisea, A. (1996). Fiji: Women in ﬁsheries—up against several barriers. Samudra July 26: 33. Wang, Q., and Y. Zhou (2008). Contributing signiﬁcantly: Asia, People’s Republic of China. Yemaya 28: 5–7. Williams, M.J. (2008). Why look at ﬁsheries through a gender lens? Development 51: 180–185. Williams, M.J, N.H. Chao, P.S. Choo, K. Ma, M.C.N. Nandeesha, M. Shariff, E. Tech, and J.M.C. Wong (2002b). Global Symposium on Women in Fisheries: Sixth Asian Fisheries Forum. 29 November 2001, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Penang, Malaysia: World Fish Centre and Asian Fisheries Society. Williams, M.J., M.C. Nandeesha, V.P. Corral, E. Tech, and P.S. Choo (eds.) (2001). International Symposium on Women in Asian Fisheries: Fifth Asian Fisheries Forum. Asian Fisheries Society, 13 November 1998, Chiang

Mai, Thailand. Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish Center and Asian Fisheries Society. Williams, M.J., S.B. Williams, and P.S. Choo (2002a). From women in ﬁsheries to gender and ﬁsheries. In: N.H. Chao-Liao, P.S. Choo, K. Matics, M.C. Nandeesha, M. Shariff, I. Siason, E. Tech, M.J. Williams, and J.M.C. Wong (eds.). Global Symposium on Women in Fisheries. Sixth Asian Fisheries Forum, 29 November 2001, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish Center and Asian Fisheries Society. Williams, S. (1996). Women’s role in ﬁshing communities: The cases of Koko, Delta State in Nigeria. In: B.P. Satia and C.Z. Wétohossou (eds.). Report of the Working Group on Women’s Key Role and Issues Related to Gender in Fishing Communities. IDAF/WP/79. Cotonou, Benin: Programme for the Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. Yeo, B.H., D. Squires, K. Ibrahim, H. Gjertsen, S.K. Syed Mohd Kamil, R. Zulkiﬂi, T. Groves, M.C. Hong, and C.H. Tan (2007). Fisher Proﬁles and Perceptions of Sea Turtle-Fishery Interactions: Case Study of East Coast Peninsular Malaysia. Discussion Series No. 6. Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish Center.

6 Governance, Science, and Society: The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries SERGE MICHEL GARCIA

globalization, poverty, and food insecurity. Against the backdrop of general degradation of the human environment and biodiversity (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005), there is therefore ample matter for concern, and ﬁsheries have become a main focus of societal attention, an emblem of the need for the rehabilitation of nature. Because of their low economic proﬁle, however, they could also become an emblematic sacriﬁcial goat on the conservation altar with catastrophic consequences for food security in many areas. Adding speciﬁcations to the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] 1995), the ecosystem approach for ﬁsheries (EAF) was formalized in 2001 against this negative perspective (FAO 2003). Proposals for improved governance developed in parallel, adding speciﬁcation on the governance aspects of the guidelines (see Reid et al. 2006). The implications of EAF for governance stem from three sources of complexity related to (1) the ﬁshery system, (2) the diversity and dynamics of the institutions involved, and (3) the strong inﬂuence of external drivers. This chapter is not a how-to guide for managers. It will touch brieﬂy on the general shift in development policies leading to EAF and on the historical connections of the approach. It will then describe the complexity of the ﬁshery systems and the implications for governance before reviewing a number of emerging issues.

6.1. INTRODUCTION Since the early 1980s, concern about ﬁsheries unsustainability has grown as resources continued to decline, despite the adoption of the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention in 1982. The challenge faced by ﬁsheries, however, reﬂects a centuries-old fundamental problem of human society in its relation with nature and renewable resources. Five centuries ago, Leonardo da Vinci was convinced that “Nothing will remain on the earth or under the earth and the water that is not pursued, removed, or damaged.” The Convention on Biological Diversity’s 2006 Global Biodiversity Outlook report indicates that “we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of Earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago.” Homo sapiens have been portrayed both as an endangered species and as the main evolutionary force behind environmental and resources degradation (Barbault 2006; Palumbi 2001; Vitousek 1997). Even though Hilborn (2007) objects to the excessively pessimistic “litany” about ﬁsheries, numerous issues clutter the ﬁsheries agenda: overﬁshing, overcapacity, illegal ﬁshing, user rights and equity, discarding practices, endangered species, risk of extinction, habitat degradation, biodiversity loss, ecosystem modiﬁcations, decreasing resilience, alien species, eutrophication and contamination, chaotic coastal policies, recognition of nonmarket values, emergence of ﬁshery ethics, climate change, 87

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Overview 1965

Public policy

Centralized Bureaucratic

Dev. policy

Fordist dev. model Exploration / Exploitation Determinism & Equilibrium Prediction

National development Infrastructures Industrialization

Fishery policy

Context

1945

Discovery Development / Expansion

1985 Uncertainty / Flexibility Consolidation

Decentralized Contractual

2005 SD & Globalization Integration Complexity & Variability Foresight Liberalized Systemic Participative

Structural adjustment Low tariff Barriers

Privatization Equity/Poverty Rights

Management Optimization

Governance Sustainability

FIGURE 6.1 International context of ﬁsheries governance development. (Slightly modiﬁed from Rey-Valette and Cunningham 2005)

6.2. SHIFTING POLICY CONTEXT Fisheries represent a minor economic sector evolving in and conditioned by larger and more inﬂuential national policies and programs. The present governance system was born after World War II, accompanying a formidable expansion of ﬁsheries in the northern hemisphere, under a “Fordist” industrial development model, governed under a centralized, top-down, bureaucratic paradigm promoting exploration, technological innovation, expansion, and industrialization (ﬁgure 6.1). In the wake of the 1972 United Nations Summit on Human Environment in Stockholm and the Bruntland Report (World Conference on Environment and Development 1987), ﬁsheries, as well as many other sectors, shifted progressively under a sustainable development paradigm, looking for improved environmental stewardship, precaution and foresight, cross-sectoral integration, participation, subsidiarity, and decentralization. In the process, societal objectives have shifted from the sustainable development of ﬁsheries to the contribution of the sector to national sustainable development. This has increased the complexity of governance strategies, calling for a rapid adaptation of decision making and its supporting research (Garcia and Charles 2007). The changes affecting ﬁsheries are a ripple of a much larger phenomenon that is providing positive energy for change as well as constraints to it. The sustainable development principles reﬂected in

EAF show the inﬂuence of large-scale development policies on ﬁsheries and the ﬁshery sector response to these policies, conditioned by the enabling or constraining environment they provide. Conversely, an EAF ﬁshery management strategy can be operational only if nested in a national development and environmental policy based on the same principles, providing high-level political legitimacy and the needed enabling legal and institutional environment.

6.3. EAF: THE MODERN UTOPIA EAF is usually seen as a modern development in governance. Its two main pillars, the natural and human systems, link it clearly with the concept of sustainable development that emerged from the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the 1992 Rio Summit. However, the roots of a movement for human development in harmony with nature can be traced back to the antique utopia of Atlantis.1 Berneri (1950) and Bourg (2003) stress that in this famous myth of the sunken land, the Atlantis society looked for societal renovation through social legislation, religious reforms and spreading of knowledge, symbolizing the long quest of humanity for peace, beauty, justice and happiness, in harmony with nature. Building on the utopian tradition, Francis Bacon, in his 1626 book The New Atlantis, reinvented a perfect society developed around three pillars: (1) quantitative science,

The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries to improve knowledge and ﬁnd solutions; (2) wise government, to organize and guide the people; and (3) religion, as the set of values needed to bound human action. Replacing religion by environmental and human ethics, the Atlantis concept looks very similar to EAF with its rigorous knowledge building, democratic governance, and recognition of societal values. Since Bacon, we have learned more about the limitations of conventional science and top-down governance (Holling 1993; Ludwig et al. 1993), and the New Atlantis concept seems to have been reformulated in the New Alliance of Nobel laureate Elia Prigogine (Prigogine and Stengers 1979), who, recognizing the fundamental consequences of natural and human complexity on both science and governance, advocated a new relation between the two. This vision has had an overwhelming inﬂuence on the development of what is now called sustainability science or management science. Under EAF, ﬁsheries are no longer a simple interaction between a stock, a ﬂeet, and a market, as conventionally assumed. They are one of the users of a productive ecosystem providing a range of goods and services to a range of users at a cost to the ecosystem in terms of abundance, structure, resilience, and so forth. The inherent limits on the goods and services that can be provided sustainably, the trade-offs between them, the competition between users, and the system resilience represent central problems for modern ﬁshery governance.

6.4. SYSTEM COMPLEXITY The systemic nature of ﬁsheries was recognized by scientists decades ago, but the attempts to take this evidence into consideration in day-to-day management processes have been slow, patchy, and of limited effectiveness. EAF forces a more comprehensive understanding of the ﬁshery systems components and relations (Garcia et al. 2003), which appear as coupled human and natural complex subsystems (or social-ecological systems; Reid et al. 2006). These systems have complex properties that need to be taken into account in their analysis, exploitation, and governance (Charles 2001; Garcia and Charles 2007). The recognition of the systemic nature of ﬁsheries2 calls for a broad opening of conventional ﬁshery science to both ecology and social sciences. It brings up a number of interconnected challenges

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related to the phenomena characterizing complex systems, such as the following: 1. Delayed responses obtained well after a measure or factor is applied 2. Remote connections far away from the area of initial impact, including beyond the agreed system boundaries (transboundary effects) 3. Sensitivity to external drivers at national, regional, or global level 4. Feedback control loops that adjust mechanisms based on responses to them 5. Many interconnected scales in time and space, to consider simultaneously; a piece of knowledge obtained at one scale may be irrelevant at another 6. Self-organization, or the capacity of the system to reorganize in unpredictable ways 7. Loss of universality, and transferability of experience between systems 8. Nonlinearity of cause–effect relations 9. Multidirectional responses: one cause, many effects; one effect, many causes 10. Multiple solutions may exist to any problem 11. Multiple transient equilibriums between which the system may ﬂip 12. Loss of reversibility after a stimulus is removed (loss of resilience) 13. Reduced predictability and reduced controllability because of the above 14. Different perspectives of different actors with different perceptions Garcia and Charles (2007) provide a detailed review of the numerous facets of this “complexity syndrome” and of the governance implications of these characteristics. Obviously, the resulting uncertainty has always been there and in part explains past management failures. EAF and a systems approach to ﬁsheries only force their being taken into account, complicating the task, but ideally reducing the risk of mistakes. The solution is in a further coadaptation of science and governance.

6.5. SYSTEMIC GOVERNANCE Having to deal with systemic complexity, governance must be, and indeed is, systemic, with properties that, in many respects, will recall that of the ﬁshery system of which governance is an integral part.3

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Overview

6.5.1. Deﬁnition The term governance has been widely used and each group of actors sees it slightly differently. Many deﬁnitions are therefore available (e.g., in the FAO glossary, www.fao.org/ﬁ/glossary/default. asp). Berkes (2008) deﬁnes ﬁshery governance as “a complex system in which social, economic and political organization of interacting and interdependent groups, and organs, public and private, connected by doctrines, ideas, and principles, intend to serve a common purpose: the regulation of the use of ﬁshery resources.” A synthesis of the deﬁnitions available leads to deﬁning governance as a systemic concept relating to the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority. It encompasses: (i) the guiding principles and goals of the sector, both conceptual and operational; (ii) the ways and means of organization and coordination of the action; (iii) the infrastructure of socio-political, economic and legal institutions and instruments; (iv) the nature and

modus operandi of the processes; (iv) the actors and their roles; and (v) the policies, plans and measures. (Garcia 2007a)

6.5.2. Responsibilities The central components and roles of governance can better be highlighted by its responsibilities. Governance is expected to establish overriding principles and objectives; maintain and adapt the institutional infrastructure and instruments; develop policy and regulatory frameworks, plans, norms, and regulations; connect government with civil society; organize and coordinate collective action; legitimate and balance stakeholders interaction; harmonize individual, sectoral and societal perspectives; maintain productive socioecological systems and social order; enforce decisions and regulations; maintain coherence across jurisdictional, space, and time scales; deﬁne the conditions for allocation of power, resources, and beneﬁts; interact with other governance systems; and maintain the capacity to learn and change.

Private arena

Public arena

Administration

Constitution

Media

Other citizens Enterprises Parliament Households Government

NGOs Fishery Associations

Statistics

Legislation

Fisheries Authority

Fishery research

Regulation

Other stakeholders

Regional councils

Traditional rules Taboos

Management Agency Courts

Fishery chambers

Fishery Committees

Fishing operations

6.2 Schematic representation of ﬁsheries governance structures. (Reprinted from Garcia and Cochrane 2008, with permission)

FIGURE

The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries

6.5.3. Structural Complexity Governance requires an interaction among three frameworks: (1) a normative framework to elaborate the ﬁshery policy, plans, laws, and regulations; (2) an operational framework to control and regulate ﬁshery production; and (3) a cognitive framework to provide the decision-support information (Minta and Settle 2003). Each framework is complex, involves many institutions and processes, and interacts in many ways with the broader environment. With notable differences between countries, these frameworks involve both the public and the private sector. While the ﬁrst one is often described in management guidelines; the second tends to be ignored despite its overwhelming inﬂuence, through negotiations and lobbying, and through its interpretation of regulations and degree of compliance. Taking a closer view of the governance structure, the administration and regulation of the sector result from the interaction of a complex web of institutions from the public and private sector, and some hybrid ones, connected by formal and informal relations, with their own dynamics and spheres of inﬂuence (ﬁgure 6.2). Every component in ﬁgure 6.2 could be further detailed to show structure and processes at lower scales. Other institutions and drivers with signiﬁcant inﬂuence exist at regional4 and global5 levels.

6.5.4. Functional Complexity The structural complexity of ﬁshery governance is obviously reﬂected in its functional complexity. As speciﬁed in the deﬁnition above, the governance of a complex social-ecological system can only be systemic (Garcia and Charles 2007). Figure 6.2 gives only a poor representation of the complexity and dynamics of governance. However, it may help to realize that, contrary to what seems conventionally assumed, governance is not a simple top-down linear process in which scientiﬁc advice, requested by a decision maker, is turned into a set of rules to be complied with by controlled ﬁshers. Its performance results from the complex dynamics of a set of organizations with their own personality, rules, and behavior, connected by processes that are only partly controlled, transparent, and predictable. When structurally deﬁcient, it will not be ﬁxed by any single panacea, be it user rights or marine protected areas (MPAs), and good governance will result from the interplay and balance between

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sets of legitimate and equitable measures, incentives, and disincentives designed through adequate processes. Governance is needed at various scales of time and space. Conventional management is operational and needed at seasonal/annual and ﬁshery level. Multiannual management plans are useful to cope with environmental variability, investment planning, and area-based multiﬂeet management. Longer term scales are relevant addressing strategic issues such as sectoral infrastructures development or the management of large marine ecosystems. Governance rests also on different levels of institutions. As illustrated by ﬁgure 6.2, at one end of the spectrum, it complies with the national constitution and is under parliamentary control. At the other end, it accounts for local informal regulations, taboos, and cultural values. Information ﬂows between scales and levels (e.g., in terms of demands, instructions, perceptions, reactions, and pressures) are rarely completely understood and optimized. The distribution of power across institutions and at different scales (e.g., through decentralization or devolution) is an extremely important factor. The information ﬂowing across the structure can be distorted or misunderstood as it moves across different backgrounds, cultures, and prejudices. Decisions at one level or in relation to a particular constituency may have unexpected effects at another level or for another constituency. Such effects might be delayed by the speciﬁc dynamics of each institution, the sector, and the resource. They generate reactions (feedback loops), some of which might be unexpected. New components may emerge unexpectedly as shown by the intrusion of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the media, and courts in ﬁsheries governance during the last decade. In addition, ﬁshery governance is affected by a number of “external” inﬂuences: • Nonﬁshery institutions with broader or different agendas such as international organizations (e.g., the International Union for Conservation of Nature [IUCN], the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora [CITES], the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, or the Convention on Biological Diversity); academia, which forms the scientiﬁc advisers; the media; the courts; and the civil society with its environmental NGOs, consumer associations, and so forth.

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Overview • National economic, social, environmental, foreign affairs, and maritime policies that the ﬁshery manager must implement in ﬁsheries and that may enable or constrain the ﬁshery-speciﬁc policy. In inland ﬁsheries and aquaculture, for example, the national policies for water use, conservation, agriculture, and energy have crucial consequences for the ﬁshery sector. • Other governance arenas: that of the state, the role of which is decreasing rapidly; that of the market and of civil society, which are growing in importance; and that of the scientiﬁc community, which maintains an important mandate. All of these act at national, local, and global level with their own structures, objectives, rules, and processes.

Fishery governance is therefore structurally diversiﬁed, functionally complex, de facto multicentered, interactive, and evolving. It is difﬁcult to accurately predict the outcome of its decision-making processes, adding administrative uncertainty to the system. Because decisions are implemented by actors with their own idiosyncrasies operating in a changing and variable natural environment, their ﬁnal outcomes (in the human or natural subsystems) are only weakly predictable. Its long-term evolution is neither intuitive nor entirely controlled as it evolves through transitional equilibriums, often triggered by systemic crises affecting the resources or human systems (Gallopin 2002). A key consequence is what Charles (2001) refers to as the “fallacy of controllability” and the need to replace the conventional governance expectations of predictability and control by uncertainty (foresight and precaution) and self-organization. It is also necessary to accept that ﬁshery crises may have multiple causes; that measures may have multiple effects and that multiple management solutions are potentially available to solve them; that it may not always be possible to objectively decide on the best one without years of testing; and that negotiations with the actors will therefore be necessary to develop a broader legitimacy. We must also accept that solutions will generally be suboptimal and can only be progressively improved through adaptive management.

Substantial principles relate to the nature of governance. From that point of view, good governance is committed, demonstrating political will. It is considered legitimate because it is based on law and conducted through democratic and representative institutions and processes. It is credible because of its legitimacy and deterrent enforcement. It is transparent in relation to objectives and decisions and nested in supportive national economic, social, and environmental policies that articulate clearly the expectations of the central government in these ﬁelds, in the ﬁshery sector.6 It is accountable to the sector and the public and seeks to satisfy societal expectations and motivations. Aware of uncertainty and related risk, it is precautionary, applying available guidelines (FAO 1996) (ﬁgure 6.3). Good governance fulﬁls a duty of care and acts responsibly to protect people and ecosystems. It looks for equity, for example, in relation to allocation of rights, duties, and wealth. It is science based, fosters interdisciplinary science, and integrates traditional knowledge. Finally, its decisions account for traditional values as well as emerging ethics. Procedural principles relate to the way in which governance operates. Recognizing inherent uncertainty, good governance is explicitly procedural, paying attention as much to ﬂexible processes as to rigid norms. It is context sensitive, adapted to local conditions. It has built-in quality controls and oversight mechanisms based on, among other things, regular

6.5.5. Governance Principles The systemic nature of the governance needed for EAF requires the adherence to a number of principles that Reid et al. (2006) subdivide as substantial and procedural. The two sets are obviously interrelated.

6.3 Types of measures as a function of risk. (Modiﬁed from Funtowicz and Ravetz 1995; Garcia 1996)

FIGURE

The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries performance assessment, and it is open to public scrutiny. It operates simultaneously at all relevant scales (of time and space) and institutional levels ensuring coordination and coherence. It targets speciﬁc objectives and priorities but remains ﬂexible and reactive, for example, actively looking for feedback signals and developing scenario analyses. It has the mechanisms and powers needed to resolves emerging conﬂicts. It looks for effectiveness and uses indicators to measure performance. It ensures active participation at all stages, from data collection and analysis to implementation, bringing in as many stakeholders as necessary and possible without stalling the processes. Finally, it is affordable and introduces measures based on an analysis of costs and beneﬁts.

6.5.6. The Science/Decision Interface Policy and management choices are informed by science. During the last century, ﬁshery science and governance have developed and coevolved, albeit perhaps not smoothly,7 adapting capacity, modus operandi, and approaches to the requirement of the other, in response to societal requirements (Catanzano and Rey 1997; Garcia 1996; Rice 2005). EAF calls for an acceleration of that coevolution. The effective recognition of ﬁshery system complexity and of its interconnections with its broader political, social, legal, and environmental

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environment requires, as part of an extended precautionary approach, a number of simultaneous and interlinked shifts of ﬁshery research toward (1) more complete and interconnected information systems; (2) more interdisciplinary frameworks for scientiﬁc enquiry; (3) strongly participative assessments and decision-making processes integrating informal knowledge and stakeholders views and perspectives;8 (4) where possible, the use of more complex models combining qualitative and quantitative information; (5) where appropriate, the use of a comprehensive suite of indicators; (6) the nesting of short-term predictions in longer term future scenarios; (7) the coelaboration of a broader range of policy options; and (8) systematic auditing of research (and management) performance. One central implication, already identiﬁed in Prigogine’s New Alliance, is the need for a much stronger interface between natural and social sciences, and between them and society. The interdisciplinary challenge is in developing coherence between the visions and the advice of the ecological, economic, social, legal, and institutional disciplines; between the scientiﬁc and traditional knowledge, integrating perceptions and values at the appropriate stages of the integrated assessment and advisory process (Garcia and Charles 2007) (ﬁgure 6.4). A fundamental step for decision-support systems that are already institutionalized will be to accept (and indeed promote) involvement of a full

FIGURE 6.4 Conceptual representation of an integrated advisory process. (Modiﬁed from Garcia and Charles 2007; inspired and redrawn from Pahl-Wostl 2002)

94

Overview

range of social sciences (e.g., geographers, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, economists) as important components of decision-making support (Jentoft 1998).

6.6. SELECTED EMERGING ISSUES 6.6.1. A Heavy Agenda EAF implementation experience is still limited and overriding objectives often not yet fully agreed. The areas for managers’ intervention are numerous, leading to a potentially discouraging wish list. Nonetheless, a number of steps can be considered starting from priority ﬁsheries with high socioeconomic or environmental stakes. The ﬁrst step is to develop an EAF management plan for the most important productive systems. To this end, the position of all stocks and productive habitats must be assessed and the effectiveness of the conventional approach audited. A minimal system of indicators should be established and rebuilding plans adopted for resources having reached the precautionary limit. Destructive ﬁshing practices should be banned. Plans to reduce overcapacity should be developed, using user rights and forms of compensation as incentives and eliminating subsidies. Critical habitat management must be introduced, for example, using marine protected areas and rotational exploitation schemes. Environmental impact assessment should start being introduced (e.g., in new ﬁsheries) and progressively generalized. The EAF plan should institutionalize some form of auditing for performance evaluation, as part of an adaptive management process. The use of a vessel monitoring system should be considered where it can be afforded. Last but not least, research on critical dimensions of the exploited ecosystems should be improved and integrated assessment and advisory systems put in place. Among the research tasks, it is urgent to identify indicators and reference values corresponding to acceptable levels of impact and deﬁne the viability envelope of the system. This wish list should obviously be adapted to the means available and actions spread over time to adjust the burden to capacity. Achieving this implies also developing the institutions required, in particular to implement the type of participative and adaptive processes needed to cope with the added burden brought about by EAF.

Strong collaborations are needed with the ministry of environment, for example, to pool available resources (e.g., jointly test MPAs). Capacity building is crucial, particularly if and where management responsibilities will be decentralized.

6.6.2. Facing Known Problems Numerous management challenges have already emerged (or reemerged, e.g., from experience gained through Integrated Coastal Areas Management [ICAM] implementation) during the last few years. It is important, for example, to identify potential obstacles to EAF implementation very early in the process and to prepare for them. It is essential to build a speciﬁc implementation capacity, including systems of monitoring and information management (e.g., geographical information systems), analytical and complex modeling skills, and participatory research and decision-making mechanisms. Scientiﬁc information will always be incomplete or uncertain, and it is urgent to develop approaches usable in data-limited situations. Building resilience (Gunderson and Folke 2005) is a priority to rebuild ﬁsheries and adapt to climate change and globalization. Getting a large range of stakeholders, with different perspectives, to agree on a common strategy and action plan, priorities, objectives, constraints, allocations of costs and beneﬁts, and a transitional pathway is certainly one of the key pathways and challenges. Institutionalizing the implementation process (e.g., through a framework law) would help overcoming bureaucratic inertia as well as sectoral and intragovernmental fragmentation. A major challenge is in bringing together the various streams of research needed (interdisciplinarity) and the traditional knowledge of the various stakeholders. The hard core challenge of EAF (as for conventional management) remains the subtle articulation between conservation and allocation in a multistakeholder environment (Garcia and Boncoeur 2007). The issue will be particularly thorny where ﬁsheries operate in a mix of competing and synergetic economic activities, in coastal areas and watersheds, or where resources are shared. Hardin’s metaphor of the “tragedy of commons” (Hardin 1998) is still valid, but the relative failure of the ICAM programs does not tell us much about our present capacity to efﬁciently allocate rights in a multistakeholder environment, particularly if predators and dependent species are added to the list of “users” and

The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries shares must be put aside for conservation and “insurance” purposes. The problem increases with the number of sovereign states involved and the ﬂuidity of the resources. Despite now having more speciﬁc international instruments at disposal and substantial efforts to deal with illegal ﬁshing and biodiversity conservation beyond national jurisdiction at the FAO and the United Nations, the statement by the late John Gulland (1984) that “there are no international arrangements to facilitate the necessary trade offs . . . to manage . . . according to an ecosystem approach” remains largely valid today at regional and international level.

6.6.3. Ideological Differences Conventional environmental conservation and ﬁsheries management, both ﬁnally heading to sustainable use, are on a collision course, with two different paradigms, two different ministries and administrations, two different decision processes, two different strategies, and two different sets of instruments, resulting in rigidity, redundancy, potential misunderstanding, institutional overlap, and ﬁghts for power (Garcia et al. 2003). It is still too early to conclude whether the result of this institutional “convergence” will lead to a soft “fusion” or a traumatic “collision,” and MPAs might be the test ground for the necessary syncretism. A collision would probably lead to the demise of ﬁsheries as a food producing industry and a food security problem in many parts of the world. An important source of potential disagreements for the manager is in the degree of human intervention that will be considered acceptable in ecological engineering, ecosystem enhancement, restoration, and conversion. The use of techniques such as species introductions, culling, and restocking are particularly controversial (Walters and Martell 1994) arguably because of the lack of capacity to predict their exact consequences. A related sore point may also emerge about the concept of societally “acceptable” impact. The determination of the latter is absolutely necessary to ﬁx the boundaries between outright protection and sustainable use and may not be scientiﬁcally straightforward.

6.6.4. Hard Choices The central challenge of all systems of governance and, indeed, their main political function, lies in the hard choices to be made with signiﬁcantly

95

different environmental, social, economic, and political implications. Some of the alternatives to be faced relate to the use of discretionary power or of participative processes for decision making, the priority to be given national agendas versus international ones, the balance between short- and long-term gains as well as economic beneﬁts and other societal values, the risk to be taken for innovation and the precaution needed to avoid possible catastrophes, and the development of adaptability to change and the assurance of consistency and stability. Trade-offs are faced, for example, between domestic and foreign markets or between foreign exchange and national nutritional goals, aquaculture development and capture ﬁsheries rationalization, small-scale and large-scale ﬁsheries, and capturing market opportunities versus protection of the local consumer. In reality, what is often presented as opposed strategies are the two extremes of a range of options within which intermediate and hybrid solutions are potential stepping stones providing alternative pathways for change. More than a matter of hard choices, most of these alternatives are a matter of degree and opportunity (timing).

6.7. SYNTHESIS AND DISCUSSION The EAF prescriptions do not signal a completely new management approach, and obvious connections exist with integrated coastal and watershed management or sustainable livelihoods approaches. EAF reﬂects a centuries-old societal requirement for a more responsible human relation with nature. Its implementation requires considering simultaneously the natural and human (including governance) components of the ﬁshery system, their complexity, low predictability, inner capacity for self-organization, and susceptibility to external drivers. Resilience, adaptability, precaution, participation, integration, empowerment, conservation, and so forth, are key ingredients of success. The principles of good science and good governance are now available, and their implementation in EAF is being tested. A number of issues have emerged, and the critical factors of success have been identiﬁed. The governance priority is in accelerating the implementation, building the scientiﬁc alliance, improving the sector capacity to participate, balancing the tensions, interests, and perceptions in systemwide effort toward sustainability.

96

Overview

The main challenge is in identifying case-dependent optimal pathways for change. The shift toward a more risk-conscious science and governance is the necessary consequence of the emerging conscience of the system complexity and of the limits of knowledge. The establishment of more integrated advisory and decision processes (Garcia 2007a) would improve the platform for an ordered shift. As agreed by FAO members, EAF can only be a progressive extension of the conventional ﬁshery management paradigm simply because ﬁshery systems are embedded in broader policy frames and institutional structures that also need to evolve. It grows organically, improving existing processes and institutions, adding more strategic layers, within which enhanced conventional processes are embedded, evaluated, and enhanced, accelerating the evolution. As a consequence EAF governance is “bipolar.” Put under tension by a complex societal demand, it must address both local and global issues, at large and small scale. It is strategic and operational. It deals with the ecosystems and stocks. It must combine the systemic and reductionist points of view at different space and time scales. It deals with the long term and the short term and strategic planning with operational management. It is both bottom up and top down. It recognizes complexity but must use simple tools. Its interdisciplinary advice needs disciplinary excellence. It brings in traditional knowledge reinforcing scientiﬁc rigor. It calls for quantitative predictions and qualitative prospective analyses. In summary, EAF governance faces the challenge of being both visionary and pragmatic.

Conventional single-stock management started to evolve toward EAF decades ago, adding multispecies considerations to it, and resulting in little global application (ﬁgure 6.5). Overall, conventional ﬁsheries management has remained a Cartesian optimization paradigm, within the New Atlantis vision of Francis Bacon. The introduction of the precautionary approach brought about the recognition of part of the uncertainty affecting the system (e.g., the use of Bayesian assessment methods) and the need for contingency planning (as in the use of harvest control rules). EAF in the strict sense requires much more evolved processes of research and governance. In its early implementation stages, it seems essentially concerned with impact limitation, for example, focusing on reducing bycatch and protecting biodiversity and emblematic species. While these purely bioecological measures are obviously steps in the right direction, they address the consequences of an incomplete governance system more than the root causes (institutional ﬂaws and overcapacity). The full-ﬂedged EAF, with its complete recognition of the systemic nature of ﬁsheries, the close collaboration of natural and social sciences, and institutionalized adaptive learning has still to come, replacing the impossible quest for maximum or optimum production by a philosophy of risk minimization. This process will take time. It may be well advanced in less than a decade in countries where EAF is already in an advanced stage of implementation (e.g., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Iceland). It may require at least two decades in the others, and may

Realism and risk aversion

Reasonably systemic

EAF (Postmodern)

EAF (First level)

Systemic Adaptive learning Risk management

Impact minimization

Conventional management Single ouput optimization

1950 FIGURE

Precautionary approach Multispecies Contingency management planning Multiple output optimization

1975

Subjective distribution of countries

2000

2025

6.5 Schematic evolution of ﬁsheries management toward EAF.

The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries never be achieved in countries where democracy is still a dream. One danger is in trying to achieve too much, hastily, stumbling on institutional or ecological rigidities or on unexpected system behavior. Another danger is in becoming discouraged by the difﬁculty, paying mere lip service to the approach, hoping that modern prophecies, as the old ones, vanish. The balance needs to be found in the customization of affordable transitional pathways for change, in both research and management institutions, compatible with industrial adaptation to global drivers.

Acknowledgment The content of this chapter is largely based on Garcia (2007a). Notes 1. The term utopia is used here in its positive sense of a golden objective, a project mobilizing human energies toward perfection. Usually there is more than one way to realize a utopia (hence many ecosystem approaches), and the journey to utopia, that is, the quest for perfection, is as important as the destination. 2. A central issue during the last International Council for the Exploration of the Sea Symposium on Fisheries Management Strategies, Galway, Ireland, 27–30 June 2006 (www.ices06sfms.com/). 3. This sections draws heavily on a presentation developed for the Bellagio Conference on Blueprint for Sustainable Global Fisheries (Garcia 2007b). 4. For example, the regional organizations for ﬁshery management, ﬁsh trade (e.g. Infoﬁsh, Infosamak), or economic cooperation (e.g., Southern African Development Community). 5. For example, at the United Nations General Assembly or the World Trade Organization. 6. Without this high-level sense of direction and cross-sectoral operational framework, ﬁshery governance runs the risk to remain entangled in difﬁcult internal debates about ﬁsheries livelihoods, resource allocation, and small-scale versus large-scale development that, in the long term, will become irrelevant as ﬁsheries, as a socioeconomic activity, are closed down for having failed to meet societal expectations. 7. Jake Rice (2005) talks about asynchronous coevolution. 8. The signiﬁcant implications of this prescription are discussed in Garcia and Charles (2007) and Garcia (2007a). 9. For example, through reinforced ﬂag state and port state measures as well as high seas marine protected areas.

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References Barbault, R. (2006). Un éléphant dans un jeu de quilles. Lhomme dans la biodiversité. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Berkes, F. (2008). Social dimensions of ﬁsheries management. In: K. Cochrane and S.M. Garcia (eds.). A Fishery Manager’s Guidebook. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Oxford: J. Wiley-Blackwell. Berneri, M.-L. (1950). Journey Through Utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourg, D. (2003). Considérations relatives à l’ histoire de la Nature. In: C. Lévèque and S. Van der Leeuw (eds.). Quelles natures voulons nous. Pour une approche socio-écologique du champ de l’ environnement. Paris: Elsevier SAS, 64–75. Catanzano, J., and H. Rey (1995). La recherche halieutique entre science et action: Réﬂexions sur fond de crise. Nature, Science et Sociétés 25:19–29. Charles, A.T. (2001). Sustainable Fishery Systems. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Science. Convention on Biological Diversity (2006). Global Biodiversity Outlook 2. www.cbd.int/gbo2/ FAO (1995). The Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (1996). Precautionary Approach to Capture Fisheries and Species Introductions. FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries, vol. 2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2003). Fisheries Management. 2. The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries, vol. 4, suppl. 2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Funtowicz, S.O., and J. Ravetz (1995). Risk management, uncertainty and post-normal science. In: H. Reinertsen and H. Haaland (eds.). Sustainable Fish Farming. Proceedings of The First International Symposium on Sustainable Fish Farming, Oslo, Norway, 28–31 August 1994. Rotterdam/ Brookﬁeld: A.A. Balkema, 261–270. Gallopin, G.C. 2002. Planning for resilience: Scenarios, surprises, and branch points. In: L.H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling (eds.). Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 361–394. Garcia, S.M. (1996). The precautionary approach to ﬁsheries and its implications for research, technology and management: An updated review. In: Precautionary Approach to Fisheries. Part 2: Scientiﬁc Papers. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 350/2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1–75.

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Garcia, S.M. (2007a). from New Atlantis to New Alliance: Science, governance, society and the ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries. Plenary lecture of the International Council for Exploration of the Sea Annual Science Conference, Helsinki, 17–21 September. www.ices.dk/ products/CMdocs/CM-2007/Plenary%20Lectures/INV0207-1.pdf Garcia, S.M. (2007b). Fisheries governance: factors of success and failure. Presented at the conference on the Bellagio Blueprint for Sustaining Fisheries, Bellagio, Italy, 21–24 February. Garcia, S.M. (2008). Fisheries assessment and decision-making: towards an integrated advisory process. In: G. Bianchi and H.R. Skjoldal (eds.). The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Wallingford: CABI, 158–196. Garcia, S.M., and J. Boncoeur (2007). Allocation and conservation of ﬁsheries resources: connecting rights and responsibilities. Paper presented at the 4th World Fisheries Congress, Vancouver, Canada. Reconciling Fisheries with Conservation: The Challenge of Managing Aquatic Ecosystems. American Fisheries Society Symposium 49(1): 587–614. Garcia S.M., and A.T. Charles (2007). Fishery systems and linkages. From clockworks to soft watches. ICES Journal of Marine Science 64(4): 580–587. Garcia, S.M., and K. Cochrane (2008). From past management to future governance: A perspective view. In: K. Cochrane and S.M. Garcia (eds.). A Fishery Manager’s Guidebook. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Oxford: J. Wiley-Blackwell, 447–472. Garcia, S.M., A. Zerbi, C. Aliaume, T. Do Chi, and G. Lasserre (2003). The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. Issues, Terminology, Principles, Institutional Foundations, Implementation and Outlook. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 443. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gulland, J.A. (1984). Looking beyond the golden age. Marine Policy 8: 137–150. Gunderson, L., and C. Folke (2005). Resilience— now more than ever. Ecology and Society 10(2): 22, www.ecologyandsociety.org/v0110/ iss2/art22/ Hardin, G. (1998). Extensions of the “tragedy of the commons.” Science 280(5364): 682–683. Hilborn, R. (2007). Moving to sustainability by learning from successful ﬁsheries. Ambio 36(4): 296–303. Holling, C.S. (1993). Investing in research for sustainability. Ecological Applications 3: 552–555. Jentoft, S. (1998). Social science in ﬁsheries management: A risk assessment. In: T.J. Pitcher, P.J.B. Hart, and D. Pauly (eds.). Reinventing

Fisheries Management. London: Kluwer, 177–184. Ludwig, D., R. Hilborn, and C. Walters (1993). Uncertainty, resource exploitation, and conservation: Lessons from history. Science 260(5014): 17–36. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Minta, S.C., and W.H. Settle (2003). Conceptual Frameworks and Case-Based Knowledge Management for the Ecosystem Approach. United Nations/FAO Information paper for the Convention on Biological Diversity/Subsidiary Body on Scientiﬁc, Technical, and Technological Advice (CBD/SBSTTA), 9 November. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Pahl-Wostl, C. (2002). Agent-based simulation in integrated assessment and resources management. In: A.E. Rizzoli and A.J. Jakeman (eds.). Integrated Assessment and Decision Support. Proceedings of the First Biennial Meeting of the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society. www.iemss.org/iemss2002 Palumbi, S.R. (2001). Humans as the world’s greater evolutionary force. Science 293: 1786–1790. Prigogine, E., and I. Stengers (1979). La nouvelle alliance. Métamorphose de la science. Paris: Gallimard. Reid, W.V., F. Berkes, T.J. Wilbanks, and D. Capistrano (2006). Bridging Scales and Knowledge Systems. Concepts and Applications in Ecosystem Assessment. Washington, D.C.: Island Press England. Rey-Valette, H., and S. Cunningham (2004). Interactions between Industrial and Artisanal Fisheries in the History of West Africa. In: P. Chavance, M. Ba, D. Gascuel, M. Vakily, and D. Pauly (eds.). Pêches maritimes, écosystèmes et sociétés en Afrique de l’ ouest: un demi siècle de changement. Collection des Rapports de Recherche Halieutique ACP/UE, 15(1). Paris: Institut de Recherche pour le Développement; Bruxelles: Commission Européenne, 495–506. Rice, J. (2005). Implementation of the ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries management: Asynchronous co-evolution at the interface between science and policy. Marine Ecology. Progress Series (Halstenbek) 300: 241–296. Vitousek, P.M., H.A. Mooney, J. Lubchenko, and J.M. Melillo (1997). Human domination of the earth’s ecosystem. Science 277: 494–499. Walters, C.J., and S.J.D. Martell (2004). Fisheries Ecology and Management. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. World Conference on Environment and Development (1987). Our Common Future. World Conference on Environment and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7 A Review of Fisheries Subsidies: Quantiﬁcation, Impacts, and Reform ANTHONY COX U. RASHID SUMAILA

in the post-World War II era. Rapid technological advancement in boat building, gear design, and ﬁsh storage methods, combined with continued subsidy provision, encouraged a “race to ﬁsh,” with consequent adverse impacts on ﬁsh stocks. Even as early as the mid-1960s, reports on ﬁnancial support to the ﬁshing sector prepared by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) urged its member countries to practice restraint in the provision of subsidies, sought to improve the transparency of subsidy programs, and highlighted the link between subsidies and overﬁshing (see OECD 1965, 1971, 1980). However, it was not until the early 1990s that ﬁsheries subsidies attracted broader attention, primarily as a result of a number of efforts to estimate the size and value of subsidies. In 1993, report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) concluded that most of the US$54 billion (109) shortfall between estimated revenues and costs could be accounted for by subsidies (FAO 1993).1 A study published by the World Bank in 1998 was the ﬁrst major effort to estimate global ﬁshing subsidy levels, with a total estimate of US$14–20 billion (Milazzo 1998). Other international organizations such as the Asia-Paciﬁc Economic Cooperation (APEC) group became engaged in the issue, while the environmental movement (most notably the World Wide Fund for Nature [WWF]) continued their pivotal role in energizing the policy debate (see, e.g., APEC 2000; WWF 1997, 2001a, 2001b).

7.1. INTRODUCTION Subsidies have been a controversial feature of ﬁsheries policy and management for many years. Fisheries subsidies have been provided for a wide range of purposes, including stimulating industry development, supporting regional communities, providing ﬁsheries infrastructure and support services, retiring ﬁshing capacity, and supporting early retirement for ﬁshers. However, ﬁsheries subsidies are recognized as having been a key factor in creating overcapacity and overﬁshing in the sector. While these problems stem from many causes, including poorly designed national and international management systems and weak enforcement of regulations, the continued provision of subsidies has exacerbated the situation. Although subsidies are a legitimate policy tool for governments in pursuing ﬁsheries policy, many subsidy programs are poorly conceived, with ill-deﬁned objectives and insufﬁcient evaluation of the ﬂow-on effects on the sector and the rest of the economy. Moreover, once introduced, subsidies tend to be very difﬁcult to remove, creating a cycle of subsidy dependence and reducing the ﬂexibility and resilience of the industry and ﬁsheries communities. The issue of ﬁsheries subsidies has been an object of concern and the subject of analysis for many years. Fisheries subsidies were originally provided by governments in the 1930s and 1940s to generate investment in the sector, particularly 99

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It was, however, the inclusion of ﬁsheries subsidies in the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 that truly propelled the issue to the forefront of the international ﬁsheries policy agenda. At its Fourth Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, the WTO undertook to “clarify and improve WTO disciplines on ﬁsheries subsidies, taking into account the importance of this sector to developing countries” (WTO 2001, para. 28). This was followed by a call at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg for countries to “eliminate subsidies that contribute to illegal, unreported and unregulated ﬁshing and to overcapacity, while completing the efforts undertaken at the WTO to clarify and improve its disciplines on ﬁsheries subsidies” (United Nations 2002, para. 30(f) ). These commitments were reinforced by the WTO Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration in 2005 (WTO 2005). The imperative to develop strong analytical foundations for the WTO subsidy negotiations prompted further efforts to analyze the impacts of ﬁsheries subsidies on resource sustainability and trade. Work undertaken by the OECD, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and FAO was complemented by academic research to provide much of the analytical underpinnings for the WTO negotiations.2 In addition, the WWF continued to convene expert forums and present detailed proposals for subsidy rules.3 While the Doha Round is currently stalled, and the future of the negotiations on ﬁsheries subsidies disciplines is uncertain at the time of writing, it is clear that the policy landscape has changed signiﬁcantly as a result of the accumulated body of data and analysis that have focused on the problem of ﬁsheries subsidies. There is now a general agreement that ﬁsheries subsidies can have an adverse impact on the ﬁsheries sector and on resource stocks, and that there is a need to address these impacts through national, regional, and international forums. This chapter reviews the state of play on ﬁsheries subsidies, focusing on the methodological and practical challenges in quantifying, assessing, and reforming subsidy programs.

7.2. CHALLENGES IN QUANTIFYING FISHERIES SUBSIDIES Access to reliable and consistent information about ﬁsheries subsidies is a fundamental element of

responsible governance in the ﬁsheries sector. Such information is required to accurately assess the impacts of subsidies on ﬁsh resources, the broader marine environment, ﬁsheries management policies, and the economic well-being of the sector and economy. However, the efforts to date illustrate the need to further improve the transparency of ﬁshery subsidy programs.

7.2.1. Deﬁning Fisheries Subsidies While it may seem relatively straightforward to deﬁne what constitutes a subsidy in the ﬁshing sector, there has been a surprising degree of debate over the years on what actually comprises a subsidy to the sector. A great deal of effort has been devoted to the deﬁnition issue in forums such as the WTO, OECD, FAO, UNEP, and APEC, as well as by analysts in the academic world. This has resulted in a variety of deﬁnitions and classiﬁcation frameworks being used in the policy debate, with the potential for creating confusion about the coverage of the various deﬁnitions and the implications for policy. This was exempliﬁed in the WTO negotiations on ﬁsheries subsidies where there has been considerable debate over what types of government programs should be covered by subsidy disciplines. Much of the debate is about the breadth of the deﬁnition of a subsidy. A relatively narrow deﬁnition is found in the WTO Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (ASCM), which is a useful starting point because it provides the only internationally legally agreed deﬁnition of a subsidy (WTO 1999) (see ﬁgure 7.1). Under Article 1 of the ASCM, a subsidy is deﬁned as a ﬁnancial contribution by a government or any public body that confers a beneﬁt to a (set of) producer(s), where a ﬁnancial contribution can involve a direct transfer of funds, a potential direct transfer (e.g., through a loan guarantee), foregone government revenue, government provision of goods and services other than general infrastructure, and government purchases of goods. The WTO deﬁnition excludes support provided through border protection measures (e.g., tariffs), which are dealt with in a separate agreement. The OECD deﬁnition of subsidies (or “government ﬁnancial transfers”) covers subsidies as deﬁned under the WTO as well as transfers related to management, research, and enforcement, ﬁsheries access agreements, and ﬁsheries-speciﬁc infrastructure. These latter items are a gray area in the WTO deﬁnition because there is considerable

101

A Review of Fisheries Subsidies

Data from government budgets

Border protection can Estimates can be obtained from be used as detailed approximmodelling ation

A subsidy under Article 1 is a financial contribution that confers a benefit. This includes:

WTO Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures

OECD definition of GFT used in this study

OECD definition including market price support

Broad definition of subsidies (e.g. FAO)

FIGURE

Direct transfers Potential direct transfers Foregone government revenue (tax exemption) Government provision of goods & services other than general infrastructure

Grey areas in WTO definition: MRE expenditure, access agreements, infrastructure

MRE expenditure, access agreements, infrastructure

As above plus:

Market price support

As above plus:

As above plus:

Uninternalised externalities, untaxed rents, negative subsidies

7.1 Schematic representation of ﬁsheries subsidy deﬁnitions. (Courtesy OECD 2006)

unresolved debate as to whether they ought to be included, and this has not been tested within the WTO.4 In principle, the OECD also includes market price support (border measures) in its deﬁnition, but data on this variable have been collected only for one country. This deﬁnition was also employed in the UNEP analysis. These relatively narrow deﬁnitions are in contrast to the very broad deﬁnition advocated by the FAO (2000, 2003) and other analysts (e.g., Schrank 2003; Schrank and Keithly 1999; van Beers and de Moor 2001). In these cases, subsidies are deﬁned as all government interventions, or lack of interventions, that affect the ﬁsheries industry and that have an economic value. This covers direct ﬁnancial transfers, services and indirect transfers (e.g., tax exemptions),

regulations (e.g., import quotas, foreign direct investment regulations, gear regulations), and lack of intervention (free access to ﬁshing grounds, lack of management measures, inadequate enforcement, untaxed resource rents, etc.). In practice, most analysis has focused on the narrower deﬁnitions of ﬁsheries subsidies. The empirical problems in trying to quantify the economic value attached to noninternalized externalities that may arise as a result of the lack of intervention are daunting and have precluded signiﬁcant attempts to develop estimates. Beyond the overall deﬁnition of a subsidy, there is a need to categorize subsidies to reﬂect differences in their impact on the sustainability of ﬁsheries resources. There has been no agreement on a common scheme for categorizing ﬁsheries subsidies, and the various

102

Overview

studies to estimate ﬁsheries subsidies have each developed their own categorization scheme. Some of these schemes are deﬁned by the intended effect of the subsidy (e.g., to reduce capital costs), while others are based on the form of the subsidy (e.g., tax exemptions, grants), and there is considerable overlap among the schemes. A more colorful approach is presented by Khan et al. (2006), who group subsidies into “good,” “bad,” and “ugly” subsidies according to their impact on resource sustainability.

7.2.2. An Overview of Estimated Fisheries Subsidies As was noted in the introduction to this chapter, there is a diverse range of estimates of the magnitude

TABLE

of the subsidies provided to the sector, with little consistency in deﬁnition, data sources, or methodology across the various estimates. Table 7.1 summarizes the published ﬁsheries subsidies estimates, noting the differences in coverage, data sources, and methodology. Each of the estimates has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, the APEC and OECD data are based on self-reporting by their respective member countries. While the OECD estimates have been collected on a consistent basis over a decade, they are also acknowledged to be underestimates of actual subsidies because data on infrastructure expenditures, fuel tax exemptions, and subnational subsidies are incomplete (OECD 2006). The recent data from the University of British Columbia (UBC) Fisheries Centre (Khan et al.

7.1 Summary of estimates of ﬁsheries subsidies Geographic Coverage

Subsidy Estimate

Data Sources and Methodology

Global

US$54 billion

WTO deﬁnition (plus unrecovered management costs)

Global

US$14–20.5 billion

1996–2006 (ongoing)

Government ﬁnancial transfersa

OECD

US$6.2 billion (2006 data)

APEC (2000)

1996

Support policies and programs

APEC

US$12.6 billion

Khan et al. (2006)

2000

Nonfuel subsidies

Developed countries

US$13.4 billion

Developing countries Developed countries

US$12.3 billion US$3.02–7.02 billion

Developing countries

US$1.16–1.51 billion

Calculated as the difference between estimated revenue and estimated costs of the global ﬁshing sector. Based on publicly available budget information in China, European Union, Japan, Norway, Russia, and United States and extrapolated to the global level. Plus estimates of the costs of management not recovered from industry. Based on annual data collection from OECD member countries. Excludes most fuel tax exemptions, and subnational transfers. Data compiled from surveys of APEC member countries and interviews with government ofﬁcials. Data on 11 subsidy program types compiled from primary and gray literature, Internet, and newspaper articles. Data estimated when only qualitative data available. Data on fuel tax exemptions compiled from primary and gray literature, internet, newspaper articles. Data estimated when only qualitative data available.

Source

Time Period

FAO (1993)

1992

Milazzo (1998)

1996

OECD (2000 and annual reports)

Sumaila et al. (2008)

2000

Subsidy Deﬁnition Used

Fuel subsidies

a Based on the WTO deﬁnition, including management, research and enforcement expenditures, infrastructure expenditure, and ﬁsheries access agreements.

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A Review of Fisheries Subsidies 2006; Sumaila et al. 2008) are based on an extensive database drawing on a wide range of sources but include a relatively large number of inferred calculations rather than hard data (particularly for developing countries) and are also acknowledged as being underestimates. Although there are large differences among the estimates, a number of observations can be made based on the various sets of data. First, the estimates all point to the fact that ﬁsheries subsidies are widespread and signiﬁcant.5 Second, there is a marked difference between the amount and type of subsidies provided by governments in the developed and developing countries. The UBC Fisheries Centre data indicate that the developing countries devote a greater proportion of their subsidies to ﬁshery port construction (34 percent of total developing country subsidies) and ﬁshery development projects (16 percent; table 7.2). In contrast, the developed countries provide a greater proportion of total support to ﬁsheries management and research (30 percent of total developed country subsidies), fuel tax exemptions (27 percent), and ﬁsher assistance programs (11 percent). This reﬂects the different development and management priorities, as well as the budgets available to the two sets of countries. Interestingly, the data indicate that both developed and developing countries spend similar proportions of their subsidies on vessel construction and modernization (7 percent and 6 percent, respectively). Third, most estimates provide only a snapshot of subsidies for a given year, making it difﬁcult to discern any trends in the provision of subsidies. The OECD undertakes an ongoing collection of

TABLE

subsidy data from its member countries, and the data indicate that the total subsidies provided have not changed signiﬁcantly, although the program objectives have shifted (ﬁgure 7.2). OECD countries now place less emphasis on vessel construction and modernization programs, and a greater proportion of subsidies go to vessel decommissioning and to management, research, and enforcement (OECD 2006). While overall OECD subsidies have ﬂuctuated around US$6 billion over the period 1996–2006, subsidies for most OECD countries have declined (particularly for European countries) (ﬁgure 7.3).

7.2.3. Measurement Issues The gaps and inconsistencies in the various data sets reﬂect a number of important measurement issues that signiﬁcantly hamper efforts to improve the transparency of subsidy programs. First, the lack of a universally agreed deﬁnition of subsidy allows governments to debate what the scope of any data gathering exercise should be and to tailor their responses accordingly. Second, there is generally poor compliance with the subsidy notiﬁcation obligations under the WTO ASCM. There is a signiﬁcant gap between the WTO notiﬁcations on ﬁsheries subsidies and the data provided to the OECD and APEC in their studies (Cox and Schmidt 2003; WWF 2001a, 2001b). Confusion and disagreement about what should be notiﬁed contribute to this gap. For example, expenditures on management, research, enforcement, infrastructure, and access agreements are generally not reported because most

7.2 Global subsidy estimates by program type (billion US$)

Type of Subsidy Program

Developing Countries

Developed Countries

Global

1.2 0.4 0.8 4.6 1.5 0.6

5 0.5 1.2 0.7 1 0.5 1.0 0.9 2.1 0.4

6.2 0.9 2.0 5.3 2.5 1.2 1.0 0.9 2.1 2.6 0.9 6.35 31.95

Fisheries management Fisheries research Vessel construction and modernization Fishing port construction Marketing and processing support Tax exemption programs Access agreements Vessel buyback programs Fisher assistance programs Fishery development projects Rural ﬁshers community development Fuel tax exemptions Total Source: Khan et al. (2006), Sumaila et al. (2008).

2.2 0.9 1.33 13.53

5.02 18.32

104

Overview 8 7

USD billion

6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

FIGURE

Management, research and enforcement

Infrastructure

Cost Reducing Transfers

Direct Payments

7.2 Subsidies to OECD marine capture ﬁsheries. (Courtesy OECD

2006)

countries do not believe that these fall under the deﬁnition of subsidy of Article 1 of the ASCM. Third, there are technical problems that are difﬁcult to overcome. Key among these is the treatment of off-budget support to the ﬁsheries sector where the cost of the subsidy to government is revenue forgone, rather than direct outlays, and is not often presented in government budget documents. Examples

include fuel tax exemptions (which are provided by a majority of countries), loan guarantees, and income tax exemptions. A further issue with respect to off-budget items is the noncollection of fees for the provision of infrastructure and port services such as harbors, navigation aids, and ﬁreﬁghting services, where the services are provided primarily for the use of the commercial ﬁshing industry.

20 10 0 –10

7.3 Average annual changes in OECD subsidies, 1996–2006. (Courtesy OECD 2006)

FIGURE

Turkey Mexico

Belgium Korea

United States Iceland

Greece Australia

Spain Canada

Norway OECD total

Finland New Zealand

United Kingdom France

Japan Italy

Sweden Denmark

–30

Portugal Ireland

–20 Germany Netherlands

Ave. Ann. Growth (%)

30

A Review of Fisheries Subsidies Fourth, much of the data are collected at the national level and usually do not contain information on subsidies made at a subnational (i.e., regional or local) level. Evidence from the OECD on ﬁsheries management costs indicates that such transfers may be signiﬁcant for some countries, particularly for countries with a federal system of government (OECD 2003). In fact, a recent detailed study shows that subsidies given to the ﬁshing sector in the United States by state and municipal governments can be substantial relative to those given by the federal government (Sharp and Sumaila 2009). Finally, developing countries often face challenges in developing the necessary level of institutional capacity to gather and report on data on ﬁsheries subsidies. This problem stretches beyond the ﬁsheries sector and is part of a broader issue of institution and capacity building in developing countries.

7.3. IMPACTS OF FISHERIES SUBSIDIES In parallel with the signiﬁcant efforts to deﬁne, identify, and quantify ﬁsheries subsidies, signiﬁcant work has been undertaken in international organizations and the academic community to improve the understanding of the impacts of ﬁsheries subsidies. The lead-up to the Doha Round and the subsequent negotiations have been the main driving force behind this work. There is now a substantial body of analysis on the effects of ﬁsheries subsidies on resource sustainability, economic proﬁtability, trade, and ﬁshing communities.

7.3.1. Economic and Resource Impacts Fisheries subsidies have an impact on the proﬁts of ﬁshing enterprises by increasing their revenue (e.g., when governments support ﬁsh prices or provide subsidies to income) or decreasing costs (e.g., through vessel construction subsidies or fuel tax exemptions). The economic and resource effects of the subsidies will then depend on the type of the ﬁsheries management regime in place in particular ﬁsheries (e.g., whether open access or controlled by property rights), as well as on the state of the ﬁsh stock (whether above or below maximum sustainable yield [MSY]) (Hannesson 2001; OECD 2006; Porter 2002). In practice, however, the impacts depend critically on the effectiveness with which

105

management regulations are enforced (even for “perfect” management systems). Moreover, it has been demonstrated that subsidies will, under the right circumstances, have an adverse impact on stocks under any management regime (Munro and Sumaila 2002). In open access ﬁsheries, the major concern is that ﬁsheries subsidies can exacerbate the common-property, or “common-pool,” problems associated with ﬁshery resources (FAO 2000; Munro and Sumaila 2002; OECD 2000). In the absence of subsidies, the common-pool characteristics of ﬁsheries resources will result in a perverse set of incentives that lead to continued increases in effort even though revenues per unit are declining, until ultimately total revenues equal total costs. This is the bionomic equilibrium (BE1) in ﬁgure 7.4 where both industry proﬁts and resource rents6 have become completely dissipated (assuming that ﬁshing cost is proportional to ﬁshing effort). The provision of subsidies lowers the total costs from TC1 to TC2 and will also lower the bionomic equilibrium to BE2 and encouraging an increase in ﬁshing effort from E3 to E4. The impact of subsidies will be to encourage further vessels to enter the ﬁshery, further reducing catches and revenues, increasing costs, and reducing proﬁts (Hannesson 2001; OECD 2006). This will lead to negative resource rent being generated and further reductions in ﬁsh resource stocks. Subsidies in open access ﬁsheries are unequivocally poor policy options from an economic and resource sustainability perspective. Introducing catch controls in the form of a total allowable catch (also known as regulated open access) does not necessarily improve on the economic situation of a ﬁshery. The key problem is that it will not eliminate the race to ﬁsh because there will be increased competition for a smaller possible catch than would be available under open access (at least in the short term). In ﬁsheries managed through a system of access rights, such as individual transferable catch or effort quotas (ITQs), the adverse impacts of subsides will be substantially reduced. When ﬁshing enterprises have individual shares of a total quota, there is no need for them to race to catch the ﬁsh before anyone else. In this situation, subsidies will raise the proﬁts in the industry, which will raise the market value of the individual quotas if these are transferable. The impact on catches and resource stocks, assuming perfect enforcement, will be zero, and the

106

Overview Total revenue and total cost ($)

TC1 MSY TC2

BE1

MEY

BE2

TR E1

E2

E3

E4

Fishing effort

7.4 How subsidies induce overﬁshing. Abbreviations: BE1 and BE2, bionomic equilibria; TC1 and TC2, total costs; E1–E4, levels of ﬁshing effort. (Data from Munro and Sumaila 2002)

FIGURE

subsidy will be a pure transfer from taxpayers to the ﬁshing industry.7 However, the assumption of perfect enforcement is a very strong one, and it is rarely (if ever) achieved in practice. Munro and Sumaila (2002) argue that, under the right set of circumstances, the introduction of subsidies to an apparently wellmanaged ﬁshery can be damaging. For example, a subsidy on some inputs, but not on others, will cause ﬁshers in an ITQ ﬁshery to substitute, where possible, the subsidized input for the unsubsidized ones. This could be inefﬁcient from society’s point of view. More signiﬁcant, Clark et al. (2005) note that even apparently useful subsidies such as buyback programs designed to reduce excess capacity can create expectations in the industry and work against their original intention.8 Fishers will come to expect that the government will cover losses that may arise from excess investment in vessels, thereby reducing the risk-adjusted discount rate9 used in making investment decisions. This would in general promote overinvestment in the ﬁshing industry, under any management regime, even ITQs. Buyback schemes, if they come to be widely anticipated by industry, will therefore have a negative impact on resource management and sustainability and could thus also be regarded as a potentially harmful subsidy. There are also economywide effects of ﬁsheries subsidies. With some notable exceptions (e.g.,

Iceland), the ﬁshing sector is relatively small in most economies, often accounting for less than 1 percent of gross domestic product and an even smaller proportion of the total workforce. However, the sector often plays a more signiﬁcant role in terms of trade, with many countries having signiﬁcant export and imports of ﬁsh and ﬁsheries products and in speciﬁc regions within many countries, accounting for a high proportion of employment and income in coastal areas. In general, the provision of transfers to the ﬁshing sector distorts the incentive structure facing agents in the economy, in particular, the attractiveness of investment in the ﬁshing sector relative to other sectors. This will draw human and other resources into the ﬁshing industry where they yield a lower real rate of return than they would if they were employed in the economy at large. Indeed, the long-term contribution of these additional resources may even be negative, as will happen when transfers exacerbate the depletion of ﬁsh stocks that results from the poor or ineffective management of the sector. Other things being equal, the provision of transfers represent a net welfare loss to society, even in the presence of effective management. Whether this welfare loss is compensated for by an increase in welfare arising from the achievement of the objectives of the transfer programs (e.g., for social objectives or management of ﬁsh resources) is an open question that remains to be addressed.

A Review of Fisheries Subsidies

7.3.2. Trade Effects of Fisheries Subsidies The trade effects of government ﬁnancial transfers have been the focus of much discussion in the WTO negotiations on ﬁsheries subsidies. Countries engaged in these negotiations have been wrestling with the difﬁculty inherent in analyzing trade and trade policy distortions in a renewable natural resource. A particular issue relates to whether an empirical link between subsidies and trade distortions can be demonstrated. Given that the impacts of transfers on catches and stocks are highly conditional on the management regimes of importing and exporting countries, it is perhaps not surprising that few deﬁnitive answers have been forthcoming in the literature to date.10 The role of management is therefore central to the question of trade effects of subsidies. If ﬁsheries management regimes that aim to constrain catches

(a)

107

and effort are effectively enforced, then subsidies are unlikely to result in a supply response that will affect either domestic or international markets. Fishers have a vertical supply curve, and although the subsidy will increase the proﬁts of ﬁshers (by increasing incomes or reducing costs), they have no incentive to undercut the world price for their output (ﬁgure 7.5a) (OECD 2006).11 If there is open access or if management regulations are not effectively enforced (as is often the case), then subsidies may well result in those ﬁshers receiving the subsidies being able to expand supplies to the domestic and world markets (at least in the short term and as long as the MSY level has not been reached). This can then affect trade ﬂows and prices in the short term (ﬁgure 7.5b). The extent of any trade distortion depends on the management regimes in importing and exporting countries, relative prices in the domestic and international markets, transport costs between the producer and the international markets, and the relative price responsiveness of international markets. Over the longer term, trade expansion induced by subsidies, which is not underpinned by effective management, will be counterproductive in terms of reductions in catches and ﬁsh stocks in the country providing the support.

Pw

7.3.3. Social Dimensions of Subsidies a S0

D

b S1 Q1

Q0

(b)

a b

Pw

c

S0

D

S1 Q1

Q0

Q3 Q2

FIGURE 7.5 Trade effects of subsidies. (a) No production response from ﬁshers due to a subsidy. (b) Fishers are able to adjust production in response to a subsidy. (Data from OECD 2006)

Subsidies are often linked to social objectives, such as the need to maintain employment in the industry, develop and support regional communities, retrain ﬁshers, and maintain cultural and heritage values. As was recognized by the United Kingdom in its 2004 review of their ﬁshing industry, the fact that these types of objectives often remain implicit, and are not translated into transparent objectives, can inhibit the effectiveness of government policy in addressing social issues (U.K. Cabinet Ofﬁce 2004). The provision of subsidies for social objectives is also a major issue for developing countries and is reﬂected in the relative priority given to development and assistance projects in their total subsidies (table 7.2). Where subsidies are used to meet social goals in ways that intersect with ﬁsheries-speciﬁc policies, it is important that the objectives be met in a costefﬁcient way. This will necessarily entail examination of both the design of subsidy policies and the appropriateness of the policy relative to other policy instruments. For example, subsidies to vessel

108

Overview

construction and modernization in order to maintain coastal communities may not be the most costefﬁcient way of achieving regional development objectives. Subsidies provided directly to target communities may be more cost-effective, allowing them to make their own choices about how to best arrange their ﬁnancial affairs, and may reduce the potential for adverse environmental effects to arise from capacity expansion. To be blunt, using subsidies in ﬁsheries to support social and development policies in a situation where many ﬁsh stocks are overexploited will only serve to undermine the medium- and long-term development goals of countries. Similarly, subsidies in the form of income support in the face of declining or overﬁshed stocks increase the subsidy dependence, and reduce the resilience, of communities, particularly if the subsidies are not accompanied by appropriate management or capacity adjustment measures. The impacts of subsidies on income distribution among and within communities can also be assessed in terms of the impact of community resilience and community cohesion. Finally, subsidy policies can promote or inhibit the extent to which individuals and communities interact with the management regimes governing their industry. For example, subsidies to support ﬁsher involvement in co-management arrangements may help to build up the capability of ﬁshers to meaningfully engage in these processes.

7.4. REFORMING FISHERIES SUBSIDIES The pace of subsidy reform has accelerated over the past couple of decades both at national and international levels, driven by a range of factors including pressure on government budgets, pressure from environmental nongovernmental organizations, resource stock collapses, low industry proﬁtability, and a realization that “business as usual” was no longer a feasible option for either governments or industry. However, the path to subsidy reform has been painful, and there is still signiﬁcant scope for further reforms to be undertaken.

7.4.1. Challenges to Subsidy Reform The classic political economy problems surrounding policy reform abound in the sector. Fisheries are characterized by relatively concentrated groups

with a high incentive to maintain the status quo and resist any diminution in subsidy programs. The costs of subsidy reform are relatively high, while the beneﬁts of reform (in terms of reduced government expenditure) are spread very widely across all the taxpayers in the community. This gives the beneﬁciaries much higher stakes in defending a policy that a member of the broader community considers largely irrelevant. As a result, the group that gains from the status quo is seen as politically “strong,” while the losers are regarded as politically “weak.” This unequal distribution of gains and losses from change serves to prevent the adoption of reform and to reinforce the status quo. In addition, uncertainty surrounding the beneﬁts of subsidy reform is often larger than the uncertainty surrounding their costs to ﬁshers, even when the expected aggregate gains are substantially larger than the expected aggregate losses. Despite these challenges, the experiences of a wide range of countries demonstrate that subsidy reform is feasible and will lead to improved sustainability, proﬁtability, and resilience in the industry. In Norway, for example, a series of resource crises in the 1980s, with low proﬁtability and excess capacity in many ﬂeets and high levels of subsidies, led the government to make fundamental changes to the way in which ﬁsheries were managed (OECD in press). A massive reduction in subsidies to the sector, from a peak of more than NOK 1.3 billion (US$1 = 6.69 NOK on 2 November 2008) in the early 1980s to less than NOK 200 million by 1994 and only NOK 50 million in 2006, was accompanied by a shift from open to closed access for the ﬁsheries and the gradual introduction of marketbased management measures and a strictly enforced licensing regime. This led to the sector becoming more self-reliant and ﬂexible in generating profits, rather than relying on government transfers to carry them through ﬂuctuating fortunes. Reform of the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in 2002 and subsequent years also reﬂected the increasing pressure for reform. While the total amount of subsidies available to E.U. member countries was not signiﬁcantly reduced, the reforms sought to tighten up the conditions under which the subsidies could be provided. In particular, there was a shift toward “greener” subsidies in the 2002 CFP reform, with a ban on subsidies for vessel construction from 2005 and tighter controls on vessel modernization subsidies to ensure that total ﬁshing capacity does not increase as a result

A Review of Fisheries Subsidies of the subsidy. These principles were later adopted under the European Fisheries Fund, which became effective in 2007.

7.4.2. Fisheries Subsidies and the WTO The inclusion of ﬁsheries subsidies in the Doha Round provided considerable impetus to the issue of ﬁsheries subsidies reform and focused the attention of policy makers on the complexities and imperatives of subsidy reform. The unique environmental aspect of the mandate was unfamiliar territory for the WTO and meant that it became a testing ground for the integration of trade disciplines with environmental objectives. The outcome of the ﬁsheries subsidies negotiations may well set a precedent for future negotiations (if any) in other resource sectors. For the ﬁrst few years after Doha, the ﬁsheries subsidies talks focused on the debate over the scope and strength of the negotiating mandate. However, by 2004, a consensus began to emerge, and it was no longer a question of whether international cooperation on subsidy reform should move forward, but how. The acceptance of the environmental mandate of the negotiations by the European Union, Japan, and China, among others, helped to solidify support. This was substantially reinforced by the 1995 Hong Kong Declaration (WTO 2005). The focus of the negotiations then shifted from the scope and strength of the Doha negotiating mandate to the scope and strength of an eventual ban on a range of ﬁsheries subsidies. Over the ensuing two years, a large number of technical proposals were submitted by WTO delegations, revealing a degree of convergence on some points and conﬂict on others. In November 2007, the chairperson of the Negotiating Group on Rules released a ﬁrst draft (known as the “Chair’s Draft”) of proposed rules for ﬁsheries subsidies (as well as antidumping and countervailing measures) (WTO 2007). The core proposals of the draft include the following: • Prohibition of a broad range of direct capacity- or effort-enhancing subsides, as well as any subsidies affecting ﬁshing on “unequivocally overﬁshed stocks” • Exemption of several speciﬁc classes of subsidies from the prohibition (e.g., for reducing ﬁshing capacity)

109

• Requiring most permitted ﬁsheries subsidies to adhere to the condition that basic ﬁsheries management systems must be in place • Allowing developing countries to use most prohibited subsidies, subject to adequate ﬁsheries management being in place and other conditions12 The Chair’s Draft, and the wide range of reactions from WTO delegations, underscores the difﬁcult issues that are yet to be fully resolved in the negotiations. For example, questions still remain over the scope of the prohibition on subsidies. While there is general agreement that direct subsidies to capital and operating costs contribute to overcapacity and overﬁshing, the inclusion of subsidies that are less direct in their contribution (e.g., port infrastructure and income support) is strongly debated. The issue of how sustainability criteria, as a precondition of the provision of some types of subsidies, are developed and applied is also controversial, although it is widely accepted in the negotiations that the management regime, and the effectiveness of enforcement, will have a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the potential impact of subsidies. A closely related issue is whether and how institutional mechanisms should be developed or modiﬁed to assist the WTO in administering ﬁsheries subsidies rules, particularly in relation to assessing compliance with any sustainability criteria. The issue of special and differential treatment for developing countries has been a central feature of the WTO negotiations and has generated heated debate. The challenge lies in allowing developing countries sufﬁcient “policy space” to be able to develop their domestic ﬁsheries industries while at the same time ensuring that impacts on resource sustainability are minimized and that there are no capacity spillovers into international ﬁsheries (Sumaila et al. 2007). Resolution of this balancing act is yet to be achieved since there is no homogeneous developing country bloc in terms of their ﬁshing industry and interests. In particular, the major ﬁshing powers of China and India are included in this group, as well as aspiring ﬁshing powers such as Brazil and Malaysia, and the prospect of these countries being exempt from large elements of the subsidy disciplines is daunting. While the future of the Doha Round remains to be resolved, signiﬁcant progress has been made on the ﬁsheries subsidies negotiations. From an initial high degree of skepticism, there is now agreement

110

Overview

on a broad framework for moving forward. While there are difﬁcult issues to be resolved, the WTO negotiations have been very effective in focusing analytical and political attention on the potential beneﬁts from reforming ﬁsheries subsidies.

7.5. CONCLUSIONS There has been a sea change in the way in ﬁsheries subsidies are perceived in national and international policy forums over the past 10–15 years. A signiﬁcant amount of effort has been devoted to identifying and measuring subsidies and to analyzing their potential and actual impacts on resource sustainability, economic proﬁtability, and community resilience. There remain, nevertheless, signiﬁcant challenges for governments in ensuring that subsidy programs do not undermine resource sustainability or compromise long-term industry viability. A priority is to improve the transparency of ﬁshery subsidy programs in order to provide a more solid information base for policy analysis and debate over the effectiveness of subsidy programs in meeting their objectives and impact. Gaining agreement on subsidy deﬁnitions and categorization is central to these efforts. Irrespective of the outcome of the Doha Round, there is a need to ensure that the considerable progress made on developing ﬁsheries subsidies disciplines is consolidated and applied to national, supranational, and international reform efforts. The development of best practice guidelines to assist in reform would be a useful undertaking at the international level. Notes 1. The FAO declined to call this ﬁgure an actual estimate of global subsidies, and the numbers are widely regarded by ﬁsheries analysts as too high as a result of being based on excessively simplistic assumptions. However, the FAO report served a useful role in putting the issue of ﬁsheries subsides ﬁrmly on the political agenda (WWF 2001a). 2. The analytical literature on ﬁsheries subsidies has mushroomed over the past ten years. A detailed literature review is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the key OECD works can be found at Hannesson (2001) and OECD (2000, 2003, 2006); the UNEP contributions, at UNEP (2004a, b) and Porter (1998, 2000); and the results

of the FAO’s expert consultations at FAO (2003) and Schrank (2003). Key examples from the academic literature can be found in Hatcher and Robinson (1998), Schrank and Keithly (1999), Gooday (2002), and Munro and Sumaila (2002). 3. In particular, the WWF has presented detailed drafting concepts and text at several stages during the WTO negotiations (e.g., WWF 1998, 2004). 4. Moreover, no notiﬁcations of infrastructure subsidies for the ﬁsheries sector have been provided to the WTO. 5. However, subsidies to the ﬁsheries sector are dwarfed by agricultural support, which amounts to around US$500 billion a year for OECD countries alone. 6. Resource rent is deﬁned as the payment (imputed or otherwise) to a factor of production that is ﬁxed in supply. 7. Individual rights can also be deﬁned for ﬁshing effort, and in some countries a variant of this regime is practiced (e.g., the Faeroe Islands). The deﬁnition of such rights is a good deal more complicated than in the case of individual ﬁsh quotas, because of the multidimensionality of effort. The incentive to increase effort by putting in additional equipment or gear remains (OECD 2006). 8. Furthermore, recent studies on the economics of buyback programs has highlighted other fundamental issues in the design and implementation of such schemes (see Holland et al. 1999; Curtis and Squires 2007; OECD 2009). 9. The discount rate is deﬁned as the riskless rate of return on an investment plus a risk premium. 10. One of the key ﬁndings from the literature on trade and renewable resources is that free trade in the presence of an open access renewable resource may disadvantage one of the trading partners, and that when one or both trading partners is able to effectively manage the resource sector, both countries may gain from trade (Brander and Taylor 1997a, 1997b, 1998). The important role played by the management regime was further demonstrated by Emami and Johnston (2000), who showed that, under some circumstances, ﬁshery management by a country may inadvertently disadvantage an open access trading partner beyond the level generated by trade. 11. This assumes that ﬁshers are, in fact, price-takers in the market (i.e., they cannot inﬂuence the world price), and that there is a reference world price (i.e., that the output market is fairly homogeneous). 12. Other key proposals were related to the creation of a mechanism for involving the FAO in the review of ﬁsheries management criteria under the discipline and strengthening of WTO rules and mechanisms for notifying subsidies.

A Review of Fisheries Subsidies References APEC (2000). Study into the Nature and Extent of Subsidies in the Fisheries Sector of APEC Members Economies. APEC Publication 00-FS-01.1. Singapore: Asia Paciﬁc Economic Cooperation. Brander, J.A., and M.S. Taylor (1997a). International trade and open access renewable resources: The small open economy case. Canadian Journal of Economics 30(3):526–552. Brander, J.A., and M.S. Taylor (1997b). International trade between consumer and conservationist countries. Resource and Energy Economics 19(4):267–297. Brander, J.A., and M.S. Taylor (1998). Open access renewable resources: trade and trade policy in a two-country model. Journal of International Economics 44(2):181–209. Clark, C.W., G.R. Munro, and U.R. Sumaila (2005). Subsidies, buybacks and sustainable ﬁsheries. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 50(1): 47–58. Cox, A., and C.C. Schmidt (2003). Subsidies in the OECD Fisheries Sector: A Review of Recent Analysis and Future Directions. Background Paper for the FAO Expert Consultation on Identifying, Assessing and Reporting on Subsidies in the Fishing Industry, Rome, 3–6 December 2002. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Curtis, R., and D. Squires (eds.) (2007). Fisheries Buybacks. Oxford: Blackwell. Emami, A., and R.S. Johnston (2000). Unilateral resource management in a two-country general equilibrium model of trade in a renewable ﬁshery resource. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 82(1):161–172. FAO (1993). The State of Food and Agriculture 1992. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2000). Report of the Expert Consultation on Economic Incentives and Responsible Fisheries, Rome, 28 November—1 December 2000. FAO Fisheries Report 638. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2003). Report of the Expert Consultation on Identifying, Assessing and Reporting on Subsidies in the Fishing Industry, Rome, 3–6 December 2002. FAO Fisheries Report 698. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gooday, P. (2002). Fisheries Subsidies. ABARE Report for the Fisheries Resources Research Fund. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics. Hannesson, R. (2001). Effects of Liberalizing Trade in Fish, Fishing Vessels and Investment

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in Fishing Vessels. OECD Papers Offprint 8. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Hatcher, A., and K. Robinson (eds.) (1999). Overcapacity, Overcapitalization and Subsidies in European Fisheries. CEMARE Misc. Publication 44. Portsmouth, UK: University of Portsmouth. Holland, D., E. Guðmundsson, and J. Gates (1999). Do ﬁshing vessel buyback programs work? A survey of the evidence. Marine Policy 23(1): 47–69. Khan, A.S., U.R. Sumaila, R. Watson, G. Munro, and D. Pauly (2006). The nature and magnitude of global non-fuel ﬁsheries subsidies. In: U.R. Sumaila and D. Pauly (eds.). Catching More Bait: A Bottom-Up Re-estimation of Global Fisheries Subsidies, pp. 5–37. Fisheries Centre Research Reports 14(6). Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Milazzo, M. (1998). Subsidies in World Fisheries: A Re-examination. World Bank Technical Paper 406, Fisheries Series. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Munro, G., and U.R. Sumaila (2002). The impact of subsidies upon ﬁsheries management and sustainability: The case of the North Atlantic. Fish and Fisheries 3(4): 233–250. OECD (1965). Financial Support to the Fishing Industry. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD (1971). Financial Support to the Fishing Industry. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD (1980). Financial Support to the Fishing Industry. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD (2000). Transition to Responsible Fisheries: Economic and Policy Implications. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD (2003). Liberalising Fisheries Markets: Scope and Effects. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD (2006). Financial Support to OECD Fisheries: Implications for Sustainable Development. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD (in press) Reforming Fisheries Policies: Insights from OECD Experiences. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD (2009). Adjusting Fishing Capacity: Best Practice Guidelines for Decommissioning Schemes. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Porter, G. (1998). Fisheries Subsidies, Overﬁshing and Trade. Geneva: United Nations Environment Programme.

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Porter, G. (2002). Fisheries Subsidies and Overﬁshing: Towards a Structured Discussion. Geneva: United Nations Environment Programme. Schrank, W.E. (2003). Introducing Fisheries Subsidies. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 437. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Schrank, W.E., and W.B. Keithly, Jr. (1999). The concept of subsidies. Marine Resource Economics 14: 151–164. Sharp, R., and U.R. Sumaila (2009). Quantiﬁcation of U.S. marine ﬁsheries subsidies. North American Journal of Fisheries Management 29: 18–32. Sumaila, U.R., A. Khan, R. Watson, G. Munro, D. Zeller, N. Baron, and D. Pauly (2007). The World Trade Organization and global ﬁsheries sustainability. Fisheries Research 88: 1–4. Sumaila, U.R., L. Teh, R. Watson, P. Tyedmers, and D. Pauly (2008). Fuel price increase, subsidies, overcapacity and resource sustainability. ICES Journal of Marine Science 65(6): 832–840. U.K. Cabinet Ofﬁce (2004). Net Beneﬁts: A Sustainable and Proﬁtable Future for UK Fishing. London: U.K. Cabinet Ofﬁce. UNEP (2004a). Analyzing the Resource Impact of Fisheries Subsidies: A Matrix Approach. UNEP/ETB/2004/10. Geneva: United Nations Environment Programme. UNEP (2004b). Incorporating Resource Impact into Fisheries Subsidies Disciplines: Issues and Options: A Discussion Paper. UNEP/ ETB/2004/10. Geneva: United Nations Environment Programme. United Nations (2002). Report of the World Summit on Sustainable Development: Plan of Implementation, Johannesburg, South Africa, 26 August–4 September, A/CONF.199/20. Geneva: United Nations. van Beers, C., and A. de Moor (2001). Public Subsidies and Policy Failures: How Subsidies Distort the Natural Environment, Equity and Trade

and How to Reform Them. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar. WTO (1999). Agreement on subsidies and countervailing measures. In: WTO (ed.). The Legal Texts: The Results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations, pp. 231–274. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. WTO (2001). Ministerial Declaration—Adopted 20 November. Ministerial Conference, Fourth Session, Doha, 9–14 November. WT/MIN(01)/ DEC/1. Geneva: World Trade Organization. WTO (2005). Ministerial Declaration—Adopted 18 December. Ministerial Conference, Sixth Session, Hong Kong, 13–18 December. WT/MIN(05)/DEC. Geneva: World Trade Organization. WTO (2007). Draft Consolidated Chair Text of the AD and SCM Agreements. Negotiating Group on Rules. TN/RL/W/213. 30 November. Geneva: World Trade Organization. WWF (1997). Subsidies and Depletion of World Fisheries: Case Studies. Washington, D.C.: World Wide Fund for Nature. WWF (1998). Towards Rational Disciplines on Subsidies in the Fishery Sector: A Call for New International Rules and Mechanisms. Surrey, U.K.: World Wide Fund International. WWF (2001a). Hard Facts, Hidden Problems: A Review of Current Data on Fishing Subsidies. WWF Technical Paper. Washington, D.C.: World Wide Fund for Nature. WWF (2001b). Fishing in the Dark: A Symposium on Access to Environmental Information and Government Accountability in Fishing Subsidy Programmes. Proceedings of a Workshop held in Brussels, 28–29 November 2000. Washington, D.C.: World Wide Fund for Nature. WWF (2004). Healthy Fisheries, Sustainable Trade: Crafting New Rules on Fishing Subsidies in the World Trade Organization. WWF Position Paper and Technical Resource. Washington, D.C.: World Wide Fund for Nature.

8 World Fish Markets JAMES L. ANDERSON FRANK ASCHE SIGBJØRN TVETERÅS

However, improved storage and preservation technologies and cheaper transportation have steadily increased ﬁsh trade. Still, there has been a virtual revolution in seafood trade over the last 30 years. After adjustment for inﬂation, from 1976 to 2006 world seafood trade value increased threefold, from US$28.3 billion (109) to US$86.4 billion. During the same period, trade volume increased from 7.9 million metric tons to 31.3 million metric tons, or almost fourfold. Hence, the unit value of seafood has decreased, increasing seafood’s competitiveness as a food source. A number of factors have caused the increased trade in seafood. Transportation and logistics have improved signiﬁcantly. In many cases, this has led to substantial reductions in transportation costs by surface and air, opening up the trade of new product forms, such as fresh seafood. Lower transportation costs have also given new producers access to the global market. Improved logistics has allowed economies of scale and scope on all levels in the supply chain, and particularly in the retail sector, where the supermarket has replaced ﬁshmongers and ﬁsh markets in a number of places. Progress in storage and preservation has continued, allowing a wider range of seafood products to be traded. Some developments in freezing technology during recent years has improved to such an extent that many product forms can be frozen twice. This is exploited by processing the products in locations with competitive advantages in processing ﬁsh rather than

8.1. INTRODUCTION Mention the term “ﬁsh market,” and most people think of a market square or hall where locally caught ﬁsh is sold to local consumers and restaurants. In many parts of the world, particularly in developing countries, this picture still has validity. However, its importance is being reduced by the day in most places. In many developed countries, the share of the seafood sold at ﬁsh markets by traditional ﬁshmongers is now less then 10 percent of total seafood sales. The ﬁsh or seafood market is, for many producers, increasingly global even if they do not export, as they are exposed to international competition. Moreover, distance is becoming less important, as ﬁsh is today routinely shipped between continents. This means that large wholesalers and retailers can source ﬁsh from all over the world, providing new opportunities for some producers and new challenges for others. For instance, the substitutes for cod are no longer primarily haddock and pollock, but also include Nile perch, catﬁsh, hoki, pangasius, and tilapia. In this chapter we discuss how the seafood market has changed and become more global, and some main factors in this process. Seafood has been a traded commodity for thousands of years.1 From early on, the quantity traded was limited, mainly because seafood is perishable, and conserving ﬁsh (e.g., by producing dried ﬁsh) was time consuming, costly, and often inefﬁcient. 113

114

Overview

locations close to where the ﬁsh is caught. Aquaculture production has increased signiﬁcantly (see chapter 4). The improved control with the harvesting process in aquaculture has enabled producers to better target the needs of the modern consumer and to further innovate in the supply chains. Total seafood production has continued to increase, increasing the available supply of seafood globally. The imposition of 200-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs) by coastal nations also gave strong incentives for increased trade.2 Countries with considerable distant-water ﬁshing ﬂeets, such as Spain and Japan, have been negatively affected, as coastal nations expanded their domestic ﬂeets to exploit the ﬁsheries within their 200-mile EEZ. As a result, countries that relied on harvesting within the 200mile EEZ of foreign nations had to increase their imports to meet domestic demand. The different factors tend to reinforce each other even though the strength of each differs by market and species. While increased seafood production in itself provides incentives to increase trade, this is not a necessary consequence. It is primarily improved transportation and logistics and better storage and preservation together with competitive prices that enabled it. The increased trade has had a profound effect on seafood markets, as an increasing number of markets have gone from regional to global and as more species from widely different places become substitutes. Moreover, a growing share of producers have access to the global market as the global transportation systems improve and can take advantage of the new market opportunities. For those markets that have the ability to pay, this increases the available supply of seafood. Hence, the share of the imports into the European Union, Japan, and the United States continues to increase. In addition to increased trade ﬂows, the organization of the supply chain has also changed in a number of places. This can be seen most clearly with growth of large supermarket chains. These chains emphasize efﬁcient logistics and distribution and have, in many cases, removed a number of the intermediaries associated with traditional supply chains. Moreover, improved freezing technology has enabled processing to be set up in places far removed from where the ﬁsh is caught, such as China, Poland, and Thailand. Airfreight of fresh ﬁsh has opened up competition from producers located thousands of miles away to the high-end fresh markets that traditionally were served only by local ﬁshermen.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of what we regard as the most important changes that have taken place in the global trade in seafood, highlighting what we think are the most signiﬁcant factors behind these changes. This allows us to not only comment on the progress to date, but also point to some likely paths for future development.

8.2. SEAFOOD PRODUCTION AND TRADE The total supply of seafood increased from 71.7 million metric tons in 1976 to 159.9 million metric tons in 2006 (FAO 2008). Hence, the availability of seafood has more than doubled. Since the 1990s, landings of wild ﬁsh have been relatively stable and aquaculture has increased its share signiﬁcantly. In 2006, aquaculture comprised 42 percent of total seafood supply, with production of 67 million metric tons. It is interesting to note that the breadth of species being produced in aquaculture is almost as large as in wild ﬁsheries, as it varies from kelp and mussels, to low-valued ﬁsh such as carp, to shrimp and other high-value species. However, higher valued species, such as salmon and shrimp, tend to play a more signiﬁcant role in the trade of aquaculture products. International trade has increased much faster than total seafood production.3 From 1976 to 2006, the export volume of seafood increased from 7.9 million metric tons to 31.3 million metric tons, or almost fourfold. Adjusted for inﬂation, the export value during this period increased threefold from US$28.3 billion to US$86.4 billion. One should note that export quantities are not directly comparable to production quantities, as exports are measured in product weight. This can lead to dramatic differences as the ﬁllet weight of tilapia is only between 30 percent and 40 percent of its harvest weight. As such, when the traded quantity is about 30 million metric tons product weight and the total production quantity is about 150 million metric tons live weight, one can conclude that the traded quantity is at least 20 percent, but most likely signiﬁcantly higher as a substantial share of the trade is in processed products. The actual ﬁgure is probably between 30 and 40 percent of total production. In addition, seafood trade also inﬂuences many domestic markets signiﬁcantly, as local ﬁshermen and ﬁsh farmers are exposed to the competition from imports.

World Fish Markets

100000 90000 80000 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0

2002 2004 2006

1992 1994 1996 1998 2000

1982 1984 1986 1988 1990

Developing countries Developed countries

1976 1978 1980

Million USD

When export quantity increases fourfold and export value only threefold, the unit value of the seafood decreases. This has increased seafood’s competitiveness as a food source and is an important factor explaining increased trade. This can be seen most clearly with successful aquaculture species such as salmon and shrimp, where real prices now are less than one-third of those 25 years ago. The proﬁtable expansion in the production of these species, despite decreasing prices, is partly due to lower production costs, improved production technologies, and lower distribution and logistics costs (for a further discussion on aquaculture, see chapter 4). The trade patterns are widely different between exports and imports. The export sources were split almost equally between developing and developed countries in 2006, as shown in ﬁgure 8.1. The share of developing countries increased from 37 percent in 1976, to 49 percent in 2006. For imports, the picture looks very different, as shown in ﬁgure 8.2.

8.1 Real-world trade value, exports, 1976–2006 (2006 = 1). (FAO 2008)

100000 90000 80000 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0

8.2 Real-world trade value, imports, 1976–2006 (2006 = 1). (FAO 2008)

FIGURE

2006

2002 2004

1998 2000

1996

1992 1994

1988 1990

1986

1982 1984

1978 1980

Developing countries Developed countries

1976

Million USD

FIGURE

115

Imports to developed countries comprised 80 percent of all imports in 2006. Even though the share declined from 86 percent in 1976, this means that most of the increased trade in seafood is to developed countries, and a considerable share is exported from developing countries. This picture is also conﬁrmed in table 8.1, which shows the world’s 10 largest seafood exporters and importers. The 10 largest importers make up 67.5 percent of all imports, while the 10 largest exporters make up 51.5 percent of the exports. Hence, imports are more concentrated. Additionally, four of the exporters are developing countries, but only two of the importers are developing countries. Japan and the United States appear as the two largest importers. However, if the E.U. countries are aggregated, this is clearly the largest market. This can be seen in ﬁgure 8.3, which shows a strong growth in the E.U. market. It is certainly not arbitrary that developed countries take most of the imports and that the European Union, Japan, and the United States are the largest seafood importers. These are the wealthiest regions in the world, with the best ability to pay. In a similar manner, economic growth has led to impressive growth of seafood imports in growing economies like China and Southeast Asia (Delgado et al. 2003).4 This makes these markets the most attractive for any producer/exporter that has access to the markets because of higher prices. Improved (and cheaper) transportation and infrastructure give many developing country producers access to these markets and thereby lead to increased seafood exports. This has further been a catalyst for the development of industrialized aquaculture and thus is the main reason that an increasing number of new species is available at ﬁsh counters and restaurants in the European Union, Japan, and the United States, and now increasingly in China and Southeast Asia. In general, increased trade will be beneﬁcial for exporters that receive a higher price for their product. In developing countries, this leads to economic development. It is also beneﬁcial for consumers (and often also processors) in the importing country, as the imports provide a higher quantity at competitive prices. For local consumers in exporting regions, increased exports often lead to higher prices. In some cases, this can be a challenge in places where seafood is a staple for the poorest citizens. Increased imports can also be negative for domestic ﬁshermen and aquaculturists in the import

116

Overview

8.1 Largest seafood importing and exporting countries in 2006 (billions US$)

TABLE

Exports Country China Norway Thailand United States Denmark Canada Chile Viet Nam Spain Netherlands

Imports

Value

Percent

Country

Value

Percent

9150.3 5543.7 5244.9 4190.1 3999.1 3682.8 3638.9 3363.4 2871.9 2827.2

10.6 6.4 6.1 4.9 4.6 4.3 4.2 3.9 3.3 3.3

Japan United States Spain France Italy China Germany United Kingdom Denmark Korea, Republic of

14258.7 13399.7 6377.8 5108.7 4745.6 4188.5 3778.6 3751.9 2939.0 2767.9

15.7 14.8 7.0 5.6 5.2 4.6 4.2 4.1 3.2 3.0

Source: FAO (2008).

25000

Million USD

20000 15000 10000 5000

USA

Japan

China

07 20

05 20

03 20

01 20

99 19

97 19

19

95

0

EU

8.3 Annual import value for seafood in China, European Union, Japan, and United States. (Norwegian Seafood Export Council 2008)

FIGURE

market, since the imports tend to put downward pressure on the demand of their products. Protectionism is a main reason for the increased number of antidumping complaints5 related to seafood in the European Union and the United States.6

8.3. FROM REGIONAL TO GLOBAL MARKETS As noted in the introduction, the geographical extent of ﬁsh markets was traditionally limited by the perishability of the product. Until a hundred

years ago, dried, dried salted, and heavily salted ﬁsh were the main product forms that were shipped over long distances. For other product forms, the market was, at best, regional, and often very local.7 From about the turn of the 20th century, there has been a steady increase in seafood trade due to improved storage and preservation and cheaper transportation. For instance, railways allowed larger but still limited quantities of high-end products, such as oysters and lobster, to be shipped. In addition, canning provided a storage and preservation that allowed seafood to be stored for a long time. However, canned product is very different from fresh product, and storage and preservation technology led to segmentation of the market. For canned product, the geographical extent of the market was vastly expanded, and for some species the market became global; for instance, tuna and salmon. While ﬁsh was caught throughout the world in ﬁrst half of the 20th century, most of what was traded was consumed in the European Union, Japan, and the United States.8 When freezing technology became popular in the 1950s, it largely replaced canning (and drying and salting) as the main storage and preservation method for a number of species and markets. Freezing is now the preferred storage and preservation method for most high-value species. Because freezing requires capital equipment, both in the freezing process and in storage throughout the value chain, it is still most prevalent in wealthier countries, although its use is steadily expanding. With a few notable exceptions, this also made most markets appear regional. For instance, the whiteﬁsh market was a North Atlantic market

World Fish Markets involving countries in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States; Paciﬁc halibut was a Paciﬁc Northwest market. However, as transportation and logistics continued to improve and freezing technology continued to expand, and fueled by increased demand that could not be met from regional ﬁsheries because of overﬁshing, the sources for the ﬁsh became increasingly global. The whiteﬁsh market is a good example. In 1980 it included primarily North Atlantic species, such as cod, saithe, and haddock. By 1990, Alaska pollock and Paciﬁc cod were established as a major part of the market, linking the North Atlantic and North Paciﬁc ﬁsheries. During the 1990s, such species as Nile perch, Argentinean and Namibian hake, and hoki from New Zealand, as well as farmed species such as pangasius and tilapia, made the market truly global. For most preserved products, transportation costs are not a big issue because they make up only a small percentage of the ﬁnal price. For instance, the current cost of transporting frozen salmon from Alaska or Chile to virtually any market in the world is about US$0.50/kg. Hence, for producers with access to the international trade routes, distance is generally no longer a signiﬁcant barrier. For producers in many developing countries, the main challenge in this respect is processing and infrastructure. Until the late 1980s, most seafood trade was with preserved products, although limited quantities of some high-end products were also shipped fresh on ice or live. Fresh seafood was primarily supplied by ﬁshermen within the same region, although improved infrastructure expanded the market so it could be served by virtually any producer. Salmon aquaculture then changed this picture dramatically.9 Initially, salmon farmers in Norway and the United Kingdom sold their ﬁsh to the same markets that consumed wild salmon; that is, domestic high-end restaurants and gourmet shops. As these markets were saturated and pressure on prices commenced, new markets were sought. There are substantial economies of scale in transport and logistics, and accordingly, producers tended to target one geographical market at a time. The ﬁrst target was France, the largest seafood importer in Europe, with one of the largest high-end markets. Moreover, it takes approximately 24 hours to transport salmon from Scotland or western Norway to Paris by truck. It was possible to guarantee delivery of fresh ﬁsh that would reach the market less than three days after it was caught.

117

With the geographical expansion of the market, a number of innovations were made with respect to logistics, preservation, and packaging. The development of leak-proof Styrofoam packaging helped make airfreight feasible. In the mid-1980s the trade ﬂow from Norway took a surprising turn as the United States became the largest import market after France. The use of airfreight was important, as it largely removed the barrier that distance previously presented to the global market for fresh salmon. In 2006, Norway and Chile exported fresh salmon to more than 150 countries. It also allowed producers in any location to access the market, and this can be seen as the main factor behind Chile’s success, now the second largest salmon producer. The same pattern can also be found for a number of other species. For instance, virtually all fresh tilapia consumed in the United States is ﬂown in from Central and South America. Where the regulatory system allows a sufﬁcient degree of control in the harvesting operation, similar systems have also been created for wild ﬁsh, with airfreight of cod from Iceland being the most prominent example. Therefore, during the last two decades, a global market has been formed for fresh seafood. However, as airfreight is signiﬁcantly more expensive than other modes of transportation, this is still a high-end market.

8.4. SPECIES AND PRODUCT FORMS Despite the fact that the seafood market has largely become global, it is also highly segmented. The market is segmented in at least two dimensions, by species and product forms. We say that a market is integrated when (a) consumers are willing to shift their consumption to the relatively cheaper product when a product’s price changes relative to its substitute, and (b) producers shift their supply to the relatively higher paying market (product) when the market’s (product’s) price changes relative to the alternative. For example, if consumers shift from cod to haddock if the price of cod increases, then these two species are integrated. Another example of integrated markets is if producers increase supply to Europe and reduce it to the United States if prices in Europe increase relative to the prices in the United States. When two markets form a common market (i.e., an integrated market), prices will tend to be highly correlated over time. For instance, in a

Overview pangasius, Nile perch, and farmed tilapia. Hence, the whiteﬁsh market not only became global during the last decades, but also grew as new species entered and inﬂuenced the price determination process. It also provides further links, as many of these species have alternate markets where they have been traditionally sold. For instance, surimi11 was one of the most important product forms for Alaska Pollock. When processors can choose whether to produce a frozen ﬁllet or surimi, they will make decisions based on the prices in these markets. This also provides a link between the whiteﬁsh and surimi markets. The whiteﬁsh market has changed, and there are now indications that cod, which used to be the leading species in the market segment, is no longer a competitor, but forms a separate market segment. One reason that species with attributes that appear quite different from the traditional whiteﬁsh species can enter the market is the introduction of new product forms. In particular, with breaded and battered products, as well as ready-made meals, it is often very hard to distinguish among different species. As prices of cod and other whiteﬁsh species increased and landings decreased during the last decades, it has become more and more attractive to ﬁnd cheaper substitutes. This means that cod is no longer used in lower valued product forms, such as ﬁshsticks. It is also interesting that the aquaculture industry targets an increasing number of new market segments and increasingly also high-volume rather than high-price segments. Further, several ﬁrms are experimenting with frozen tilapia blocks, targeting the lower priced end of the whiteﬁsh market. Figure 8.4 shows how U.S. 300 250 Million USD

ﬁsh market with two market stalls selling cod of the same quality, one will expect that the price in the two stalls is the same every day. Otherwise, buyers would purchase only from the cheapest stall. However, as the daily catches vary, one would expect price to change from day to day. When investigating whether markets are integrated, one is not interested in the actions of individual consumers or ﬁrms but in what the most important groups are doing. Hence, one is interested in whether a sufﬁcient number of consumers or producers respond to the initial change in the relative prices such that the two products have a common price determination process. The seafood market is highly segmented because, for most species, prices are determined independently of each other, and this is also the case for many product forms.10 However, markets for different product forms using the same species as raw material tend to be more integrated than markets for different species. The main reason for this is that a producer does not care much about who the ﬁsh is sold to, and the ﬁsh will be sold to the buyer willing to pay the highest price. If two processors both want ﬁsh from the same ﬁshery, they will have to pay similar prices. Thus, the globalization of the ﬁsh market can be seen as a process where a barrier to trade—transportation costs—has been reduced and the market becomes integrated as producers from more places ship their seafood to the highest-paying market. That the markets for different species are segmented or not integrated can be interpreted as evidence that consumers have different preferences for different types of seafood. This also seems sensible, as different species have different characteristics, and no chef would consider using the same recipe for cod as for herring or squid. However, globalization also makes new species compete with each other. This is most apparent in the whiteﬁsh market. Thirty years ago, cod was the most preferred species in this market. However, there also were several cheaper alternatives, such as saithe and redﬁsh. The price development of these species was determined by cod, because few would buy them if their prices become too close to the price of cod, while demand for the alternative species increased when their prices decreased relative to cod. As noted above, in the 1980s Alaska pollock and Paciﬁc cod entered the whiteﬁsh market, making the price of Alaska pollock related to the price of other types of whiteﬁsh. A number of other new species also entered this market during the 1990s and later, including farmed catﬁsh, hoki, farmed

200 150 100 50 0 19 93 19 9 19 4 95 19 9 19 6 97 19 9 19 8 99 20 00 20 0 20 1 02 20 0 20 3 04 20 0 20 5 06 20 07

118

Tilapia

Pollock

Other cod

Atlantic cod

FIGURE 8.4 Annual U.S. import value of Atlantic cod, other cod, pollock, and tilapia. (National Marine Fisheries Service 2008)

119

World Fish Markets imports of traditional whiteﬁsh, such as cod and Alaska pollock, has decreased since 1993 and how total quantity is higher due to increased imports of tilapia. The aquaculture industry is also increasingly targeting market segments that traditionally have been serviced by land-based food producers. In many West European countries, one can now ﬁnd freshly packed ﬁsh, such as salmon, in similar presentations and in counters beside the chicken and pork sections. One can also ﬁnd an increasing array of ready-made meals and easy-to-prepare seafood appetizers. At ﬁrst glance, few people who see the smoked salmon counter in a French supermarket would think it was seafood if they were not informed by the array of brands, packaging, and other marketing devises. The reliable supplies of farmed ﬁsh have also allowed an increasing degree of standardization in the hotel, restaurant, and catering (or horeca) sectors, and consequently increased the share of aquaculture products in this market segment. This development was led by salmon, catﬁsh (in the United States), and shrimp, but more recently, a number of new species, such as tilapia and pangasius, are appearing on menus. The impact of aquaculture on seafood in the United States can be seen in table 8.2, which shows per capita consumption of the largest species segments in 2000 and 2006. Consumption of traditional wild species, such as tuna and cod, has stagnated or declined, while consumption of (primarily) farmed species, such as shrimp, salmon, and tilapia, is rapidly increasing. The effect of tilapia is particularly profound, as the species was not on the top 10 list in 2000.

TABLE 8.2 Top 10 seafoods consumed in the United States, 2000 versus 2007

Rank

2000 (lb per capita)

2007 (lb per capita)

While the seafood market is still diverse, a signiﬁcant part of product development makes it less diverse. For instance, as more species become “whiteﬁsh” and lose their separate identity, the seafood market becomes less segmented, as these species face similar price determination processes. This development is likely to continue in order to meet the requirements of the largest outlets for seafood in many parts of the world, the retail chains.

8.5. SUPPLY CHAIN DEVELOPMENT AND THE IMPACT OF THE RETAIL CHAINS Improved logistics and distribution have not only expanded seafood trade, but also changed the seafood supply chains. Twenty years ago, most seafood supply chains consisted of many small independent agents at each level and markets clearing at a number of levels through the chain. Moreover, because of the perishability of ﬁsh, processing plants were usually placed as close to the ﬁshing grounds as possible. As the ﬁshing grounds typically were not close to the main population centers, this led to long supply chains for the product. Economies of scale thus created the large seafood companies and branded products, such as Birdseye, Frionor, and Young’s Bluecrest. However, the direction tended to be straight from the ﬁrst processor to the consumer. During the last 20 years, there have been two main changes in the supply chains, caused by the growth of supermarkets and retail chains, and

100% 80%

% Change 60%

Tuna Shrimp Pollock Salmon Catﬁsh Cod Clams Crabs Flatﬁsh Scallops

3.50 3.20 1.59 1.58 1.00 0.75 0.47 0.38 0.42 0.27

Total

13.16

Shrimp Tuna Salmon Pollock Tilapia Catﬁsh Crab Cod Clams Flatﬁsh

4.10 28.12 2.70 –22.86 2.36 49.62 1.73 8.81 1.14 >318.31 0.88 –12.05 0.68 78.68 0.46 –38.00 0.45 –4.47 0.32 –24.05 14.82

Source: National Marine Fisheries Service (2008).

12.68

40% 20% 0%

19 8 19 8 8 19 9 9 19 0 9 19 1 9 19 2 9 19 3 9 19 4 9 19 5 9 19 6 9 19 7 98 19 9 20 9 00 20 0 20 1 0 20 2 03

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Supermarkets

Mongers and stalls

Other outlets

8.5 United Kingdom market share of supermarkets, ﬁshmongers, market stalls, and other outlets. (Seaﬁsh Industry Authority)

FIGURE

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Overview

because many ﬁnﬁsh can be refrozen after processing. Increasingly, retailers have become organized in chains with focus on effective logistics and distribution. In several countries, the retail chains have almost completely replaced ﬁsh markets and ﬁshmongers. The United Kingdom is a good example (ﬁgure 8.5). In 1988, only 16 percent of seafood sales were through supermarkets, while the most signiﬁcant outlets were ﬁshmongers and market stalls, with 65 percent of the sales. By 2003, this situation was reversed: 86 percent of sales were in supermarkets and only 11 percent was by ﬁshmongers and market stalls. Although not equally strong everywhere, increasing retail chain dominance in seafood retailing has taken place in Western and Eastern Europe, the United States, Japan, and a number of the fast-growing developing countries. There are a number of reasons for this development, but the most important factors relate to economies of scale and scope in the distribution chain and marketing. The focus on efﬁcient distribution has removed many levels in the supply chains, and many intermediaries have disappeared. Moreover, suppliers of limited volumes of seafood ﬁnd it difﬁcult to meet the requirements of the big buyers, and increasingly it is an advantage, if not crucial, to be big enough to sell to retail chains. This has beneﬁted aquaculture and large sourcing companies. Because diversity is expensive, most retail chains also limit the number of suppliers. Only the high-end retailers will generally have more than a few species for sale. The most signiﬁcant change in the supply chains is caused by improved freezing technology. As mentioned above, processing has traditionally been done near the harvesting region (when it was not done onboard), because of seafood’s perishability. In the 1990s freezing technology became so good that it allowed double-freezing of ﬁsh, at least those with low fat content, which includes a large part of the white ﬁnﬁsh species. One could freeze the ﬁsh quickly after harvest, transport it to another location, partially thaw it, process it, and freeze it again without signiﬁcant impacts on quality. This has removed distance as a factor when determining where to process seafood that eventually was to be sold as frozen or other highly preserved product forms. Hence, processing can be set up where processing costs are the lowest. In many ﬁsheries, it is no longer a competitive advantage for the processors to be located near the ﬁshing grounds.

This has led processing to be set up in places far removed from where the ﬁsh is caught, such as China, Poland, and Thailand. China now is clearly the largest seafood processing country. It also gives rise to some very interesting trade patterns. For instance, the typical ﬁshstick consumed in Europe today is most likely based on Alaska pollock that was caught in the Bering Sea, shipped to China, and ﬁlleted there before being frozen into a block. This block is then shipped to Germany or Poland, where it is processed into the ﬁshsticks. Moreover, one can also observe frozen ﬁsh going from Europe to China for processing before being shipped back. The same is true for U.S. ﬁsh.

8.6. SUSTAINABLE SEAFOOD, ECOLABELING, AND SEAFOOD SAFETY Most of the main trends in the seafood market share the common factor that they lead to more trade and a less segmented market. They have contributed to the globalization of the seafood market. However, during the last decade there was also an increasing focus on factors that segment the market, particularly in the European Union and the United States. The two most important concerns are the environmental impact of the ﬁshing or aquaculture activity, and seafood safety. In Europe, seafood safety is a part of a larger trend with respect to food safety, which became particularly acute after the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) outbreaks in the United Kingdom. Many retailers now prefer or require more stringent quality assurances. This had led to demand for more information about how a product is produced and how it moves through the supply chain. This is often referred to as the traceability of a product. The retailers and consumers also want to be assured that the production processes meets different requirements with respect to hygiene, animal welfare, and related concerns. Exporters are therefore increasingly required to meet Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) standards, provide different types of International Standardization Organization (ISO) certiﬁcates, or meet national standards in the importing countries. There are certainly cases where such measures seem to be justiﬁed; for example, some ﬁsh from China were found to contain harmful chemicals such as malachite green. There are also a number of

World Fish Markets exporters that think these requirements are a new form of trade barrier. The experiences of Kenyan exporters of Nile perch and Bangladeshi shrimp exporters are examples, as imports to the European Union have been terminated by the European Union in periods due to food safety concerns. The E.U. Commission claims, of course, that import bans were entirely justiﬁed. There is little doubt that many of the world’s ﬁsh stocks are not in good condition (FAO 2006). During the last decade, several nongovernmental organizations have become advocates of marketbased management of ﬁsheries. They claim that consumers do not accept the mismanagement of ﬁsh stocks. Ecolabels, as discussed in chapter 46, are a market-based tool since they allow the consumers to choose seafood only from well-managed ﬁsheries.12 Certiﬁcation, labeling, and meeting speciﬁc standards has the effect of segmenting the market into those products where the standard is met and those where it is not. Meeting the standards requires that producers provide information that otherwise would not be provided and carry out costly additions to the production processes they otherwise would not undertake. This makes some producers unable or unwilling to meet the standards and therefore further segments the market and reduces trade or changes trade patterns. While some standards seem justiﬁed, the myriad requirements that differ among countries create barriers for many producers. This is particularly true for producers in developing countries, where limited infrastructure makes it very hard to document the production process even when it is compliant. This is a particularly acute problem for ecolabeling, as many developing countries lack the governance structure for its ﬁsheries to be certiﬁed.

8.7. CONCLUDING REMARKS During the last three decades, seafood trade has increased tremendously as traded value has increased threefold and traded quantity has increased fourfold. There are a number of reasons for this development. Taken together, however, these seafood market drivers project a continued strong demand for seafood, increased supply (primarily from aquaculture), and reduced cost and barriers when trading seafood. As far as we can see, these trends are set to continue, and trade with seafood is therefore likely to continue to increase.

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There have been signiﬁcant changes in the structure of the seafood trade during the previous decades, and this structural change is also likely to continue as different producers and markets have different abilities to exploit new opportunities or meet new challenges. It is very difﬁcult to predict the development with any detail. However, some features seem relatively certain. Imports will continue to ﬂow to the markets with the best ability to pay. The member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will therefore remain among the largest seafood importers. However, seafood imports to emerging economies are increasing, since in these countries a substantial share of disposable income growth is directed toward food consumption, unlike wealthy countries, where the food’s share of expenditures tend to decrease when income grows. China and Southeast Asia are the most important regions in this respect. As more and more producers gain access to these markets because of better international transportation networks, competition will increase. Furthermore, aquaculture products will dominate in an increasing number of market segments due to stagnating supply of capture ﬁsheries and continued growth of aquaculture production. This will also reduce the product heterogeneity in the seafood markets, as the largest market segments are likely to be dominated by a few groups of species, predominantly farmed, with similar characteristics.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Jingjie Chu, Barbara Harrison, and Kristin Lien for helpful comments and the Norwegian Research Council for funding. The usual disclaimer applies. Notes 1. Kurlansky (1997) provides a highly entertaining story of the cod trade in the northern Atlantic from about 1000 a.d. 2. Peru, Ecuador, and Chile implemented EEZs as early as 1952. By the time the United States declared its 200-mile EEZ in 1976, 37 nations had already extended their jurisdiction, and by the mid-1980s, nearly all coastal nations had imposed EEZs. 3. Anderson (2003) provides a thorough review of international seafood trade and also discusses trade of the most important species. 4. In ﬁgure 8.3, the import ﬁgures for China start in 1998.

122

Overview

5. Dumping is deﬁned as “a price which is lower than the price for which it is sold in the home market, after adjustments for difference in the merchandise, quantities purchased, and the circumstances of the sale” (U.S. International Trade Commission 2001). 6. Keithly and Poudel (2008) provide an interesting discussion of shrimp in the United States. 7. It is interesting to note that the main reason for the long-standing, long-distance ﬁsh trade in Europe was that Catholics generally do not eat meat on Fridays and during Lent. 8. We use the term “European Union” to describe Western Europe even though the European Community was not formed before the 1950s, and it took decades to develop into the European Union. 9. Bjørndal (1990) provides an overview of the early development of salmon aquaculture. 10. Asche et al. (2007) provide a review of studies investigating substitution and market integration for seafood. 11. Surimi is deﬁned as an intermediate product of reﬁned, stabilized ﬁsh protein concentrate developed in Japan (Anderson 2003, p. 45). 12. Wessells (2002) provides a more general discussion about the role of information in seafood sales.

References Anderson, J.L. (2003). The International Seafood Trade. Cambridge, U.K.: Woodhead Publishing. Asche, F., T. Bjørndal, and D.V. Gordon (2007). Studies in the demand structure for ﬁsh and seafood products. In: A. Weintraub, C. Romero,

T. Bjørndal, and R. Epstein (eds.). Handbook of Operations Research in Natural Resources, pp. 295–314. Berlin: Springer. Bjørndal, T. (1990). The Economics of Salmon Aquaculture. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Delgado, C.L., N. Wada, M.W. Rosengrant, S. Meijer, and A.M. Ahmed (2003). Fish to 2020: Supply and Demand in Changing Global Markets. Washington: International Food Policy Research Institute. FAO (2006). The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2006. Rome: Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of United Nations. FAO (2008). FISHSTAT Plus: Universal Software for Fishery Statistical Time Series. Fisheries Department, Fishery Information, Data and Statistics Unit. Version 2.3. Rome: Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of United Nations. Keithly, W.R., Jr., and P. Poudel (2008). The Southeast U.S.A. shrimp industry: Issues related to trade and antidumping duties. Marine Resource Economics 23(4):459–483. Kurlansky, M. (1997). Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. New York: Penguin. National Marine Fisheries Service (2008). www. nmfs.gov. Norwegian Seafood Council (2008). Personal communication. U.S. International Trade Commission (2001). Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Handbook. USITC Publication 3482, 9th ed. Washington, D.C.: U.S. International Trade Commission. Wessells, C.R. (2002). Markets for seafood attributes. Marine Resource Economics 17(2): 153–162.

9 Climate Change and Fisheries Management KEITH BRANDER

and social concern, as the rates of global warming, rising sea level, altered rainfall, and falling pH become more apparent (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] 2007). Given the importance of ﬁsh in the food supply of many countries, it is not surprising that future ﬁsheries production and the consequences of climate change for ﬁsheries management are also an increasing subject of concern. Fish is the largest net exported commodity for developing countries (Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of United Nations [FAO] Fisheries Department 2004). The adverse impacts of climate on future ﬁsheries production may be severe, so responsible planning needs to take into account the time scale over which such impacts could occur, the areas (countries, marine ecosystems) most at risk, and the scope for adaptation. However the increasing urgency of planning for climate change should not obscure the need to continue to deal with the threats from other human activities, such as overﬁshing and habitat degradation; the emergence of new pressures, such as climate change, unfortunately does not cause the old ones to go away. How quickly can we expect climate change to affect ﬁsheries? This depends on the rate at which climate changes and on the sensitivity of particular ﬁsh species or marine systems to such changes. Ocean climate and terrestrial climate vary in much the same way, and it is difﬁcult to distinguish between “natural” climate variability and the additional changes brought about by anthropogenic

9.1. INTRODUCTION Fish stocks ﬂuctuate in abundance, distribution, and productivity under the inﬂuence of changes in their physical and biological environment. We know from sediment cores that such natural ﬂuctuations have occurred over thousands of years (Baumgartner et al. 1992). One of the most striking and globally signiﬁcant recent ﬂuctuations in marine production and ﬁsheries arose from the effect of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and decadal variability in ocean climate on the ecosystem off the west coast of South America. During the period 1970–2004, catches of Peruvian anchoveta (Engraulis ringens) varied from 94,000 tons to 13 million tons, largely due to ENSO (Barber 2001; Jacobson et al. 2001). Such enormous natural variability of course creates great problems for ﬁshing communities and ﬁsheries managers, but also provides a powerful incentive for scientists to investigate and understand the processes that cause variability, and for managers, the ﬁshing industry and dependent communities to learn how to adapt to environmentally driven changes. Some of the lessons that can be learned from coping with natural variability can be transferred to help in adapting to the new problems generated by global climate change. The impact of anthropogenic climate change on all aspects of the natural world and on human activity has become an issue of pressing political 123

124

Overview

factors (mainly greenhouse gases). In this chapter, I describe the background of natural climate variability and the effects on marine ecosystems. Over the next twenty to ﬁfty years, the oceans will increasingly experience conditions that move beyond the envelope of previous climate variability and into a state for which there are no past analogues within human history (IPCC 2007). Can we identify which countries, ﬁsheries, and marine ecosystems are most at risk from climate change? Yes—the vulnerability of countries depends on the local rate of climate change, the degree to which they are dependent on ﬁsheries, and their ability to adapt (Allison et al. 2009). Vulnerable ﬁsh species and ecosystems are also being identiﬁed, and I give examples of these. However, ﬁsheries worldwide exploit a very large number of species that depend on the productivity of natural ecosystems. Our ability to predict or control the response of marine ecosystems to changes in ocean climate is minimal, and there are likely to be sudden, unexpected alterations to their productivity and composition. How can we best adapt to climate impacts on ﬁsheries? In spite of our limited ability to predict and control marine ecosystems, we have some effective adaptation options. Most ﬁsheries are fully exploited or overexploited, and many are suffering from habitat degradation as a result of ﬁshing and other human activities. Reducing the stresses caused by overﬁshing and by habitat degradation is an effective form of adaptation to the additional pressures that climate change will impose on marine ecosystems. Climate change therefore reinforces the existing imperatives for ﬁsheries management and adds further justiﬁcation to reducing ﬁshing pressure and allowing stocks to rebuild to higher biomass levels, with consequent increased diversity in age structure and geographic spread. The aims of ﬁsheries management include ensuring that catches (1) are sustained at high levels, (2) remain reasonably stable, (3) do not cause unacceptable damage to the marine ecosystem, and (4) are equitably distributed among the participants. Climate variability and climate change increase the uncertainty in achieving these aims, so climate impacts must be included when evaluating risk and uncertainty in achieving management aims. In order to reduce the uncertainty over impacts of climate, we require better understanding of the processes by which climate affects productivity and distribution of ﬁsh stocks, but also well-designed monitoring

and responsive and ﬂexible management processes that can cope quickly with unexpected trends.

9.2. CLIMATE CHANGE AND CLIMATE VARIABILITY The climate of the earth (and of the oceans) has always ﬂuctuated. No two years are the same, and this natural variability also extends over decades, centuries, and millennia. The increase in greenhouse gases that has occurred since the industrial revolution is causing rapid progressive changes in climate, which are superimposed onto this background of natural variability. The most valuable sources of information that we have for predicting the consequences of future climate change are the observations and reconstructions of past climate variability and the impacts that they have had on marine ecosystems and ﬁsheries (Brander 2003). As recent ocean climate moves to the limits of the previously observed envelope of climate variability, we are beginning to observe changes in distribution and productivity of ﬁsh stocks and shifts in seasonal timing that go beyond those previously experienced (Beare et al. 2004; Brander et al. 2003; Quero et al. 2000). Ocean climate is the long-term (30 year average) state of a number of environmental factors that affect marine ecosystems and ﬁsh stocks, including temperature, winds, ocean transport, oxygen, vertical mixing, and pH. Planetary motion causes daily, seasonal, and longer term cycles (e.g., 18.6-year nodal tide) in the physical and chemical environment, and natural variability (interannual variability, weather) overlays these cycles. Climate change affects not only the mean values of environmental factors, but also their variability. It may alter the frequency and intensity of extreme events (ﬂoods, high waves, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes), so although it is difﬁcult to attribute any particular extreme event to anthropogenic climate change, a change in its likelihood of occurrence can be estimated (IPCC 2003). It is very likely (>90 percent chance) that hot extremes, heat waves, and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent (IPCC 2007). Over the next two or three decades, the anthropogenic component of global warming is expected to add a temperature increment that is fairly small, compared with normal variability. Interannual variability in the sea surface temperature of the North

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125

FIGURE 9.1 Temperature proﬁle at Hell’s Gate (Fraser River, British Columbia) in 2004 (solid top line), also showing 60-year mean (solid middle line), ±1 standard deviation (shaded lines), and 60-year minimum and maximum (dashed lines). For several days in mid-August, Fraser River water temperatures as measured at Hell’s Gate were the highest ever recorded. (Data from Canadian Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans 2005)

Sea, for example, is around 2–3°C, whereas the expected annual anthropogenic increment in temperature is about 1 percent of this (IPCC 2007). Organisms therefore normally experience variability, which is large relative to the climate change effect. However, even though the year-on-year rate of anthropogenic climate change may seem slow, this is very rapid compared with previous natural change, and because it is cumulative it results quite quickly in levels of temperature higher than those experienced for thousands of years. In some cases, long-term changes in mean values of climate variables cause gradual changes in species and ecosystems, by altering growth, mortality, and life history patterns in ways that alter distributions and the balance between interacting species within an ecosystem (Teal et al. 2008). In other cases, extreme conditions (e.g., exceptionally cold winters or hot summers) cause high mortalities that abruptly change the abundance of sensitive species, so a shortduration effect can have long-term biological consequences. We therefore need to be aware of changes in climate variables at all time scales in order to detect and attribute the cause of a particular observed change. For example, ﬁgure 9.1 shows part of the annual temperature climatology for the Fraser River

in British Columbia, based on a 60-year time series. This is the observed envelope of climate variability for this location and season. “Abnormally” high temperatures, which were outside this envelope, occurred during July and August 2004 when the salmon run was beginning and caused high mortality (Canadian Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans 2005).

9.3. HOW CLIMATE AFFECTS FISH The effects of increasing temperature on marine ecosystems are already evident, with rapid poleward shifts in distributions of ﬁsh and plankton in regions, such as the Northeast Atlantic, where temperature change has been rapid (Beaugrand et al. 2002; Brander 2003; International Council for the Exploration of the Sea [ICES] 2008). Further changes in distribution and productivity are expected due to continuing warming and freshening of the Arctic (Drinkwater 2005). Some of the changes are expected to have positive consequences for ﬁsh production (Arctic Climate Impact Assessment [ACIA] 2005), but in other cases reproductive capacity is reduced and stocks become vulnerable to levels of ﬁshing that had previously been

126

Overview

sustainable (Brander and Mohn 2004). Local extinctions are occurring at the edges of current ranges, particularly in freshwater and diadromous species, for example, salmon (Friedland et al. 2003) and sturgeon (Reynolds et al. 2005). The rate at which climate can be expected to affect a ﬁsh species depends on the size of climate change and on the sensitivity of the species in question: Impact = scale of climate change × sensitivity of species (or ecosystem) The IPCC report (IPCC 2007) is one of the authoritative sources of information about expected scales and rates of future climate change, but there are a number of limitations, particularly for ocean climate. Future rates depend on the chosen scenario for future greenhouse gas emissions, and within the overall global trends, there are quite large regional differences. Only a few of the ocean climate factors that affect ﬁsh are included in the global climate models. Some ﬁsh and shellﬁsh species are more sensitive to environmental change than are other species, and within a species the sensitivity depends on the life history stage, size, and the position within the tolerance range and within the geographic range. North Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) has probably been studied more intensively than any other marine species and therefore provides many examples to illustrate the complex processes that affect sensitivity, in relation not only to temperature but also to light, salinity, and oxygen. Apart from one or two species like cod, we have very limited knowledge of the sensitivity of species and ecosystems to different environmental variables, and our ability to predict regional rates of change in ocean climate is also very limited. The principal threats to future ﬁsheries production identiﬁed here are expected to act progressively (i.e., a linear response) and to interact with each other. However, marine ecosystems can also respond to changes in physical or biological forcing in a nonlinear way (Hsieh et al. 2005), for example, when a threshold value is exceeded and a major change in species composition, production, and dynamics takes place. We know that such nonlinear responses occur but do not yet understand how or under what conditions. These are key limitations in our ability to forecast future states of marine ecosystems.

9.3.1. Identifying and Studying Effects at Different Time and Space Scales The impacts of climate (and environmental variability in general) on ﬁsh can be studied and described at different scales and at different levels from individual to population to ecosystem. For example, on a very small scale (hours, millimeters), one can investigate the effect of temperature on the development rate of a planktonic ﬁsh egg (Thompson and Riley 1981). At an intermediate scale (days, kilometers), temperature may affect survival rates of ﬁsh larvae at an ocean front or in a ﬁord. At a large scale (years, hundreds of kilometers), one can detect basin-scale effects (e.g., the inﬂuence of the North Atlantic Oscillation, a climate index, on ﬁsh recruitment; Stige et al. 2006). These different scales and explanations may all be part of the same causal chain, but they present very different requirements for measurement of the environment or “climate.” At the small scale, we can measure the actual conditions experienced by an individual egg; at the large scale, we use statistical methods to explore the consequences of differences in factors such as seasonal pressure ﬁelds for ﬁsh stocks in an ocean basin. The small scale helps us to understand the “proximate” impact of the environmental factor on physiological processes and development rates. However, in most cases this does not help much with predicting outcomes at larger scales, because the population consists of innumerable other individuals that experience different conditions and because there are many more life history stages and processes that can govern the outcome. Large-scale statistical studies are more useful for predicting impacts of climate on ﬁsh stocks but are worryingly vague about the processes behind apparent relationships. One of the most difﬁcult issues in attributing observed changes in a particular species to climate is to identify the appropriate life history stages, time periods, and locations when critical effects occur. The critical processes can involve temperature (e.g., warm or cold tolerance), salinity (including density effects), oxygen (interacting with temperature in setting metabolic limits), transport process (which can carry eggs and larvae away from areas in which they survive), and many other factors. Our conﬁdence in attributing observed change to climate is in many cases limited by uncertainty over the identiﬁcation of critical biological processes and lack of appropriate, long time series of relevant climate variables.

Climate Change and Fisheries Management

9.3.2. Direct and Indirect Effects Climate change has both direct and indirect impacts on ﬁsh stocks. Direct effects act on physiology and behavior and alter growth, development, reproductive capacity, mortality, and distribution (Perry et al. 2009). Indirect effects alter the productivity, structure, and composition of the ecosystems on which ﬁsh depend for food and shelter. Plankton species composition, productivity, and phenology (seasonal timing) are affected by climate, with consequences for the different life history stages of ﬁsh that depend on them (Beaugrand et al. 2003). In some cases we are able to show that changes in distribution and abundance of commercially exploited species are due to climate effects on a competitor, predator, or parasite. Some of these climate effects affect aquaculture as well as capture ﬁsheries. Effects of climate on both wild and farmed oyster production provide instructive examples of how climate changes may act and also of how this can interact with other human interference, such as deliberate introduction of species to new areas. The Paciﬁc oyster (Crassostrea gigas) was introduced to European waters for aquaculture purposes from Taiwan and Japan in the 1960s. It was not expected to reproduce in the wild in Europe because of low winter temperatures, but it has done so and is now spreading in a number of European littoral areas, such as the Waddensee, where it forms extensive reefs that alter both the local ecosystem and the patterns of sedimentation (Reise et al. 2005). Two possible reasons that reproduction of the species occurred against expectation are (1) winter temperatures were warmer than expected and (2) the information on sensitivity to low temperature was wrong. In fact, both of these contributed to the rapid colonization that this species is now undertaking. One of the lessons is to beware of drawing conclusions from observed distributions about the factors that limit natural range (the observed bioclimate envelope). As the next example shows, there may be other “lurking variables” that in fact govern distribution. Distribution and commercial production of the Eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) are affected by the northward spread of two protozoan parasites (Perkinsus marinus and Haplosporidium nelsoni) from the Gulf of Mexico to Delaware Bay and farther north, where they have caused mass mortalities. A combination of ﬁeld observations, experiments, and coupled physical-biological modeling

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has been used to show that winter temperatures consistently lower than 3°C limit the development of the MSX (multinucleated spore unknown) disease caused by Haplosporidium (Hofmann et al. 2001). The observed effects of winter temperature on the Eastern oyster are therefore due to an indirect effect of cold winters on a parasite. If the oyster were introduced to an area where the parasite cannot survive (perhaps because it requires an intermediate host), then the distribution at the warm end of the range might expand. The poleward spread of this and other pathogens can be expected to continue as such winter temperatures become rarer. Pathogens have been implicated in mass mortalities of many aquatic species, including plants, ﬁsh, corals, and mammals, although lack of adequate data makes it difﬁcult to attribute causes (Harvell et al. 1999).

9.3.3. Primary Production and Food Chain Effects The rate of production in any marine ecosystem depends ultimately on the rate at which new primary production (NPP) is created by plant photosynthesis. Climate-induced changes in NPP can occur due to changes in nutrient supply and light environment, which are affected by vertical mixing, ice melt, water runoff from land, and aerial transport of nutrients (dust and sand). In the Paciﬁc and the Atlantic oceans, nutrient supply to the upper productive layer of the ocean is declining due to reduced meridional overturning circulation, increased thermal stratiﬁcation, and changes in windborne nutrients (Curry and Mauritzen 2005; McPhaden and Zhang 2002). From our present knowledge, we expect that NPP will decline in most regions due to climate change, which is an issue of concern for future global ﬁsheries production and therefore for ﬁsheries management (Behrenfeld et al. 2006). Polar regions will probably become more productive as the ice cover retreats, allowing greater light penetration into the ocean (Loeng et al. 2005). Satellite measurements of ocean color over the past two decades show changes in global NPP, but with large regional differences that can be related to changes in upper ocean temperature gradients, wind stress, and atmospheric iron deposition (Lehodey et al. 2003). An annual reduction in NPP of roughly 1 percent occurred between 1994 and 2004 (Behrenfeld et al. 2006). Paleological evidence and simulation modeling show North Atlantic plankton biomass declining

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Overview

by 50 percent over a long time scale during periods of reduced meridional overturning circulation (Schmittner 2005). Most ﬁsheries exploit species that are several steps removed from primary production in the food chain. The transfer efﬁciency at each step is approximately 10–20 percent. This means that ﬁsheries production is only a fraction of 1 percent of ocean primary production, and with a few notable exceptions (e.g., the Faroe marine ecosystem; Hansen et al. 2005), the relationship between NPP and ﬁsheries production is weak. The effect of temperature on NPP is also uncertain (Sarmiento et al. 2005). Production in aquaculture can be maximized by harvesting ﬁsh or other taxa such as bivalves that are herbivores, detritivores, or primary carnivores, but species at higher trophic levels may have greater economic value.

9.3.4. Increased Climate Sensitivity Due to FisheriesInduced Changes Differences in sensitivity to environmental factors have already been mentioned, but one aspect that is important in relation to ﬁsheries management is the interaction between ﬁshing and the sensitivity of individual species or ecosystems. There is increasing evidence that populations and systems become more sensitive to climate impacts when they are heavily exploited (Brander 2005; Hsieh et al. 2006; Perry et al. 2008; Planque et al. 2008). The increase in sensitivity to perturbation is a result of reduced age structure (Ottersen et al. 2006), constriction of geographic substructure (Hilborn et al. 2003), and other kinds of loss of diversity (Casini et al. 2008). The consequence is that heavily exploited populations may be perturbed more strongly by climate than will less exploited or unexploited populations of the same species. Therefore, a key adaptation strategy to reduce the impact of climate on marine systems is to reduce ﬁshing pressure (Brander 2007b). However, truncating the age structure of populations may also cause increasingly unstable dynamics independently of environmental factors, because of changing demographic parameters such as intrinsic growth rates (Anderson et al. 2008). The interaction between ﬁshing and sensitivity to environment can also take place in the other direction, when productivity of a ﬁsh stock is reduced due to environmental change. This can alter the resilience of the stock to ﬁshing and

other pressures such that it becomes vulnerable to levels of ﬁshing that were previously sustainable. Many of the periods of severe decline in ﬁsh stocks occurred when ﬁshing mortality remained high or increased following a period of reduced productivity (Brander 2007c). However, climate change can cause increases as well as decreases in productivity, so some species and stocks will become more resilient and able to produce higher sustainable catches (Pawson et al. 2007).

9.4. IMPACTS OF CLIMATE ON FISHERIES MANAGEMENT Climate change is only one of many pressures that ﬁsh stocks experience; box 9.1 (table B9.1) lists several causes of changes in ﬁsh stocks. Fishing was the earliest anthropogenic pressures on ﬁsh stocks and marine ecosystems, beginning hundreds or even thousands of years ago (Jackson et al. 2001; Ojaveer and MacKenzie 2007). Climate change, whose impact has been detected over the past few decades, is the most recent. Management of ﬁsheries, and of marine ecosystems has not yet succeeded in dealing adequately with the old pressures (ﬁgure 9.2) and some of them, particularly overﬁshing, are of greater immediate concern than the effects of climate change (Beddington et al. 2007). Nevertheless, climate change over the coming decades to centuries will have progressively greater impacts on marine ecosystems and ﬁsheries. Anticipating and adapting to such changes will help to minimize the disruption to marine ecosystems and to human food supplies.

9.4.1. Climate Impacts Increase the Urgency of Controlling Fishing Effort The most effective management strategy at present is not a new one, but a reinforcement of the existing imperative to halt increases in ﬁshing pressure on stocks that are currently fully exploited and to reduce the level of ﬁshing on all stocks that are currently overexploited (Brander 2007a). This will help to achieve three goals at the same time: (1) maintaining high, sustainable yields; (2) enhancing adaptation to climate change; and (3) increasing ﬁsh stock biomasses, thus allowing the same catch to be taken for less use of fuel (reducing greenhouse gas emissions). A strategy to restrain and reduce the

Climate Change and Fisheries Management

BOX

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9.1 Causes of changes in ﬁsh stocks B9.1 Causes of observed changes in ﬁsh stocks, divided into climate and nonclimate factors and into “natural” and anthropogenic changes

TABLE

Nonclimate

Climate

Natural

Anthropogenic

Competition, predation, disease, internal dynamics, etc. Temperature, vertical mixing, circulation, etc.

Fishing, eutrophication, pollution, habitat alterations, species introductions, etc. Temperature, vertical mixing, circulation, pH, etc.

The “natural” factors have always varied and caused changes in marine systems. The anthropogenic factors are new (although some have been acting for many centuries) and are, in principle, controllable by human intervention and management. Note that the climate factors are the same whether they are natural or anthropogenic. pH is treated as anthropogenic because of the recent increase in atmospheric CO2. There are, however, interactions among the four categories shown in table B9.1 that cannot be ignored, because they have important consequences for ﬁsheries management in relation to climate change. In particular, the sensitivity of ﬁsh stocks and marine ecosystems to environmental variability and climate change depends on how heavily they are exploited and stressed by ﬁshing and other human activities.

level of ﬁshing can be regarded as a “no-regret,” triple-win option since it simultaneously addresses the issues of sustainable ﬁshing, adaptation to climate, and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. Taking each of the goals of the triple-win option in turn:

biomass have to be adjusted, and it is clear that many, perhaps most, cases of stock collapse have occurred because ﬁshing mortality remained high or even increased at a time when productivity declined. • The consequence of ﬁshing-induced changes for resilience of ﬁsh populations and marine ecosystems has been addressed above. Populations that are less stressed and that retain an adequate age structure and geographic subpopulation structure will be better adapted to resist the effects of climate change. • The amount of fuel used to catch a ﬁxed quantity of ﬁsh depends directly on the abundance of ﬁsh, which in turn depends on the level of ﬁshing mortality. Fuel efﬁciency will therefore always beneﬁt from reducing the level of ﬁshing.

• Maintaining high sustainable yields is the principal aim of ﬁsheries management in any case, but the biological limits and reference points to achieve this aim depend on changes in environmental conditions and on climate change, which affect ﬁsh distribution and productivity. In situations where productivity is reduced, the reference levels for ﬁshing mortality and

The economic effects of climate change on ﬁsheries need to be taken into account, and research in this ﬁeld is developing rapidly in order to help with strategies for adaptation or, in some cases, mitigation of future impacts (ACIA 2005). Some of the possible impacts and adaptations to them are set out in table 9.1.

Climate change Introductions Human expansion

Mechanical habitat destruction

Altered ecosystems

Pollution Fishing “Past”

“Present”

9.2 The historic development of pressures on ﬁsheries and marine ecosystems due to human expansion. (Redrawn from Jackson et al. 2001)

FIGURE

TABLE

9.1 Adaptations of ﬁsheries to climate change

Impact

Supply Side

Demand Side

Fish distribution changes

Revise ﬁshing rights allocation Allocate species combinations and access at ecosystem level

Decreased productivity

Economic incentives to switch target species or use other gear Improve product quality and life Reduce production inefﬁciencies and waste Introduce ecosystem management Switch to new species Increase imports

Changes in consumer preferences, eco-labeling, and certiﬁcation Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Quality labeling (the last wild food . . . ) Taxes on ecological costs of ﬁsh Advertise unique nutritional value of ﬁsh, inform customers

Source: Parry (2000, chap. 9).

BOX 9.2 Response of Atlantic cod to environmental variability Temperature affects rates of maturation of adult cod and rates of development and survival of eggs and larvae (ICES 2005). Rapid growth in early life stages enhances survival and increases the number of recruits per unit of spawning biomass. This results in greater surplus production and greater resilience to ﬁshing pressure so that cod stocks at the warm end of the species range (Celtic Sea, Irish Sea, North Sea) are able to withstand higher ﬁshing mortalities than at the cold end of the range. However, within these warmer ecosystems, cod are rarely the dominant demersal ﬁsh species, and they may be vulnerable to further increases in temperature, which either exposes them to temperatures beyond their tolerance range or favors their warm-tolerant competitors. The optimal temperature for cod growth (when food is not limiting) decreases as the ﬁsh get bigger, from about 12°C for a 100 g ﬁsh to 6°C for a 5,000 g ﬁsh (Bjornsson et al. 2001). The change in growth rate and recruitment in response to temperature is greatest at the lowest and highest temperatures within the overall tolerance range (ﬁgures B9.1 and B9.2). The question of how much particular stocks of cod have become adapted to their environment is still under investigation. Genetic adaptation to extreme conditions has implications for ﬁsheries management under climate change, and special protection of warm-tolerant strains may reduce climate impacts. The ﬁsh farming industry aims to select broodstocks with good food conversion ability under speciﬁc environmental conditions, but this requires that the traits in question should be heritable (Folkvord 2005; Jónsdóttir et al. 1999). Two examples of adaptations to extreme environmental conditions are the production of antifreeze in Canadian stocks that experience subzero temperatures (Goddard and Fletcher 1994) and the production of eggs with very low density by Baltic cod, where salinity and consequently water density is much lower than in other areas (ICES 2005). The latter stock also provides one of the few cases where environmental cause and biological effect can be demonstrated all the way from physiological processes to population impact.

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Growth rate (% per day)

1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 0

5

15

10

Temperature (°C) 100 g

1000 g

250 g

5000 g

B9.1 Growth rate of four sizes of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua L.) in rearing experiments at different temperatures in which they were provided unlimited food. The steep dashed line intersects the growth curves at their maximum values, to show how the temperature for maximum growth rate declines as ﬁsh get bigger. (Redrawn from Bjornsson and Steinarsson 2002)

FIGURE

Arcto-Norwegian = 1 Greenland =

0

Recruitment

2

Iceland =

–1

North Sea =

1 Irish Sea =

0 –1 –2 –3

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Near-surface T (°C) during planktonic stage

B9.2 Composite pattern of recruitment for ﬁve Atlantic cod stocks to illustrate the effect of temperature during the planktonic stage of early life on the number of recruiting ﬁsh. The scales are log e(number of 1-year-old ﬁsh), with the means adjusted to zero. The axes for the ArctoNorwegian and Iceland stocks have been displaced vertically.

FIGURE

131

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Overview

9.4.2. Vulnerable Countries, Species, and Marine Ecosystems On a global scale, it is not easy to identify the main losers and winners from changes in ﬁsheries as a result of climate change. There are obvious advantages to being well informed, well capitalized and able to shift to alternative areas or kinds of ﬁshing activity (or other non-ﬁshery activities) as circumstances change. Modeling studies have assessed country vulnerability on the basis of exposure of its ﬁsheries to climate change, high dependence on ﬁsheries production, and low capacity to respond (Allison et al. 2009). The studies show that climate will have the greatest economic impact on the ﬁsheries sectors of central and northern Asian countries, the Western Sahel in Africa, and coastal tropical regions of South America as well as on some small- and mediumsized island states (Aaheim and Sygna 2000). Indirect economic impacts will depend on the extent to which local economies are able to adapt to new conditions in terms of labor and capital mobility. Change in natural ﬁsheries production is often compounded by decreased harvest capacity and reduced access to markets (FAO Fisheries Department 2006). Some of the most vulnerable systems may be in the megadeltas of rivers in Asia, such as the Mekong, where 60 million people are in some way active in ﬁsheries. These are mainly seasonal ﬂoodplain ﬁsheries, which, in addition to overﬁshing, are increasingly threatened by changes in the hydrological cycle and in land use, damming, irrigation, and channel alteration (IPCC 2007). Thus, the impact of climate change is just one of a number of pressures that require integrated international solutions if the ﬁsheries are to be maintained. Some marine ecosystems, such as the Baltic Sea, are vulnerable to quite small changes in ocean climate, because certain key species are close to their tolerance limits (Koster et al. 2005). The Baltic Sea is a large, almost totally enclosed sea with a low average salinity, which declines to almost freshwater in the northern and eastern areas. The three principal ﬁsh species that are exploited commercially are marine species: Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus), and sprat (Sprattus sprattus), and tolerance of low salinity rather than temperature is the factor that may govern the population of cod in particular, as the climate changes.

Cod in the Baltic are unable to reproduce at salinities below 11 because the sperm become inactive and the eggs sink into the anoxic layers of the deep basins where spawning occurs (ICES 2005). The frequency of inﬂows carrying saline, oxygenated water into the deep basins of the Baltic has been low over the past twenty years, due to changes in large-scale atmospheric pressure patterns, and this, together with ﬁshing pressure, has resulted in a declining cod population (Koster et al. 2005). The Baltic is an extreme and very well-studied system, and other examples are less clear-cut and probably more gradual. However, although processes affecting future ﬁsheries production are expected to act progressively (i.e., a linear response) and to interact with each other, marine ecosystems can also respond to changes in physical or biological forces in a nonlinear way (Hsieh et al. 2005), for example, when a threshold value is exceeded and a major change in species composition, production, and dynamics takes place. We know that such nonlinear responses occur (often described as regime shifts) but do not yet understand how or under what conditions. This is a key limitation in our ability to forecast future states of marine ecosystems.

9.4.3. Robust and Adaptive Management Strategies Given the evidence that climate change is beginning to affect the distribution, abundance, and productivity of exploited marine resources and the expectation that further changes will occur as conditions move beyond what we have previously experienced, it is timely to review strategies for future management (ICES 2007). Our ability to predict future regional climate and the impact that this will have on marine ecosystems is limited (Pearce and Le Page 2008); therefore, two kinds of strategy suggest themselves. The ﬁrst is to devise robust management systems, such as harvest control rules, which are designed to achieve their purpose even if climate causes changes in distribution, abundance, and productivity (Mohn and Chouinard 2007). This can be likened to adopting a strategy for driving a car safely even if conditions (e.g., visibility, ice, volume of trafﬁc) change. The second strategy is to devise responsive management systems that rely on rapid updating about changes in conditions and respond accordingly. This is like an alert driver who immediately

Climate Change and Fisheries Management adjusts driving style as conditions change. The ﬁrst strategy is more cautious, but both strategies can be followed at the same time, with the more cautious approach being used when the incoming information about conditions is uncertain or is not available quickly enough. The second strategy requires constant monitoring and interpretation of new information, which, of course, has a cost. In the real world, there are many institutional and technical problems in creating ﬁsheries management systems that are well informed and ﬂexible and can interpret and respond quickly to the kinds of change that climate may cause. A basic requirement for most ﬁsheries management is accurate knowledge of how much ﬁsh is being caught, but in many parts of the world the quality of this information is poor and may even be deteriorating. Existing ﬁsheries management often uses historic patterns of ﬁsh distribution to allocate ﬁshing rights between different countries or communities, which can create problems when ﬁsh distribution and productivity changes. Some ﬂexibility in ﬁsheries (gear switching, harvesting different species) is adaptive, and even within communities there may be advantages in allowing or encouraging diversity of alternative livelihoods. The beneﬁts of being well informed and having sufﬁcient resources to plan for changing conditions are obvious. For example, within the Dutch ﬁshing ﬂeet, a number of vessels are investing in ﬁshing gear designed to catch species (red mullet, squid) that have increased in abundance in the southern North Sea and are expected to continue to do so. The problems that climate change poses for ﬁsheries management are very serious in the long term and therefore warrant considerable attention. However, they should not be allowed to divert attention away from the urgent problems caused by overﬁshing, habitat degradation, and other existing pressures. Ignoring the effects of climate and continuing with existing strategies for ﬁsheries management is not a sensible option. If existing management targets (e.g., maximum sustainable yield) and reference levels (e.g., precautionary ﬁshing mortality and stock biomass) are altered by climate change, then they cease to be suitable as strategic management objectives. The possible consequences of climate change are being taken into account in planning most areas of human activity, including sea defense, water supply, health, tourism, insurance, agriculture, and

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forestry, and it is timely to include them in planning ﬁsheries management.

Acknowledgments This chapter is a product of the ICES/GLOBEC Cod and Climate Change program and the work was supported by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) contract MF0434 and by E.U. FP6 project RECLAIM, contract no. 44133(SSP8).

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Climate Change and Fisheries Management Hsieh, C., C.S. Reiss, J.R. Hunter, J.R. Beddington, R.M. May, and G. Suguhara (2006). Fishing elevates variability in the abundance of exploited species. Nature 443: 859–862. ICES (2005). Spawning and Life History Information for North Atlantic Cod Stocks. ICES Cooperative Research Report 274. ICES (2007). Report of the Workshop on the Integration of Environmental Information into Fisheries Management Strategies and Advice (WKEFA). ICES CM 2007/ACFM: 25. ICES (2008). An assessment of the changes in the distribution and abundance of marine species in the OSPAR maritime area in relation to changes in hydrodynamics and sea temperature. In ICES Advice Book 1. www.ices.dk/ committe/acom/comwork/report/asp/advice. asp IPCC(2003). The IPCC Workshop on the Detection and Attribution of the Effects of Climate Change. IPCC Working Report. New York: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC (2007). Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, J.B.C., M.X. Kirby, W.H. Berger, K.A. Bjorndal, L.W. Botsford, B.J. Bourque, R.H. Bradbury, R. Cooke, J. Erlandson, J.A. Estes, T.P. Hughes, S. Kidwell, C.B. Lange, H.S. Lenihan, J.M. Pandolﬁ, C.H. Peterson, R.S. Steneck, M.J. Tegner, and R.R. Warner (2001). Historical overﬁshing and the recent collapse of coastal ecosystems. Science 293: 629–637. Jacobson, L.D., J.A.A.A de Oliveira, M. Barange, R. Félix-Uraga, J.R. Hunter, J.Y. Kim, M. Ñiquen, C. Porteiro, B.J. Rothschild, R.P. Sanchez, R. Serra, A. Uriarte, and T. Wada (2001). Surplus production, variability, and climate change in the great sardine and anchovy ﬁsheries. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 58: 1891–1903. Jónsdóttir, Ó.D.B., A.K. Imsland, A.K. Daníelsdóttir, V. Thorsteinsson, and G. Nævdal (1999). Genetic differentiation among Atlantic cod in south and south-east Icelandic waters: Synaptophysin (Syp I) and haemoglobin (HbI) variation. Journal of Fish Biology 54: 1259–1274. Koster, F.W., C. Mollmann, H.H. Hinrichsen, K. Wieland, J. Tomkiewicz, G. Kraus, R. Voss, A. Makarchouk, B.R. MacKenzie, and M.A. John (2005). Baltic cod recruitment—the impact of climate variability on key processes. ICES Journal of Marine Science 62: 1408–1425. Lehodey, P., F. Chai, and J. Hampton (2003). Modelling climate-related variability of tuna populations from a coupled ocean

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biogeochemical-populations dynamics model. Fisheries Oceanography 12: 483–494. Loeng, H., K. Brander, E. Carmack, S. Denisenko, K.F. Drinkwater, B. Hansen, K. Kovacs, P. Livingston, F. McLaughlin, and E. Sakshaug (2005). Marine Systems. In: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. Cambridge University Press, 453–538. McPhaden, M.J., and D. Zhang (2002). Slowdown of the meridional overturning circulation in the upper Paciﬁc Ocean. Nature 415(6872): 603–608. Mohn, R.K., and G.A. Chouinard (2007). Harvest control rules for stocks displaying dynamic production regimes. ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 64: 693–697. Ojaveer, H., and B.R. MacKenzie (2007). Historical development of ﬁsheries in northern Europe— Reconstructing chronology of interactions between nature and man. Fisheries Research 87: 102–105. Ottersen, G., D.Ø. Hjermann, and N.C. Stenseth (2006). Changes in spawning stock structure strengthen the link between climate and recruitment in a heavily ﬁshed cod (Gadus morhua) stock. Fisheries Oceanography 15: 230–243. Parry, M.L. (ed.) (2000). Assessment of Potential Effects and Adaptations for Climate Change in Europe: The Europe ACACIA Project. Norwich, U.K.: Jackson Environment Institute, University of East Anglia. Pawson, M.G., S. Kupschus, and G.D. Pickett (2007). The status of sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) stocks around England and Wales, derived using a separable catch-at-age model, and implications for ﬁsheries management. ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 64: 346–356. Pearce, F., and M. Le Page (2008). The decade after tomorrow. How is the climate going to change over the next few years? New Scientist 199(2669): 26–30. Perry, R.I., P. Cury, K. Brander, S. Jenning, C. Möllmann, and B. Planque (2009). Sensitivity of marine systems to climate and ﬁshing: Concepts, issues and management responses. Journal of Marine Systems. www.sciencedirect. com/science/article/B6VF5-4VNH3V7-J/2/ fcd5d7d7c15892de9845e14e57b8816a Quero, J.C., M.H. Du Buit, J.L. Laborde, and J.J. Vayne (2000). Observations ichtyologiques effectuées en 1999. Annales de la Société des sciences naturelles de la Charente-Maritime 8: 1039–1045. Reise, K., N. Dankers, and K. Essink (2005). Introduced species. In: K. Essink, C. Dettmann, H. Farke, K. Laursen, G. Lüerßen, H. Marencic, and W. Wiersinga (eds.). Wadden Sea

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quality status report 2004. Wilhelmshaven: Common Wadden Sea Secretariat, 155–161. Reynolds, J.D., T.J. Webb, and L.A. Hawkins (2005). Life history and ecological correlates of extinction risk in European freshwater ﬁshes. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 62: 854–862. Sarmiento, J.L., R. Slater, R. Barber, L. Bopp, S.C. Doney, A.C. Hirst, J. Kleypas, R. Matear, U. Mikolajewicz, P. Monfray, J. Orr, V. Soldatov, S.A. Spall, and R. Stouffer (2005). Response of Ocean Ecosystems to Climate Warming. Global Biogeochemical Cycles 18 (GB3033): 1–23. Schmittner, A. (2005). Decline of the marine ecosystem caused by a reduction in the Atlantic overturning circulation. Nature 434: 628–633.

Stige, L.C., G. Ottersen, K. Brander, K.S. Chan, and N.C. Stenseth (2006). Cod and climate: Effect of the North Atlantic Oscillation on recruitment in the North Atlantic. Marine Ecology Progress Series 325: 227–241. Teal, L.R., J.J. Leeuw, H.W. van der Veer, and A.D. Rijnsdorp (2008). Effects of climate change on growth of 0-group sole and plaice. Marine Ecology Progress Series 358: 219–230. Thompson, B.M., and J.D. Riley (1981). Egg and larval development studies in the North Sea cod (Gadus morhua L.). Rapports et Procèsverbaux des Réunions du Conseil International pour l’Exploration de la Mer 178: 553–559.

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ECOSYSTEM CONSERVATION AND FISHERIES MANAGEMENT

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10 Conservation of Biodiversity and Fisheries Management JAKE RICE LORI RIDGEWAY

10.1. INTRODUCTION Fisheries and marine biodiversity are inextricably linked—not only through the prosecution of ﬁsheries in oceans ecosystems, but across the continuum of international obligations, policy frameworks and standards, management institutions and tools, and science support needed to choose responsible strategies and tactics for management. The role of responsible ﬁshing in helping to maintain biodiversity health—deﬁned as maintaining the general species composition, the trophic diversity of biotic communities, and the functional integrity of habitats—is broadly recognized. Critics outside the ﬁshing community (which includes ﬁsheries policy, management, and science experts, plus industry participants and dependent communities) often argue that ﬁshing interests are cavalier about their role in marine biodiversity loss. These critics question the efﬁcacy of ﬁsheries management approaches and whether ﬁshing can be counted on as part of the solution to better protection of ecosystems and biodiversity. Widespread and continuing evidence of depleted and overﬁshed stocks and species has not helped to alter perceptions in these regards and fosters distrust of those engaged in managing (or prosecuting) ﬁsheries. On the other hand, within the ﬁshing community, the broader “biodiversity agenda”—championed by environmental governmental interests and

nongovernmental organizations—is often seen as hostile to sectoral and ﬁshing community interests. The motives of the “biodiversity agenda” are suspected of including a willingness to shut down ﬁshing to achieve ecosystem “preservation.” Aggressive criticism of management measures, taken by ﬁshing authorities to promote responsible stewardship, for failure to “adequately” reduce ﬁshing effort and close areas to ﬁshing through favored tools of marine protected areas (MPAs), has not helped to alter perceptions of ﬁshing stakeholders or managers in these regards. Biodiversity protection and ﬁsheries are thus too often perceived to be opposed agendas, championed by distinct “expert” communities in separate forums. A consequence is processes that address ﬁsheries and ecosystems/biodiversity on separate— or even competing—tracks, each failing to embrace the expertise and knowledge (much less policy approaches) of the other community. This makes it difﬁcult to achieve the synergies necessary for integrated, holistic approaches to sustainable ﬁsheries and biodiversity conservation. This chapter examines the linkages between ﬁsheries and biodiversity, showing how the entire continuum needs to function as an integrated whole to achieve both conservation and sustainable use. It can do so, necessarily, only in a high-level manner, which does not do justice to the complexity of linkages across the biodiversity and ﬁshing agendas.

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10.2. THE INTERACTIONS OF FISHERIES WITH BIODIVERSITY Fisheries—even well-managed ones—affect biodiversity in a variety of ways: through directed catches, impacts on nontarget species, and impacts on ﬁsh habitats. This is no different than terrestrial human activities, some of which are even designed to reduce biodiversity (e.g., crop agriculture). However, when ﬁshing depletes stocks below sustainable levels, normal effects are ampliﬁed and new negative interactions may result, especially through dynamic and unsustainable changes in the structure and functioning of the affected ecosystems. The effects may alter biodiversity at the scales of communities, populations and genetic diversity, and habitat quality (International Council for the Exploration of the Sea [ICES] 2000, 2001; Lokkeborg 2005; Rice 2005). The following are key pathways of impact of ﬁsheries on biodiversity.

10.2.1. Direct Mortality on Target Stocks Even when ﬁshing occurs at sustainable rates, a ﬁshery will alter the abundance and size of the target species, as well as any species taken consistently as bycatch. Jurisdictions commonly set management targets for stock biomass below 50 percent of unexploited biomass and set limits often as much as 20–30 percent of unexploited biomass (Mace 1994). Sustainable ﬁshing mortality rates often double total mortality rates of stocks, such that older ﬁsh become much less common in the population. Fisheries also reduce population densities, often allowing both the growth rate and survivorship of juvenile ﬁsh to increase due to alleviation of density-dependent pressures (Goodwin et al. 2006). As a population becomes increasingly dominated by younger, fastergrowing ﬁsh, productivity initially increases. However, many other life history traits, such as age of sexual maturation, may also change if exploitation is high. The life history changes can eventually reduce productivity of a stock because younger, smaller breeders often produce fewer, lower quality eggs per kilogram of size and alter the role of a stock in the ecosystem, as smaller ﬁsh feed on smaller prey and support a different size distribution of predators (Bianchi et al. 2002; Pope et al. 2006). Hence, even sustainably managed ﬁsheries have consequences for the structure and function of the

larger ecosystem. In ﬁsheries where many of the larger species are exploited, the aggregate effects on the community dynamics can be noteworthy, even without any single species being seriously overexploited.

10.2.2. Overﬁshing All the ecosystem impacts described for sustainable harvesting of target species become ampliﬁed if a stock is seriously overﬁshed. Overﬁshing can erode the ability of a population to replace itself, as large fecund adults comprise a decreasing portion of the population, and all ages vulnerable to the ﬁshery suffer high mortality. In addition, with both abundance and size composition further compromised, changes in the role of the species in the food web are also ampliﬁed. Ecosystems increasingly composed of smaller individuals experience increased competition among smaller ﬁsh, favoring species (and individuals) that mature at smaller sizes and often younger ages. When a number of the larger species in an ecosystem are all overexploited, the entire size composition of the community is altered. Large predators become rare, with much more ecosystem biomass packaged in small individuals with short life expectancies (Piet and Jennings 2004). This makes communities less resilient to other perturbations, because large numbers of long-lived individuals give the population a “buffer” against short-term environmental ﬂuctuations, which is diminished as the population is reduced. Perhaps most important, there is increasing evidence that, whereas population and ecosystem effects of ﬁshing at sustainable rates are usually reversible in reasonable time frames, the effects of overﬁshing may not be. At the level of populations, there is increasing evidence of a genetic component to most major life history traits that are affected by ﬁshing, such that overﬁshing selects (in the evolutionary sense) for some kinds of traits and against others. These changes in genetic makeup and diversity of a population may occur after only a few generations of severe overﬁshing yet may take generations to reverse, even if overﬁshing ends (Jorgensen et al. 2007). Likewise, there is growing evidence that the changes in food webs and size composition of a heavily exploited community may result in what are known as “trophic cascades.” Species once held at relatively low abundance due to predation by large species of ﬁsh increase greatly in abundance, when their predators are overﬁshed. In turn their

Conservation of Biodiversity and Fisheries Management increased abundance puts increasing predation pressure on their own prey, depressing populations of their prey, just as prior to overﬁshing, they had been held down by their own predators (Oesterblom et al. 2006; Scheffer et al. 2005). These waves of predator–prey ﬂuctuations may reconﬁgure the entire food web, which may be very slow to recover, even if ﬁshing on larger species were greatly reduced.1

10.2.3. Bycatches Few ﬁsheries are so selective that they take only the species that they target. Species taken as bycatch experience all the same changes in life history characteristics, size composition, and potential ecological role that a target species would experience. The degree of ecosystem impact depends on two key factors: the catchability of the bycatch species, and its productivity and sustainable mortality rate. As a generalization, commercial ﬁsheries strive to harvest target species efﬁciently. Consequently, good ﬁshing strategies and gears should be able to retain the target species and avoid or allow release of nontargeted bycatch species. Hence, it could be argued that if a ﬁshery is sustainable with regard to the target species, it should be even more likely sustainable with regard to bycatch species. However, there are circumstances where this would not be true. If the habits or shape of a nontargeted species makes it particularly vulnerable to a ﬁshing gear and/or a ﬁshing strategy, then catchability of the bycatch species could even be higher than for the target species (Catchpole et al. 2005). In other cases, bycatch species could be less productive (Musick 1999) than the target species. Even with a lower absolute exploitation rate than the target species, the lower productivity alone would mean such bycatch species could suffer serious overexploitation and decline, even if the abundance of the target species were comparatively stable (Jennings et al. 1998; Walker and Heessen 1996). This situation is particularly true when long-lived, slow-growing species, such as some sharks (www.fao.org/ﬁshery/ ipoa-sharks/en) and seabirds (www.fao.org/ﬁshery/ ipoa-seabirds), are taken in ﬁshing gears.

10.2.4. Habitat Impacts of Fishing Gears There are a number of major reviews of the ways that ﬁshing gears affect seaﬂoor species, communities,

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and habitats (Barnes and Thomas 2005; Lokkeborg 2005). The impacts can include direct damage to structurally complex habitat features; direct mortality of individual benthic organisms due to physical impacts; injuries to benthic individuals making them more vulnerable to other sources of mortality such as disease, predation, or starvation; or indirect harm due to increasing sediment and/or nutrients in the water column (ICES 2001). All gears that have a likelihood of contacting the seabed may have such impacts, although impacts tend to increase as gears are heavier, have a larger surface area in contact with the seabed, and are towed at greater speeds when in contact with the seabed. The consequences of these impacts vary greatly depending on diverse circumstances. Gear impacts can increase total mortality of the benthic populations. Such increased mortality favors species with fast growth rates, rapid maturation rates, and small sizes at maturity, while reducing the abundance of long-lived and slow-growing species, with the concomitant changes in the benthic community. Some benthic species are sessile and have fragile or brittle shells or exterior structures, further increasing their vulnerability to gear impacts. Fishing gear can also affect the physical habitats of the seabed itself. Soft bottoms with sediments, sand, and mud can be stirred up and suspended but generally resettle after disturbances (although animals buried in sediments may be killed). Hard bottoms, particularly if they contain strong threedimensional structures, may be permanently altered in ways that reduce their complexity (Lindeboom and deGroot 1998; National Research Council 2005). This can have signiﬁcant secondary consequences for animals that may have used such structures for shelter, feeding, and so forth. Sometimes the physical structure is itself biogenic, as with corals and sponge reefs, resulting in both types of negative consequences at the same time, which may require very long periods for recovery. Or the epibenthic community could be habitat for ﬁsh, and structural alterations could reduce its functional value to species that depend on the habitat for shelter or feeding (Auster 2005; Costello et al. 2005).

10.2.5. Reducing the Threats of Fishing to Biodiversity None of these potential effects of ﬁshing on biodiversity are new to the ﬁshing expert community, and most can largely be addressed through the

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application of well-known management principles. Strategies to mitigate the undesirable impacts of ﬁshing on biodiversity are generally known, as are the circumstances needed for them to be effective, and many mitigation measures have been at least partially enacted. Generally, sustainable exploitation rates can be achieved by matching harvest rate to productivity of the single species stocks, ensuring that all ﬁsh taken by ﬁshing gear are accounted for under harvest limits (i.e., not just the portion of the catch that is legally landed) and distributing the catch broadly over the stock components and sizes (Walters and Martell 2004). Specialized circumstances, such as recovery from past overﬁshing, may require additional measures to manage speciﬁc risks, such as paying attention to sex ratios in the catch or selectively targeting or avoiding some speciﬁc ages or sizes. When serious overﬁshing has occurred, recovery of the depleted stock may require more draconian measures over long time frames and as part of comprehensive recovery plans. Addressing unsustainable bycatches requires, in principle, the same type of approach as addressing overﬁshing of target species. Management measures and strategies may be harder to develop and apply, because both ﬁsheries data collection and biological knowledge of bycatch species are often poorer than for targeted species, but the concepts are the same. This includes the acceptance of some level of impact on bycatch species, as long as the impact is sustainable. However, for the bycatch species in a ﬁshery, it may be adequate to identify the few species with high catchability and particularly vulnerable life histories that can only sustain the lowest exploitation rates. If a ﬁshery is managed such that these species do not suffer an unsustainable mortality rate, then more productive and less vulnerable species should also not suffer unsustainable impacts (ICES 2001; Rice 2005). The ﬁrst steps toward addressing the detrimental impacts of ﬁshing and overﬁshing on communities are simply to ensure that the single species exploitation rates of targeted and bycatch species are all sustainable. This in itself, maintained over time, will allow many community-scale impacts to at least begin recovery. However, most food webs and ecosystems do have some species that play particularly important roles, either as essential prey for some (often many) species of predators, or as “keystone” predators regulating the abundance of

many prey species (Hunt and McKinnel 2006; Mills et al. 1993; Yodzis 1996). Such species require special consideration in an ecosystem approach to management. Again, strategies for accommodating essential forage species in ecosystem approaches to management are well developed and proven (American Fisheries Society 1997; Croxall et al. 1992). Strategies for considering top-down control of predators in management strategies are much less fully developed but are under active discussion (Lessard et al. 2005). Fisheries must deal explicitly with the impacts of ﬁshing gear on benthic populations, communities, and habitats. Strategies for achieving this usually involve spatial management measures (e.g., gear exclusion zones, MPAs), such that the likelihood of potentially harmful gears seriously and adversely affecting particularly vulnerable benthic features is managed directly. However, measures to modify the operation of the gears, substitute less damaging gears for more damaging ones, and occasionally just alter the timing of ﬁshery may also contribute to reducing habitat impacts of a ﬁshery (Lokkeborg 2005). Scientiﬁc advice for ﬁsheries management is giving increasing attention to both the biodiversity impacts and appropriate mitigation measures for speciﬁc ﬁsheries. If both the general effects of ﬁshing on biodiversity and strategies to address them are known and case-speciﬁc advice is forthcoming, why is the ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries (EAF) broadly considered a relatively new development? A key consideration is that until recently the policy environments and institutions for managing ﬁsheries and for conserving biodiversity have evolved largely independently of each other.

10.3. THE EVOLVING POLICY ENVIRONMENT The international legal basis for management of marine ﬁsheries derives from the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS; United Nations 1982). UNCLOS governs obligations on sectoral use of oceans, with obligations and rights generally organized according to maritime zones, and deals explicitly with dependent species. For straddling and highly migratory ﬁsh stocks, speciﬁc obligations are further delineated in the U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA; United Nations 1995), which formalizes high-level standards for effective

Conservation of Biodiversity and Fisheries Management and compatible domestic and international management of such ﬁsh stocks. UNFSA speciﬁcally mandates mechanisms for international cooperation (regional ﬁsheries management organizations [RFMOs] and arrangements as discussed further in chapter 36) and includes principles for ecosystembased management (part II, article 5) and the precautionary approach (part II, article 6) to ﬁsheries management. Although discrete (nonstraddling) high-seas stocks are not covered by a similar legal tool, it is widely recognized that, where relevant, the broad principles of UNFSA apply also to these stocks. Regional and national legislation and regulatory frameworks implement the obligations of international law and are a critical part of the international legal regime. The legal obligations contained for ﬁsheries are further detailed through various “soft-law” tools (e.g., the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] Code of Conduct on Responsible Fisheries [FAO 1995] and a wide range of guidelines and annexes underlying its components), various voluntary FAO international plans of action (capacity, illegal, unreported and unregulated ﬁshing, sharks, and seabirds) that morally obligate states to develop national plans of action. Aside from the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, UNCLOS, UNFSA, and the subsequent provisions of most regional ﬁsheries management conventions have focused ﬁrst on the conservation and management of target species in ﬁsheries, even though UNCLOS and UNFSA acknowledge that management authorities have wider ecosystem responsibilities. The Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) has been ratiﬁed by most states that have also ratiﬁed UNCLOS and UNFSA. Many of its provisions were reinforced and have had their application interpreted explicitly as forward-looking political commitments in the marine contexts through various provisions of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, and the resultant Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, and ongoing Resolutions of the U.N. General Assembly (Resolution on Sustainable Fisheries and Omnibus Resolution on Oceans and the Law of the Sea).2 Together, these agreements commit states to conserve marine biodiversity through the management of human activities in the sea, including the diversity of communities, species, populations, genes, and habitat, with many provisions relevant to the management of marine capture ﬁsheries.

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The ﬁsheries policy and management community has been aware of many of these biodiversity commitments for some time, but ﬁsheries commitments have received priority over biodiversity-related instruments or U.N. political commitments, even though United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) commitments were incorporated into the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fishing just three years after UNCED. Fisheries interests are unequivocally loyal to UNCLOS and, as relevant, UNFSA, which are instruments oriented to respecting sectoral rights and obligations in oceans. Awareness is greatest for initiatives of the specialized U.N. agency responsible for ﬁsheries, the FAO. Notwithstanding explicit provisions in the code, ﬁsheries interests display much less awareness of the relevant provisions of the Conservation of Biological Diversity and its Marine Program of Work (the Jakarta Mandate: Convention on Biological Diversity 1995); provisions that are often the concern of other ministries (often of the environment). The FAO responded to calls for greater focus on ecosystem-based management approaches by elaborating the Code of Conduct and facilitating negotiation of the Reykjavik Declaration on Sustainable Fisheries -2001 (FAO 2002), wherein states agreed to adopt an EAF. Subsequent FAO technical guidelines for the application of the ecosystem approach in ﬁsheries further delineate a speciﬁc voluntary management “standard” for EAF. These were being augmented by technical guidelines for the management of deep-sea ﬁsheries on the high seas and the protection of vulnerable marine ecosystems in 2009 (FAO 2009).

10.4. POLICY AND MANAGEMENT IMPLICATIONS OF THESE CHALLENGES: BUILDING COHERENT ECOSYSTEM APPROACHES Although ﬁsheries can have (and often have had) detrimental consequences for biodiversity, we have argued above that sufﬁcient knowledge and tools exist to at least improve performance of ﬁsheries management, and that States have made policy commitments to do so. Nonetheless, high-proﬁle critics of ﬁsheries stress the threats that ﬁsheries pose to biodiversity, and are often scathingly critical of the

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pace of ﬁsheries reform (Jackson et al. 2001; Worm et al. 2006). This broader attention has raised the stakes on ﬁsheries management reform, including fuller implementation of EAF. The onus is now on the ﬁsheries management system to show that it can adequately reform itself to implement needed measures to contribute to conservation and protection of biodiversity, and greater sustainability of its use. There are reasons why progress is likely to be slower than some may desire. Despite the broader appreciation of the effects on biodiversity from ﬁshing, including possible risks of accelerated biodiversity loss from unsustainable ﬁshing, there are a large number of players, institutions, and organizations addressing such risks, often with divergent assumptions regarding the efﬁcacy of solutions and tolerances for the risks. They also interact in a very public setting, partly because ﬁshing is possibly the industry activity with the broadest ecological impact on the ocean ecosystems, the greatest community dependencies, and possibly because of better information on—and broader reporting about—the state of ﬁsh stocks than about other threats to biodiversity (the “streetlamp” effect). The necessary ﬁsheries management reforms may also be challenged domestically by lack of scientiﬁc knowledge, institutional capacity or political willingness to institute reform, given the possibly high political and immediate cost they may imply. Internationally all these challenges can be magniﬁed by weaknesses in management authorities and international cooperation. Fortunately knowledge, capacity, cooperation, and political will can be built, but an enabling policy environment is needed to assure progress on these commitments. Is this the case currently? A coherent agenda in managing ﬁsheries in a biodiversity context must expect, and enable, various players to play to their strengths. This includes ﬁsheries management authorities and related stakeholders (i.e., “let ﬁshery managers manage”). At the same time the biodiversity challenges must be taken seriously if the sector is to be credible at the biodiversity table. In respect of biodiversity, responsible ﬁsheries must ensure that avoidable negative impacts on biodiversity are indeed avoided, and unavoidable ones are managed to ensure that their impacts are sustainable, using the available tools. Moreover, as will be discussed below, there needs to be a more common understanding and agreement on what is “sustainable” among the various communities.

There has been an impressive and increasingly proactive use of the U.N. to conﬁrm global political direction across the range of key international forums—ﬁshing and otherwise—that are then taken up in specialized forums to enact in terms of guidelines, research and monitoring. The annual United Nations General Assembly Resolution on Sustainable Fisheries signals the emerging political commitments in respect of ﬁsheries and ecosystems. Examples include, among numerous other commitments, commitments to manage incidental impacts of ﬁshing on nontarget species, implement special measures on vulnerable ﬁsheries species, and most recently on the requirements of responsible ﬁshing in avoiding signiﬁcant adverse impacts on vulnerable marine ecosystems. However the U.N. generally cannot, and should not, become a substitute for specialized forums and their authorities setting speciﬁc and detailed management standards. Moreover, U.N. Resolutions trigger actions by many agencies, and these actions must be coordinated, if not collaborated (see chapter 36). The challenges in this context are particularly apparent in the context of the high seas. For high-seas ﬁsheries, the international review and reform of RFMOs is a major step to ensuring that management authorities are adequately informed about the risks that need to be addressed and the tools available to mitigate them, are both competent and appropriately authorized to apply the tools, and accountable for the consequences of using (or not using or not complying with) them.3 More broadly, the Convention on Biological Diversity (which has adopted the code as the instrument of choice to implement the Convention on Biological Diversity provisions in ﬁsheries) undertakes scientiﬁc work and thematic reviews on numerous high seas biodiversity issues. The International Union for Conservation of Nature also supports research and builds tools for practical use in conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. It is also deeply involved in debate on policy issues, with resolutions that often contribute importantly to international agenda setting. Informal global processes, such as the biennial Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts, and Islands (www.globaloceans.org/), are dedicated to informal reviews of progress against a range of international commitments and include a broad range of oceans stakeholders and international institutions, as well as fostering linkages between developed and developing countries. The Global Environment Facility provides signiﬁcant funding that can be leveraged

Conservation of Biodiversity and Fisheries Management into needed capacity building mechanisms for developing countries in these respects. Actions in all these forums may be triggered by the same U.N. resolution, and ﬁsheries can beneﬁt from all the initiatives to provide information on emerging risks and potential responses. However, for the products of the different initiatives to work together there must be integrated knowledge tools and objective science-based diagnostic and prioritysetting tools, at the level of ﬁsheries and in spatially oriented approaches (Belﬁore et al. 2004; Clark et al. 2006; International Maritime Organization 2005). What types of policy environments and institutional practices produce such products and tools in ways that maintain the conﬁdence of ﬁsheries practitioners and stakeholders, particularly if they arise from forums not drawing from that community (e.g., the Convention on Biological Diversity Conferences of Parties)? What would create a willingness for these other forums to trust the ﬁsheries practitioners, and to use their products appropriately?4

10.4.1. Contributions of Traditional Stock Management Unequivocally, the robustness of the regime for comprehensive ﬁsheries management even on single stocks is a sine qua non for better biodiversity outcomes. This involves overcoming the entire range of ﬁsheries governance challenges determining optimal exploitation, respect of international and national management regimes (including compliance), measurement of the impacts of management on ﬁsheries outcomes, and calibration of management. Moreover, industry stakeholders themselves must face the correct incentives to avoid overinvesting in effort and capital and to be compliant with established management measures. This generally implies increased use of economic instruments in management regimes, thus aligning incentives for responsible stewardship (which should also be coherent throughout the entire ﬁsheries value chain: harvesting, processing, trade, and consumers). The international policy environment is increasingly focused on this alignment through discussions on policy coherence, and unilateral measures are also being taken in major market states to force this process (i.e., by asking for certiﬁcation that ﬁsheries products have been caught in compliance with international management standards). In some markets, private operators (e.g., retailers, buyers) are doing likewise through the use of their buying power.

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Overall, while strong single-species management is a major downpayment on ecosystem approaches to management, it is well known that the more myopic the management regime in scope or space, the more precautionary should be planning, both of management and of development.

10.4.2. Importance of Ecosystem Approaches to Management But the real glue between sectoral management and oceans health and biodiversity protection is the deﬁnitive implementation of EAF, nested in linked multisectoral approaches to biodiversity protection, itself based on common buy-in to ecological/environmental goals, ecosystem assessments, and management targets. In policy terms, this is the nesting of ecosystem-based ﬁsheries governance into integrated oceans governance (Ridgeway 2009). This makes the integration of science, management, and policy across many dimensions (including disciplines, sectors, and geographically) essential—an idea developed further in chapter 36. For individual industry sectors such as ﬁshing, the debate about whether or not an ecosystem approach to management will—or should—be taken is long over. The dialogue is about how to implement such an approach, not if it should be implemented. EAF requires that within an ecosystem approach, policy, and management should take account of (1) effects of external inﬂuences on resources being used, (2) intraecosystem interactions, and (3) the full impact of the activity on the ecosystem (FAO 2003; Garcia and Cochrane 2005; Rice et al. 2005). These components make integration of science, management, and policy across a much wider range of interests essential. First, simply in accounting for environmental inﬂuences on stocks and the ecosystem effects of ﬁshing, it is necessary to consider the status of ecosystem components other than those being harvested in a ﬁshery. Moreover, ﬁsheries policy and management cannot address the sustainability of ﬁshery impacts on nontargeted ecosystem components only in a narrow sectoral management framework. The core question of what is a “sustainable ﬁsheries impact” is not solely a question for ﬁsheries managers. Even for targeted stocks, with a common economic currency, the policy debate about the “acceptable” impact has been long and complex. For the impacts of ﬁsheries on parts of the

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ecosystem that are not marketed commercially, dialogue both on what is “acceptable” and regarding who should pay the immediate and the long-term costs of mitigation (and, where necessary, remediation) has to engage many interest groups with different perspectives and values. In parallel with the different perspectives on what is an acceptable impact on an ecosystem component or components, there may well be authorities other than ﬁsheries management agencies that have both jurisdiction and accountability for conservation, protection, and sustainable use ecosystem components affected by ﬁshing. Although ﬁsheries may have priority in decisions about allocation of use rights (and related human impacts on ﬁsh stocks among ﬁshery users), that same priority cannot be assumed for the overall impact on the ecosystem. For example, protected species and environmental quality legislation is commonly administered, at least in part, by environment agencies rather than ﬁsheries agencies. In addition, many activities other than just harvesting ﬁsh occur in oceans and seas. Many of these may be affecting some of the same ecosystem components that are being affected by ﬁshing, often with such effects much more poorly documented. In coastal zone management in particular, ﬁsheries are just one of several players sharing both ocean space and impacts on coastal resources, and sometimes not as a dominant player. Thus, as conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity gain increasing policy proﬁle, ﬁsheries become only one of many players on a more level ﬁeld. This is challenging traditional views of stakeholder primacy within marine use debates in areas where ﬁshing is predominant (as it is also for other users in areas where ﬁshing is not the major ocean industry). Traditional behavior associated with active collaboration among diverse players, in any context, requires dialogue on mutual beneﬁt before active and trusting engagement can be expected. This has not necessarily been a characteristic of the biodiversity agenda up to now, regarding ﬁsheries and nonﬁshing (especially environmental) interests. Historical distrust among the ﬁsheries and biodiversity communities from the stakeholder level to the most senior policy levels often impedes constructive dialogue on challenges that can only be resolved collaboratively (Ridgeway 2009). Moreover, this kind of strategic cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary dialogue has not been as evident as might be desired among international

institutions responsible for these diverse agendas. Too rarely have ﬁsheries experts conducted their business as if they were well informed of the implications for ﬁsheries interests of developments in the biodiversity agenda. Coincidently, equally rarely have ﬁsheries interests—including those within the FAO—been actively invited to engage in expertlevel Convention on Biological Diversity initiatives on marine biodiversity, even those relating to ﬁshing. Expert groups advising ﬁsheries agencies and biodiversity agencies on inextricably interrelated problems often have few or no members in common. This greatly enhances the risks that the expert advice will point the different agencies toward different, and possibly incompatible, solutions to each agency’s portion of the common problem, and that each agency will consider the choices of the other agencies unsound and posing unacceptable risks. The unfortunate result has been forum-hopping of initiatives to ﬁnd agendas of maximum successes and minimum interference from opposing perspectives. Even where the formal mandates of ﬁsheries and biodiversity agencies limit the degree of integration possible on policy and management development, the simple step of seeking their scientiﬁc and technical advice from a common set of experts, including the full range of responsible and nonadvocacy interpretational perspectives, could enhance the coherence of all the subsequent policy development, by ensuring the agencies all begin with a common understanding of the range of risks associated with the management options available. Such coherence is developing in some areas, such as between FAO and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and between FAO and the Marine Stewardship Council within the ﬁsheries sector, but is less evident more broadly. With the specialized institutions internationally clinging to their old constituencies, the integration of issues from increasingly internally coherent U.N. member states has again made U.N. resolutions (both Sustainable Fisheries Resolution and the Omnibus Resolution on Oceans and the Law of the Sea) a major integrating political framework that can be used to knit the agendas together. Thus, even though, as noted above, the U.N. should not become the substitute for effective sectoral-based development of policy and management, it seems often to be the key meeting point for constituencies that must work in an integrated way.

Conservation of Biodiversity and Fisheries Management

10.5. CONCLUSION This chapter has taken a broad and necessarily high-level initial view of how ﬁsheries and biodiversity interact in the governance, management, and prosecution of ﬁsheries. It argues that a continuum is required from international obligations, policy frameworks, and standards, through to management institutions and tools and scientiﬁc support for choosing both strategies and tactics for management and for understanding technical aspects of ﬁsheries. The entire continuum needs to function as an integrated whole and to ensure that the collectivity of incentives for oceans users and domestic and international institutions is aligned toward conservation and sustainable use. Because ﬁsheries and biodiversity interact at each point in the continuum, processes that address them in separate tracks are likely not to achieve their own objectives, much less ﬁnd the synergies necessary for an integrated approach to either domestic or international governance. It is possible to have coherent ﬁsheries and oceans governance without going to the controversial extreme of a formal global environment authority. Biodiversity and ﬁsheries do not replace each other as management frameworks, nor are they opposed agendas. Ecosystem-based approaches to ﬁsheries and integrated management of oceans are frameworks linking sectoral uses of oceans— such as in ﬁsheries—and marine environmental and biodiversity cross-sectoral considerations. Fisheries management institutions are best placed to manage ﬁsheries (i.e., at the level at which they should be managed and with relevant issues, as described above), but to be credible they must accept responsibility for considering and managing impacts of the ﬁsheries on ecosystems, not just the target species, ensuring that the impacts are sustainable and that measures and considerations are transparent. Adoption and determined implementation of an ecosystem approach to managing ﬁsheries provide the means to do this, complemented where relevant by other tools and mechanisms. Nonﬁshing institutions must share responsibility for integrating policy frameworks, targets, and commitments that realistically accommodate the realities of ﬁshing as a major oceans user, realistic tolerance for sustainable impacts of ﬁshing, and realistic expectations of biodiversity governance. The resultant policies need to respect the roles

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and responsibilities of stakeholders in the ﬁshing sector, including welcoming the advice and perspectives of ﬁshing experts who have long been immersed in issues related to the impacts of ﬁshing on ecosystems.

Acknowledgments The opinions and interpretations presented in this chapter are those of the authors, who take sole responsibility for the content. They are not to be interpreted as policies or positions of the institution(s) by which the authors are employed.

Notes 1. Some of these changes would occur also naturally in relation to natural ﬂuctuations that may boost populations of predators or preys. However, in natural ecosystem ﬂuctuations, not all predator species would be affected in the manner that can be seen in seriously overﬁshed situations. Such a situation leads to changes in communities that can be very hard to reverse 2. See, for example, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 63/111, Oceans and the Law of the Sea (United Nations 2008a) and United Nations General Assembly Resolution 63/112, Sustainable ﬁsheries (United Nations 2008b). 3. The accountability of RFMOs is to their member states, through the governments of the member states and citizens of those states. However, there is no formal and central oversight of the performance of RFMOs. 4. This distrust of tools built by other agencies is not unique to ﬁsheries management agencies. Biodiversity conservation agencies and organizations are sufﬁciently distrustful of ﬁsheries (and other governmental) regulatory agencies that selection rules for their expert groups can exclude scientists employed directly by governments or RFMOs.

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FAO (2009). International Guidelines for the Management of Deep-Sea Fisheries on the High Seas. FAO Fisheries Technical Report 881. Rome: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Garcia, S.M., and K.L. Cochrane (2005). Ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries: A review of implementation guidelines. ICES Journal of Marine Science 62: 311–318. Goodwin, N.B., A. Grant, A.L. Perry, N.K. Dulvy, and J.D. Reynolds (2006). Life history correlates of density-dependent recruitment in ﬁsheries. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 63: 494–509. Hunt, G.L., and S. McKinnell (2006). Interplay between top-down, bottom-up, and waspwaist control in marine ecosystems. Progress in Oceanography 68: 115–124. ICES (2000). Report of the ICES Advisory Committee on the Marine Environment. ICES Cooperative Research Report 241. Copenhagen: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. ICES (2001). Report of the ICES Advisory Committee on Ecosystems. ICES Cooperative Research Report 249. Copenhagen: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. International Maritime Organization (2005). Revised Guidelines for the Identiﬁcation and Designation of Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas. International Maritime Organization Assembly Resolution A.982(24). www.imo. org/includes/blastDataOnly.asp/data_idpercent3D14373/982.pdf Jackson, J.B.C., M.X. Krby, W.H. Berger, K.A. Bjorndal, et al. (2001). Historical overﬁshing and the recent collapse of coastal ecosystems. Science 293: 629–638. Jennings, S.J., J.D. Reynolds, and S.C. Mills (1998). Life history correlates of responses to ﬁsheries exploitation. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 265: 333–339. Jorgensen, C., K. Enberg, E.S. Dunlop, R. Arlinghaus, D.S. Boukal, K. Brander, B. Ernande, A. Gårdmark, F. Johnston, S. Matsumura, H. Pardoe, K. Raab, A. Silva, A. Vainikka, U. Dieckmann, M. Heino, and A.D. Rijnsdorp (2007). Ecology: Managing evolving ﬁsh stocks. Science 318(5854): 1247–1252. Lessard, R.B., S.J.D. Martell, C.J. Walters, T.E. Essington, and J.F. Kitchell (2005). Should ecosystem management involve active control of species abundances? Ecology and Society 10(2): 1–23. Lindeboom, H., and S.J. deGroot (1998). The Effects of Different Types of Fisheries on the North Sea and Irish Sea Benthic Ecosystems. NIOZ-Rapport 1998-1. Texel: Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. Lokkeborg, S. (2005). Impacts of Trawling and Scallop Dredging on Benthic Habitats and

Conservation of Biodiversity and Fisheries Management Communities. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 472. Rome: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Mace, P.M. (1994). Relationships between common biological reference points used as thresholds and targets of ﬁsheries management strategies. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science 51: 110–122. Mills, L.S., M.E. Soulé, and D.F. Doak (1993). The keystone-species concept in ecology and conservation. BioScience 43: 219–224. Musick, J.A. (1999). Ecology and conservation of long-lived marine animals. In: JA Musick (ed.) Life in the Slow Lane: Ecology and Conservation of Long-Lived Marine Animals. American Fisheries Society Symposium 23. Washington, D.C.: American Fisheries Society, pp. 1–10. National Research Council (2002). Effects of Trawling and Dredging in Seaﬂoor Habitat. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Oesterblom, H., M. Casini, O. Olsson, and A. Bignert (2006). Fish, seabirds and trophic cascades in the Baltic Sea. Marine Ecology Progress Series 323: 233–238. Piet, G.J., and S.L. Jennings (2004). Response of potential ﬁsh community indicators to ﬁshing. ICES Journal of Marine Science 62: 214–225. Pope, J.G., J.C. Rice, N. Daan, H. Gislason, and S.L. Jennings (2006). Modelling an exploited marine ﬁsh community with 15 parameters— results from a charmingly simple size-based model. ICES Journal of Marine Science 63: 1029–1044. Rice, J.C. (ed.) (2005). Ecosystem Effects of Fishing: Impacts, Metrics, and Management Strategies. ICES Cooperative Research Report 272. Copenhagen: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Rice, J.C., V. Trujillo, S. Jennings, K. Hylland, O. Hagstrom, A. Astudillo, and J.N. Jensen (2005). Guidance on the Application of the Ecosystem Approach to Management of Human Activities in the European Marine Environment. ICES Cooperative Research Report 273. Copenhagen: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Ridgeway, L.R. (2009). Governance beyond Areas of National Jurisdiction: Linkages to Sectional Management. Oceanis 35–1/2. Towards a

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New Governance of High Seas Biodiversity. Paris: Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations. Scheffer, M., S. Carpenter, and B. de Young (2005). Cascading effects of overﬁshing marine systems. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 20: 579–581. United Nations (1982). United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982. New York: U.N. Ofﬁce of Legal Affairs. United Nations (1995). Agreement for the Implementation of the Provisions of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 Relating to the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks. New York: U.N. Ofﬁce of Legal Affairs. United Nations (2008a). General Assembly Resolution 63/111, Oceans and the Law of the Sea. www.un.org/Depts/los/general_assembly/general_assembly_resolutions.htm United Nations (2008b). General Assembly Resolution 63/112, Sustainable ﬁsheries, including through the 1995 Agreement for the Implementation of the Provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 relating to the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, and related instruments. www.un.org/Depts/los/general_ assembly/general_assembly_resolutions.htm Walker, P.A., and H.J.L. Heessen (1996). Longterm changes in ray populations in the North Sea. ICES Journal of Marine Science 53: 1085–1093. Walters, C.J., and S.J.D. Martell (2004). Fisheries Ecology and Management. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Worm, B., E.B. Barbier, N. Beaumont, J.E. Duffy, C. Folke, B.S. Halpern, J.B.C. Jackson, H.K. Lotze, F. Micheli, S.R. Palumbi, E. Sala, K.A. Selkoe, J.J. Stachowicz, and R. Watson (2006). Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. Science 314(5800): 787–790. Yodzis, P. (1996). Food webs and perturbation experiments: Theory and practice. In: G.A. Polis and K.O. Winemiller (eds.). Food Webs: Integration of Patterns and Dynamics. New York: Chapman-Hall, pp. 133–149.

11 Minimizing Bycatch of Sensitive Species Groups in Marine Capture Fisheries: Lessons from Tuna Fisheries ERIC L. GILMAN CARL GUSTAF LUNDIN

11.1. INTRODUCTION 11.1.1. Ecological, Economic, and Social Issues Related to Fisheries Bycatch Bycatch in marine capture ﬁsheries is the retained catch of nontargeted but commercially viable species (referred to as “incidental catch”) plus all discards (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] 2005).1 It is an increasingly prominent international issue, raising ecological concerns, as some bycatch species of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises), seabirds, sea turtles, elasmobranchs (sharks, skates, and rays), and other ﬁsh species are particularly vulnerable to overexploitation and slow to recover from large population declines (FAO 1999a, 1999b, in press; Fowler et al. 2005; Gales 1998; Gilman et al. 2005, 2006a, 2006c, 2008; Lutz and Musick 1997). Bycatch can alter biodiversity and ecosystem functions by removing top predators and prey species at unsustainable levels (Myers et al. 2007). It also alters foraging behavior of species that learn to take advantage of discards. Economic effects of bycatch on ﬁsheries include loss of bait, reduced availability of baited hooks when they are occupied with unwanted bycatch species, and concomitant reduced catch of marketable species; the imposition of a range of restrictions, closed areas, embargos, and possible closures; allocation among ﬁsheries, where bycatch

in one ﬁshery reduces target catch in another, and bycatch of juvenile and undersized individuals of a commercial species can adversely affect future catch levels (Brothers et al. 1999; Hall et al. 2000). Discarded bycatch raises a social issue over waste: From 1992 to 2001 an average of 7.3 million metric tons of ﬁsh were annually discarded, representing 8 percent of the world catch (FAO 2005). Prominent bycatch issues include dolphins and porpoises in purse seine ﬁsheries and driftnets; ﬁsh discards in shrimp trawl ﬁsheries; and seabird, sea turtle, marine mammal, and shark bycatch in longline, purse seine, gillnet, and trawl ﬁsheries (FAO 1999a, 1999b, 2005, in press; Hall et al. 2000). In commercial tuna ﬁsheries, the incidental bycatch of sensitive species groups (seabirds, sea turtles, marine mammals, and sharks) and bycatch of juvenile and undersized tunas are allocation and conservation issues. In addition to problematic bycatch, overexploitation and illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) ﬁshing, which complicates bycatch management, are additional conservation issues facing the management of tuna ﬁsheries. This chapter employs examples of bycatch in commercial tuna ﬁsheries to describe (1) the range of options to reduce bycatch, (2) principles and approaches to successfully introduce effective bycatch reduction measures, and (3) initiatives taken by intergovernmental organizations, the ﬁshing industry, and retailers to address bycatch. Changes needed to improve the sustainability of tuna production are recommended.

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11.1.2. Commercial Tuna Fisheries Purse seine, pelagic longline, and pole-and-line ﬁsheries are the primary commercial ﬁshing methods for catching tunas. Large longline vessels generally catch older age classes of bigeye and blueﬁn tunas for the sashimi market, and some longline ﬂeets target albacore for canning (ﬁgure 11.1). Purse seine vessels catch younger age classes of target skipjack and yellowﬁn and incidental bigeye tunas for canning (a very small volume is used for tuna ranching) (Majkowski 2007) (ﬁgure 11.2). Like purse seiners, pole-and-line vessels catch ﬁsh close to the surface, catching mostly skipjack and small/juvenile yellowﬁn, albacore, and blueﬁn, primarily for canning (Majkowski 2007) (ﬁgures 11.3 and 11.4). Tuna products are an important food source and global commodity. They are the third most important seafood commodity traded in value terms (FAO 2007). The export value of 2004 internationally traded tuna products was US$6.2 billion (109), 8.7 percent of total global ﬁsh trade (FAO 2007). In 2005, 82 percent of world tuna was consumed as canned product, and 18 percent as fresh product (including as sashimi). Japan consumed 78 percent of the fresh tuna. In 2004, canned tuna consumption was highest in the European Union, followed by the United States, combined accounting for 83 percent of the total global consumption of canned tuna. Demand for both canned and fresh tuna has been rapidly and steadily increasing: the reported landings of the principal market species of tunas increased from less than 0.2 million metric tons in the early 1950s to a peak of 4.3 million metric tons in 2003, largely due to increased catch of tropical

Sea surface

FIGURE 11.2 Deployed purse seine. A purse seine is made of a long wall of netting framed with ﬂoat line and lead line, with purse rings hanging from the lower edge of the gear, through which runs a purse line made from steel wire or rope, which allows the pursing of the net. Purse seine nets can be up to 1.5 km long and 150 m deep. (Courtesy FAO)

tunas (yellowﬁn and skipjack) by purse seiners (Majkowski 2007) (ﬁgure 11.5). Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Spain accounted for half of 2004 reported landings (Majkowski 2007). Despite their high fecundity and wide distribution, of the 20 tuna stocks for which the status is known, at least ﬁve are “overﬁshed,” meaning their biomass levels are below maximum sustainable yield (MSY) or other biological threshold. “Overﬁshing” is occurring for at least an additional four stocks, meaning the ﬁshing mortality rate is higher than that which produces MSY or other threshold (Bayliff et al. 2005; Majkowski

Float Float line

Main line

Baited hook

Branch line

FIGURE 11.1 Basic conﬁguration of a section (two baskets) of pelagic longline gear. Gear is suspended from line drifting freely in the pelagic environment, at depths anywhere from the sea surface to 400 m into the thermocline. Lines can be up to 100 km long and carry up to 3,500 baited hooks. Lengths, materials, design, and methods of setting and hauling vary among ﬁsheries and among vessels in a ﬁshery. (Courtesy E. Gilman)

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Ecosystem Conservation and Fisheries Management 2007). Increased purse seine catches of skipjack stocks that are only moderately exploited might be sustainable if gear is restricted to being deployed only on freeswimming skipjack schools. Increased longline and pole-and-line catches of moderately exploited albacore stocks might also be sustainable.

11.2. BYCATCH PROBLEMS IN TUNA FISHERIES Table 11.1 summarizes problems with bycatch of sea turtles, seabirds, marine mammals, sharks, and juvenile and undersized tunas in pelagic longline and purse seine ﬁsheries. There are extremely low bycatch levels in pole-and-line ﬁsheries, where bycatch that does occur consists of juvenile kawakawa tuna, frigate mackerel, mahi mahi, and rainbow runner. Discards are believed to have high postrelease survival rates due to the use of barbless hooks and ﬂick-off practices (in which crew remove unwanted hooked ﬁsh by using a quick jerking motion).

11.3. MEASURES TO REDUCE BYCATCH AND MORTALITY

11.3 Pole-and-line vessel ﬁshing for tuna. (Courtesy U.S. NOAA Fisheries photo library)

FIGURE

Table 11.2 summarizes general categories of strategies to reduce unwanted bycatch and mortality in marine capture ﬁsheries. Table 11.3 summarizes the state of

11.4 Longline-caught bigeye and yellowﬁn tunas for sale at the Honolulu ﬁsh auction. (Courtesy Western Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council)

FIGURE

153

Minimizing Bycatch of Sensitive Species Groups 2,500,000 Tonnes

2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 1986 1989 1992 1995 1998 2001

1950 1953 1956 1959 1962 1965 1968 1971 1974 1977 1980 1983

0

Year Purse seine 58% Pole-and-line 14%

Longline 15% Other gear 13%

Troll <1% FIGURE 11.5 Trends in weight of world reported landings of principal market species of tunas by ﬁshing gear type. (Modiﬁed from Bayliff et al. 2005)

knowledge for reducing bycatch in pelagic longline and purse seine ﬁsheries employing changes in ﬁshing gear or methods. Where progress is lacking, research and development priorities are identiﬁed. Figures 11.7–11.9 provide examples of methods to reduce

Sri Lanka 2%

seabird and sea turtle interactions in longline ﬁsheries and dolphin mortality in purse seine ﬁsheries. Some pelagic longline ﬁsheries have problematic bycatch of seabirds, sea turtles, sharks, and toothed whales. Some purse seine ﬁsheries have problematic bycatch of juvenile and undersized tunas, dolphins, sharks, sea turtles, and whales. Of these, there has been progress in identifying effective bycatch reduction methods only for seabirds and sea turtles on longlines and direct mortality of dolphins in purse seines. Several principles and approaches require consideration when developing measures to reduce bycatch through changes in ﬁshing gear and methods: • Fishery-speciﬁc solutions: Solutions to bycatch problems may be ﬁshery speciﬁc. For instance, while an underwater setting chute has been shown to be very effective at avoiding seabird captures in the Hawaii pelagic longline ﬂeet (Gilman et al. 2003), trials in Australia have been less promising, likely due to the seabird species’ complex and behavioral interactions, the weighting design, and the use of live bait (Brothers et al. 2000).

Vanuatu Panama 2% 2% Ghana Colombia China 2% 2% 2%

Venezuela 2% Seychelles 2% United States 3%

Japan 14%

Taiwan 12%

Iran 3% Maldives 4%

Indonesia 9%

Mexico 4% Ecuador 4% France 5% Papua New Guinea 6%

Philippines 8% Korea 6%

Spain 7%

11.6 Contributions to global tuna reported landings, 2004. (Data from Majkowski 2007)

FIGURE

TABLE

11.1 Bycatch problems in pelagic longline and purse seine ﬁsheries

Species Group

Pelagic Longline

Purse Seine

Seabirds

Problematic primarily in higher latitudes; represents the largest threat to most albatross and large petrel species (Gales 1998; Brothers et al. 1999; Gilman et al. 2005)

Not problematic.

Sea turtles

Problematic primarily in the tropics and subtropics; one of numerous anthropogenic threats (Gilman et al. 2006c; FAO in press)

Sea turtles can become entangled in ﬁsh-aggregating devices (FADs) and can be caught in the pursed net (Hall et al. 2000; Molony 2005; Romanov 2002). Turtles are typically encountered alive in the net and are released (FAO in press). Sets on FADs and logs result in higher turtle catch rates than do dolphin-associated and unassociated (free-swimming tuna school) sets (Hall 1998; Hall et al. 2000; Saﬁna 2001; Molony 2005).

Sharks

A large proportion of the total catch in some ﬁsheries; can be a target, incidental bycatch, or discarded bycatch (Gilman et al. 2008); there has been increasing concern about the status of some shark stocks, the sustainability of their exploitation, and ecosystem-level effects from shark population declines (FAO 1999b; Myers et al. 2007)

Purse seine ﬁsheries can have high shark bycatch (Hall et al. 2000; Romanov 2002). Sets on FADs and logs result in higher shark catch rates than do dolphin-associated and unassociated sets (Hall 1998; Hall et al. 2000; Molony 2005; Saﬁna 2001).

Marine mammals

Occasionally result in entanglement and hooking of cetaceans, causing injury and mortality (e.g., Forney 2004); ﬁshers may harass and kill cetaceans to try to prevent depredation (removal of hooked ﬁsh and bait) and gear damage; isolated (e.g., island-associated) cetacean populations may be most at risk

There has been substantial success in achieving 98% reductions in direct dolphin mortality in purse seine ﬁsheries in the eastern Paciﬁc Ocean (Hall 1998; IATTC 2007a). Dolphin populations have not recovered as anticipated, perhaps because the stress from having purse sets made on them causes miscarriages or separation and loss of calves (Archer et al. 2004; Edwards 2006). Purse seining in other areas typically does not involve setting around dolphins. Purse seine vessels occasionally set on whale-associated tuna schools, which can result in injury and mortality of whales (Molony 2005; Romanov 2002).

Juvenile and undersized tunas

Not problematic (might be higher at seamounts)

Restrictions on setting on dolphin schools resulted in a shift to setting on FADs and logs, where the catch rates of juvenile and undersized tunas and unmarketable species of ﬁsh (e.g., mahi mahi, sharks) are higher than in unassociated sets (Romanov 2002; Secretariat of the Paciﬁc Community 2006).

154

TABLE

11.2 Methods to reduce unwanted bycatch and injury in marine capture ﬁsheries

Method

Description

Modiﬁcations to ﬁshing gear and methods

Gear technology and altered ﬁshing methods can reduce bycatch (table 11.3).

Input and output controls

Input controls include limiting the amount of ﬁshing effort or capacity (limiting vessel numbers of a speciﬁed size, prohibiting new entrants, instituting buy-back schemes). Output controls include limiting catch through, e.g., total allowable catch, or quotas of target, incidental or discarded bycatch species. For instance, purse seine vessels of nations participating in the IATTC’s Tuna-Dolphin Program receive individual vessel dolphin bycatch limits (Hall 1998).

Compensatory mitigation

Individual vessels or a ﬁsheries association could meet bycatch mitigation requirements through compensation to a public or private organization to conduct conservation projects to address other anthropogenic sources of mortality. Management authorities could create a fee and exemption structure for the bycatch of sensitive species, similar to a “polluter pays” system. For instance, governments could reduce or withhold subsidies, charge a higher permit or license fee, or use a higher tax rate if bycatch thresholds are exceeded. Alternatively, the fee structure can provide a positive incentive, where a higher subsidy, lower permit or license fee, or lower taxes apply when bycatch standards are met. Compensatory mitigation programs likely require 100% observer coverage, a substantial limitation. Problems with lack of performance of compensatory mitigation activities and off-site and out-ofkind mitigation could occur when this method, a long-standing practice in U.S. wetlands management (Environmental Law Institute 2006), is applied to ﬁsheries bycatch (e.g., conducting conservation activities at a nesting colony not part of the population interacting with the ﬁshery, or conserving different age classes than affected by the ﬁshery). The concept holds promise if used to complement and not detract from actions to ﬁrst avoid and minimize bycatch.

Marine protected areas

Spatial and temporal restrictions of ﬁshing, especially in locations and during periods of high concentration of bycatch species groups, can contribute to reducing ﬁsheries bycatch. Establishing protected areas containing seabird or sea turtle nesting colonies and adjacent waters is potentially an expedient strategy. Seasonal closures might also be able to contribute to reversing and preventing the overexploitation of tuna stocks, such as through closures in equatorial waters during the period of peak bigeye and yellowﬁn tuna spawning. The establishment of a representative system of protected area networks on the high seas also holds promise. However, this will require extensive and dynamic boundaries, deﬁned, in part, by the location of large-scale oceanographic features and short-lived hydrographic features, and would require extensive buffers (e.g., Hyrenbach et al. 2000). Extensive time will be required to resolve legal complications with international treaties, to achieve international consensus and political will, and to acquire requisite extensive resources for enforcement.

Fleet communication

Fleet communication programs can report real-time observations of temporally and spatially unpredictable bycatch hotspots to be avoided by vessels in a ﬂeet (Gilman et al. 2006b). Fleet communication may be appropriate in ﬁsheries where there are strong economic incentives to reduce bycatch, interactions with bycatch species are rare events, and adequate onboard observer coverage exists.

Industry self-policing

Self-policing uses peer pressure from within the industry to criticize bad actors and acknowledge good actors (e.g., Fitzgerald et al. 2004). A ﬁshing industry can create a program where information for individual vessel bycatch levels, compliance with relevant regulations, and other relevant information is made available to the entire industry. This is especially effective where regulations contain industrywide penalties if bycatch rates or caps are exceeded. (continued)

155

156 TABLE

Ecosystem Conservation and Fisheries Management

11.2 Continued

Method

Description

Handling and release practices

There has been substantial progress in identifying best practices for handling and releasing seabirds and sea turtles caught in longline gear. There are guidelines for implementing backing-down and hand-rescue procedures to release dolphins from purse seines.

Changing gear

It may be commercially viable to introduce alternative ﬁshing methods that result in a lower bycatch to target catch ratio than the previously employed method.

TABLE 11.3 State of knowledge for bycatch reduction in pelagic longline and purse seine tuna ﬁsheries, and research and development priorities

Bycatch Species Group

Pelagic Longline

Purse Seine

Seabirds

Several effective methods, including night setting, tori line, underwater setting devices, side setting, branch line weighting, and blue-dyed bait (Brothers et al. 1999; Gilman et al. 2003, 2005, 2007a)

Not problematic

Sea turtles

Wide circle hook with £100 offset and large ﬁsh bait (Gilman et al. 2006c; FAO in press); invest in research on deeper setting, alternative hook designs, artiﬁcial bait, baiting techniques and deterrents (Gilman et al. 2006c; FAO in press)

Invest in research on modiﬁed FAD designs (e.g., Molina et al. 2005); avoid encircling turtles, monitor FADs and release any entangled sea turtles, recover FADs when not in use (FAO in press); restrict setting on FADs, logs, and other debris

Sharks

Fish instead of squid for bait, prohibit wire leaders, avoid hotspots, set deeper, move when shark interaction rates are high (FAO in press; Gilman et al. 2008; Ward et al. 2007); invest in research on shark repellents (Stoner and Kaimmer 2008)

Avoid hotspots; restrict setting on FADs, logs, other debris, and whales; invest in research on shark repellents for deployment on FADs (Stoner and Kaimmer 2008)

Marine mammals

Avoid hotspots, ﬂeet communication (Gilman et al. 2006a, 2006b); invest in research on deterrents and echolocation disruption (Mooney et al. 2008)

Medina panel, backing down, deploy rescuers (Hall 1998); restrict setting on marine mammals

Juvenile and undersized tunas

Not problematic

Invest in research on sorting grids (Nelson 2007); restrict setting on FADs

• Industry direct involvement in research and development: Fishers have a large repository of knowledge, which can be tapped to contribute to ﬁnding effective and practical bycatch solutions. Several bycatch reduction methods were developed by ﬁshermen, including the bird-scaring tori line for longlining, and technical methods to reduce dolphin mortality for eastern Paciﬁc purse seining (Hall et al. 2000). Furthermore, participation of ﬁshers can result in industry developing a sense of ownership for bycatch reduction methods. • Commercial viability: Given the state of ﬁsheries management frameworks, including

limited resources for monitoring, control, and surveillance, methods shown to be effective in research experiments at reducing bycatch may not be employed as prescribed or at all by ﬁshers if they are not convenient and economically viable or, better yet, provide operational and economic beneﬁts. Identifying commercially viable bycatch solutions can maximize industry employment. For instance, in some studies, use of circle hooks and ﬁsh bait to avoid turtles increased catch rates of some target species (Gilman et al. 2006c), and side setting to avoid seabirds resulted in operational beneﬁts (Gilman et al. 2007a).

Minimizing Bycatch of Sensitive Species Groups

157

11.7 A seabird avoidance method called “side setting,” employed in the Hawaii longline ﬂeet, where gear is set from the side of the vessel rather than the conventional position at the stern (Gilman et al. 2007a), is one of several effective methods to reduce seabird capture in pelagic longline ﬁsheries. (Illustration by Nigel Brothers)

FIGURE

• Consideration of effects on multiple species groups: It is important to identify any conﬂicts as well as mutual beneﬁts of bycatch reduction strategies amongst species groups. For instance, as discussed previously, efforts to protect eastern Paciﬁc dolphins resulted in increased ﬁshing on ﬁsh-aggregating devices (FADs), free-ﬂoating or anchored structures constructed and deployed by ﬁshermen to attract schools of ﬁsh, which increased bycatch of juvenile and undersized tunas, sharks, dolphin ﬁsh, sea turtles, and marine mammals (Hall 1998; Molony 2005; Secretariat of the Paciﬁc Community 2006). Setting longlines at night to protect albatrosses and other diurnal foraging seabirds has led to higher bycatch of nocturnal white-chinned petrels (Weimerskirch et al. 1999). Use of wider circle hooks and ﬁsh bait to reduce turtle bycatch rates and mortality in pelagic longline ﬁsheries also reduces bycatch of sharks (Gilman

et al. 2006c, 2007c) and seabirds (International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas 2007).

11.4. INITIATIVES BY INTERGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS, FISHING INDUSTRY, AND RETAILERS AND BUYERS 11.4.1. Regional Fisheries Management Organizations There has been limited progress in reducing most bycatch problems in longline and purse seine ﬁsheries. The two areas where there has been progress (seabirds on longlines, dolphins in purse seines) may require improvements. Three regional ﬁsheries management organizations (RFMOs) have adopted

11.8 Use of wider circle-shaped hooks and ﬁsh bait, instead of narrower J and tuna hooks and squid bait, are methods in use to reduce sea turtle catch and injury in pelagic longline ﬁsheries. (Photo of hooks, E. Gilman; photos courtesy of U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service Southeast Fisheries Science Center)

FIGURE

11.9 Purse seine vessel employing backdown maneuver to allow a school of dolphins to escape. The end of the net farthest from the vessel is lowered beneath the sea surface and passed below the dolphins. A crew member on a raft is assisting with the release of the dolphins. A Medina panel (not visible) is used. A Medina panel is a section of ﬁne mesh netting sewn into the purse seine net to surround the apex of the backdown area where porpoises are most likely to come into contact with and become entangled in the net. (Courtesy of the IATTC)

FIGURE

158

Minimizing Bycatch of Sensitive Species Groups legally binding measures requiring the employment of seabird avoidance methods: the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Blueﬁn Tuna (CCSBT), Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), and the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) (Gilman et al. 2007b). The areas where these measures are required may be insufﬁcient in covering higher latitude areas where seabird interactions have been observed to be problematic (Gilman et al. 2007b). Furthermore, WCPFC does not require vessels <24 m in length to employ seabird avoidance measures in areas north of 230°N latitude, but high seabird bycatch rates have been documented by vessels in this size category in this area (e.g., Gilman and Kobayashi 2008). Inadequate observer coverage prevents determining compliance with these international seabird conservation measures. In purse seine ﬁsheries, vessels operating in the eastern Paciﬁc Ocean of nations that are contracting parties to the Agreement on the International Dolphin Conservation Program (AIDCP), a legally binding multilateral agreement administered by the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), receive annual, individual vessel dolphin mortality limits. There is an annual cap of 5,000 total dolphin mortalities in the ﬁshery, as well as annual mortality caps for individual dolphin stocks, established at 0.1 percent of each stock’s minimum estimated abundance (IATTC 2007a, 2007b). When making dolphin-associated sets, participating vessels allocated individual dolphin mortality limits are also required to have an onboard observer (for vessels with a carrying capacity exceeding 363 metric tons), use a Medina dolphin safety panel, conduct backdown after dolphins are captured, deploy at least one rescuer during backdown (see ﬁgure 11.9), carry speciﬁed dolphin safety/rescue equipment, and other measures (IATTC 2007b). As previously discussed, IATTC’s measures have successfully reduced direct dolphin mortality, but dolphinassociated sets may cause miscarriages or separation and loss of calves, and hinder dolphin population recovery (Archer et al. 2004; Edwards 2006). Many pelagic longline ﬁsheries targeting species other than sharks, when not prevented by regulation, will retain the ﬁns of captured sharks, which fetch a high value in the Asian dried seafood trade, and occasionally will retain meat and other parts (cartilage, liver oil, skin) from marketable species of sharks (Gilman et al. 2008). To address the social concern that shark ﬁnning is wasteful when a large portion of the shark is discarded, and ecological

159

concerns over the sustainability of shark exploitation in ﬁsheries, legally binding measures have been adopted by some RFMOs (e.g., International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, and IATTC) and nations to restrict shark ﬁnning practices so that carcasses must be landed if ﬁns are retained (Gilman et al. 2008). In the few ﬁsheries with adequate enforcement, these measures have resulted in large reductions in shark ﬁshing mortality through increased discards of live sharks, but the majority of ﬁsheries lack adequate enforcement, and shark ﬁnning practices have not been affected by these measures in these ﬁsheries (Gilman et al. 2008). Despite progress in identifying effective turtle avoidance methods for longlines, which in some ﬁsheries has been shown to be economically viable (table 11.3), there are no legally binding measures in place by an intergovernmental organization, including RFMOs, to address sea turtle–ﬁshery interactions (Gilman et al. 2007b). IUU vessels are unlikely to employ bycatch reduction measures. IUU ﬁshing also causes damage to ﬁsh stocks and economic losses to society. Several regional ﬁshery bodies have taken steps to reduce IUU ﬁshing, including instituting requirements for vessel monitoring systems (electronic transmitters, placed on ﬁshing vessels, which transmit information about the vessel’s position to enforcement agencies via satellite), managing lists of authorized and illegal vessels, port and at-sea inspection programs, and trade documentation programs (Lack 2007). The RFMO’s catch and trade documentation programs are believed to have failed in preventing IUU ﬁshing. This is due to inadequate laws and weak enforcement, as well as corruption, including laundering and mislabeling seafood, illegal atsea transshipment, and noncompliance by some RFMO members. Recommended solutions involve technological changes (e.g., instituting mandatory electronic catch documentation, to reduce forgery and manipulation) and supply chain practices (e.g., prohibiting transshipment at sea) (Lack 2007). Input and output controls contribute to managing overall bycatch levels. The ﬁve tuna RFMOs have taken steps to attempt to address tuna-ﬁshing overcapacity, including through limited entry (through registers and licensing), catch quotas for member nations or individual participants in a ﬁshery through individual quotas, and temporal closures. Overall, the tuna RFMOs have not been successful in preventing continued growth of tuna ﬂeets (Bayliff et al. 2005).

160

Ecosystem Conservation and Fisheries Management

Observer coverage is generally insufﬁcient in commercial tuna ﬁsheries. For example, worldwide, 40 nations are engaged in longline ﬁshing, of which only 15 have observer programs (Beverly and Chapman 2007). WCPFC has adopted a target of 5 percent observer coverage. CCSBT adopted a target of 10 percent observer coverage of members’ longline ﬁsheries, and data standards have been established. However, the collection of seabird bycatch data is voluntary, and members are not required to share observer data with CCSBT. IOTC lacks observer coverage requirements. Observer programs are needed that include a goal of monitoring bycatch, and sufﬁcient observer coverage rates are needed to allow for relevant statistical analyses and data recording protocols, in part, to understand bycatch interactions, including documenting interaction rates to provide a basis for ﬂeetwide extrapolations and identifying when and where interactions occur. The objective determines the appropriate onboard observer coverage rate. For instance, an observer program designed to ensure that sea turtle annual interaction caps are not exceeded, or to institute a compensatory mitigation program, would require 100 percent coverage, while determining ﬂeetwide annual bycatch interaction levels and rates might require 20 percent coverage (FAO in press). The RFMO process has largely failed in addressing bycatch problems and preventing overexploitation of tuna stocks, in part because consensus-based decision making has often prevented RFMOs from adopting appropriate measures, and because of low compliance by member states with effective RFMO measures (Rosenberg 2003; Saﬁna and Klinger 2008). There is no indication that the wholesale changes needed to correct these problems of political will and compliance will occur in the near future. The mandate of regional ﬁshery bodies, including RFMOs, is usually to cooperate in maintaining populations of exploited species at sustainable levels. As ecosystem considerations are a relatively new focus, there are few instances where regional ﬁshery bodies’ mandates explicitly reference the conservation of nontarget species (FAO in press). The mandate of these bodies should be broadened to cover issues relating to the sustainability of vulnerable bycatch species. However, ultimately, RFMO conservation and management measures will be effective only if member state compliance substantially improves and political will to allow RFMOs to adopt effective measures develops.

11.4.2. Fishing Industry Voluntary initiatives by the ﬁshing industry related to reducing unwanted bycatch have been limited and generally not proactive. Voluntary industry initiatives have primarily resulted from incentives to comply with government measures, as well as market-based and social factors. In longline ﬁsheries, voluntary industry ﬂeet communication programs (Gilman et al. 2006b) and industry self-policing (Fitzgerald et al. 2004), instituted in response to incentives created by regulatory measures, have successfully reduced bycatch. An effective voluntary industry initiative to address bycatch has been identiﬁed in only one commercial tuna ﬁshery (U.S. North Atlantic longline swordﬁsh ﬁshery), which ceased to be formally active in 2003 (Gilman et al. 2006b). Recently, several voluntary initiatives have involved the exchange of traditional J-shaped hooks for circle hooks in order to assess pelagic longline ﬁsheryspeciﬁc efﬁcacy at reducing sea turtle interactions and economic viability (e.g., Largacha et al. 2005). Hooks are largely a disposable, high-turnover item, and many vessels select cheap, short-life hooks (Gilman et al. 2006c). It is unclear at this incipient stage whether, once the free circle hooks require replacement, vessel operators will replace them with circle or traditional hooks, because circle hooks are currently more expensive and less robust. While unrelated to bycatch, in response to an excess supply of ﬁsh to tuna canneries and concomitant reductions in prices for skipjack from canneries, some owners of tuna purse seiners formed the World Tuna PurseSeine Organization, which temporarily limited ﬁshing effort by their vessels.

11.4.3. Retailer and Buyer Tuna Sourcing Environmental nongovernmental organizations and, to a degree, consumers are increasingly demanding that seafood sold by retailers and restaurants be sustainably produced. Approaches by major grocery retailers to demonstrate that their seafood comes from sustainable ﬁsheries have been diverse. There has been a recent proliferation of programs assessing the sustainability of individual ﬁsheries or seafood species. These include in-house retailer programs, including the assessment of ﬁsheries against retailerestablished sustainability criteria; individual retailer partnerships with environmental nongovernmental organizations who conduct assessments and make

Minimizing Bycatch of Sensitive Species Groups recommendations for sustainable seafood sourcing; and use of a retailer ecolabel. There are also numerous third-party programs for marine capture ﬁsheries, including ecolabeling programs and consumer guides, which assess the sustainability of individual ﬁsheries, rank the relative sustainability of individual seafood species, or rank retailers based on the sustainability of their seafood sourcing practices. Sustainability assessment programs provide large market-based incentives for some ﬁshing industries to meet sustainability criteria (e.g., Johnston et al. 2001). While relatively new and difﬁcult to predict how it will develop, these market-driven incentives for sustainable seafood production may eventually become the strongest “voluntary” incentive for the tuna industry to improve practices. Retailers, buyers, distributors, processors, and tuna ﬁshing industries have identiﬁed the need for (1) improved scientiﬁc rigor of some assessment programs and (2) a single set of minimum sustainability standards to address confusion and diminished conﬁdence created by the recent proliferation of competing certiﬁcation and ecolabeling programs (FAO 2007; International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council 2008). Competing certiﬁcation programs have produced conﬂicting determinations of the sustainability of individual ﬁsheries, contributing to the confusion created by multiple assessment programs employing different standards and assessment methods. As the sustainable seafood movement matures, retailers and restaurant chains may harmonize their methods for sustainable seafood sourcing, eliminating all but the most scientiﬁcally rigorous assessment programs. A welcome development would be the adoption of international guidelines for national competent authorities for ﬁshery sustainability certiﬁcation and labeling. These competent authorities would be responsible for establishing national standards for certiﬁcation and labeling seafood products, which state that the product comes from a sustainable source, similar to standards for products certiﬁed as being organic or meeting safety and quality standards. These national sustainability standards would apply to assessment methods employed by government, retail and ﬁshing industries, and environmental nongovernmental organizations.

11.5. CONCLUSIONS There has been mixed progress in addressing unwanted bycatch in longline and purse seine tuna

161

ﬁsheries. It is likely that, given sufﬁcient investment in research and development, economically viable changes in ﬁshing gear and methods are possible to nearly eliminate bycatch in tuna ﬁsheries. However, even in the gear types where substantial progress has been made, despite the availability of effective bycatch reduction methods that, in some cases, also increase ﬁshing efﬁciency and provide operational beneﬁts, the majority of ﬂeets do not employ these methods (e.g., Brothers et al. 1999; Gilman et al. 2005). Furthermore, despite the fact that the tuna ﬁshing industry recognizes that their long-term viability relies on the availability of tuna resources at sustainable and optimal levels (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council 2008), voluntary industry action to reverse and prevent further overexploitation of tuna stocks and to address bycatch issues has been extremely limited. While RFMOs have made recent progress in addressing bycatch, through the adoption of legally binding conservation measures, for some ﬁshing gear types and some bycatch species groups (Gilman et al. 2007b), compliance by many member states is likely low, where observer programs and national management frameworks are weak or nonexistent, preventing deﬁnitive assessments. Where intergovernmental organization and ﬁshing industry initiatives have generally been ineffective, we can be cautiously optimistic that ecolabeling and other certiﬁcation programs for marine capture ﬁsheries, and adoption of suitable sustainable seafood sourcing policies by retailers and seafood buyers, are becoming an effective “voluntary” incentive for the ﬁshing industry to improve practices and national and international authorities to improve management. Recognizing this context, combined, several approaches may improve the sustainability of commercial tuna ﬁsheries: • Increase investment to augment progress in addressing bycatch problems involving sea turtles in purse seines, sharks in both longlines and purse seines, cetaceans in both longlines and purse seines, and juvenile and undersized tunas in purse seines. • Increase investment to better understand indirect adverse effects from purse seine sets on dolphin schools. • To maximize industry use of effective bycatch reduction methods, where possible, identify

162

•

•

•

•

• •

•

Ecosystem Conservation and Fisheries Management measures that are practical and convenient for use by crew and are economically viable—or, better yet, provide operational and economic advantages. Where needed, revise the mandate of regional ﬁshery bodies to include consideration of ecosystem effects of tuna ﬁsheries, with explicit reference to the conservation of nontarget species occurring in the same ecosystem. Require adequate onboard coverage by international observers for the purpose of monitoring bycatch trends and levels, which would improve compliance with RFMO measures. Modify RFMO legal frameworks so that RFMOs must adopt the scientiﬁc committees’ recommendations. This could eliminate the current tendency for scientiﬁc advice to be ignored by RFMOs, which results from industry lobbying, interference by politicians, and the inability of member states to reach consensus on speciﬁc approaches for the sustainable use of shared ﬁsheries resources. Establish and manage a representative system of protected area networks on the high seas to contribute to the management of interactions between marine capture ﬁsheries and highly migratory sensitive species groups, and to contribute to reversing and preventing overexploitation of target stocks. Improve measures to eliminate IUU tuna ﬁshing. Involve the ﬁshing industry more in its own governance. This could instill a sense of industry responsibility for their long-term viability, and improve tuna ﬁshery sustainability. Assess the sustainability of individual tuna ﬁsheries under scientiﬁcally rigorous certiﬁcation and ecolabeling programs, and have retailers and buyers adopt sustainable tuna sourcing policies. Market-driven incentives from certiﬁcation programs and retailer and buyer sourcing policies may become the strongest “voluntary” incentive for the tuna ﬁshing industry to improve sustainability and management effectiveness.

Acknowledgments We are grateful for the collaboration of the Hawaii longline industry over the past decade in exploring bycatch reduction methods, from which much of the insights included in this document were derived. Comments from an anonymous reviewer greatly improved the chapter.

Note 1. “Target” catch is the catch of a species or species assemblage primarily sought in a ﬁshery, while “nontarget” catch is the catch of a species or species assemblage not primarily sought. “Incidental” catch is the portion of nontarget catch that is retained, while “discards” is the portion of nontarget catch that is not retained.

References Archer, F., T. Gerrodette, S. Chivers, and A. Jackson (2004). Annual estimates of the unobserved incidental kill of pantropical spotted dolphin (Stenella attenuate attenuate) calves in the tuna purse-seine ﬁshery of the eastern tropical Paciﬁc. Fishery Bulletin 102: 233–244. Bayliff, W.H., J.I. Moreno, and J. Majkowski (eds.) (2005). Second Meeting of the Technical Advisory Committee of the FAO Project “Management of Tuna Fishing Capacity: Conservation and Socio-economics.” Madrid, Spain, 15–18 March 2004. FAO Fisheries Proceedings No. 2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Beverly, S., and L. Chapman (2007). Interactions between Sea Turtles and Pelagic Longline Fisheries. Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission, Scientiﬁc Committee, third regular session, 13–24 August 2007, Honolulu. Information Paper WCPFC-SC3-EB SWG/IP-01. Palikir, Federated States of Micronesia: Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission. Brothers, N.P., J. Cooper, and S. Lokkeborg (1999). The Incidental Catch of Seabirds by Longline Fisheries: Worldwide Review and Technical Guidelines for Mitigation. FAO Fisheries Circular No. 937. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Brothers, N., D. Chaffey, and T. Reid (2000). Performance Assessment and Performance Improvement of Two Underwater Line Setting Devices for Avoidance of Seabird Interactions in Pelagic Longline Fisheries. ARF Project R2000/0469. Canberra: Australian Fisheries Management Authority and Environment Australia. Edwards, E.F. (2006). Duration of unassisted swimming activity for spotted dolphin (Stenella attenuata) calves: Implications for mother-calf separation during tuna purse-seine sets. Fishery Bulletin 104: 125–135. Environmental Law Institute (2006). The Status and Character of In-Lieu Fee Mitigation in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Environmental Law Institute.

Minimizing Bycatch of Sensitive Species Groups FAO (1999a). International Plan of Action for Reducing Incidental Catch of Seabirds in Longline Fisheries. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (1999b). International Plan of Action for the Conservation and Management of Sharks. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2005). Discards in the World’s Marine Fisheries: An Update. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper No. 470. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2007). The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2006. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (in press). FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries. Reducing Sea Turtle Interactions and Mortality in Marine Capture Fisheries. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Fitzgerald, S.M., T. Smith, and J. Smoker (2004). Implementation before regulation: Coordinated efforts to proactively reduce freezer longline seabird bycatch in Alaskan waters. In: Proceedings of the Thirty-ﬁrst Annual Meeting of the Paciﬁc Seabird Group. La Paz, Mexico, 21–25 January 2004, 45. Seattle: Paciﬁc Seabird Group. Forney, K.A. (2004). Estimates of Cetacean Mortality and Injury in Two U.S. Paciﬁc Longline Fisheries, 1994–2002. Southwest Fisheries Science Center Administrative Report LJ-04-07. La Jolla, Calif.: U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service. Fowler, S., R. Cavanagh, M. Camhi, G. Burgess, G. Cailliet, S. Fordham, C. Simpfendorfer, and J. Musick (eds.) (2005). Sharks, Rays and Chimaeras: The Status of the Chondrichthyan Fishes. Gland, Switzerland: World Conservation Union. Gales, R. (1998). Albatross populations: Status and threats. In: G. Robertson and R. Gales (eds.). Albatross Biology and Conservation. Chipping Norton, Australia: Surrey Beatty and Sons, pp. 20–45. Gilman, E., C. Boggs, and N. Brothers (2003). Performance assessment of an underwater setting chute to mitigate seabird bycatch in the Hawaii pelagic longline tuna ﬁshery. Ocean and Coastal Management 46: 985–1010. Gilman, E., N. Brothers, and D. Kobayashi (2005). Principles and approaches to abate seabird bycatch in longline ﬁsheries. Fish and Fisheries 6: 35–49. Gilman, E., N. Brothers, and D. Kobayashi (2007a). Comparison of the efﬁcacy of three seabird bycatch avoidance methods in Hawaii pelagic longline ﬁsheries. Fisheries Science 73: 208–210.

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Gilman, E., N. Brothers, G. McPherson, and P. Dalzell (2006a). Review of cetacean interactions with longline gear. Journal of Cetacean Research and Management 8: 215–223. Gilman, E., S. Clarke, N. Brothers, J. AlfaroShigueto, J. Mandelman, J. Mangel, S. Peterson, S. Piovano, N. Thomson, P. Dalzell, M. Donoso, M. Goren, and T. Werner (2008). Shark interactions in pelagic longline ﬁsheries. Marine Policy 32: 1–18. Gilman, E., P. Dalzell, and S. Martin (2006b). Fleet communication to abate ﬁsheries bycatch. Marine Policy 30: 360–366. Gilman, E., and D. Kobayashi (2008). Reducing Seabird Bycatch in the Hawaii Longline Tuna Fishery. Honolulu: National Marine Fisheries Service, Paciﬁc Islands Regional Ofﬁce. Gilman, E., D. Kobayashi, T. Swenarton, N. Brothers, P. Dalzell, and I. Kinan (2007c). Reducing sea turtle interactions in the Hawaii-based longline swordﬁsh ﬁshery. Biological Conservation 139: 19–28. Gilman, E., T. Moth-Poulsen, and G. Bianchi (2007b). Review of Measures Taken by Intergovernmental Organizations to Address Problematic Sea Turtle and Seabird Interactions in Marine Capture Fisheries. Fisheries Circular No. 1025. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gilman, E., E. Zollett, S. Beverly, H. Nakano, D. Shiode, K. Davis, P. Dalzell, and I. Kinan (2006c). Reducing sea turtle bycatch in pelagic longline gear. Fish and Fisheries 7: 2–23. Hall, M.A. (1998). An ecological view of the tunadolphin problem: Impacts and trade-offs. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 8: 1–34. Hall, M.A., D.L. Alverson, and K.I. Metuzals (2000). By-catch: Problems and solutions. Marine Pollution Bulletin 41: 204–219. Hyrenbach, K., D. Forney, A. Karin, and P.K. Dayton (2000). Marine protected areas and ocean basin management. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems 10: 437–458. IATTC (2007a). Agreement on the International Dolphin Conservation Program. Executive Report on the Functioning of the AIDCP in 2006. La Jolla, Calif.: Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. IATTC (2007b). Agreement on the International Dolphin Conservation Program (as amended October 2007). La Jolla, Calif.: Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (2007). Report of the Meeting of the Sub-committee on Ecosystems, Madrid, Spain February 19–23, 2007. Madrid: International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas.

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International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council (2008). Sustainable Tuna Roundtable, 2008 Meeting Report. 21 April 2008, Manos Conference Center, Brussels. Gland, Switzerland and Honolulu, Hawaii: International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council. Johnston, R.J., C. Wessells, H. Donath, and F. Asche (2001). A contingent choice analysis of ecolabeled seafood: Comparing consumer preferences in the United States and Norway. Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 26: 20–39. Lack, M. (2007). Catching On? Trade-Related Measures as a Fisheries Management Tool. Cambridge, U.K.: TRAFFIC International. Largacha, E., M. Parrales, L. Rendon, V. Velásquez, M. Orozco, and M. Hall (2005). Working with the Ecuadorian Fishing Community to Reduce the Mortality of Sea Turtles in Longlines: The First Year March 2004—March 2005. Honolulu, Hawaii: Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council. Lutz, P.L., and J.A. Musick (eds.) (1997). The Biology of Sea Turtles. Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press. Majkowski, J. (2007). Global Fishery Resources of Tuna and Tuna-like Species. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 483. Rome: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Molina, A., J. Ariz, P. Palleres, R. Molina, and S. Deniz (2005). Project on New FAD Designs to Avoid Entanglement of By-catch Species, Mainly Sea Turtles and Acoustic Selectivity in the Spanish Purse Seine Fishery in the Indian Ocean. First meeting of the Scientiﬁc Committee of the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission, 8–19 August 2005, Noumea, New Caledonia. Fishing Technology Working Paper 2, Scientiﬁc Committee. Palikir, Federated States of Micronesia: Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission. Molony, B. (2005). Estimates of the Mortality of Non-target Species with an Initial Focus on Seabirds, Turtles and Sharks. WCPFC-SC1 EB WP-1. First meeting of the Scientiﬁc Committee of the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission, WCPFC-SC1, Noumea, New Caledonia, 8–19 August 2005. Palikir, Federated States of Micronesia: Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission. Mooney, T., P. Nachtigall, A. Pacini, and M. Breese (2008). Acoustic deterrents reduce false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens) echolocation

abilities but only so much. In: E. Gilman (ed.). Proceedings of the Fourth International Fishers Forum, November 12–14 2007, Puntarenas, Costa Rica. Honolulu, Hawaii: Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council, pp. 55–62. Myers, R.A., J.K. Baum, T.D. Shepherd, S.P. Powers, and C.H. Peterson (2007). Cascading effects of the loss of apex predatory sharks from a coastal ocean. Science 315: 1846–1850. Nelson, P. (2007). Response of Yellowﬁn Tuna to Different Sorting Grids for Reducing Juvenile Bycatch. Eureka, Calif.: Sea Grant Extension California. Romanov, E. (2002). Bycatch in the tuna purseseine ﬁsheries of the western Indian Ocean. Fishery Bulletin 100: 90–105. Rosenberg, A.A. (2003). Managing to the margins: The overexploitation of ﬁsheries. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1: 102–106. Saﬁna, C. (2001). Tuna Conservation. In: B.A. Block and D. Stevens (eds.). Tuna Ecological Physiology and Evolution. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 413–459. Saﬁna, C., and D. Klinger (2008). Collapse of blueﬁn tuna in the Western Atlantic. Conservation Biology 22: 243–246. Secretariat of the Paciﬁc Community (2006). Preliminary Review of the Western and Central Paciﬁc Ocean Purse Seine Fishery. Prepared for the Internal Meeting of Paciﬁc Island Parties to the South Paciﬁc Regional U.S. Multilateral Treaty, March 6–8, Honolulu, Hawaii. Noumea, New Caledonia: Secretariat of the Paciﬁc Community. Stoner, A., and S. Kaimmer (2008). Reducing elasmobranch bycatch: Laboratory investigation of rare earth metal and magnetic deterrents with spiny dogﬁsh and Paciﬁc halibut. Fisheries Research 92: 162–168. Ward, P., E. Lawrence, R. Darbyshire, and S. Hindman (2007). Large-Scale Experiment Shows That Banning Wire Leaders Helps Pelagic Sharks and Longline Fisheries. Working Paper 5. Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission, Scientiﬁc Committee Third Regular Session, 13–24 August 2007, Honolulu. Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia: Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission. Weimerskirch, H., A. Catard, P.A. Prince, Y. Cherel, and J.P. Croxall (1999). Foraging whitechinned petrels Procellaria aequinoctialis at risk: From the tropics to Antarctica. Biological Conservation 86: 273–275.

12 One Fish, Two Fish, IUU, and No Fish: Unreported Fishing Worldwide KAIJA METUZALS RACHEL BAIRD TONY PITCHER U. RASHID SUMAILA PRAMOD GANAPATHIRAJU

Where there is a sea, there are pirates. —Ancient Greek Proverb

12.1. INTRODUCTION It is well known that overﬁshing is increasingly threatening the world’s marine capture ﬁsheries (Jackson et al. 2001; Myers and Worm 2003). Today, one of the most severe problems affecting world ﬁsheries is illegal ﬁshing.1 Illegal or pirate ﬁshing occurs in almost all ﬁsheries and can take up signiﬁcant amounts of global catches (Agnew et al. 2008; FAO 2002a). Illegal ﬁshing is a form of overﬁshing, and in today’s world of globalization, roving pirates are exploiting not only the high seas (Berkes et al. 2006) but also coastal waters. Moreover, large catches from small-scale unregulated artisanal ﬁsheries generally go unreported in developing countries. Illegal, unreported, and unregulated catches, collectively termed IUU, are the focus of this chapter, although all, including discards, are technically “unreported” to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) catch database (Pitcher et al. 2002). On 28 August 2003, a Uruguayan-ﬂagged ﬁshing vessel, the Viarsa 1, was apprehended by Australian authorities after a record-breaking 21-day hot pursuit2 (Molenaar 2004). The Viarsa 1 was suspected of ﬁshing illegally for Patagonian toothﬁsh (also referred to as Chilean sea bass) in Australian waters adjacent to the Heard and McDonald islands

(Ribot-Cabrera Ors v. the Queen 2004). The 3,900-nautical-mile chase, which tracked across the Southern Ocean and into the Atlantic Ocean, was not only exciting but also raised questions about the interpretation of international law.3 The chase and arrest caught international attention4 and made headlines around the world. However, the Master and Crew were acquitted of charges.5 For much of the latter part of the last century, IUU ﬁshing activity was largely overlooked by those responsible for setting quotas and management, although since the 1980s some stock assessment scientists used IUU information, usually gathered conﬁdentially At that time, both national and international ﬁsheries agencies were generally quite explicit about their role in working for the ﬁsheries industry. Given that the appalling track record of mismanagement of ﬁsheries is no longer able to be concealed, since the early 1990s there has been demand for more accountability to the public for what is a commonly owned marine resource. So, in the past ten years, concerns about overexploitation and the increased proﬁle of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have focused attention on IUU ﬁshers, and there has been a move for increased effort to gather, and make transparent, information about IUU. IUU ﬁshing not only threatens the commercial viability of target ﬁsh species, marine ecosystems,

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but also undermines legitimate ﬁshers and national and regional conservation measures and challenges the sovereignty of coastal states (Erceg 2006). The objective of this chapter is to discuss the nature of IUU ﬁshing from a global perspective before analyzing some case studies to illustrate how IUU ﬁshing is being addressed in different regions.

12.2. BACKGROUND OF IUU FISHING The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), a regional ﬁsheries management organization with responsibility for marine resources in the Southern Ocean, is credited with ﬁrst coining the term IUU ﬁshing. At its annual meeting in 1997, the commission addressed the multifaceted problems posed by illegal, unreported (or often misreported), and unregulated ﬁshing. Since 1997, the term “IUU ﬁshing” has regularly been discussed at CCAMLR meetings (it has been a permanent agenda item) and has subsequently been adopted by other international ﬁsheries bodies such as the FAO, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and regional ﬁshery bodies such as the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT), the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization, and the North East Atlantic Fisheries Organization, among others (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] 2005).

12.3. DEFINITION OF IUU FISHING The ofﬁcial international deﬁnition of IUU ﬁshing is given by FAO (2001, 2002b). The three categories of IUU ﬁshing are as follows.6

12.3.1. Illegal Fishing Illegal ﬁshing is conducted by vessels in violation of national laws or international obligations (FAO 2001).

12.3.2. Unreported Fishing Unreported ﬁshing refers to ﬁshing activities that have not been reported, or have been misreported, to the national authority or regional ﬁsheries management organization (FAO 2001).

This category can be further broken down into catches not covered by the reporting system. Pitcher et al. (2002) subdivided this category as follows: 1. Unreported discards, which may or may not be legal, but are not reported by observers 2. Unmandated catches, which a given agency is not mandated to record 3. Illegal catch, which includes catches that contravene a regulation from the regulatory body—they may be unreported, misreported by species or size, or deliberately misreported and concealed, usually to conceal quota violations

12.3.3. Unregulated Fishing Unregulated ﬁshing refers to ﬁshing activities by vessels without nationality, or by those ﬂying the ﬂag of a state not party to a ﬁsheries management organization, and where such ﬁshing activities are conducted in a manner inconsistent with state responsibilities under international law (FAO 2001). These deﬁnitions are somewhat problematic. For example, unmandated and unregulated ﬁshing may overlap; discards may be reported or estimated by a local ﬁsheries agency but not reported to FAO because no such catches are included in the ofﬁcial world catch database. Sport ﬁshery catches are not included in the FAO database either, although they can exceed commercial ﬁsh catches in some places. Many small-scale artisanal ﬁsheries, which make an increasingly contribution to the world catch, are sometime estimated (often poorly), and sometimes ignored in national catches reported to FAO. Also, “ghost ﬁshing” by abandoned or lost ﬁshing nets and traps can be considerable. Inclusion of estimates of all these sources of catch likely raises the true world marine ﬁsh catch by 20–60 percent (Pitcher et al. in press). Unfortunately, confusion over IUU deﬁnitions may encourage disinformation and the concealment of illegal catches, a loophole that has been exploited, even in North America, by “experts” paid by parts of the ﬁshing industry.

12.4. FACTORS OR INFLUENCES CONTRIBUTING TO IUU FISHING The key factors encouraging IUU ﬁshing are the rising demand for seafood; serious overcapacity of

Unreported Fishing Worldwide the ﬂeets; high proﬁtability (see imcsnet.org), a pernicious combination of poorly crafted regulations and weak enforcement in developed countries; corruption and concealment and the ease of obtaining false documentation in developing countries; and failure to regulate high seas ﬁshing. The demand for seafood continues to rise, and global per capita ﬁsh consumption has increased over the past four decades (FAO 2006). The overcapacity of the ﬁshing ﬂeet with “too many ﬁshers chasing too few ﬁsh” and subsidies to keep these ﬂeets operating are other factors. But most important, IUU ﬁshing is an attractive option to make high proﬁts (most operators target high value species) with low overheads and a very low risk of apprehension.7 The total operating costs of ﬁrms involved in illegal ﬁshing are generally much lower than those of the average ﬁshing ﬁrm operating legally, often because safety standards are not observed and laborers are exploited. Low labor costs and almost no safety costs8 are evident for ﬂeets engaged in IUU activities under cover of ﬂags of convenience (FOCs). In this way, vessel owners often employ FOC or ﬂags of noncompliance to avoid enforcement to regulation. This allows an owner to register the vessel under a more favorable jurisdiction (Erceq 2006). In the past, IUU ﬁshing operators have rarely been apprehended and prosecuted. If they were, sanctions were too low to act as an effective deterrent. In fact, Sumaila et al. (2004) estimated that penalties should be increased at least 24-fold to make it unproﬁtable to engage in IUU ﬁshing. According to FAO, IUU ﬁshing activities have been reported in various regions of the world, on the high seas and in coastal areas as well. Some activities are associated with illicit activities, such as bribery and corruption, and the use of armed resistance to surveillance and enforcement. Operators of IUU vessels are unlikely to respect international rules and regulations (FAO 2007b).

12.5. LEGAL FRAMEWORK: INSTRUMENTS AND LAWS A number of international legal instruments exist to address IUU ﬁshing. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) sets out the framework for ﬂag states and coastal states to take measures in respect to IUU ﬁshing vessels (U.N. General Assembly 2008a). It requires ﬂag states to take measures

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in respect of IUU ﬁshing vessels as well as to exercise effective control over ships ﬂying their ﬂag. On the high seas, ﬂag states are required to take or cooperate with other states in taking measures for their respective nationals in order to conserve the living resources. In the territorial sea, a coastal state can take enforcement measures to ensure compliance with its laws and regulations (U.N. General Assembly 2008a). The U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA) was adopted in 1995 with the aim of speciﬁcally addressing straddling and highly migratory ﬁsh.9 The overall purpose of the UNFSA was to implement more effectively the relevant principles of the 1982 UNCLOS (Lodge et al. 2007). UNFSA strengthens the legal regime through regional ﬁsheries management organizations (RFMOs), operating at global, regional, and subregional levels. Under UNCLOS and UNFSA, states agreed that the conservation and management of high seas ﬁsheries resources could be carried out only through international cooperation in research and regulation. The FAO compliance agreement is also relevant in this context and entered into force in 2003. A number of other agreements or incentives address IUU ﬁshing. Although these agreements are not binding (some elements may be representative of customary international law or reﬂected in UNCLOS or UNFSA), they have made a contribution to international ﬁsheries management. They include the following: • 1995 FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries • 2001 FAO International Plan of Action on IUU ﬁshing (IPOA-IUU) • 2005 FAO Model Scheme on Port State Measures to Combat Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing10 The 1995 FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries is an international code that outlines the principles and standards of a code of practice for responsible ﬁshing on the high seas. Included are terms for the conservation and management of resources, since the right to ﬁsh carries with it the obligation to do so in a responsible manner (FAO 2001). The IPOA-IUU (which was developed as a voluntary instrument by FAO) within the framework of the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries was elaborated in 2000 and was adopted by consensus

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in March 2001. This is the plan to respond to IUU issues, such as reﬂagging of vessels to evade controls, ﬁshing in areas without the authorization of the coastal state, and failure to report catches (misreporting, etc.), whereby states and RFMOs would be introducing effective and transparent actions to prevent IUU ﬁshing (FAO 2002b). Member states agreed to put the IPOA-IUU into effect by 2004 and to eliminate subsidies that contribute to IUU ﬁshing in order to achieve sustainable ﬁsheries management (Schmidt 2005). A number of complementary measures have been adopted by states and RFMOs to combat IUU ﬁshing. Such measures include monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS), boarding, inspection regimes, negative and positive lists of ﬁshing vessels (also called “black” lists), and market or trade measures that prevent ﬁsh or ﬁsh products derived from IUU ﬁshing from reaching the market (U.N. General Assembly 2008a). Also, port states have intensiﬁed measures, such as denial of port services to vessels on IUU ﬁshing lists (U.N. General Assembly 2008a). FAO also developed a model scheme for state measures, which is legally binding (FAO 2005a, 2007a, 2007c). A logical sequence is the development of a national plan of action (NPOA). The NPOA for IUU ﬁshing is designed so that individual countries can manage and protect ﬁsheries in a biologically sustainable manner and to outline potential action to be taken when necessary to prevent destructive practices. A number of countries, such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, have adopted an NPOA for IUU ﬁshing. However, China and Japan, both major ﬁshing states, have not yet developed or adopted an NPOA. Japan has continued to implement the IPOA-IUU without formally adopting a formal NPOA.11

12.6. METHODS TO ESTIMATE IUU FISHING Although it is nearly impossible to have accurate values for illegal ﬁshing activities, because they are secretive and clandestine, some estimates are available. The Marine Resources Assessment Group (MRAG) used top-down and bottom-up methodologies to estimate IUU activities (MRAG 2005b). However, the most common top-down approach applies global estimates of the proportion of

unreported catch. Pauly et al. (2003) provided an estimate of unreported catch as a proportion of the total global reported catch, in the range of 25–30 percent. The average estimate of IUU ﬁshing in the MRAG case studies, as expressed as a proportion of unreported catch, is 18 percent (MRAG 2005a). The bottom-up approach involves analysis of more detailed information at the local scale, and estimates are then scaled up to obtain an IUU ﬁshing estimate for the region. Pitcher et al. 2002 have developed a method whereby Monte Carlo estimates are used to obtain upper and lower reference points (see, e.g., Ainsworth and Pitcher 2005; Forrest et al. 2001; Pitcher and Watson 2000; Pitcher et al. 2002; Preikshot 2001). One issue in obtaining accurate ﬁgures is that, in the developing world, huge catches made by large numbers of small-scale artisanal ﬁshers have gone largely unreported, not least because of the difﬁculties of doing so (e.g., Indonesia has an estimated 60 million part-time ﬁshers). There is an encouraging shift to smart methods of estimating actual catches rather than relying entirely on ﬁgures reported through government channels (e.g., Watson et al. 2004). Another problem with IUU ﬁshing estimates is the scarcity of detailed studies and estimates available even for developed countries such as Australia, Canada, or the United States that have elaborate monitoring systems in place and data over relatively long time series. The data for IUU ﬁshing are difﬁcult to collect, and people seem unwilling to discuss the issues. However, it is important to remember that, as in all rackets (whether the ﬁshing industry or others), only insiders have the knowledge and connections (Thomas Naylor, personal communication, 26 May 2008). For example, in a study in New South Wales, Australia, the illegal activities of the abalone stock were estimated by using public and group meetings as well as interviews and conﬁdential meetings (Palmer 2004). Offenders were found to be highly organized, sophisticated, countersurveillance conscious, well funded and equipped, aggressive, contentious, and potentially violent. Levels of illegal harvesting were estimated at 20–60 percent of commercial catches. A combination of empirical data collection (including surveillance data), comprehensive literature searches, modeling, estimation algorithms, and interviews with government ofﬁcials, industry

Unreported Fishing Worldwide representatives, ﬁsheries ofﬁcers, ﬁshers, and traders should be used to estimate IUU ﬁshing harvests. Information on trade, including vessel licenses and tax data, as well as public meetings and conﬁdential interviews, would be the optimum method in order to get an estimate of IUU ﬁshing.

12.7. MAGNITUDE OF IUU FISHING In the past, the FAO has examined IUU ﬁshing activities on the high seas (Bray 2000) and attempted to produce various estimates. One estimate made by Evans (2000) was that ﬁsh catches are probably underreported by up to 75 percent and high sea catches by 100 percent. Local studies of IUU ﬁshing have been published from British Columbia (Ainsworth and Pitcher 2005), Chile (Kalikoski et al. 2008), Brazil (Freire 2008), Eritrea (Tesfamichael and Pitcher 2007), and Morocco and Iceland (Pitcher et al. 2002). Recently, an FAO-sponsored study of IUU ﬁshing in the Arafura Sea, Indonesia (Nurhakim et al. 2008), revealed an amazing 1.5 million metric tons per annum of unreported ﬁsh catches; for some ﬁshing gears, estimated catches were 50–100 times the reported catch. Estimations were carried out by a consortium of government and ﬁshing industry representatives, based on a series of eight workshops held throughout the region and on surveillance overﬂights and satellite data. In the latest global study (refer to Agnew et al. 2008) MRAG and the University of British Columbia estimated illegal ﬁshing from more than 60 economic exclusive zones (EEZs) and 17 high seas regions. The estimates were based on a spatial algorithm for reported (FAO) catch from the Sea Around Us Project (Watson et al. 2004), and the inﬂuence table and anchor points approach based on literature, working party reports, and interviews with MCS managers. Overall, the estimates are based on approximately 95 percent of global catches. The results were that globally between 11 percent and 19 percent (12–26 million metric tons per annum) were illegal. Note that, because it did not include discards, this global study did not cover all categories of IUU ﬁshing. The work demonstrated that there is signiﬁcant difference in the level of IUU ﬁshing and that the highest trends were evident in the eastern

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central Atlantic (FAO area 34). This area is close to Morocco, the Canaries, and Cape Verde and is situated in the Gulf of Guinea, where a number of countries actively ﬁsh and trade. The lowest trend in IUU ﬁshing was observed in the southwest Paciﬁc (FAO Area 81). Over the past ten years, IUU ﬁshing has declined in some areas, increased in eastern central and southwestern Atlantic (especially along the African coast), and stabilized in others. Other published estimates of IUU ﬁshing (Agnew et al. 2008; High Seas Task Force 2006) estimate that in some areas commercial catches may be three times greater than permitted levels.

12.8. FINANCIAL LOSSES TO THE FORMAL ECONOMY DUE TO IUU FISHING The overall estimated loss from the examined ﬁsheries is 11–19 percent of the reported catch, worth US$5–11 billion (109) in 2003 (Agnew et al. 2008). Taking the total estimated value of illegal catch losses within the analyzed ﬁsheries and areas and raising by the proportion of the total world catch, the lower and upper estimates of the total value of current IUU ﬁshing losses to the formal global economy worldwide were between US $10 and $23 billion annually, representing between 11 and 26 million metric tons of catch. This estimate is roughly consistent with the estimate of US$9 billion made recently by MRAG (2005b), the European Commission’s (2007) estimate of $15 billion, and estimates from Pauly et al. (2002) at $25 billion.

12.9. SUMMARY OF ECONOMIC FACTORS DRIVING IUU FISHING IUU ﬁshing is driven by the economics of involvement (OECD 2004, 2005). And it persists because it pays (OECD 2005). The current overcapacity in the world’s ﬁshing ﬂeet, ineffective management, and subsidies all contribute to IUU ﬁshing (LeGallic and Cox 2006; Sumaila and Pauly 2006). The following factors, taken from Sumaila et al. (2006), are important in determining the potential beneﬁt to ﬁshers that cheat:

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1. The more catch that can be realized by engaging in IUU ﬁshing, the higher the probability that a ﬁsher will engage in IUU ﬁshing, all other things being equal. 2. Catch per unit effort or the time it takes to catch the ﬁsh is also a consideration since the more time spent searching for ﬁsh or traveling to and from the ﬁshing grounds, the more the cost and the greater the probability of getting caught. 3. If prices are too low, then in most cases there will be no ﬁnancial incentive to engage in IUU ﬁshing. This logic breaks down when food security is a driving factor. 4. Cost of ﬁshing includes consideration of the cost of labor, capital, fuel, license and royalty payments, and so forth. A number of variables that form part of the beneﬁt–cost calculation of IUU ﬁshers are provided in table 12.1.

TABLE

Each economic driver will act differently. For instance, one economic driver might reduce costs, thereby increasing the IUU incentive, and another might increase the value of the catch, thereby achieving the same result (OECD 2004). All these variables are important and can act in a cumulative way. Most ﬁsh species subject to IUU ﬁshing are characterized by very high market price. This has been the case for Patagonian toothﬁsh, orange roughy, and tuna, but less commercially important species can also reach prices to motivate IUU ﬁshers (Schmidt 2005). Extreme poverty is another economic driver, as are low penalties for convicted (or repeat offenses). As mentioned above, Sumaila et al. (2004), using empirical data, estimated that the maximum penalty structure should be increased by as much as 24 times (compared to the current system) for violators to eliminate the expected positive net proﬁts and thus have an economic effect on IUU ﬁshing activities.

12.1 Main variables in IUU activities

Variable 1. Quantity 2. Price 3. Company tax rate 4. Fuel costs 5. Other running costs 6. Crew cost 7. MCS costs 8. Flagging and registration costs 9. Insurance costs 10. Vessel purchase costs 11. Repair and maintenance 12. Safety equipment cost 13. Fraud costs 14. Moral/reputation cost 15. Avoidance costs 16. Expected sanctions Source: Adapted from Schmidt (2005).

Possible Reasons IUU vessels are not bound by international regulations Excess capacity of ﬁshing ﬂeet Insufﬁcient price for certiﬁed/labeled ﬁsh: possibilities to disguise catches Existence of tax havens Tax system distortion Insufﬁcient restriction to port/facilities access No need for avoidance behavior Availability of ready and cheap labor, resulting from poor economic situations in developing countries IUU vessels not bound by national and/or international regulations Vessels ﬂying ﬂags of noncompliance, reﬂagging international vessels (IMO) Vessels are not bound by national or international rules Subsidies to build or export vessels: excess capacity Insufﬁcient ﬁscal and foreign investment rules Vessels are not bound by national/international regulations Poor economic and social situation Vessels not bound by national/international regulations Insufﬁcient control of trade measures Existence of global or local economic imbalance Lack of recognition of the gravity of problem Lack of transparency in ownership Insufﬁcient MCS capacities Vessels not bound by national, regional, or international regulations

Unreported Fishing Worldwide

12.10. GLOBAL INITIATIVES TO COMBAT IUU FISHING Since the networks behind large-scale illegal ﬁshing are often international and circumvent international and national laws, international cooperation is the only viable avenue towards solving this problem. —Jens Stoltenberg, Prime Minister of Norway One of the more recent examples of international cooperation to deter IUU ﬁshing was the formation of the High Seas Task Force (www.high-seas.org). It was formed in 2003 after a meeting of the Round Table on Sustainable Development at OECD. The High Seas Task Force was composed of government ministers from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Chile, Namibia, and New Zealand. In addition, NGOs such as World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature were invited to participate. While an important voluntary initiative, it is fair to say that a number of signiﬁcant ﬁshing states were not represented on the task force. In 1999, more than 19 million metric tons of ﬁsh was caught on the high seas; 80 percent of this was taken by 26 countries. China, Thailand, India, and Japan took more than 1 million metric tons each. Chile, Indonesia, Philippines, Peru, South Korea, Malaysia, Spain, Taiwan, and Iceland captured more than half a million metric tons. Mexico, Ecuador, the United States, Pakistan, Norway, Denmark, Sri Lanka, and Brazil took more than one-quarter million metric tons, and Russia, Netherlands, Iran, and France, more than 200,000 metric tons (estimates from the Sea Around Us Project, University of British Columbia). Of the task force members, only Chile is in the top 25 countries representing 80 percent of the high seas catch. The major distant-water ﬁshing countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the United States, and Spain, were not included (Oceana 2003). Another point to note is that China to date has not yet signed the UNFSA (Cheng et al. 2007). In 2005, Canada hosted an international conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on the Governance of High Seas Fisheries and the United Nations Fish [Stocks] Agreement titled “From Words to Action.” Ministers from 19 states issued a ministerial declaration with speciﬁc commitments to ﬁght IUU ﬁshing. These commitments included strengthening the use of scientiﬁc information and the precautionary

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approach in the decision making of RFMOs, and increasing MCS (for details, see www.dfo-mpo. gc.ca/overﬁshing-surpeche/history_e.htm). By 2006, the task force identiﬁed an action plan, with a series of proposals (ﬁgure 12.1). The task force has been disbanded ofﬁcially, but a number of states are actively ﬁghting IUU ﬁshing using the Chatham House Initiative.12 Chatham House, London, is the home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, a world-leading institute for the debate and analysis of international issues. The most recent information on IUU ﬁshing worldwide is posted on their web site www. illegal-ﬁshing.info. There is also an International MCS Network Database of all vessels suspected of illegal activities.13 This is a voluntary network of more than 50 nations (imcsnet.org) hosted by the United States. Additionally, the Chatham House has held a series of annual workshops since 2006 (Chatham House 2006, 2007, 2008) and published analyses of improved governance by RFMOs (Lodge et al. 2007; Mooney and Rosenberg 2007; Owen 2007. Another important initiative is the recent report on the work of the United Nations Open-Ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea (U.N. General Assembly 2008b). In it, the international community recognized not only that illegal ﬁshing poses a threat to sustainable development, but also that such illegal activities are run by transnational organized crime groups (point 10c, p. 5). Large-scale IUU ﬁshing could often be conducted by global criminal networks operating across different jurisdictions, and it was evident from Norwegian analyses that ﬁshing vessels, cargo vessels, and other ships had often collaborated in the commission of various crimes at sea (point 29, p. 9). This is a major development in that the international community has recognized the links between IUU ﬁshing and organized crime.

12.11. REGIONAL FISHERIES MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATIONS The role of RFMOs, international ﬁsheries bodies, is to manage the high seas ﬁsheries (of highly migratory and straddling stocks). They do this by organizing international cooperation around stock assessments, decisions, and monitoring. However, the implementation and enforcement remains a

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Ecosystem Conservation and Fisheries Management Proposal 1 Strengthen international MCS Network.

Proposal 2 Establish a Global Information System on High Seas fishing vessels.

Proposal 3 Promote broader participation in UN Fish Stocks Agreement and the FAO Compliance Agreement.

Proposal 4 Promote better high seas governance by 1) developing a model for improved governance by RFMOs; 2) Independent review of RFMO; 3) Better coordination and port and trade–related measures; 4) supporting initiatives to bring all unregulated high seas fisheries under effective governance.

Proposal 5 Adopt and promote guidelines on flag states performance. Proposal 6 Support greater use of port and trade measures by 1) promoting concept of responsible port state; 2) reviewing domestic port state measures to ensure international standards; 3) strengthening domestic legislation on importing of IUU product.

FIGURE

Proposal 7 Fill critical gaps in scientific knowledge and assessment. Proposal 8 Address the needs of developing countries.

12.1 High Seas Task Force list of proposals. (High Seas Task Force 2006)

ﬂag state responsibility. It was thought that the establishment of these organizations with a set of multilevel rules would reduce the “tragedy of the commons” (Lodge et al. 2007), or the concept of overﬁshing or overexploitation with no respect of ownership of the resource. In the case of international ﬁsheries, the difﬁculty in management is that because of the nature of international law, many arrangements are voluntary and on a regional basis. Furthermore, states that are unwilling to do manage the resource, cannot be compelled to join regional agreements,14 and states that are not party to regional agreements are not bound by the rules of these agreements (Lodge et al. 2007). Nevertheless, many RFMOs have begun to take stronger steps to control ﬁsheries in their regions more effectively. Such measures include quotas, gear restrictions, closed areas, and other controls on ﬁshing. Some RFMOs require their markets to prohibit ﬁsh from being landed or transshipped in their ports in cases when ﬁsh were suspected to have been landed illegally. Mandatory catch documentation and trade documentation schemes are increasingly used (Dalton 2005). However, many RFMOs are facing difﬁculties in trying to effectively deter IUU ﬁshing activities (Swan 2004). As part of the High Seas Task Force initiative, Mooney and Rosenberg (2007) analyzed the

RFMOs. They reported that most RFMOs have now adopted vessel “black lists,” and some have implemented a trade information scheme to identify future market opportunities or combat IUU ﬁshing. Only three RFMOs—CCAMLR, Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), and International Paciﬁc Halibut Commission (IPHC)—appear to comply consistently with both scientiﬁc advice and corresponding management measures. According to the analysis, CCAMLR is the most advanced in terms of developing and implementing measures, not only in adopting overarching objectives and decision rules, but also in its efforts to monitor and remediate impacts on associated species—it conducts assessments on predator species (Mooney and Rosenberg 2007). Also, only CCAMLR has incorporated IUU ﬁshing effort into stock assessments for toothﬁsh, including trade analysis. This appears to be assisting in describing the impact of IUU ﬁshing within its convention area (Mooney and Rosenberg 2007). At the present time, no RFMO has actually imposed strict measures to deter IUU ﬁshing activity effectively (e.g., trade sanctions) (Mooney and Rosenberg 2007). However, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) did impose some trade sanctions on Chinese Taipei for overﬁshing bigeye tuna. The 2006 quota

Unreported Fishing Worldwide was cut, the total number of vessels was reduced from 100 to 15, and an observer program was put in place to control transshipments. The program would make it harder for vessels to launder catches at sea from one ocean to another. ICCAT also maintains a “black” vessel list (available from www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/media/ npress-communique/2005/hq-ac94-eng.htm). Yet it is worth noting that CCAMLR has experienced some success with its catch documentation scheme for the toothﬁsh, and several other RFMOs use IUU vessel lists to identify IUU vessels operating within their area.

12.12. THE U.S. INITIATIVE: MAGNUSON-STEVENS FISHERY CONSERVATION AND MANAGEMENT ACT REAUTHORIZED The United States provides another example of an initiative of controlling IUU ﬁshing. In 2007, the United States passed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006. The original Magnuson-Stevens Act was the primary ﬁsheries law for the United States, and improvements were needed. The new law is interesting in several respects: it mandates the use of annual catch limits and accountability measures to end overﬁshing, provides for widespread marketbased ﬁshery management through limited access programs, and calls for increased international cooperation (www.nmfs.noaa.gov/msa2007). This Act also authorizes the U.S. secretary of commerce to deny access to American ports to countries that are found to be engaging in IUU ﬁshing activities.

12.13. SOME CASE STUDIES 12.13.1. Europe Fishes Africa’s Fish In recent years, the European Union has become the world’s largest market for ﬁsh (New York Times 2008c). Having overﬁshed its own waters of many species, Europe now ﬁshes elsewhere and has to import 60 percent of what it consumes. Most of these imports are illegal ﬁsh from developing nations such as Senegal and northwest African countries (New York Times 2008b).15 Much of the

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ﬁsh is caught and shipped illegally to the European Union, disrespecting quotas, regulations, and treaties.16 The smuggling operations are well ﬁnanced and are carried out by large-scale mechanized ﬁshing ﬂeets that are able to stay at sea for long periods of time. The catch then enters European markets through the Canary Islands and other ports where inspection is minimal (New York Times 2008a). Therefore, the European Union has established a number of initiatives combating IUU ﬁshing in various ways. In 2003, the European Union, concerned about the widespread inaccuracy of ofﬁcial statistics, conﬁrmed that misreporting of catch statistics might have played an important role in the decline of the cod stocks in the North Sea. In 2002, more than 8,139 serious breaches of rules were recorded by all member states, including falsifying and misreporting of the catch. The countries with the highest number of incidents were Spain, France, and Portugal. These infractions include falsifying, concealing, destroying, and tampering with evidence or logbooks. The European Union has set up a Compliance Scoreboard, which is available to the public on the Internet at europa.eu.int/comm./ﬁsheries, and has imposed heavy ﬁnes on France.17 In September 2008, the European Union, now very concerned that ﬁsh products entering could be of questionable origins, adopted a new law (coming into effect 1 January 2010) that will oblige all products entering to be certiﬁed as “legal” (available from http://ec.europa.eu/ﬁsheries/cfp/external_relations/illegal_fishing-en.htm). The regulations involve measures to ﬁsh products along the entire food chain, control of port access, inspection provisions, a vessels list, sanctions, and a certiﬁcation scheme applicable to all ﬁsh products (Committee on Fisheries 2007). Such measures will ensure traceability of ﬁsh and enhance ecolabeling schemes. The legislative act is one of the most comprehensive instruments to prevent IUU ﬁshing to date.18 However, the legislation will affect trade and development for African, Caribbean, and Paciﬁc (ACP) states. In a recent analysis of the legislation, Tsamenyi et al. (2008) predicted that, in practice, such legislation and labeling may lead to some hardships for the ACP.

12.13.2. Misreporting by China Watson and Pauly (2001) described misreported landings by China, where China claimed to have

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caught much more than was likely, given other catches per unit areas. Overreporting by China was thought to have masked decreases in the global ﬁsh catch for more than a decade. However, China is an interesting example, because in addition to ofﬁcial overestimates of catches, at the same time there was also much misreporting, nonreporting, and illegal ﬁshing. Estimates of the decline in ﬁsh populations calculated from 30-year-old historical records of ﬁsh catch rates and locations retrieved from a trunk in Hong Kong suggest that true catches must have been in the region of the overreported ﬁgures (Cheung and Pitcher 2008).

12.13.3. Illegal Fishing in Australian Waters There is evidence that organized criminal groups around the world are becoming involved in IUU ﬁshing, lured mainly by demand from China for prized ﬁsh species. In a report by the Australian Institute of Criminology, organized crime groups from China, Australia, Russia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Japan have all been linked to illegal ﬁshing, with ﬁsh stocks either sold illegally or used to launder money (Putt and Anderson 2008). The authors state that criminal groups targeted prized species in demand in Asia, such as abalone, shark ﬁns, and sea cucumber.19 According to Putt and Anderson (2008), “It is clear that overseas illicit markets in seafood products such as abalone, bêche-de-mer and shark ﬁn are ﬂourishing, due in part to a steadily increasing demand from mainland China.” What is also clear is that there is extensive international involvement in supply (e.g., Australia or South Africa), harvesting (e.g., Spain, Indonesia, or domestic operator), facilitation (e.g., organized crime groups), and the market (e.g., mainland China). It is also clear from the literature that the illicit trade is well run, with established markets and distribution routes (Putt and Anderson 2008).20 Proﬁts from illegal ﬁshing can be high, with buyers in China willing to pay up to $5,000 for meals with top-quality abalone, and with demand for shark ﬁn growing an estimated 5 percent a year. In New Zealand, several coastal abalone ﬁshing areas have been closed, with the ofﬁcial catch of 1,057 metric tons a year estimated to be matched by 1,000 metric tons of poached abalone. As crime groups increased their interest in illegal ﬁshing, there is evidence of growing cooperation between crime

groups and gangs in different countries.21 “A wide range of criminal activities may be associated with the illegal trade, including the concealment of ﬁnancial transactions and proﬁts. These crimes include violence, corruption, fraud and money laundering, with the transfer of the proceeds of crime across networks and national borders” (McCusker 2005 and Willetts 1998, as cited in Putt and Anderson 2008). Putt and Anderson (2008 described that Australian abalone, shark ﬁn, and seahorses were attractive to international poachers, while abalone, lobster, mud crabs, snapper, and reef ﬁsh were vulnerable to poaching for the domestic market. Australia’s commercial ﬁshing harvest is worth about A$2.3 billion ($2.2 billion) a year, with about A$1.85 billion worth of seafood exports.

12.13.4. The Case of “Black” Cod At least one in ﬁve (perhaps even one in three) Barents Sea cod is “black,” that is, illegally and unreported harvested ﬁsh taken outside the ofﬁcial quotas (Grescoe 2008). Black cod ends up in Britain today. In theory, the Russian and Norwegian ﬁshers are strictly managed under the Council for the Exploration of the Seas. The ﬁshers are obliged to report their catch, but in practice many keep a second set of logs. Rather than return to port with a hold overﬂowing with illegal ﬁsh, they are met at sea by refrigerated transport ships, or reefers, that take the catch to certain European ports where controls are not as strict. For example, in August 2006, the Russian reefer ship Mumrinskiy docked at a port in Holland, after collecting unreported catches from at least ﬁve trawlers in the Barents Sea (Grescoe 2008). There were at least 100 Russian trawlers ﬁshing illegally and operating in maﬁa-style gangs. Russia’s ﬁshing industry changed dramatically since the late 1980s to ﬁt into the global market. Large-scale illegal and unreported ﬁshing was possible due to the change in domestic markets whereby Russian vessels landed in western ports. Unreported catches rose from 25 to 130 thousand metric tons in 1990–1992 (Stokke 2009). In 2006, the world’s biggest cod trading company was Ocean Trawlers, a company of Norwegian trawlers. The cod, which the ﬂeet caught in Arctic seas, was then sent to China to be ﬁlleted, and frozen blocks were shipped to the United Kingdom (WWF 2008). Once it was known that it was ﬁshed illegally, Britain’s biggest ﬁsh companies have since

Unreported Fishing Worldwide tried to distance themselves from this illegal cod. Nevertheless, the ﬁsh traders at Billingsgate claimed that everyone in the industry knows exactly which cod is black. “It is the stuff that comes in unlabeled boxes. It also tends to be 20 percent cheaper than the regular traceable cod!” (Grescoe 2008). And as long as Britain wants its cod, the stocks will keep on declining, and some of the cod sold locally is guaranteed to be black (Grescoe 2008).

12.13.5. Seafood Smuggling in the Caribbean Another case of seafood smuggling was reported in 2007 as Canadian and U.S. agents broke up an international smuggling ring ranging from the Caribbean to Canadian and U.S. ports, and major cities. Queen conch, used in Asian cuisine, was taken out of the Caribbean and unlawfully transported to U.S. and Canadian customers. Smugglers illegally shipped the conch to Canada by air and sea via the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Honduras, and Colombia (Canadian Press 2007). The shipment was falsely labeled as “frozen whelk, product of Canada” (North Country Gazette 2008). DNA analysis was conducted and thus conﬁrmed that the product was really Queen conch and not whelk as indicated on the shipping documents. The ring was dismantled by inspectors from the United States and the Wildlife Enforcement Branch of Environment Canada.

12.13.6. Abalone Wars in South Africa The high demand for abalone has led to the development of organized Chinese maﬁa syndicates in South Africa. These syndicates buy poached abalone and smuggle it out of the country (Hauck 1999 as cited in Plagányi and Butterworth 2008). The demand is driven by its reputed aphrodisiac qualities (in China) and traditional use as a high-status product for important ceremonial events (in Japan). The product can be sold legally in Hong Kong and Taiwan (Gastrow 1999 as cited in Plagányi and Butterworth 2008). Drastic declines in abalone populations elsewhere in the world, such as the black abalone Haliotis cracherodii ﬁshery off California, have increased both the demand and the price of abalone. The South African species H. midae is one of the most sought after because of its large size

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and high quality (Tarr and MacKenzie 2002 as cited in Plagányi and Butterworth 2008). Poaching undoubtedly occurred throughout the history of the abalone ﬁshery, but only during the last decade has it spiraled out of control. The magnitude of the catch taken by the illegal sector is unknown. However, a spokesperson for the illegal sector claimed that their catch was approximately half that of the legal commercial ﬁshery in the 1990s. In 1997, a joint task force including the South African Police Service was set up to combat the poaching problem. Unfortunately, efforts focused in a speciﬁc zone, with the result that poachers shifted their operations to other zones. In 1999, police estimated that the illegal harvesting and trade was worth approximately 500 million South African rand (approximate equivalent to US$75 million)— approximately the same as the proﬁt from the legal harvesting and sale of abalone (Gastrow 1999 as cited in Plagányi and Butterworth 2008). In 2002 and 2003, the poaching activity exceeded the total legal take ever recorded (Tarr and MacKenzie 2002 as cited in Plagányi and Butterworth 2008). Given the large scale and lucrative business of poaching operations, the local ﬁght against poaching has, at times, been akin to a war with gun-toting gangsters set against police, soldiers, and environmental ofﬁcers. A recent social and criminological study (Hauck 1997 and Hauck and Sweijd 1999 as cited in Plagányi and Butterworth 2008) highlighted the need to shift away from policing and toward more cooperative management structures (Plagányi and Butterworth 2008).

12.14. REDUCING IUU FISHING OPERATIONS The “top-down” government or international agency initiatives have generated a lot of literature, but their effectiveness is highly questionable largely because of the absence or poor design of the legal instruments that are supposed to act as incentives to comply. In fact, some of the most effective recent efforts to reduce illegal ﬁshing have been led by large-scale global ﬁsh wholesale traders in an effort to gain market share for their products through various forms of ecolabeling, or eco-responsible “green” protocols increasingly adopted by large ﬁrms. For example, in the Barents Sea, illegal ﬁshing by the almost uncontrollable Russian vessels was rife by 2006, but was reduced by at least 80 percent

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when the half dozen key ﬁsh buyers let it be known that purchases would be based on environmental responsible protocols adopted by these global companies (Canon, personal communication). In this case, there was no “ecolabel” that a consumer would see as such, and the highly effective incentive was driven by the desire to make sales sustainable by aligning company policy with a “greener” public opinion. But ecolabels themselves can also reduce IUU; for example, in Canada, a December 2008 advertising campaign by a major retailer pivoted on the use of Marine Stewardship Council– certiﬁed salmon. NGOs, Greenpeace, WWF, the Environmental Justice Foundation, and commercial ﬁshers have also identiﬁed ways to curb IUU ﬁshing. They do this by obtaining and disclosing information on vessel ownership and ﬁshing licenses. For example, the International Southern Ocean Longline Fisheries Information Clearing House (ISOFISH) was established and funded by industry and conservation groups with a mandate to halt IUU ﬁshing (Erceq 2006). ISOFISH was very successful in bringing IUU ﬁshing of the Patagonian toothﬁsh into the public domain. As well as NGOs, some industry representatives have become involved. In 2003, the Coalition of Legal Toothﬁsh Operators released information on a group of deep-sea ﬁshing vessel operators from Galicia, northwest Spain. Information from this group was used to identify individuals believed to have played a key role in the operation of at least 26 IUU vessels (Erceq 2006). In 2004, the same group released further information to suggest that the individuals were linked to IUU ﬁshing operations in Uruguay (Erceq 2006). Another way to deter IUU ﬁshing operations is to target involved individuals (through educating and training), not only ﬁshing masters or ofﬁcials as Erceq (2006) suggests, but also the consumers as Grescoe (2008) advocates. As long as the consumer, whether in Asia, in the Americas, or in the European Union, is willing and able to pay for illegal seafood, the overﬁshing will persist. Consumers should take an active rather than passive role in obtaining complete and correct information regarding the origin, labels, and production methods of suppliers (Clarke 2007). In fact, the importation of poached seafood (e.g., in Japan) demonstrates that where there is the demand, there can be a thriving black market in ﬁsh, even in highly regulated environments. One of

the problems with regulating seafood is that once it is ﬁlleted it can be passed off as anything—it no longer looks like the ﬁsh it was. IUU ﬁshing not only is overﬁshing the already depleted ﬁsh stocks of the world, with its associated biodiversity loss but is also a major economic problem, where illegal ﬁsh are mixed and mislabeled in the legal international markets (Jacquet and Pauly 2007, 2008).

12.15. CONCLUSIONS The cases we have chosen illustrate the IUU ﬁshing problems from Australia’s toothﬁsh, to Barents Sea cod, to abalone in South Africa, to smuggling in the Caribbean and Europe. Although they are very different, each case describes one type of IUU ﬁshing. In the case of Australia’s toothﬁsh, it was shown how international legislation and compliance is still lacking to stop unreported and unregulated ﬁshing. Yet some progress has been made to date. The Barents Sea cod example shows that unreported ﬁshing occurred: no labeling, no market measures, and transshipments. The smuggling in the Caribbean has shown that illegal products can easily enter international legal markets. The misreporting in China is probably only one of many misreporting activities worldwide. This chapter has provided a brief overview of the problem of IUU ﬁshing and some of the international, regional, and national responses. Although international and national regulations protect the marine resources to ensure sustainability, more effort is required at tackling IUU ﬁshing. Lately, serious crime and organized criminal activity have been linked to the ﬁshing industry. Nevertheless, some process was made at the international level, when the U.N. General Assembly in 2008 recognized that IUU ﬁshing was connected to organized crime groups (U.N. General Assembly 2008a). According to Putt and Anderson (2008), global experience suggests that key factors can hinder efforts to reduce and prevent organized criminal activity: • a weak or complex regulatory environment • inadequate resources and expertise and a failure of vision • corruption and poor governance • insufﬁcient cooperation between key agencies nationally and internationally

Unreported Fishing Worldwide Addressing organized criminal activity in ﬁshing creates law enforcement challenges for all countries (Putt and Anderson 2008) and at all levels. Meanwhile, the main challenge of marine ﬁsheries today is how to effectively achieve sustainable ﬁshing and to stop overﬁshing. Relatively simple market-based incentives have been virtually ignored by the “top down” management agencies, and a careful examination of innovative ways to encourage this trend might have surprisingly effective results. Unless IUU ﬁshing is recognized as an environmental crime, and we see a rigorous enforcement of existing laws coupled with smart use of market incentives, IUU may well continue until the last ﬁsh disappears from the sea.

Acknowledgments Many thanks to Prof. Butterworth and Eva Plagányi, who provided information on the South African experience. A very special mention to Prof. Thomas Naylor of the Economics department at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. We also thank Lori Ridgeway, Angela Bexten, and Pola Yip of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Ottawa, who provided the latest information on IUU ﬁshing activities.

Notes 1. The U.N. Secretary General stated that IUU ﬁshing was “one of the most severe problems currently affecting world ﬁsheries.” IUU ﬁshing was addressed at length in the 1999 Secretary’s General’s report to the U.N. General Assembly on Oceans and the Law of the Sea. Also in 1999, the General Assembly adopted resolution 54/32, which included references to combat IUU ﬁshing. And again in 2008 (U.N. General Assembly 2008a). 2. “Hot pursuit” refers to pursuit by vessels, aircraft, or ofﬁcials with different nationalities. In this case, the nations were Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. 3. Whether the pursuit was a valid hot pursuit under international law was one such question. 4. The illegal catch was sold for more than AU$1 million. The crew was acquitted by jury trial. One relevant factor in the case was the lack of evidence of actual ﬁshing within the Australian ﬁshing zone. The events are described in Knecht (2006). 5. Although the jury ultimately acquitted the charged crew members, the arrest and forfeiture of the vessel and catch appear to have acted as a deterrent to would-be IUU ﬁshers searching for Patagonian toothﬁsh. There have been no arrests

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in Australia’s Southern Ocean exclusive economic zone (EEZ) since 2005. 6. Cognitive implications of the ﬁnal clause of item 3 are of considerable interest because it raises a number of points about the failure to perceive a need to regulate new ﬁshing areas, often remote from capital cities where ﬁsheries agencies headquarters are generally located, or far from the developed world. This attitude has led to a consistent pattern of neglect of the regulation of such ﬁsheries since the 1950s. For example, the same problem has been evident surprisingly recently in the increasing exploitation of deep-sea ﬁsh resources. The use of estimation algorithms to cover areas and times that lack detailed data means that this issue needs no longer impede the will to attempt rational management. 7. However, the risk of apprehension has increased in some regions. For example, Australia increased its surveillance and enforcement presence in the northern sector of its EEZ in 2005–2007, with a corresponding peak in arrests. 8. See the case studies in International Transport Workers Federation (2006). 9. The Agreement for the Implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 relating to the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks is also called the U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement of 1995. 10. For more information, see Essential References on Port State Measures, available at ftp://ftp.fao.org/ FI/DOCUMENTS/tc-psm/port_state_biblio.pdf 11. See point 25 in FAO (2005b). 12. These initiatives were supported by the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and WWF International. 13. The International MCS network is hosted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), available at http://www. nmfs.noaa.gov/msa2007 14. Under international law, states cannot be compelled to accept obligations within conventions—the rule of pacta tertii (i.e., “Res inter alios acta alteri nocere non debet” [often cited as the pacta tertii rule]: “Things done between strangers ought not to injure those who are not parties to them”; Black 1968, p. 1471). 15. The region’s governments bear much of the blame for their ﬁsheries’ declines, since many have made money from foreign ﬂeets rather than controlling ﬁshing. 16. A major problem is that many governments are encouraged to join conventions, treaties, and agreements, but they lack the capacity to effectively coordinate enforcement measures and/or the funding needed to carry through the management responsibilities that signing has created (Lodge et al. 2007). In general terms, this is the situation in many African States, where E.U. distant-water

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ﬂeets ﬁsh illegally in coastal waters (New York Times 2008a). 17. The Times of London (2005) reports, In July 2005 France was been ﬁned the largest amount imposed by the highest court of the European Union for ﬂouting EU ﬁsheries law over 20 years on a scale that posed a serious threat to ﬁsh stocks. Paris was ﬁned E20 million ($32.4 million) by the European Court of Justice after it found the French Government guilty of allowing ﬁshers to catch and sell small, immature ﬁsh in deﬁance of EU efforts to conserve ﬁsh stocks. Citing the duration and seriousness of the offences, the court also imposed a recurring ﬁne of E57.8 million every six months until France complies with EU policy. The court considered this one of the most serious breaches of European law because France shrugged off two decades of inspections, warning letters, legal threats and court action by the European Commission, which upholds EU policy. France, one of the most frequent transgressors of EU law, was found guilty of the same offence in 1991, but largely ignored the judgment. 18. See Council Regulation establishing a Community system to prevent, deter and eliminate illegal, unreported and unregulated ﬁshing, amending Regulations (EEC) No 2847/93, (EC) No 1936/2001 and (EC) No 601/2004 and repealing Regulations (EC) No 1093/94 and (EC) No 1447/1999 Brussels, 22 September 2008. Number 12083/08, Peche 204. Interinstitutional ﬁle: 2007/0223(CNS). 19. While three priority species in Australia were identiﬁed from the literature as attractive to international illegal markets (abalone, shark ﬁn, and seahorses), there are also illegal domestic markets in many species, including abalone, rock lobster, and native ﬁsh. During consultations, stakeholders also referred to illegal restaurant/café trade in poached reef ﬁsh, eel, crayﬁsh, squid, razor ﬁsh, snapper, and dhuﬁsh, as well as the illegal taking of rare cowries, ornamental ﬁsh, and coral. It is impossible to estimate the size and value of these illegal domestic markets. However, it was estimated in 1997 that one of Australia’s better known abalone poachers was earning in excess of $1 million a year from the harvest and sale of illegal abalone (Tailby and Gant 2002, as cited in Putt and Anderson 2008). Tailby and Gant (2002) thoroughly researched the illegal market in Australian abalone but were not able to accurately quantify either the size or the value of the illegal market (Putt and Anderson 2008). 20. Most illegal rock lobster is shipped from Sydney to Melbourne to Hong Kong, where it may be transshipped to other destinations, such as

Singapore, China, and Taiwan (Putt and Anderson 2008, p. 15). Hong Kong is the focus for the legal global trade in products such as abalone, shark ﬁn, seahorse, and bêche de mer. There appears to be a major market for illegal abalone, with dried abalone being sold in large quantities in Kong Hong. Hong Kong acts as a gateway for the legitimate and illegal trade to mainland China, and it has been suggested that two systems operate to facilitate the smuggling of abalone into mainland China, with the ﬁrst involving local ﬁshing authorities whereby duty is paid. This is a safer but more expensive option than the second system via “gangster controlled organizations” (Chung 2005, as cited in Putt and Anderson 2008, p. 19). 21. Furthermore, Putt and Anderson (2008) speculate that the illegal ﬁsh trade could be used to pay off other criminal activities, such as drugs and arms sales and human trafﬁcking.

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Jackson, et al. (2001). Historical Overﬁshing and the recent collapse of coastal ecosystems. Science 2093: 629–637. Jacquet, J.L., and D. Pauly (2007). The rise of seafood awareness campaigns in an era of collapsing ﬁsheries. Marine Policy 31: 308–313. Jacquet, J.L., and D. Pauly (2008). Trade secrets: Renaming and mislabeling of seafood. Marine Policy 32: 309–318. Kalikoski, D., and T.J. Pitcher (2008). Estimating illegal and unreported ﬁshery catches from Chile. In: D. Kalikoski and T.J. Pitcher (eds.). Assessing Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishery Catches (IUU): Some Case Studies. Fisheries Centre Research Reports 16(5). Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Knecht, G.B. (2006). Hooked: Pirates, Poaching, and the Perfect Fish. Emmaus, Penn.: Rodale Press. LeGallic, B., and A. Cox (2006). An economic analysis of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) ﬁshing: Key drivers and possible solutions. Marine Policy 30: 689–695. Lodge, M.W., D. Anderson, T. Lobach, G. Munro, K. Sainsbury, and A. Willock (2007). Recommended Best Practices for Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. Report of an independent panel to develop a model for improved governance by Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. Royal Institute of International Affairs. London: Chatham House. Molenaar, E.J. (2004). Multilateral hot pursuit and illegal ﬁshing in the southern ocean: The pursuits of the Viarsa 1 and the South Tomi. International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 19(1): 19–42. Mooney-Seus, M., and A. Rosenberg (2007). Recommended Best Practices for Regional Fisheries Management Organizations: Regional Fisheries Management Organizations: Progress in Adopting the Precautionary Approach and Ecosystem Based Management. Technical Study No. 1. Chatham House Reports. www. chathamhouse.org.uk. MRAG (2005a). Review of Impacts of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing on Developing Countries. London: Marine Resources and Fisheries Consultants… MRAG (2005b). IUU Fishing on the High Seas: Impacts on Ecosystems and Future Science Needs. London: Marine Resources and Fisheries Consultants. Myers, R.A., and B. Worm (2003). Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory ﬁsh communities. Nature 423: 6937. New York Times (2008a). Europe takes Africa’s ﬁsh, and boatloads of migrants follow. 14 January.

New York Times (2008b). Europe’s appetite for seafood propels illegal trade. 15 January. New York Times (2008c). Until all the ﬁsh are gone. 21 January. North Country Gazette (2008). Seafood dealers sentenced in smuggling operation. 28 January. www.northcountrygazette.org/2008/01/28/ seafood-dealers-sentenced-in-smuggling Nurhakim, S., V.P. Nikijuluw, H. Badrudin, T.J. Pitcher, and G.A. Wagey (2008). A Study of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing in the Arafura Sea, Indonesia. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) (2004). Fish Piracy: Combating Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) (2005). Why Fish Piracy Persists. The Economics of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing. www.sourceoecd.org/agriculture/9264010874. Paris: OECD Publishing. Owen, D. (2007). Recommended Best Practices for Regional Fisheries Management Organizations: Practice of RFMOs Regarding Non-members. A Report to Support the Independent HighLevel Panel to Develop a Model for Improved Governance by RFMOs. Chatham House Reports, Technical Study 2. www.chathamhouse.org.uk Palmer, M. (2004). Report on Illegal Fishing for Commercial Gain or Proﬁt in NSW. www.ﬁsheries.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_ﬁle/4819/ Black-Market-Report.pdf Pauly, D., V. Christensen, S. Guénette, T.J. Pitcher, U.R. Sumaila, C.J. Walters, R. Watson, and D. Zeller (2002). Towards sustainability in world ﬁsheries. Nature 418: 689–695. Pitcher, T., and R. Watson (2000). The basis for change: Estimating total ﬁshery extractions from marine ecosystems of the North Atlantic. In: D. Pauly and T.J. Pitcher (eds.). Methods for Assessing the Impact of Fisheries on Marine Ecosystem of the North Atlantic.: Fisheries Centre Research Reports 8(2). Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Pitcher, T., R. Watson, R. Forrest, H. Valtysson, and S. Guenette (2002). Estimating illegal and unreported catches from marine ecosystems: A basis for change. Fish and Fisheries 3: 317–339. Plagányi, É.E., and D.S. Butterworth (2008). Does classic stock assessment have a role in a failed case of reconciliation of ﬁsheries with conservation? In: J.L. Nielsen, J.J. Dodson, K. Friedland, T.R. Hamon, J. Musick, and E. Verspoor (eds.). Reconciling Fisheries with Conservation: Proceedings of the Fourth World Fisheries

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Sumaila, U.R., and D. Pauly (eds.) (2006). Catching More Bait: A Bottom-up Re-estimation of Global Fisheries Subsidies. Fisheries Centre Research Reports 14(6). Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Swan, J. (2004). International Action and Responses by Regional Fishery Bodies or Arrangements to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing. FAO Fisheries Circular 996. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Tesfamichael, D., and T.J. Pitcher (2007). Estimating the unreported catch of Eritrean Red Sea ﬁsheries. African Journal of Marine Science 29(1): 55–63. The Times (London) (2005). France nets record ﬁne for ﬁsh breaches. 14 July. Tsamenyi, M., M. Palma, B. Milligan, and K. Mfodwo (2008). Development Impact of the Council Regulation Establishing a European Community System to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing on Commonwealth ACP Member Countries. Report for International Trade and Regional Co-operation Section, Economic Affairs Division, Commonwealth Secretariat, London. U.N. General Assembly (2008a). The UN General Assembly, 10 March 2008 Sixty-third Session, items 73(a), 99-107. New York: U.N. General Assembly. U.N. General Assembly (2008b). Report on the Work of the United Nations Open-Ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea, 25 July. http://www.un.org/ Depts/los/consultative_process/consultative_ process_info.htm Watson, R., and D. Pauly (2001). Systematic distortions in world ﬁsheries catch trends. Nature 414 (6863): 534–536. Watson, R., A. Kitchingman, A. Gelchu, and D. Pauly (2004). Mapping global ﬁsheries: Sharpening our focus. Fish and Fisheries 5: 168–177. WWF (World Wildlife Fund) (2008). Illegal Fishing in Arctic Waters: Catch of Today-Gone Tomorrow? www.panda.org/arctic.

13 Ecosystem Modeling and Fisheries Management ANTHONY D.M. SMITH ELIZABETH A. FULTON

13.1. INTRODUCTION Fisheries management and ﬁsheries science have long been focused on issues of sustainable harvests (Smith et al. 2007). However, there has been a gradual shift over the past decade from a primary focus on target species and resources to a broader concern about impacts on other parts of the ecological systems in which ﬁsheries operate. This broader focus has come to be known as ecosystem-based ﬁsheries management (EBFM) (Pikitch et al. 2004) or the ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries (EAF) (Garcia et al. 2003). Pikitch et al. (2004) state that the overall aim of EBFM is to sustain healthy marine ecosystems and the ﬁsheries they support, with the more speciﬁc aims of (1) avoiding degradation of ecosystems, (2) minimizing the risk of irreversible change, (3) obtaining long term socioeconomic beneﬁts from ﬁshing, and (4) adopting a precautionary approach to uncertainty. This broader EBFM focus has arisen from concerns about a number of wider impacts of ﬁshing. First among these has been bycatch, the taking and discarding of species other than target species (or other commercially valuable species). It has been estimated that ﬁshing results in the annual discarding of around 27 million metric tons of bycatch (Alverson et al. 1996), and concerns have been raised about the impacts of this both on individual

bycatch species and on the broader ecosystem. There has been particular concern about the impacts of ﬁshing on threatened, endangered, and protected species, many of which are now the subject of speciﬁc international and national protection measures and recovery programs (International Union for Conservation of Nature 2004). This includes many marine mammals, marine reptiles, seabirds, and many species of sharks and rays. A third area of concern has been the impacts of certain gear types (mainly trawls and dredges) on benthic habitats (Auster and Langton 1998; Collie et al. 2000; Schwinghamer et al. 1996; Thrush et al. 1998). A fourth area of concern has been about impacts at the level of the ecosystem itself, including the possibility of changes to the structure and function of ecosystems arising from ﬁshing. This includes impacts on key species and components of ecosystems arising from indirect impacts (e.g., impacts of targeted ﬁshing on predator or prey species) as well as whole system impacts such as regime shifts (Reid et al. 2001). Along with the broader policy and management response to ecological issues, the past decade has also seen an increase in the development and application of scientiﬁc tools in support of EBFM (Smith et al. 2007). This chapter focuses on the application of one of these tools—ecosystem modeling—to the issues and challenges faced by taking a broader EAF management.

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13.2. OVERVIEW OF MARINE ECOSYSTEM MODELING Fisheries science has a long tradition of using mathematical modeling to inform ﬁsheries management (Smith 1994). The ﬁrst applications go back to the early years of the 20th century (Baranov 1918) and extend through the ﬁrst half of that century (Graham 1935), with a series of classic papers and monographs arising mid-century (Beverton and Holt 1957; Ricker 1954; Schaefer 1954). Economic considerations were added to the models at about this time (Gordon 1954). Most ﬁsheries modeling was (and still is) focused around the problem of determining sustainable yields from single target species (Funk et al. 2000; Hilborn and Walters 1992; Motos and Wilson 2006). Serious attempts to move beyond a single-species approach to ﬁsheries modeling did not arise until the 1970s and 1980s, and followed several disparate approaches. Some arose from an extension of predator–prey models used in mathematical ecology (e.g., Beddington and May 1982; May et al. 1979). Others arose from adding a more explicit predation term to the concept of natural mortality in contemporary conventional single-species models (e.g., Helgason and Gislason 1979; Pope 1979). A few arose from an attempt to model broader trophic and ecosystem properties of ﬁshery systems (Bax 1985; Laevastu and Larkins 1981; Polovina 1984). Very few of these early models saw any serious uptake in practical ﬁsheries assessment and management. Perhaps one of the most inﬂuential was that of Andersen and Ursin (1977). While not used directly in ﬁsheries, their multispecies formulations were operationalized by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) Multispecies Working Group (Pope 1991) and eventually led to the development of the multispecies virtual population analysis approach (Sparre 1991). This approach is still used in the North Sea and North Atlantic today. Moving forward in time, and partly driven by the wider focus of ﬁsheries management through EBFM, the past decade has seen a considerable expansion in the application of ecological and ecosystem models to ﬁshery management issues. Walters and Martell (2004) review a number of current approaches to ecological modeling for ﬁsheries management. Plaganyi (2007) provides a very comprehensive review of models in support of an EAF, discusses 25 modeling types, reviewing 20 different models and modeling frameworks in depth,

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and assesses them against a range of criteria relating to technical details as well as use and application. A number of these models are directly derived from some of the pioneering models listed in the previous paragraph. For example, the most widely used modeling framework, Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) (Christensen and Walters 2004a; Walters et al. 1997) is directly descended from the original Ecopath model developed by Polovina (1984). Similarly some recent multispecies models such as GADGET (Begley and Howell 2004) derive from earlier attempts to include marine mammal predation in area-disaggregated models such as BORMICON (Stefansson and Palsson 1998). Most of the models reviewed by Plaganyi (2007) are not full ecosystem models. Several belong to the class of “minimally realistic models” that generally focus on the target species together with one or two other species that are either predators or prey of the target species. Most of these have been developed with a speciﬁc question in mind, for example, whether or to what extent marine mammals compete with ﬁsheries for common prey species. An early example of a model developed to address such a question is described in Punt and Butterworth (1995). This model examined, for the South African hake ﬁshery, whether a cull of seals that also prey on hake would result in increased potential yields for the ﬁshery. Other models have examined similar issues but from the perspective of the predator rather than the ﬁshery, for example, whether the ﬁshery on Alaskan pollock might inhibit the recovery of the Steller sea lions (Wolf et al. 2006). A number of the models reviewed by Plaganyi were developed to address issues of ecosystem management in the Southern Ocean, particularly the issue of krill harvesting, for example, Ecosystem Productivity Ocean Climate model (Constable 2005, 2006), Spatial Multispecies Operating Model (Plagányi and Butterworth, 2006), and the krill–predator–ﬁshery model (now called Foosa) of Watters et al. (2005, 2006). Krill are a key component of the diet of many species in the Antarctic food chain, including many species of whales, seals, and seabirds. Various attempts have been made to develop a commercial ﬁshery for krill over the years, mostly without commercial success, although current catches exceed 100,000 metric tons. However, concerns remain should catches expand further, and considerable effort has been made within the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic

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Marine Living Resources to develop models and precautionary harvest strategies ahead of such a development (Constable 2006). Of the models reviewed, Plaganyi regards three as being full ecosystem models, in the sense that they explicitly represent most or all parts of the ecosystem (e.g., all trophic levels). These three models are EwE (Christensen and Walters 2004a; Walters et al. 1997), Atlantis (Fulton and Smith 2004; Fulton et al. 2004), and InVitro (Gray et al. 2006). Of these, InVitro is an agent-based model that has been used to address issues arising from multiple human use of the marine environment (including such sectors as ﬁshing, mining, tourism, and land use) and is not currently used principally to address EBFM. The remainder of this section therefore focuses on EwE and Atlantis, the two most widely applied ﬁshery ecosystem models today.

13.2.1. Ecopath with Ecosim EwE currently has three main components (Christensen and Walters 2004a; Walters et al. 1997, 1999, 2000). The ﬁrst is Ecopath, a network deﬁnition tool that allows for the construction of static, mass-balanced snapshots of the network and biomass pools in an ecosystem (including the activities of ﬁshing ﬂeets). The second, Ecosim, takes the Ecopath snapshot as an initial condition and then adds time-dynamic components to allow for scenario simulation and policy exploration. The third, Ecospace, adds a spatial dimension to the Ecosim simulations and is designed for exploring spatially explicit ﬁsheries questions, such as the impact of ﬁsheries management zones and protected areas. In combination, these tools are a quite useful means of addressing ecological questions, evaluating potential trophically driven ecosystem effects of ﬁshing, exploring management policy options, and (more recently) modeling the effect of environmental changes (Bulman et al. 2006). The base Ecopath parameterization is based on solving a set of simultaneous equations that describe how total production for each group is divided among predation, yield, other mortality, any biomass accumulation, and migration (Christensen and Pauly 1992; Pauly et al. 2000; Walters et al. 1997). The mass balance solution to these equations then forms a basis for all the other EwE components. Key uncertainties can be considered using data pedigrees and Monte Carlo simulation of the major input parameters (drawing from

probability distributions for each parameter) to give bounds around forecast policy outcomes (Gaichas et al. 2007; Pitcher et al. 2005). Fitting procedures in Ecosim also allow for formal ﬁtting of the model to time series of biomass estimates. This ﬁtting process adjusts predator–prey and diet parameters to minimize differences between the data and simulated biomass trajectories (e.g., Ainsworth and Pitcher 2005). Residuals to the model ﬁts can also be used to look for evidence of external environmental factors that may be driving the system. Such factors can be included in the model by using climate forcing, derived from environmental time series or proxies (e.g., ice cores) to drive parameters or processes such as primary production. EwE is a potentially highly sophisticated tool. It has drawn some criticism regarding the handling of uncertainty associated with the input parameters, the forage-arena feeding assumptions (Plagányi and Butterworth 2004), and the implications of structural uncertainty (Pinnegar et al. 2005), but these issues pertain to all complex ecosystem models. All complex models should be used carefully, cautiously, and thoughtfully so as to minimize the risk of misleading results (Cochrane 2002). This cautionary approach is best delivered by the management strategy evaluation approach detailed below.

13.2.2. Atlantis Atlantis (Fulton and Smith 2004; Fulton et al. 2004) is a whole-ecosystem (or end-to-end) modeling framework designed to allow policy and management evaluation. It contains submodels to represent each step in the adaptive management cycle (i.e., biophysical, ﬁsheries, monitoring, assessment, management, and socioeconomic). A deterministic biophysical submodel is at the core of the framework. This has a fairly coarse three-dimensional spatial resolution, using polygons deﬁned to match major geographical and bioregional features of the system of interest. Biological components and processes are replicated in each layer of each polygon, with movement between the polygons by advective transfer or directed movements. Either observed or synthetic environmental time series can be used to drive the system. Biologically, this submodel tracks nutrient ﬂows (usually expressed as nitrogen and silica) through the main biological groups in the system, and explicitly represents consumption, production, waste production, migration, predation, recruitment, habitat dependency, and mortality. Atlantis

Ecosystem Modeling and Fisheries Management allows for a ﬂexible deﬁnition of the trophic groups in the model and can represent both biomass pools and age-structured populations. The remainder of the Atlantis submodels deal with the actions, decisions, impacts, and outcomes of the human components of the system. These include detailed exploitation, monitoring, assessment, management, and socioeconomic submodels. As with the biophysical submodel, these anthropogenic submodels can be ﬂexibly conﬁgured using a range of assumptions, formulations, and network structures. The exploitation submodel not only deals with the impacts of pollution, coastal development, and broad-scale environmental change but also provides a detailed model of the dynamics of ﬁshing ﬂeets. Multiple ﬂeets can be represented, with each ﬂeet characterized by its own gear selectivity, habitat association, targeting, effort allocation, and management structures. At its most complex, this submodel draws on the socioeconomic submodel to explicitly model ﬁsher behavior by representing economic and social drivers, compliance decisions, exploratory ﬁshing, and other real-world complications such as capital investment, disinvestment, information sharing, and quota trading. The exploitation model also supplies “simulated data” to the monitoring and assessment submodels. Monitoring can include both ﬁshery-dependent data (e.g., catch rates by ﬂeet) and ﬁshery-independent data (e.g., scientiﬁc surveys), and realistic levels of measurement error are represented (bias and variance). The assessment submodel then applies standard ﬁshery assessment methods such as stock assessment (with the ability to communicate with thirdparty software that performs the assessment). The output of these assessments is then used as input to the management submodel (which is typically a set of decision rules and associated management actions for each ﬁshery sector). The management submodel includes options for an extensive set of ﬁshery management instruments, including gear restrictions, days at sea, quotas, spatial and temporal zoning, discarding restrictions, size limits, and bycatch mitigation, allowing for the construction of realistically complex management plans for each sector. It also allows for the consideration of delays or checkpoints in the management process, the potential inﬂuence of lobbying, tiered harvest control rules, conservation considerations, and economic controls. As with EwE, Atlantis’s inputs can be highly uncertain. Unfortunately, the large size of most

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Atlantis models and the complex feedbacks within them make them unsuitable for classical sensitivity analyses (Pantus 2007). While loop analysis, perturbation analysis, and bounded parameterizations have been used effectively with this model (Fulton and Pantus 2007), this model also needs to be applied with care, caution, and thought, most often in a management strategy evaluation context.

13.3. ECOSYSTEM MODELING AND FISHERIES MANAGEMENT 13.3.1. A Systems View of Fisheries Management Once upon a time, ﬁsheries were viewed (by scientists, at least) as simple systems. There was a target species and a ﬁshing ﬂeet, and the main scientiﬁc and management questions were to try to determine the size of the resource and the amount of catch or ﬁshing effort it could sustain. Fishery models were mainly about the population dynamics of single species, with ﬁshing represented by a simple catch equation related to ﬁshing effort and stock abundance. Of course, ﬁsheries never were this simple, and the systems view of ﬁsheries has gradually expanded to take account of “externalities” such as environmental inﬂuences on stock dynamics, species interactions, economic drivers, and performance, and most recently the management system itself and the way in which ﬁshers interact with and respond to it. Fisheries are now seen as linked biophysical, socioeconomic, and governance systems. Garcia and Charles (2008) provide a recent view of ﬁsheries as complex systems. An important perspective in this evolution of a systems view of ﬁsheries is of ﬁsheries as adaptive management systems (Walters 1986). In the simpler single-species view, this perspective focuses on all the elements in the decision making process, including monitoring, stock assessment, decision making, and implementation of management measures. This perspective, in turn, led to the development of formal approaches to harvest strategy evaluation such as management procedures (Butterworth et al. 1997) and management strategy evaluation (Sainsbury et al. 2000). These approaches, while stemming from a single-species management focus, are increasingly being advocated for EBFM (Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of United Nations 2008;

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Sainsbury et al. 2000) and adopted as outlined in the examples presented in the next two sections.

13.3.2. Examples of Comprehensive Applications 13.3.2.1. EwE in New South Wales Atlantis and EwE have both seen extensive applications over the last decade. EwE has been applied on regional or even global scales (Watson et al. 2003), though its area of application is typically much more constrained (e.g., Fulton and Smith 2004). There are now many examples where EwE has been used to model the evolution of quite complicated biophysical and socioeconomic systems—with many trophic groups (as many as 100 or more) and multiple ﬁsheries. Some of the most detailed examples have been used to explore broad policy options, identifying trade-offs among social and economic objectives of ﬁsheries management and ecological, conservation, and recovery objectives. One example is from the New South Wales (NSW) coast of Australia (Forrest 2009). This model includes 57 biological groups (from primary producers to top predators) and six ﬁsheries. The Ecosim version of this model was ﬁtted to known time series, and the evolution of the system since 1976 was considered by forcing the model with historical catch time series or estimates of historical ﬁshing pressure (Forrest 2009). Once this exploration and ﬁtting was complete, Ecosim’s ﬁsheries policy optimization routine (Christensen and Walters 2004b) was used to ﬁnd ﬁshing effort levels (particularly for the offshore trawl ﬂeet) that would achieve a range of policy objectives on a 50-year time horizon. The ﬁsheries objectives considered in the optimization were drawn from broad EBFM objectives. These objectives represent a mix of social, economic, and ecological values as the optimization routine maximizes a multicriterion objective function. Forrest (2009) deﬁned eight policy objectives to achieve broad “ecosystem-based” goals: A. Maximize total yield i. Maximize total yield ii. Maximize total yield but do not allow costs to exceed earnings iii. Maximize total proﬁt (low costs) iv. Maximize total proﬁt (high costs) B. Prevent overﬁshing of “weak” stocks (sensu Hilborn et al. 2004) C. Maximize biodiversity

D. Maximize ecosystem maturity E. Maintain the status quo (i.e., as it was in the 1976 base case)—this is a reference scenario for comparison against the optimized states found under objectives A–D. The subdivision of objective A was necessary because initial analyses suggested that the optimal strategy for maximizing catch was exceptionally heavy ﬁshing and large-scale system restructuring. The extirpation of many predatory species makes this simple solution unacceptable to many stakeholders, so variants with more realistic constraints were also tested. Between them, these variants on objective A covered social and economic objectives associated with EBFM. The next three objectives all dealt with different aspects of the ecological side of EBFM. The overﬁshing objective (objective B) sought a solution where no stock was ﬁshed at a rate exceeding its long-term optimum ﬁshing mortality rate (this optimization used Ainsworth’s [2006] modiﬁed version of Ecosim’s “mandated rebuilding” policy objective). Objective C sought a ﬁshing strategy that would balance harvesting with biodiversity (by maximizing the Q-90 biodiversity index deﬁned by Ainsworth [2006] based on the slope of the cumulative species abundance curve). Objective D sought to maintain or restore abundance of long-lived and often charismatic species, which is consistent with E.P. Odum’s description of ecosystem maturity (Christensen 1992). Only objectives A(i) and D required substantial adjustment to the base-case ﬁshing efforts (Table 13.1). Objective A(i) (the unconstrained

13.1 Optimal trawling effort (relative to the 1976 trawling effort) found by Ecosim’s ﬁsheries optimization routine TABLE

Effort Relative to 1976 Effort

Objective A(i) A(ii) A(iii) A(iv) B C D E

Maximize total yield Maximize total yield (no net loss) Maximize proﬁt (low costs) Maximize proﬁt (low costs) Weakest stocks not overﬁshed Maximize Kempton’s Q-90 index Maximize ecosystem maturity Maintain 1976 status quo

Source: From Forrest (2009).

62.79 1.81 1.19 1.05 0.61 1.27 0.03 1.00

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Ecosystem Modeling and Fisheries Management maximization of total yield) required a 60-fold increase in ﬁshing effort, while objective D required effort levels fall by 97 percent. The more realistically constrained objectives showed that in 1976 the NSW ﬁshery required only minor changes to reach reasonable EBFM objectives. Socially, the ﬁshery could maximize yield, remain economically viable, and employ the greatest number of crew by increasing its 1976 effort levels by 80 percent (much less than the more than six-fold increase in ﬁshing pressure actually seen since 1976). Economically, though, greatest proﬁts (objectives A(iii) and A(iv) ) were reached with fairly conservative increases in ﬁshing effort (about 10–20 percent). This level of effort resulted in almost no depletion of valuable quota species and an overall increase in catch and value of these groups. Interestingly, a similar level of effort also led to the greatest levels of biodiversity (objective C). Even the 39 percent reduction in ﬁshing effort required for weak stock management (objective B) led to a slight increase in the catch and value for quota species (as well as beneﬁting the many vulnerable chondrichthyans in the system). This highlights how a systems view of ﬁsheries can lead to quite unexpected results and much lower levels of effort than simply employing a “more is better” ratchetlike approach.

Savina et al. (2008) went on to extend this work to consider the management and system-level implications of the use of marine reserves of different sizes in combination with the levels of effort identiﬁed by the policy optimization. This work highlighted that the spatial context and impacts of displaced effort can be quite important for predicting the impacts of management for groups with strong ontogenetic shifts in behavior. It also showed that reasonably large reserves are required for detectable effects to be observed and that those effects differ based on whether the species is a predator or prey and mobile or sedentary (ﬁgure 13.1). Sedentary predatory species beneﬁt (manifest as reduction in mortality and increase in biomass) much more than do either mobile or prey species.

13.3.2.2. Atlantis-SE Another comprehensive system-level application is the Atlantis-SE model of southeastern Australian ﬁsheries. This model was used to evaluate the potential impacts and effectiveness of a set of alternative ﬁsheries management strategies (Fulton et al. 2007). Since 2000, it had been widely recognized that the regional-scale ﬁsheries in the southeast of Australia were facing severe problems, including deteriorating economic performance

Fishing removed Trevallies

Shallow demersal territorials

Shallow demersals

Fishing inside reserve

Fishing displaced Morwongs & Redfish

Trevallies

Shallow demersal territorials

Sharks & rays

Shallow demersals

Biodiversity

Biodiversity

Morwongs & Redfish

Sharks & rays

Fishing outside reserve

Fishing inside reserve

Positive effect Marine reserve

Negative effect Lesser effect

Marine reserve

Net increase Net decrease

13.1 Schematic representation of the main impacts of marine parks with all of the displaced ﬁshing removed (left) and the displaced ﬁshing redistributed outside of the reserve area (right). (Data from Savina et al. 2008)

FIGURE

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and ecological state. Quota management was proving inadequate to solve these problems and simultaneously meet ecological and economic goals laid out under policy or legislation (e.g., the Australian Fisheries Management Act, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, and Australia’s National Plan of Action for the Conservation and Management of Sharks). There was widespread agreement (among managers, industry, scientists, and nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]) that a new approach was required. In support of this reconsideration of the ﬁshery, management strategy evaluation (MSE) was undertaken to evaluate alternative management options at a whole of ﬁshery level. In the ﬁrst stage of the study, the MSE was conducted using a qualitative method (Smith et al. 2004), but the second stage saw the implementation of perhaps the most comprehensive ﬁshery system model used to date—including all components of the Atlantis framework. The outcomes of both stages of the study (qualitative and quantitative) provided strategic insights into the consequences and potential trade-offs associated with the range of proposed management strategies. The quantitative model used was an implementation of the Atlantis framework, including explicit dynamic representation of more than 70 of the major biophysical components (functional groups and target species) in the system, 33 ﬂeets (including recreational ﬁshers), the 17 most important ports, and the major physical, ecological, behavioral, economic, and social drivers in the system. The range of management strategies considered included status quo management (as at 2000), enhanced quota management, mixed (integrated) management (involving a combination of quota, effort, gear, and spatial management measures), conservation-driven management (deﬁned by an Australian NGO), and management as it had pragmatically evolved by 2006 (deﬁned by staff at the Australian Fisheries Management Authority). Each of these management strategies comprised an alternative mixture of quota management, spatial management, gear controls, and effort controls, and between them they spanned a continuum from “business as usual” during the late 1990s through to more integrated packages that combine the use of all levers simultaneously. This combination of management levers and the scales of operation of the ﬁshery meant that the resulting model was one of the ﬁrst and largest (in terms of the spatial, temporal, and system scales

represented) to examine whole-ﬁshery management strategies at such a large scale. Performance measures used to judge the alternative management strategies spanned ecological, economic, and social objectives. By considering the time series of these measures it was clear that there was no one “best” strategy (that outperformed all other strategies against all objectives), but that integrated management was most effective overall, with the “least worst” outcomes across all objectives. This management strategy leads to almost immediate shifts in the system, including a contraction in size of all ﬁsheries sectors. This is associated with high transition costs, but if these can be survived then there are signiﬁcant beneﬁts to be made from the medium- to long-term gains in performance across all management objectives (ecological, economic and social). The integrated management strategy is not without problems. For example, total landed catches are often at lower levels than taken historically; lack of quota for byproduct groups can mean that it is not unusual for the quota of a target species to go unﬁlled; overcatch and high grading are not completely eliminated; and issues associated with spatial management also arise (e.g., limited movement between locations can result in local depletion even when the bulk of the population is doing well). Nevertheless, the performance of this strategy is much more consistent than for any other strategy tried—it is rarely “worst” at anything and is often in the middle to high end of the performance for the majority of the performance measures. By contrast, the status quo strategy was incapable of preventing the ecological, economic, and social degradation of the system. Initially, it did nothing to reduce effort, resulting in an extension of the ﬁsheries footprint instead. Eventually, economic pressure leads many operators to exit the ﬁshery, but even then any beneﬁts are quickly dissipated—ﬁshing through the food web (targeting both higher-trophic-level chondrichthyans and lower-trophic-level squid and small pelagics) continues into the medium and longer term (as traditionally targeted ﬁnﬁsh resources prove less and less lucrative). The performance of the enhanced quota management strategy effort was signiﬁcantly better than the status quo strategy in the medium term, but in the longer term could not prevent the ecological degradation of the system either. Exit of vessels was again driven by economic pressures, with many of the remaining operators also shifting behavior (e.g.,

Ecosystem Modeling and Fisheries Management deep-water vessels moving into shallower waters, as the spatial management imposed makes it difﬁcult for this ﬂeet to remain proﬁtable). The use of total allowable catches (TACs) as a dominant management lever under this strategy is compromised by the overcatch problems and the gradual extension in the number of targeted species (to include most chondrichthyans and forage species). This extension of targeting allows operators to effectively circumvent the intent of TAC regulation by subsidizing their practices with take of nonquota species. This has potentially severe ecological consequences (especially for near-shore communities) even while many sectors maintain a strong economic performance. The conservation-based strategy sits at the other end of the ecological–economic trade-off spectrum. It makes extensive use of spatial closures, which does lead to a strong recovery in many ecological groups, but at a signiﬁcant industry and human cost. Effort, employment, and landed catch drop substantially with few vessels remaining in the ﬁshery. Ultimately, even the few boats remaining are not economically viable, as there are insufﬁcient returns (in absolute terms) to cover costs, even with substantial increases in catch per unit of effort (CPUE) arising from recovery of target species. During the life of the Atlantis-SE modeling project, there were several major developments in the ﬁshery, including an extensive restructure package resulting in buyout of effort in several ﬂeets, accompanied by a number of signiﬁcant changes in management. The new management arrangements (using a combination of management levers, but not quite to the extent of the fully integrated strategy) were captured by the pragmatic management strategy. While this strategy did not perform as strongly against all objectives as the integrated management approach, it did much better than any of the “single lever” options represented by the status quo, enhanced quota, and conservationbased management strategies. This bodes well for the ﬁshery in the medium to long term (though it does not preclude further short-term pain). Potentially the most contentious aspect of this pragmatic strategy is the way in which discards are handled. A complete ban on the discard of target species (i.e., those under quota) had been proposed for the ﬁshery (though this has never actually been introduced). Model results suggested that the way in which this was intended to be implemented could have signiﬁcant impacts on ﬁsher behavior, habitat,

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and stock status (particularly for scavenging species and their prey and competitors). This management scenario also results in an increase in gear conﬂict and more inclusive targeting (picking up a broader set of species), as there is less scope for “searching.” The volume of quota trading also increases (especially for by-product species, a situation that has been observed in the British Columbia and the New Zealand trawl ﬁsheries), causing substantial increases in associated costs. Most important, there is a loss of continuity in time series of indicators used historically to monitor trends in abundance of stocks, such as CPUE. This behavioral sensitivity to the form of management used and its unanticipated consequences described above exempliﬁes one of the major ﬁndings of this whole-system study. Behavioral uncertainty is one of the most critical (and often neglected) uncertainties facing the successful implementation of new management options. Unforeseen consequences of the responses of ﬁshers to changes in management have been a signiﬁcant factor in many ﬁsheries management failures. In the Atlantis-SE study, behavioral uncertainty was a major part of the reason that there was no “best” management strategy; human behavioral response resulted in every management action having its drawbacks or not playing out as anticipated. For instance, allowing operators to switch ﬁshing gear as desired was predicted by economists to result in signiﬁcant economic efﬁciencies. However, the model predicted that it would be rarely used, as costs of switching gear were usually prohibitive. Even where these costs are subsidized, switching was rarely as proﬁtable as anticipated because optimal quota packages in this multispecies ﬁshery are highly gear dependent. Without explicitly representing such feedbacks in the ecological, economic, and social aspects of the system, these “unexpected” consequences of otherwise plausible management actions would be missed. These kinds of large-scale models are not appropriate for giving tactical advice, but they can be invaluable for providing insight regarding the relative merits and trade-offs associated with different management levers. Fulton et al. (2007) showed that successful management of a ﬁshery as complex as that in southeastern Australia requires a balanced combination of a variety of input, output, and technical management levers. Even then, no one strategy consistently results in optimal performance across the entire system and all objectives. Tradeoffs must be made, and unanticipated outcomes

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will arise. As one of very few studies worldwide to consider alternative management strategies at a whole-ﬁshery and whole-ecosystem level, early lessons can be learned regarding the true form (and pitfalls) of EBFM: (1) There is often a strong trade-off in short term costs and long term payoffs. (2) Economically viable ﬁsheries and an unaffected system are incompatible, and transparent decisions regarding “acceptable levels of impact” need to be made because such decisions will have implications for which ﬁshing sectors remain viable. (3) There is the potential for ﬁshing operators to effectively circumvent the intent of management strategies if these are highly dependent on single levers, such as quotas. (4) Weak (or strong) stock management has signiﬁcant ecological and economic implications. (5) Management measures (e.g., spatial management to protect deep water stocks) and rising costs (e.g., fuel costs) may cause a reversal in the trend to increasingly ﬁsh deeper waters. Consequently, popular shelf species can be signiﬁcantly affected. (6) There is a small window of maximal effect for buyback schemes: if proposed too early, it will not be taken up by operators; if implemented too late, the system is too degraded ecologically and economically to beneﬁt, effects are rapidly dissipated, and there is only minimal impact on the future evolution of the system. Even if timed well, ﬁshers will perceive beneﬁts dissipating relatively quickly (within a decade) even if the system beneﬁts last much longer than this in absolute terms. Together, these ﬁndings highlight that, because of the multitude of feedbacks and dynamic behavior in ﬁshed ecosystems (especially among the human components), ﬁsheries management will remain a difﬁcult, complicated, and ongoing prospect. Without a systems-level view, overly simplistic solutions will continue to be presented, implemented, and viliﬁed when they fail.

13.3.3. Links to Other Uses and Impacts in Marine Ecosystems Dynamic systems are by deﬁnition highly connected and multifactor entities. This means that ﬁsheries

and the biological groups they interact with do not exist in isolation from the multitude of other pressures and processes in the system. An extension of the systems perspective given above is to include all the interacting factors that act upon ﬁshed systems. These include not only already-recognized environmental drivers, but also large-scale climate change and other human uses or stresses in the system— such as habitat degradation due to coastal development and infrastructure construction, pollution, oil and gas extraction, mining, shipping, tourism, and conservation. While some of these may act to countervail the potential impacts of ﬁshing, others may act synergistically or may even overwhelm the effects of ﬁshing. Climate change and the potentially large impacts it may have on recruitment success and species composition have highlighted this issue, but the literature is replete with examples of problems of cumulative impact that predate this climate concern. For example, experience in Chesapeake Bay has shown that it can be incredibly difﬁcult to disentangle the impacts of different sources of stress on a system—in that case, it was a complex mix of the removal of oyster beds by ﬁsheries and eutrophication due to nutrient pollution that produced poor water quality and prevented the establishment and recovery of new oyster beds (Dauer and Alden 1995). As societal expectations and management practices shift from single-species management, to an EAF, to ecosystem-based management, a more inclusive, multiple-use management approach will be necessary. This is evident in the number of marine end-to-end (from “physics to ﬁsh and ﬁshers”) conferences and meetings that are occurring globally (up from one in 2005 to more than ten in 2008) and the increasing number of models that can include many different system uses and processes (e.g., the expansion of nonﬁsheries sectors in Atlantis, sophistication of environmental drivers in EwE, and the development of true multiple-use models such as InVitro).

13.4. CONCLUSIONS The application of ecosystem models to ﬁshery management problems is now almost three decades old, with the pace of development increasing signiﬁcantly in the past decade. In terms of the “scientiﬁc S-curve,” ecosystem modeling for ﬁsheries has passed the initial slow phase of development and is entering a rapid phase of innovation and exploration, with

Ecosystem Modeling and Fisheries Management increasing uptake of results. Nevertheless, it is still well short of the mature phase of widespread acceptance and use characteristic of single-species modeling approaches. The latter have been routinely used in ﬁsheries management for at least ﬁve decades, and the pace of innovation has slowed signiﬁcantly (though by no means ceased, as the increasing focus on spatial modeling and analysis shows). The other important distinction between population and ecosystem models of ﬁsheries is the way they are used to inform issues in ﬁsheries management. Population models (stock assessment) are routinely used to inform tactical decision making in ﬁsheries, such as the setting of annual quotas for species. In fact, with the development of formal harvest strategies and management procedures (Butterworth and Punt 1999), the use of stock assessment models has become deeply embedded in the whole adaptive management cycle of stock management. The use of ecosystem models in ﬁsheries management is still far from this situation, and arguably may never reach it. At the moment, models such as EwE and Atlantis are starting to be used to explore and inform policy and broad management options for ﬁsheries, but are nowhere yet used to make tactical decisions about ﬁsheries management (e.g., determining TACs). Rather, they are being used as operating models in a management strategy evaluation approach, both to explore and to inform on the wider ecological impacts of ﬁshing, and increasingly (as in the Atlantis example presented above) to evaluate whole-ﬁshery management plans, to rank alternative strategies, to examine combinations of measures, and to highlight trade-offs across broader sets of ﬁshery management objectives. The combination of an ability to address the broader impacts of ﬁshing, to examine a broader set of management options (including spatial management strategies), and increasingly to model the human elements of ﬁshery systems in a more realistic manner, suggests that “ecosystem modeling” is set to play an increasing role in informing ﬁshery management over the coming decades.

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A better way to manage ﬁsheries? The South African experience. Pp. 83–90 in E.K. Pikitch, D.D. Huppert, and M.P. Sissenwine (eds.). Global Trends: Fisheries Management. American Fisheries Society Symposium 20. Bethesda, Md.: American Fisheries Society. Christensen, V. (1992). Network Analysis of Trophic Interactions in Aquatic Ecosystems. Ph.D. thesis, Royal Danish School of Pharmacy, Copenhagen, Denmark. Christensen, V., and D. Pauly (1992). ECOPATH II—a software for balancing steady-state ecosystem models and calculating network characteristics. Ecological Modelling 61: 169–185. Christensen, V., and C. Walters (2004a). Ecopath with Ecosim: Methods, capabilities and limitations. Ecological Modelling 172: 109–139. Christensen, V., and C. Walters (2004b). Trade-offs in ecosystem-scale optimisation of ﬁsheries management policies. Bulletin of Marine Science 74: 549–562. Cochrane, K.L. (2002). The use of ecosystem models to investigate ecosystem-based management strategies for capture ﬁsheries: Introduction. Pp. 5–10 in T. Pitcher and K.L. Cochrane (eds.). The Use of Ecosystem Models to Investigate Multi-species Management Strategies for Capture Fisheries. Fisheries Centre Research Reports 10(2). Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Collie, J.S., S.J. Hall, M.J. Kaiser, and I.R. Poiner (2000). A quantitative analysis of ﬁshing impacts on shelf-sea benthos. Journal of Animal Ecology 69: 785–798. Constable, A.J. (2005). Implementing Plausible Ecosystem Models for the Southern Ocean: An Ecosystem, Productivity, Ocean, Climate (EPOC) Model. Workshop document presented to WG-EMM subgroup of Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, WG-EMM-05/33. Hobart, Tasmania: Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. Constable, A.J. (2006). Using the EPOC Modelling Framework to Assess Management Procedures for Antarctic Krill in Statistical Area 48: Evaluating Spatial Differences in Productivity of Antarctic Krill. Workshop document presented to WG-EMM subgroup of Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, WG-EMM- 06/38. Hobart, Tasmania: Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. Dauer, D.M., and R.W. Alden III (1995). Long-term trends in the macrobenthos and water quality of the lower Chesapeake Bay (1985–1991). Marine Pollution Bulletin 30: 840–850. Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2008). Best Practices in Ecosystem

Modelling: Modelling Ecosystem Interactions for Informing an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. FAO Fisheries Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries 4, Suppl. 2, Add. 1. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Forrest, R. (2009). A Model of New South Wales Coastal Community and Fisheries. Ph.D. thesis, Resource Management and Environmental Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Fulton, E.A., and F.J. Pantus (2007). Ecosystem models and sensitivity analysis: An impossible combination? Proceedings Estuarine Research Foundation 2007, Science and Management Meeting, Providence, R.I., 4–7 November 2007. Annapolis, Md.: Estuarine Research Federation. Fulton, E.A., and A.D.M. Smith (2004). Lessons learnt from the comparison of three ecosystem models for Port Phillip Bay, Australia. African Journal of Marine Science 26: 219–243. Fulton, E.A., M. Fuller, A.D.M. Smith, and A.E. Punt (2004). Ecological Indicators of the Ecosystem Effects of Fishing: Final Report. Report R99/1546. Canberra: Australian Fisheries Management Authority. Fulton, E.A., A.D.M. Smith, and D.C. Smith (2007). Alternative Management Strategies for Southeast Australian Commonwealth Fisheries: Stage 2: Quantitative Management Strategy Evaluation. Canberra: Australian Fisheries Management Authority. Funk, F., T.J. Quinn II, J. Heifetz, J.N. Ianelli, J.E. Powers, J.F. Schweigert, P.J. Sullivan, and C. I. Zhang (eds.) (2000). Fishery Stock Assessment Models. Alaska Sea Grant College Program Report AK-SG-98-01. Fairbanks, Alaska: University of Fairbanks. Gaichas, S., G. Odell, R. Francis, and K. Aydin (2007). Fishing the Gulf of Alaska marine food web: Do predator prey interactions imply ecosystem thresholds? Proceedings of the North Paciﬁc Marine Science Organization 16th annual meeting, The Changing North Paciﬁc: Previous Patterns, Future Projections, and Ecosystem Impacts. 26 October–5 November 2007, Victoria, B.C., Canada. Sidney, B.C.: North Paciﬁc Marine Science Organization. Garcia, S.M., and A.T. Charles (2008). Fishery systems and linkages: Implications for science and governance. Ocean and Coastal Management 51(7): 505–527. Garcia, S.M., A. Zerbi, C. Aliaume, T. Do Chi, and G. Lasserre (2003). The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. Issues, Terminology, Principles, Institutional Foundations, Implementation and Outlook. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 443. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.

Ecosystem Modeling and Fisheries Management Gordon, H.S. (1954). The economic theory of a common property resource: The ﬁshery. Journal of Political Economy 82: 124–142. Graham, M. (1935). Modern theory of exploiting a ﬁshery, and application to North Sea trawling. Journal du Conseil 10: 264–274. Gray, R., E.A. Fulton, L.R. Little, and R. Scott (2006). Operating Model Speciﬁcation within an Agent Based Framework. North West Shelf Joint Environmental Management Study Technical Report 16. Hobart, Tasmania: Commonwealth Scientiﬁc and Industrial Research Organization. Helgason, T., and H. Gislason (1979). VPA—Analysis with Species Interaction Due to Predation. ICES Statutory Meeting 1979/G:52. Copenhagen: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Hilborn, R., and C.J. Walters (1992). Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment: Choice, Dynamics and Uncertainty. London: Chapman and Hall. Hilborn, R., A.E. Punt, and Z. Orensanz (2004). Beyond band-aids in ﬁsheries management: Fixing world ﬁsheries. Bulletin of Marine Science 74: 493–507. International Union for Conservation of Nature (2004). Red List of Threatened Species: A Global Species Assessment—Analysis of the Data Held in the 2004 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. London: International Union for Conservation of Nature. Laevastu, T., and H.A. Larkins (1981). Marine Fisheries Ecosystem, Its Quantitative Evaluation and Management. Farnham, U.K.: Fishing News Books. May, R.M., J.R. Beddington, C.W. Clark, S.J. Holt, and R.M. Laws (1979). Management of multispecies ﬁsheries. Science 205: 267–277. Motos, L., and D. Wilson (eds.) (2006). The Knowledge Base for Fisheries Management, Vol. 36. Developments in Aquaculture and Fisheries Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Pantus, F.J. (2007). Sensitivity Analysis for Complex Ecosystem Models. Ph.D. thesis, School of Physical Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane. Pauly, D., V. Christensen, and C. Walters (2000). Ecopath, Ecosim, and Ecospace as tools for evaluating ecosystem impact of ﬁsheries. ICES Journal of Marine Sciences 57: 697–706. Pikitch, E.K., C. Santora, E.A. Babcock, A. Bakun, R. Bonﬁl, D.O. Conover, P. Dayton, P. Doukakis, D. Fluharty, B. Heneman, E.D. Houde, J. Link, P.A. Livingston, M. Mangel, M.K. McAllister, J. Pope, and K.J. Sainsbury (2004). Ecosystem-based ﬁshery management. Science 305: 346–347. Pinnegar, J.K., J.L. Blanchard, S. Mackinson, R.D. Scott, and D.E. Duplisea (2005). Aggregation

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and removal of weak-links in food-web models: System stability and recovery from disturbance. Ecological Modelling 184: 229–248. Pitcher, T.J., C.H. Ainsworth, H. Lozano, W.L. Cheung, and G. Skaret (2005). Evaluating the Role of Climate, Fisheries and Parameter Uncertainty Using Ecosystem-Based Viability Analysis. ICES CM 2005/M:24. Copenhagen: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Plagányi, É. (2007). Models for an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 477. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Plagányi, É.E., and D.S. Butterworth (2004). A critical look at the potential of Ecopath with Ecosim to assist in practical ﬁsheries management. African Journal of Marine Science 26: 261–287. Plagányi, É.E., and D.S. Butterworth (2006). A Spatial Multi-species Operating Model (SMOM) of Krill-Predator Interactions in Small-Scale Management Units in the Scotia Sea. Workshop document WG-EMM-06/12 presented to the Working Group on Ecosystem Monitoring and Management of Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, Hobart, Tasmania. Polovina, J.J. (1984). Model of a coral reef ecosystem. Coral Reefs 3: 1–11. Pope, J.G. (1979). A Modiﬁed Cohort Analysis in Which Constant Natural Mortality Is Replaced by Estimates of Predation Levels. ICES C.M. 1979/H:16. Copenhagen: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Pope, J.G. (1991). The ICES multispecies working group: Evolution, insights and future problems. ICES Marine Science Symposium 193: 22–23. Punt, A.E., and D.S. Butterworth (1995). The effects of future consumption by the cape fur seal on catches and catch rates of the cape hakes. 4. Modelling the biological interaction between cape fur seals (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) and cape hakes (Merluccius capensis and M. paradoxus). South African Journal of Marine Science 16: 255–285. Reid, P.C., M. Borges, and E. Svendsen (2001). A regime shift in the North Sea circa 1988 linked to changes in the North Sea horse mackerel ﬁshery. Fisheries Research 50: 163–171. Ricker, W.E. (1954). Stock and recruitment. Journal of Fisheries Research Board of Canada 11: 559–623. Sainsbury, K.J., A.E. Punt, and A.D.M. Smith (2000). Design of operational management strategies for achieving ﬁshery ecosystem objectives. ICES Journal of Marine Science 57: 731–741.

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Savina, M., E.A. Fulton, S. Condie, and R. Forrest (2008). Ecologically Sustainable Development of the Regional Marine and Estuarine Resources of NSW: Modelling of the NSW Continental Shelf Ecosystem. Hobart, Tasmania: Commonwealth Scientiﬁc and Industrial Research Organization. Schaefer, M.B. (1954). Some aspects of the dynamics of populations important to the management of the commercial marine ﬁsheries. IATTC Bulletin 1: 27–56. Schwinghamer, P., J.Y. Guigné, and W.C. Siu (1996). Quantifying the impact of trawling on benthic habitat structure using high resolution acoustics and chaos theory. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 53: 288–296. Smith, A.D.M., E.A. Fulton, A.J. Hobday, D.C. Smith, and P. Shoulder (2007). Scientiﬁc tools to support practical implementation of ecosystem based ﬁsheries management. ICES Journal of Marine Science 64: 633–639. Smith, A.D.M., M. Sachse, D.C. Smith, J.D. Prince, I.A. Knuckey, P. Baelde, T.J. Walker, and S. Talman (2004). Alternative Management Strategies for the Southern and Eastern Scaleﬁsh and Shark Fishery—Qualitative Assessment Report. Canberra: Australian Fisheries Management Authority. Smith, T.D. (1994). Scaling Fisheries: The Science of Measuring the Effects of Fishing, 1855–1955. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sparre, P. (1991). Introduction to multispecies virtual population analysis. ICES Marine Science Symposium 193: 12–21. Stefansson, G., and O.K. Palsson (1998). The framework for multispecies modelling of arcto-boreal systems. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 8: 101–104. Thrush, S.F., J.E. Hewitt, V.J. Cummings, P.K. Dayton, M. Cryer, S.J. Turner, G.A. Funnell, R.G. Budd, C.J. Milburn, and M.R. Wilkinson (1998). Disturbance of the marine benthic habitat by commercial ﬁshing: Impacts at the scale of the ﬁshery. Ecological Applications 8: 866–879. Walters, C.J. (1986). Adaptive Management of Renewable Resources. New York: Macmillan. Walters, C.J., and S.J.D. Martell (2004). Fisheries Ecology and Management. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Walters, C., V. Christensen, and D. Pauly (1997). Structuring dynamic models of exploited ecosystems from trophic mass-balance assessments. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 7: 139–172. Walters, C., D. Pauly, and V. Christensen (1999). Ecospace: Prediction of mesoscale spatial patterns in trophic relationships of exploited ecosystems, with emphasis on the impacts of marine protected areas. Ecosystems 2: 539–554. Walters, C., D. Pauly, V. Chistensen, and J.F. Kitchell (2000). Representing density dependent consequences of life history strategies in aquatic ecosystems: EcoSim II. Ecosystems 3: 70–78. Watson, R., D. Pauly, V. Christensen, R. Froese, A. Longhurst, T. Platt, S. Sathyendranath, K. Herman, J. O’Reilly, and P. Celone (2003). Mapping ﬁsheries on to marine ecosystems for regional, oceanic and global integrations. Pp. 375–396 in G. Hempel and K. Sherman (eds.). Large Marine Ecosystems of the World, Trends in Exploitation, Protection, and Research. Large Marine Ecosystem, Vol. 12. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Watters, G.M., J.T. Hinke, K. Reid, and S. Hill (2005). A Krill-Predator-Fishery Model for Evaluating Candidate Management Procedures. Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources WGEMM-05/13. Hobart, Tasmania: Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. Watters, G.M., J.T. Hinke, K. Reid, and S. Hill (2006). KPFM2, Be Careful What You Ask For—You Just Might Get It. Submission to Scientiﬁc Committee of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources WG-EMM-06/22. Hobart, Tasmania: Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. Wolf, N., J. Melbourne, and M. Mangel (2006). The method of multiple hypotheses and the decline of Steller sea lions in western Alaska. Pp. 275–293 in I. Boyd, S. Wanless, and C.J. Camphusen (eds.). Top Predators in Marine Ecosystems. Their Role in Monitoring and Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

14 Conservation of the Leatherback Sea Turtle in the Paciﬁc PETER H. DUTTON HEIDI GJERTSEN DALE SQUIRES

14.1. INTRODUCTION Paciﬁc leatherbacks are among the world’s most endangered sea turtles. A unique life history makes sea turtle populations vulnerable to several sources of mortality at critical stages in their life, which is aggravated by the several decades required to reach sexual maturity for many species. Leatherback turtles are highly migratory, facing a variety of threats throughout their range, often encompassing territories of many different nations. Threats to Paciﬁc leatherbacks include at-sea mortality from ﬁshing interactions and egg and hatchling mortality due to loss of nesting habitat, nest predation, egg harvest, and other beach-related activities. A holistic approach that addresses threats on the nesting beaches as well as those at sea is required if sea turtle populations currently in crisis are to recover or stabilize in the long run (Dutton and Squires 2008). Population recovery measures coupled with ﬁshing can be viewed as reconciling biodiversity conservation with continued commercial use of marine resources. Continued ﬁshing requires integrating ﬁshery management into a holistic sea turtle recovery strategy and within a multilateral context to account for the turtles’ transboundary nature. Two key components of this holistic strategy include maximizing reproductive output through protection of nesting females, their breeding habitat, and their eggs while also reducing or eliminating mortality of animals on the high seas

due to bycatch in large-scale commercial ﬁshing operations. Third, the reduction of subsistence, small-scale, and artisanal coastal ﬁshers’ takes of turtles is a major conservation issue, and perhaps the most intractable component of this holistic recovery strategy (Dutton and Squires 2008). This chapter considers a holistic strategy for Paciﬁc leatherback conservation, with a focus on integrating economic principles such as designing appropriate incentives and pursuing cost-effective strategies in a transnational setting.

14.2. LEATHERBACK LIFE HISTORY AND SOURCES OF MORTALITY High mortality of turtles and plunder of their nests by both humans and animals have been and remain prime causes of population declines (Chaloupka 2003). Egg harvesting, predation, and nesting habitat destruction have been important sources of mortality for all species of Paciﬁc sea turtles. Encroachment of human populations into coastal habitats further contributes to population declines by degrading nesting beaches. Turtle harvests for subsistence or commercial purposes and incidental mortality in commercial and artisanal ﬁshing also diminish sea turtle populations. Leatherbacks are one of the species that pelagic net and longline ﬁsheries most commonly encounter on the high seas,

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although this species also occurs in coastal waters. Small-scale coastal ﬁsheries are an important and intractable source of mortality for these and the other species of Paciﬁc sea turtles that warrant further consideration (Alfaro-Shigueto et al. 2007). Considerable uncertainty remains over the status of key stocks and the extent to which bycatch in various ﬁsheries has contributed, and continues to contribute, to declines in Paciﬁc sea turtles (Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations 2004; Kaplan 2005; Lewison et al. 2004). The catastrophic population decline of Paciﬁc leatherbacks has been well documented in the Malaysian leatherback population that nested in Terengganu, once one of the largest rookeries in the Paciﬁc, which now is all but extinct (Chan and Liew 1996). For almost ﬁfty years, every egg laid at this beach was harvested, and there has been a sudden decline in numbers of nesters from several thousand in the late 1970s to just two or three nesting annually since the 1990s. The extent that impacts at sea contributed to the Malaysian population collapse is unknown, but clearly the demographic erosion caused by the total harvest of eggs over at least one leatherback generation (9–20+ years), would have undermined this population’s ability to sustain anthropogenic mortality at sea. In the eastern Paciﬁc, the nesting populations in Mexico and Costa Rica have recently collapsed, most likely as a result of the convergence of several factors: mortality from high-seas drift-net ﬁsheries in the 1980s, coastal artisanal gillnet ﬁsheries in South America into the 1990s, intensive egg harvest beginning in the 1970s, killing of females on nesting beaches, and possibly poorly understood environmental factors, such as long-term cycles of climate variation (Saba et al. 2007). Costa Rican and Mexican take of eggs has declined, but with this critically low breeding population, the take of any leatherbacks from this breeding stock will have a relatively large negative impact on recovery. The largest leatherback population that remains in the Paciﬁc occurs in Papua, Indonesia, in the western Paciﬁc (Dutton et al. 2007; Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations 2004). While there is uncertainty over the historic status of this population, data from current surveys indicate that the Papua population has not collapsed in the way that the Malaysian and eastern Paciﬁc populations have (Hitipeuw et al. 2007). Papua also has not as long a history of whole-scale commercial harvest of eggs. There is, however, directed

take of reproductive adults on foraging grounds around Indonesia, feral pig predation, beach erosion, and human subsistence harvest of eggs. A portion of these western Paciﬁc populations migrate to foraging and developmental areas across the North Paciﬁc and off the west coast of North America (Benson et al. 2007), and it is these turtles that are caught incidentally in high-seas longline and coastal drift-net ﬁsheries (Dutton et al. 2000). Historic curtailment of large-scale egg harvest and relatively large numbers of nesters create a better opportunity for population recovery and for effective beach conservation (Hitipeuw et al. 2007).

14.3. CURRENT CONSERVATION EFFORTS 14.3.1. Nesting Beaches Nesting beach conservation measures aim to optimize reproductive success of nesters, primarily through protecting nesting females and their eggs from harvest or predation, and nests from destruction by tidal inundation and beach erosion. These actions, if sustained long enough, have been shown to be effective in reversing population declines (Chaloupka et al. 2008; Dutton et al. 2005). In many cases, despite the complex life histories of these animals, this necessary approach by itself appears to have stimulated long-term increases in depleted sea turtle populations (Balazs and Chaloupka 2004; Chaloupka et al. 2008; Dutton et al. 2005). However, simply protecting nesting females during the time they haul out on beaches, and preventing take of their eggs at the time they are laid do not constitute effective conservation if those eggs do not produce hatchlings at the end of their two-month incubation. For example, in Malaysia, despite continuing placement of leatherback eggs in hatcheries, not a single egg has hatched in ﬁve years. In Indonesia, long-term protection of nesting females and their eggs in situ has been valuable, but recent research indicates very low hatch success, and current efforts must mitigate other factors such as pig predation, tides, and erosion. Recent studies show that the western Paciﬁc leatherbacks consist of a metapopulation comprising scattered small aggregations nesting on the islands and areas throughout the region, with a dense focal point on the northwest coast of

Conservation of the Leatherback Sea Turtle in the Paciﬁc Papua, Indonesia (Dutton et al. 2007). Between 1,800 and 3,600 nests are laid per season in Jamursba Medi, and approximately 2,500 nests at Wermon. Local villagers monitor and patrol the beaches, but researchers are concerned by new information indicating that the majority of nests laid are not producing hatchlings, despite decadelong elimination of egg harvest (Tapilatu and Tiwari 2007). Some community-based beach and nest protection procedures have been developed to improve hatch success. The Huon Coast of Morobe Province hosts 50 percent of leatherback nesting in Papua New Guinea, but nesting beach impacts are severe due to egg harvesting by villagers, beach erosion, wave inundation, and predation by village dogs. In the Solomon Islands, egg collection and killing of turtles for food drastically reduced the leatherback nesting population. However, important nesting sites still occur at Isabel Island and at Rendova and Tetapare in the Western Province, and thus population recovery is still possible through dedicated conservation actions directed at boosting hatchling production (Dutton et al. 2007).

14.3.1.1. Research on Life History Parameters, Migration Patterns, and Population Dynamics Data are collected in conjunction with scientiﬁc experts through monitoring of nest counts for population assessment, status and trend, sand temperatures, hatch success studies, collection of samples and tagging of nesting turtles, telemetry studies, and aerial surveys. Critical activities include daily nest counts and nightly beach patrols during the nesting season, and training of patrollers in data collection. Basic data collection must be continued, and increased in areas where it is lacking consistency, such as the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Additional efforts are required in many areas to standardize data collection, storage, and analysis. Many projects suffer from a basic lack of oversight, due to remoteness or ﬁnancial constraints. An onsite project manager should be hired for each nesting beach project, and where necessary, additional monitors and team leaders should be hired, as outlined in a recent plan proposed for monitoring and protection of key leatherback nesting sites in the western Paciﬁc (Steering Committee, Bellagio Sea Turtle Conservation Initiative 2008).

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14.3.1.2. Interventions to Address Human Poaching, Predation, Habitat Destruction, and Hatch Success Most beaches with conservation projects are effectively controlling human predation through state- or village-level bans on harvest and hired enforcement ofﬁcials or patrollers, or periodic economic incentives in return for demonstrated conservation. In terms of other threats, some experiments are under way with predation control (fences, grids), nest relocation to shaded areas, or hatcheries. Many areas still lack activities to mediate impacts of predation, inundation, beach erosion, and elevated sand temperatures. Additional activities that projects may need to employ are predator controls such as bamboo grids, fences, or traps, and nest relocation to shaded areas or hatcheries.

14.3.1.3. Interventions to Increase Community Support for Conservation Ultimately, long-term program success depends on local communities incorporating practices compatible with sustainable sea turtle populations into their socioeconomic and cultural fabric. The complexity of tribal and village politics and a colonial “cargo culture” legacy pervasive in many parts of Melanesia affect conservation success. Gjertsen and Stevenson (in press) review this in detail and present a case study of direct conservation payments in the Solomon Islands that can serve as a model. Further integration of anthropology and socioeconomics into sea turtle conservation would enhance success (Kinch 2006). Education and awareness activities can strengthen social conservation norms by improving understanding of the problem and the need for conservation. Some projects are investigating alternative economic opportunities such as tourism. In others, direct incentive programs provide beneﬁts contingent on conservation performance. Apart from the Rendova program, most areas suffer from insufﬁcient incentives and interest from much of the affected communities. In Jamursba Medi and Wermon, a scholarship program improved community enthusiasm for the project, but beneﬁts are not broadly distributed, nor are they truly contingent on conservation performance. There is a need to improve community incentive and sustainable livelihood programs in most areas.

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14.3.1.4. Institutional and Financial Support Improved institutional capacity for nesting beach conservation is required, such as coordination between donors, country-level managers, and sitelevel managers. This lack of capacity is in part due to the current state of funding, which is short term and insufﬁcient to implement the full range of needed activities, limiting long-term project planning. Without ongoing support, conservation investments made in some years may be lost in lowfunding years. Endowment funds would avoid this instability and cover recurrent conservation costs (Steering Committee, Bellagio Sea Turtle Conservation Initiative 2008). Endowments are accounts that generate interest sufﬁcient to pay recurring annual costs of a project. For example, investing $800,000 into a fund earning 5 percent interest covers $40,000 recurring annual costs in perpetuity.

14.3.2. Fisheries Bycatch Reduction Where conservation resources are limited, it is easier and cheaper to focus on the tangible outcomes of nesting beach conservation than to address the complex challenges of at-sea conservation. Uncertainty on the status and biology of turtles on the remote high seas and the relative impact of different ﬁsheries on sea turtle populations contributed to the controversy and litigation characterizing the policy debate. These uncertainties remain, but many countries started testing ﬁshing technologies expected to reduce sea turtle interactions and mortality in high-seas pelagic longline ﬁsheries, and some adopted the use of better gear and handling procedures to release turtles with minimum harm (Watson et al. 2005). More information is required about the interactions of sea turtles with coastal ﬁsheries, particularly in the vicinity of nesting beaches, where the high density of breeding turtles increases the likelihood of interactions, or other areas of concentration, such as those at foraging areas off Baja California, Mexico (Peckham et al. 2007) and off Malaysia (Yeo et al. 2007). Models of sea turtle population dynamics clearly show the critical conservation contribution by protection of the adult reproductive population segment. Breeding adults come into contact with coastal ﬁsheries as they migrate to and from the nesting beaches, during nesting, and in the internesting

habitat. The important area immediately adjacent to the nesting beach is often overlooked as focus is placed on high seas and coastal ﬁsheries that interact with turtles on distant foraging areas. National parks and other boundaries designed to protect nesting habitat are being extended to include the adjacent waters in Papua and off the key leatherback nesting beaches in Mexico and Costa Rica. Omuta (in press) ascribes the sudden increase in loggerhead numbers nesting on Yakushima Island in Japan partly to the disappearance of the local pound net ﬁshery that would have drowned females intercepted before they reached the nesting beaches. The impact of climate change on oceanic conditions could alter ﬁshing patterns, turtle movements, and the physical characteristics of nesting beaches. Attention is increasingly focused on incidental bycatch in heterogeneous coastal ﬁsheries as a signiﬁcant contributor to sea turtle mortality found in the waters of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Indo-Paciﬁc. These ﬁsheries include artisanal drift gillnet and other net, trap, and line ﬁsheries and small- to medium-scale commercial ﬁsheries using purse seines, longlines, bottom trawls, drift gillnets, and shrimp trawls. A number of issues arise when addressing bycatch and direct takes of sea turtles in coastal ﬁsheries of low- and mediumincome countries. The biodiversity conservation issue cannot be neatly separated from the management of these ﬁsheries and from poverty, economic development, coastal zone management, and sometimes even ethnicity. The difﬁculty is compounded because the beneﬁts of biodiversity conservation are enjoyed not only by those bearing the costs but by relatively wealthy populations throughout the globe. The low incomes and limited employment opportunities facing many coastal ﬁshers, their families, and their communities limit their collective ability to absorb the costs of conservation, such as direct gear costs and indirect or opportunity costs through any incomes forgone from reduced catches following bycatch reduction measures and reduced direct takes for consumption (Alfaro-Shigueto and Mangel in press; Yeo et al. 2007). The standard ﬁshery management policies—especially for bycatch—developed in temperate water and high-income countries for the medium- and large-scale commercial coastal and high-seas vessels are much more difﬁcult to transfer to the complex multispecies ecosystem of the tropics, which is compounded by the less developed conservation and management infrastructure in low- and middle-

Conservation of the Leatherback Sea Turtle in the Paciﬁc income countries. The conservation and management challenge is magniﬁed for the artisanal and smallscale vessels, which may not be licensed, where entry into the ﬁshery may be open, no landings records are kept, vessels are small and operate out of areas scattered along a long coastline, and enforcement is uneven at best or more usually absent.

14.4. THE WAY FORWARD: THE HOLISTIC APPROACH, ECONOMIC INCENTIVES, AND COST-EFFECTIVE CONSERVATION APPROACHES Elements of a holistic sea turtle conservation strategy draw from approaches that have been developed to address global issues of ocean, atmospheric, climate, and biodiversity conservation. This strategy includes addressing the transboundary context through multilateral cooperation and coordination; mitigation measures and conservation investments, such as nesting site and other habitat protection; community involvement in conservation; and adoption of technology standards to reduce incidental takes of sea turtles by swordﬁsh, tuna, and shrimp ﬁshing ﬂeets. Additional ingredients include establishing conservation incentives, which include positive incentives from, for example, side payments to increase participation and compliance, and perhaps negative incentives arising from trade and other sanctions; equitably distributed burdens; and ﬁnance mitigation and conservation investments and adoption of technology standards in developing nations. Additionally, taxes and fees, including in-kind contributions, deserve consideration as a “double dividend” means of raising revenues to fund mitigation measures and side payments to those bearing the costs of conservation while confronting producers and consumers with their external costs (Dutton and Squires 2008). Past approaches have generally focused on natural science research and solutions that are either command-and-control (laws and enforcement) or aimed at education and awareness programs. Only recently have incentives been considered for leatherback conservation, and a broad range of economic tools remain available.

14.4.1. Incentives for Conservation Economic incentives guide producers and consumers to address all costs and beneﬁts from consumption

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and production, even if not presently captured by market values. Policy decisions are strategic choices that restructure economic incentives to more closely align decentralized private behavior with social goals and in the international arena, to restructure relations among international parties to help shift noncooperative behavior toward the cooperative behavior required for multilateral conservation. Market-based approaches replace the adverse incentives currently threatening turtle populations with positive incentives—carrots—that foster conservation and population recovery or negative incentives—sticks—that penalize adverse behavior. They also lower regulatory costs. The distribution and nature of costs and beneﬁts of sea turtle conservation contribute to misaligned incentives for conservation and recovery. Beneﬁts are largely enjoyed by populations in high-income, developed countries or high-income groups in developing countries. These beneﬁts are predominately nonmarket economic values, notably existence value and, to a lesser extent, indirect use value.1 As economic values without markets, the question arises of how to create markets or other mechanisms to express consumer demand for indirect use and nonuse value associated with public goods and common resources.2 The costs, in contrast, largely fall on lower income communities, mostly in developing countries, who can ill-afford to adopt costly conservation measures. These costs are also immediate and tangible through lost incomes and lost consumption of turtles, turtle eggs, ﬁsh, shrimp, and other marine-related resources associated with turtles; that is, these costs are largely opportunity costs of direct use values forgone.

14.4.1.1. Mitigation Measures and Conservation Investments Mitigation measures and conservation investments are well established in the international arena and allow continued commercial activities through compensating mitigation. The Kyoto Protocol provides allowances for “sinks”—credits for the absorption of carbon dioxide by forests, cropland management, and revegetation (Barrett 2003). The Clean Development Mechanism allows an Annex I country to mitigate its emissions by undertaking abatement within a non-Annex I country. The Montreal Protocol established the Multilateral Fund for mitigation. The U.S. Endangered Species Act provides for mitigation to counter environmental degradation

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(Heal 2000). U.S. Wetlands Mitigation Banking curtails wetlands loss and encourages protection and rehabilitation of wetlands as a precondition for developing other areas. Sea turtles provide a unique opportunity for mitigation and conservation investments because they return to nesting sites to lay eggs, thereby providing a focal point for conservation. Conservation investments to protect the turtles, sites, eggs, and hatchlings can actively increase turtle populations. In short, depending on the program design, conservation investments and mitigation, as part of a holistic population recovery program, generate a net increase in turtles, even after explicitly accounting for uncertainty. Conservation investments and mitigation can be directly established between developing and developed countries and, in fact, are critical given the disconnected localized costs in developing countries and ﬁshers and nonmarket beneﬁts concentrated in developed countries. Higher income producers and consumers of seafood that entail sea turtle mortality can mitigate their activities through ﬁnancing conservation investments such as nesting site protection or cleaner gear in coastal ﬁsheries.3

14.4.1.2. Side Payments Side payments, or transfers between and among parties, have both distributive and strategic functions (Barrett 2003). Side payments can be implemented through technology transfers, payment of incremental costs to adopt technology standards by developing country ﬂeets (e.g., circle hooks for longlines), payment for conservation or for nesting site protection, and access to otherwise restricted markets for shrimp, tunas, and swordﬁsh. Side payments help increase participation and make agreements fair. Side payments, by which gainers of a policy can compensate those who bear the burdens, help to ensure that nations otherwise losing by participating instead gain. Higher income ﬁshing ﬂeets and consumers can ﬁnance mitigation measures and conservation investments in lower income countries through side payments.

14.4.1.3. Direct Conservation Payments Direct conservation payments, especially to local communities for nesting site and habitat preservation and coastal small-scale and artisanal ﬁshers for adoption of technology standards and perhaps not ﬁshing or

gear changes during nesting seasons, can contribute to population recovery. These payments address two of the three anthropogenic sources of sea turtle mortality, and can be in the form of land purchases, leases, or easements targeting nest protection and other conservation performance metrics. Sellers deliver conservation outcomes in exchange for a previously negotiated payment in cash or in kind, conditional on conservation outcomes (Rice 2000). These payments can be crafted as multiyear conservation agreements in the form of contracts to relevant local communities. Direct conservation payments can occur as side payments from developed to developing nations in the context of an international environmental agreement or through voluntary but collective mitigation programs by ﬁshing industries and others. One example of direct payments for leatherback turtle conservation occurs in Rendova, Solomon Islands (Gjertsen and Stevenson in press). The participating villages each have a turtle monitor, a villager chosen by the project manager. An incentive program induces villagers to bring the turtle monitor to a nesting leatherback, where the incentives consist of payments to both individuals and a community fund. Additional payments are made if the nest hatches. Such an approach through direct conservation payments helps to close the gap between external beneﬁts enjoyed by society and the otherwise lower private beneﬁts realized by private players. Ferraro and Gjertsen (in press) discuss other examples.

14.4.1.4. Taxes or Fees Levied on Producers and Consumers Taxes, fees, or charges can be levied on swordﬁsh or shrimp landings, on the basis of sea turtle mortality, or on consumption of swordﬁsh or shrimp. These (Pigovian) taxes or fees can be levied either unilaterally on domestic producers or consumers or multilaterally through an existing or future international agreement. Taxes or fees levied on the swordﬁsh or shrimp landings of producers and/or on consumers of catches in ﬁsheries with sea turtle interactions can potentially yield several dividends. The ﬁrst dividend reduces sea turtle mortality through reduction of ﬁshing effort due to higher costs or prices, activities to reduce turtle interactions, and even induced technical change. The second dividend raises revenue to ﬁnance sea turtle conservation investments and population recovery.4 As a market-based policy

Conservation of the Leatherback Sea Turtle in the Paciﬁc instrument, (Pigovian) taxes provide economic incentives for conservation and contribute to economic efﬁciency. A similar tax was levied on the production of chloroﬂuorocarbons (CFCs) during the mandatory phase-out under the Montreal Protocol, creating a hybrid system under which a phased decline in CFC production was augmented by a pollution tax (Portney 2003). Such a tax is ideally levied on at-sea takes or mortality of sea turtles but is very difﬁcult to implement without direct observer coverage. Instead, a tax on swordﬁsh or shrimp landings is a more practical, albeit second-best, way to incorporate the external ﬁshing and consumption costs from sea turtle mortality into the seafood price. This tax could be determined from estimated take and mortality rates of sea turtles given the reported amount of target species catch. An analogous situation occurred with the transferable permit system that accomplished the U.S. phase-out of leaded gasoline. Stavins (1998, p. 487) observes, “The currency of that system was not lead oxide emission from motor vehicles, but the lead content of gasoline.” The turtle currency would be shrimp or swordﬁsh landings.

14.4.2. Cost-Effectiveness of Conservation Strategies As conservation resources are limited, programs generating the greatest turtle mortality reduction per dollar yield the most social beneﬁts. When alternative programs are not mutually exclusive and may be combined at various levels, efﬁciency requires that each program should be implemented to the level at which the last dollar invested in each program returns the same beneﬁt (assuming diminishing returns to increasing investment in each program). If the marginal beneﬁt of one program is much higher than another, additional funds should keep being allocated to that program until the marginal beneﬁt of the programs become equal, the equimarginal principle. When either programs cannot be implemented at continuously varying scales (“lumpy investments”) or there are greater than proportional beneﬁts from increasing the scale of competing programs, then a discrete choice of one program over another may be required. The “biggest bang for the buck” principle implies that the program providing the greater beneﬁts for a given cost or the program costing the least to achieve a particular welfare goal should be undertaken. This is the principle of cost-

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effectiveness, which prioritizes conservation strategies that result in greater impacts for a given cost, according to the biological impact (beneﬁt) divided by the economic cost of the action. This gives priority to those actions that have the greatest biological impact relative to the economic cost of producing that impact. In evaluating two conservation strategies, efﬁciency might require some of both—equating the marginal beneﬁt in each program of the last dollar spent—or efﬁciency might suggest one strategy instead of the other as the cheaper alternative to achieve a given reduction in turtle mortality. Gjertsen (in press) assessed three strategies for Paciﬁc leatherback conservation in terms of the cost per adult female (produced or protected by the intervention). (Gjertsen [in press] assumes linearity and no stochasticity. The assumptions were made for ease of exposition, and the optimal mix of activities will include some proportion of each.) Current activities to produce hatchlings at Jamursba Medi and Wermon nesting beaches cost more than 10 times less per turtle than the Hawaii shallow-set longline regulations and more than 100 times less per turtle than the California drift gillnet time area closure. Hence, “investing” in nesting beach protection activities at these beaches currently yields a very large bang for the buck. For the same cost, 10 times as many adult female leatherbacks are generated through the nesting beach project compared to the Hawaii regulations, and 100 times as many leatherbacks compared to the gillnet closure. The analysis suggests that incorporating costs into the decision model might prioritize different conservation actions than when solely considering biological impacts and achieves more for a given budget. The evidence suggests severe misallocation of resources, requiring additional funds allocated to nesting beach protection at Jamursba Medi and Wermon. These are very high-output beaches, so other nesting beach protection activities may realize a lower impact per dollar. There are limits to beneﬁts from nesting beach protection investments, and eventually the impact per dollar declines. Diminishing returns emerge to any conservation activity, but expanding nesting beach efforts will likely continue to be cost-effective over some large range. Given very low hatchling success at many nesting beaches, likely potential sizable beneﬁts remain from increasing investment in improving hatchling production. The regulations to reduce bycatch in Hawaii longline and California drift gillnet ﬁsheries represent relatively high-cost, low-impact strategies, but

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more cost-effective bycatch reduction strategies are likely to exist. For example, expanding the longline gear changes from Hawaii to other ﬁsheries provides a potentially low-cost intervention. There may be high-bycatch ﬁsheries in hotspot areas, such as directly off nesting beaches during nesting season, or other low-cost opportunities, such as small numbers of ﬁshermen causing high bycatch (see Peckham et al. 2007). Charges on the producer and consumer beneﬁts of higher income country ﬁsheries can ﬁnance, as side payments, these mitigation activities in lower income countries. Recall that the transboundary setting and transnational externality mean that unilateral approaches to sea turtle population recovery are often ineffective. When leatherbacks or loggerheads migrate across economic exclusion zones and through the high seas, ﬁsh formerly caught in a regulated ﬁshery are likely to be caught by other nations and imported back into the nation with the regulated ﬁshery—production and trade leakages—yielding little or no net conservation gain for sea turtles. Under these conditions, bycatch reduction strategies are a weakest link technology: the impacts may be zero (or negative) if efforts are only implemented in one area or one ﬁshery, particularly when there is the possibility of imports from unregulated ﬁsheries. For example, according to U.S. market sources, much of the swordﬁsh supply that was lost from the Hawaii closure was replaced by fresh imports from foreign longline catches (Bartram and Kaneko 2004). With the exception of California, the other main sources of imports (Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, South Africa) have higher associated sea turtle bycatch per unit effort. It will thus be important to continue to evaluate opportunities for expanding the transfer of bycatch reduction technologies and pursue other cooperative multilateral solutions and trade restrictions on imported swordﬁsh or shrimp not sustainably harvested. An important area for further research and action is identifying any low-cost, high-impact opportunities for bycatch reduction in small-scale coastal ﬁsheries, as there is currently a dearth of information on the extent of leatherback bycatch in small-scale coastal ﬁsheries or the costs of reducing it.

14.5. CONCLUSIONS Paciﬁc leatherback population recovery requires a holistic, multilateral recovery strategy addressing

multiple sources of sea turtle mortality at different life stages in the face of continued ﬁshing by largescale, small-scale, and artisanal ﬂeets and mortality at the turtle nesting sites. The discussion explored a variety of policy instruments addressing the sources of mortality at different life history stages, including creation of economic incentives through market-based and other policy instruments, where practicable, to facilitate recovery, as opposed to command-and-control regulations, laws, and adverse incentives. Positive economic incentives contribute toward a self-enforcing recovery strategy in a multilateral framework emphasizing cooperation and coordination among private and public players. Cost-effective strategies increase the conservation bang for the buck. Cost-effective conservation can tax some of the higher income countries’ ﬁsheries economic surplus to ﬁnance conservation investments and mitigation measures aimed at lower income country nesting sites and coastal ﬁsheries rather than unilateral actions halting ﬁsheries that have no lasting impact on sea turtle mortality reduction because of production and trade leakages. Conservation charges on continued harvests and consumption of swordﬁsh and shrimp not only account for external sea turtle mortality costs, but also create the economic surplus to ﬁnance conservation investments and mitigation measures through a double dividend. Opportunities exist to immediately implement holistic recovery measures under existing international sea turtle and ﬁsheries treaties. These can be augmented through additional formal or informal bilateral or broader multilateral agreements and coordinated actions by individual nations, NGOs, and industry organizations, and others acting in tandem that are quicker to establish and sometimes more effective.

Notes 1. Indirect use value derives from services (less tangible qualities) that inﬂuence production processes by ﬁrms or households. Existence value arises from knowledge that environmental service exists, and is linked to altruism. 2. A public good is one that can be consumed by all without depleting the good, that is, a good that is nonexcludable and nonrival. 3. Gjertsen and Stevenson (in press) provide a case study example. Payments to collect eggs for

Conservation of the Leatherback Sea Turtle in the Paciﬁc hatcheries with further payments conditional upon the rate of hatching success is another example. Payments for beach patrols to protect against anthropogenic and animal predation of in situ nests, hatching rate success from in situ nests, and movement of in situ nests to areas above the high tide line are other examples. 4. See Bouvenbag and Golder (1999) for a general discussion. In addition, comparable charges are used in Europe and Japan to address water pollution and, to a lesser extent, air pollution (Tietenberg 1990). France and the Netherlands use charges designed to raise revenues to fund activities that improve water quality. Moreover, taxes intended to raise revenue in competitive markets distort resource allocation and create economic inefﬁciency through what is called a dead weight loss. However, when there is a preexisting market failure and inefﬁciency due to an external cost (e.g., sea turtle mortality from ﬁshing), a tax or fee both raises revenue for conservation and recovery and addresses the market failure, thereby inducing efﬁciency; the dead weight loss is thus not an issue when a Pigovian tax addresses preexisting market failure.

References Alfaro-Shigueto, J., P.H. Dutton, M.F. Van Bressem, and J. Mangel (2007). Interactions between leatherback turtles and Peruvian artisanal ﬁsheries. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 6: 129–134. Balazs, G.H., and M. Chaloupka (2004). Thirtyyear recovery trend in the once depleted Hawaiian green sea turtle stock. Biological Conservation 117: 491–498. Barrett, S. (2003). Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Bartram, P., and J. Kaneko (2004). Catch to Bycatch Ratios: Comparing Hawaii’s Longline Fisheries with Others. SOEST Publication 04-05, JIMAR Contribution 04-352. Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii: Paciﬁc Fishery Research Program and Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, University of Hawaii. Benson, S.R., P.H. Dutton, C. Hitipeuw, B. Samber, J. Bakarbessi, and D. Parker (2007). Postnesting migrations of leatherback turtles from Jamursba Medi, Birds Head Peninsula, Indonesia. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 6(1): 150–154. Bovenbag, A.L., and L. Goulder (1999). Environmental taxation. In A. Auerbach and M. Feldstein (eds). Handbook of Public Economics. Amsterdam: North-Holland Press.

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Chaloupka, M. (2003). Stochastic simulation modeling of Loggerhead population dynamics given exposure to competing mortality risks in the Western South Paciﬁc. Pp. 275–294 in A.B. Bolten and B.E. Witherington (eds). Loggerhead Sea Turtles. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Chaloupka, M., K.A. Bjorndal, G. Balazs, A.B. Bolten, L.M. Ehrhart, C. Limpus, H. Suganuma, S. Troëng, and M. Yamaguchi (2008). Encouraging outlook for recovery of a onceseverely-exploited marine megaherbivore and restoration of its ecological function. Journal of Global Ecology and Biogeography 17: 297–304. Chan, E.H., and H.C. Liew (1996). Decline of the leatherback population in Terengganu, Malaysia, 1956–1995. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 2(2): 196–203. Dutton, D.L., P.H. Dutton, M. Chaloupka, and R.H. Boulon (2005). Long-term nest protection linked to the increase of a Caribbean leatherback turtle Dermochelys coriacea nesting population. Biological Conservation 126: 186–194. Dutton, P.H., and D. Squires (2008). Reconciling biodiversity with ﬁshing: A holistic strategy for Paciﬁc sea turtle recovery. Ocean Development and International Law 39(2): 200–222. Dutton, P.H., A. Frey, R. LeRoux, and G. Balazs (2000). Molecular ecology of leatherbacks in the Paciﬁc. In N. Pilcher and G. Ismael (eds). Sea Turtles of the Indo-Paciﬁc. Research, Management and Conservation. London: Asean Academic Press. Dutton, P.H., C. Hitipeuw, M. Zein, S.R. Benson, G. Petro, J. Pita, V. Rei, L. Ambio, J., and Bakarbessy (2007). Status and genetic structure of nesting stocks of leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) in the western Paciﬁc. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 6(1): 47–53. Ferraro, P., and H. Gjertsen (in press). A global review of incentive payments for sea turtle conservation. Chelonian Conservation and Biology. Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (2004). Expert Consultation on Interactions between Sea Turtles and Fisheries within an Ecosystem Context. FAO Fisheries Report 738. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations. Gjertsen, H. (in press). Can we improve our conservation bang for the buck? Cost-effectiveness of alternative leatherback turtle conservation strategies. In P. Dutton, D. Squires, and M. Ahmed (eds). Conservation of Sea Turtles in the Paciﬁc. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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Gjertsen, H., and T. Stevenson (in press). Direct payments for leatherback turtle conservation in Rendova, Solomon Islands. In P. Dutton, D. Squires, and M. Ahmed (eds). Conservation of Sea Turtles in the Paciﬁc. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Heal, G. (2000). Nature and the Marketplace: Capturing the Value of the Ecosystem. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Hitipeuw, C., P.H. Dutton, S.R. Benson, Y. Thebu, and J. Bakarbessi (2007). Population status and inter-nesting movement of Leatherback Turtles, Dermochelys coriacea, nesting on the northwest coast of Papua, Indonesia. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 6(1): 28–36. Kaplan, I.C. (2005). A risk assessment for Paciﬁc leatherback turtles (Dermochelys Coriacea). Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 62(8): 1710–1719. Kinch, J. (2006). Socio-economic Baseline Study of Communities involved in Leatherback Turtle Nesting Beach Projects along the Huon Coast, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Honolulu, Hawaii: Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council. Lewison, R.L., S.A. Freeman, and L.B. Crowder (2004). Quantifying the effects of ﬁsheries on threatened species: The impact of pelagic longlines on loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles. Ecology Letters 7: 221–231. Omuta, K. (in press). Conservation project on Yakushima Island: The biggest nesting site in Japan. In P. Dutton, D. Squires, and M. Ahmed (eds). Conservation of Sea Turtles in the Paciﬁc. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Peckham, S.H., D. Diaz, A. Walli, G. Ruiz, L. Crowder, and W. Nichols (2007). Small-scale ﬁsheries jeopardizes endangered Paciﬁc loggerhead turtles. PLoS ONE 2(10): 1–6. Portney, P. (2003). Market-based approaches to environmental policy: A “refresher” course. Resources 151: 15–18. Rice, R. (2000). A Direct Approach to Marketing the Environmental Services of Tropical

Forests. Washington, D.C.: Conservation International. Saba, V.S., P. Santidrián-Tomillo, R.D. Reina, J.R. Spotila, J.A. Musick, D.A. Evans, and F.V. Paladino (2007). The effect of the El Niño Southern Oscillation on the reproductive frequency of eastern Paciﬁc leatherback turtles. Journal of Applied Ecology 44: 395–404. Stavins, R. (1998). What can we learn from the grand policy experiment? Lessons from S02 allowance trading. Journal of Economic Perspectives 12(3): 69–88. Reprinted in R.N. Stavins (ed). (2000). Economics of the Environment: Selected Readings. New York: Norton, 50–130. Steering Committee, Bellagio Sea Turtle Conservation Initiative (2008). Strategic Planning for Long-Term Financing of Paciﬁc Leatherback Conservation and Recovery. Proceedings of the Bellagio Sea Turtle Conservation Initiative, Terengganu, Malaysia; July 2007. WorldFish Center Conference Proceedings 1805. Penang, Malaysia: WorldFish Center. Tapilatu, R.F., and M. Tiwari (2007). Leatherback turtle, Dermochelys coriacea, hatching success at Jamursba-Medi and Wermon beaches in Papua, Indonesia. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 6(1): 154–158. Tietenberg, T. (1990). Economic instruments for environmental regulation. Oxford Review of Economic Policy 6(1): 17–33. Watson, J., S. Epperly, A. Shah, and D. Foster (2005). Fishing methods to reduce sea turtle mortality associated with pelagic longlines. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 62: 965–981. Yeo, B.H., S.K. Syed Mohd. Kamil, K. Ibrahim, D. Squires, H. Gjertsen, T. Groves, and R. Zulkiﬂi (2007). A Socioeconomic Study and Survey of Sea Turtle-Fishery Interactions in Malaysia: Case Studies in Terengganu and North Pahang. Final report. Data collection on coastal ﬁsheries and sea turtle conservation in Malaysia. Penang: WorldFish Center.

15 Conservation of the Vaquita (Phocoena sinus) in the Northern Gulf of California, Mexico JAY BARLOW LORENZO ROJAS-BRACHO CARLOS MUÑOZ-PIÑA SARAH MESNICK

Phocoena sinus was discovered as a new species in 1958 at a time when its populations were most surely already declining. Now, in only 17 years, it is on the border of extinction. —Bernardo Villa Ramírez, 1976

15.1. INTRODUCTION 15.1.1. The Vaquita: 50 Years from Discovery to Critically Endangered Before the discovery of a bleached skull on a beach north of Punta San Felipe in Baja California, Mexico, on 18 March 1950, the vaquita was unknown to the scientiﬁc community. The following year, two additional skulls were found, and these three skeletal specimens formed the basis for naming a new species of porpoise, Phocoena sinus (Norris and McFarland 1958), commonly known as the vaquita (“little cow” in Spanish). The external appearance of the species was not described until the retrieval of 13 fresh specimens in the 1980s (Brownell et al. 1987) (ﬁgure 15.1). A detailed review of all known records conﬁrmed that the distribution was restricted to the upper Gulf of California (Brownell 1986). Coincident with this scientiﬁc description of the new species was the realization that individuals were incidentally taken in artisanal and commercial ﬁsheries. Fishermen in the upper gulf were familiar with this species long before scientists were

aware of its existence. While documented mortality of the vaquita in gillnet ﬁsheries has been occurring since at least the 1950s (Norris and Prescott 1961), researchers noted that the vaquita has probably been incidentally caught since the 1930s (Brownell 1982; Vidal 1995). In the early years, most bycatch was in the gillnet ﬁshery for totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi), a large member of the croaker family (Scianidae) endemic to the northern Gulf of California (Brownell 1982; Flanagan and Hendrickson 1976). While there was no systematic documentation of incidental mortality in the early years, scattered records noted that vaquitas were taken in the artisanal gillnet ﬁshery for totoaba and shark and in the commercial trawl ﬁshery for shrimp (Brownell 1982; Flanagan and Hendrickson 1976; Norris and Prescott 1961). Concern over the species’ conservation status was expressed for many years (Brownell 1982, 1983; Barlow 1986; D’Agrosa et al. 2000; Perrin 1988; Robles et al. 1987; Vidal 1995). The species was reclassiﬁed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List from Vulnerable (IUCN 1978) to Endangered and is currently listed as Critically

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FIGURE 15.1 Four vaquita that were caught in gillnets in 1985. (Photo courtesy of Alejandro Robles)

15.2 Recent (October 2008) photograph of two vaquitas near the center of their distribution in the upper Gulf of California, Mexico. (Photo by T. A. Jefferson taken under permit DR/488/08 from the Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, SEMARNAT)

FIGURE

Endangered (IUCN 1996). The species has been listed on Appendix 1 (fully protected) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) since 1979. The species has been listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act since 1985, and in 1994 the Mexican Standard NOM-059-ECOL listed the vaquita as in danger of extinction.

Meta-analysis of early surveys conﬁrmed that the population numbered only a few hundreds of individuals (Barlow et al. 1997). Based on the most complete survey to date (in 1997), Jaramillo-Legoretta et al. (1999) estimated 567 individuals (coefﬁcient of variation = 0.51, 95 percent log-normal conﬁdence interval = 177–1073). Acoustic monitoring of vaquita echo-location clicks revealed that

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Conservation of the Vaquita in the Northern Gulf of California the population had declined by 8.7 percent per year from 1997 to 2007 (Jaramillo-Legoretta 2007). Projecting the population forward from 1997 to 2007, Jaramillo-Legoretta et al. (2007) estimate that only approximately 150 vaquitas remain and conclude that, if no action is taken, vaquita are likely to decline within the next two years to a level where extinction may be inevitable. The threats facing the vaquita have changed little since its discovery 50 years ago. With the recent extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) (Turvey et al. 2007), the vaquita (ﬁgure 15.2) is the world’s most critically endangered cetacean species. The species will surely go extinct soon unless ﬁshing practices are changed.

15.1.2. Northern Gulf of California: Habitat and Humanity The northern Gulf of California not only is the only habitat of the vaquita but also is home to approximately 100,000 people who live around its margins. The northern gulf is a relatively shallow inland sea (ﬁgure 15.3) with a very high tidal range (~8 m). Tidal mixing brings nutrients to the surface waters, making the waters of the northern gulf some of the most productive of any ocean (Álvarez-Borrego and Lara-Lara 1991). The high productivity of the waters resulted in a great abundance of ﬁsheries resources, some of which are now depleted by overﬁshing. The initial development of the three major settlements in this area (Puerto Peñasco, San Felipe, and El Golfo de Santa Clara) was intimately linked to the commercial ﬁsheries that developed there. Commercial ﬁshing originally developed in the 1920 to exploit large populations of totoaba. Early ﬁshing methods included handlines, spears, and dynamite. In many cases, only the swim bladder was harvested for sale to Chinese markets. By the 1940s, totoaba ﬁshing was primarily by gillnets, and most of the catch was exported to the United States. Totoaba catches reached a maximum of 2,000 tons per year in the late 1930s and early 1940s (Cisneros-Mata et al. 1995), but the species continued to decline under heavy ﬁshing pressure and is currently listed as endangered. A total ban on the ﬁshing for totoaba did not occur until 1975 (Flanagan and Hendrickson 1976). As the totoaba resources declined in the late 1940s, trawling for shrimp (Penaeus spp.) overtook gillnetting for totoaba in economic importance. Shrimp trawling was primarily carried out from

32°N El Golfo de Sant Clara

Puerto Penasco

San Felipe

115°W

31°N

114°W

113°W

15.3 Map of the northern Gulf of California showing locations of the three ﬁshing communities. Solid polygon indicates the Vaquita Refuge Zone and the dashed line between San Felipe and Puerto Peñasco is the aquatic boundary of the Biosphere Reserve

FIGURE

Puerto Peñasco because it was the only ﬁshing village with a harbor deep enough for trawlers. Other gillnet ﬁsheries developed for sharks, rays, curvina golﬁna (Cynoscion othonopterus), chano (Micropoganias megalops), and other species using small outboard-powered boats called pangas. Panga ﬁshermen in San Felipe and Santa Clara discovered that they could compete with the shrimp trawlers by entangling shrimp in gillnets called chinchorro de línea. Gillnetting and trawling for shrimp are now the most important ﬁsheries in the upper gulf. The relative importance of ﬁshing to the area has, however, declined considerably in the past two decades. Tourism has greatly surpassed ﬁshing in economic importance in Puerto Peñasco and San Felipe. El Golfo de Santa Clara remains primarily a ﬁshing village, but there is optimism that access by a new paved road may provide increased opportunities for tourism and associated development. Although there has been a shift from ﬁshing to a tourism-based economy in the region, the Gulf of California remains the raison d’être for both. Given that the economy of the region is so closely tied to the Gulf of California and given that the region is the only habitat of two endangered, endemic species (vaquita and totoaba), the health of this ecosystem is critical. Fortunately, primary production remains high and pollutant concentrations remain low, because of tidally driven upwelling that brings clean, nutrient rich deep water to the surface waters and the lack of river input of pollutants.

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The principle human-caused perturbation to the northern gulf ecosystem has been overﬁshing and the reductions in ﬂow from the Colorado River to near zero levels. Overﬁshing has driven long-lived species such as totoaba, sharks, and groupers to commercial extinction in the northern gulf ecosystem. Reduction in ﬂow from the Colorado River has likely made conditions even worse for totoaba and for another estuarine-breeding ﬁsh, curvina golﬁna. However, the reduction of river input is not thought to have adversely affected the vaquita (Rojas-Bracho and Taylor 1999).

15.1.3. Fishery Bycatch Although all marine mammals are susceptible to gillnet entanglement (Perrin et al. 1994), porpoises, including vaquita, are particularly vulnerable (Jefferson and Curry 1994). The ﬁrst reports of incidental catch of vaquitas in totoaba nets came from Norris and Prescott (1961), and the problem of ﬁsheries bycatch was acknowledged by every author writing about the species’ status since that time. Vidal et al. (1994) documented 128 vaquitas caught in gillnet ﬁsheries from March 1985 through February 1992, of which 65 percent were killed in gillnets set for totoaba. A minimum of 15 vaquitas died from early 1993 to early 1994 in nets set by ﬁshermen from just one village, El Golfo de Santa Clara (D’Agrosa et al. 1995). These ﬁrst minimum estimates of vaquita bycatch were presented to the small cetacean subcommittee of the International Whaling Commission in 1994, and that subcommittee expressed “extreme concern over the status of this species” and recommended that “immediate action be taken to eliminate incidental catches in all ﬁsheries” (International Whaling Commission 1995). The only effort-corrected study to estimate vaquita incidental catch was that of D’Agrosa et al. 2000). Their study used ﬁsherman interviews and on-board observers to quantify the bycatch of vaquita per ﬁshing trip in each of ﬁve types of gillnets from January 1993 to January 1994. They extrapolated their bycatch rate to the total estimated number of trips from El Golfo de Santa Clara to be 39 vaquitas/year (95 percent conﬁdence interval = 14–93; D’Agrosa et al. 2000). When they extrapolated mortality rates to the estimated number of ﬁshing trips from neighboring San Felipe, the estimate of total annual bycatch increased to 78–168 per year. D’Agrosa et al. (2000) concluded that these bycatch rates were unsustainable.

Although ﬁshermen would no longer be willing to cooperate in such a voluntary study of vaquita bycatch, there is continued evidence of bycatch in ﬁshing operations. From 1995 to 2004, 22 vaquita deaths were reported by ﬁshermen and government ﬁeld personnel, and 11 carcasses were recovered (Rojas-Bracho and Campoy 2004).

15.1.4. Other Risk Factors Although ﬁshery bycatch has been identiﬁed as the greatest risk factor for vaquita survival, other potential risk factors have been identiﬁed and reviewed. Rojas-Bracho and Taylor (1999) examined three risk factors (pollutants, loss of Colorado River input, and genetic inbreeding) and found that none would appreciably increase the risk of extinction and none would prevent the recovery of vaquita.

15.2. POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND SOCIAL SOLUTIONS 15.2.1. Historical Governance: Much Talk and Little Action From the ﬁrst description of the species in 1958, more than 34 years passed before the ﬁrst action directed toward vaquita conservation in 1992. Earlier, several management actions indirectly beneﬁted vaquita and/or its environment (reviewed in Secretaría del Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales y Pesca [SEMARNAP] 1995). On 2 March 1992, the government created the Technical Committee for the Preservation of the Vaquita and the Totoaba. This group recommended provisions for protecting vaquita, including the creation of a reserve for the species. On 10 June 1993, the Biosphere Reserve of the Upper Gulf of California and Delta of the Colorado River was declared (Secretaría de Pesca 1994), and in 1995 the management plan for this reserve was published (SEMARNAP 1995). In 1994, the formal acknowledgment that the vaquita is a species in danger of extinction represented a fundamental change in the policy of the Mexican government toward vaquita. SEMARNAP listed the vaquita on its priority list of species subject to special protection and conservation (Conservación y Recuperación de Especies Prioritarias; Programa de Conservación de Vida Silvestre y Diversiﬁcación Productiva en el Sector Rural, 1996–2000; Dirección General de Vida Silvestre, Instituto Nacional

Conservation of the Vaquita in the Northern Gulf of California de Ecología, 1997). In 1997 the Mexican Government, through its National Institute of Fisheries, created the International Committee for the Recovery of Vaquita (Comite Internacional para la Recuperacion de la Vaquita [CIRVA]) with scientists from Europe, North America, and Mexico. The goal of this team was to draft a recovery program based on the best available scientiﬁc information. In its ﬁrst meeting the recovery team concluded, after reviewing and analyzing potential risk factors, that incidental mortality in gillnets represented the greatest immediate threat to the survival of the species (Rojas-Bracho and Jaramillo-Legoretta 2002). Later, in its second meeting CIRVA recommended the following: • The bycatch of vaquitas must be reduced to zero as soon as possible. • The southern boundary of the Biosphere Reserve should be expanded to include all known habitat of the vaquita. • Effective enforcement and development of effective enforcement techniques to regulate ﬁsheries activities should be implemented as soon as possible. • Research should start immediately to develop alternative gear types and ﬁshing techniques to replace gillnets and development of socioeconomic alternatives for ﬁshermen. On 29 December 2005 the “Program for the Protection of the Vaquita” was published in the Diario Oﬁcial de la Federación, the Mexican Federal Register. The main components of the program were the declaration of a Vaquita Refuge Zone and the transfer of $1 million to the state governments of Baja California and Sonora to implement actions within the Vaquita Refuge Zone. However, the measures failed due to a lack of speciﬁc terms of reference regarding a compensation scheme (see Rojas-Bracho et al. 2006). In 2007, the president of Mexico announced the Conservation Program for Endangered Species (Programa de Conservación de Especies en Riesgo), which will initiate speciﬁc Species Conservation Action Programs (Programas de Acción para la Conservación de Especies) for a list of selected species, including vaquita within the top ﬁve. Despite all these well-intentioned government declarations, little was done in practice to protect the vaquita until 2008 (see section 15.2.4). After the Biosphere Reserve’s management plan was published, no decisive actions were taken to regulate ﬁsheries

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bycatch within the reserve areas where vaquitas are most commonly found. Furthermore, about 40 percent of vaquitas occur outside the boundaries of the Biosphere Reserve. The Program for the Protection of the Vaquita established the Vaquita Refuge Zone in 2005 that included most of the vaquita habitat, but ﬁshing in that zone continued through 2007 with little change. In fact, the number of pangas ﬁshing with gillnets roughly doubled after CIRVA recommended that the number of pangas be capped and that vaquita bycatch should be reduced to zero as soon as possible. The implementation of a real vaquita refuge failed because of a lack of enforcement and a lack of an adequate compensation plan or economic alternatives for the artisanal ﬁshermen who depend on that area for their livelihoods.

15.2.2. A Way Forward Clearly, management has been ineffective at controlling vaquita mortality in gillnets. The vaquita will surely go extinct if nothing changes. For change to occur, we must understand the impediments to change and correct them. Some of these impediments are as follows: (1) There has been a history of denial and delay in dealing with the problem of vaquita bycatch. The prospect of losing a porpoise species did not seem real or immediate. No species of cetacean had previously gone extinct in historic time. The problem was left to future administrations or future generations. (2) Fishing is viewed more as a right than a privilege in the region. Until recently in Mexico, access to ﬁsheries has not been limited. Although a system of permits was established for gillnet ﬁsheries, there was little enforcement of permit regulations in the northern gulf. There is a history of civil unrest in the region when attempts were made to implement ﬁsheries regulations. (3) There is little in the way of economic alternatives for ﬁshermen. Although tourism and associated development are booming in Puerto Peñasco and, to a lesser extent, San Felipe, most ﬁshermen do not have the training, education, or inclination to move into alternative careers. El Golfo de Santa Clara remains a ﬁshing village with few other economic opportunities even if the barriers of training, education, and inclination were eliminated.

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To save the vaquita, steps need to be taken immediately to eliminate ﬁsheries bycatch. The perception that cetacean extinction is not a real threat is gone, now that the Chinese river dolphin has been declared “probably extinct” (Turvey et al. 2007). The perception that the problem of vaquita bycatch can be delayed has been vanquished by additional research that shows the population to be only approximately 150 individuals and still declining. The government of Mexico must now take the politically unpopular steps of banning the use of gillnets throughout the range of vaquita and of enforcing that ban. For a generation of ﬁshermen who have, for the most part, not been regulated, this action will be perceived as taking away their right to a livelihood. In the short term, economic compensation will be required to compensate ﬁshermen for their loss of income. In the longer term, alternative methods of ﬁshing must be developed that do not result in vaquita bycatch, ﬁshermen must be provided alternative means of making a living, or both.

15.2.3. Economic Valuation of the Fisheries The government of Mexico has already undertaken a critical ﬁrst step in planning for the economic compensation that will be necessary in order to implement a gillnet ban. Economists at the National Institute of Ecology (INE) have undertaken a study to determine the value of the gillnet ﬁsheries in the upper Gulf of California. Information for the economic analyses presented here was largely gathered from trusted anonymous sources within the ﬁshing industry and the government. Much of the gillnet ﬁshing is conducted illegally (without permits) and is therefore not included in the ofﬁcial records. The number of pangas ﬁshing with gillnets was estimated as the sum of legally permitted and illegal boats. The number of legal boats is not known

precisely because some permits cover an unspeciﬁed number of vessels. In 2007, the ﬁsheries agency in Mexico (CONAPESCA) began a process of individualizing the multiboat permits so that each permit covered only one vessel. The numbers of legal vessels reported in table 15.1 are the estimated numbers of individual permits plus the estimated number of pangas covered by multiboat permits. These estimates are most accurate for San Felipe and Santa Clara, where the individualization process is nearly complete. Estimates of legal vessels in Puerto Peñasco (table 15.1) are less precise because the individualization process has just begun there. Estimates of the number of illegal pangas (table 15.1) come from local Secretaría del Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT) ofﬁcials and nongovernmental organizations that work with the ﬁshermen and are only rough estimates. With these caveats, we estimate the total number of pangas ﬁshing with gillnets in the northern gulf is approximately 1,073. The total catch of shrimp is known relatively precisely because virtually all landings are handled by a few ﬁrms (private or cooperatives) and the international distribution is handled largely by one company. By far, the largest and most proﬁtable catch is of the premium-sized blue shrimp (Penaeus stylirastris). The catch of blue shrimp by panga ﬁshers is approximately 722 metric tons per year, with a beach landing price of approximately US$14/kg. The total gross income from shrimp for all panga ﬁshers is approximately US$10.1 million per year (table 15.2). The gillnet ﬁshery for ﬁnﬁsh is an important source of income for ﬁshermen, especially in the months when the shrimp ﬁshery is closed. Six major ﬁnﬁsh species are caught (chano, curvina golﬁna, manta, sierra, shark, and guitarra), with an aggregated catch of 5,583 metric tons (table 15.3). The gross income from ﬁnﬁsh is approximately US$5.7 million.

15.1 Estimated number of small skiffs (pangas) ﬁshing with gillnets in each of the three communities in the upper Gulf of California

TABLE

Number of pangas legally ﬁshing with gillnets (with permits) for shrimp and ﬁnﬁsh in 2007 Number of pangas illegally ﬁshing with gillnets for shrimp and ﬁnﬁsh (circa mid-2000s) Total

San Felipe, Baja California

Santa Clara, Sonora

Puerto Peñasco, Sonora

321

243

69

633

170

200

70

440

491

443

139

1,073

Total

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Conservation of the Vaquita in the Northern Gulf of California

TABLE 15.2 Estimates of ﬁsheries landings for shrimp and their economic value in three communities of the northern Gulf of California

Total shrimp landings per season-year (metric tons) Average shrimp landings per season per panga (metric tons) Regional total gross income per season from shrimp captured by all pangas (million US$) Average shrimp gross income per season per panga (thousand US$) Labor costs per season per panga (thousand US$) Other expenditures per season per panga (thousand US$) Net income per panga per season, (thousand US$) Total value of proﬁts obtained by the legal ﬁshing activity per season (thousands US$) Estimated total proﬁts obtained by pangas illegally ﬁshing shrimp per season (early 2000s) (thousand US$) Sum of net proﬁts from legal and illegal shrimp ﬁshing per season in the area (thousand US$)

The net income from ﬁsheries is estimated as the gross income minus the operational costs. We consider the ﬁxed costs (gasoline, nets, ice, depreciation, etc.) and labor separately and estimate these as annual costs for each panga. The gross income per panga is estimated as the gross income for the ﬁshery in each community divided by the total number of pangas (legal and illegal) ﬁshing there. For the shrimp ﬁshery, we estimate the ﬁxed costs to be US$4,600 per year per panga for all areas and estimate the labor costs as the wages that would be paid to two ﬁshers (US$1.50/kg shrimp caught) if they were hired from the community (although, in fact, the ﬁshers are often the permit holder and a family member). For the ﬁnﬁsh ﬁshery, we estimate ﬁxed costs to be 72 percent of the gross income (higher than for the shrimp ﬁshery) and the labor costs to be 12 percent of the beach-landing value of the catch (equal to the shrimp ﬁshery). The annual proﬁts per panga in the shrimp ﬁshery range from US$2,200 to $3,200 in the three communities (table 15.2), and the annual proﬁts per panga in the ﬁnﬁsh ﬁshery range from US$226 to $1,935 (table 15.3). Although all of these values are sensitive to uncertainties in estimates of the number of pangas and of the operational costs, they provide a good ﬁrst approximation for estimating the opportunity cost of not ﬁshing. Our estimates of the value of a permit are based on the assumption that the labor market works smoothly in the region, and that a family that

San Felipe, Baja California

Santa Clara, Sonora

Puerto Peñasco, Sonora

342 0.70 4.7

280 0.63 4.0

100 0.76 1.4

9.6

8.9

10.3

2.3 4.6 2.7 873

2.1 4.6 2.2 534

2.5 4.6 3.2 201

462

439

227

1,335

973

428

provided all its labor for the panga could easily ﬁnd work outside the ﬁshery at the same implicit wage. If the ﬁshers use family labor to work the pangas, then their opportunity cost would increase by an amount equal to any difference between the wage the ﬁshers could obtain in other economic activity and their implicit ﬁshers’ wage. While local labor markets are thin in Santa Clara and San Felipe, the regional and U.S. labor market provide more opportunities. In that case, the cost of job search and migration costs should be included. We have little information on the set of skills the ﬁshers’ families have and thus could not produce an estimate of this difference. Our estimates use the net proﬁts as the lower bound for the ﬁshers’ opportunity cost of handing back the permit, while the upper bound would include the labor costs. The opportunity cost of not ﬁshing for a year can be used directly to estimate the cost of a “rent-out” to temporarily reduce ﬁshing effort and vaquita bycatch. Permit holders should be willing to accept a payment of this amount to forgo ﬁshing for one year. The cost of a permanent “buyout” of a permit would be equal to the expected net proﬁts in perpetuity given the discounted value of future catches. If catches were constant and the discount rate was 10 percent per annum, the value of a permit would be approximately 11 times the annual net proﬁts. For shrimp permits, this would be US$29,700, $24,200, and $35,200 for San Felipe, Santa Clara, and Puerto Peñasco, respectively (table 15.2). The

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Marine Fisheries Conservation and Management

15.3 Estimates of ﬁsheries landings for ﬁnﬁsh and their economic value in three communities of the northern Gulf of California

TABLE

San Felipe, Baja California

Santa Clara, Sonora

Puerto Peñasco, Sonora

1,469 2.8

3,946 7.0

168 0.6

1.6

3.9

0.2

3.0

6.9

0.8

0.7

1.7

0.2

1.5

3.3

0.4

Total ﬁnﬁsh landings per year (metric tons) Average ﬁnﬁsh landings per year per panga (metric tons) Regional total Gross Income per year from ﬁnﬁsh captured by all pangas (million US$) Average ﬁnﬁsh gross income per year per panga (thousand US$) Estimated labor costs per season per panga (thousand US$) Other estimated expenditures per season per panga (thousand US$) Net income per panga per season (US$) Total value of proﬁts obtained by the legal ﬁshing activity per season (thousand US$) Estimated total proﬁts obtained by pangas illegally ﬁshing ﬁnﬁsh per season (early 2000s) (thousand US$) Sum of net proﬁts from legal and illegal ﬁnﬁsh ﬁshing per sason in the area (thousand US$)

value of a ﬁnﬁsh permit varies more widely from US$2,400 in Peñasco to $21,300 in Santa Clara. Although these preliminary estimates of economic value are useful for decision making at early stages of designing a buyout program, the estimates can be improved through the use of a contingent valuation study or through a revealed preference approach, observing results of the informal sales/ rents of permits among ﬁshers or observing the larger scale responses once the ﬁrst stages of the buyout program begin.

15.2.4. The Vaquita Recovery Plan In 2007, the Mexican Federal Government began implementing a plan to save the vaquita (Programa de Acción para la Conservación de Especies 2008). That plan includes four key components: 1. Both the federal ﬁsheries and environmental enforcement agencies (CONAPESCA and PROFEPA) have committed additional resources for the enforcement of current regulations to eliminate ﬁshing without a permit. Reducing the number of illegal ﬁshers and closing access to the ﬁshery are the most cost-effective conservation measures to protect vaquita. However, this will be difﬁcult to

857 297

1,935 702

226 52

146

387

16

442

1,089

68

implement for political and logistical reasons. Illegal ﬁshing has been historically tolerated in Mexico, particularly by poor, artisanal ﬁshers using small boats. Political opposition is likely if poor families are economically hurt by this enforcement. Also, enforcing regulations on dispersed, small-scale ﬁshing operations requires many enforcement ofﬁcers and is expensive. In both 2007 and 2008, US$1 million was appropriated for increased ﬁsheries enforcement in the northern gulf. 2. The National Institute of Fisheries (INAPESCA) is instituting a program to test new ﬁshing methods that can be used from pangas without a risk of catching vaquitas. Trials with suripera nets were begun in 2007. These nets have been used successfully to catch shrimp in narrow canals along the Paciﬁc coast of Sinaloa. They typically have very low bycatch rates and, because of their small exposed surface, would be extremely unlikely to catch vaquitas. 3. SEMARNAT is instituting a voluntary program to compensate ﬁshermen who choose to give up their gillnet permits. This compensation would take the form of a buyout for ﬁshers who are willing to stop ﬁshing or a “switchout” for ﬁshermen who are willing to switch to alternative, vaquita-safe ﬁshing methods.

Conservation of the Vaquita in the Northern Gulf of California Several options were considered for setting the price for permit buyouts (Curtis and Squires 2007): bilateral bargain between the government and ﬁshing associations, an inverse auction where ﬁshers would submit sealed bids with the price they would be willing to accept and the lowest prices would be accepted, and a government-set, ﬁxed-price offer to buy. SEMARNAT chose the offer-to-buy approach, with offers slightly higher than the combined value of permits for shrimp and ﬁnﬁsh for a total buyout (US$50,000) and less for a switchout (US$27,300). In 2008, US$17 million was appropriated for permit buyouts and switchouts, which retired the gillnet permits for approximately one-third of the legal ﬁshers. 4. All gillnet and trawl ﬁshing would be banned in the Vaquita refuge. Rigorous enforcement of this ban by PROFEPA began at the start of the shrimp season in September 2008. Currently, the government of Mexico is investing unprecedented resources to eliminate gillnetting and protect the vaquitas in the upper Gulf of California. The core area where vaquitas are most abundant is being protected. Despite this, illegal ﬁshing continues, and two-thirds of the legal ﬁshing effort continues within areas where vaquita are known to occur. A similar level of effort and resources will be needed in future years to ensure that the plan is fully implemented. The social and economic problems associated with the ban on illegal ﬁshing still need to be addressed. Although the work is not ﬁnished, a way forward has been found.

15.3. CONCLUSIONS The vaquita can be saved. The primary risk factor (ﬁshery bycatch) has been identiﬁed, and secondary risk factors should not prevent recovery if bycatch can be eliminated. However, CIRVA has determined that the population is so low now that only a complete elimination of bycatch is likely to provide a reasonable level of assurance that the population will recover. This will require the complete elimination of entangling nets within the range of the species. The government of Mexico is currently implementing a plan to accomplish this with a combination of ﬁshing permit buyouts, conversions to alternative ﬁshing methods, and at-sea enforcement. Mexico is looking to partner with other countries and with nongovernmental

213

conservation groups to accomplish this daunting task. If they are successful, this will be the ﬁrst time that any country will have eliminated bycatch to bring a species back from the brink of extinction while dealing with the social and economic wellbeing of their ﬁshermen. If they fail, the whole world will feel the loss.

References Álvarez-Borrego, S., and J.R. Lara-Lara (1991). The physical environment and primary productivity of the Gulf of California. American Association of Petroleum Geologist Memoirs 47: 555–567. Barlow, J. (1986). Factors Affecting the Recovery of Phocoena sinus, the Vaquita or Gulf of California Harbor Porpoise. U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Administrative Report LJ-8637. La Jolla, Calif.: Southwest Fisheries Science Center. Barlow, J., T. Gerrodette, and G. Silber (1997). First estimates of vaquita abundance. Marine Mammal Science 13: 44–58. Brownell, R.L., Jr. (1982). Status of the cochito, Phocoena sinus, in the Gulf of California. Pp. 85–90 in J.G. Clark (ed). Mammals in the Seas, Vol. 4: Small Cetaceans, Seals, Sirenians and Others. Selected Papers of the Scientiﬁc Consultation on the Conservation and Management of Marine Mammals and their Environment. FAO Advisory Committee on Marine Resources Research. Working Party on Marine Mammals. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations. Brownell, R.L., Jr. (1983). Phocoena sinus. Mammalian Species 198: 1–3. Brownell, R.L., Jr. (1986). Distribution of the vaquita, Phocoena sinus, in Mexican waters. Marine Mammal Science 2: 299–305. Brownell, R.L., Jr., L.T. Findley, O. Vidal, A. Robles, and N.S. Manzanillo (1987). External morphology and pigmentation of the vaquita, Phocoena sinus (Cetacea: Mammalia). Marine Mammal Science 3: 22–30. Cisneros-Mata, M.A., G. Montemayor-López, and M.J. Román-Rodríguez (1995). Life history and conservation of Totoaba macdonaldi. Conservation Biology 9(4): 806–814. Curtis, R., and D. Squires (eds) (2007). Fisheries Buybacks. Oxford: Blackwell. D’Agrosa, C., C.E. Lennert-Cody, and O. Vidal (2000). Vaquita bycatch in Mexico’s artisanal gillnet ﬁsheries: Driving a small population to extinction. Conservation Biology 14: 1110–1119.

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D’Agrosa, C., O. Vidal, and W.C. Graham (1995). Mortality of the vaquita (Phocoena sinus) in gillnet ﬁsheries during 1993–94. Report of the International Whaling Commission 16(Special Issue): 283–291. Flanagan, C.A., and J.R. Hendrickson (1976). Observation on the commercial ﬁshery and reproductive biology of the totoaba, Cynoscion macdonaldi, in the northern Gulf of California. Fishery Bulletin 74: 531–544. International Whaling Commission (1995). Report of the sub-committee on small cetaceans (annex G). Report of the International Whaling Commission 45: 165–186. IUCN (1978). Red Data Book. Morges, Switzerland: International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. IUCN (1996). Red Data Book. Vol. 1. Gland, Switzerland: International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Jaramillo-Legoretta, A.M., L. Rojas-Bracho, R.L. Brownell, Jr., A.J. Read, R.R. Reeves, K. Ralls, and B.L. Taylor (2007). Saving the vaquita: Immediate action not more data. Conservation Biology 21: 1653–1655. Jaramillo-Legoretta, A.M., L. Rojas-Bracho, and T. Gerrodette (1999). A new abundance estimate for vaquitas: First step for recovery. Marine Mammal Science 15: 957–973. Jefferson, T.A., and B.E. Curry (1994). A global review of porpoise (Cetacea: Phocoenidae) mortality in gillnets. Biological Conservation 67: 167–183. Norris, K.S., and W.N. McFarland (1958). A new harbor porpoise of the genus Phocoena from the Gulf of California. Journal of Mammalogy 39: 22–39. Norris, K.S., and J.H. Prescott (1961). Observations on Paciﬁc cetaceans of Californian and Mexican waters. University of California Publications in Zoology 63: 291–402. Perrin, W.F. (1988). Dolphins, Porpoises, and Whales. An Action Plan for Conservation of Biological Diversity: 1988–1992. Gland, Switzerland: International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Perrin, W.F., G.P. Donovan, and J. Barlow (eds) (1994). Gillnets and Cetaceans. International Whaling Commission, Special Issue 15.

Cambridge: International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Programa de Acción para la Conservación de Especies (2008). Programa de Acción para la Conservación de la Especie: Vaquita (Phocoena sinus). Mexico D.F.: Gobierno Federal, Estados Unidos Mexicanos. www.conanp.gob.mx/ pdf_especies/PACEvaquita.pdf Robles, A., O. Vidal, and L.T. Findley (1987). La totoaba y la vaquita. Información Cientiﬁca Y Technológica 9: 3–6. Rojas-Bracho, L., and Campoy, J. (2004). Mortalidad. incidental reciente de vaquitas marinas en el alto Golfo de California, México (1995–2004). Internal report. Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Ecology and Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas. Rojas-Bracho, L., and A.M. Jaramillo-Legorreta (2002). Vaquita Phocoena sinus. Pp. 1277– 1280 in W.F. Perrin, B. Wursig, and J.G.M. Thewissen (eds). Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals. San Diego: Academic Press. Rojas-Bracho, L., and B.L. Taylor (1999). Risk factors affecting the vaquita. Marine Mammal Science 15: 974–989. Rojas-Bracho, L., R.R. Reeves, and A. Jaramillo-Legoretta (2006). Conservation of the vaquita Phocoena sinus. Mammal Review 36: 179–216. Secretaría de Pesca (1994). Diario Oﬁcial de la Federación México D.F. 10 February, pp. 47–50. SEMARNAP (1995). Programa de Manejo 1. Mexico D.F.: Reserva de la Biósfera Alto Golfo de California y Delta del Río Colorado, Secretaría del Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales y Pesca. Turvey, S.T., R. Pitman, T. Taylor, J. Barlow, T. Akamatsu, L. Barrett, X. Zhao, and R. Reeves (2007). First human-caused extinction of a cetacean species? Biology Letters 3: 537–540. Vidal, O. (1995). Population biology and incidental mortality of the vaquita, Phocoena sinus. Report of the International Whaling Commission 16(Special Issue): 247–272. Vidal, O., K. Van Waerebeek, and L.T. Findley (1994). Cetaceans and gillnet ﬁsheries in Mexico, Central America and the Wider Caribbean: A preliminary review. Report of the International Whaling Commission 15(Special Issue): 221–233.

16 Conservation of Cold-Water Coral Reefs in Norway JAN HELGE FOSSÅ HEIN RUNE SKJOLDAL

concentration of CO2 in seawater. We describe here some of the ecological features of the cold-water coral reefs, how they are affected and threatened, and what measures are taken in Norway to conserve and protect them.

16.1. INTRODUCTION Tropical coral reefs form some of the largest biological structures of the world and represent marine ecosystems with high biodiversity. In this respect, coral reefs are the marine parallel to the tropical rainforests. The reefs are formed by some of the animals and plants that inhabit them. Stony corals are the most important, together with calcareous algae. These organisms produce a skeleton that builds up the reefs. Tropical corals have symbiotic algae in the skin that need light for photosynthesis. Therefore, tropical reefs are found only in relatively shallow areas and in clear water where light penetration is good. Typically, there are many different species of corals and algae on a tropical reef. Corals also live in deep and cold water, but they are without symbiotic algae because of the lack of light. Cairns (2001) lists 1,334 stony coral species, of which 672 belong to the nonsymbiotic group, and only a quarter of these live in water shallower than 40 m. About six of the species are important reef builders in deep water.1 Cold-water coral reefs are common and abundant along the coast and on the continental shelf of Norway. These reefs have been affected by ﬁsheries to considerable extent, in particular from bottom trawling. There are also other potential threats to the reefs, for instance, from oil exploration and production, from aquaculture, and, not the least, from ocean acidiﬁcation from increasing

16.2. WHAT ARE COLD-WATER CORAL REEFS? In this chapter we use the term “cold-water coral reef” as deﬁned by Fosså et al. (2005), referring to the structures build by Lophelia pertusa: a reef is an individual seabed feature consisting of an accumulation of coral skeleton. A reef may consist of a single or several coalesced coral mounds. A reef complex is an area consisting of closely located coral reefs separated by other seabed substrates. In Norway it is the species Lophelia pertusa that builds reefs, and it is able to form massive complexes tens of kilometers long and up to 30 m high (Fosså et al. 2002; Freiwald et al. 2002; Hovland and Mortensen 1999; Mortensen et al. 1995; Wilson 1979a). The reefs are found along most of the coast, in fjords and on the continental shelf and slope. In general, they thrive on elevated features on the seaﬂoor, such as on ridges, along edges of ﬁshing banks, on top of old plough marks from icebergs, and on fjord sills. Coral debris from the Sula Reef complex, where we ﬁnd some of the highest 215

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mounds, has been dated to be about 9,000 years old (Hovland and Mortensen 1999), so we believe that Lophelia colonized the shelf after the last glaciation about 10,000 years ago. The Lophelia pertusa coral was ﬁrst discovered in Norway and described in the 18th century (Gunnerus 1768; Linné 1758). After the work by Gunnerus, many Norwegian zoologists studied deep-water corals (e.g., M. Sars and G.O. Sars). Sars (1865) was the ﬁrst to mention that Lophelia pertusa builds reefs. The ﬁrst records of Lophelia outside Norway are from Scottish waters from the mid-19th century (Johnston 1847; Wilson 1979b). A Lophelia reef forms a complex threedimensional habitat providing a variety of niches for a rich community of invertebrates (Mortensen and Fosså 2006). The reef is made up of coral colonies that are up to 2 m high, and fragments of dead skeleton with variable size and age (Hovland and Mortensen 1999; Mortensen 2000; Mortensen et al. 1995; Wilson 1979a). Habitats within the Lophelia reefs can be deﬁned at different spatial scales (Jonsson et al. 2004; Mortensen et al. 1995). A reef typically consists of three vertical zones, or reef subhabitats, that are important as a structuring factor for the presence of other species that live on it: (1) The live-Lophelia zone at the top of the reef, consisting mainly of living colonies separated by areas with dead broken skeletons; (2) the deadLophelia zone between the top and the foot of the reef, characterized by large fragments of dead corals and a high diversity of megafauna; and (3) the Lophelia-rubble zone with small skeletal fragments mixed with sediments ﬂanking the foot of the reef. The horizontal extent of the rubble zone varies from only a few meters to several tens of meters. The upper live zone and the intermediate dead zone form steep slopes and normally have a similar vertical range, whereas the rubble zone has a narrower depth range and a lower bottom inclination.

16.3. ECOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF COLD-WATER CORALS 16.3.1. Fish Lophelia reefs offer habitats for a great diversity of organisms. It is often claimed that Lophelia reefs and coral gardens (gorgonian or antipatharian forests) serve as feeding places, refuges from predators, and breeding and nursery habitats for ﬁsh. Fishermen

report that catches are high in coral areas, which are often targeted with longline, gillnet, and trawl. Few studies have addressed the association of ﬁsh and their abundance with Lophelia in the northeast Atlantic (Costello et al. 2005; Husebø et al. 2002). However, a number of studies have incorporated ﬁsh in more general descriptions of the fauna elements connected to deep-water reef systems (e.g., Fosså et al. 2000; Freiwald et al. 2002; Mortensen et al. 1995). In Norway, Husebø et al. (2002) conducted experimental ﬁshing with longlines and gillnets on the southwestern shelf on and off deep-water coral reefs. The results showed that catches of redﬁsh (Sebastes marinus) were signiﬁcantly higher in coral habitats compared to other habitats. However, stomach analyses showed that the food was not supplied from the reef, but consisted of plankton. Catches of tusk (Brosme brosme) and ling (Molva molva) were also higher in the coral habitats compared to the surrounding areas, but this was not statistically signiﬁcant. Costello et al. (2005) analyzed the occurrence of ﬁsh from still photos and video at locations in Norway, north of Scotland, and west of Ireland. They concluded that signiﬁcantly more ﬁsh and ﬁsh species are associated with Lophelia reefs than the adjacent seabed, and that most of the species and their abundance in the reef habitat are of commercial importance. Similar results are reported from Iceland by Steingrímsson (2004) and Steingrímsson and Einarsson (2004). Analysis of high-resolution logbook data from otter-trawl and longline ﬁshing vessels revealed that, for example cod (Gadhus morhua), saithe (Pollachius virens), and haddock (Melanogrammus aegleﬁnus) were commonly caught in coral areas. Also for redﬁsh, tusk, ling, and blue ling (Molva dypterygia), there were indications that they are more common in coral habitats than outside. From the Mediterranean Sea, preliminary information on benthopelagic fauna in the cold-water coral province in the Ionian Sea has been reported by Tursi et al. (2004). Several ﬁsh species co-occur with Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata, but the ecological signiﬁcance of the corals for the ﬁsh is still unknown. A growing number of studies in the United States also address the relationship between coldwater corals and ﬁsh (e.g., Lumsden et al. 2007; Ross and Quattrini 2007). The latter showed that several species demonstrated speciﬁcity to deep-reef habitats, while others were always more common away from the reefs. In the Aleutian

Conservation of Cold-Water Coral Reefs in Norway Islands in the North Paciﬁc, 97 percent of juvenile rockﬁsh and 96 percent of juvenile golden king crabs have been found associated with emergent epifauna such as octocorals and sponges (Stone 2006). However, Auster (2005, 2007) points out that the co-occurrence of ﬁshes with corals does not necessarily mean there is a functional link to population processes. More comprehensive studies are needed.

16.3.2. Invertebrates Camera recordings of animal life in a deep-water coral reef are very colorful. Gorgonians such as Paragorgia, Primnoa, and Paramuricia in a variety of reds and yellows stand out against the shining white Lophelia, which is often accompanied by conspicuous sponges such as Mycale and Geodia (see ﬁgure 16.1). The smaller fauna consist of

A

B

16.1 A. A tusk (Brosme brosme) in a typical Norwegian Lophelia pertusa deep-water reef environment. The photo is taken at 200 m depth, 70° 26′ N, 21° 10′ E. B. Redﬁsh (Sebastes sp.) and the sea anemone Protanthea simplex are common species on the reefs. The sponges Geodia barretti (white and round, upper left) and Mycale lingua (on live Lophelia, middle and upper left) are also common. (Photo by Pål B. Mortensen and Jan Helge Fosså, Institute of Marine Research, Norway)

FIGURE

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hydrozoans, polychaetes, snails, bivalves, sea stars, crustaceans, and a variety of other animal groups. The invertebrate fauna of Norwegian reefs has recently been studied and reviewed by Mortensen and Fosså (2006). The study was carried out with video from remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and by dredge and grab and showed the reef fauna to be dominated by mollusks, crustaceans, and bryozoans. No species are known to have obligate relationships with Lophelia, and there are few examples of species that are specially adapted to live in this habitat. Only two species were found to live in direct contact with the soft tissue of the corals. Even though none of the species are found exclusively on the reefs, some are rare in other habitats. The reefs may therefore be important for many species and supply nearby hard bottom habitats with larvae. The species diversity was highest in samples of coral skeleton with a low proportion of live corals and lowest in samples from the coral rubble zone surrounding the reefs. Deposit feeders were most common in the rubble, whereas suspension feeders dominated among colonies with living corals. The numbers of species reported by Dons (1944), Burdon-Jones and Tambs-Lyche (1960), and Jensen and Frederiksen (1992) from Lophelia reefs in the Northeast Atlantic was between 173 and 282. By including the results from Mortensen and Fosså (2006), a total of 796 species have been recorded, and of these, 621 were from reefs in Norway. With the few studies undertaken, it is expected that this number will increase with new sampling. While the species diversity in the coral rubble zone is lower than where there is a mixture of live and dead colonies, it is still relatively high compared to areas off the reef. This is a clear indication that this zone is a genuine part of the reef ecosystem, which has implications for management. When protecting a reef, it is important to include a transitional zone between the reef and the surrounding seabed. This zone has two purposes: (1) to ensure that the exchange of organisms between adjacent ecosystems is not disturbed or disrupted, and (2) to serve as a buffer zone to protect the complete reef habitat from gear operation from ﬁshing vessels. Experience from numerous dives with ROVs shows that zooplankton abundance is high in reef areas, especially in shelf environments at 100–300 m depth. Lophelia eat zooplankton in situ (unpublished observations), which is also supported by indirect evidence (Kiriakoulakis et al. 2005), and redﬁsh caught in coral reef habitats also eat zooplankton (Husebø et al. 2002). It is therefore important to gain better

understanding of the link between pelagic production, the place of the corals in the food web, and the interactions among ﬁsh, corals, and plankton, as well as the role of particulate organic matter as food for corals. Thiem et al. (2006) modeled the water ﬂow and particle concentrations along the continental break and slope. The results show that the particle encounter rates for reefs in the water layer near the seabed are particularly high close to the shelf break. This indicates that many Lophelia reefs are located along the shelf edge because the supply of food is particularly good in these areas. It is clear that from a biodiversity point of view the Lophelia reefs are important and represent “islands” of high biodiversity contrasting the surrounding seabed.

16.4. MAPPING OF THE REEFS 16.4.1. Cooperation with Fishermen In the early 1990s, longline and gillnet ﬁshermen contacted the Institute of Marine Research (IMR) to express their concerns about the negative effects of trawling on coral reefs. Their worries referred to the potential function of the reefs as feeding grounds and nursery areas for ﬁsh. They claimed that corals had disappeared from trawling grounds and that their catches in these areas were reduced. In some places they noticed on their echo sounders that rough bottom (the coral buildups) had disappeared and that the gear did not get stuck any longer. From their experience, this was a clear indication that the corals were destroyed and leveled out by bottom trawls. On the basis of this information, a program for research and mapping of the reefs was initiated in 1997. Through this work, new reefs and ﬁshery impacts were documented. The IMR started to map coral reefs and evaluate the impact from ﬁsheries in 1997. From the beginning it was important to cooperate with the ﬁshermen. In the mapping project, we systematically collected information through interviews with a large number of ﬁshermen. We used this information to select sites for scientiﬁc investigations with in situ photography to obtain documentation of the seaﬂoor. In most cases these “spot checks” veriﬁed the information from the ﬁshermen on the occurrence and damage of coral reefs. The combination of interviews of ﬁshermen and scientiﬁc groundtruthing allowed us to obtain a quick overview of

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FIGURE 16.2 Distribution of Lophelia pertusa cold-water coral reefs and some named coral ﬁelds and coral marine protected areas on the mid-Norwegian shelf. In general, use of bottom ﬁsh trawl is not allowed within 12 nautical miles of the shore.

the distribution and damage of coral reefs on the Norwegian continental shelf (Fosså et al. 2002). The shelf and shelf break between 62° 30′ N and 67° 50′ N contain the densest occurrence of Lophelia, the majority at 200–400 m depth (Fosså and Alvsvåg 2003; 2004; Fosså et al. 2002; Mortensen et al. 2001) (see ﬁgure 16.2). This is adjacent to the productive basin of the Norwegian Sea (Skjoldal et al. 2004). The shallowest reef, the Selligrunnen Reef in the Trondheimsfjord, is found at 40 m depth.

16.4.2. Developing New Mapping Techniques In the beginning, our ability to map and document the condition of deep-water coral reefs was hampered by the lack of suitable technology and experience. No ROV was at hand, and we used a simple photo rig to inspect the reefs. For acoustic mapping of the seabed, we used side-scan sonar and ordinary ﬁsh echo sounders. The development of the multibeam echo sounder (MBE) has been a great leap

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A

B

16.3 Examples of growth forms of Lophelia reefs on the continental shelf off Norway as shown by MBE maps. A. Section of the Sula reef complex. Irregular convex structures show coral mounds. Single mounds are shown on the left. Fused reef mounds on ridge structures appear diagonally across the picture. B. Part of the Træna coral ﬁeld. The reefs, about 150–200 m long, are easy to identify on the ﬂat seabed. They grow against the bottom current with live corals at the “head” end and no live corals at the “tail.” See ﬁgure 16.2 for the locations (Courtesy of the Geological Survey of Norway and Institute of Marine Research, Norway)

FIGURE

forward for mapping of the seabed. IMR started to use MBE in 2000, and we are now able to identify potential coral areas by analyzing seaﬂoor topography on maps (see ﬁgure 16.3). Fast and reliable ground-truthing methods using simple and inexpensive systems have been developed. Mapping and quantiﬁcation of corals demand more advanced instrumentation, such as single-beam echo and MBE used in combination with data-processing software, allowing coral reefs to be detected in real time. Systems providing realtime presentation of MBE data are especially useful in combination with ROV positioned with acoustic navigation systems. A very effective mapping procedure is to use MBE, preferably along with collection of seismic reﬂection data or subbottom proﬁler, followed by ground-truthing with a tethered video camera platform or an ROV. Fosså et al. (2005) suggest procedures for mapping of reefs, postprocessing of mapping data, and how to map and sample the associated biodiversity.

16.5. DOCUMENTATION OF IMPACT FROM FISHERIES 16.5.1. Bottom Trawling Bottom trawling on the banks of the Barents Sea started in the 1930s. The activity increased in the

1960s by the introduction of factory and fresh ﬁsh trawlers. In the mid-1980s, trawling expanded along the shelf break and extended farther on the Norwegian shelf as a result of lower quotas for the Northeast Arctic cod in the Barents Sea. By the end of the 1980s the rockhopper gear was developed, allowing larger vessels to trawl in areas previously inaccessible due to the roughness of the bottom, such as coral reefs (Fosså et al. 2002). These trawl ﬁsheries targeted Greenland halibut (Reinhardtius hippoglossoides), redﬁsh (mostly Sebastes marinus), and saithe (Pollachius virens). The impact on Lophelia reefs by trawlers has been inspected with ROV equipped with video camera, and side-scan sonar has been used to document trawl tracks (ﬁgure 16.4). Dead coral fragments lying on the slopes of reefs are a common feature, and this is part of the natural process of decay in coral reefs. In order to differentiate between coral remains due to natural decay from those due to trawling activities, we looked for living colonies that were broken and tilted or turned upside-down on leveled seabed. Furrows or scars in the seabed are usually clear evidence of trawling activity, and the remains of ﬁshing gear such as gillnets, anchors, and trawl nets among corals added to the evidence. It is very difﬁcult to perform direct quantitative observations of the proportion of reefs damaged or destroyed. But for some areas, such as

Conservation of Cold-Water Coral Reefs in Norway

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B

A

C

16.4 A. Smashed coral reef from a trawl ground at the continental break. Storegga, 6 May 1998, at about 220 m depth. B. Heavily disturbed seabed with smashed coral remains. Iverryggen, 17 May 1999. C. Picking up pieces of coral skeleton as evidence of trawl damage at Storegga, 6 May 1998. (B and C reprinted from Fosså et al. 2000; all courtesy of the Institute of Marine Research, Norway)

FIGURE

the shallowest part of Sørmannsneset on the shelf edge outside the county of Møre and Romsdal, we documented that entire reefs were wiped out (Fosså et al. 2002). The results from the ﬁrst three years of mapping, including information from ﬁshermen, indicated that a signiﬁcant part (30–50 percent) of the reefs were damaged or affected (Fosså et al. 2002). The inherent limitation of the methodology and the still limited extent of the mapping along the Norwegian shelf done so far make our estimates of damage tentative and underpin the need for new assessments. Cooperation with the ﬁshermen is still important, and just recently new information on distribution of reefs has been provided by the Norwegian Fishing Vessel Owners Association (which includes the bottom trawlers). Damage of corals has also been reported from other areas in the northeast Atlantic, for example, the Darwin Mounds northwest of Scotland and in

the Porcupine Sea Bight in Irish waters (International Council for the Exploration of the Sea [ICES] 2001).

16.5.2. Longlines and Gillnets Lophelia reefs are considered good ﬁshing places for gillnet and longline, and there are considerable ﬁshing activities in coral areas. The bottom-set nets and lines are secured to the bottom with heavy anchors (20–120 kg). During visual inspections of reef areas, lost longlines, gillnets, and other types of ﬁshery-related equipment on the seabed are commonly observed (Fosså et al. 2000). It is more the rule than the exception to ﬁnd entangled ropes and nets. Lost nets continue to trap ﬁsh (ghost ﬁshing) and also cover parts of the coral colonies. One direct effect on the corals is breakage of the skeleton, but the effect of a net that covers coral colonies is not known. We have reasons to believe

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FIGURE 16.5 Gillnet with a tusk (Brosme brosme) and gorgonian coral bycatch (Primnoa resedaeformis). (Courtesy Odd-Børre Humbordstad, Institute of Marine Research, Norway)

that extensive use of gillnets in gorgonian forests can have a signiﬁcant bycatch of gorgonians and hence signiﬁcant impact (ﬁgure 16.5). Although these ﬁshing techniques obviously cause breakage and disturbance of corals, it is often assumed that the extent of damage is less compared to the effect of bottom trawling. However, a study of gorgonian corals on a Canadian longline ﬁshing ground showed that this ﬁshing practice had a clear impact on corals. Because these organisms are longlived, the effect of a relatively low disturbance frequency may accumulate over time (Mortensen and Buhl-Mortensen 2004). Thus, persistent high use of longline and gillnet in coral areas can cause severe damage over time. Consistent international advice from ICES is now to ban all bottom-set gear where corals could be affected.

16.6. OTHER THREATS 16.6.1. Aquaculture Salmon farming dominates the aquaculture industry in Norway. The farms are located either in fjords or in the surrounding archipelagos, sheltered from the exposure to the open ocean. The

few reefs that are found along the coast usually occur on the fjord sills. Until now, there has been only one record of a conﬂict between the location of a salmon farm and the presence of coral reefs in a fjord area south of Bergen. Fortunately, there is a common understanding between the authorities and the farm of the potential harm this activity can pose to the reefs, so that a monitoring program will be launched.

16.6.2. Oil and Gas Exploration and Production Effects from oil exploration activities on corals may arise during several phases of the development and operational lifetime of an oil ﬁeld. Exploration drilling could interfere with coral habitats in areas close to the drill site from anchoring and discharge of drill mud and cuttings to the seaﬂoor. During the production phase, the same interference as for exploration drilling might apply, but additional area requirements for infrastructure, anchoring, and discharge of produced water (unless injected back into the geological structures) can occur. Handling of pipelines and cables may also interfere with corals during anchoring related to the operations and due to area requirements for the installation. However,

Conservation of Cold-Water Coral Reefs in Norway any pipeline installation requires impact assessment. Cables are not seen as a signiﬁcant problem in relation to corals, as they normally can be placed with minimal impact on the corals. According to the Norwegian Petroleum Activities Act, new offshore areas can be opened for petroleum exploration after evaluation of the various interests involved in the relevant area, including environmental aspects. Throughout all phases of any subsequent exploration, reasonable precautions shall be taken to prevent damage to animal life and vegetation in the sea. The license award agreement can include work obligation to the licensee, such as to produce a detailed account of the impact on the environment, possible risks of pollution, and the impact on other affected activities, with respect to a larger deﬁned area. This can also include mapping of coral habitats or regulations of, for example, drilling. Any subsequent activities shall have a speciﬁc permit from the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, based on advice from the Directorate of Fisheries and Institute of Marine Research. This permit might include restrictions on operational activities in areas with coral habitats, such as distance from corals, discharge of drilling mud and cuttings, and further mapping obligations. In case of development and operation of a petroleum deposit, a plan shall be submitted to the authorities, including impact assessment, environmental aspects, and measures to prevent and remedy environmental effects.

16.6.3. Ocean Acidiﬁcation Skeletons of corals are made of aragonite, a form of calcium carbonate, the raw materials of which must be extracted from the seawater by the organisms. For millennia, the chemical soup that makes up the salinity of the seawater has remained rather constant, and the chemical environment in which the corals grow and survive has become their optimal environment. As it has been readily documented, burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and about one-third of the carbon released has found its way into the oceans. Due to the slow mixing between the surface and deep oceans, most of the carbon is still locked at shallow depths where coral reefs exist. The absorption of CO2 by the oceans causes a reduction in the pH of the seawater, which in turn changes the chemical equilibrium in which the corals form their hard skeleton. Levels of pH in upper ocean waters have been

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reduced by 0.1 units since the start of the industrial revolution (Royal Society 2005). While this may seem like an innocuously small amount, this number equates to a 30 percent increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions in seawater because the pH scale is logarithmic. Levels of pH are predicted to drop further by up to 0.3–0.4 units during this century (Royal Society 2005). This means that the capacity to calcify will be reduced for coral reefs in Norway during this century, and the cold-water coral distribution on a global scale may be signiﬁcantly reduced by the end of the century (Guinotte et al. 2006). Ocean acidiﬁcation is a big issue that must be addressed on the global political arena. In the meantime, we should monitor the relevant chemical properties of the seawater and select reefs to monitor for growth and condition of the reefs. Experimental work on the response of calcifying organisms to low pH is crucial in addition to monitoring the natural conditions.

16.6.4. Bioprospecting The rich species diversity in the cold-water coral reef habitat invites bioprospecting, and Norwegian reefs have already been subject to this activity. Especially the sponges have been targeted since they host a variety of microorganisms. In most cases, only small amounts of material/tissue are required for analysis, and such bioprospecting is thus not a threat if sampling is carried out with care. However, the situation can change if the substances of interest cannot be synthesized and one has to rely on comprehensive sampling to obtain sufﬁcient material. The collection of material in marine bioprospecting in Norway is organized by Marbank (a marine biobank) and is regulated through the 2009 Act on Conservation of Nature, Landscape and Biological Diversity and the 2008 Act on Management of Living Marine Resources.

16.7. MANAGEMENT 16.7.1. Principles of Protection Norway was the ﬁrst country to have implemented measures to protect cold-water corals in European waters. IMR documented damage to Lophelia reefs on trawl grounds in 1998 (Fosså et al. 2000, 2002). In 1999, Norwegian ﬁsheries authorities established a regulation for the protection of deep-water coral

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16.1 Norwegian coral MPAs by December 2008

Reef Site

Implementation Date

Offshore/Inshore

Sula Reef Iverryggen Reef Selligrunnen Reef Røst Reef Tisler Reef Fjellknausene Reef

March 1999 January 2000 June 2000 January 2003 December 2003 December 2003

Offshore Offshore Inshore, fjord Offshore Inshore, fjord Inshore, fjord

reefs against damage from ﬁsheries. This national regulation prohibits intentional destruction of coral reefs and requires precaution when ﬁshing in the vicinity of known reefs. Furthermore, the regulation gives special protection to speciﬁed reefs by total ban of the use of ﬁshing gear that are dragged along the bottom and thus may come in contact with the reefs. So far, ﬁve reefs have received special protection: the Sula Reef, Iverryggen Reef, Røst Reef, Tisler Reef, and Fjellknausene Reef. In addition, the environmental authorities through the Norwegian Nature Conservation Act have temporarily conserved the Selligrunnen Reef in the Trondheimsfjord (table 16.1). Several additional reefs are presently under consideration for protection. In 2003, the government established a working group to give advice on further measures needed to protect deep-water coral reefs. The working group concluded that the ecological importance of reefs was underestimated and, because of this, more research and increased mapping were needed (Directorate of Fisheries 2003). The working group also recognized that many different activities may be potentially harmful to coral reefs and suggested, in accordance with the precautionary approach, that the legal basis for the protection of coral reefs should be broadened to cover all types of potentially damaging activities. In this way, the competent authorities could be given the necessary legal instruments to prohibit any activity that may have harmful effects on coral reefs in one or more speciﬁc area.

16.7.2. Coral Protection in the Context of a National System of Marine Protected Areas The process of establishing a network of marine protected areas (MPAs) started in 2001 when an advisory committee was appointed with representatives

Size (km2) 978 620 0.6 303 1.8 1.9

Restrictions Bottom trawling Bottom trawling Human activities Bottom trawling Trawling (crustaceans) Trawling (crustaceans)

from ﬁve government agencies, two industry nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), two green NGOs, and three scientiﬁc institutions. The committee reviewed a list of possible MPAs and proposed in 2005 a system or network of 36 selected MPAs. They ranged in size from 5 km2 to more than 3,000 km2, and in location from land-locked fjords or polls to broad transects or corridors from the coast across the continental shelf (Directorate for Nature Management 2004) (ﬁgure 16.6). This proposal along with legal and practical aspects have since been considered by various ministries and government agencies, and as of December 2008, speciﬁc proposals for establishment of the system of MPAs are being prepared for hearings in a formal process. It is expected that the MPAs will be formally established by the end of 2009 or in 2010. Several of the suggested MPAs are known to harbor corals and coral reefs. The Røst Reef and Iverryggen Reef, which are already protected against bottom trawling, are among the 36 areas, as is the Sula Reef, which is included in the larger transect from Froan. The Østfold area at the border to Sweden contains the Tisler Reef and Fjellknausene Reef, as well as several other newly discovered reefs. Reefs are known to occur in the Ytre Hardangerfjord area and the Korsfjorden area just south of Bergen on the Norwegian west coast. The Rødberg-Grønningsbukta and Tautraryggen areas in the Trondheimsfjord contain corals, the latter the Selligrunnen Reef, the shallowest known reef. Two large areas in northern Norway, the Andfjorden and Lopphavet transects, have been partly mapped with MBE and are known to harbor extensive growth of corals and coral reefs. The transect from Andfjorden includes a prominent canyon (Bleiksdypet) that cuts into the narrow shelf in this region, and there are known corals along the northern ﬂank of this canyon.

(A)

Polls High-current areas Bogan–Frelsøy Shallow-water areas Fjords Iverryggen Open coastal areas Transect from the coast and offshore areas

Grandefjæra Transect off Froan

Skarsundet Bogenfjord

Remman Tautraryggen Griphølen

Rødberg, Grønningsbukta Gaulosen

Giske Stad

Sognefjord Lurefjord

Korsfjord Outer Hardangerfjord

Transect off Jæren Østfold

Transect off Tromøya

Framvaren

(B) Transect off Tanafjord Lopphavet Outer Karlsøy Inner Porsangerfjord

Transect from Andfjord

Rystraumen

Rossfjordstraumen Røstrevet Karlsøyvær Saltstraumen

Tysfjord Kaldvågfjord and Hamarøypoll

16.6 Geographical distribution of a national system of 36 proposed MPAs in southern (A) and northern (B) Norway. The proposed MPAs have been grouped in six categories, from polls or land-locked fjords to broad transects or shelf areas. (From Directorate for Nature Management 2004)

FIGURE

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16.7.3. The Use of Vessel Monitoring Systems in Coral Management Since 2000, Norwegian ﬁshing vessels more than 24 m in length are required to use satellite tracking systems. Currently, a total of 400 Norwegian ﬁshing vessels have satellite tracking equipment installed that automatically transmits the vessel’s position, time, course, and speed approximately every hour, 24 hours a day, regardless of where in the world the vessel is located. Similarly, foreign vessels ﬁshing in Norwegian waters are subject to satellite tracking. The general rule is for vessels with an overall length exceeding 24 m. However, due to the bilateral agreement between Norway and the European Union, mutual tracking of vessels greater than 18 m has been

required from 1 July 2004 and for vessels greater than 15 m from 1 January 2005. Coastal states take the responsibility for controlling and administering the tracking in their own economic zones. High seas areas that are not covered by any country’s ﬁshing jurisdiction are administered by regional ﬁsheries management organizations such as North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission, Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization, and Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, where the members jointly frame the regulations. In the case of the Norwegian coral MPAs on the continental shelf, the use of vessel monitoring systems (VMS) is very helpful both to scientists and to managers. The scientists can use the information to assess the potential impact from ﬁshing activities in an area, and the managers can use the

2004 – 2005 Trawl tracks 2004 Trawl tracks 2005 Coral MPA

Iverryggen Reef

65°N

10°E

Sula Reef

16.7 Iverryggen Reef and the Sula Reef MPAs on the Norwegian continental shelf and VMS tracks from bottom trawlers during 2004 and 2005. See ﬁgure 16.2 for locations and the text for explanation. (Courtesy of the Institute of Marine Research, Norway)

FIGURE

Conservation of Cold-Water Coral Reefs in Norway data as a tool in the process of identifying conﬂicts and examining consequences for the ﬁsheries of a closure. The experience so far is that the trawlers respect the established coral MPAs and that VMS is an efﬁcient method to monitor compliance. The Iverryggen coral MPA was established in 2000 because bottom trawlers were in the process of trawling down reefs located in a hilly area to the northeast of a major trawl ground. Again, it was coastal ﬁshermen using static gear that urged IMR to assess the damage. Severe damage to the reefs was documented in 1999, and the coral area was closed to bottom trawling and proposed as an MPA. The VMS data from 2004 and 2005 show that the ﬁshing occurred outside the MPA but as close as possible to the border of the southwestern corner (see ﬁgure 16.7). This example shows how the VMS clearly identiﬁes the changed ﬁshing pattern where an MPA has been established (unfortunately, we do not have VMS data from before the area was closed, but we know they trawled there because of the reports and the documentation of damage). The high degree of compliance can result from the ﬁshermen agreeing to the restrictions and also from knowing that they are monitored and that the vessels can be identiﬁed.

16.8. CONCLUDING REMARKS Cold-water coral reefs were ﬁrst discovered and described from Norway. They are abundant on the Norwegian shelf where they constitute an important habitat with high species diversity. The threedimensional structure of reefs provides hiding places and a diversity of small scale habitat features that may be important for the many different species that live associated with the reefs. The reefs are also important habitat for ﬁsh and are targeted by longline and gillnet ﬁsheries. It is crucial to learn more about the ecological signiﬁcance of Lophelia so that management decisions can be made on sound scientiﬁc basis. For example, it is necessary to understand the overall habitat-related distribution of ﬁsh species, at speciﬁc life history stages, in order to assess the particular role of corals (Auster 2005). The E.U. project CoralFISH (started in June 2008) will assess the interaction between corals, ﬁsh, and ﬁsheries, aiming to support the implementation of an ecosystem approach to management of areas in the deep sea.

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The Norwegian authorities acted quickly to provide protection to cold-water coral reefs once it became clear that bottom trawling was damaging and destroying reefs. The issue was ﬁrst raised by ﬁshermen, and the conservation was enacted by the Ministry of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs through the Directorate of Fisheries in consultation with the Directorate for Nature Management. This was probably important for the acceptance of the ﬁshing industry for the new measures to protect the corals, formally signed 10 months after the ﬁrst evidence was presented. The photo and video documentation of the reefs with all their colors and beauty, and of their destruction with leveled ground of coral fragments, no doubt played an important role in the quick actions taken by the managers and the acceptance of the new restrictions by the ﬁshermen. Seeing the video recordings of the reefs and the ﬁshes hovering over them conveys clearly the message that this is a habitat we should not destroy by destructive ﬁshing practices. So far, the Norwegian coral reef case can be seen as a story of success. However, there are obstacles and problems to solve ahead of us. We need to put the reefs onto the regular charts that ﬁshermen are using for navigation and ﬁshing activities. This is important in relation to the legal requirement of ﬁshermen exerting caution when ﬁshing in the vicinity of known coral reefs. As we have seen in recent coral surveys where many new reefs are discovered or revealed, this is a major task that requires a large effort. An MBE survey in 2003 indicated the presence of almost 1,500 unknown coral mounds on the mid Norwegian shelf, the Træna coral ﬁeld (see ﬁgure 16.3B; Fosså and Alvsvåg 2004; Fosså et al. 2005). This suggests that far more reefs are still to be discovered. The seabed mapping program MAREANO has started systematic mapping off northern Norway to provide a better basis for the management plan for the Barents Sea and the area off the Lofoten Islands (see www.mareano. no; Ministry of Environment 2006; Winsnes and Skjoldal 2008). Mapping has also been carried out in the E.U. research project HERMES. Another important topic relates to the distribution and density of corals. Corals may grow in a few scattered small colonies within a large area or in denser occurrences with many scattered coral colonies and small reefs, or in large reefs or reef aggregations. Important is also how bottom trawling should be regulated and ﬁshers exert their caution. How large must a colony or occurrence of Lophelia be

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before ﬁshing must be stopped or the area closed? This question relates not only to reef-forming corals like Lophelia but also to gorgonians that may form forests and contribute to coral gardens. While bottom trawling is clearly a destructive practice on coral reefs, the impacts of ﬁshing with longlines and gillnets are more difﬁcult to assess. No doubt, damage is done when snagged lines and nets are pulled to get them loose or they remain stuck and are lost. However, the extent of such damages remains largely unknown. The Norwegian authorities have so far been reluctant to impose restrictions on the use of passive gears in coral areas, which are often targeted by longline and gillnet ﬁsheries. To some extent, the ﬁsheries will regulate themselves by avoiding setting gear where the chance of losing them is high. Cold-water coral reefs are threatened by a number of activities. Ocean acidiﬁcation is probably the most serious threat and one that is difﬁcult to avoid or remediate. Fisheries and offshore petroleum activities are also threats, but these can largely be handled through good management practices that aim to conserve the coral reefs and gardens as ﬁsh habitats and as hotspots of marine biodiversity. There is an urgent need to carry out the further mapping and establish monitoring of the extent and conditions of selected reef areas. Global climate change is here already, and developments in ﬁshing technology occur rapidly and may allow destructive ﬁshing practices in coral areas that have so far been avoided due to their occurrence in rough terrain. Cold-water coral reefs are abundant in Norway, but they are also common along continental shelves and on seamounts many places in the North Atlantic and elsewhere (Freiwald et al. 2004). There is great concern and much attention in international forums (e.g., the U.N. General Assembly globally and North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission and Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR) in the North Atlantic) to the possible damage to these sensitive and diverse habitats from destructive ﬁshing practices such as bottom trawling. Stopping these practices may be an important step to achieve the 2010 target of reducing the rate of loss (or stopping the loss) in biodiversity. Good management practices for protecting the important cold-water coral reef habitats are essential practical steps in the implementation of the ecosystem approach in ﬁsheries (Bianchi and Skjoldal 2008).

Acknowledgments First of all, we thank the many ﬁshermen along the coast who have given invaluable information about coral occurrences and impacted areas. Funding for some aspects of this work came from the E.U. projects HERMES (contract GOCE-CT-2005-511234-1) and PROTECT (contract SSP8-CT-2004-513670). We also thank Kristian Skaar (IMR) for processing of data for ﬁgure 16.7 and for cooperation with many of our colleagues at sea as well as in the ofﬁce.

Note 1. See Rogers (1999) and Freiwald et al. (2004) for global overviews of deep-water corals, Roberts et al. (2006) for general biology and ecology, and Lumsden et al. (2007) for a comprehensive overview for offshore waters of the United States.

References Auster, P.J. (2005). Are deep-water corals important habitats for ﬁshes? Pp. 747–760 in A. Freiwald and J.M. Roberts (eds). Cold-water corals and ecosystems. Berlin: Springer. Auster, P.J. (2007). Linking deep-water corals and ﬁsh populations. Pp. 93–99 in R.Y. George and S.D. Cairns (eds). Conservation and adaptive management of seamount and deep-sea coral ecosystems. Miami: Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami. Bianchi, G., and Skjoldal, H.R. (eds) (2008). The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. London: Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations and CABI Publishing. Burdon-Jones, C., and H. Tambs-Lyche (1960). Observations on the fauna of the North Brattholmen stone-coral reef near Bergen. Årbok for Universitetet i Bergen, Matematisk-naturvitenskaplig Serie 4: 1–24. Cairns, S.D. (2001). A brief history of taxonomic research on azooxanthellate Scleractinia (Cnidaria: Anthozoa). Bulletin of the Biological Society of Washington 10: 191–203. Costello, M.J., M. McCrea, A. Freiwald, T. Lundälv, L. Jonsson, B.J. Bett, T.C.E. van Weering, H. de Haas, J.M. Roberts, and D. Allen (2005). Role of cold-water Lophelia pertusa coral reefs as ﬁsh habitat in the NE Atlantic. Pp. 771–805 in A. Freiwald and J.M. Roberts (eds). Cold-water Corals and Ecosystems. Berlin: Springer. Directorate for Nature Management (2004). Råd til utforming av marin verneplan for marine

Conservation of Cold-Water Coral Reefs in Norway beskyttede områder i Norge. Endelig tilråding med forslag til referanseområder. Rapport fra Rådgivende utvalg for marin verneplan 30, juni 2004 [in Norwegian]. Trondheim: Directorate for Nature Management. www.dirnat.no Directorate of Fisheries (2003). Report from the Working Group on Protection of Corals [in Norwegian]. Bergen: Directorate of Fisheries. Dons, C. (1944). Norges korallrev. Det Kongelige Norske Videnskabers Selskabs Forhandlinger 16: 37–82. Fosså, J.H., and J. Alvsvåg (2003). Kartlegging og overvåkning av korallrev. Pp. 62–67 in L. Asplin and E. Dahl (eds). Havets Miljø 2003. Fisken og Havet, Special Issue 2-2003. Bergen: Institute of Marine Research. Fosså, J.H., and J. Alvsvåg (2004). Kartlegging og overvåkning av korallrev. Pp. 61–66 in K. Sjøtun (ed). Havets Miljø 2004. Fisken og Havet, Special Issue 2-2004. Bergen: Institute of Marine Research. Fosså, J.H., B. Lindberg, O. Christensen, T. Lundälv, I. Svellingen, P.B. Mortensen, and J. Alvsvåg (2005). Mapping of Lophelia reefs in Norway: Experiences and survey methods. Pp. 359–391 in A. Freiwald and J.M. Roberts (eds). Cold-Water Corals and Ecosystems. Berlin: Springer. Fosså, J.H., P.B. Mortensen, and D.M. Furevik (2000). Lophelia korallrev langs norskekysten. Forekomst og tilstand. Fisken og Havet 2-2000:1–94. Bergen: Institute of Marine Research. Fosså, J.H., P.B. Mortensen, and D.M. Furevik (2002). The deep-water coral Lophelia pertusa in Norwegian waters: Distribution and ﬁshery impacts. Hydrobiologia 471: 1–12. Freiwald, A., J.H. Fosså, A. Grehan, T. Koslow, and J.M. Roberts (2004). Cold-water coral reefs— out of sight no longer out of mind. Cambridge: United Nations Environment Programme– World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Freiwald, A., V. Hühnerbach, B. Lindberg, J. Wilson, and J. Campbell (2002). The Sula Reef Complex, Norwegian Shelf. Facies 47: 179–200. Guinotte, J.M., J. Orr, S. Cairns, A. Freiwald, L. Morgan, and R. George (2006). Will humaninduced changes in seawater chemistry alter the distribution of deep-sea scleractinian corals? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 4(3): 141–146. Gunnerus, J.C. (1768). Om nogle norske coraller. Det Kongelige Norske Videnskabers Selskabs Skrifter 4: 38–73. Hovland, M., and P.B. Mortensen (1999). Norske korallrev og prosesser i havbunnen. Bergen: John Grieg. Husebø, Å., L. Nøttestad, J.H. Fosså, D.M. Furevik, and S.B. Jørgensen (2002). Distribution

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and abundance of ﬁsh in deep-sea coral habitats. Hydrobiologia 471: 91–99. ICES (2001). Initial Report of the Study Group on Cold Water Corals in Relation to Fishing. Copenhagen: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Jensen, A., and R. Frederiksen (1992). The fauna associated with the bank-forming deepwater coral Lophelia pertusa (Scleractinaria) on the Faroe shelf. Sarsia 77: 53–69. Johnston, G. (1847). A History of the British Zoophytes. 2nd ed. London: Van Voorst. Jonsson, L.G., P.G. Nilsson, F. Floruta, and T. Lundälv (2004). Distributional patterns of macro- and megafauna associated with a reef of the cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa on the Swedish west coast. Marine Ecology Progress Series 284: 163–171. Kiriakoulakis, K., E. Fisher, G.A. Wolff, A. Freiwald, A. Grehan, and J.M. Roberts (2005). Lipids and nitrogen isotops of two deep-water corals from the North-east Atlantic: Initial results and implications for their nutrition. Pp. 715–729 in A. Freiwald and J.M. Roberts (eds). Cold-Water Corals and Ecosystems. Berlin: Springer. Linné, C. von (1758). Systema naturae per Regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species. Tomus I. Regnum animale. 10th ed. Stockholm. Lumsden, S.E., T.F. Hourigan, A.W. Bruckner, and G. Dorr (eds) (2007). The State of Deep Coral Ecosystems of the United States. NOAA Technical Memorandum CRCP-3. Silver Spring, Md.: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Ministry of Environment (2006). Integrated Management of the Marine Environment of the Barents Sea and the Sea Areas Off the Lofoten Islands [translation in English]. Report No. 8 to the Storting 2005–2006. Oslo: Ministry of Environment. www.regjeringen.no. Mortensen, P.B. (2000). Lophelia pertusa (Scleractinia) in Norwegian waters. Distribution, growth, and associated fauna. Ph.D. diss., University of Bergen. Mortensen, P.B., and L. Buhl-Mortensen (2004). Distribution of deep-water gorgonian corals in relation to benthic habitat features in the Northeast Channel (Atlantic Canada). Marine Biology 144: 1223–1238. Mortensen, P.B., and J.H. Fosså (2006). Species diversity and spatial distribution of invertebrates on Lophelia reefs in Norway. In Proceedings of the 10th International Coral Reef Symposium, 1849–1868. Tokyo: Japanese Coral Reef Society. Mortensen, P.B., M. Hovland, T. Brattegard, and R. Farestveit (1995). Deep water bioherms of the scleractinian coral Lophelia pertusa (L.) at

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64° N on the Norwegian shelf: Structure and associated megafauna. Sarsia 80: 145–158. Mortensen, P.B., M.T. Hovland, J.H. Fosså, and D.M. Furevik (2001). Distribution, abundance and size of Lophelia pertusa coral reefs in midNorway in relation to seabed characteristics. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 81: 581–597. Roberts, J.M., A.J. Weeler, and A. Freiwald (2006). Reefs of the deep: The biology and geology of cold-water coral ecosystems. Science 312: 543–547. Rogers, A.D. (1999). The biology of Lophelia pertusa (Linnaeus, 1758) and other deep-water reef-forming corals and impacts from human activities. International Revue of Hydrobiology 84: 315–406. Ross, S.W., and A.M. Qattrini (2007). The ﬁsh fauna associated with deep coral banks off the southeastern United States. Deep-Sea Research I 54: 975–1007. Royal Society (2005). Ocean acidiﬁcation due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Policy document 12/5. London: Royal Society. Sars, M. (1865). Om de i Norge forekommende fossile dyrelevninger fra Quartærperioden. Universitetets program for første halvaar 1864. Christiania. Skjoldal, H.R., R. Sætre, A. Færnø, O.A. Misund, and I. Røttingen (eds) (2004). The Norwegian Sea ecosystem. Trondheim: Tapir. Steingrímsson, S.A., and S.T. Einarsson (2004). Kóralsvæði á Íslandsmiðum: Mat á ástandi og tillaga um aðgerðir til verndar þeim. Reports

of the Marine Research Institute 110 [with English summary]. Reykjavík. Steingrímsson, S.A. (2004). Protection of Vulnerable Areas in Icelandic Waters [in Icelandic]. Reykjavik: Ministry of Fisheries. Stone, R.P. (2006). Coral habitat in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska: Depth distribution, ﬁnescale species associations, and ﬁsheries interactions. Coral Reefs 25: 229–238. Thiem, Ø., E. Ravagnan, J.H. Fosså, and J. Berntsen (2006). Food supply mechanisms for coldwater corals along the continental shelf edge. Journal of Marine Systems 60: 207–219. Tursi, A., F. Mastrototaro, A. Matarreses, P. Maiorano, and G. D’Onghia (2004). Biodiversity of the white coral reefs in the Ionian Sea (Central Mediterranean). Chemistry and Ecology 20 (suppl. 1):107–116. Wilson, J.B. (1979a). The distribution of the coral Lophelia pertusa (L.) [L. prolifera] in the north-east Atlantic. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 59: 149–164. Wilson, J.B. (1979b). “Patch” development of the deep-water coral Lophelia pertusa (L.) on Rockall Bank. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 59: 165–177. Winsnes, I., and H.R. Skjoldal (2008). Management plan for the Norwegian part of the Barents Sea ecosystem. In G. Bianchi and H.R. Skjoldal (eds). The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management. London: Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations and CABI Publishing.

17 Conservation Investments and Mitigation: The California Drift Gillnet Fishery and Paciﬁc Sea Turtles CHUCK JANISSE DALE SQUIRES JEFFREY A. SEMINOFF PETER H. DUTTON

the Convention on Biological Diversity (Slootweg et al. 2006). Nonetheless, such approaches can face complexity when the ecology is complex, and controversy still surrounds the approach, despite its widespread application (Burgin 2008). Sea turtle nesting sites and coastal artisanal and commercial ﬁsheries off these nesting sites provide a natural focal point for environmental mitigation and biodiversity conservation investments, because sea turtles return to the same nesting sites at their natal beaches to lay eggs that require a period of incubation. Conservation investments can take the form of protecting the turtles, sites, eggs, and hatchlings and reductions of incidental takes and postentanglement or hooking mortality by ﬁshers off nesting sites and can actively increase turtle populations. Conservation investments can also be made to alter gear and ﬁshing practices in “hot spots” of turtle concentrations, such as the loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) spot along the Paciﬁc Coast of the Baja California Peninsula, Mexico (Peckham et al. 2007). Effective sea turtle biodiversity conservation investments are embedded in a holistic approach to sea turtle population recovery that addresses multiple sources of mortality, including technical change and technology standards that introduce gear modiﬁcations, such as turtle excluder devices and circle hooks; measures to reduce postgear encounter mortality; and ﬁsher and community education; and directly addresses “hot spots” with sea turtle concentrations, among other measures (Dutton and Squires 2008).

17.1. INTRODUCTION Sea turtles provide a unique opportunity by which producers and consumers inﬂicting sea turtle mortality can make conservation investments that mitigate their actions (Dutton and Squires 2008; Wilcox and Donlin 2007; WorldFish Center 2004). These conservation biodiversity investments can be further supplemented by those consumers enjoying the beneﬁts, such as existence value, from consuming the global public good of biodiversity. Mitigation measures and conservation investments are well established in the international arena and allow continued commercial activities through compensating mitigation. The Kyoto Protocol provides allowances for “sinks”—credits for the absorption of carbon dioxide by forests, cropland management, and revegetation (Barrett 2003). The Clean Development Mechanism allows an Annex I country to mitigate its emissions by undertaking abatement within a non-Annex I country. The Montreal Protocol established the Multilateral Fund for mitigation. The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) provides for mitigation to counter environmental degradation (Bean 1993; Boonie 1999; Heal 2000). Wetlands Mitigation Banking in the United States curtails wetland loss and encourages protection and rehabilitation of wetlands as a precondition for developing other areas. Mitigation has also been applied for ﬁsh habitat (Harper and Quigley 2006). Such an approach has also been endorsed by 231

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Up to a point, cost-effective conservation, generating the greatest “conservation bang for the buck,” may be more likely through conservation investments in nesting sites than commercial ﬁsheries of higher income countries (Gjertsen 2009). For example, Paciﬁc leatherback nesting site protection costs one-tenth of the economic cost from at-sea measures with the Hawaiian shallow set longline ﬂeet and one-hundredth the economic cost of at-sea measures with the California drift gillnet ﬁshery for swordﬁsh (Gjertsen 2009). A mixture of strategies is most likely optimal, depending on the cost-effectiveness of each strategy. Adopting costeffective conservation allows more conservation than otherwise given a ﬁxed budget and leads to economic efﬁciency. An adverse selection problem, which is a manifestation of the free-rider problem in international environmental agreements (Barrett 2003), arises in that care must be taken that the country or group investing in mitigation projects in other countries is not investing in measures that would have been taken anyway. Not only do recipient countries have incentives to offer projects they would have undertaken in any case, but investing countries and groups also have incentives to select these projects. Conservation investments and mitigation can be directly established between developing and developed countries through side payments or transfers in cash or in kind. In fact, these side payments are critical because of the localized costs borne by ﬁshing communities in developing countries and consumers when undertaking conservation investments, through opportunity costs of forgone incomes and direct turtle and turtle egg consumption and direct costs of gear modiﬁcations to reduce incidental turtle takes (Yeo et al. 2009). In contrast the beneﬁts are largely consumption of the sea turtle biodiversity public good, which provides nonmarket beneﬁts, such as enjoyment of existence value, that are largely concentrated among developed countries and higher income biodiversity consumers in lower income countries.1 In short, local groups bear real costs and are disconnected from those enjoying beneﬁts that are both direct use value and market, through increased harvesting and consumption, and nonmarket through continued existence and enhanced biodiversity. Conservation investments and mitigation measures at and off nesting sites and in migration corridors and localized concentration “hot spots” can be ﬁnanced by taxation of the consumer and producer

surplus created by continued responsible ﬁshing. Ideally, a (Pigovian) tax levied at the margin on incidental sea turtle takes not only directly establishes economic incentives through forcing consumers and harvesters of ﬁsh and shrimp (the incidence depends on the demand elasticities) to bear the full external cost, but also produces tax receipts to help ﬁnance the conservation investments through a form of environmental double dividend (Bovenbag and Goulder 1999). A second-best tax on swordﬁsh or shrimp landings (or imports) may be necessary, however, due to problems of setting a tax at the margin on incidental takes of sea turtles and comprehensive at-sea observer programs. Such a second-best tax only generates accurate economic incentives if the ratio of targeted and incidental take species remains constant, and in all cases reduces ﬁshing effort (through a contraction effect) (Segerson 2009). Although highly uncertain, making explicit the external costs of sea turtle mortality through a tax (or a shadow price through a quota) can induce (endogenous) technical change biased toward turtle saving (e.g., Goulder and Mathias 2000 for climate change), such as the development of circle hooks (Watson et al. 2005). Finally, unilateral reductions in sea turtle mortality through partially or fully curtailed shrimp or swordﬁsh harvesting do not reduce overall sea turtle mortality as do those through multilateral efforts, because these transboundary sea turtles are simply caught and suffer mortality by ﬂeets in other parts of the ocean, and the swordﬁsh and shrimp are imported to ﬁll the harvesting shortfall (called production and trade leakages). The balance of this chapter discusses a speciﬁc conservation investment by an association of California drift gillnet swordﬁshers, the Federation of Independent Seafood Harvesters (FISH), initiated in the fall of 2004, with payments to the Mexican conservation group Asociación Sudcaliforniana de Protección al Medio Ambiente y la Tortuga Marina (ASUPMATOMA)2 to aid their Paciﬁc leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) recovery efforts. The genesis of this conservation investment, ultimately spearheaded by a single person, Peter Dupuy, is traceable to the implementation of swordﬁsh ﬁshery regulations enacted for the purpose of protecting Paciﬁc leatherback turtles under the ESA. Whether or not this proves to be an isolated example of unilateral investment in marine conservation by drift gillnet swordﬁshers, an examination of drift gillnet swordﬁshing dynamics, both abstract and concrete,

The California Drift Gillnet Fishery and Paciﬁc Sea Turtles provides insight into crafting realistic approaches to marine conservation. We shed light on a number of questions and issues. Is this example an isolated action by a single ﬁsher or by several? Is the investment in turtle conservation over a span of several years and in multiple sites, or is it a one-shot investment in a single place? What are the impacts of catching swordﬁsh on turtles, and is this the primary motivation for the conservation investment? Were there any other factors that led to this conservation investment, such as a nongovernmental organization (NGO) or regulatory pressure? What contractual arrangements, if any, have been made between FISH and the groups managing the sea turtle nesting sites? What tangible beneﬁts does FISH receive from investing in turtle conservation, such as improved reputation or regulatory advantages with swordﬁsh (e.g., direct compensatory mitigation), or is it simply a case of conservation investment as an actual expression of willingness to pay to enjoy nonmarket nonuse (passive) values, such as existence value? What are the key factors for investment in sea turtle conservation and mitigation by ﬁshing associations, foundations, governments, and NGOs? What lessons have been learned from this conservation investment that can be applied elsewhere?

17.2. SEA TURTLE BACKGROUND Sea turtles are migratory and transboundary, traveling across the exclusive economic zones of different nations and through the high seas. Breeding habitat can lie in one nation and their developing and foraging habitat in another nation’s waters or in the high seas, where there is little or no governance. The absence of a central authority to organize and enforce conservation creates transboundary resource and jurisdictional problems and a transnational external cost (Barrett 2003). Conservation and recovery limited to unilateral measures by individual nations are likely to fall short of the required conservation level, which instead requires cooperative and multilateral conservation, involving the efforts of multiple nations acting in concert. The absence of multilateral conservation also leads to the transnational externality (Barrett 2003) and unintended consequences such as market transfer effects, which have the potential to increase global sea turtle mortality when unilateral bans on

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production in a relatively low mortality ﬁshery shift production to countries with minimal environmental controls (Rausser et al. 2009). To comply with the ESA, ﬁsheries management has attempted to address conservation of Paciﬁc sea turtles. One option has been to simply shut down or dramatically curtail commercial ﬁsheries, some of which ﬁsh wholly or partly on the high seas but under U.S. jurisdiction. This option was followed in the Paciﬁc for leatherback and loggerhead turtles, when the Hawaii pelagic longline ﬁshery for swordﬁsh was closed for several years before reopening in 2004 under very stringent conditions. Similarly, the California drift gillnet ﬁshery for swordﬁsh and sharks was signiﬁcantly scaled back by time-area closures to reduce incidental takes and mortality. Critically, even reduced sea turtle mortality from large-scale commercial ﬁshing is insufﬁcient to induce the recovery of sea turtle populations, since there are other important sources of natural and anthropogenic mortality from traditional coastal ﬁsheries (for both direct takes of turtles or for target ﬁsh species) and at nesting beaches (Dutton and Squires 2008). The traditional ﬁsheries can occur off nesting sites, taking sea turtles during nesting season, or can occur in foraging grounds, taking turtles year-round in many cases. The reduction of sea turtle populations to critically low numbers aggravates and compounds the problem of reducing sea turtle mortality from commercial ﬁshing alone and precludes this approach as the single genesis for sea turtle population recovery. Instead, it is increasingly recognized that a broader based and integrated recovery strategy is required that addresses all of the sources of anthropogenic mortality at critical stages in the sea turtle’s life cycle, is multilateral and cooperative because of the migratory ﬁsh and sea turtle stocks, and recognizes the entire suite of existing biological, ecological, political, legal, economic, and social factors that affect sea turtle population recovery (Dutton and Squires 2008; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2004a, 2004b; WorldFish Center 2004). The several decades typically required for sea turtles to reach sexual maturity and the acute status for some populations such as leatherbacks and loggerheads—both of which face the threat of extinction in the Paciﬁc—compound the difﬁculty faced. As stated by the Bellagio Blueprint (WorldFish Center 2004), Paciﬁc sea turtles will only be rescued from the brink of extinction if all nesting beaches

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are protected, takes of turtles in commercial and artisanal ﬁsheries are greatly reduced, existing international conservation and ﬁsheries treaties and agreements are strengthened and coordinated, and the traditional use of sea turtles is encouraged to become sustainable. When faced with limited funds, however, a mix of cost-effective strategies is likely.

17.3. NESTING SITE PROTECTION FOR PACIFIC SEA TURTLES In contrast to conservation challenges of many marine mammals, such as dolphins or whales, sea turtles offer a unique opportunity to increase population levels through a broad-based recovery strategy that includes directly addressing mortality on nesting grounds. Thus, rather than a defensive strategy simply focusing on reducing at-sea mortality from ﬁshery interactions, a recovery strategy can become proactive and include conservation investments that directly increase the population at nesting sites and offshore waters. Sea turtles, which have existed for 30–100 million years, evolved to withstand high mortality of eggs and hatchlings. Sea turtles are long-lived and have high reproductive output, producing tremendous quantities of eggs over their lifetimes. Nesting and hatching represent critical life history stages. Without hatchlings on the beach, populations are deprived of the new recruits that normally replenish juveniles and adults lost to natural or unnatural processes. Without this population recharge, all other conservations efforts are moot when population levels are low and populations will recover slowly, if at all. Hence, maximizing hatchling success is necessary to recover populations edging close to extinction. In principle, sea turtles populations are resilient to low hatchling success rates, as long as survival of later stages remains high (e.g., later juvenile through adult). However, in the face of mortality of juveniles, subadults, and adults by artisanal and commercial ﬁsheries, or other means, high hatchling success rates are vital for population stability. To maximize hatching success and survivorship of hatchlings, a variety of nesting beach protection strategies have been employed (Dutton et al. 2005). Such strategies are diverse, and are usually based on the array of anthropogenic impacts that

are local to an area. For example, in areas with substantial beach development, beach protection may include stringent regulations on the types of beach lighting and or the prevention of foot and vehicular trafﬁc on beaches during nesting seasons. However, in many parts of the world, far greater threats occurs in the form of illegal, and sometimes legal, harvest of eggs. In these situations beaches may be cordoned off from human activity. When this is not possible, conservationists may comb the beaches throughout the day and or night, camouﬂaging the nest sites to throw egg collectors of the trail. In the most extreme cases, every nest is collected and moved to a protected area that is under supervision (Sarti et al. 2007).

17.4. LEATHERBACK SEA TURTLES Leatherback turtles are more pelagic than any other sea turtle species. Whereas leatherbacks foraging off the Paciﬁc coast of the United States, from California to Washington, originate from nesting stocks in the western Paciﬁc, tens of thousands of kilometers away (Benson et al. 2007; Dutton et al. 2000), their counterparts nesting at relatively proximal sites along the coasts of Mexico and Costa Rica rarely if ever enter U.S. waters, and instead remain in more southerly portions of the eastern Paciﬁc (Eckert and Sarti 1997; Morreale et al. 1996). Leatherback populations have declined throughout much of the Paciﬁc (Sarti et al. 1996, 2007; Spotila et al. 2000). In the eastern Paciﬁc populations, leatherback turtles have declined by more than 90 percent in the last two decades. The depletion of Paciﬁc leatherbacks has been so extreme that they have been considered in imminent danger of extinction (Spotila et al. 2000). The species is currently listed as critically endangered in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species (2008) and is included in Appendix 1 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (United Nations Environmental Program 1975). Paramount to recovery is that all nesting and foraging site, no matter how small, be included as conservation target areas. For example, all leatherback nesting sites around the Paciﬁc—including the Agua Blanca site in Baja California—require protection, so that hatchling production can be optimized to begin rebuilding the depleted populations. Only

The California Drift Gillnet Fishery and Paciﬁc Sea Turtles by ensuring that populations continue to recharge with incoming juveniles can the full beneﬁts of bycatch reduction in the open oceans be realized in the long run.

17.5. THE CALIFORNIA DRIFT GILLNET FISHERY Drift gillnets capture by entanglement. Typically, besides an appropriate vessel, drift gillnet gear required for this ﬁshery includes a net, 45–60 large inﬂatable ball buoys, a spar buoy called a “high-ﬂyer” afﬁxed with a radar reﬂector and battery-operated strobe light, a deck-mounted hydraulically powered reel on which to store the net, and a reel-mounted level wind to assist in deploying and retrieving the net. Webbing is hung loosely, much like a drapery, between the ﬂoat line at the top, and the lead line at the bottom. The looseness, or “slack,” gives the net its entanglement properties and is built into the net by adjusting the amount of net captured with the hangings that attach the top of the webbing to the ﬂoat line so that the ﬁnished length of the net is about 40–50 percent less than the total length of webbing used if it were stretched out. A ﬁsherman chooses the depth/length combination for the net based on the size reel that it would require and the amount of vessel stability sacriﬁced by carrying the weight of the reel and a wet net. When ﬁshed, the net hangs vertically in the water column between the buoyant ﬂoat line at the top of the net and the weighted lead line at the bottom. The top of the net is suspended below the sea surface by the ball-shaped buoys to a depth equal to the length of the buoy lines. This depth has historically ranged from 18 feet to as much as 90 feet, but is currently limited by regulations enacted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) to a minimum depth of 36 feet. Drift gillnet trips range from one night to one month, but typically last 5–15 days. Fish availability, market price, weather conditions, phase of the moon, vessel ﬁshing range, and ﬁsh-cooling capabilities dictate the timing, and length of ﬁshing trips. About sunset, the net is usually deployed starting at the upwind position of the set. When the entire net has been deployed, the vessel stops and drifts with the net attached throughout the night. Retrieval usually begins just before sunrise. The vessel is pulled stern ﬁrst into the wind and seas as the net is rewound on the hydraulically powered reel.

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Fishermen locate where to ﬁsh by looking for temperature fronts between cooler and warmer water masses, or turbidity fronts between green and blue water masses, enabled by high-resolution satellitegenerated sea surface temperature data. Until 2001, the California drift gillnet ﬁshery operated primarily outside of state waters to about 150 miles offshore, ranging from the U.S.–Mexico border in the south to north of the Columbia River, depending on sea temperature conditions. Due to seasonal ﬁshing restrictions and the seasonal migratory pattern of swordﬁsh, about 90 percent of the annual ﬁshing effort occurs between August 15 and December 31.

17.6. LEATHERBACK NESTING SITE PROTECTION AND CONSERVATION INVESTMENT IN BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO The mitigation activities for leatherback turtles in Baja California entail protecting nesting sites by a coalition of ﬁve Mexican nongovernmental and governmental groups, including ASUPMATOMA, Municipio de los Cabos, Grupo Ecologista y Tortuguero de Pescadero, Grupo Tortuguero de Todos Santos, and Amigos del Cabo Pulmo. The nesting site protection entails monitoring of beaches scattered along nearly 170 km of coast from Todos Santos to Cabo Pulmo (ﬁgure 17.1). The nesting site protection for leatherbacks is part of a broader sea turtle conservation investment that also targets loggerhead turtles and green turtles (Chelonia mydas) throughout the Gulf of California and along the Paciﬁc Coast of the Baja California peninsula (Felger et al. 2005). The actual effectiveness of the ASUPMATOMA nesting site protection from the conservation investment remains unknown. FISH has raised funds from a variety of sources to fund sea turtle conservation efforts by ASUPMATOMA, a Mexican nonproﬁt organization. The funds provided by FISH, in conjunction with funds from the Western Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council and the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), among others, support conservation investments that contribute to recovery of Paciﬁc leatherback populations at Agua Blanca, Baja California, Mexico. The funds raised by FISH came from a variety of sources: $10,000 from the Central California Joint Cable Fisheries Committee, $10,000 from the Southern California Joint

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17.1 Map of Mexico showing the six most important nesting sites for Paciﬁc leatherback turtles. The hatched-line box corresponds with the map inset showing the tip of the Baja California Peninsula. The star indicates the location of Agua Blanca, site of the ASUPMATOMA leatherback nesting beach protection program

FIGURE

Cable Fisheries Committee, $10,000 from other cable sources, $8,000 from the Western Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council, $2,000 from Boston Sword and Tuna, $1,000 from MacLean’s Seafood, and $30,000 from the NMFS. To date, leatherback conservation effort in Mexico has focused on three of the primary nesting aggregations on the mainland Paciﬁc coast in the states of Michoacan, Guerrero, and Oaxaca (Dutton et al. 2002; Sarti et al. 2007). However, this accounts for only about 45 percent of the total nesting in Mexico. The remainder consists of low densities of nests spread out along thousands of kilometers of beach, and protection at most of these low-density nesting areas has not been implemented due to lack of funds. The limited government funds are directed to protection of these primary sites, and the challenge of protecting the lower density sites is being addressed at the grass-roots level by regional NGOs that coordinate with the national program. ASUPMATOMA employs the funds for protection of one of these low-density leatherback nesting sites at Agua Blanca. Nesters and their eggs are

monitored and protected, and research is directed to improving incubation conditions to maximize hatchling production. Agua Blanca is believed to be a site responsible for 8 percent of all leatherback nesting in Mexico (ASUPMATOMA 2005). Research satellite-tracking of leatherbacks from Agua Blanca is contributing to the knowledge base needed to craft efforts to stabilize the Paciﬁc leatherback population.

17.7. WHY DID DRIFT GILLNET SWORDFISHERS INVEST IN LEATHERBACK CONSERVATION? An ESA-required Section 7 Consultation in 20003 resulted in a “Biological Opinion” concluding that protective measures were needed for the drift gillnet ﬁshery to protect endangered leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles. In August 2001, a northern closure to protect leatherbacks affected approximately 90 percent of the entire ﬁshing grounds north of Point Conception during the ﬁshing season in that area. A southern closure, during El Niño periods,

The California Drift Gillnet Fishery and Paciﬁc Sea Turtles affected 100 percent of the entire ﬁshing grounds south of Point Conception in all but the last month of ﬁshing season in that area. The most difﬁcult aspect of these closures for ﬁshermen to accept is that they feel that they are not responsible for the endangered status of these sea turtles. From the point of view of the ﬁshermen, the ﬁshery is being sacriﬁced to protect endangered sea turtles whose demise they were not responsible for, and they feel that this unilateral sacriﬁce will probably ultimately make little difference to the turtles’ recovery unless the more widespread impacts on the nesting beaches, at high seas, and at coastal foraging areas are addressed; they simply feel that there is no opportunity to do anything about it. Fishermen responded by pressuring NMFS to include sea turtle conservation in its annual review, even though it was not technically covered under the MMPA. NMFS cooperated, and the review body evolved beyond marine mammals to provide a public forum to collectively work to lower the number of takes and mortality of leatherback and loggerhead turtles in the Paciﬁc. Fishermen familiarized themselves with the causes of sea turtle decline. Many concluded that investing in nesting beach and hatchling protection was an obvious way to advance sea turtle repopulation. However, nesting beaches for the sea turtle stocks affected by the drift gillnet ﬁshery were far away, in the Western Paciﬁc (P. Dutton, unpublished data). Nevertheless, ﬁshermen began discussing fund-raising options. Two obstacles were apparent. First, many ﬁshermen were willing to invest in sea turtle conservation, but not if it produced a beneﬁt for noninvesting ﬁshermen who were free riders. For example, FISH is supported entirely by membership dues. However, when representing drift gillnet ﬁshermen, it is not practical for FISH to represent only dues-paying members. Consequently, the cost of representing the ﬁshery is historically paid by about 65 percent of drift gillnet ﬁshermen, but all receive the beneﬁt. The second obstacle was that the NMFS would not consider regulatory ﬂexibility in return for ﬁshermen’s investment in sea turtle conservation. Between the NMFS position regarding regulatory ﬂexibility and obstacles to fund-raising by ﬁshermen, investment in sea turtle conservation lost momentum until FISH director Pete Dupuy, while vacationing in Baja, Mexico, heard about a leatherback nesting beach conservation program there and investigated. Dupuy met with ASUPMATOMA

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president Rene Pinal and became familiar with his program to protect Paciﬁc leatherbacks. The drift gillnet ﬁshery faces limits on the number of takes and mortality of both leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles because of the ESA. Leatherbacks present a greater problem in most years for the drift gillnet ﬁshery, however, because leatherbacks, by including more temperate waters in their migration and foraging range than do loggerheads, more frequently pass through the waters that the drift gillnet vessels ﬁsh. In contrast, only when the waters ﬁshed by the gillnet vessels warm during El Niño years do loggerheads migrate in sufﬁcient numbers to the southern range of the drift gillnetters’ ﬁshing grounds to pose a sufﬁciently serious problem to trigger time-area closures enacted under the ESA. Dupuy, aware of the NMFS position regarding conservation investment, looked at the situation through a ﬁsherman’s eye: what was the problem, and what was the best way to address it? Low leatherback population was the problem. The best way to help restore the population was nesting beach protection along with egg and hatchling husbanding. Dupuy also took a critical look at ASUPMATOMA’s operation. He saw that, although simple, it was well designed and operated. It was also struggling for lack of funds. Impressed with ASUPMATOMA’s program, Dupuy decided to help. Through FISH, Dupuy promoted ASUPMATOMA’s program and looked for sources of funds. Some FISH members were on cable/ﬁshery committee boards, which were created to fund ﬁshery-related issues. The fund was established by telecommunication companies to mitigate impacts of offshore telecommunication cables on ﬁshery operations. Dupuy petitioned, and the Central California and the Southern California cable/ﬁshery committee boards both agreed to give $10,000 to FISH in two yearly installments to support ASUPMATOMA’s program. FISH paid the ﬁrst $10,000 installment to ASUPMATOMA in 2004. FISH’s conservation investment in leatherback nesting site protection in Baja California is not motivated directly by programs that provide incentives for conservation investment that are currently in place or that are expected to be in place in the near future, such as those under the Kyoto Protocol or formal mitigation measures under the ESA. A formal discussion of compensatory mitigation has not even begun for Paciﬁc leatherback or loggerhead sea turtles in the California drift gillnet, or Hawaiian pelagic longline ﬁsheries. One more factor indicates

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that FISH’s motivation is not simply related to a “put-and-take” system: the nesting sites for the Paciﬁc leatherbacks encountered by California drift gillnet vessels lie in the western and central Paciﬁc Ocean, not in the eastern Paciﬁc Ocean. In fact, the leatherbacks from the Baja California sites migrate southward toward the Humboldt Current off western Latin America, where they may be intercepted by commercial and artisanal ﬁshing vessels.

17.8. WHAT LESSONS CAN BE LEARNED? A convergence of inﬂuences led to the conservation investment by FISH, with the Mexican NGO ASUPMATOMA, to contribute to population recovery of Paciﬁc leatherback sea turtles at Agua Blanca, Baja California. These factors include a host of events spanning decades of interaction between drift gillnet ﬁshermen and state and federal regulators, as well as the vision and leadership of a single California drift gillnet ﬁsherman. Also, FISH, as the combination of its forerunner organizations, was not a simple novice when the time came to respond to ﬁshery threatening regulations enacted under the ESA. However, it is doubtful that any funds would have been available for investment in sea turtle recovery were it not for the coincidental fact that funding for ﬁshery-related issues was available from local cable/ﬁshery committees. FISH looked into various options to provide an equitable fund raising method for drift gillnet ﬁshermen to invest in conservation programs. The voluntary approach met with little success. Most ﬁshermen are not willing to contribute due to freeriding by others. FISH came to the conclusion that the most equitable approach is to tax ﬁshermen a few cents per pound of landed swordﬁsh. This way, ﬁshermen who stand to beneﬁt the most pay the most. The problem is that there is no simple way to establish such a fund-raising process. For example, it would take special Californian legislation to establish a process for drift gillnet ﬁshermen to authorize such a tax, that would be withheld by swordﬁsh buyers and held in trust by the California Department of Fish and Game to be used for conservation investment programs of the ﬁshermen’s choice. Lack of an equitable fund-raising process is a major obstacle standing in the way of enabling ﬁshermen to invest in conservation projects.

The conservation investment by FISH with ASUPMATOMA in leatherback population recovery points the way forward to the type of partnerships between the ﬁshing industry and NGOs that will be critical to fully fund the investment shortfalls that inevitably face the supply of common resources or public goods such as biodiversity conservation, including sea turtles. In the same vein as nonrivalrous (nondepletable) public goods, use of rivalrous (depletable) common resources cannot be excluded, and hence common resources face underinvestment and undersupply and free-rider problems when marshaling funding for conservation investments. The transnational nature of the common sea turtle resource further compounds the complexity and difﬁculty in garnering conservation investment to recover populations. Financing for conservation investment supporting increases in transnational biodiversity conservation, such as sea turtles, will require collaboration across governments, industry bodies, and NGOs. No single source is likely to have, or make available, sufﬁcient funds to make the size of investment required to make side payments, endow conservation funds and conservation concessions, ﬁnance gear changes for commercial and artisanal ﬂeets in developing countries, pay ongoing costs associated with nesting site protection, or compensate coastal artisanal ﬁshers for ceasing to ﬁsh during nesting seasons.

Notes 1. Gjertsen and Stevenson (2009) provide a case study example of a direct payment scheme in Rendova, Solomons. A payment is made to the individual discovering and reporting a new leatherback nesting site, to the monitor who documents the discovery, and to that individual’s community (in the form of a community fund). If the nest successfully hatches (at least one hatchling emerges), then the original observer, monitor, and community fund receive an additional payment. Another example is payments to collected eggs for hatcheries with further payments conditional upon the rate of hatching success. Payments for beach patrols to protect against anthropogenic and animal predation of in situ nests, hatching rate success from in situ nests, and movement of in situ nests to areas above the high-tide line are other examples. 2. ASUPMATOMA is the Spanish acronym for Association Sudcaliforniana de Protecion al Medio Ambiente y a la Tortuga Marina A.C. Rene Pinal, current President, along with a small group of residents

The California Drift Gillnet Fishery and Paciﬁc Sea Turtles and local biologists, founded ASUPMATOMA in Cabo San Lucas 18 years ago. 3. A Section 7 Consultation is required under the Endangered Species Act of the United States. Such a consultation ensures that federal agency actions are not undertaking, funding, permitting, or authorizing actions likely to jeopardize the continued existence of listed species or destroy or adversely modify designated critical habitat. References Barrett, S. (2003). Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bean, M. (1993). Incentive-based approaches to conserving red-cockaded woodpeckers in the sandhills of North Carolina. Pp. 19–26 in W.E. Hudson (ed). Building Economic Incentives into the Endangered Species Act. Washington, D.C.: Defenders of Wildlife. Benson, S.R., P. H. Dutton, C. Hitipeuw, B. Samber, J. Bakarbessi, and D. Parker. (2007). Postnesting migrations of leatherback turtles from Jamursba Medi, Birds Head Peninsula, Indonesia. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 6(1): 150–154. Boonie, R. (1999). Endangered species mitigation banking: Promoting recovery through habitat conservation planning under the Endangered Species Act. Science of the Total Environment 240: 11–19. Bovenbag, A.L., and L. Goulder (1999). Environmental taxation. In A. Auerbach and M. Feldstein (eds). Handbook of Public Economics. Amsterdam: North-Holland Press. Burgin, S. (2008). BioBanking: An environmental scientist’s view of the role of biodiversity banking offsets in conservation. Biodiversity and Conservation 17(4): 807–816. Dutton, P.H., and D. Squires (2008). Reconciling ﬁshing with biodiversity: A holistic recovery strategy for Paciﬁc Sea Turtles. Ocean Development and International Law 39(2): 200–222. Dutton, D.L., P.H. Dutton, M. Chaloupka, and R. Boulon. 2005. Increase of a Caribbean leatherback turtle Dermochelys coriacea nesting population linked to long-term nest protection. Biological Conservation 126: 186–194. Dutton, P.H., A. Frey, R. LeRoux, and G. Balazs (2000). Molecular ecology of leatherbacks in the Paciﬁc. In N. Pilcher and G. Ismael (eds). Sea Turtles of the Indo-Paciﬁc. Research, Management and Conservation. London: ASEAN Academic Press. Dutton, P.H., L. Sarti, R. Márquez, and D. Squires, (2002). Sea turtle conservation across the shared marine border. In L. Fernandez (ed).

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Both Sides of the Border: Transboundary Environmental Management Issues Facing Mexico and the United States. The Hague: Kluwer. Eckert, S., and L. Sarti (1997). Distant ﬁsheries implicated in the loss of the world’s largest leatherback nesting population. Marine Turtle Newsletter 78: 2–7. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2004a). Expert Consultation on Interactions between Sea Turtles and Fisheries within an Ecosystem Context. FAO Fisheries Report No. 738. www.fao.org/documents/ show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/007/y5477e/ y5477e04.htm Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2004b). Technical Consultancy. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Felger, R.S., W.J. Nichols, and J.A. Seminoff (2005). Sea turtles in northwestern Mexico: Conservation, ethnobiology, and desperation. Pp. 405– 424 in J.L.E. Cartron, G. Ceballos, and R.S. Felger (eds). Biodiversity, Ecosystems, and Conservation in Northwestern Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press. Gjertsen, H. (2009). Can we improve our conservation bang for the buck? Cost-effectiveness of alternative leatherback turtle conservation strategies. In P. Dutton, D. Squires, and M. Ahmed (eds). Conservation of Paciﬁc Sea Turtles. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Gjertsen, H., and T. Stevenson. (2009) Direct incentive approaches for leatherback turtle conservation. In P. Dutton, D. Squires, and M. Ahmed (eds). Conservation of Paciﬁc Sea Turtles. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Goulder, L., and K. Mathias (2000). : Optimal CO2 abatement in the presence of induced technological change. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 39: 1–38. Harper, D., and J. Quigley (2006). Compliance with Canada’s Fisheries Act: A ﬁeld audit of habitat compensation projects. Environmental Management 37: 336–350. Heal, G. (2000). Nature and the Marketplace: Capturing the Value of the Ecosystem. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. International Union for the Conservation of Nature. (2008). IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Gland, Switzerland: International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Morreale, S.J., Standora E.A., Spotila J.R., and Paladino F. 1996. Migration corridor for sea turtles. Nature 384: 319–320. Peckham, S.H., D. Maldonado, A. Walli, G. Ruiz, W.J. Nichols, and L. Crowder (2007). Smallscale ﬁsheries bycatch jeopardizes endangered Paciﬁc loggerhead turtles. PLoS One 2(10):e1041.

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Rausser, G., S. Hamilton, M. Kovach, and R. Stifter (2009). Unintended consequences: The spillover effects of common property regulations. Marine Policy 33(1): 24–39. Sarti, M.L., A.R. Barragán, D. García-Muñoz, P. Huerta, and F. Vargas (2007). Conservation and biology of the leatherback turtle in the Mexican Paciﬁc. Chelonian Conservation and Biology 6(1): 70–78. Sarti, M.L., S.A. Eckert, T.N. Garcia, and A.R. Barragan (1996). Decline of the world’s largest nesting assemblage of leatherback turtles. Marine Turtle Newsletter 74: 2–5. Segerson, K. (2009). Policies to reduce stochastic sea turtle bycatch: An economic efﬁciency analysis. In P. Dutton, D. Squires, and M. Ahmed (eds). Conservation of Paciﬁc Sea Turtles. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Slootweg, R., A. Kolhoff, R. Verheem, and R. Höft (2006). Biodiversity in EIA and SEA. Background Document to CBD Decision VII/28: Voluntary Guidelines to Biodiversity-Inclusive Impact Assessment. Utrecht, Netherlands: Commission for Environmental Assessment. Spotila, J.R., R.D. Reina, A.C. Steyermark, P.T. Plotkin, and F.V. Paladino (2000). Paciﬁc

leatherback turtles face extinction. Nature 405: 529–530. United Nations Environmental Program. (1975). Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Geneva: United Nations Environmental Program. Watson, J., S. Epperly, A. Shah, and D. Foster (2005). Fishing methods to reduce sea turtle mortality associated with pelagic longlines. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 62: 965–981. Wilcox, C., and C. Donlan (2007). Resolving economic inefﬁciencies: Compensatory mitigation as a solution to ﬁsheries bycatch-biodiversity conservation conﬂicts. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 5(6): 325–331. WorldFish Center (2004). The Bellagio Blueprint for Action on Paciﬁc Sea Turtles. www.worldﬁshcenter.org/news/PDF/PR_14Jan04.pdf Yeo, B.H., S.K. Syed, M. Kamil, K. Ibrahim, D. Squires, H. Gjertsen, T. Groves, and R. Zulkiﬂi (2009). Can coastal ﬁsheries bear the cost of sea turtle conservation? Evidence from the east coast of peninsular Malaysia. In P. Dutton, D. Squires, and M. Ahmed (eds). Conservation of Paciﬁc Sea Turtles. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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18 Southeast Asian Fisheries MERYL J. WILLIAMS DEREK STAPLES

18.1. INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE Bridging the Paciﬁc and Indian oceans, Southeast Asia (SEA)1 is a major marine ﬁsheries region. In 2006, SEA countries produced 13.8 million metric tons of marine capture ﬁsheries product (excluding marine mammals but including catch by SEA vessels outside their own marine jurisdictions), 17 percent of the world total marine capture ﬁsheries production (Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], www.fao.org/ﬁgis). All of the 11 SEA countries except Lao PDR are coastal countries: Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Viet Nam. The countries are very varied in terms of their size, the area of their economic exclusion zones and geography. Indonesia and Philippines are large archipelagic nations, while Malaysia has both mainland and island components. The region contains several enclosed seas, with little high seas area internally. Marine jurisdictions of the SEA coastal states adjoin each other and those of their neighbors, such as Australia, China, India, Papua New Guinea, and Palau. The marine ﬁsh stocks in SEA directly support approximately 10 million people as ﬁshers, roughly the same number again in support industries plus, indirectly, the families of these workers. Nearly

100 million people may be directly dependent on the ﬁsh stocks of SEA (Williams 2007). Many of those dependent directly on the ﬁsh supply chain are women (see chapter 5). The seas within SEA support large and diverse ﬁsh resources, but ﬁsheries have developed too rapidly for marine resource conservation to keep pace. Fishing, ﬁsh processing, and ﬁsh trade have featured since human habitation began, but local and customary ﬁsheries management did not prepare people for the large technological advances and rapid increase in both small-scale and industrial ﬁsheries in the 20th century (Butcher 2004; Morgan and Staples 2006). The ﬁsheries expansion was fueled by technological advances and accompanied by rapid population growth—from an estimated regional population of 40 million in the early 1900s (Butcher 2004) to today’s population of more than half a billion people. National maritime jurisdictions have constrained but not stopped the range of SEA ﬁshing vessels (Butcher 2004) and high seas ﬁshing. Much of the coastal area is overﬁshed, and no substantial stocks remain to be exploited (Lungren et al. 2006), although considerable effort is being exerted currently to discover “untapped” resources. The total catch has continued to increase, but there has been a large shift in what is being caught, with increasing proportions of small, low-value/trash ﬁsh taken (Silvestre et al. 2003), including juveniles of many

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TABLE 18.1 Marine capture ﬁsheries production in SEA (17 percent of world marine capture ﬁsheries production)

Country Brunei Darussalam Cambodia Indonesia Malaysia Myanmar Philippines Singapore Thailand Timor-Leste Viet Nam Total SEA

2006 Production (1,000 metric tons) 2 61 4,458 1,296 1,376 2,161 3 2,579 <1 1,816 13,7531

2006 World Ranking, Marine Capture Fisheries Production 152 80 4 16 14 11 144 9 174 12

2005 Exports: Marine, Inland, and Aquaculture (US$1,000) NA NA 1,802,961 634,370 460,057 347,830 402,130 4,465,747 NA 2,741,127

2005 Imports: Marine, Inland, and Aquaculture (US$1,000)

Per Capita Average Fish and Fish Products Consumption (kg/capita/year)

NA NA 102,544 522,198 NA NA 747,497 1,421,710 NA 282,481

NA 28 21 57 19 29 NA 31 NA 18

NA, not assessed. Source: FAO Yearbook, Fisheries Global Information System (www.fao.org/ﬁshery/ﬁgis/en).

sought-after species. Total catch trajectories may be about to level off or even trend downward in a pattern familiar to other regions in the world in recent decades, especially the North Atlantic Ocean. Six of the SEA countries—Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Viet Nam, Myanmar, and Malaysia— are in the world top 20 marine capture ﬁsheries countries (table 18.1). SEA ﬁshers produce more marine ﬁsh than Europe, North America, or Africa. Thailand, Viet Nam, and to some extent Indonesia are very active international ﬁsh trading nations (table 18.1). Nearly 80 percent of SEA ﬁsh exports (from aquaculture and freshwater ﬁsheries as well as marine capture) go to developed countries (North America, Europe, Japan, and Korea). China and intraregional trade accounts for most of the remainder (FAO 2006). Though geographically united, and united through regional and international ﬁsheries conventions, codes, and regional bodies, SEA countries have each had their own pathways of ﬁsheries development (for details at the country level, see Williams 2007; De Young 2007). The present chapter looks at key regional ﬁsheries management and governance issues that affect all countries, focusing on new trends in ﬁsheries management, progress in addressing entrenched problems and positioning ﬁsheries to provide greater public and private beneﬁts.

18.2. SEA FISHERIES MANAGEMENT TRENDS AND ISSUES Historic practices, national ﬁsheries developments, regional and international ﬁsheries trends, and external social and economic factors all inﬂuence SEA ﬁsheries management. Compared to developed countries, however, the SEA countries still lack the full ﬁsheries management capacity needed to address the big marine ﬁsheries challenges. National borders are porous, government ﬁsheries agencies lack capacity and are often given low national priority, corruption in ﬁsheries is common, information systems are weak, and the countries lack coherent whole-government and whole-society approaches. The management approaches of developed countries from temperate waters may not be appropriate to SEA, and more suitable solutions for tropical ﬁsheries with millions of ﬁshers need to be developed. Fisheries research is weak, fragmented along discipline lines, dominated by biology and descriptive social science but lacking strong contributions from economics and political science. SEA marine ﬁsheries are effectively open access, especially for the larger scale commercial boats, and lack workable use rights. This open access, combined with the rapid development, has lead to severe overcapitalization and overexploitation. The

Southeast Asian Fisheries consequences of this are not yet fully recognized, but ﬁshers are all experiencing lower catch rates and returns. This coupled with increasing costs is making ﬁshing very unproﬁtable, especially for the poor coastal communities. Notwithstanding the large number of small-scale ﬁshers, SEA ﬁsheries resources is also ﬁshed by larger and more powerful operators with larger vessels and ﬁshing and ﬁsh-ﬁnding gear who often ignore zoning, gear, and seasonal ﬁshing regulations, to the detriment of small-scale ﬁshers whose inshore exclusion zones they ﬁsh.

18.2.1. Regional and International Fisheries Management Cooperation In ﬁsheries management and conservation, SEA countries participate in several international and regional ﬁsheries consultative arrangements, although, except in the case of tuna ﬁsheries, there are no formal cooperative management arrangements in any of the seas. Most SEA countries have signed and ratiﬁed the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Thailand has not ratiﬁed it, and Cambodia and East Timor have not yet signed it (table 18.2). Indonesia and the Philippines have signed but not ratiﬁed the 1995 U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA), but the other countries have not signed. All SEA countries signed the Plan of Implementation of the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) that includes ﬁsheries commitments such as the pivotal Article 30(a) to “maintain or restore stocks to levels that can produce the maximum sustainable yield . . . not later than 2015” (World Summit for Sustainable Development Plan of Implementation 2002). Supported by FAO, the Asia-Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission (APFIC) is tracking progress and encouraging countries to meet WSSD and related ﬁsheries targets. For SEA countries, these APFIC progress reviews provide valuable insights and are used in the analysis below. The APFIC’s 29th Session (2006b) highlighted the poor state of the region’s ﬁsheries resources, especially the large catch of low-value/trash ﬁsh. It agreed, in a nonbinding way, to reduce ﬁshing capacity and to directly channel more of the small ﬁsh caught to the human food chain instead of to ﬁsh and animal feeds (APFIC 2006a). Some progress has been made, but ﬁshing capacity is still far too high. The APFIC 29th Session also stressed greater

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involvement of ﬁsheries stakeholders in management and cooperation to improve ﬁsh market access. The SEA countries are also members of the group for Asia-Paciﬁc Economic Cooperation (APEC) that hosts a Fisheries Working Group and a Marine Resource Working Group. In 2005, the Ocean Related Ministerial Meeting of APEC approved the Bali Plan of Action, among whose comprehensive, but generalized, undertakings is that APEC would increase the number of its members to “ratify or adhere to” the international and regional ﬁsheries arrangements, such as UNFSA. For highly migratory species, especially tuna, three regional ﬁsheries management organizations (RFMOs) are relevant to SEA countries (table 18.2), namely, the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Blueﬁn Tuna (CCSBT), and the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission (WCPFC). Indonesia is a cooperating nonmember for the IOTC, is a signatory (yet to ratify) to the WCPFC (Williams 2007), and joined the CCSBT in 2008. Malaysia and Thailand are members of the IOTC and signatories yet to ratify the WCPFC. SEA has no actual RFMOs, reﬂecting the inshore nature of the ﬁsheries that are managed mainly on a national basis, subject to ﬁrst settling maritime boundaries—a work still in progress.2 The WCPFC may be competent in the South China Sea with respect to highly migratory stocks, should the SEA countries become members. Few SEA scientiﬁc studies have been conducted to determine the extent to which ﬁsh stocks are shared across national boundaries and therefore need to be jointly managed. This is something that is being addressed in part by the Southeast Asian Fisheries Regional Development Center (SEAFDEC) and WCPFC. Of relevance to food safety and ﬁsh trade, the larger SEA countries are members of the Ofﬁce International des Epizooties (OIE, also known as the World Organization for Animal Health) and the global food standards body, Codex Alimentarius (table 18.2). Recently, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) joined with the SEAFDEC, a regional, intergovernmental technical agency established by Japan and SEA countries in 1967. ASEAN and SEAFDEC established a Fisheries Consultative Group that developed a strategic partnership in 2006 that effectively made SEAFDEC an advisory body to ASEAN on ﬁsheries and aquaculture science and technology matters (ASEAN-SEAFDEC Strategic Partnership). More recently, ASEAN has been

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18.2 SEA country memberships in key regional and international multilateral organizations, accessions to treaties and conventions relevant to ﬁsheries

TABLE

A: Global Country

UNCLOSa

UNFSAb

WTOc

OIE, CAd

Brunei Cambodia East Timor Indonesia Malaysia Myanmar Philippines Singapore Thailand Viet Nam

R S — R R R R R S R

— — — R — — S — — —

M M — M M M M M M M

CA OIE, CA — OIE, CA OIE, CA CA OIE, CA OIE, CA OIE, CA OIE, CA

APEC (FWG, MRCWG)e

ASEANf

IOTCg

CCSBTh

M M — M M M M M M M

— — — M M — M — M —

B: Regional Country Brunei Cambodia East Timor Indonesia Malaysia Myanmar Philippines Singapore Thailand Viet Nam

M

M M — M M M M

— M

C

WCPFCi — — — S, C — — S, M — —

APFICj M M M M M M M

SEAFDECk M M — M M M M M M M

Abbreviations: M, member; R, signed and ratiﬁed; S, signed but not yet ratiﬁed; O, observer; C, cooperating nonmember; ?, decisions pending. a

U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982. U.N. Agreement for the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks 1995. c World Trade Organization. d Ofﬁce International des Epizooties, Codex Alimentarius, the global food standards body. e Asia Paciﬁc Economic Forum (Fisheries Working Group, Marine Resources Conservation Working Group). f Association of Southeast Asian Nations. g Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. h Commission for the Conservation of Southern Blueﬁn Tuna. i Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission, the agency established by the Convention for the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks of the western and central Paciﬁc. j Asia Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission. k Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center. b

Source: Williams (2007).

exploring the possibility of an ASEAN Regional Management Mechanism with the assistance of SEAFDEC and APFIC. Trade information for SEA is collated by INFOFISH, based in Malaysia. Since the early 1990s, East Asian countries, including those of SEA, expanded their regional programs in integrated coastal management. In 2003, all the SEA and other East Asian countries agreed to the Sustainable Development Strategy for the Seas of East Asia (Partnerships in Environmental

Management for the Seas of East Asia [PEMSEA] 2003). Fisheries are included in this strategy, but ﬁsheries ministries have not engaged fully with such integrated coastal management initiatives.

18.2.2. New Fisheries Management Approaches The current ﬁsheries management practices and agencies in SEA—ﬁsheries departments, usually

Southeast Asian Fisheries inside the ministries of agriculture–lack the full range of tools and resources to control ﬁshing effort and its effects. Most ﬁsheries management agencies were modeled on those from the colonial powers or developed world from an era of open access ﬁsheries, and although these models have changed to address modern ﬁsheries challenges in these countries, those of SEA have remained relatively static. They were based on central ﬁsheries management systems that could not adequately reach the vast number and diversity of ﬁsheries operations in SEA, many of them remote and isolated. Government agencies also often have difﬁculty coping with marine ecosystem conservation and the competing claims of different industries for coastal and ocean space. Only Indonesia has created a comprehensive ministry, the Ministry for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries. Before the colonial era, local resource management systems provided social and economic order to ﬁshing and some provided important conservation and resource management (Ruddle 1994). Some of these traditional community-based systems persisted through major changes in ﬁsheries technology and political systems, but many were eroded. Exceptions do exist; for example, 75 percent of villages surveyed in Maluku, Indonesia, still had some form of sasi laut (a community-based institution [sasi] for managing the sea [laut]) (Novaczek et al. 2001), and elements of the traditional van chai (local stakeholder organizations) system persist in coastal Viet Nam (Ruddle 1998). Now, some of these systems are being strengthened and adapted as part of the change to co-management (see next section) (Cinner and Aswami 2007). Mainstream ﬁsheries management is being reshaped by two trends: ﬁsheries co-management and the ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries. The former encourages participation of both government and stakeholders in ﬁsheries management, while the latter is a broadening of management to consider ecosystems in a context of the three dimensions of sustainable development—ecological, social, and economic. Both approaches are particularly useful in managing small-scale ﬁsheries (Berkes et al. 2001; Pomeroy and Rivera-Guieb 2006). In SEA, comanagement has been initiated as part of national government decentralization policies and a way to manage depleted ﬁsheries resources through cooperation between central government agencies and local communities. Poverty, but rarely gender and other representational dimensions, has also been

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a driver of community-based and co-management management movements (APFIC 2005a). Co-management, because it deals with day-to-day issues of the stakeholders, covers a more comprehensive set of environment concerns and interactions with other users and thus encourages an ecosystem approach. Broad multisectoral ecosystem approaches, for example, large marine ecosystem projects (Olsen et al. 2006), have included ﬁsheries management in their mandate across a range of geographic and political scales. The extent to which both approaches address equity of access and use rights is less prescribed.

18.2.2.1. Co-management and Community-Based Management In the Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam during the 1990s and early 2000s, governments changed their legislation to allow for greater devolution and decentralization, including in ﬁsheries and coastal area management. Under devolution, subnational levels of government (provincial, state, local) were given responsibilities, and civil society organizations and communities were potentially offered a more active role. However, in practice, sharing of ﬁsheries management roles and responsibilities between government agencies and users groups is fraught with problems, including low management capacity, inequity, problems of legitimating authority, and unclear demarcation of responsibilities between different government levels (see, e.g., Fox et al. 2005 for Indonesia). Co-management bridges centralized and community self-management (ﬁgure 18.1). Co-management and community-based management are based on common property theory, located between pure state property and pure communal property systems (Pomeroy and Riviera-Guieb 2006). Not all governments have formal policy and legislation frameworks to support this, although momentum is gathering (Macfadyen et al. 2005). In 2006, national ﬁsheries policies in Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines Thailand, and Viet Nam did make speciﬁc provision for co-management and communitybased management, but Malaysian and Myanmar policies did not (APFIC 2006b). At the 2006 APFIC meeting, SEA countries agreed to the principle of co-management, a major normative move that APFIC will track. In SEA, the practice of co-management has often been based mainly on pilot projects that are

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Government centralised management

Co-management

Community self-governmance and self-management

Informing Consultation Cooperation Communication Information exchange Advisory role Jointaction Partnership Community control Inter-area coordination FIGURE

18.1 Schematic of co-management. (Adapted from Pomeroy and Ahmed 2006)

not sustained after funding is withdrawn (APFIC 2005a). More recently, co-management is being brought into mainstream ﬁsheries policies in several countries, the notable example being Cambodia, where a new Community Fisheries Development Ofﬁce has been established. Under co-management, lessons and many positive outcomes for enforcement and compliance, changes in transaction costs, and institutional resilience are well documented (Pomeroy and Ahmed 2006). Few studies, however, have documented consistently the changes in resource and conservation status, although many cases are still in their early stages, and little improvement might yet be expected. Community-based management inevitably becomes more difﬁcult in the presence of other marine industries, such as tourism, cities, and ports, and is particularly vulnerable to unregulated larger scale commercial ﬁshing that undermines local measures, as is discussed further below.

18.2.2.2. Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Whereas some progress has been achieved in bringing co-management into mainstream ﬁsheries policies in many SEA countries, the newer ecosystem-based approach has progressed less. Only Indonesia, Malaysia, and Philippines ﬁsheries policies make any reference to ecosystem approaches or their components, for example, biodiversity (APFIC 2006b). This partly reﬂects the fact that, although

ecosystems approaches have been practiced traditionally for centuries, ecosystem approaches to ﬁsheries, as deﬁned by developed countries, are recent, and that few agreed concrete measures are yet available, especially for the complex marine ecosystems of SEA. However, as the ecosystem approach becomes more widely understood, it will become more apparent that SEA countries are already practicing some aspects of the approach. Use of marine protected areas, ﬁsh refuges, and ﬁsh sanctuaries, for example, are included in most country’s policies (APFIC 2006b). APFIC in 2008 has agreed to make the ecosystem approach a major theme for the biennium 2009–2010. Several theoretical ecosystem approaches to ﬁsheries and marine ecosystem management3 (see chapters 6 and 10) are proposed to address problems within and external to ﬁsheries. These approaches are more comprehensive than conventional ﬁsheries management and go beyond single-species approaches (Pikitch et al. 2004), and incorporate social and economic elements (see chapter 39). In SEA, a Philippines ﬁsheries project (FISH) is testing ecosystem-based ﬁsheries management in a tropical developing country (Christie et al. 2007). In the Philippines, ecosystem approaches were reframed to exhibit concern for societal as well as natural ecosystem wellbeing. Four ecosystem-based pilot sites, deﬁned on ﬁsheries not political boundaries, each connect authorities in different government layers (national, provincial, and local/municipal) (Christie et al. 2007).

Southeast Asian Fisheries

18.2.3. Addressing Existing Fisheries Management Problems In SEA, new ﬁsheries management trends, such as co-management and ecosystem approaches, are overlays to existing ﬁsheries management practices, many of which are only weakly institutionalized. Fishing capacity has few controls except for economic and social measures that act to deter expansion in extreme cases. Illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) ﬁshing is rife, and ﬁsheries information is inadequate. Fisheries management is not effective and public and private beneﬁts are dissipated.

18.2.3.1. Creating Rights-Based Systems, Limiting Access, and Managing Fishing Capacity Moving from open access ﬁsheries to rights-based ﬁsheries is a major challenge for SEA. Rights for small-scale ﬁshers are more likely to be group rights in the form of territorial use rights than individual rights (Anuchiracheeva 2000). Even group rights are problematic, however, because most SEA ﬁsheries are mixed small- and large-scale ﬁsheries and full rights to coastal areas are rarely secured or respected. Indeed, common property rights to coastal ﬁsheries resources are rarely protected by law, and expansion of ﬁshing and other coastal uses erodes these rights and creates de facto open access or no property rights systems (Kurien 2000). Rights-based systems are rarely referred to in SEA ﬁsheries policies (APFIC 2006b). Malaysia and Viet Nam, on the one hand, seek to reduce the number of ﬁshers. On the other hand, others want to increase employment in ﬁsheries, for example, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines (“maximizing” employment), and Thailand (APFIC 2006b). A major research and policy task is to design appropriate rights systems for SEA ﬁsheries, although it is difﬁcult to see how these rights-based systems will limit ﬁsheries access in the foreseeable future. These systems will probably evolve through strengthening co-management rather than a topdown approach. More favored forms of reducing ﬁshing pressure in SEA are the following: (a) Supporting alternative livelihoods, for example, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Viet Nam (APFIC 2006b). Aquaculture is often cited, often mistakenly, as an alternative (discussed below).

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(b) Transferring excess ﬁshing effort from nearshore waters to offshore waters, for example, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam. This policy also can backﬁre, resulting in increased overall ﬁshing pressure. (c) Closed seasons and zoned ﬁshing areas for different vessel sizes (Silvestre et al. 2003). These measures are widespread but have a history of repeated failure unless supported by locally based management measures. For example, Phang Nga Bay community-based management (Thailand) tackled resource depletion and conﬂicts with trawlers (Macfadyen et al. 2005) through successful closed areas, but in the Gulf of Thailand since the 1950s, large areas repeatedly failed as effective ﬁsh refuges when nationally proclaimed regulations were ﬂouted (Saikliang 2006). In Thailand, Cambodia, and Philippines, studies on ﬁshers’ perceptions of acceptable exit strategies indicated that sustainable alternative livelihoods, banning the use of some gears and establishment of protected areas were the only widely accepted solutions (Salayo et al. 2008). All SEA countries recognize the problem of overcapacity in ﬁsheries and its link to overﬁshing, and some have developed national plans of action based on the International Plan of Action on the Management of Fishing Capacity, part of the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fishing. By 2007, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia had national plans of action on ﬁshing capacity; Philippines and Viet Nam were still to develop theirs; and Thailand claimed ongoing action (Morgan et al. 2007). In Asia, ﬁsheries capacity reduction programs generally have not succeeded (Morgan et al. 2007), though continuing and renewed efforts were reported by all SEA countries at the 2008 APFIC meeting. Social, biological, economic, and political factors determine “optimal ﬁshing capacity” in any ﬁshery or country, but even if achieved, this level of ﬁshing is often not sustainable in the long term. Most capacity control efforts target the large registered vessels. Although registered to ﬁsh, these often violate their license and ﬁshing regulations, for example, ﬁshing illegally inshore or with proscribed gear. In most SEA countries, small-scale ﬁshers do not have to register their boats or gear, and their capacity is not easily assessed or controlled. In SEA, vessel decommissioning is rare and piecemeal and often accompanied by incentives to upgrade vessels for offshore ﬁshing. On the Malaysian west coast, the Department of Fisheries

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bought out and sunk trawlers but offered ﬁnancial assistance to replace these with offshore vessels (Majid 2008).

Fishing Practices Including Combating IUU Fishing in the Region.” This regional plan of action has been endorsed by the ministers responsible for ﬁsheries of those ten countries during “Regional Ministerial Meeting on Promoting Responsible Fishing Practices Including Combating IUU Fishing in the Region” held in Bali, Indonesia, on 4 May 2007.

18.2.3.2. Addressing IUU In SEA, IUU ﬁshing is a major problem inside and across maritime borders. IUU ﬁshing is also one of the most critical diplomatic ﬁshing issues among SEA countries and with neighbors, for example, Indonesia and Australia (Williams 2007). Malaysia, Philippines, and Viet Nam reported that unregistered vessels, prohibited gear and methods, and ﬁshing without access agreements were the main IUU problems (Morgan et al. 2007). Across Asia, including SEA, large-scale ﬁsheries lost the most due to IUU—10.5 percent due to national vessels poaching and 9 percent due to foreign vessels; small-scale ﬁsheries lost 6 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively (Morgan et al. 2007). All SEA countries refer to policy measures to combat IUU ﬁshing, and some countries such as Indonesia are taking a tougher stance against IUU (APFIC 2006b; unpublished 2008 reports to APFIC). However, despite the high level of IUU ﬁshing, SEA countries have not formed regional mechanisms to tackle it, nor are they very active in international arrangements (Morgan et al. 2007; Williams 2007). A recent advance is a regional initiative to promote a more collaborative effort to promote responsible ﬁshing practices, including management of ﬁshing capacity, and combating IUU ﬁshing has been undertaken recently by ten countries—Indonesia, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Viet Nam—by formulating the “Regional Plan of Action to Promote Responsible

TABLE

18.2.3.3. Fisheries Data and Statistics Information on SEA ﬁsheries is inadequate. Fisheries data collections are poor, especially for smallscale ﬁsheries (De Young 2007), and few countries undertake regular assessments on the status of stocks (Lungren et al. 2006) (table 18.3). In SEA, many surveys and studies have been conducted, but they were either project-funded and ad hoc, or not analyzed in a way useful for ﬁsheries management. An excellent analysis of past trawl surveys is given in Silvestre et al. (2003), demonstrating the usefulness of these surveys, if analyzed adequately. Socioeconomic information is even less well covered.

18.2.4. External Fisheries Management Challenges So far, this chapter has addressed challenges generated within ﬁsheries, such as overcapacity and poorly deﬁned rights systems. But ﬁsheries also have to contend with competition from aquaculture, the demand for ﬁsh for trade, degrading environments, threats from climate change, and other coastal uses. Also, parts of SEA are prone to natural disasters, such as regular typhoons in the Philippines and Viet Nam, ﬂoods, and occasional

18.3 Summary of ﬁsheries assessment practices in selected SEA countries

Country Indonesia Malaysia Myanmar Philippines Thailand Viet Nam

Regular Stock Assessment No Yes No No No No

Number of Speciesa Multiple species Main species Multiple species Multiple species Multiple species Multiple species

Resource Surveys b

Yes Yes Yesb Yes Yes Yesa

Abbreviations: MEC, maximum economic yield; MSY, maximum sustained yield. a

Multiple species assessments based on aggregated catch and effort data. Surveys not regular.

b

Source: Extracted from Lungren et al. (2006, table 14).

Reference Points

Used in Management

Generic MSY MSY, MEY Generic MSY Generic MSY Generic MSY Generic MSY

Yes (partial) Yes No No No No

Southeast Asian Fisheries tsunamis. Almost all of these external challenges push ﬁsheries sustainability further down policy priorities, reducing government attention or directing it to other ﬁsheries issues, and reduce ﬁsheries credit-worthiness and shake public trust in ﬁshing. Rarely is attention given to how ﬁsheries can be positioned to contribute to greater public and private beneﬁts such as rebuilt ﬁsh stocks and improved local economies.

18.2.4.1. Aquaculture Thailand, Viet Nam, Philippines, and Malaysia are major marine aquaculture producers, and marine aquaculture is expanding also in Malaysia and Myanmar. Fisheries and aquaculture compete “in the ecosystem and the marketplace” (Anderson 2008). In SEA, aquaculture offers a privatized, more controllable, and innovative way to produce more ﬁsh. A single ministry or department is usually responsible for ﬁsheries management and aquaculture. With more evident beneﬁts, aquaculture often garners more government resources for personnel, enforcement, research, and data gathering compared to ﬁsheries, and this trend will continue as aquaculture grows and ﬁsheries production decline. Some synergies between aquaculture and ﬁsheries occur in product quality and safety schemes that SEA countries are actively pursuing. There has been recent interest in certiﬁcation schemes covering both sustainability and food safety aspects. Although often seen as an alternative to ﬁshing, most of the ﬁsh farmers were not formerly ﬁshers. For example, in Thailand, only 25 percent (west coast) and 29 percent (east coast) of shrimp farmers had been ﬁshers; among Viet Nam shrimp farmers, less than 10 percent has been ﬁshers (Lebel et al. 2002). Many marine species cultured also still rely on wild-caught fry or brood stock to stock ponds and cages, for example, black tiger prawn (Penaeus monodon). Small ﬁsh from trawls are also used as feeds for aquaculture (Funge-Smith et al. 2005), both as direct feed for cages and indirectly in ﬁsh meal, an essential ingredient in aquaculture feeds. As a result, discard rates are estimated at only about 1 percent for SEA trawl ﬁsheries (Kelleher 2005), and the demand for such ﬁsh drives further overexploitation. For example, in 1999 in Thailand, 45 percent of the trawl catch was of low-value and “trash” ﬁsh (APFIC 2005b).

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18.2.4.2. The Fish Supply Chain and Trade SEA free trade agreements and promotion of ﬁsh trade have not been counterbalanced by ﬁsheries controls. An ASEAN roadmap to promote trade in the region was protested by nongovernment organizations because its free trade provisions were not matched with measures that protect overexploited ﬁsh stocks (Rivera 2006). Fisheries management is usually subjugated to trade policies and imperatives negotiated in more inﬂuential government circles, such as ministries of ﬁnance and trade. International trade can change ﬁsh supply chains creating winners and losers. Trade improves product quality and centralizes landings and processing, thus changing the access to product by coastal communities (see also chapter 5 on gender issues). To maintain international market access, departments/ministries of ﬁsheries and the ﬁshing industry also have to deal with a wide range of new market requirements, common to aquaculture also, for environmental, safety, and quality standards and certiﬁcation procedures. For example, in the World Trade Organization from 1996 to 2001, Malaysia, Thailand, and the United States engaged in trade disputes over shrimps and sea turtles. In 2001, after winning a partial victory on the discriminatory nature of the ban, the amended U.S. position eventually held (Anonymous 2001), but the United States gave technical assistance to introduce turtle excluder devices on shrimp trawls. Other examples include the Viet Nam–U.S. pangasius catﬁsh naming dispute; the U.S. shrimp tariffs on antidumping dispute (overturned); E.U. zero tolerance on the antimicrobials and antibiotics chloramphenicol and nitrofuran, resulting in rejections of shrimp; and the Australia risk analysis on fresh shrimp import.

18.2.4.3. The State of SEA Marine Ecosystems Fishing and the ﬁsh supply chains, such as landing ports and processing plants, contribute to marine ecosystem degradation and are also victims of environmental degradation. SEA has some of the world’s highest rates of environmental degradation, for example, deforestation (U.N. Environment Program 2007). Marine environment status reports highlight the high toll from declining marine and coastal resources and environment, such as food security undermined, coastal erosion, economic

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development unable to compensate for degradation, and threats to human health from polluted seafood (www.pemsea.org; Asian Development Bank 2002; ASEAN 2006). Speciﬁc SEA ecosystems are at risk: Coral reefs in SEA contain the highest biodiversity of coral, reef ﬁshes, and likely other animal groups and are the most threatened in the world (Burke et al. 2002); only Indonesian reefs showed apparently improving condition in the decade 1994–2004 (Wilkinson 2004). Mangrove resources have declined dramatically and continue to decline in all SEA countries (Wilkie and Fortuna 2003). Sea grass habitats are not well mapped, monitored, or protected by marine parks. Currently, SEA state-of-the-environment reports are based not on regular monitoring, but rather on aggregate fragmented study results. However, the PEMSEA project is developing a “state of the coasts” reporting system that will greatly improve environment reporting.

18.2.4.4. SEA Fisheries Management and Fuel Costs Motorized SEA ﬁshing vessels are struggling to remain proﬁtable under high fuel prices and declining catches. Fuel efﬁciency will be a major future operating factor. Under pressure from ﬁshers, ﬁshing fuel subsidy mechanisms have been developed in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand (Sumaila et al. 2008) and in Viet Nam (Thanh Nien News 2008). The pressure for relief is increasing, yet despite the fact that these subsidies are propping up unsustainable practices, governments have not required signiﬁcant ﬂeet restructures or other concessions to compensate. In Viet Nam, some fuel subsidies were made conditional on building larger offshore vessels. Viet Nam ﬁshers also report innovative cooperative ﬁshing trips to minimize group fuel costs (Thanh Nien News 2008).

18.2.4.5. Competing Uses of the Marine Ecosystem and Integrated Coastal Area Management Within marine ecosystems, the position of ﬁsheries will be determined by the extent of other activities

and the institutions that govern ecosystem uses. Thus, ﬁsheries positions vary greatly with location, for example, whether urban, rural, or insular, and country. Since SEA ﬁshing is widespread and other coastal activities are expanding, it overlaps increasingly with other uses of marine resources. Marine ﬁshing is always overtaken in urban and coastal development, pushed out of landing beaches and ports and outcompeted for seaspace by shipping, aquaculture, and pollution. Within countries, two institutions, often in concert, that inﬂuence the position of ﬁsheries are integrated coastal zone management and decentralized coastal management. A comparison of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Philippines with respect to these institutions (Siry 2007) shows that Indonesia and Philippines are most advanced in terms of supporting legislation and government and civil society implementation capacity, and the centralized Malaysian system lags in both. However, all countries still lacked implementation capacity (Siry 2007). Nearly thirty years ago, the concept of integrated coastal area management arose because sectoral approaches were recognized as insufﬁcient to deal with many ﬁsheries problems (Chua 2006). However, to date, too little progress has been made on integrating ﬁsheries into coastal area management frameworks (Ganapin et al. 2007). Judging by the experts and politicians who attended the East Asian Seas congresses in 2003 and 2006, shipping, ports, tourism, and environment sectors have each engaged more actively than ﬁsheries in integrated coastal management, although they only focus on ports and harbors and do not really address ﬁsheries issues that extend to whole coastlines. In marine spatial planning, ﬁshing communities, and especially their atsea activities, are usually missing from the planning information (St Martin and Hall-Arber 2008). In SEA conservation projects, such as the Global Environment Facility–South China Sea project, demonstration sites are designated for habitat conservation and ﬁsheries refuges, the latter being developed based on critical life cycle stages of key ﬁsheries species (www.unepscs.org). In more urban and industrial settings, integrated coastal management projects, such as those of PEMSEA (www.pemsea.org/sites), tend not to have a high ﬁsheries component. In integrated coastal management zoning, ﬁshing and aquaculture tend to be placed in outer sea regions because of inshore pollution and/or other higher value uses of the environment (Chua 2006). Furthermore, coastal

Southeast Asian Fisheries economic development, albeit aspiring to be ecologically sustainable, may be the main purpose of integrated management. Indonesian Law 27/2007 on the management of coastal zones and small islands was passed as “a strategic step to divert the national development policy from land-oriented to sea-oriented” (Anonymous 2007).

18.2.4.6. Emergencies and Disasters Because coastal communities live close to the sea right along the coasts of all SEA counties, they are extremely vulnerable to disasters. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and southern Myanmar; typhoons in Myanmar, Philippines and Viet Nam; and oil spills such as the 2006 Solar I oil spill off Guimaras province in the Philippines are all examples of recent disasters that have affected ﬁsheries and ﬁshing communities. After each disaster, plans are made that are meant to reduce the impact of the next disaster, but in practice little is done. Large amounts of aid money, both foreign and national, are required for recovery and rehabilitation, but little is invested in long-term disaster prevention and preparedness. Following the 2004 tsunami, the affected countries were swamped by nongovernmental organizations wanting to assist. However, the recovery process was very chaotic, and the tendency to try to provide small-level assets to affected people (rather than strategically plan rehabilitation at community level over a long term) meant that the most common response was to replace the ﬁshing boats and gear of the small-scale ﬁshers. Three years after the tsunami, there are more boats present than before (not all are being used), and many are of poor quality, adding to the ﬁsheries management problems that existed in these areas. Perhaps the silver lining for some communities such as those in Banda Aceh is that international aid from unconventional donors that are taking longer term visions is now being used to strengthen ﬁsheries management.

18.3. REGIONAL PROSPECTS FOR PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BENEFITS FROM FISHERIES For centuries, SEA’s seas and marine ecosystems have delivered many private and public

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socioeconomic and cultural beneﬁts, particularly to small-scale ﬁshing communities. The continued provision of these beneﬁts is being severely threatened and SEA countries will need to respond. Presently, regional ﬁsheries cooperation is minimal and will take time to build. Furthermore, the ﬁsheries sector is engaged only weakly and in a reactive way with wider economic and integrated coastal management systems. Fisheries and other economic developments have outstripped society’s capacity to ensure sustainability. Presently, local and national ﬁsheries management is not based on sustainable development principles, pursuing near term economic, and mainly private beneﬁt. The main policies are all production driven, and the SEA broader marine management discussion needs to be reframed in terms of achieving greater beneﬁts and increased equity—between ﬁsheries and other economic sectors, and between ﬁsheries and the environment. Parties will need to perceive that the beneﬁts of cooperation within the sector and across sectors outweigh the present downward spiral of separate and individual actions. In all SEA countries, ﬁshing is a major industry and supports many livelihoods. The demand for ﬁsh is great, and if ﬁsheries were better managed, the region would have a comparative advantage. We propose that guideposts to a sustainable ﬁsheries transition are emerging as SEA countries come to grips with the issues. The guideposts result from a combination of insights from indigenous approaches, such as traditional community-based management, and external tools, norms, and targets such as ecosystem-based approaches, the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, and the ﬁsheries targets of the WSSD, and build on the move to decentralization and more participatory approaches that are occurring in the region. To achieve an effective transition to sustainable marine ﬁsheries, almost certainly at a lower catch level and with fewer ﬁshers than at present, we suggest ﬁsheries management institutes giving attention to the following three policy directions. 1. Build cooperation: Fisheries are connected— with other sectors, across levels of government and across countries. In the short term, national government ﬁsheries managers need to strengthen cooperation with other government ministries and with outside agencies. To position ﬁsheries, SEA governments need a whole-government approach. For example, ﬁshing capacity reduction programs,

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resource conservation, and marine spatial planning needs to be coordinated with ﬁnance, social assistance, conservation, and other sector ministries, for example, ports and trade. The impetus to create this could come from the ﬁsheries ministry. In some countries, such as Indonesia, this approach is made easier by a more integrated marine ministry. At subnational levels, national ﬁsheries ministries must create the frameworks for well-coordinated co-management, with nested governance, from local to regional. They and their subnational government counterparts and stakeholders need to also be well coordinated with respect to both ﬁsheries matters and interests outside ﬁsheries in order to jointly work out solutions to problems involving ﬁsheries. Building cooperation within countries is an immediate imperative and one that should grow the capacity for external engagement. Building regional cooperation is a middle- to long-term imperative that needs to accelerate. Tackling cross-border IUU is a necessary ﬁrst step, but this needs to be followed by managing shared stocks and creating regional ﬁsheries synergies. All ﬁsheries cooperation should be built on good information on ﬁshing, the ﬁshers, supply chains, marine resources, and ecosystems. 2. Improve the levers of control of ﬁsheries exploitation: Presently, SEA has little control over ﬁshing capacity and effort, and the coastal resources are almost universally overexploited. Steps are being taken to address this, but much more needs to be done. Less ﬁshing needs to be translated into socially just and advantageous programs. Sensible employment programs should help the private sector create jobs outside ﬁshing and redirect some jobs out of ﬁshing and into ﬁsheries service and ﬁsh postharvest industries that improve the value of the product and the community wellbeing. Formal recognition and protection of the rights to ﬁsh are intrinsic to community well-being. Through co-management, ﬁshers need to determine who can and who cannot ﬁsh on behalf of the society at large. This needs to involve both large-scale and small-scale ﬁsheries and appropriate rightbased systems. Wherever possible, rights should only be ceded voluntarily and with compensation, not taken away by the “might” of government or private entrepreneurs. Effective ﬁshing controls, especially top-down rules and regulations, are difﬁcult to enforce because they can be subverted by gear innovations and noncompliance. Therefore, managers at all

levels must develop better knowledge of conditions in the ﬁshery and call on all the valuable lessons from research on compliance and enforcement, such as creating legitimate regulations based on the best available information, wide consultation and regular public justiﬁcation. Compliance will also be improved with enhanced enforcement plus locallevel engagement with the control measures. 3. Build the ﬁsheries information base rapidly and make information publicly accessible: Fisheries management needs good information. In SEA, this is a particular challenge given the large number of ﬁsh species, ecosystems, and ﬁshers, all of which cover a broad geographic scale. Despite the size and importance of the marine ﬁsheries sector, information on ﬁsh, ﬁshing, ﬁsheries, and marine ecosystems is still hard to ﬁnd. Information must be made more publicly accessible, and information gaps acknowledged. As well as Web-based information in local languages, appropriate information exchange is needed at local level. Fortunately, more devolved ﬁsheries management stimulates the demand for and collection of better information. Marine spatial planning will only recognize ﬁsheries if relevant information is available. SEA has a large number of researchers and research agencies, but much of the research is not linked to management or decision making. Involving the researchers in planning and monitoring of management performance is essential. SEA researchers will have to become more familiar with the tools for rapid appraisals that are available and should be using these in a more targeted way. However, rapid appraisals may form the backdrop for more detailed information that can only be found from special research and survey, such as information on ﬁsh life cycles needed to design ﬁsh refuges. In conclusion, we propose that SEA, one of the most important ﬁsheries regions of the world, needs to improve its governance and ﬁsheries management systems to increase the contribution that the sector makes to sustainable regional development. Key steps in the transition to sustainability are building cooperation, better control on ﬁshing capacity and effort, and better, more accessible ﬂow of information.

Notes 1. Only after World War II was SEA viewed as a culturally and economically distinguishable

Southeast Asian Fisheries geographic region, having been previously considered as an area where Chinese and Indian cultural and economic interests penetrated (Osborne 2004). 2. For example, Malaysia and Indonesia are still negotiating sea territory in the Sulu Sea off the northeast coast of Borneo/Kalimantan, involving the islands of Sipadan, Ligitan, and, separately, the Ambalat oil block. Malaysia won a decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2002 on Sipadan and Ligitan, but Indonesia is establishing settlements on small islands in the Sulu Sea to assist further claims. Indonesia also has borders to be settled with the new nation of East Timor, Singapore, and some of its Australian boundary. In 2008, Singapore won its ICJ claim against Malaysia to the rocky outcrop of Pedra Branca/Batu Putih in the Singapore Strait. The South China Sea is one of the world’s most contested marine territories. 3. Christie et al. (2007) distinguishes terms with a ﬁsheries focus: EC, ecosystem considerations; EBFM, ecosystem-based ﬁsheries management; and EAF, ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries; from those with a marine ecosystem focus: EBM, ecosystembased management; EAM, ecosystem approach to management; LMW, large marine ecosystem-based management; and EM, ecosystem management. The terms more or less form a continuum from approaches seeking the least to the greatest ecosystem conservation.

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19 West African Coastal Capture Fisheries BENEDICT P. SATIA ALHAJI M. JALLOW

19.1. INTRODUCTION 19.1.1. Description of the Area The area covered in this review extends from Morocco, including the Canary Islands, to Angola below the mouth of the Congo River (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] Statistical Area 34) and covers a total of 14.2 million square kilometers (ﬁgure 19.1). The continental shelf is generally narrow, a total of 0.65 million square kilometers. Two large marine ecosystems (LMEs)—the Canary Current LME and the Gulf of Guinea LME—are dominant in the region, while the southern part is affected by the Benguela Current LME. These three LMEs rank among the most productive coastal and offshore waters in the world, with rich ﬁshery resources, oil and gas reserves, precious minerals, a high potential for tourism, and a reservoir of marine biodiversity of global signiﬁcance (Bakun 1978; Koranteng et al. 1996; Payne et al. 1987; Sherman 1993). The area encompasses temperate, tropical, and equatorial waters, lagoons, and estuaries. The waters are ﬁshed by 22 coastal countries and more than 47 foreign/distant-water ﬁshing nations (DWFNs). The region can be divided into three natural ecological zones with varying abundance of ﬁshery resources. The northern zone from the Straits of Gibraltar to 5°N includes offshore upwelling areas, shallow banks, and near-shore estuaries and

is highly productive. The second zone extends from 5°N to the equator. Its upwelling phenomenon is concentrated off Ghana but is enhanced by inﬂuxes of nutrients from adjoining rivers and estuaries. Fishery resources are less abundant, and the economic importance of ﬁsheries is relatively less except in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire (Kebe and Tallec 2006). The zone is characterized by extensive lagoon systems from Cote d’Ivoire to Cameroon. The lagoons and wetlands (intertidal mangrove swamps and estuarine and beach ridges) are important nursery and breeding grounds for some species, including shrimps and coastal pelagic species. The third zone is from the equator to Angola. The abundance of its resources is similar to that of the northern zone, due in part to the inﬂuence of the upwelling phenomenon of the Benguela Current. Some of the major resources in all the zones are shared, that is, distributed in waters under the jurisdiction of two or more states.

19.1.2. Importance of the Fisheries Sector According to the FAO (2004), more than 4.5 million people in the region are critically dependent on ﬁshing for their livelihoods, food security, employment, and income through wealth generation and exports. The ﬁsheries also support subsistence activities and provide “employment of last resort,” thereby reducing vulnerabilities of ﬁsheries communities,

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19.1 The marine Coastal Area of West Africa: FAO Statistical Area 34. (www.fao. org/ﬁshery/area/Area 34/en)

FIGURE

which are often characterized as among the poorest in society. Nutritionally, staples such as rice, wheat, maize, and cassava make up the bulk of the food consumed by the people, supplying the majority of energy and nutrients. However, ﬁsh is a very important source of dietary protein, especially in the ﬁsheries communities, and plays a vital role in human nutrition through its richness in micronutrients. Average yearly per capita consumption of ﬁsh is on the decline, from 13 kg (live weight equivalent) in the mid-1990s to only 8 kg in 2003, but this represents more than 30 percent of the average daily protein consumption. Per capita consumption is greater than 20 kg/year in Gambia, Gabon, Ghana, and Senegal (Laurenti 2007). There is a marked disparity even within countries and that reﬂects a wide range of different situations: ﬁsh supply, demand, and purchasing power. The gradual decline in per capita consumption of ﬁsh over the past decade is expected to continue unless supplies and per capita incomes increase. Rapid population growth in the region—3–4 percent per year—and sustained expansion of international trade in ﬁsh caused a transformation of the ﬁsheries during the past two decades. This situation is coupled by growing number of ﬁshers, rapidly expanding demand for ﬁsh outside

ﬁsheries communities, an increasing share of highvalue African landings exported out of the region, and a ﬂourishing intraregional trade in ﬁsh and ﬁshery products even as ﬁsh stocks are dwindling (International Collective in Support of Fishworkers [ICSF] 2001). Fish trade accounted for, on average, 27.8 percent of the total agricultural exports in the region (FAO 2007a). Globalization and further liberalization of both intraregional and world trade offer many beneﬁts and opportunities in the region. Balancing resource access and economic opportunity, new safety, and quality requirements are important challenges. Globalization and trade also have negative effects on ﬁsheries sustainability (FAO 2006; Kurien 2005). It has been suggested that improved risk-based tools must be adopted so that the ﬁsh safety standards at landing sites and factories reﬂect the most current and effective scientiﬁc methods available to protect public health (FAO 2006). The marine ﬁsheries sector is also an important source of revenue for some national economies, often contributing to servicing local and foreign debts. However, in several countries the sector’s contribution to national economies is less than 2 percent (Kebe and Tallec 2006). In Mauritania, ﬁsh landings amount to about 430,000 metric tons annually, contributing 12 percent to gross domestic

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product (GDP) and 22–29 percent to the national budget, providing more than 26,000 jobs, and accounting for more than 50 percent of the foreign exchange earnings. In contrast, in Benin the marine ﬁsheries sector employs about 5,000 active ﬁshers, lands about 10,000 metric tons annually, and contributes less than 2 percent to GDP (Gbaguidi 2008; Kebe and Tallec 2006; Marine Resources Assessment Group [MRAG] 2005).

19.1.3. Proﬁle of the Marine Fisheries Sector The sector consists of (1) inshore ﬁsheries exploited mostly by artisanal or small-scale ﬁshers and (2) offshore ﬁsheries exploited mainly by industrial ﬁsheries. The latter is made up of national and foreign-ﬂag/DWFN vessels. Small-scale ﬁsheries in the region comprise a dynamic and evolving subsector, employing labor-intensive harvesting, processing, and distribution technologies to generally exploit near-shore ﬁshery resources, within ﬁve nautical miles from the lowest baseline on the coast.1 The subsector operates at widely differing organizational levels ranging from self-employed (full-time, part-time, or seasonal) single operators through informal micro-enterprises to formal businesses, supplying ﬁsh and ﬁshery products to local and domestic markets and for subsistence consumption (Satia and Horemans 1993). Export-oriented production has increased signiﬁcantly over the past decade because of greater market integration and globalization (ICSF 2001). Technological advancement in terms of outboard and in-board motors combined with geographical positioning systems (GPS) have greatly enlarged the area of operation of small-scale ﬁshers beyond the zone normally reserved for the sector (Everett and Sheves 1991; Satia and Horemans 1993). Typically, more men are engaged in ﬁshing and more women in ﬁsh processing and marketing, but even when not directly engaged in ﬁshing, women are known to ﬁnance a signiﬁcant proportion of small-scale ﬁsheries activities (FAO 2007a; Satia and Wetohossou 1996). The industrial ﬁsheries consist of enterprises of varying sizes. The subsector employs capitalintensive ﬁshing technologies and salaried crews. The vessels consists of trawlers, purse seines, and shrimp trawlers generally more than 12 m long and licensed to ﬁsh in offshore waters. However, industrial ﬁshers tend to intrude inshore waters reserved for nontrawl ﬁshing (FAO 1998). An

important component of the industrial ﬁsheries is foreign-ﬂag vessels operating on the basis of ﬁsheries access agreements (FFAs), ﬁsheries partnership agreements (FPAs) or joint-venture arrangements (MRAG 2005). At least 14 countries in the region have signed ﬁsheries agreements with the European Union or entered into joint venture arrangements with other foreign countries (Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements 2005; MRAG 2005).

19.2. STATUS AND TRENDS OF THE FISHERIES 19.2.1. Resource Status The ﬁsheries of West Africa are among the most diverse in the world and consist of small and large pelagic species, demersal ﬁnﬁsh species, and crustaceans and mollusks. The small pelagic resources account for nearly 50 percent by mass of total catches. They are the most important in terms of food security to coastal communities and are also the most commonly shared stocks in view of their migratory nature. About 70 percent of the small pelagics are exploited by artisanal ﬁshers, although important industrial ﬁshing for these resources takes place in a few countries (Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Gabon, Mauritania, Morocco, and Senegal). The most important pelagic species from a livelihood and economic perspective include sardines, sardinellas, bonga, mackerels, and anchovy (FAO 2008). The most economically important large pelagic ﬁsh species in the area are tunas (skipjack, yellowﬁn, and bigeye). They occur in the entire region and are caught throughout the year by tuna bait boats, purse seiners, and artisanal ﬁshers. Other large pelagic species in the area include Atlantic little tuna, Atlantic bonito, Atlantic sailﬁsh, swordﬁsh, and marlins (International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas [ICCAT] 2007). The demersal ﬁnﬁsh fauna is quite homogeneous; the same ﬁsh assemblages are represented over similar bottom types and water depths throughout the region (Troadec and Garcia 1980). Common examples of demersal resources include croakers, snappers, sole, sea breams, jacks, and threadﬁns. Shrimps and lobsters constitute a very important crustacean resource (Troadec and Garcia 1980). The shrimp resources tend to be localized and are dominated by ﬁve species: pink, tiger, rose, Guinea, and the striped

West African Coastal Capture Fisheries red shrimp. The latter is taken mainly in Angolan waters. Two species of lobsters are predominant: royal spiny lobster and red slipper lobster. Recently, there has been an emergence of monodon prawns in the region. The origin of this resource is uncertain (FAO 2001a). The most abundant species of mollusks are the cephalopods and cuttleﬁsh. Available information (FAO 2005a, 2008) indicates that 69–77 percent of the stocks for which information is available, particularly the demersal ﬁnﬁsh and shrimp resources, are fully or overexploited. The small pelagic resources range from underexploited to fully exploited. Small pelagic resources are known to be greatly affected by climate and environmental conditions, and therefore the resources need to be closely monitored (Pezennec and Koranteng 1998). There seems to be an increase in the occurrence of cephalopods in some parts of the region, particularly in water depths of about 100 m, but many stocks of cephalopods are overexploited.

19.2.2. Fish Production Caramelo and Tandstad (2005) report that nominal catches from the region increased almost 12-fold from about 300,000 metric tons in 1950 to close to 3.6 million metric tons in 1977. Since then, catches have oscillated in a relatively smooth fashion between 2.5 million metric tons in 1979 and 4.1 million metric tons in 1990, due to DWFN ﬁshing effort, changes in markets, and climate-induced changes in stock productivity. Catches have remained relatively stable, with an average of 3.6 million metric tons landed in 1995 and 3.4 million metric tons in 2002. Trends of annual nominal total catches between 1950 and 2000 are shown in ﬁgure 19.2. 4500 4000 3500 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 1950 FIGURE

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19.3. FISHERIES MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AND GOVERNANCE 19.3.1. Current Status of Fisheries Governance The dominant approach to ﬁsheries management in most countries over the past thirty years has been and continues to be founded on a fairly centralized system of governance or the absence of it. FAO (2006) deﬁnes ﬁsheries governance as “the sum total of the legal, social, economic and political arrangements used to manage ﬁsheries” and provides requirements for good governance.2 No country in the region meets these requirements in an effective manner. Within the current regime, with very few exceptions, ﬁshers are seen as objects of management as opposed to active partners in the process of marine stewardship. In all the countries, the legal framework for ﬁsheries management is usually embedded in a ﬁsheries law or act. Some of the legislation is deﬁcient in assignment of responsibility for ﬁsheries management and control. Even when the legislation stipulates the responsibilities, the corresponding human and ﬁnancial means are generally lacking. The legislation may outline speciﬁc management tools (mesh size, zoning, area, and seasonal closures, etc.), but the scientiﬁc basis for such prescriptions may be difﬁcult to justify because reliable primary information is lacking, or there are structural and functional weaknesses within existing institutions (Anonymous 2004; Hussein and Zoundi 2004). In a number of countries, including Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, and Benin, small-scale ﬁsheries activities are guided by two sets of regulations, one dictated by the “state” through de jure open access and the other set by the village through a system of traditional use rights and common property resources (Bennett 2002; Satia and Horemans 1995).

Foreign fleets Coastal states

19.3.2. State-Supervised Management Practices The “state” ﬁsheries management practices as they pertain to the four main resource groups can be summarized as follows:3 1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

19.2 Annual nominal catches (thousand

metric tons) by coastal states and foreign ﬂeets, eastern central Atlantic (FAO Statistical Area 34). (FAO 2005)

(a) Small pelagic species: mesh size regulations, spatial zoning of ﬁshing grounds, and vessel licensing. In several countries, there are no clear schemes of licensing small-scale vessels/ﬁshers. Small-scale ﬁsheries in the

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region therefore tend to operate in de facto free access regimes. (b) Tuna and tuna-like species: their management falls under the auspices of the ICCAT. ICCAT management actions for tuna resources prescribe minimum permissible landed weight (size) of ﬁsh, quotas, and limitation of incidental catches, restrictions on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) ﬁshing, as well as trade-related measures (ICCAT 2007). Compliance is less than perfect, and substantial quantities of undersized tunas are landed, especially in coastal ﬁsheries. To address these and other issues, ICCAT and the Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic (CECAF) in 2004 agreed to exchange information and data and collaborate in the conservation and management of the resources (FAO 2004b). (c) Demersal ﬁnﬁsh ﬁshery: management measures include mesh size regulations, spatial zoning of ﬁshing grounds, vessel licensing, biological rest, and sanctuaries. (d) Crustaceans and mollusks: mesh size regulation is the main management measure for shrimp ﬁsheries, complemented with restrictions on area of operation and size of vessels as well as the use of bycatch reduction devices such as turtle exclusion devices. There are also restrictions on gear types and ﬁshing techniques. Generally, the regulations are not complied with, especially where enforcement is weak or virtually nonexistent. The use of marine protected areas as a management tool is gaining prominence in the region. The West African Regional Marine Protected Area Network, formally created in April 2007, currently includes 15 marine protected areas spread among the countries of Mauritania, Senegal, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, and Sierra Leone (C. Karibuhuye, personal communication).

19.3.3. Traditional Management Systems Several communities in the region are reported to have “managed” their ﬁsheries and other marine resources using a variety of traditional practices, rituals, and taboos signifying respect, and these practices could have lasted for centuries (Satia and Horemans 1995). The key to this system was the territorial control of resources institutionalized through religious belief systems (Entsua-Mensah and Dankwa 1997; Olomola 1993; Satia and Horemans 1995; Welcomme

1972). Most of the practices were in lagoons, estuaries, and creeks. Quite often, the regulations were not speciﬁcally aimed at protecting the stocks, but were a nested system of rights aimed to ensure equitable access to resources with the view to maintaining the livelihoods of the community as a whole. In addition each ﬁshing village had its own particular set of norms that govern behaviors at sea and on the beach. In some cases, the resources were managed communally or controlled by individuals on behalf of groups. The traditional approaches were affected by colonialists and developers and overpowered by commercial ﬁshing interests and outside interference, resulting in the institution of open-access conditions in the name of modern management systems. Since the early 1990s, as a result of the wave of democratization and decentralization that blew through sub-Sahara Africa, there was a resurgence of the traditional practices in the region particularly in Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone (Bennett 2002; Olomola 1993; Satia and Horemans 1995). The principal management measures, rules, or regulatory mechanisms that are now in place include the following: • Prohibition of the capture of immature/juvenile ﬁsh • Restriction of the use of particular ﬁshing gear, for example, monoﬁlament nets • Prohibition of ﬁshing in some areas considered sacred grounds or identiﬁed as spawning, breeding, or nursery grounds • Observance of a nonﬁshing day each week, which permits ﬁshers to maintain their gear and equipment, rest, and undertake social activities • Total ban on ﬁshing activities for various periods prior to and during annual festivals • Ban on the capture of certain species for a period before certain festivals • Prohibition of the use of chemicals (poisons) as a means of catching ﬁsh • Prohibition of the use of magical power/superstitions in ﬁsh harvesting • Taboos against eating certain ﬁsh species • Ritualism for the replenishment of ﬁsh stocks (sacriﬁces, prayers, other rituals, and ceremonies) • Closed seasons • The use of brush parks to offer certain ﬁsh species a relatively protected environment for breeding, spawning, and feeding; provide additional ﬁsh food in the form of aufwuchs (aquatic organisms attached to underwater

West African Coastal Capture Fisheries substrates) and associated fauna that colonize the structure; and as ﬁsh-aggregating devices. The prescriptions for conservation and management found in several “state” ﬁsheries legislations and regulations in many ways resemble the prescientiﬁc prescriptions based on traditional ecological knowledge and simple rules of thumb. This indicates that at some point the peoples’ interests were strongly linked to the prudent use of their resource base.

19.4. CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES Considering that many of the resources are either fully or overexploited, the above management practices are not adequate to give required results. The root cause for the observed overexploitation is the failure of governance and perspective in the face of imperfect scientiﬁc knowledge and poverty. The main contributing factors, with attempted and possible solutions, are summarized in this section.

19.4.1. Policy and Institutional Issues Some of the critical policy and institutional issues are the following: (1) Open access character of the ﬁsheries: Under open access regimes, no ﬁsher can invest in future catches by delaying current catches. This attitude, along with generalized poverty, has contributed to excessive ﬁshing capacity, effort, and overﬁshing (FAO 2005c; Neiland and Bene 2004; World Bank 2004). Country proﬁles produced by FAO (FAO 2007b) indicate that a few countries are trying new approaches, such as individual quotas (Congo), total allowable catch (Ghana, and Angola), and community and territorial rights (Benin, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana). These actions seem inadequate, and overall ﬁshing effort must be strongly reduced particularly for the demersal resource, to reestablish high and sustainable catches and minimize the risk of environmental impacts. The socioeconomic implications of such reduction of ﬁshing effort are high, but adoption of such measures is necessary. (2) Technical and enforcement difﬁculties: No country in the region has a complete suite of an operational institutional framework4 for governance of its ﬁsheries. In several countries, a key tool for ﬁsheries management, the monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS) system, is often

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lacking or inadequate. Elements of MCS are available in some countries, including Angola, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Morocco, Nigeria, and Senegal (FAO 2004c). The European Union is also providing assistance for MCS to countries under recently negotiated FPAs (MRAG 2005). The experience of a subregional initiative to ensure the surveillance of its members’ exclusive economic zone is summarized in box 19.1. In some countries ﬁshers have organized into groups for identifying industrial vessels intruding into coastal zones reserved for artisanal ﬁshers (Bah 2005). Studies have shown that in the absence of MCS or where the system is ineffective, IUU ﬁshing is high and negatively affects the sustainability of the ﬁsheries (Kelleher 2002; MRAG 2005). (3) Conﬂicting objectives for the sector: There is disagreement on the objectives of the sector and on how to best achieve long-term sustainability and efﬁciency in the use of resources. Several governments still look at the ﬁsheries sector as a safety net, and many people believe that the possibilities of the sector providing food, employment, and so forth, are limitless. The situation is complicated by limited capability for effective ﬁsheries management in several countries (FAO 1999, 2004c). Consequently, over the past 30 years many countries have tended to concentrate on ﬁsheries development as opposed to ﬁsheries management. Small-scale ﬁsheries sector frame surveys (census of ﬁshers, their equipment and gear, etc.), indicate that there has been a 5–10 percent increase in ﬁshing effort in three years in a number of countries (A. Gbaguidi, personal communication). Another impediment to effectively working toward objectives is the conﬂicting roles in several ﬁsheries administrations, where licensing, stock assessment, and enforcement units are under the same department. The FAO Advisory Committee on Fisheries Research (ACFR) emphasizes that there is a need to strengthen national and regional capacities for long-term management of the ﬁsheries (FAO 2003). Greater priority should be placed also on ﬁghting poverty, the root cause for disagreement on objectives. In doing so, efforts to sustain the well being of small-scale ﬁshers must be integrated both vertically and horizontally taking into account the sustainable livelihoods approach (Cunningham et al. 2007; Linselink 2003; Satia 1993). (4) Insufﬁcient scientiﬁc information: Sound science is a critical input to understanding the complicated dynamics of marine ecosystems (Holdren 2008). However, in several countries the critical mass for sound research is not available and planning of research is not tailored to management requirements; ﬁsheries scientists and science agencies, where they

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BOX 19.1 The Experience of Subregional Initiative in Northwest Africa The Surveillance Operations Coordinating Unit (SOCU), based in Banjul, The Gambia, and ﬁnanced by the government of Luxemburg, provides support to the secretariat of the SRFC by collecting information on ﬁshing operations along the coasts of its seven member countries, train air observers, and reinforce cooperation between countries of the subregion. SOCU works intimately with coast guards of the countries, and such joint operations have contributed to the arrest and prosecutions of vessels ﬁshing illegally. Results of aerial surveillance between 2002 and 2006 can be summarized as follows: THE EXPERIENCE OF THE SUBREGIONAL INITIATIVE IN NORTHWEST AFRICA

Period April 2002 December 2002 March–April 2003 July–August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 March 2004 May 2004 August 2004 October 2004 April 2006 Total

Vessels Detected

Vessels Inspected

199 50 59 130 92 99 125 135 60 113 40 1,102

31 13 06 27 80 22 48 55 29 44 25 378

Vessels Arrested 01 08 04 06 05 05 09 05 00 02 08 55

Source: Compiled from Review of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing in Developing Countries. Final Report July 2005 of the Marine Resources Assessment Group Ltd., prepared for the United Kingdom Department for International Development with support from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.

exist, tend to work in institutional vacuums that lack formal means for research results to be translated into ﬁsheries management, or are of marginal use for management decisions (Anonymous 2004; Hussein and Zoundi 2004; Staples et al. 2004). There is a need to strengthen regional and national capacities in ﬁsheries research and to improve regional and international collaboration through twinning between research institutes in the region and those in developed countries in order to ﬁll the scientiﬁc gaps that exist and make sound science the basis for management decisions and policy making. (5) Absence of ﬁsheries management plans: Many countries have produced broad ﬁshery policies and programs, but no speciﬁc ﬁshery-by-ﬁshery management plans. In 2007 the Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem (GCLME) Project with its partners developed template management plans for demersal,

pelagic, and shrimp ﬁsheries, respectively (C. Ibe, personal communication). In 2007 FAO organized workshops on incorporating in a systematic manner the principles of ecosystem-based management in the ﬁsheries agenda of countries in the region (Anonymous 2008). The interaction of ﬁsheries and the surrounding ecosystem is essential to maintain and restore stocks, but it is also important to point out that the present capacity in the region is insufﬁcient to deal with conventional management of ﬁsheries, and the higher costs implied by ecosystem-based management would represent a signiﬁcant challenge for which long-term assistance is required. (6) Inadequate governance for transboundary resources: Several ﬁsh stocks are transboundary, yet they are managed in a fragmented manner as several “management authorities” have overlapping responsibilities (data collection, scientiﬁc analyses, and

West African Coastal Capture Fisheries implementing management controls) for the same resource. Countries are searching for agreement to manage these shared resources (Cochrane and Tandstad 2000; FAO 2002; GCLME 2006, 2007; Anonymous 2008). Using transboundary diagnostic analysis (TDA), the three LME projects have identiﬁed the major transboundary problems, established the root causes, and formulated suites of actions (BCLME TDA 1999; GCLME 2005; O’Toole et al. 2001). The main areas where regional action is required are (a) sustainable management and utilization of resources, (b) assessment of environmental variability, ecosystem impacts, and improvement of predictability, and (c) maintenance of ecosystem health and management of pollution. The GCLME project has elaborated a subregional action plan for the management of the shared sardinella resources of Angola, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Gabon (C. Ibe, personal communication). The countries of Northwest Africa, in collaboration with FAO and the government of Norway, are working to develop cooperative management regime for shared small pelagic resources in the area (Anonymous 2008). (7) Top-down management and centralized decision-making approach: There is an absence of explicitly “pro-poor” strategies that include measures to ensure the sustainability of ﬁsheries in many countries. Since the early 1990s, several countries have taken steps to democratize and decentralize their systems of national governance, and several have produced poverty reduction strategy papers that include ﬁsheries (Thorpe et al. 2006). The process has been slow and hampered by the shortage of skills at the local level as well as uncertain ﬂows of resources. It is reported that only three countries (Ghana, Guinea, and Senegal) have adopted sectoral mainstreaming (FAO 2007a). Fishers’ participation in the management of the resources is being attempted in a few countries, and they incorporate the “sustainable livelihoods approach” (SLA) in most cases with the objective of meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from a ﬁsheries perspective (Linselink 2003). However, many of these initiatives are short-lived and closely tied to projects, or progress has been enabling with implementation generally yet to occur (Cunningham et al. 2007; Horemans and Jallow 1997; Satia et al. 2004).

19.4.2. Socioeconomic Issues The problem of overﬁshing is compounded, and in some cases inﬂuenced, by a number of economic factors or circumstances.

265

(1) Overcapitalization, overcapacity, and subsidies: Many ﬁsheries are overcapitalized, and shortterm economic concerns have received undue weight relative to the steps needed to cut back harvests and achieve the long-term biological and economic potential (Cunningham and Greboval 2001; FAO 2005d). In several countries, the ﬁshing ﬂeet has over twice the capacity needed to extract the biomass in their EEZ in a sustainable manner. The result is a vicious circle in which catches per vessel/canoe fall, proﬁts drop, and the resources are intensively exploited to maintain supplies, causing further depletion of stocks and intervention by governments as subsidies, including import exemptions on gears and equipments, rebates on fuel, and so forth (Afful and Kebe 1996; FAO 2005c; Mabawonku 1987). These incentives put further pressure on the stocks, leading to more overﬁshing, accompanied in some cases by habitat destruction and the incidental kills of untargeted species. These situations threaten the long-term sustainability of the ﬁsheries and aggravate the pervasive poverty of the sector as well as limit the contribution of ﬁsheries to food security (FAO 2005b; International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development 2006). Governments should actively address the issue of overinvestment and overcapacity, because effective management of the ﬁsheries, maintaining, and restoring ﬁsh stocks to levels that can produce their maximum sustainable yield would be impossible when overcapacity exists. (2) Prevalence of IUU ﬁshing: IUU ﬁshing is a major problem and constitutes a signiﬁcant constraint in attempts to manage the ﬁshery resources sustainably (FAO 2005d). The presence of priced ﬁshery resources, the shallow nature of most of the coasts, the absence of MCS systems, weak governance, and overcapacity of global ﬁshing ﬂeets are some of the factors that heighten the vulnerability of the region to IUU ﬁshing (MRAG 2005). The effects of IUU ﬁshing include ﬁnancial, economic, social, and environmental/ecological impacts and are interrelated (Agnew and Barnes 2004). Table 19.1 gives some indicators of IUU ﬁshing in the countries of the region as of 2005. Kelleher (2002) reported that incidences of IUU ﬁshing are less in countries with greater investments in MCS than in those where investments in MCS have been small. MRAG (2005) further underscores the signiﬁcant relationships that exist between the amount of IUU ﬁshing, the state of MCS, and the state of governance of a country. Table 19.2 summarizes estimated IUU losses (million US$), for four selected countries in comparison to Namibia,

TABLE

19.1 Some indicators of IUU ﬁshing in West African Coastal capture Fisheries as of 2005

266

Country

Av. Gov. score

IUU as % of current legal catch

Angola Benin Cameroon Cape Verde Congo Congo, DR Cote d’Ivoire Equatoral Guinea Gabon Gambia Ghana Guinea G. Bissau Liberia Mauritania Morocco Nigeria Sao Tome et Principe Senegal S. Leone Togo

–1.158 –0.294 –0.868 0.353 –1.120 –1.697 –1.383 –1.148 –0.466 –0.296 –0.083 –0.966 –0.872 –1.626 –0.209 –0.189 –1.211 –0.323 –0.176 –0.903 –0.964

24 12 41 0 19 123 82 61 19 12 4 102 41 146 9 8 66 13 8 35 47

IUU value

GNP US$b 2003

Fish. as % GNP

49 2 15 0 15 4 42 1 11 3 11 105 5 12 17 59 327 0 32 29 10

10.0 3.0 10.0 0.7 2.0 5.0 11.0 0.4 4.8 0.4 7.0 3.o 0.2 0.4 1.0 40.0 43.0 0.1 6.0 1.0 1.0

4.00 0.47 1.00 2.00 1.32 0.10 0.75 0.44 1.50 12.0 2.50 1.75 3.70 3.00 12.0 3.00 1.15 5.00 2.50 3.50 4.00

Potential increase based on % GNP to ﬁsheries 0.96 0.06 0.41 0.00 0.77 0.12 0.62 0.27 0.29 1.46 0.11 1.78 1.52 4.38 1.06 0.24 0.76 0.66 0.19 1.24 1.88

Fish consump. (kg/ha/yr) 14.6 8.8 13.6 21.9 18.3 6.0 15.0 12.8 44.1 23.5 29.7 12.8 2.1 5.6 11.5 8.4 7.6 13.7 29.2 14.6 11.1

Potential increase (kg/ha/yr). 3.49 1.06 5.54 0.00 10.70 7.37 12.37 7.77 8.53 2.86 1.27 13.05 0.86 8.18 1.01 0.68 5.02 1.81 2.22 5.17 5.21

Annual additional cost to eliminate IUU ($m) 3.08 0.08 0.51 0.00 0.13 0.13 1.29 0.04 0.43 0.14 0.91 2.21 0.17 0.31 0.94 3.43 10.32 0.02 1.92 1.11 0.32

Beneﬁt-cost if % value ($m) to country 45.90 1.60 14.70 0.00 4.20 4.20 40.50 1.10 10.20 2.80 9.90 103.00 5.00 11.40 16.10 55.70 316.40 0.40 30.30 27.60 9.20

Benetit-cost if 5% value ($m) to Country –0.630 0.004 0.245 0.000 0.087 0.087 0.800 0.021 0.102 0.006 –0.372 3.056 0.083 0.271 –0.091 –0.469 6.017 0.021 –0.312 0.328 0.162

Note: these percentages are estimated IUU as a percentage of estimated total catch (i.e. estimated IUU + FAO reported catch). Source: Captain Mamadou Ball, Coordinator, Surveillance Operations Coordination Unit (SOCU), Project of the Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission (SRFC), c/o Fisheries Department, Banjul, Gambia.

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West African Coastal Capture Fisheries which has one of the most effective MCS system worldwide (MRAG 2005). The Sub Regional Fisheries Commission (SRFC), Ministerial Conference on Fisheries Cooperation among African States bordering the Atlantic Ocean (ATLAFCO), and Regional Fisheries Committee for the Gulf of Guinea (COREP) have adopted declarations to combat IUU ﬁshing. Since good governance appears to go hand in hand with good MCS systems and procedure, improvements in these areas as well as the promotion of the political will to enforce regulations and improve regional cooperation, and better coordination and information use would greatly improve the situation. Governments should also implement the key principles and essential elements of the FAO’s international plan of action to curb IUU ﬁshing (FAO 2001b). (3) Conﬂicts within the ﬁsheries: The ﬁsheries are characterized by interactions in a biological, economic, and physical sense between small-scale and industrial sectors, as well as within the smallscale ﬁsheries sector. Sometimes these interactions degenerate into conﬂicts. Conﬂicts have increased because of the multiplicity of gears and increased

mobility of artisanal ﬁshing boats, as well as increased intrusion of inshore areas by industrial vessels (Everett and Sheves 1991; Satia and Horemans 1993). The situation is complicated when DWFNs are involved because coexistence between small-scale ﬁshers and the industrial ﬂeets increases and because ﬁsh landed locally by industrial ﬁsheries exacerbates price-depressing impacts. Generally, there is an intuitive link between poverty and conﬂicts, so tackling poverty in ﬁsheries communities and addressing entitlements could address many of the fundamental problems that result in conﬂicts. Other possible solutions include better enforcement of regulations, increase use of MCS to combat IUU ﬁshing, and strengthened capacity building. Conﬂicts may also exist between national industrial ﬂeets and DWFNs, which are better subsidized (Acheapong 1997; Milazzo 1998). There are mixed feelings concerning the signiﬁcant presence and effects of foreign ﬂeets in the region (Agritrade 2007; Cheriﬁ 2002; Kaczynski and Fluharty 2002; Martin et al. 2001). In response to criticisms, the European Union has moved from “cash for access” to FPAs based on the promotion of sustainable development

19.2 Summary of estimated IUU losses ($m) and state of MCS in selected West African countries and Namibia

TABLE

Summary

Angola

Guinea

Liberia

Demersal Small Pelagic Tuna general Shrimp Cephalopods Demersal discards Total

0.0 22.5 0.9 11.8 – 13.7 49.0

17.2 0.0 4.8 27.2 48..5 7.6 105.3

4.5 0.0 6.4 0.8 – – 11.7

State of MCS Governance score IUU as % of current legal catch GNP US$b (2003) Fish as % GNP Potential increase based on %GNP to ﬁsheries Fish consumption (kg/cap./yr) Potential increase (kg/cap./yr) Annual additional cost to eliminate IUU ﬁshing ($m) Beneﬁt minus cost assuming full IUU ($m) accrues to country Beneﬁt minus cost assuming only 5% beneﬁt ($m) accrues to the country

moderate –1.158 24 10 4 0.90 14.6 3.49 3.08 45.90 –0.630

poor –0.966 102 3 1.75 1.78 12.8 13.05 2.21

Sierra Leone 21.2 – 3.0 4.5 – – 28.7

almost non-existent –1.626 146 0.4 3 4.38 5.6 8.18 0.31

very poor –o.903 35 1 3.5 1.24 14.6 5.17 1.11

11.40

27.60

103 3.056

0.271

0.328

Namibia 0.1 – – – – – 0.1 very good 0.347 0 4 10 0 14 0 0 0 0

Note: It is assumed that 2% of the ﬁsheries value calculated using FAO ﬁsheries data and MRAG’s estimates of the IUU value is required to achieve an MCS capability of the same quality as Namibia’s. Source: Complied from MRAG (2005), Review of IUU ﬁshing and developing countries.

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in its relationship with the coastal countries (Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements 2005). The initiatives are less than three years old, but a preliminary assessment of this initiative (Walmsley et al. 2007) indicates that there have been encouraging changes in the structure and approach of FPAs compared to FFAs. The former is reported to provide higher and more consistent revenue to the coastal states, contain greater provisions for monitoring and control, and are more transparent and consistent. However, for coastal states, joint ventures and other means to develop their own ﬁshing capacity may be preferable to access and so-called partnership agreements in the longer term. Weaknesses were also observed on facilitating integration of developing coastal states into the global economy and better governance of ﬁsheries. Furthermore, many partner recipient countries have limited capacity to manage their ﬁsheries in a sustainable manner under the FPAs. (4) Migration of ﬁshers: The small-scale ﬁsheries are renowned for high levels of internal and international migration and mobility. The principal regional migrant ﬁshers are Senegalese, Ghanaians, Beninese, and Nigerians (Haakonsen and Diaw 1991). Initially, these migrations were a response to ﬁsh movements and abundance, but recently ﬁshers’ migrations have evolved and are more akin to labor migration (ICSF 2002; Jul-Larsen 1994). These migrations have a positive impact on the production and supply of animal protein in host countries and the creation of employment and technology transfers as migrant ﬁshers are better organized, better skilled, and better equipped (Diaw and Haakonsen 1992). Sometimes migrations have resulted in frictions and conﬂicts caused by misunderstanding, reluctance of migrants to invest in local economies, and their use of inappropriate or destructive gears and techniques. Migrant ﬁshers have freedom of movement within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) zone, but there are yet no regulatory instruments that recognize their rights to free movement within the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) zone. There is a need to protect migrant ﬁshers through better education on existing regulations, encourage integration of migrants in economic activities (crew formation, transfer of technology, ﬁsh processing, and commercialization), and harmonize legislation and regulations through mutual consultations between concerned countries. ECOWAS and CEMAC could consider establishing an intraregional framework for the management of small-scale ﬁshers’ migrations

and other associated migrations. These efforts will also provide a partial response to regional development and to the achievement of MDGs. Fishers’ migrations together with such other factors as poverty greatly inﬂuence the course of HIV/AIDS in the region. Speciﬁc programs are being implemented to combat the prevalence of this pandemic in smallscale ﬁsheries communities (SFLP 2004).

19.4.3. Bycatch, Discards Losses, and Environmental Issues Bycatch (incidental capture of nontargeted species), discards, and multispecies interactions (Eayrs 2005; FAO 1998; Kelleher 2005) as well as environmental issues such as near-shore forcing and pollution and the use of destructive ﬁshing gear and ﬁshing techniques (Ibe et al. 1998; Isebor 1999; Koranteng 1998; Ukwe et al. 2001) are other important concerns in the ﬁsheries. Many of the environmental problems are tranboundary and require greater cooperation among the countries concerned.

19.5. TRANSITION TO BETTER OUTCOME The critical factors that limit the transition to sustainable outcome are weak governance and absolute poverty. These factors need to be addressed through the effective implementation of the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (FAO 1995), which is a comprehensive blueprint for the management of all ﬁsheries and provides requirements for good governance of marine ﬁsheries. Instruments (technical guidelines, international plans of action and strategies) produced in the framework of the code should also be taken into account, as appropriate, in addressing these issues. Combating poverty in the ﬁsheries sector presents massive challenges because it encompasses multiple dimensions of deprivation and not just income and is increasingly recognized as multisectoral in its dimension (FAO 2004b; Neiland and Bene 2004). It would seem better addressed with a comprehensive strategy that combines the integrated approach and SLA in the framework of targeted investments to stimulate broad-based economic growth, wealth, and income redistribution (Cunningham and Bostock 2004; FAO 2005c). A number of programs have recently been implemented or are ongoing: the Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Program, the three LME projects,

West African Coastal Capture Fisheries and the Strategic Partnership Program (World Bank, FAO, World Wildlife Fund, and African Countries), aimed at addressing these constraints and contributing to the World Summit on Sustainable Development targets and the MDGs from a ﬁsheries perspective. Poverty in the ﬁsheries also has strong institutional and political dimensions. Institutional reforms coupled with strong political commitment to make the right investment choices and effectively implement them would improve both public and private wealth. From the single case of IUU ﬁshing (box 19.1 and table 19.1) signiﬁcant gains in per capita ﬁsh consumption and increased gross national product through ﬁsheries could be achieved by combating this malpractice. Notes 1. Legislation in all the countries prohibits trawl ﬁshing within a zone 3–5 nautical miles (depending on the country) from the lowest coastline. This zone is commonly described as reserved for small-scale ﬁshers because in principle they are not expected to use trawling gear or dredging equipment, although recently in some countries small-scale ﬁshers are introducing pair trawling in this zone. Generally, this zone also consists of an appreciable area of wetlands made up of saline creeks, intertidal mangrove swamps, estuaries, and beach ridges and is the nursery and breeding grounds for some of the most economic important ﬁshery resources, including shrimps and many demersal ﬁnﬁsh. 2. FAO (2006) states that good governance of marine ﬁsheries should as much as possible meet the following requirements: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Provide necessary information Deal with conﬂict Induce compliance with rules Provide physical, technical, and institutional infrastructure 5. Encourage adaptation and change to achieve sustainability 3. There are six regional ﬁshery organizations in the region: 1. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) was established in 1969 to conserve tuna and tuna-like species and to cooperate in maintaining the populations of those species at levels that will permit the maximum sustainable catch for food and other purposes. ICCAT’s geographical area is the Atlantic

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

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Ocean and adjacent seas. Of its 48 members, 13 are from the region (www.iccat.int/en/ contracting.htm). Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic (CECAF) is an FAO body founded in 1967. Its geographical area is FAO Statistical Area 34. It covers all species, except tuna and tuna-like species, and its objectives include to promote the optimum utilization of living aquatic resources by the proper management and development of the ﬁsheries and ﬁsheries operations, the development of marine and brackish water aquaculture, and the improvement of related processing and marketing activities in conformity with the objectives of its members. Its members are 22 coastal states and 12 noncoastal states (www.fao.org/ﬁshery/rfb/cecaf). Regional Fisheries Committee for the Gulf of Guinea (COREP) was established in 1984. Members are Angola, Cameroon, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The geographical area includes the waters under the jurisdiction of its members. The objective is coordination, harmonization, development, and exploitation of common ﬁsh stocks in the members’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs) (www.fao.org/ﬁshery/ rfb/corep). The Sub Regional Fisheries Commission (SRFC) was established in 1985. Its members are Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Mauritania, and its geographical area are the waters under the jurisdiction of the members. It primary objective is the harmonization of policies of member countries with regard to the preservation, conservation, and exploitation of their ﬁsheries resources and strengthening of cooperation (www.fao.org/srfc_inst). The Fishery Committee of the West Central Gulf of Guinea (FCWC) was established in 2006 by the six countries from Liberia to Nigeria to ensure the sustainable development of their ﬁsheries and the strengthening of subregional cooperation in appropriate areas of ﬁsheries (www.fao.org/ﬁshery/rfb/fcwc). The Ministerial Conference on Fisheries Cooperation among African States bordering the Atlantic Ocean (ATLAFCO) was established by Convention in 1991. Its 22 members are coastal states from Morocco to Namibia. Principal objective is promotion of cooperation in the ﬁeld of ﬁsheries management and development address issues of livelihoods and strengthening of solidarity with land-locked African and geographically disadvantaged states of the region (www.comhafat.org).

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4. According to the World Bank (2004), a complete suite of an operational institutional framework should consist of the ﬁsheries management system, monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS) system, ﬁsheries judicial system, decentralized decision making, and collaborative management, as well as the deﬁnition of access rights, for the governance of the ﬁsheries. Although assistance has been provided in this respect to a couple of countries, for example, Ghana, they are yet to be operational. References Acheapong, A. (1997). Coherence between EU Fisheries Agreements and EU Development Cooperation: The Case of West Africa. ECDPM Working Paper 52. Maastricht, Netherlands: European Centre for Development Policy Management. Afful, K., and M. Kebe (1996). Fiscal Policy and the Artisanal Fisheries Sector in Ghana and Senegal. IDAF/WP/90. Cotonou, Benin: Program for Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. Agnew, D.J., and C.T. Barnes (2004). Economic Aspects and Drivers of IUU Fishing: Building a Framework. OECD AGR/FI/IUU (2004)2. In Fish Piracy: Combating Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, pp. 169–200. Agritrade (2007). ACP-EU Fisheries Relations: Executive Brief. agritrade.cta.int/en/ﬁsheries/ acp_eu_ﬁsheries_relations/executive_brief Anonymous (1990). Report of the ad hoc technical meeting on artisanal ﬁsheries craft, propulsion, gear and security in the IDAF region; Cotonou, 25–26 September 1989. IDAF/WP/28. Cotonou, Benin: Program for Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. Anonymous (2004). Report of the Third Session of the African Fisheries Research and Marine Science Institutes Network (RAFISHMER), Douala, Cameroon, 28–30 July. Anonymous (2008). FAO/NORAD Symposium, Science and the Challenges of Managing Shared Small Pelagic Fish Stocks in Northwest Africa, 11–14 March 2008, Casablanca, Morocco. www.smallpelagics2008.org Bah, T.S. (2005). Incursions by Industrial Trawlers into Guinea’s Coastal Zone at Last a Sigh of Relief from the Small-Scale Fishers of Bongolon. Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Program. www.sﬂp.org/eng/007/pub1/103.htm Bakun, A. (1978). Guinea current upwelling. Nature 271: 147–150. BCLME TDA (1999). Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem Programme (BCLME) Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis (TDA). Wind Hock, Namibia: United Nations Development Program.

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Central Atlantic. Dakar, Senegal, 24–27 May 2004. FAO Fisheries Report 753. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2003). Report of the Fourth Session of the Advisory Committee on Fisheries Research. Rome, 19–22 October 2002. FAO Fisheries Report 699. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2002). Report of the Workshop on the Management of Shared Small Pelagic Resources in Northwest Africa. Banjul, Republic of the Gambia, 30 April–3 May 2002. FAO Fisheries Report 675. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2001a). Report of the Fifteenth Session of the Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic. 1–3 November 2000, Abuja, Nigeria. FAO Fisheries Report 642. Accra, Ghana: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2001b). International Plan of Action to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (1999). Report of the Fourteenth Session of the Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic. 6–9 September 1998, Nouakchott, Mauritania. FAO Fisheries Report 591. Accra, Ghana: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (1998). Report of the Tenth Session of the CECAF Sub-committee on the Management of Fisheries Resources within the Limits of National Jurisdiction. 8–11 December 1997. FAO Fisheries Report 575. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (1995). Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gbaguidi, A.A. (2008). Informations sur les Pêches Maritimes Béninoises. Rapport Technique 45. Cotonou, Benin: Centre de Recherches Halieutiques et Oceanologiques du Benin. GCLME. (2005). Report of the Final Meeting of the Regional Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis (TDA), 3–7 October. Accra, Ghana: Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem Project. GCLME (2006). Report of the Sub-regional Workshop on the Management of the Shared Stock of Sardinella sp between Angola, Congo, RD Congo and Gabon, Luanda, Angola. 27–29 February 2006. Accra, Ghana: Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem Project. GCLME (2007). Report of the Second Sub-regional Workshop on the Management of the Shared Stock of Sardinella species in Between Angola, Congo, RD Congo and Gabon, Luanda,

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Angola. 14–16 September 2007. Accra, Ghana: Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem Project. Haakonsen, J.M., and C. Diaw (1991). Fishermen’s Migrations in West Africa. IDAF/WP/36. Cotonou, Benin: Program for Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. Holdren, J.P. (2008). Science and technology for sustainable well-being. Science 319(5862): 424–434. Horemans, B., and A.M. Jallow (1997). Present State and Perspectives of Marine Fisheries Resources Co-management in West Africa. IDAF/WP/104. Cotonou, Benin: Program for Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. Hussein, K., and J. Zoundi (2004). The contribution of research to the sustainable livelihoods of artisanal ﬁshing communities. In: B.P. Satia and D. Staples (eds). ACFR—Papers Presented at the Second Session of the Working Party on Small-Scaled Fisheries. Bangkok, Thailand, 18–21 November 2003. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Ibe, C.A., L.F. Awosika, and K. Aka (1998). Nearshore Dynamics and Sedimentology of the Gulf of Guinea. Proceedings of the First International Oceanographic Commission–Economic Commission for Africa Cruise in the Gulf of Guinea. Abidjan, Cote Ivoire: Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem Project. ICCAT (2007). Report of the 20th Regular Meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of the Atlantic Tunas. Antalya, Turkey, 9–16 November 2006. Madrid, Spain: International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. ICSF (2001). Report of the Workshop on Problems and Prospects for Developing Artisanal Fish Trade in West Africa. 30 May–1 June 2001, Dakar, Senegal. Chenai, India: International Collective in Support of Fishworkers. ICSF (2002). Report of the Study on Problems and prospects of Artisanal Fish Trade in West Africa. Chenai, India: International Collective in Support of Fishworkers. International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (2006). Fisheries, International Trade and Sustainable Development Policy Discussion Paper. Geneva, Switzerland: International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development. Isebor, C.E. (1999). The Mangroves of the Gulf of Guinea Large Marine Ecosystem. United Nations Industrial Development Organization Sub Project 92 on the Environment in West Africa. Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire: Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem Project. Jul-Larsen, E. (1994). Migrant Fishermen in Pointe Noire (Congo): Continuity and Continuous

Change. Cotonou, Programme for Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa, 64p. IDAF/WP/56. Cotonou, Benin: Program for Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. Kaczynski, V.M., and D.L. Fluharty (2002). European policies in West Africa: Who beneﬁts from ﬁsheries access agreements? Marine Policy 26: 75–93. Kebe, M., and F. Tallec (2006). Contribution of Fisheries to National Economies (West and Central Africa), Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Programme in West Africa. Cotonou, Benin: Impression AGCom. Kelleher, K. (2005). Discards in the World’s Marine Fisheries: An Update. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 470, Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Kelleher, K. (2002). Robbers, Reefers and Ramasseurs: A Review of Selected Aspects of Fisheries MCS in Seven West African Countries. Aerial Surveillance Luxemburg supported, FAO executed Project 722. Dakar, Senegal: Sub-regional Fisheries Commission. Koranteng, K.A. (1998). The Impacts of Environmental Forcing on the Dynamics of Demersal Fishery Resources of Ghana. Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, U.K. Koranteng, K.A., J.M. McGlade, and B. Samb (1996). A review of the Canary Current and Guinea Current large marine ecosystems. ACPEU Fisheries Research Report 2: 61–83. Kurien, J. (2005). Responsible Fish Trade and Food Security. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 456. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Laurenti, G. (2007). 1961–2003, Fish and Fishery Products. World Apparent Consumption Statistics Based on Food Balance Sheets. FAO Fisheries Circular 821, rev. 8. Rome: Fisheries and Aquaculture Economics and Policy Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Linselink, N.M. (2003). Participation in SmallScale Fisheries Management to Improve the Livelihoods of Fishermen in West Africa. FAO Technical Document on Fisheries No. 432. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Mabawonku, A.F. (1987). The Role and Effect of Subsidies on Fisheries Development in West Africa (Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, the Gambia and Senegal). Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic Series 90/53. Dakar, Senegal: Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic. Martin, W., M. Lodge, J. Caddy, and K. Mfodwo (2001). A Handbook for Negotiating Fishing Access Agreements World Wildlife Fund Marine Conservation Program. Washington, D.C.: World Wildlife Fund.

West African Coastal Capture Fisheries Milazzo, M. (1998). Subsidies in World Fisheries: A Re-examination. World Bank Technical Paper 406, Fisheries Series. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. MRAG (2005). Review of Impacts of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing in Developing Countries. Final Report, July. London: Marine Resources Assessment Group. Neiland, A., and C. Bene (eds) (2004). Poverty and Small-Scale Fisheries in West Africa. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Boston: Kluwer. Olomola, A.S. (1993). The traditional approach towards sustainable management of common property ﬁsheries resources in Nigeria. MAST 6(1/2): 92–109. O’Toole, M.J., V. Shannon, V. de Barros Neto, and D. Malan (2001). Integrated management of the Benguela current region: A framework for future development. Pp. 229–251 in B. von Bodungen and R.K. Turner (eds). Science and Integrated Coastal Management. Berlin, Germany: Dahlem University Press. Payne, A.I.L., J.A. Gulland, and K.H. Brink (eds) (1987). The Benguela and comparable ecosystems. South African Journal of Marine Science 5: 1–957. Pezennec, O., and K.A. Koranteng (1998). Changes in the dynamics and biology of small pelagic ﬁsheries off Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana—the ecological puzzle. In: M.H. Durand, R.M. Cury, C. Roy, A. Bakun, and D. Pauley (eds). Global versus Local Changes in Upwelling Systems. Paris: ORSTOM, pp. 329–343. Satia, B.P. (1993). Ten Years of Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa (Origin, Evolution and Lessons Learned). Program for Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. Cotonou, Benin: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Satia, B.P., O. Njifonjou, and K. Angaman (2004). Fisheries co-management and poverty alleviation in the context of the sustainable livelihood approach; a case study in the ﬁshing communities of Aby Lagoon in Cote d’Ivoire In Poverty and small-scale ﬁsheries in West Africa. In E. Neiland and C. Bene (eds). Poverty and SmallScaled Fisheries in West Africa. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and Kluwer, pp. 151–170. Satia, B., and C.Z. Wetohossou (eds). (1996). Report of the Working Group on Women’s Key Role and Issues Related to Gender in Fishing Communities. IDAF/WP/79. Cotonou, Benin: Program for Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa (IDAF). Satia, B., and B. Horemans (1995). Report of the Workshop on Participatory Approaches and Traditional Fishery Management Practices in

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West Africa. Conakry, Guinea, 13–15 November 1995. IDAF WP/74. Cotonou, Benin: Program for Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. Satia, B., and B. Horemans (1993). Report of the Workshop on Conﬂicts in Coastal Fisheries in West Africa. IDAF/WP/53. Cotonou, Benin: Program for Integrated Development of Artisanal Fisheries in West Africa. SFLP (2004). Fisheries and AIDS. Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Programme Liaison Bulletin 17–18: 3–35. Sherman, K. (1993). Large marine ecosystems as global units for marine resources management–an ecological perspective. In: K.A. Sherman and L.M. Alex (eds). Large Marine Ecosystems: Stress, Mitigation, and Sustainability. AAAS Selected Symposium. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, pp. 3–14. Staples, D., B. Satia, and R.P. Gardiner (2004). A Research Agenda for Small-Scale Fisheries. FAO Regional Ofﬁce for Asia and the Paciﬁc, Bangkok, Thailand. RAP Publication 2004/21 and FIPL/C 10009 (En). Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Thorpe, A., C. Reid, R. Van Anrooy, and C. Brugere (2006). African Poverty Reduction Strategy Programmes and the Fisheries Sector; Current Situation and Opportunities. Paper for DFID/ FAO Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Program. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Troadec, J.P., and S. Garcia (eds) (1980). The Fish Resources of the Eastern Central Atlantic. Part 1. The Resources of the Gulf of Guinea from Angola to Mauritania. Fisheries Technical Report 186(1). Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Ukwe, C.N., C.E. Isebor, and B.I. Alo (2001). Improving the Quality of Coastal Waters in the Gulf of Guinea Large Marine Ecosystem through Mangrove Restoration. Proceedings of the 12th Biennial Coastal Zone Conference. Cleveland, Ohio: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Walmsley, S.F., C.T. Barnes, I.A. Payne, and C.A. Howard (2007). Comparative Study of the Impact of Fisheries Partnership Agreements. Technical Report May 2007. London: Marine Resources Assessment Group. Welcomme, R.L. (1972). An evaluation of the acadjas method of ﬁshing as practiced in the coastal lagoons of Dahomey (West Africa). Journal of Fisher Biology 4(1): 39–55. World Bank (2004). Saving Fish and Fishers: Towards Sustainable and Equitable Governance of the Global Fishing Sector. Report 29090-GLB. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.

20 Coastal Fisheries in India: Current Scenario, Contradictions, and Community Responses D. NANDAKUMAR NALINI NAYAK

20.1. INTRODUCTION India is home to around 1.15 billion (109) people and is the second largest country in Asia. Its global coordinates stretch from 80° 4¢ to 37° 6¢ N latitude and from 68° 7¢ to 97° 25¢ E longitude. Peninsular India’s coastline extends to 8,118 kilometers in length, with an economic exclusion zone (EEZ) of 2.02 million square kilometers (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] 2004), ﬂanked by the Arabian Sea on the west, the Indian Ocean in the south, and the Bay of Bengal on the east. It is landlocked on the northern side (see ﬁgure 20.1). India is the largest sovereign nation in the South Asian region. For administrative purposes, it is divided into 29 states and 7 union territories. Although it has a secular and democratic constitution, the interplay of religion, caste, and class determine its social and political life. The coastal seas are highly productive zones because of the extensive natural habitats and biological diversity created by the highly dynamic coastal processes. Coastal ﬁshing communities have evolved diverse survival strategies and are well adapted to this dynamism.

20.1.1. Coastal Processes The coastal zone is an interface that includes human inhabited terrestrial and open ocean environments

inﬂuenced by the hinterland geography. There are various mountain systems within the Indian subcontinent, which give rise to extensive diversity of climate, rainfall, and soil conditions that generate a variety of distinct plant and animal communities. Mountains are also the source of river systems that nourish the east and west coastal seas. These mountain ranges act as a natural barrier to cold polar winds and facilitate the monsoon wind-driven climate in India. Meteorological and other oceanographic parameters that inﬂuence the ﬁshery also exhibit wide variations in space and time. These oceanographic parameters have played an important role in the evolution of the diverse ﬁsheries and continue to exert a great inﬂuence on the livelihoods of these communities. One of the most important aspects of the oceanographic features in coastal India is the prevailing littoral and long-shore current system. There are seasonal changes of direction, particularly with the littoral currents. While these natural phenomena create ideal conditions that attract ﬁsh and other marine organisms to inshore waters, a shallow continental shelf and land conﬁguration coupled with extensive natural habitats such as wetlands, mangroves, and coral reefs provide rich breeding and feeding grounds for ﬁsh and other marine species. India has a rich variety of wetland habitats: from inland paddy wetlands to coastal lagoons and backwaters. The total area of wetlands (excluding rivers) in India is 58,286,000 hectares, or 18.4 percent of

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FIGURE 20.1 coastline and coastal states in India. (Adapted from surveyoﬁndia.gov.in/soi_maps/atlas/p_21_200.pdf)

the country, 70 percent of which are under paddy cultivation. One of India’s most important coastal wetland areas, the Chilka Lake (Orissa), has been designated under the Convention of Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar Convention). The mangroves and wetlands of the Andamans and Nicobar Islands and the Sunderbans are protected as a marine bioreserve. There are delicate sea grass beds in the Palk Bay and rich coral reef ecosystems in the Lakshadweep and Andaman and Nicobar islands and in the gulfs of Kutch and Mannar. The monsoonal cycle plays an important role in supplying water and sediment to the coastal plains of India. Annual ﬂooding by freshwater runoff from surrounding highlands and marine water occurs during the monsoon (June to September in the west

coast and December to March along the east coast), ﬂooding more than 30,000 square kilometers of lowlands annually. These high-rainfall months bring sediment and freshwater to the coasts and tidal ﬂat accretion in the gulf regions. The rise and fall of sea level caused by tides are regular and has a higher magnitude along the northwest coast. There is a great range in the daily or semidaily change in water levels. The annual recurrence of upwelling along the west coast increases primary and secondary productivity. All these factors contribute to a rich multispecies ﬁshery in India. It is also important to note that the risk and uncertainties arising from physical, biological, and socioeconomic environments increase the vulnerability of ﬁshing communities. It is the close-knit social fabric that helps communities

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absorb external changes and stresses while maintaining their livelihoods (Nandakumar 2007).

20.1.2. Human Modiﬁcations There is a tremendous inﬂux of human population ﬂocking to coastal settlements since the beginning of this century. Due to ill-conceived and fragmented management strategies, habitat degradation is intense in most of the coastal areas in India. Dredging, land reclamation, mining of sand, dumping of spoils, runoff from construction, sewage discharge from human settlements, uncontrolled tourism, poorly planned and implemented construction, and careless recreation on reefs are the major causes for the degradation of India’s marine habitats. Increasing urbanization, industrialization, aquaculture development, and industrial ﬁsheries are exerting tremendous pressure (both direct and indirect) on an already stressed marine and coastal ecosystem. To site few examples: Using indicators of relative vulnerability due to tourism, intensive agriculture/aquaculture, and industrial development, studies conducted by Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI) identiﬁed “hotspot districts” in several areas, such as tourism in North Goa, intensive agriculture/aquaculture in East Godavari, and industries in Thane, having an adverse impact on coasts and coastal communities (Jorge et al. 2002; TERI 2000). Gujarat is one of the richest states of the country and has a diverse and ecologically sensitive coast. It is here, at Alang, that one of the largest shipbreaking yards is located and where half the world’s discarded ocean-going ﬂeet is scrapped. This industry is virtually unregulated, and pollution from shipwrecking devastates the local environment and the lives of hundreds of migrant workers (Tiwari 1998). The takeover of coastal land for port development has destroyed mangroves and people’s access to the sea and grazing lands in Mundra, Kutch District of Gujarat (Langa 2008). Lack of appropriate management measures is having long-term impact on millions of poor coastal ﬁshing communities of India. For example, 3,000 Bhoi ﬁsher folk from 42 villages in Maharashtra are reported to have lost their livelihood due to efﬂuent discharge and destruction of marine life in Dabhol Creek (8 km away from the industrial estate) from the 155 factories in the Lote industrial area in the Ratnagiri district. Pollution has affected the health of children and adults in the surrounding villages (Bunsha 2001). Development activity also forces people out of their traditional

habitation. For example, a ﬁshing community in Sondikud village in Orissa has been displaced twice without any compensation, ﬁrst to make way for the Paradwip port and then for the construction of a university (Nayak 1997). The navigation canal project, Setusamudram, in the fragile ecosystem of Gulf of Mannar is another environmental disaster (Kalyanaraman 2007). At the other end of the Gulf of Mannar is the nuclear plant of Koodankulam, where the thermal discharge is a threat to the precious biological reserve. Moreover, three large human settlements of ﬁshers live within ﬁve kilometers of the plant, and their livelihoods have been irreparably affected (Bidwai 2007). The fact that the coastal communities have risen in revolt against such developments for the last decade is a sign of the negative impact of such development on the coasts and coastal livelihoods.

20.2. COASTAL COMMUNITIES, FISHING PRACTICES, AND THEIR VARIATIONS India’s large coastline is occupied by diverse groups of ﬁshing and nonﬁshing communities. The people speak different languages, follow different religious faiths, and have a very complex caste system. More than 3.5 million ﬁshers spread over 3,202 villages derive their livelihoods from capture ﬁsheries that are spread over the 2 million square kilometers of India’s EEZ (Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute [CMFRI] 2005a) (table 20.1). One out of three is active in or is dependent on ﬁshing in these villages. Being physically at the margin of the landmass, these communities are also socially marginalized, falling among the backward castes in the caste hierarchy that is a speciﬁc characteristic of Indian society. TABLE

20.1 A proﬁle of marine ﬁsheries in India

Population Segment

Number

Marine ﬁsher population Marine ﬁsher households Number of active ﬁshers Average number of seagoing ﬁshers per village Average number of ﬁshers per village Fish-landing centers Marine ﬁshing villages

3.52 million 756,212 1.025 million 282 825 2,251 3,202

Source: Based on Marine Fisheries Census 2005, Government of India, Ministry of Agriculture and Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Cochin.

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Coastal Fisheries in India While the largest number is Hindu (71.4 percent) there are also Christians (16.6 percent) and Muslims (9.2 percent). Women form 48.6 percent of the population, indicating a negative female sex ratio of 948 females for 1,000 males, and the average family size is 4.7. The social indicators of these communities are generally lower than those of the interior. Only 56.5 percent of the ﬁshers are educated, of which 22.2 percent have secondary and only 5.6 percent with more than secondary education (CMFRI 2005a). About 46.8 percent of ﬁshers are engaged in active ﬁshing and ﬁshery-related activities, and the ﬁshery is their only source of livelihood. They possess no other skills or access to resources to make a livelihood in any other manner. The major ﬁshery-related occupations are working on crafts (39.2 percent), mending of nets (28.6 percent), and marketing (14.0 percent). Among women, the major ﬁshing associated activities are marketing (41.8 percent), labor (18.4 percent), and curing/ processing (18 percent) (CMFRI 2005a). Having engaged in the ﬁshery for centuries, the marine ﬁshers have developed and evolved ideal ﬁshing craft and gear utilizing their traditional and highly perfected skills of navigation and ﬁshing. These are as numerous and diverse as the communities themselves, also developed speciﬁcally to suit the varied ecosystems in which they live. The modernization phase in ﬁsheries started in the 1950s and was the cause for the “technological dualism” into a “modern” and “traditional” sector (see ﬁgure

20.2). There were small trawlers introduced to target demersal species that operated alongside the traditional dugouts, plank canoes, and small four-logged catamarans. Then the 1980s was a period when import-led development in the country resulted in modernization of the “traditional” small-scale ﬁshery. During this period, the small crafts were replaced by other beach-landing crafts made of either ﬁberglass or marine plywood ﬁtted with inboard motors or outboard motors (OBMs), depending on the size and area of operation. All this was made possible because of a rather open ended policy of the government in keeping with the open access to the ﬁshery, as this sector was in no way controlled or managed. According to the CMFRI (2005b), there are 238,772 crafts, of which 58,911 are mechanized, 75,591 are motorized, and rest are nonmotorized/ nonmechanized. Of the mechanized crafts, 29,241 are small trawlers (32–54 feet in length), which although mechanized are not ﬁtted with modern equipment or facilities except in some cases an echo sounder in a small percentage of cases and the use of geographical positioning systems in a few more. Trawlers account for 39.6 percent of the mechanized craft, followed by gillnetters (31. 3 percent), dol-netters (19.2 percent), and others. There are 1,896 traditional marine ﬁsh-landing centers, 33 minor ﬁshing harbors, and 6 major ﬁshing harbors. Nearly 62 percent of the ﬁsher families involved in ﬁshing possess neither ﬁshing craft nor ﬁshing gear (CMFRI 2005b).

30

Landings (lakh tonnes)

25

20

15

10

5

Small trawlers, dugouts, plank canoes, small four-logged catamarans

0 1950

1965

export trade expansion and motorization of country craft initiated

Modernization of traditional small scale fishery, introduction of beach landing crafts of fiber glass and plywood with IBM or OBM

1980

20.2 Phases of marine ﬁsh production in India, 1950–2005. (Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Cochin, India)

FIGURE

2005

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Table 20.2 gives an idea of the manner in which the evolution of the ﬁshery took place with the gradual transformation of the craft in the different regions of the country. Whereas the data indicates the increase in number of craft and subsequently the increase in the ﬁshing effort, it does not dwell on the actual capacity of the craft, which has also increased. The introduction of OBMs transformed the nonmechanized sector, as a large number of traditional ﬁshers motorized their craft. In several regions, there was an improvement in the craft itself as the government introduced ﬁberglass beachlanding craft along the northwest coast and other beach-landing plywood craft were introduced by ﬁshermen’s organizations on the southwest and southeast coasts. On the whole, there was thus a phenomenal increase in ﬁshing effort with greater dependence on fossil fuel. The use of speciﬁc gear also deﬁnes a community. Traditionally, large beach seines are in use along most of the west coast and the southeast coast, together with a wide variety of drift nets and gillnets, which target different species. Hooks and lines are used mainly in the southern areas. Large dol-nets are used in the gulfs on the east and west coasts. A dol-net is a ﬁxed bag net operated in strong tidal currents and is used mainly to catch Bombay duck (Harpodon nehereus) of the west coast of India. In speciﬁc areas with the extended continental shelf, communities are involved in ﬁshing without any craft. But these gears have also undergone changes primarily with the introduction of nylon and monoﬁlament twine in the 1960s. The nets became larger in size with smaller mesh sizes, and also more nonselective as midwater purse seines and high open-bottom trawls were also introduced. There are some areas where women have also been involved in ﬁsh gathering and also in diving for oysters and collection of seaweed. A signiﬁcant feature of the traditional ﬁshery is that it is TABLE

decentralized and labor intensive and adopts a sexual division of labor that is complementary, the men ﬁshing and the women involved in the postharvest activity. The ﬁshermen use a variety of gear for different species in different seasons. The remuneration to labor has always been on a sharing basis, one share going to the craft and gear after deduction of expenses. Fish is landed in the home village, whence the women take it to market, always keeping the best for home consumption. The majority of these ﬁshing communities have their own community organizations that regulate life in the community and norms that regulate the ﬁshing. These latter differ in operational styles, some being more democratic than others. Nevertheless, they are totally male dominated all over the country. In the process of integration into the modern state, the role of these traditional institutions has reduced signiﬁcantly in the past ﬁfty years.

20.2.1. Women in Fisheries The complementary sexual division of labor in traditional ﬁsheries implies that men ﬁsh and women do the shore jobs. This means that women are active participants in the ﬁshery as they generally attend to all the land-based aspects of the ﬁshery both in the pre- and postharvest work. Making of ﬁshing nets was traditionally the work of women, and in some areas they bait the hooks for line ﬁshing, too. It is they who take hold of the catch of their husbands or other ﬁshermen once it is landed, as they market the ﬁsh and convert it into other food and money for the sustenance of the family. Marketing the ﬁsh in several areas is a laborious task as women travel several miles under difﬁcult circumstances to reach markets. Initially, women also processed ﬁsh, salting and drying it as there were no other preservation measures. Moreover, as in all other communities, women are responsible for nurturing the entire family and keeping the home ﬁres burning. This

20.2 Changes in technology in different regions of India, 1980 and 2005

Craft

Northwest Region

Southwest Region

Northeast Region

Southeast Region

Year Mechanized Motorized Nonmechanized Total

1980 3,553 — 6,633 10,186

1980 2,061 — 33,213 35,274

1980 410 — 13,744 14,154

1980 3,259 — 79,356 82,615

2005 14,134 11,308 4,261 29,703

2005 9,877 17,856 17,099 44,832

2005 10,406 6,495 25,485 42,386

2005 10,879 38,896 50,141 99,916

Source: Compiled from the CMFRI Census of 1980 and 2005 (1980 census data are not available for the state of Maharashtra, which is in the northwest region).

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Coastal Fisheries in India complementary sexual division of labor gave the artisanal ﬁshery the resilience to survive heavy odds, like bad seasons and indebtedness. Women account for 48.3 percent of the ﬁsher folk in ﬁshing-associated activities. Among those engaged in ﬁsh marketing, 73.6 percent are women and around 75.7 percent of those involved in curing and processing are women (CMFRI 2005a). Women face several problems in the market battling extortionist male traders and competitive prices as iced ﬁsh from the big harbors gets dumped in the market. As they otherwise have to walk around 8–12 kilometers to and from the market with the ﬁsh loads on their heads, they are at a disadvantage reaching the market late in comparison to the male merchants, who get there faster on their bicycles or mopeds. Women in Kerala (from 1978) and later in other areas therefore began to mobilize to defend their rights in the market, especially against the tax collectors. They also organized to demand the right to travel on the public transport with their ﬁsh. These women were not asking for a dole from the government but a basic right to travel on public transport, like other citizens. Achieving such a demand was not easy, and it took two years of constant protest and a lot of groundwork until in some states, the government ﬁnally created the Fishermen’s Welfare Corporation to run special vehicles exclusively for women ﬁsh vendors. These struggles have given women a consciousness of their own rights, and they have realized that by not asserting these rights, they can be easily marginalized in the development process (Nayak and Vijayan 2006; Nayak et al. 2006). Unfortunately, with the intervention of the state in the modernization of ﬁsheries, women have faced many setbacks. The modernization of the ﬁshery, together with it becoming more harbor based, gradually displaced women as men entered the marketing arena. This was because women were not assisted by the government to enhance their skills and have access to credit so that they, too, could retain their space in the marketing. In matrilocal communities where women inherited the ﬁshing equipment and therefore had a share to the catches, they were totally displaced when the banks came in with credit and recognized the man as the ﬁsher and began giving loans directly to men to buy ﬁshing equipment. The modern state did not recognize the social norms that gave women a legitimate place in the ﬁshery (Nayak 1993). This has been another big struggle for women to register and be recognized as workers in the ﬁshery so that

they can avail themselves of the welfare beneﬁts that some states have for the ﬁshworkers.

20.3. FISH RESOURCES AND PRODUCTION The marine ﬁshery resources of the country’s EEZ stand assessed at 3.93 million metric tons. This resource is distributed in the inshore (58 percent), offshore (34.9 percent), and deep sea (7 percent). The major share of this resource is demersal (2.02 million metric tons), followed by 1.67 million metric tons of pelagic and 0.24 million metric tons of oceanic resources (Government of India 2004). The west coast contributes 70 percent and the east coast 30 percent of the total marine ﬁsh landings. An estimated 75 percent of ﬁsh production in India is from the coastal waters, with 58 percent being within the 0–50 m depth (see ﬁgure 20.3). The west coast contributes 50 percent more ﬁsh per unit area (8.8 metric tons/km2) than the east coast (5.9 metric tons/km2). This is attributed to oceanographic features such as upwelling and higher primary and secondary productivity on the west coast (Government of India 2001; Vivekanand 2002). As a consequence of state support, technological growth, and growth in export and domestic markets, India’s total ﬁsh production increased eightfold— from 0.7 million metric tons in 1951 to 6.2 million metric tons in 2002 (FAO 2006). In 2001–2002, ﬁsheries contributed US$8,485 value from capture and farmed ﬁsh production (FAO 2006). This is about 1.21 percent of the gross domestic product of India at 2002 prices (Government of India 2002).

0–50 (58%)

50–200 (35%)

200–500 (1%)

>500 (6%)

FIGURE 20.3 Depthwise estimate of marine ﬁsheries resource potential in the Indian EEZ. (Source: Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Cochin, India)

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Case Studies in Governance 35 30 25 20 15 10

2005–06

2004–05

2003–04

2002–03

2001–02

1999–00 2000–01

1998–99

1997–98

1996–97

1995–96

1994–95

1993–94

0

1992–93

5 1991–92

According to the Central Ministry of Agriculture, in 2004–2005 the total ﬁsh production in the country was 6.3 million metric tons, increasing from 4.2 million metric tons in 1991–1992. The major contribution to this increase came from the inland sector (including aquaculture), which increased its share from 41 percent in 1991–1992 to 56 percent in 2004–2005. However, the total marine ﬁsh landings show a slight declining trend during 2005–2006 (see ﬁgure 20.4).

Marine fish landings 00,000 tonnes

20.3.1. Sectorwise Marine Fish Production In 2004, the marine ﬁsh catch was 2.99 million metric tons (see ﬁgure 20.4) (Government of India 2004), of which 63 percent was from the west coast and the rest from the east coast. In 2001, 67 percent of the production was from mechanized ﬁshing units (using trawls, gillnets, and purse seines), while 25 percent was from motorized ﬁshing units (using gillnets, lines, and purse seines with OBMs), and 8 percent from nonpowered ﬁshing units. It is signiﬁcant that half of total marine capture ﬁsheries production was from the mechanized trawl sector in 2001 (see ﬁgure 20.5). The share of the nonmechanized sector declined from 20 percent in 1991 to just about 8 percent in 2001, while that of the motorized sector increased from 16 percent to 24 percent in the same period (CMFRI 2005b). As stated earlier, a large number of the traditional nonmechanized craft were motorized, which implies that the traditional ﬁshers also increased their share of the total catch

FIGURE 20.4 Marine ﬁsh landings in India, 1991–1992 to 2005–2006. (Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Cochin, India)

but at high cost as the ﬁshing itself became more capital intensive.

20.3.2. Marine Product Exports In the early stages, the need for foreign exchange earnings compelled the government to orient development of ﬁsheries toward export. In the 1970s, shrimp was the major export item. But gradually the species composition of the export basket changed and involved larger quantities of lower value species and those that also formed the food for local consumption. Marine products exports from India increased from a meager 31,695 metric tons in 1969–1970 to 75,583 metric tons in 1980–1981 and to 461,329 metric tons in 2004–2005 (see ﬁgure 20.6). It is also a major contributor to foreign exchange earning

80 70

Percentage

60 50 40

Mechanized Motorized Non Mechanized

30 20 10 0 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

20.5 Percentage contribution of different sectors to marine ﬁsh production in India, 1991–2001. (Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Cochin, India)

FIGURE

281

Coastal Fisheries in India fetching US$1,365 million during 2004 (FAO 2004). However, there is a marginal decline of 0.78 percent in the unit value realization compared to the previous year (see ﬁgure 20.7). The share of frozen shrimp fell from 57 percent in 1988–1989 to 30 percent in 2004–2005, and the share of frozen ﬁnﬁsh increased from a mere 11 percent to 35 percent during the same period. However, in terms of value, frozen shrimp continues to dominate (63.50 percent), with frozen ﬁnﬁsh in second place with a mere 11.4 percent (Marine Products Export Development Authority 2007). This indicates that the prices that ﬁnﬁsh exports earn are not substantial and could fetch as high a price in the domestic market.

respect to any of these matters. State jurisdictions for administrative purposes are limited to 12 nautical miles from the shoreline. The maritime states are responsible for the territorial waters (up to 12 nautical miles), and the central government for the area beyond that and up to the EEZ limit of 200 nautical miles. In the central government, the ministries of agriculture, commerce and industry, environment and forests, food processing, and defense play important roles in the ﬁsheries sector. While the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying of the Ministry of Agriculture is responsible for ﬁsheries in the EEZ, beyond 12 nautical miles the Ministry of Commerce and Industry is responsible for the development and promotion of exports of ﬁsh products. The coast guard, under the Ministry of Defense, provides protection to ﬁshermen and assistance to them at sea while in distress and regulates ﬁshing by foreign ﬁshing vessels in the maritime zones. The coast guard also has a mandate to protect endangered marine species under the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. The Ministry of Environment and Forests protects and preserves the coastal and marine ecology and environment (excluding the marine environment in the EEZ) and coastal habitat protection issues. The Department of Ocean Development holds the responsibility to draft policies and legislation relating to ocean and ocean resources and conservation of the marine environment in the EEZ. While the Ministry of External Affairs is responsible for negotiations on matters regarding the law

20.4. FISHERIES DEVELOPMENT AND MANAGEMENT: STATE INITIATIVES Fisheries in India fall under the umbrella of the Ministry of Agriculture, but their development and management are undertaken by a number of institutions falling under other ministries as well, with responsibilities divided between both the central and state governments. Fish production from the EEZ and the “deep sea,” as well as major ﬁshing harbors, the ﬁshing vessel industry, seafood export trade, and marine and inland research and training, is the responsibility of the central government. The Indian parliament has exclusive power to make laws with

700000 600000 500000 400000 300000 200000 100000

04 04 – 20 05 05 – 20 06 06 –0 7 20

03

03 –

20

02

02 – 20

01

01 – 20

96

00 –

20

91

95 – 19

86

90 –

19

81

85 – 19

76

80 –

19

75 –

19

19

70 –

71

0

Exports in tonnes FIGURE 20.6 Marine products exports from India (metric tons), 1971– 2007. (Marine Products Exports Development Agency, Cochin, India)

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–0 7

–0 6

05

06 20

04

–0 5 20

03

–0 4 20

–0 3 02

20

01

–0 2 20

–0 1

20

–9 6 20

00

95

–9 1 19

–8 6

90 19

–8 1 19

85

–7 6

80 19

75 19

19

70

–7 1

0.00

Value in US $ Million FIGURE 20.7 Marine products exports from India (million US$), 1971– 2007. (Marine Products Exports Development Agency, Cochin, India)

of the sea, and the Department of Ocean Development is the nodal agency for implementing the provisions of the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (International Collective in Support of Fishworkers 2003). In addition, there is a separate set of agencies, at the central and state levels, that deal with implementation of programs aimed at poverty alleviation, social security, infrastructure development (rural roads and rural water supply), and strategies for rural employment and development. The planning commission is responsible for the formulation of the ﬁve-year plans for the most effective and balanced utilization and allocation of resources.

20.4.1. State’s Planned Effort for Fisheries Development Focus on the rural sector and eradication of poverty has been the development priorities in India’s ﬁve-year plans. In general, there has been a consistent emphasis on increasing production to enhance income and employment opportunities and to meet protein and food security needs across plan periods. There has also been a consistent emphasis on improving landing, storage, and transport infrastructure and modernizing the ﬁshing boats. Various plans saw the latter as an important way to draw the ﬁshermen out of poverty. The ﬁrst and second plan periods (1951–1960) initiated many intergovernmental projects that, among other things, introduced trawlers in India.

The third plan (1961–1969) focused on exports. The fourth plan (1969–1974) advocated credit and subsidies for the development of an indigenous trawler ﬂeet, to compete with imported trawlers speciﬁcally for those trawlers that were meant to ﬁsh in the “deep sea.” The ﬁfth plan (1974–1979) proposed the creation of a special Trawler Development Fund in order to help smaller entrepreneurs and cooperatives to purchase and operate trawlers for marine ﬁsheries. During this period, the conﬂict between the trawlers and the traditional sector began. The trawl sector that initially targeted shrimp ﬁshed in the near-shore ﬁshing grounds of the traditional sector. It also caught a large amount of “bycatch” that ﬂooded the local markets, thus also reducing the ﬁsh prices, causing a hue and cry by women ﬁsh vendors of the traditional sector. There was protest by the traditional ﬁshers in several parts of the country. As a result, the sixth plan (1980–1985) proposed improving craft and gear of the small-scale ﬁshers with the objective of improving the socioeconomic condition of ﬁshermen. It also recognized the conﬂict between the two sectors. This was the turning point for the traditional sector as it began to compete for survival with the trawl sector. The eighth plan (1992–1997) emphasized the motorization of traditional crafts. Although the ﬁrst, second, third, and fourth ﬁve-year plans strongly advocated setting up and expanding cooperatives among ﬁshers to prevent the exploitation by middlemen, the cooperatives, generally, have been merely instruments to channel

Coastal Fisheries in India government subsidies and have in no way acted as producer organizations. According to the CMFRI census, one out of ﬁve ﬁsher folk is a member of some cooperative society, ﬁsheries or others (CMFRI 2005a). The eighth plan gave impetus to the National Welfare Fund schemes for development of housing and drinking water facilities in ﬁshing villages introduced during the seventh plan. It proposed the saving-cum-relief scheme for ﬁshermen, under which ﬁshermen could save a ﬁxed amount every day during good ﬁshing seasons, and this, supplemented by additional contribution from the state and central governments, could be utilized to disburse a monthly amount to each ﬁsher family during the lean periods in ﬁshing or during the closed season. Several working groups in earlier plan periods had recognized that coastal resources were under pressure. But it was only in the ninth plan (1997–2002) that the importance of conservation of aquatic resources and genetic diversity was highlighted, referring to the need to conserve the ﬁsheries resources of the coastal waters. It also emphasized the judicious exploitation of the coastal ﬁsheries resources by the traditional and small-scale sector. It recognized the need to protect their ﬁshing rights vis-à-vis the mechanized and deep-sea ﬁshing ﬂeet. Mention was made of the ﬁsherwomen only in the ninth plan, a focus that continued into the tenth plan. This was the result of years of protest by women and the traditional ﬁshers who were active in struggles to safeguard their spaces in the ﬁshery and the rights of the coastal people to a livelihood. It was also in line with the growing awareness on the need to address gender issues. The Report of the Working Group of Fisheries for the 10th Five-Year Plan (Government of India 2001) advocated an immediate adoption of a community-based and participatory approach to complement scientiﬁc ﬁsheries management, as there were hitherto no such measures in place. Simultaneously, there was emphasis in the tenth plan on the introduction of a new generation of ﬁshing vessels for development of offshore ﬁshing, and the technological upgrading of traditional vessels.

20.4.2. Coastal Zone Regulations and Other Legal Measures India’s Maritime Zones Act of 1976 recognizes the sovereign rights to conservation and management of living resources in the Indian EEZ, in addition to

283

their exploration and exploitation. The basic ﬁsheries legislation following this Act is the Maritime Zones of India (Regulation of Fishing by Foreign Vessels) Act, 1981 and the Maritime Zones of India (Regulation of Fishing by Foreign Vessels) Rules, 1982. This act makes no mention of ﬁsheries conservation and management. Fisheries within 12 nautical miles are managed under the Marine Fishing Regulation Act of the maritime states of India. The Act is based on a model piece of legislation prepared by the government of India’s Ministry of Agriculture in 1979, in response to demands from coastal ﬁshers. It was drawn up at a time when tremendous conﬂicts ensued between the two subsectors over access to ﬁshing space and resources, sometimes even leading to destruction of life and property (Kurien et al. 1982). The Coastal Regulation Zone Notiﬁcation under the Environmental Protection Act was created in 1991. This was a progressive step that could have safeguarded the coasts and the livelihoods of the ﬁshers. However, since its inception, there have been many amendments diluting the very purpose and weakening its legislative power. Apart from this regulation that attempts to protect the 500 meters from the high tide line along the entire coast, other conservation initiatives include marine protected areas (MPAs). India’s MPAs cover 5,000 square kilometers (i.e., about 4 percent) of the country’s protected area network. Although implemented with good intentions, the participation of local ﬁshing communities has been excluded, and therefore there is little room for success.

20.5. FACTORS LIMITING TRANSITIONS TO BETTER OUTCOMES Despite a major involvement of the government in the development of ﬁsheries, the present status of the ﬁshery and the ﬁshing communities is not very encouraging. The lure of proﬁtable markets has fueled investments in the ﬁsheries sector and led to an expansion in ﬁshing capacity and competition for resources. State policies that focused on expanding production and exports, without putting in place the institutional arrangements to manage this development, have led to a decline in the ﬁsheries rather than sustaining the industry. The 1970s and 1980s, for example, saw an expansion of mechanized trawling for shrimp.

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During this phase, in most states, it was capital from outside the sector that supported the expansion of activities such as trawling. Several studies (Johnson 2002; Nayak et al. 2006; Plateau et al. 1985) highlight that a large number of boat owners had never been regular ﬁshermen prior to the introduction of trawlers by the government. It was also such a situation that precipitated the conﬂicts between the mechanized trawl sector and the artisanal sector in several Indian states that continue to this day. The later years saw rapid increase in capacity in the small-scale sector as well, with the adoption of OBMs, enabling the small-scale sector to access resources in deeper waters at greater distances. By 1998, following the introduction of OBMs in the late 1970s, nearly 40 percent of artisanal craft had been motorized (Vivekanand 2002). This was a reaction by the small-scale sector to the competition posed by the mechanized ﬂeet and the market that signaled high export demand for shrimp and cuttleﬁsh. The process was facilitated by state policies that provided subsidies for kerosene and the purchase of OBMs. During this period, the smallscale sector also adapted gear types used by the mechanized sector. For example, Kerala witnessed the emergence of the ring seine (a modiﬁed form of purse seine) and the mini-trawl net. These were known to be highly nonselective and, while contributing to increases in production, also increased costs of ﬁshing. For instance, while a motorized catamaran using hooks and lines required an investment of Rs.35,000, a canoe using a ring seine in Kerala required an initial investment of as much as Rs.500,000 in 1993–1994 (Sathiadhas and Kanagam 2000). The investment for the latter is now in the range of Rs.1.2–1.5 million, almost the same or more than the investment needed to purchase a mechanized trawler. The increase in investment was accompanied by a corresponding increase in operating costs, particularly for fuel (Narayana et al. 2000). These developments precipitated overﬁshing in the absence of an effective management system regulating the use of resources. Most affected in this process were the ﬁshermen on nonmechanized craft using passive gear that faced depleting catches and increasingly vulnerable livelihoods. These were numerically in the majority. A study on motorization in Kerala notes that motorization created conditions that compelled the surviving nonmotorized units to concentrate in the shallower near-shore waters, creating further

ﬁshing pressure in these waters. In the prevailing open-access situation, it was clearly the poorer ﬁshermen who were losing out. In districts of Andhra Pradesh such as Srikakulam, East Godavri, and Prakasam, it was common for boat owners to remove the engines from their boats during certain periods, to reduce costs as catches dwindled (Integrated Coastal Management 2002). According to a report from Sanna Arjipalli village in Orissa (Integrated Coastal Management 2000), the number of boat-owning ﬁshers declined, and many of the earlier owners started to work as crew on motorized boats. At least a quarter of the total ﬁshing boats were reported to be owned by outside traders. This is corroborated in the study by Nayak et al. (2006), which notes that the majority of the workers on the trawl boats in Gujarat are from Andhra Pradesh. The fate of these migrant workers is a major concern as they work in bad conditions and have no rights or social security. The implications of high initial investments and operating costs have been far reaching. In 1997, only 23 percent of the active ﬁshermen in the marine ﬁsheries sector owned ﬁshing implements, compared to 34 percent in 1980 (Sathiadhas and Biradar 2000), and this appears to be indicative of a trend toward greater concentration of ownership. This again is corroborated by the CMFRI census of 2005, which reveals that around 60 percent of the ﬁshers do not own any craft or gear. Higher investments and running costs have also meant greater indebtedness. Although both formal (banks and cooperatives) and informal (traders and moneylenders) sources of credit exist, the latter continue to be more important because formal sources of credit are not adapted to the realities of the sector, making it more difﬁcult to obtain and repay loans. Informal credit also leads to bondedness as the ﬁshermen are bound to sell their ﬁsh to the trader who has advanced them money, implying that they are unable to sell to the highest bidder. As the merchants also determine prices, the bonded ﬁshers are at a further disadvantage. It is only the high demand for ﬁsh and the subsequent high prices that have kept the ﬁshers aﬂoat. The ﬂip side of this is that ﬁsh for local consumption and for the poor has substantially reduced. The aforementioned development strategy has had an impact on women and life in the community in general. Women have been marginalized in the ﬁsheries and been forced into other kinds of wage work to keep the home ﬁres burning. For those who

Coastal Fisheries in India have retained their space, life is a continuous struggle to access ﬁsh for sale. They also experience increased violence in the household as their men are driven to drinking. This and increasing coastal pollution also lead to high morbidity. Studies also reveal that there is a fall in the female:male sex ratio as the ﬁshery gets more capitalized (Nayak et al. 2006). Unfortunately in India, despite the fact that decentralized governance is legalized by an Act of Parliament, people’s participation in governance narrows down to representation by political party groups. Civil society organizations and institutions though very active in the country are given very little importance by the state. In several parts of the country the ﬁshing communities have their own community organizations. These organizations have been totally bypassed by the state in development planning. Since the 1960s, political parties began to make inroads into these communities. Now, several political parties have their presence in the ﬁshing communities, but none of them actually has any clear idea of the ﬁsheries and intervenes on behalf of the ﬁshers. They consider the ﬁshers mere vote banks. It was only since 1978 that an independent movement of ﬁshworkers grew out of the struggle between the traditional and the trawl ﬁshers. This movement was initiated in Goa and grew to become what is presently the National Fishworkers Forum (NFF). Now recognized as a national front of the traditional ﬁshworkers, this federation has drawn attention to the issues of the ﬁshworkers during the last 30 years. As a result, the debate on the ﬁsheries development policy was introduced into mainstream politics, and the government was pressured to establish legislation to safeguard the interests of the coastal ﬁshers. As the trawler and business interests have a powerful lobby and as organizing this highly dispersed artisanal sector along the long coastline of the country is indeed a Herculean task, the NFF has unfortunately not been able to move effectively into establishing workable ﬁsheries management regimes at the local levels and arrest the collapse of the ﬁshery. It is nevertheless a ﬁshworker organization in which women ﬁshworkers have played a major role and could in the future help the ﬁshers to move toward greater sustainability.

20.5. CONCLUSION One of the major shortcomings in Indian marine ﬁsheries is the lack of attention to management

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issues. Even basic features such a proper registration of trawlers and purse seiners was not undertaken even in the “advanced” ﬁshery states such as Kerala. Despite the zoning initiatives, the sea remains an “open access” realm, which has led to huge overcapitalization and a large rent drain. In states like Kerala, despite the radical governments and the independent ﬁshworker movements, the ﬁshery has been “evolving toward unsustainability” (Kurien 2004). Today the government of India seems to pay little attention to the needs of the ﬁshing communities. It takes recourse to new regimes imposed by the globalized economy to cut subsidies and move increasingly toward the privatization of harbors and the coasts. The state’s effort to overcome the problems of declining coastal productivity and deteriorating marine biodiversity resulting from environmental degradation and marine pollution is to develop technologies such as sea ranching and mariculture to increase the productivity of India’s coastal areas. It focuses on aquaculture as the only means to increase ﬁsh production while offering little support and no alternatives to the marine ﬁshers to sustain their ﬁshery. But the ﬁshing communities and ﬁshworker organizations themselves are gradually moving toward ﬁsheries management making a demand for a mode of co-management. The future depends on how the government and the scientiﬁc institutions will reach out to communities to safeguard their livelihood, the ﬁsh resources, and the sensitive coastal ecosystems. References Bidwai, P. (2007). ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Mega Nuclear Plant Hits Popular Opposition. IPS News. 11 June. ipsnews.net/news. asp?idnews=38119. Bunsha, D. (2001). The Hindu Survey of the Environment 2001. Chennai: The Hindu. CMFRI (Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute) (2005a). Marine Fisheries Census 2005. New Delhi: Government of India, Ministry of Agriculture. CMFRI (2005b). Marine Fisheries Information Service. Technical and Extension Series. Cochin, India: Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute. FAO (2006). Review of the State of World Marine Capture Fisheries Management: Indian Ocean. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 488. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2004). The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA). Fisheries Department.

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Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Government of India (2004). Marine Fishing Policy. New Delhi: Government of India. Government of India (2002). Tenth Five Year Plan. Vol. 1: Dimensions and Strategies. New Delhi: Government of India, Planning Commission, Yojana Bhavan. Government of India (2001). Report of the Working Group of Fisheries for the 10th Five-Year Plan. New Delhi: Government of India. Integrated Coastal Management (2000). Changing Fish Utilization and Its Impact on the Poor in Kerala—A Scoping Study. London: Changing Fish Utilization and Its Impact on Poverty in India Project, Post-Harvest Fisheries Research Programme, Department for International Development. Integrated Coastal Management (2002). Globalization and Seafood Trade Legislation: The Effect on Poverty in India—Final Report for Andhra Pradesh. London: Natural Resources Institute. International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (2003). Report on Coastal Fisheries and Poverty: The Case of India. Chennai, India: International Collective in Support of Fishworkers. Johnson, D.S. (2002). Emptying the sea of wealth: Globalisation and the Gujarat Fishery, 1950– 1999. Ph.D. diss., University of Guelph. Jorge, M.R., N. Lourenc, C.R. Machado, and L. Rodrigues (2002). Measuring, monitoring and managing sustainability in Indian coastal areas: The socioeconomic dimension. Littoral, September: 22–26. Kalyanaraman, S. (2007). Rama Setu and the Need to Save the Ecosphere. News Today, 13 November. newstodaynet.com/col. php?section=20&catid=29&id=1873 Kurien, J. (2004). Kerala’s Marine Fishery: Evolving towards Unsustainability. A Personal Statement Spanning Three Decades. Paper presented at International Workshop on the Implementation of International Fisheries Instruments and Factors of Unsustainability and Overexploitation in Fisheries, Siem Reap, Cambodia, 13–16. Kurien, J., and S. Mathew (1982). Technological Change in Fishing: Its Impact on Fishermen, ICSSR Monograph. Trivandrum, India: Centre for Development Studies. Langa, M. (2008). Zone of contention: Villagers veto sale of grazing land to Mundra SEZ. Down to Earth 17(1). Marine Products Export Development Authority (2007). Export of Marine Products from India (April 2006–March 2007). mpeda.com/inner_ home.asp?pg=publications/exportreview/ trends.htm

Nandakumar, D. (2007). Livelihood Assets and Survival Strategies in Coastal Communities in Kerala, India. Ph.D. diss., University of Victoria. Narayana, K.R., S. Suryaprakash, and L. Achoth (2000). Structural changes in ﬁshing pattern— a natural resource study in Tamil Nadu. In: R. Sathiadas and K. Venkateshvaran (eds). Proceedings of National Seminar on Fisheries Economics, Extension and Management, 58–68. Rome: International Fund for Agricultural Development. Nayak, N. (1993). Continuity and Change in Artisanal Fishing Communities: A Study of the Socio-economic Conditions of Artisanal Fishing Communities in the South West Coast of India following Motorization of Fishing Crafts. Trivandrum, India: Programme for Community Organisation and South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies. Nayak, N. (1997). Women First: Report of the Women in Fisheries Programme of ICSF in India. Chennai, India: International Collective in Support of Fishworkers. Nayak, N., and A.J. Vijayan (2006). The Coasts, the Fish Resources and the Fishworkers’ Movement. New Delhi: National Human Rights Commission. Nayak, N., D. Nandakumar, and A.J. Vijayan (2006). Coastal Population Dynamics and Ecosystem Changes: How Markets, Technology and Institutions Affect the Process along the West Coast of India. Trivnadrum, India: PROTSAHAN. Plateau, J.P., J. Murickan, and E. Delbar (1985). Technology, Credit and Indebtedness in Marine Fishing. Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation. Sathiadhas, R., and R.S. Biradar (2000). Fisheries in the development of the Indian economy. In: R. Sathiadhas and K. Venateshvaran (eds). Proceedings of the National Seminar on Fisheries Economics, Extension and Management, 1–20. Rome: International Fund for Agricultural Development Sathiadhas, R., and A. Kanagam (2000). Distribution problems and marketing management of marine ﬁsheries in India. In: V.N. Pillai and N.G. Menon (eds). Marine Fisheries Research and Management. Cochin, India: Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute. TERI (2000). Measuring, Monitoring and Managing Sustainability: The Coastal Dimension. Second Annual Report of the Expert Committee, Director General, Research. New Delhi, India: Tata Energy Research Institute. Tiwari, M. (1998). Titanic junkyard. Down to Earth, 15 March. www.ban.org/library/down_ to_earth.html Vivekanand, E. (2002). Marine Fisheries and Fish Biodiversity in India. sdnp.delhi.nic.in/nbsap/ themes/naturalaqua/biodiversityms.html

21 Japanese Coastal Fisheries MITSUTAKU MAKINO

21.1. INTRODUCTION

21.2. FISHERIES CO-MANAGEMENT IN JAPAN

Japan has one of the world’s oldest and best-established ﬁshery co-management regimes (Lim et al. 1995; Pomeroy and Berkes 1997). This chapter starts by presenting the institutional features of ﬁsheries governance, speciﬁcally highlighting the co-management framework of local coastal ﬁsheries, before brieﬂy introducing two case studies of successful co-management: the sandeel ﬁshery in Ise Bay and the snow crab ﬁshery off Kyoto Prefecture. A successful transition to greater public and private beneﬁts must be the goal of human– ecosystem interactions (Grafton et al. 2008). However, the current ﬁsheries governance framework in Japan is not sufﬁciently consistent with ecosystem-based management. Therefore, this chapter identiﬁes the institutional impediments to better ecosystem-based management. Then, using the case of the Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site, the supplemental measures needed for ecosystem-based management and the roles of local ﬁshers in the management are described. Experience gained from this case could inform future ecosystem-based management in other countries where large numbers of small-scale ﬁshers catch a wide range of species under a ﬁsheries co-management regime.

21.2.1. Institutional Framework for Fisheries Co-management Marine ﬁshing rights are classiﬁed into three categories in Japan: (1) ﬁshing rights for coastal ﬁsheries, (2) ﬁshing licenses for offshore and distant water ﬁsheries, and (3) free ﬁsheries (Ruddle 1987; Yamamoto 1995). Although the expiration period is ﬁxed in law, ﬁshing rights are regarded as real rights, and the provisions of the territorial rights law are applied mutatis mutandis. However, they do not include the right to privatize sections of the sea surface. Fishing rights are rather similar to use rights in their attributions, that is, the right to conduct ﬁshery operations exclusively in speciﬁed areas by speciﬁed methods. By contrast, ﬁshery licenses do not represent real rights, but taking the large capital investments of the license holders into account, they are also strongly protected under the law. The fundamental concept of ﬁshery management in Japan is “the holistic utilization of the sea surface” by the resource users themselves, as stated in Section 1 of the Fishery Law of 1949 (Makino and Matsuda 2005), which remains in force. Under this concept, the wide range of ﬁshing operations

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conducted within a given area must be arranged and coordinated with the overall usage impact in mind, and not simply in terms of each individual economic unit. As a result, coordinating organizations at various levels and on various scales have been created to act as instruments to facilitate holistic ﬁshery coordination (table 21.1); these include the Fishery Policy Council at the national level, widearea ﬁsheries coordinating committees (WFCCs) at the multijurisdictional level, area ﬁshery coordinating committees (AFCCs) at the prefectural level, and local ﬁsheries cooperative associations (FCAs) at the local level. In addition to these formal coordinating organizations, a number of new operational ideas have been developed since the late 1970s, largely on the initiative of the ﬁshers themselves. These developments include the establishment of resource management ﬁsheries, or Shigen Kanri-gata Gyogyo. More speciﬁcally, in order to maintain and improve their incomes, as well as to sustain resources, autonomous bodies of local ﬁshers known as ﬁshery management organizations (FMOs) have initiated various management measures. FMOs are often formed by a group of ﬁshers within an FCA. FMOs corresponding to particular target species are sometimes organized by members from several neighboring FCAs, or even by members of FCAs from several prefectures (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] 1993; Hasegawa et al. 1992).

TABLE

Within such a framework, the principal decision makers with regard to management are the local ﬁshers. The Fishery Law provides a framework for ﬁshery management through a system of ﬁshing rights and licenses. In order to achieve the holistic utilization of the ocean, these coordinating organizations have been granted wide-ranging authority and power. For example, the AFCCs, which consist mainly of local ﬁshers, may determine the allocation of, and restrict applications for, ﬁshing rights and licenses by means of their ﬁshery ground plan and committee directions. A variety of ﬁshing restrictions have been stipulated by prefectural ﬁshery coordinating regulations, FCA regulations, and FMO rules. Prefectural ﬁshery coordinating regulations broadly stipulate ﬁshing restrictions, and these regulations apply throughout the prefecture. FCA regulations stipulate ﬁshing restrictions in more detail, and these are applicable only locally. In particular, FCA regulations consider the restrictions set out in the prefectural ﬁshery coordinating regulations and make additions to them. Similarly, the FMO rules constitute a further reﬁnement of the FCA regulations. The government also plays a vital role in ﬁshery resource management. In fact, the co-management literature makes it clear that neither local ﬁshers nor the organizations to which they belong can function efﬁciently without government cooperation or intervention (Dolsak and Ostrom 2003; Pomeroy and Berks 1997). This is also the case for the Japanese

21.1 Coordinating organizations in Japan

Level

Organization

Function

National

Fishery Policy Council

Multijurisdictional

Wide-area ﬁsheries coordinating committees (WFCCs)

Prefectural

Area ﬁshery coordinating committees (AFCCs)

Local

Local ﬁsheries cooperative associations (FCAs)

More specialized purposes

Fishery management organizations (FMOs)

The advisory body to the government for national level ﬁshery coordination, design of national ﬁshery policy, etc. Coordination of resource use and management of highly migratory species; also addresses resource restoration plans Mainly composed of democratically elected ﬁshers; Coordination through the ﬁshery ground plan, prefectural ﬁshery coordinating regulations, and committee directions Composed of local ﬁshers; establish operational regulations (FCA regulations) that stipulate gear restrictions, seasonal/ area closures of ﬁshing grounds, etc. Autonomous bodies of ﬁshers; rules are more detailed and stricter than FCA regulations

Japanese Coastal Fisheries institutional framework. For example, the Prefectural Fisheries Division is responsible for the issuance and renewal of ﬁshing rights and licenses and bases its decisions on advice from the AFCC. Scientiﬁc information or administrative guidelines presented by the prefecture often form the basis for the regulations and rules devised by local ﬁshers. Furthermore, the resource management agreement system described in the Marine Fisheries Resource Development Promotion Law of 1971 legislatively encouraged autonomous ﬁshery management among ﬁshers. When a local agreement between ﬁshers prevails at a certain level within an area, the government can validate the agreement, and then it becomes an ofﬁcial rule. Therefore, it constitutes an ofﬁcial support system for autonomous resource management by the ﬁshers. Also, in relation to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Law Regarding Preservation and Management of Living Marine Resources was enacted in 1996. This law introduced a total allowable catch (TAC) and a total allowable effort (TAE) system. Based on advice from the Fishery Policy Council or WFCCs, the central government sets the TAC and TAE and controls total ﬁshing pressures. However, the allocation of quotas and the determination of access rules are basically the responsibility of ﬁshers’ organizations.

In short, Japanese ﬁsheries management comprises decentralized co-management between local ﬁshers and the government, rather than compulsory, top-down regulation by the government, or market-oriented management based on property rights and their efﬁcient utilization by economically rational resource users. The transaction costs for ﬁsheries management, which constitute the strongest counterargument to top-down management systems, are also shared between the government and the local ﬁshers. Makino and Matsuda (2005) analyzed a case in Kanagawa Prefecture and found that the transaction costs, especially the monitoring, enforcement, and compliance costs, were extremely low (about 0.6 percent of production).

21.2.2. Successful Cases of Fisheries Co-management in Japan 21.2.2.1. Sandeel Fisheries in Aichi Prefecture The Japanese sandeel (Ammodytes personatus) stock in Ise Bay is one of the most important resources for the pelagic-trawl ﬁsheries of Aichi and Mie prefectures (ﬁgure 21.1). The pelagic-trawl ﬂeet consists of two-net boats (about 15 tons) equipped with a

21.1 Location of case studies and ﬁsheries cooperative associations (indicated as circles along the coastline)

FIGURE

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net winch and one or two transport boats. Currently, about 200 such enterprises consisting of 700 ﬁshing boats from Aichi and Mie prefectures share the sandeel stock in Ise Bay. All of the ﬁshers belong to one of the 12 ﬁsheries cooperative associations (FCAs) and their branches along Ise Bay. Since around 1960, technological progress including the realization of increased engine power, and larger ﬁshing gear, and the installation of echo sounders has led to an increase in the ﬁshing capacity of the pelagic trawl ﬁshery in Ise Bay. Coincidently, during this period, ﬁsh seed production technologies for aquaculture became widespread in Japan, and the demand for adult sandeels as ﬁshmeal increased rapidly. These two factors resulted in the intensive exploitation of sandeel resources in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result, the sandeel stock in Ise Bay collapsed in the late 1970s. After this collapse, the ﬁshers thinking changed. They began to realize the importance of resource management and implemented various measures on an autonomous basis. Their ﬁrst measure, introduced in 1980, was to stop operating during the spawning period (from the end of November to mid December). As a second measure, they have protected the spawning stock since 1986. In addition, researchers at the prefectural research institute formulated the mathematical relationships between sandeel body length on the opening day of the sandeel ﬁshery and the value of the

catch during the season. Based on this formula and the data collected in joint experimental operations undertaken by researchers and ﬁshers, the sandeel ﬁshers established opening and closing days for their operations in the early 1990s. Furthermore, in order to ensure the protection of the spawning stocks, a marine protected area (MPA) was established as a no-take zone at the mouth of the bay in the latter part of the ﬁshing season. The area of no-take zone can be varied adaptively according to the estimated annual sandeel stock. For more details of management measures and implementation processes, see Tomiyama et al. (2008). Figure 21.2 shows the changes in the sandeel catch from 1979 to 2006. Compared with the depleted period of 1979 to 1982, and despite considerable ﬂuctuations, the catch has gradually improved. The total harvests for Aichi and Mie prefectures improved from 515 metric tons in 1982 to 19,108 metric tons in 2004, and 19,073 metric tons in 2006. Figure 21.3 shows that both the public beneﬁt (in terms of stock level, estimated by the prefectural research institutes) and private beneﬁt (in terms of catch value) have improved. To create a body to manage the shared ﬁsh stock, sandeel ﬁshers in 12 FCAs from both prefectures established a cross-prefectural ﬁshers’ organization. This framework plays a central role in decision making for the self-management of the

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21.2 Changes in sandeel catch (metric tons) in Ise Bay, 1979–2006. (Tomiyama et al. 2008)

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21.3 Public and private beneﬁts of the sandeel ﬁshery in Ise Bay. (Tomiyama et al. 2008)

FIGURE

sandeel resources in Ise Bay. This exceeds the scope of the local FCAs, and even the prefectural border. Researchers in Aichi and Mie research institutes for sandeel management are providing assistance with scientiﬁc information and guidance. The sandeel management approach developed in Ise Bay is a good example of the co-management of Japanese ﬁsheries in the following sense. First, voluntary organizations of ﬁshers from Aichi and Mie prefectures play a central role in managing the sandeel stocks in Ise Bay. By holding regular meetings on important resource management occasions such as the conﬁrmation of maturation or the determination of the opening day of the sandeel ﬁshery, ﬁshers from both prefectures get to know each other, build trust, and increase the legitimacy of the decisions. This leads to excellent compliance without costly enforcement. This volunteerism and the close relationships between ﬁshers are especially characteristic of this particular case. Second, activities by ﬁshers’ organizations have been strongly supported by the ﬁsheries research institutes in each prefecture through the provision of scientiﬁc information and forecasts. The most important factor facilitating self-management by ﬁshers is that they fully understand the need for resource management. In this particular case, ﬁshers had suffered seriously from declining resources between 1975 and 1982, and this experience taught them the importance of resource management. This is a signiﬁcant factor that promotes a positive attitude to management.

21.2.2.2. Snow Crab Fisheries in Kyoto Prefecture Kyoto Prefecture is located on the northern side of central Japan and has about 320 kilometers of coastline facing the Sea of Japan (ﬁgure 21.1). The bottom trawling sector is the second largest ﬁshery sector in Kyoto Prefecture. In 2006, they operated with ﬁfteen vessels and six or seven crew members on each vessel. The most important target species for this ﬁshery is the snow crab (Chionoecetes opilio). As a result of overﬁshing, the snow crab catch in the region declined greatly from 369 metric tons in 1964 to 58 metric tons in 1980 (ﬁgure 21.4). In an effort to restore snow crab stocks and generate more value, the organization of local ﬁshers introduced various management measures on an autonomous basis. Speciﬁcally, permanent and seasonal MPAs were introduced as no-take zones and these have been expanded since 1983. Permanent MPAs are meant to provide snow crabs with sanctuaries from ﬁshing and were established around their critical habitats. Seasonal MPAs are aimed mainly at avoiding bycatch of low-value crabs. The Kyoto Prefectural government supported these activities with funding and scientiﬁc research and advice. Also, other autonomous measures such as stricter minimum size limits and gear improvements have been introduced (Makino 2008). As ﬁgure 21.5 shows, the total catch has gradually increased since the implementation of the above

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management measures. Both the catch per unit of effort (CPUE) and the average value of catches landed in Kyoto Prefecture increased greatly. Figure 21.4 shows the public beneﬁt (index for the stock biomass in terms of CPUE, calculated as tons/day) and private beneﬁt (in terms of catch value). The average CPUE for 1978–1982 was 54 kilograms per day; for 2001– 2005, it had increased to 287 kilograms per day. As a private beneﬁt, the catch value rose from $914,500 in 1980 to $3,578,000 in 2001 (National Federation of Bottom Trawlers’ Unions 2006). There are several factors that are speciﬁc to Kyoto Prefecture. There are few bottom-trawling vessels in Kyoto (ﬁfteen), and the vessels are all

a similar size. Such homogeneity among resource users would contribute to effective decision making and implementation of the governance measures (Dolsak and Ostrom 2003). The roles played by government and other third parties should also be emphasized. Scientiﬁc information provided by the research institutes was a valuable resource that supported the establishment and improvement of Kyoto’s self-management regime. Financial support provided by local and central government also facilitated MPA construction. Although the above two cases had successful outcomes, several problems in the Japanese

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21.5 Changes in snow crab catch (metric tons) in Kyoto Prefecture. (National Federation of Bottom Trawlers’ Union 2006)

FIGURE

Japanese Coastal Fisheries institutional framework merit recognition and discussion. In fact, there are many structural defects in relation to Japanese ﬁsheries co-management. For example, autonomous decision making by local ﬁshers could sometimes leads to inﬂexibility or reclusiveness. Vested interests may be overprotected or egalitarianism pressure may prevent efﬁcient use of the resource. Local organizations may also prove to be unwilling to introduce new technologies, thereby retarding technical progress. A decentralized approach is not a versatile prescription. In addition, coordination by local ﬁshers is vital to the current institutional framework, but it inevitably becomes very complex and locally speciﬁc. Sometimes ﬁshers cannot play their expected roles as coordinators. As for the resources status within the Japanese economic exclusion zone, 43 of the 90 stocks (52 species) that were assessed were categorized as being at low levels in 2007. To deal with these situations, the Resource Recovery Plan system was implemented in 2001. Now, the Resource Recovery Plan, along with TAC, is the most important policy measure for resource management in Japan. As of April 2008, 63 plans have been implemented. The next task is the scientiﬁc veriﬁcation of the effectiveness of each plan for resource recovery.

21.3. EXPANDING FISHERIES CO-MANAGEMENT TO ECOSYSTEM-BASED MANAGEMENT 21.3.1. Institutional Impediments to Ecosystem-Based Management in Japan The marine ﬁsheries industry uses marine ecosystem services. Therefore, the sustainability of the ﬁsheries industry is ultimately dependent on the sustainability of marine ecosystems. Consequently, ﬁsheries management and marine ecosystem management are inextricably linked. However, the current institutional frameworks of Japanese ﬁsheries co-management and activities under this regime are not sufﬁciently consistent with ecosystem-based management. There are at least three institutional impediments to a transition to the ecosystem-based management (Makino 2005). This section identiﬁes these institutional impediments, and derives possible solutions.

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First, the main focus of Japanese ﬁsheries management has been target species, especially highly valued ones, and it has not paid much attention to the ecosystem context, per se. The reason relates simply to the principal aim of the current Fishery Law of 1949 enacted shortly after Japan’s defeat in World War II, that is, to develop the productivity of ﬁsheries to cope with domestic food shortages and to improve the economic status of ﬁshers engaged in ﬁshing operations (Makino and Matsuda 2005). However, Article 2 of the Fisheries Basic Act of 2001 recognizes that ﬁsheries resources are a component of the marine ecosystem and require ecosystem conservation. Therefore, in recent years, ecosystem conservation has become an important policy task in Japanese ﬁsheries administration, and to achieve it, progress should be made in scientiﬁc understanding, especially of the interrelationship between ﬁshing activities and marine ecosystems. Second, marine ecosystems have a broad range of users. This means there are various interests related to marine ecosystems, such as the nonuse value for citizens, or the dispersal of land-oriented pollutants or nutrients through material circulation. Also, the availability of the ﬁshery resources as a bequest to future generations, or their potential to provide new goods such as pharmaceuticals has potential value. Therefore, determining the use of marine ecosystems and conservation objectives inevitably become important social issues. In this regard, marine resource users and local communities are important stakeholders, as they live on the resource and can more directly affect its future. Their rights and interests have to be appropriately recognized and incorporated into management planning. At the same time, the involvement of all relevant stakeholders and technical expertise in planning and carrying out joint activities, and sharing management resources, is essential for effective management. However, under the current ﬁsheries management system, the scope of coordination and stakeholder participation is limited to the ﬁsheries sector only, and no other marine ecosystem users are included in the decision-making process. A new decision-making system should be devised that clearly reﬂects all the relevant stakeholders’ interests. This system can be established as an extension of the current ﬁsheries coordinating organization (table 21.1) by incorporating various stakeholders into the organization, or separately established with the ﬁsheries industry as a constituent.

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Finally, adaptive management is needed to deal with uncertainty in ecosystems, including ﬁsheries resources. As a prerequisite, the ecosystem must be continuously monitored. However, the current ﬁsheries management system monitors only commercially important resources. The ﬁrst step is to identify priorities as regards essential information, determine the additional roles that ﬁshers can take on, and develop supplementary data-gathering and monitoring systems to ﬁll the gap. Also, measurable management indicators of the overall status and long-term trends of the ecosystems must be developed and continuously included in the management decision-making processes.

21.3.2. Example of EcosystemBased Management in Japan: Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site In the Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site, ﬁshery co-management was successfully expanded to an ecosystem-based management system, in which the ﬁsheries sector plays an essential management role. Several new measures have been introduced to overcome the institutional impediments identiﬁed above (Makino et al. 2009).

21.3.2.1. Ecosystems and Fisheries in Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site Shiretoko Peninsula and its adjacent marine areas (the Shiretoko Natural Heritage World Site, ﬁgure 21.1) mark the southernmost limit of the seasonal sea ice in the northern hemisphere and are home to a marine ecosystem in which a wide variety of organisms migrate and live (Ministry of Environment and Hokkaido Prefectural Government 2007). In early spring, the sea ice melts, and blooms of ice algae and other phytoplankton become the most characteristic feature of the lowest trophic level of the Shiretoko ecosystems. The area’s high productivity supports a wide range of species, including marine mammals, seabirds, and commercially important species (Sakurai 2007). A distinguishing characteristic of this site is the interrelationship between the marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Many anadromous salmonids migrate up the peninsula’s rivers to spawn. They serve as an important food source for upstream terrestrial

species, such as the brown bear, Steller’s sea eagle, and white-tailed eagle. The peninsula is also internationally important as a stopover point for migratory birds (International Union for Conservation of Nature [IUCN] 2005). On account of the outstanding features of the Shiretoko region, the Japanese government nominated the region for World Heritage Listing in January 2004, and it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in July 2005. The ﬁsheries sector in the Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site developed rapidly since after World War II (Shiretoko Museum 2001). Today, the marine areas around the peninsula are among the most productive ﬁsheries in Japan. The ﬁsheries sector is one of the most important industries in the regional economy. In 2006, 851 ﬁshers were engaged in the industry, yielding 73,641 metric tons of ﬁsh, worth 22,966 million yen (Hokkaido Prefectural Government 2007). Their main target species and gear types are salmonids by set net, common squid by jigging, and walleye pollock, cod, and arabesque greenling by gillnet. The ﬁsh processing and marketing industries are also very active here. Furthermore, the dried kelp produced in this area is one of the most highly prized in Japan and, as a result, commands high prices.

21.3.2.2. New Management Measures for Ecosystem-Based Management With a view to achieving ecosystem-based management, one of the most important new measures implemented in the Shiretoko World Natural Heritage area is a system for coordinating the wide range of sectors involved (ﬁgure 21.6). The Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site Regional Liaison Committee discusses the proper management of the site, exchanges information, and coordinates various interests. The committee is composed of ofﬁcers from a wide range of ministries and departments, including environment, ﬁsheries, forestry, rivers, education, tourism, transport, and coast guard. Fisheries cooperative associations, the tourism industry sector, the Scientiﬁc Council (described below) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also participate. The committee serves as the main arena for policy coordination among administrative bodies. The Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site Scientiﬁc Council was established to provide scientiﬁc

Japanese Coastal Fisheries

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Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site Regional Liaison Committee Role: exchange information, and coordinate interests/policies amongst administrative sectors. Participants: Central/local government, Fisheries Cooperative Associations, Sightseeing Guide Associations, and NGOs.

Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site Scientific Council Role: Provide Scientific Advice on management, research, and monitoring activities Participants: Scientists, Central/local government, Fisheries Cooperative Associations, and NGOs. Marine WG

River Construction WG

cooperation and coordination

Shiretoko National Park Committee for the Review of Proper Use Role: Build use rules for tourists to reduce negative impacts on environment Participants: Scientists, Central/local government, NGOs.

Yezo Deer WG

FIGURE 21.6 New coordinating organizations in Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site. (Ministry of Environment and Hokkaido Prefectural Government 2007)

advice on the formulation of the management plan and on research and monitoring activities. The Scientiﬁc Council is composed of natural scientists, social scientists, and representatives of ministries and departments in central and local government, of ﬁsheries cooperative associations, and of NGOs. Also, the Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site is a popular tourist destination, and since its inclusion on the World Heritage List, the number of tourists has increased considerably. The marine area is used for such activities as sightseeing, sea kayaking, private boating, scuba diving, and recreational ﬁshing. To prevent tourism having any negative impact on the marine ecosystem and local ﬁsheries, the Shiretoko National Park Committee for the Review of Proper Use has conducted research and set proper-use rules for tourists. These organizations and their interrelationships have helped to ensure participation, the exchange of information and opinions, and the establishment of a consensus among the wide-ranging interests of the multiple users of the ecosystem services, thus supporting the legitimacy of the management plans and rules. Another important new measure is the formulation of the Multiple Use Integrated Marine Management Plan (Marine Management Plan), based on advice from the Marine Working Group of the

Scientiﬁc Council. It deﬁnes management measures for conserving the marine ecosystem, strategies for maintaining major species, monitoring methods, and policies for managing marine recreational activities. Its objective is “to conserve the marine ecosystem and maintain stable ﬁsheries through the sustainable use of living marine resources in the marine area of the heritage site” (Ministry of Environment and Hokkaido Prefectural Government 2007). The ﬁsheries sector has participated since the beginning of the drafting process. Because the ecosystem is disturbed, unclear, and complex, the Marine Management Plan stipulates the introduction of adaptive management (Holling 1978; Walters 1986) as a basic strategy. Finally, the third new measure involves the modiﬁcation of river constructions. To maintain and facilitate interactions between the marine and terrestrial ecosystems, artiﬁcial constructions such as dams have been modiﬁed since 2005 on scientiﬁc advice from the River Construction Working Group. The working group surveyed 118 artiﬁcial constructions in Shiretoko and evaluated their impact on salmonids. It investigated possible structural modiﬁcations, taking account of their effect on disaster risk. Some of the constructions were left unchanged because the modiﬁcations could have increased the risk of disaster in densely populated

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areas. As a result, 25 structures have been modiﬁed or are being modiﬁed as of the end of January 2008.

21.3.2.3. Role of Fisheries Sector under Ecosystem-Based Management To monitor the Shiretoko marine ecosystem, the Marine Working Group drew up a food web (ﬁgure 21.7), identiﬁed indicator species, and speciﬁed monitoring activities. The identiﬁed indicator species are salmonids, walleye pollock, arabesque greenling, Paciﬁc cod, Steller sea lions, seals, spectacled guillemots, slaty-backed gulls, Japanese cormorants, Steller’s sea eagles, and white-tailed eagles. The catch data compiled by local ﬁshers include many of the indicator species and other major marine species in the food web. Local ﬁshers have ﬁshed in this area for a long time and have compiled more than ﬁfty years’ worth of data. For some species, more detailed information has been collected including size, time and place of catch, and maturity. This information provides an important foundation for monitoring changes in the functions and

structure of the Shiretoko marine ecosystem. Under the Marine Management Plan, the local ﬁshers are recognized as an integral part of the ecosystem, and the data they have compiled are utilized ofﬁcially to monitor the ecosystem cost-effectively. However, catch data alone are insufﬁcient for monitoring the entire marine ecosystem, because ﬁshers’ behavior has an economic context. Therefore, the Marine Management Plan speciﬁes the monitoring of noncommercial species, as well as basic environmental indices such as weather, water quality, sea ice, and plankton. Walleye pollock is one of the most important target species for gillnet ﬁshers in the Shiretoko area. The total annual catch was around 100,000 metric tons in the late 1980s but has dropped greatly since 1990 and in 2006 was only 9,200 metric tons. It was believed that both climate change and increased ﬁshing in the late 1980s led to the stock collapse in the early 1990s (Ishida et al. 2006). During the nomination process, the IUCN requested the proper management of walleye pollock, because this ﬁsh is the prey of the Steller sea lion, which is on the IUCN red list. To cope with the decline in the catch, local ﬁshers and researchers have cooperatively introduced

FIGURE 21.7 Food web of the Shiretoko Heritage site (depicted by the Marine Area Working Group of the Scientiﬁc Council). Abbreviations of common species names, AG, arabesque greenling; BT, bighand thornyhead; F, ﬂatﬁsh; G, greenlings; O, octopus; OP, ocean perch; PH, Paciﬁc herring; PS, Paciﬁc saury; R, rockﬁsh; S, seals; SC, saffron cod; SF, sandﬁsh; SL, sand-lance. (Ministry of Environment and Hokkaido Prefectural Government 2007)

Japanese Coastal Fisheries autonomous management measures in addition to ofﬁcial management measures such as the TAC set by the national government.1 Local ﬁshers compile data related to such factors as catch size, time, area, body size, and maturity. These data are sent to the prefectural research station for analysis. The results are returned to the ﬁshers, and management measures are discussed. For example, the local ﬁshers voluntarily enlarged the mesh size of the pollock gillnet from 91 to 95 mm in the 1990s, in accordance with research results provided by the research station. Gillnet ﬁshers divide the ﬁshery ground into 34 areas based on their local knowledge and experience. They declared seven of these areas protected to conserve resources. These protected areas include a portion of the spawning ground of the walleye pollock. The protected areas are reexamined every year on the basis of the previous year’s performance and scientiﬁc advice from the local research station. After the World Heritage Listing nomination, an additional six areas were designated as protected. Although these autonomous management measures are not well deﬁned or documented, the Marine Management Plan ofﬁcially incorporates these measures as a component of ecosystem-based management. The result was a considerable reduction in administrative costs (Makino et al. 2009). This is a key point in terms of practical ecosystembased management. An important next step is to obtain scientiﬁc veriﬁcation of the validity of these measures.

21.4. CONCLUSION The fundamental concept of ﬁsheries management in Japan is “the holistic utilization of the sea surfaces” by the resource users themselves. Within such a framework, the principal decision makers with regard to management are the local ﬁshers. The Fishery Law provides a framework for ﬁshery management through a system of ﬁshing rights and licenses. To achieve the holistic utilization of the sea surfaces, the wide range of ﬁshing operations conducted within a given area are arranged and coordinated by coordinating organizations at various levels and on various scales. These coordinating organizations have been granted wide-ranging authority and power. The government also plays a vital role in ﬁshery resource management. Neither local ﬁshers

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nor the organizations to which they belong can function efﬁciently without government cooperation or intervention. Also, scientiﬁc information or administrative guidelines presented by the research institutes often form the basis for the regulations and rules devised by local ﬁshers. Case studies of the sandeel ﬁshery in Ise Bay and the snow crab ﬁshery off Kyoto Prefecture show that both public and private beneﬁt can be improved by appropriate co-management. The marine ﬁsheries industry uses marine ecosystem services. Therefore, the sustainability of the ﬁsheries industry is ultimately dependent on the sustainability of marine ecosystems. However, the current institutional frameworks of Japanese ﬁsheries co-management and activities under this regime are not sufﬁciently consistent with ecosystem-based management. The institutional impediments can be summarized as follows: lack of appropriate attention to the potential impact of ﬁshing operations on ecosystems, insufﬁcient involvement of the wide range of ecosystem service users in decision-making processes, and a lack of ﬂexible attitudes toward the uncertainties and ﬂuctuations of ecosystems and target resources. Using the case of the Shiretoko World Natural Heritage Site, in which ﬁsheries co-management appears to have successfully expanded to ecosystembased management, new measures for overcoming the above impediments were described. In this system, the local ﬁshers are an integral component of the ecosystem, rather than unwanted extras to be eliminated from the “original ecosystem.” Moreover, local ﬁshers are not something to be managed or controlled but are expected to play an indispensable management role, especially as regards ecosystem monitoring and resource management. Responsible ﬁsheries run by local resource users can contribute to the realization of cost-effective ecosystem-based management. Experience drawn from this case could inform future ecosystem-based management in other countries where large numbers of small-scale ﬁshers take a wide range of species under a ﬁsheries co-management regime.

Note 1. It is important to note that the local ﬁsh stocks are harvested by Russian trawlers operating around the southern Kuril Islands, where Japan and Russia have had territorial conﬂicts since World War II.

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References Dolsak, N., and E. Ostrom (2003). The challenges of the commons. In: N. Dolsak and E. Ostrom (eds). The Commons in the New Millennium. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 3–34. FAO (1993). Report of the FAO/Japan Expert Consultation on the Development of CommunityBased Coastal Fishery Management Systems for Asia and the Paciﬁc. FAO Fisheries Report 474. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Grafton, Q., R. Hillborn, D. Squires, M. Williams, S. Garcia, T. Groves, J. Joseph, G. Libecap, M. Makino, G. San Martin, T. Matthiasson, A. Parma, L. Ridgeway, B. Satia, and L. Zang (2008). Positioning ﬁsheries in a changing world. Marine Policy 32: 630–634. Hasegawa, A., H. Miyazawa, and T. Yamamoto (1992). An overview of Japanese ﬁsheries management systems developed under the initiative of ﬁshermen. In: T. Yamamoto and K. Short (eds). International Perspectives on Fisheries Management. Tokyo: National Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations, pp. 102–126. Hokkaido Prefectural Government (2007). Hokkaido Fisheries White Paper [in Japanese]. Hokkaido: Hokkaido Prefectural Government. Holling, C.S. (1978). Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Ishida, R., M. Torisawa, and O. Shida (2006). Fisheries and ﬁsheries resource in Shiretoko (continental shelf area) [in Japanese]. Kaiyo Monthly 38: 626–631. IUCN (2005). Technical evaluation report, Shiretoko (Japan). ID No. 1993. Gland, Switzerland: International Union for Conservation of Nature. Lim, C.P., Y. Matsuda, and Y. Shigemi (1995). Comanagement in marine ﬁsheries: The Japanese experience. Coastal Management 23: 195–221. Makino, M. (2005). The ecosystem approach of the CBD and ﬁsheries management in Japan. Global Environmental Research 7: 95–104. Makino, M. (2008). Marine protected areas for the snow crab bottom ﬁshery off Kyoto Prefecture,

Japan. In: R. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Selfgovernance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 604. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Makino, M., and H. Matsuda (2005). Co-management in Japanese coastal ﬁshery: Its institutional features and transaction cost. Marine Policy 29(5): 441–450. Makino, M., H. Matsuda, and Y. Sakurai (2009). Expanding ﬁsheries co-management to ecosystem-based management: A case in the Shiretoko World Natural Heritage, Japan. Marine Policy 33: 207–214. Ministry of Environment and Hokkaido Prefectural Government. (2007). The Multiple Use Integrated Marine Management Plan. Hokkaido: Ministry of Environment and Hokkaido Prefectural Government. National Federation of Bottom Trawlers’ Unions (2006). Report of Snow Crab Catch at the Sea of Japan in Fiscal Year 2005. Tokyo: National Federation of Bottom Trawlers’ Unions. Pomeroy, R.S., and F. Berks (1997). Two to tango: The role of government in ﬁsheries co-management. Marine Policy 21(5): 465–480. Ruddle, K. (1987). Administration and Conﬂict Management in Japanese Coastal Fisheries. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 273. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Sakurai, Y. (2007). An overview of the Oyashio ecosystem. Deep-Sea Research II 54: 2526–2542. Shiretoko Museum (2001). Fisheries in Shiretoko [in Japanese]. Shari: Association for Shiretoko Museum. Tomiyama, M., T. Komatsu, and M. Makino (2008). Sandeel ﬁsheries governance in Ise Bay, Japan. In R. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Selfgovernance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 604. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Walters, C.J. (1986). Adaptive Management of Renewable Resources. New York: Macmillan. Yamamoto, T. (1995). Development of a community-based ﬁshery management system in Japan. Marine Resource Economics 10: 21–34.

22 Property Rights in Icelandic Fisheries THOROLFUR MATTHIASSON SVEINN AGNARSSON

22.1. INTRODUCTION

22.2. COD AND HERRING FISHERIES

In the late 1960s, following a decade of ever increasing catches, the herring stocks around Iceland had been almost depleted. A few years later scientists warned that the cod stock faced a similar fate, unless catches were severely reduced. Because of the importance of the ﬁsheries sectors—in particular, cod and herring—for the Icelandic economy, declining catches of the two species had drastic consequences at both the local and national level (Agnarsson and Arnason 2007; Jonsson 1984). More important, however, the serious condition of the stocks served as a reminder that unchecked utilization of a natural resource could not continue indeﬁnitely and that open access would sooner than later have to give way to some sort of management. In the ensuing years, a quota system was ﬁrst introduced into the herring ﬁshery, and a combination of effort and volume restrictions was used to manage the cod ﬁshery. Finally, in 1990, a comprehensive quota system was initiated in almost all the Icelandic ﬁsheries. This chapter discusses the development of the herring and cod ﬁsheries in the last years of open access and describes the main attributes of the management tools introduced in each ﬁshery, as well as the current management system. Special attention is paid to the treatment of social justice questions that have popped up time and again during the implementation of the individual transferable quote (ITQ) regime in Iceland.

Icelanders and foreign ﬁshermen have for centuries exploited the rich ﬁshing grounds of the Icelandic coast, with cod as the dominant species in terms of both volume and value. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Icelandic ﬁshing ﬂeet was completely modernized, with trawlers replacing decked vessels and motorboats replacing rowing boats. The steam engine became a symbol of modern times and prosperity. The new vessels could handle a larger payload and had a far greater operational range than the old ones. In addition, they were able to utilize gear such as bottom trawls that hitherto had been operated only by foreigners. Reliable catch ﬁgures exist for the period since 1905, and these show that both Icelandic and foreign catches skyrocketed from less than 100,000 tons in 1905 to more than 300,000 tons in 1938 (see ﬁgure 22.1). The fact that foreign catches grew faster than Icelandic catches can partly be explained by lack of capital in Iceland to develop the ﬁsheries and the ﬁshing industry. Hence, both the ﬁshing infrastructure and the ﬁshing ﬂeet were underdeveloped compared to the foreign ﬂeet. Catches declined dramatically during both world wars as foreigners that frequented the Icelandic ﬁshing banks were forced to use manpower and equipment in the war effort. In the postwar era, catches picked up again from the growth trend of the 1930s and reached an all-time high of

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some 500,000 tons in 1958. During the 1950s, Iceland twice extended its ﬁshing zone, to four miles in 1952 and to 12 miles in 1958. Both extensions met stiff resistance from European governments, especially England. The battle for complete control of the ﬁshing grounds on the Icelandic continental shelf was continued in the 1970s, with the extension to 200 miles in 1975 signaling the end of foreign ﬁshing. Since the last English vessels left the Icelandic ﬁshing zone in 1976, domestic harvesters have had the ﬁsheries almost completely to themselves. Icelanders invested heavily in the ﬁshing industry in the 1970s, both in vessels such as sterntrawlers and in land-based processing plants. At ﬁrst, increased effort yielded increasing catches, with landings rising from 266,000 tons in 1975 to 460,000 tons six years later. Since then, cod catches have declined, despite several attempts to turn the trend around. In the summer of 2007, the quota for the ﬁshing year 2007–2008 was set at 130,000 tons, the lowest catches since 1922. The Icelandic herring ﬁshery developed into a large-scale industry during the ﬁrst half of the 20th century. Three main stocks were exploited; Icelandic spring spawning herring, Icelandic summer spawning herring, and the Atlanto-Scandic (Norwegian-Icelandic spring spawning) herring, with the latter becoming the most important in the 1960s. As shown in ﬁgure 22.2, Icelandic catches ranged from 60,000 to 220,000 tons until 1961, when they escalated to a record ﬁgure of 370,000

22.3. THE SEARCH FOR A MANAGEABLE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM The harsh reality of the fate of the herring stock showed Icelanders that although national control of the ﬁshing grounds might be a necessary condition for sustainable management of the aquatic resource, it was far from sufﬁcient.2 In October 1975, the Icelandic Marine Research Institute (MRI) issued a “black report” on the state of the cod stock. The initial response was to reduce the total allowable catch (TAC), which was resolutely overﬁshed, as no sanctions were induced to avert overﬁshing. Effort restrictions were next in line, with the Ministry of Fisheries stipulating measures in 1977 aimed at limiting cod catches. Each trawler was banned from ﬁshing cod for 30 days a year, all other vessels had to accept a one week ban, and attempts were made to ban further increases of the ﬁshing capacity of

600 Iceland

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22.1 Cod catches in Icelandic waters (thousand tons), 1905–2006. (MRI 2008, table 3.1.1)

FIGURE

Property Rights in Icelandic Fisheries

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FIGURE 22.2 Herring catches in Icelandic waters (thousand tons), 1900– 2006. (Icelandic Historical Statistics [Jonsson and Magnusson 1997], table 5.8; MRI 2008, tables 3.19.1 and 3.19.8)

the ﬂeet. The introduction of these measures coincided with the entrance of big year classes of cod at 3 years of age into the ﬁshable stock. Hence, the cod stock grew, leaving politicians and the MRI free to worry about other things. Vessel owners soon learned how to expand ﬁshing capacity of existing vessels without violating the capacity restrictions in effect. Thus, the capacity of the ﬁshing ﬂeet grew without much restraint from the ﬁshery managers. It soon became clear that despite the effort restrictions, the cod ﬁshery was being mismanaged. Catches usually far exceeded the TAC, while the restrictions also led to greater ﬁshing of other demersal species, increasing the pressure on species such as haddock, saithe, and redﬁsh. The system was also economically wasteful. Environmental conditions in the ocean deteriorated in the early 1980s, leaving the effort restrictions inadequate as measure of keeping the cod stock at a sustainable level. In addition, prices on foreign markets had fallen, and most of the harvesting companies were experiencing severe operating losses. The processing industry was doing only slightly better. As mentioned above, the herring ﬁsheries had collapsed around 1970, and in 1972 all gear except driftnets were banned in the ﬁsheries. Since purse seine had been the most widely used gear, and the use of driftnets had been very limited, the new restrictions really amounted to a moratorium on herring. In 1975, the ban on use of other gear,

including purse seine, was lifted, and each purse seiner allocated a quota. Vessels using driftnets were, however, not subject to a quota. In 1977 all vessels taking part in the herring ﬁsheries were allocated quotas, and in 1979 the quotas became transferable. Transferability was introduced to reduce the cost of ﬁshing, but in many cases the allotted quota was less than expected catch in one trip to the ﬁshing ground. The management system remained relatively unchanged in the next decade and was ﬁnally merged into the new comprehensive system in 1990 (described below). In the autumn of 1983, a government advisory committee was formed to analyze the state of the ﬁsheries and to propose new methods to deal with the problems at hand. The general view was that the time had come to abandon effort restrictions and, instead, turn to a quota system. These ideas had gained considerable ground, among both ﬁshermen and vessel operators, not least because of the success of the quota systems in the herring and capelin ﬁsheries that had been put into place in the 1970s. These enhanced management methods were discussed at the meetings of the Fisheries Association of Iceland during 1983, with the meeting embracing these views. Their proposals were later adapted by the Icelandic parliament (Alþingi) and on 22 December 1983 Parliament passed an amendment to the Fisheries Act of 1976, which gave the Minister of

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Finance discretionary powers to introduce an individual vessel quota system, as well as to restrict entry through licensing (Act 82/1983). Central to this Act and the associated Decree 44/1984 was that all vessels of 10 or more gross registered tons (GRT) were allocated quotas in the cod ﬁshery and six other important demersal ﬁsheries based on their overall catch record in the period from 1 November 1980 to 31 October 1983. Quotas were, however, allocated only to ships that had been active in the period from 1 November 1982 to 31 October 1983 and were still in operation. These vessels were issued a ﬁshing permit. Allowance was made, however, for vessels that had been out of operation due to repairs or other accepted reasons. Although the quota system was the dominant idea behind this new management regime, the effort restrictions were not abandoned altogether. Owners of new vessels or vessels that had been in operation for less than 12 months of the reference period could choose between obtaining an average quota for similarly sized ships and abiding by effort restrictions. Similar rules also applied to vessels that had changed hands, or in cases were a new captain had taken over the ship. Transfers of quotas were allowed to some extent. The system was intended as a preliminary measure for one year at a time. The opening up of the effort quota window paved the way for an increased role for such quotas each time the system was up for approval for an additional year. Parliamentarians, vessel owners, and other stakeholders understood that a hybrid output and effort quota system was not the right recipe for stability. Hence, in 1990 the parliament discussed and accepted Act 38/1990, which marked the introduction of a comprehensive quota system and made quotas permanent. At that time, it had also become self-evident that excluding a substantial part of the ﬂeet from management was not a very wise move. Thus, the system was extended to cover all vessels bigger than 6 GRT. However, a loophole was opened for the smallest vessels, the rather large ﬂeet of open boats.

22.4. OVERVIEW OF THE CURRENT ICELANDIC ITQ SYSTEM The current ITQ system in the Icelandic ﬁsheries is based on the Fisheries Management Act of 1990 and subsequent amendments (Act 38/1990). At present,

the ITQ system applies to 25 different ﬁsheries, which represent about 98 percent of landed value. The Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture determines the TAC for the next ﬁshing year3 for each of the ﬁsheries, after consultation with the MRI, which puts forward its recommendation each year in a report describing and discussing the current status of the ﬁsh stocks. A valid ﬁshing license is needed to take part in the ﬁsheries. Two different types of licenses now exist: quota licenses and hook-quota licenses, with the latter open only to boats smaller than 15 GRT. The hook-quota licenses derive their name from the fact that bottom longline and hand line are the only ﬁshing gear allowed. In the ITQ system a clear distinction is made between two types of quotas: TAC-shares and annual catch entitlements (ACE). The former is also sometimes called permanent quotas. Each vessel is allocated a percentage share in each of the ﬁsheries the vessel is entitled to take part in. Once the TAC for each ﬁshery has been set, the ACE of each vessel is simply calculated as the product of the TAC share of the vessel and TAC. Thus, a vessel with a 1 percent share in a certain ﬁshery will be allocated an ACE of 1,000 tons if the TAC is 100,000 tons, but only 500 tons if the TAC is 50,000 tons. All quotas are denominated in cod-equivalent terms, as the cod ﬁshery is by far the most important ﬁshery. Cod equivalents for each quota-year are determined on the basis of the average unit value of the landings of each species the year before, and provide a measure of the relative value of individual species compared to cod.4 The initial allocation of the permanent quotas is discussed below, but the Act states that when a TAC is introduced into a ﬁshery that has not been restricted before, TAC shares will be allocated on the bases of each vessel’s catch history in the previous three years. Quotas may only be allocated to vessels. The TAC shares are almost completely transferable, the only restrictions applying to cases when shares are transferred to a ﬁrm in a different community. Then the community where the seller is located has the right to buy at the negotiated price. This provision has though seldom been utilized as municipalities have not had funds or political willingness to intervene. The TAC shares are completely divisible. By contrast, only half of the ACE of each vessel may be transferred in a single quota-year between vessels of different ownership. Offsetting transfers of different species with equal value are, however, not subject to any such restrictions. Thus

Property Rights in Icelandic Fisheries vessel owners are forced to harvest at least half of their quota allocations measured in cod equivalents each quota-year. If the utilization is less than 50 percent for two years running, the vessels forfeit their TAC shares. Allowance is though made for damages incurred or substantial repairs. Quotas— both TAC shares and ACE—may be transferred from vessels in the quota system to vessels in the hook-quota system, but not the other way around, that is, not from smaller to larger vessels. There is an upper limit or ceiling on the TACshare holdings of each harvester and related ﬁrms or individuals. The limit varies from 12 percent for cod to 35 percent for redﬁsh. In most cases though there is a 20 percent ceiling. In addition, the combined TAC shares of each ﬁrm in all ﬁsheries must not exceed 12 percent of the total value of the TAC, measured in cod equivalents. The corresponding ceiling in the hook-quota system is 5 percent. There is considerable ﬂexibility in the two quota systems. Thus, catches may exceed ACE in some of the demersal ﬁsheries, provided quotas are larger than catches in others. This does, however, not apply to the cod ﬁshery. Up to 20 percent of quota holdings in most ﬁsheries can be transferred between ﬁshing years. Finally, should catches exceed quotas in any ﬁshing year, the quota allocation of the subsequent year is simply reduced correspondingly. The overﬁshing may range between 3 and 5 percent, depending on the ﬁshery involved.

22.4.1. Problems with “Grandfathering” and Transferability Quotas for demersal ﬁsheries were allotted in 1983 as a part of a temporary solution to the overﬁshing problem. The allotment was based on catches during the previous three years, with exceptions in case of irregularities regarding ship or captain, as described above. Allotment of quotas in pelagic ﬁsheries and in shrimp ﬁsheries did not necessarily follow the same rules. Quotas for herring were initially distributed equally between eligible vessels. Half or more of the capelin quota was distributed equally between vessels, while the rest was distributed according to the cargo capacity of each vessel. The methods used to allot quotas were assumed to be temporary. A rudimentary market for temporary as well as permanent quotas soon developed. With increase in trade in quotas, some people became worried that the development was getting

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out of hand and started voicing their discontent. Other critics pointed out the lack of social justice, as vessel owners in small communities were handed valuable quotas for free and could rent or sell the quota out of the community. In the process, the quota owners collected substantial fees, while those previously engaged in the harvesting and processing industry—ﬁshermen and workers—collected unemployment insurance. Many also feared that the free transfer of quotas would put concentration in the industry on a fast track, transforming recruitment and family traditions. In order to meet this criticism, a new sentence was added to the opening paragraph of the Fishery Management Act in 1988. This sentence states that “the ﬁsh stocks around Iceland are the property of the Icelandic people.” This declaration has been kept in all subsequent revisions of the Fishery Management Act. Further, the ﬁrst article of the current Act states that the ﬁsh stocks in Icelandic waters are the common property of the Icelandic people, and that allocation of ITQs to individual harvesters does not represent irrevocable property right in these TAC shares.

22.4.2. The Catch Fee According to an amendment to the Fishery Management Act passed by the Icelandic parliament in 2002 (see www.althingi.is/vefur/lagasafn.html), the vessel owner holding a quota right is required to pay a catch fee (veiðigjald). The institution of the catch fee can be explained as an effort aimed at reducing the tension caused by free allotment of quotas. A detailed account of the political process leading up to the introduction of the catch fee is given in Matthiasson (2008). The catch fee is levied yearly as a given amount per cod-equivalence kilogram. The amount is to reach 9.5 percent of estimated resource rent. The resource rent is estimated according to a formula given by the act of law. The formula can be motivated with references to economic theory. As the catch fee was instituted, a number of other levies accruing to the public purse were discontinued. Hence, the income from the catch fee did not constitute totally fresh money for the public coffers. Three important observations can be made, First, the catch fee has so far been in the range of 0.6–1.6 percent of rental price of quotas. The rental price is by many seen as a proxy for the resource rent. Second, the catch fee has not reduced tension caused by free allotment of quotas. But, third, the catch fee is

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a pioneering exercise both in the Icelandic and the international context. The institution of the catch fee forebodes a road possibly taken when other publically owned resources are handed to private users in Iceland in the future.

22.4.3. The Small-Vessel Loophole As mentioned above, the quota system introduced in 1984 applied only to vessels 10 GRT or larger. Instead, during the period 1984–1990, various measures were used to both limit cod catches of the smaller vessels, as well as the number of vessels taking part in the ﬁshery. At ﬁrst, TACs were set for cod and six other important demersal species, but in 1985 TACs applied only to the cod and haddock ﬁshery, and from 1986 only to the cod ﬁshery. Catches of other demersal species, such as haddock, saithe, and catﬁsh, were thus completely unrestricted. Effort restrictions usually took the form of a cod ﬁshing ban for a certain number of days in a year or shorter time interval. This applied both to vessels using hooks, that is, line or longline, or nets. Because of fears that the latter might seriously overﬁsh their “limits,” a special ﬁshing license system was introduced for the netters in 1986. In addition to effort restrictions, each netter was also allocated a certain catch maximum. Up to 1988, entry into the small boat ﬁsheries was completely open. However, in January of that year a new Act was introduced that attempted to

curb the small boat ﬂeet expansion (Act 3/1988). Boats larger than 6 GRT that were already in the ﬂeet or being built were issued ﬁshing licenses, and a new boat could not enter the ﬂeet without another one being sold abroad or taken permanently out of operation. Boats smaller than 6 GRT were banned from employing nets, but the ban did not apply to vessels that had used nets in 1986 or 1987. At the end of 1983, there were 828 vessels smaller than 10 GRT in the Icelandic ﬁshing ﬂeet. The small boats were allocated a quota of 8,300 tons for the following year, but their catches were almost double that amount, or 15,500 tons. This represented a 5.9 percent share of Icelandic cod catches. During the next six years, catches—both in tons and as a percentage share—rose tremendously, as more and more ﬁshermen realized how easy it was to enter the small boat ﬁsheries (see ﬁgure 22.3).5 In 1990, catches had risen to 48,000 tons, or 14.4 percent of the total. By then, the ﬂeet counted 1,600 boats smaller than 10 GRT, almost twice as many as had been active in 1983. Even the attempts to limit the number of boats larger than 6 GRT had proved futile, as their number grew by one hundred in 1988–1990. When a comprehensive quota system was introduced in 1990, a new attempt was made to deal with the small-vessel problem. Boats larger than 6 GRT were thus included in the quota system, but effort restrictions used to manage the cod ﬁshery of smaller vessels. It may seem strange that the

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FIGURE

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Property Rights in Icelandic Fisheries authorities decided to stick with the effort restrictions that had proved fairly useless in limiting catches—not only of the small boat ﬂeet but also of the trawlers—rather than allowing past experience to dictate management methods. However, despite the overﬁshing, many believed that including all vessels in a quota system would constitute too drastic a step and that such a move could not gain enough political support. Many people still clung to the rather romantic view of a one or two ﬁshermen going out on an open wooden vessel with a small engine and rather limited range, and regarded the operation of these vessels as an integral part of life in the small ﬁshing villages that dot the Icelandic coastline. Although such old-fashioned boats still existed, in reality most of the small ﬁshing ﬂeet was in the process of being completely modernized. During the next decade, major improvements were made in design, speed, and equipment, and by the turn of the century the most efﬁcient boats were harvesting more than 300 tons a year. As an example, in 2001 six boats—all 6 GRT in size— registered catches in excess of 300 tons of cod and other demersal species, with one boat recording catches of 512 tons. According to the Fisheries Act of 1990, boats smaller than 6 GRT could choose between entering the quota system that applied to all larger vessels,

or obtaining a hook license. Almost all boat owners opted for the latter. During the period 1990–1995, effort restrictions were used to limit the catches of those vessels. When the results proved—as expected—rather disappointing, harvest caps were introduced for individual vessels. In the next few years, the management system became ever more complex, with up to ﬁve systems simultaneously in operation during the ﬁshing years 1998/1999 through 2000/2001. In 1999 this intricate management web was greatly simpliﬁed with the introduction of a choice between effort restrictions with transferable ﬁshing days and a quota system. The effort restriction system was slowly phased out in the ensuing years. By the beginning of the ﬁshing year 2004–2005, 715 out of the 729 vessels smaller than 6 GRT had obtained permanent quotas. Only 14 boats then still remained in the effort restriction system. Two years later, the small open loophole was ﬁnally closed. The small vessels were allocated quotas in cod, as well as in haddock, saithe, and catﬁsh based on past ﬁshing history, much to the chagrin of owners of larger vessels who were ﬁrmly opposed to the allocation in demersal species other than cod, as it diminished their own quota shares. In the ﬁshing year 1991/1992, cod catches of the small-vessel ﬂeet amounted to 22,000 tons, or 7.7 percent of catches in Icelandic waters (see ﬁgure 22.4).

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22.4 Cod catches of the small vessel ﬂeet in the ﬁshing years 1991/1992 through 2006/2007, in thousand tons (left axis) and as a percentage share of total Icelandic catches (right axis). (Data from Runolfsson 1999, ﬁgure 9.17; Directorate of Fisheries, www.ﬁskistofa.is)

FIGURE

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Five years later, the harvest had almost doubled to 40,000 tons, or 20 percent, and since then cod catches have been in the 35,000–40,000 ton range. No limit or TAC was set on cod catches of this ﬂeet during 1991/1992 through 1993/1994, but in subsequent years the small ﬂeets regularly overﬁshed their allocation. Thus, in the ﬁshing years 1994/1995 through 1997/1998 landings were 20–40 percent above the ceiling, and overﬁshing in these years totaled 44,000 tons. Subsequently, better harmony was achieved between landings and allocations. It is interesting to compare actual harvests of these small boats during the period 1991–2001 with what they would have been allocated if similar rules had been in effect for vessels smaller than 6 GRT as for the larger vessels. As shown in ﬁgure 22.5, actual harvests always far exceeded what they would probably have been allocated. During the 1990s, efforts were made to restrict entry into the hook license ﬁsheries, and these restrictions proved somewhat successful. The number of boats smaller than 6 GRT dropped from 1,148 at the end of the 1991/1992 ﬁshing year to 800 in 1999/2000, but as expected, the ﬂeet dwindled much faster once a quota system was in place. At the beginning of the ﬁshing year 2007/2008, only 422 boats were registered in the small-vessel quota system, half the number of seven years earlier, and a little more than one-third of the number of boats in 1991/1992.

22.4.4. Efﬁciency Gains Caused by the ITQ System Transferability of herring quotas was introduced to save costs as each allotted quota could easily be ﬁshed in one trip. Concentrating quotas in that case would lower average cost of ﬁshing each kilo of herring considerably. Needless to say, the quota holder and the owner of the vessel ﬁshing the quota found a way to split the gains one way or another. The same is true in other ﬁsheries: a ﬁsher commanding a low-cost method of harvesting will be able to offer to lease or buy the quota of another quota holder with a less efﬁcient mode of ﬁshing. A general increase in efﬁciency will push the level of the lease price upward. Hence, the evolution of the lease price of a cod equivalence of quota can give some indication of efﬁciency gains in an ITQ ﬁshery. Figure 22.6 shows the evolution of the lease price of cod equivalent since an active lease market emerged in 1992. The nominal price in Icelandic kronur is deﬂated by a price index for ﬁsh products (also in Icelandic kronurs) except for the two last years. Hence, the evolution of the two last years can reﬂect uneven development of ﬁsh prices and general prices in Iceland. Other caveats apply. Short supply of quotas can drive up lease price temporarily due to excess ﬁshing capacity. Furthermore, during the early stages of the ITQ, system participants

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FIGURE 22.5 Actual harvest and possible allocation of cod quotas of the small-vessel ﬂeet (thousand tons), 1991 through 2000/2001. (Estimates from the Federation of Icelandic Fishing Vessel Owners n.d.)

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22.6 Development of lease price for quotas (cod equivalents): ﬁxed prices in Icelandic kronurs. (Unpublished data on the development of lease quota prices from the Central Bank of Iceland)

FIGURE

may not have known the potential of using the rental market to make their operation more efﬁcient, thus depressing the overall lease price. Nonetheless, ﬁgure 22.6 clearly shows that the lease price has increased by a factor of 2–3 during the 15 years it displays. It is also noticeable that the lease price seems to increase in jumps. The reasons for this behavior are somewhat unclear, but there are signs of a learning process taking place, with participants in the market gradually gaining the necessary expertise. The price rise could also indicate a steady technical progress.

22.5. THE RULING OF THE U.N. HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTEE The institution of the ITQ system has been challenged in Icelandic courts on several occasions. In 1998 the Supreme Court of Iceland ruled that it was unconstitutional to restrict the right to ﬁsh to those holding a title to a vessel during a speciﬁc period of time (the so-called Valdimar case, named after the person who raised the case; see www.haestirettur. is/domar?nr=767&leit=t). A second ruling of the Supreme Court stated that the Ministry of Fisheries could, however, allocate ITQs to a restricted group of people (the Vatneyri case, after the name of the vessel used to challenge the Fishery Management Act).

There may be a thin red line of legal reasoning connecting the two rulings, but most people did see them as contradictory. In the aftermath of the Vatneyri case, two ﬁshers, who by coincidence were not eligible for quota allotment at the outset of the quota exercise, deliberately disobeyed the law after having been denied quota based on equal treatment arguments. Icelandic courts did not accept their equality arguments and rejected the reasoning of the two ﬁshers. Hence, the two ﬁshers brought their case before the U.N. Human Rights Committee. The committee ruled in October 2007 that the initial allotment of quotas had been a violation of the equality principle embedded in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The committee further ruled that the two ﬁshermen should be compensated for their losses and that the rules of the Fishery Management Act should be brought into line with the spirit of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The government of Iceland, which was given 180 days to prepare its actions, announced that compensation would not be paid but that the government would be willing to consider a long-term plan for directing the Icelandic Fishery Management System into the course given by the ruling of the U.N. Human Rights Committee (2007). The government also proposed a communication process with the committee regarding the adequacy of the actions taken (see Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture 2008).

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Many critics of the grandfathering rule used to meter out the initial rights to ﬁsh in Iceland have pointed to various measures that could be taken to meet the requirements of the U.N. Human Rights Committee. The most extreme would be to auction permanent or temporary rights. This would be similar to U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s auctioning of oil-drilling rights in U.S. costal waters in 1982 (Wenar 2008). Less extreme would be some form of yearly recall of quotas. Recalled quota would then be auctioned or rented. Lastly, the catch fee could be increased. This last method is alluded to in the reply of the government of Iceland to the U.N. Human Rights Committee.

22.6. CONCLUSIONS As an exercise in implementing ITQs, the introduction and development of the Icelandic ﬁsheries management system have been a success in some respects but left proponents disappointed regarding other aspects. One of the major successes of the system is how comprehensive and all-inclusive it has become. It did not take a long time to develop an exhaustive quota system for the pelagic species herring and capelin, but establishing a comprehensive quota system without loopholes in the more valuable demersal ﬁsheries did prove more difﬁcult. While Icelandic ﬁsheries authorities did manage to keep catches within the allocated quotas in the quota part of the system, management by effort restrictions has clearly been proven inadequate. Hence, it may be concluded that the Icelandic experiment proves that ITQs are superior if the aim is to control catches in a predictable manner. The Icelandic experiment also shows how difﬁcult it can be to ease all stakeholders in a ﬁshery into acceptance of the system when the ﬂeet in question is very segmented. The Icelandic ﬂeet included ships as varied as small open boats registering a few tons to vast freezer trawlers that could stay at sea for weeks. The ITQ system has also delivered on the promise of reducing average harvesting costs. When the quota system was introduced, it was believed that the most valuable stocks, primarily cod, could be rebuilt and that stronger stocks would lead to higher catches. This has not materialized. Indeed, cod catches are now only half of what they were in the early 1980s. Although the quota system, as such, cannot be blamed for this disappointing development, opponents of the ITQs

system have frequently cited this as one of the prime reasons for abandoning the quota system and using different management methods. Lastly, the strong sentiment toward grandfathering quotas came as a surprise to the advocates of the ITQ system. The quota system has been the theme of discussion in several general election cycles, and an entire political party was founded on the agenda to change the system in fundamental ways. The longevity of the loopholes for small vessels can be seen as an attempt to defuse political threats against the idea of using transferable quotas as a management device. So far, Icelanders have not experienced stakeholder conﬂicts based on environmental interests (leaving food for birds or whales) or recreational interests (the tourist industry). Those interests will inevitably gain momentum in years to come. It will be interesting to see if the Icelandic system is ﬂexible enough to accommodate those without fundamentally compromising its essence.

Notes 1. These ﬁgures include all catches of Icelandic spring and summer spawning herring and Icelandic catches of Atlanto-Scandic herring. 2. For a more detailed account, consult Matthiasson (2003). 3. The quota-year runs from 1 September to 31 August. 4. The cod equivalents are thus based on the exvessel price of a kilogram of ﬁsh of a given species relative to the ex-vessel price of a kilogram of cod. Thus, holding a given amount of cod equivalents of cod, say, can give more value added than holding the same amount of cod equivalents of, say, haddock or saithe. 5. Many anecdotes exist of ﬁshing vessel owners that were allocated quotas in 1984 but sold their share as soon as possible and instead began operating small vessels that were exempt from the quota system.

References Agnarsson, S., and R. Arnason (2007). The role of the ﬁshing industry in the Icelandic economy. In: T. Bjørndal, D.V. Gordon, R. Arnason, and U.R. Sumaila (eds). Advances in Fisheries Economics, pp. 239–256. Oxford: Blackwell. Federation of Icelandic Fishing Vessel Owners (n.d.). Actual Harvest and Possible Allocation of Cod Quotas of the Small Vessel

Property Rights in Icelandic Fisheries Fleet 1991–2000/01. www.liu.is/template1. asp?Id=313&sid=98&topid=393 Jonsson, G., and M.S. Magnusson (eds) (1997). Icelandic Historical Statistics. Reykjavík: Statistics Iceland. Jonsson, S. (1984). Sjávarútvegur Íslendinga á 20. öld. Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag. Matthiasson, T. (2003). Closing the open sea: Development of ﬁshery management in four Icelandic ﬁsheries. Natural Resources Forum 27(1): 1–18. Matthiasson, T. (2008). Rent collection, rent distribution, and cost recovery: An analysis of Iceland’s ITQ catch fee experiment. Marine Resource Economics 23(1): 105–117. Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture (2008). Views, Adopted by the Human Rights Committee on

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24 October 2007, concerning Communication 1306/2004. eng.sjavarutvegsraduneyti.is/newsand-articles/nr/9306 MRI (2008). State of Marine Stocks in Icelandic Waters 2007/2008—Prospects for the Quota Year 2008/2009. Reykjavik: Marine Research Institute. Runolfsson, B.T. (1999). Sjávarútvegur Islendinga: Þróun, staða og horfur. Reykjavik: Ministry of Fisheries. U.N. Human Rights Committee (2007). Views Adopted on 24 October 2007, Concerning Communication No. 1306/2004. daccessdds. un.org/doc/UNDOC/DER/G07/458/05/PDF/ G0745805.pdf?OpenElement Wenar, L. (2008). Property rights and the resource curse. Philosophy and Public Affairs 36(1): 2–32.

23 Economic Instruments in OECD Fisheries: Issues and Implementation LORI RIDGEWAY CARL-CHRISTIAN SCHMIDT

23.1. INTRODUCTION The behavior of economic agents responds to incentives, and those engaged in ﬁshing are no different. Fisheries are a common property resource, where—just like other public goods—the costs and beneﬁts of users’ actions may not be internalized, unless incentives are altered through management mechanisms. In the case of ﬁsheries, the management regime goal must be to reduce overinvestment in ﬁshing and improve both conservation and economic/social outcomes. Marketlike (or “property rights–like”) instruments are tools used to deﬁne access rights to ﬁsheries resources. They are intended to alter the incentive structure otherwise favoring overexploitation. They can range from measures that imperfectly inﬂuence ﬁshers’ incentives to ﬁsh and to invest in capital, to increasingly “pure economic instruments” based on market interchange, which may inﬂuence incentives more completely. Policy makers of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)1 generally agree that the use of economic instruments can improve the efﬁciency of ﬁsheries resource allocation and use, thus helping to better align the incentives of ﬁshers against overﬁshing, in line with societal objectives.2 Hence, and against the background of poor economic performance in many ﬁsheries, there has been a strong shift in OECD

countries toward the use of economic instruments in ﬁsheries management. At the same time, the introduction of economic instruments is often met with resistance from ﬁshers and other stakeholders, as they often perceive that the results of the use of such tools might clash with their speciﬁc economic or social prerogatives or priorities. This is often associated with both poor information and knowledge of the beneﬁts of economic instruments and, especially, how they can be used ﬂexibly to bring about desired outcomes across different circumstances. One reason for stakeholder reluctance to embrace property rights-like tools in ﬁsheries seems to be the assumption that this implies management regimes based only on individual transferable quotas (ITQs), which is a quite “pure” right-based approach (as described below). This likely reﬂects that ITQs have been the instrument of choice in countries that have most visibly embraced regimes based on economic instruments. Such views are in contrast with the wide range of economic management instruments actually employed in OECD ﬁsheries. These instruments vary considerably in the way in which they bundle together the key attributes of rights-based approaches, and how they can be ﬂexible in adapting to speciﬁc management and societal contexts (see boxes 23.1–23.3 for examples).

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23.1 Characteristics of the Icelandic ITQ

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23.B1 Icelandic ITQ system. (OECD 2006)

The Icelandic quota system is comprehensive (covers almost all ﬁsheries) and the levels of all property rights characteristics are high. A high level of the quality of the title, duration, and exclusivity mean that ﬁshers can take into account long-term effects of business decisions and underpin investments. A relatively high level of transferability (the Icelandic system does not allow for full transferability across regions to avoid geographical concentration) and full divisibility can facilitate ﬂeet adjustment. High levels of ﬂexibility, associated with the possibility of renting annual vessel catch quota, and high divisibility are expected to contribute toward adaptation to unpredictable economic and environmental events.

BOX

23.2 Community Quota System in Korea

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23.B2 The Korean community quota system. (OECD 2006)

FIGURE

In 2001 the ﬁsher-oriented co-management system was introduced in Korea following limited success with other management systems. The system extends to ﬁshing villages the responsibility and rights associated with the management of ﬁshing grounds, ﬁshery (continued)

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BOX

23.2 Community Quota System in Korea (cont.)

resources, and harvesting with a sense of co-ownership. High levels of exclusivity, duration, responsibility, and quality of the title incite ﬁshers to conserve resources and stabilize catches so that long-term beneﬁts would be available for the community. This serves to invigorate the characteristics of local ﬁsheries, boost active participations of ﬁshers to put the systems into practice, and restrict both conﬂicts and “race-for-ﬁsh” behaviors.

BOX

23.3 Japanese Community Quota-Pooling System

Flexibility

Exclusivity 5 4 3 2 1

Duration

0

Divisibility

Quality of Title

Transferabilty CQs + pooling

23.B3 Characteristics of the Japanese community quota pooling system

FIGURE

Under the pooling system, the value of landed ﬁsh of individual ﬁshers is pooled and redistributed among individual ﬁshers based on certain criteria. The community quota-pooling system works under a three-layer structure. The ﬁrst is the regulatory measures under the prefecture’s ﬁsheries adjustment rules. The second is the system for use and management of ﬁshing grounds by the government, which may establish closed seasons of two months or longer. The last is the operation management system built by each ﬁshery’s cooperative association. It was found that rather high levels of exclusivity, duration, and quality of the title incite ﬁshers to limit ﬁshing effort to the resource condition (i.e., such that long-term beneﬁts would be available for the community). The collective decision process and the pooling system restrict both conﬂicts and “race-for-ﬁsh” behaviors. Furthermore, when a simple uniform distribution is employed, the pooling system should encourage ﬁshers to reduce their ﬁshing capacity and ﬁshing costs.

23.2. THE OECD APPROACH TO POLICY DEVELOPMENT The OECD “study approach” is often based on comparison of policies and practices across member

countries to extract ideas about best-practices in relation to effective results, and to understand the critical components of policy options and how they link to different outcomes. Exchanges of experience across diverse circumstances can improve understanding

Economic Instruments in OECD Fisheries of how policies and programs can be reformed to improve their overall performance. Research and government-to-government dialogue, aided by a secretariat, takes place across numerous OECD committees, including the Committee for Fisheries. The speciﬁc work of the OECD’s Committee for Fisheries contributes to improving national ﬁsheries policy formulation and implementation and international ﬁsheries debate and policy formulation. It also provides a ﬁsheries (common property) perspective to overall OECD cross-cutting policy advice. In this context, the OECD’s Committee for Fisheries has, over many years, focused on economic instruments in ﬁsheries, with the intent of promoting understanding of their beneﬁts. The most recent work was undertaken with a view to highlighting the range of economic instruments actually used in OECD ﬁsheries and, in so doing, to demystify the concept of “property rights” approaches to ﬁsheries. The ultimate objective was to encourage increased use of economic instruments in ﬁsheries management, as called for by an increasing number of international ﬁsheries experts, and to respond to the call by OECD ministers for increased use of economic instruments to meet sustainable development objectives. The objective of economic efﬁciency is usually the baseline for the committee’s analysis, but this does not imply that this describes the sole policy goal of all, or any, OECD countries. However, as a fundamental benchmark, it allows an examination of trade-offs (or, in economic terms, opportunity costs) associated with policies that address additional (or alternate) objectives. This observation is important, as the different “values” that ﬁsheries policy makers place on the ﬁshing sector (i.e., what is to be achieved from ﬁshing) differ across countries. In some countries (e.g., New Zealand), economic efﬁciency is indeed stated to be a principal objective, while some other countries (or important regions within countries) maintain that social objectives (e.g., high levels of ﬁsheries employment) are important.

23.3. CHARACTERISTICS OF ECONOMIC INSTRUMENTS USED TO MANAGE FISHERIES The concept of property rights–based management instruments is sometimes resisted in ﬁsheries, because of its association with “privatization” of a common property resource. This stems from confusion between the “ownership” status of a resource itself

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(common property, as opposed to “private property”) and its management regime (open access and other management regimes that do not interfere with ownership of the unexploited stock, but instead describe the conditions under which someone can use the common resource). It is not meant to imply privatization of oceans (or ocean resources) in the manner of terrestrial private property. The common-property nature of ﬁsheries is a resource status that is enshrined in international law and in many countries’ national legislation and that therefore explicitly rejects the terrestrial notion of private ownership. However, as a management concept, it is more properly meant to describe “user rights” or “access rights” to speciﬁc resources over a deﬁned or permanent period of time. As such, the concept is described here as a property rights-like approach. The only property or private asset is the access right or use right, not the ocean (or its resources) itself. Fisheries resources are expropriated and become property only once they are caught. Notwithstanding these caveats, the challenge for the OECD committee was to ﬁnd a common normalizing framework with which to compare economic instruments in place in ﬁsheries across OECD countries. The common denominator was a decomposition of management instruments into a series of property rights characteristics that could be deemed to provide the pathways to ﬁshers’ incentives. The property rights literature (Scott 1988, 2000) outlines a number of characteristics of property rights: • Exclusivity, the extent to which other participants are prevented from injuring or interfering with an owner’s rights • Duration, the length of time a right owner might expect to exercise “ownership” • Quality of title, the certainty, security, and enforceability of the property right • Transferability, the extent to which the entitlement to a right can be transferred by selling, leasing, or trading • Divisibility, the possibility of dividing the right into narrower forms of rights or quota into smaller amounts as desired • Flexibility, the ability of rights holders to freely structure their operations Fisheries management instruments in common use across OECD countries can be analyzed for their property rights, such as “content” (see also Devlin and Grafton 1998). Property rights characteristics of management instruments can be ranked using an

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indicative scale ranging, for example, from zero (low level of a characteristic) to ﬁve (high level of a characteristic). A management instrument scoring near a maximum on all aspects of property rights characteristics would be a more “pure” property rights-like instrument than one with only some characteristics (see ﬁgure 23.1). It could be expected that a more pure form of user right might deliver conservation outcomes and economic returns most efﬁciently. It is possible to cluster certain kinds of characteristics, with a view to delivering certain kinds of outcomes that policy makers might favor at a particular point in reform. For instance, when ﬁsheries management instruments have strong characteristics of exclusivity (combined with duration and quality of title), this is likely to ensure better long-term decisions on investments for ﬁshers, and hence a better alignment of long-term capital to the resource. As a consequence, this has a tendency to reduce excess capacity. On the other hand, characteristics such as transferability, ﬂexibility, and divisibility are more closely related to the maximizing of shorter-term economic rent. When these characteristics are strong, ﬁshers’ incentive structures will allow a better match between an existing capacity and the opportunities or desire to ﬁsh, with the rest of holdings potentially transferable to other users, thus maximizing overall beneﬁts from the ﬁshery. Other kinds of clusters or constructs of the property rights characteristics can deliver yet other outcomes, related to social cohesion for example. These examples show how different property rights attributes can be conceivably combined to seek certain outcomes. Irrespective of whether policy makers are seeking a large-scale reform, sequential reform,

Flexibility

Exclusivity 5 4 3 2 1

Duration

0

Divisibility

Quality of Title

Transferabilty Reference

23.1 Illustration of property rights characteristics. (OECD 2006)

FIGURE

or simply to gain some conservation beneﬁts while avoiding other outcomes at a particular time, actual outcomes depend on the way the particular ﬁsheries management instruments are constructed based on the relative content of the property rights characteristics. This analysis identiﬁed the nature of key strengths, and weaknesses across different management instruments in use in OECD ﬁsheries.3 As such, the analysis provides a guide for policy makers to be able to identify potential beneﬁts of a range of property rights-like instruments. This should act as a catalyst to encourage their more determined adoption and implementation in national ﬁsheries management regimes. This framework was applied to ﬁsheries management instruments across 16 OECD countries,4 based on detailed member country descriptions of their management regimes and committee discussions. The OECD management systems examined were as follows: Territorial use rights in ﬁsheries (TURFs): Allocation of an area of the sea for the exclusive use right of a single or group of ﬁshers. Community-based quotas (CQs): Quotas provided to a community of ﬁshers (usually cooperative) for their exclusive use. Often the community will decide how internal allocation takes place. Vessel catch limits (VCs): Restricts the amount of catch the vessels may take over a given period of time, or per ﬁshing trip. Individual nontransferable quotas (IQs): Provides a given harvest possibility to a vessel but that quota is not transferable. A characteristic of IQs is that they will eliminate the race to ﬁsh and thus make ﬁshing more efﬁcient. Individual transferable quotas (ITQs): As IQs, but quotas are transferable to ensure most economic efﬁcient use among all the vessels in the ﬂeet. Limited nontransferable permits/licenses (LLs): Licenses (or permits) to ﬁsh (rather than a given quantity). Limited licenses restrict the access to the ﬁshing. Limited transferable permits/licenses (LTLs): As LLs, but transferable to ensure better overall use of the ﬁshing ﬂeet capacity, as nonused licenses can be transferred to those vessels/ ﬁshers that need it. Individual nontransferable effort quota (IEs): Effort is regulated (e.g., amount and size and type of nets and pots, as well as vessels characteristics such as motor power) and is deﬁned as the maximum amount of effort a ﬁsher can engage over a speciﬁc period of time.

TABLE

23.1 Summary of marketlike instruments in OECD ﬁsheries

Marketlike Instrument

Examples in OECD Countries

Key Features

Territorial use rights in ﬁsheries (TURFs)

Ocean quahog (Iceland) Oyster (USA) Mussels, scallops (NZ) Abalone (Japan) Lakes and some coastal areas (Sweden) Aquaculture (Mexico) Japan, Korea USA (community development quotas for Eskimo and Aleut Native Alaskans) New Zealand (allocation of a permanent share of the total allowable catch to Maori) Canada Europe (collective quotas allocated to producer organizations) Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, UK, USA

Allocation of a certain area of the ocean to a single user, usually a group, which then undertakes ﬁshing by allocating rights to users within the group; usually of long duration and with high degree of formal and informal transferability within the group Catch quotas are attributed to a ﬁshing community with decisions on allocation of rights within the community taken on a cooperative basis; often used in formalizing traditional access rights in small-scale ﬁsheries; provide a high degree of exclusivity, divisibility, and ﬂexibility

Community-based quotas (CQs)

Vessel catch limits (VCs)

Individual nontransferable quotas (IQs)

Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Canada, Portugal, USA, France, Belgium

Individual transferable quotas (ITQs)

Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, USA

Limited nontransferable Australia, Belgium, Canada, Greece, Iceland, licenses (LLs) Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, UK, USA, France, Japan, Spain

Limited transferable licenses (LTLs)

Mexico, UK Norway and France (to a limited extent)

Individual nontransferable effort quotas (IEs)

Allowable ﬁshing days (Iceland, Belgium) Limited number of pots in crab and lobster ﬁsheries (Australia, Canada, France, UK, USA) Limited number of ﬁshing hours per day in scallop ﬁshery (France) Tradable ﬁshing days (Spain’s 300s ﬂeet) Fishing capacity (Sweden)

Individual transferable effort quotas (ITEs)

Source: OECD Secretariat (see also www.oecd.org/tad/ﬁsh).

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Restrict the amount of catch that each vessel can land for a given period of time (week, month, year) or per trip; characterized by relatively low or moderate levels for most rights characteristics; provide limited exclusivity and may not reduce the race to ﬁsh, while providing some degree of ﬂexibility and quality of title Provide a right to catch a given quantity of ﬁsh from a particular stock or, more usually, a percentage of a total allowable catch (TAC); relatively high characteristics of exclusivity and ﬂexibility allow rights holders to use their rights in a least-cost way to secure a given quantity of ﬁsh; largely eliminates the race for ﬁsh that exists under a competitive TAC, but lack of transferability restricts efﬁciency of harvesting Provide a right to catch a given percentage of a TAC, which is then transferable; rate highly on all criteria; allow for appropriate longterm incentives for investment decisions as well as short-term use of ﬁshing capacities Can be attached to a vessel, to the owner, or to both; must be limited in number and applied to a speciﬁc stock or ﬁshery to be considered as marketlike; helps to reduce the race to ﬁsh and prevent rent dissipation by restricting access to a stock; lack of transferability and divisibility limits the optimal use of ﬁshing capacity Provides ﬁshers with an increased incentive to adjust capacity and effort over the short to long term in response to natural and economic conditions; generally given for a very long duration but are not divisible Rights attached to quantity of effort unit a ﬁsher can employ for a given period of time; tend to be used in ﬁsheries for sedentary species and are characterized by moderate or relatively high levels of exclusivity, duration, and quality of title Makes short- and long-term adjustment easier and allows for a better use of ﬁshing capacities

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Individual transferable effort quota (ITEs): As with IEs but transferable to ensure better overall use of ﬂeet effort and capacity. Table 23.1 provides an overview of key property rights-like management instruments in OECD countries. For further particulars on individual ﬁsheries, including detailed case studies in a number of countries, see OECD (2006). The different economic instruments in use across OECD countries’ ﬁsheries are a reﬂection of policy makers’ intended outcomes for a given ﬁshery, or a phase of reform. A few illustrative examples of diverse approaches to market-based instruments in the OECD—one dealing with the Icelandic ITQ ﬁsheries management system, and the others addressing Korean and Japanese CQs—are provided in boxes 23.1–23.3. Appendix 1 contains a mapping of the nine typical property rights-like instruments (i.e., TURFs, CQs, VCs, IQs, ITQs, LLs, LTLs, IEs, and ITEs) as they are applied, on average, in the OECD. These are based on discussions of institutional and other arrangements related to their actual design in various countries. It will be observed that the relative content of the different property-rights characteristics differ markedly across the different tools. Some caution, however, should be taken in interpreting these outcomes, as the number of ﬁsheries used to calculate the “OECD average” may be limited. These examples demonstrate the point that property rights-like management instruments are not “created equal,” and that their relative content of property rights characteristics will change the way the individual instruments deliver ﬁsheries outcomes in terms of the incentive structure to conserve resources, ﬁsher’s income, and cost structure.

23.4. KEY OBSERVATIONS Perhaps the most important observation of the analysis done across OECD countries is the fact that, despite arguments often made to the contrary, many ﬁsheries management systems in use across OECD countries include instruments that contain property rights characteristics. In fact, the analysis shows that some countries that initially had denied their philosophical willingness to use property rights instruments (e.g., ITQs) had pure forms of rights-like approaches (e.g., TURFs) already in use (see appendix 1).

Second, the work shows, importantly, that ITQs (the common proxy for marketlike measures, as noted above) are just one in a continuum of market-like instruments in current use in the OECD. When bundled together in different ways, property rights characteristics give speciﬁc outcomes that may be particularly important in a particular policy and economic setting. As clearly shown in appendix 1, several market-based approaches differ only in degree, implying that ﬂexibility in design to certain contexts is possible with potentially little economic/conservation cost. Third, this continuum also implies that sometimes important trade-offs do exist in the extent to which economic efﬁciency, and hence conservation incentives and strong economic outcomes, is likely to be achieved using different instruments. Notwithstanding the point above, there are also large differences among the characteristics of some instruments. For example, the characteristics of VCs offer signiﬁcantly fewer incentives for capacity control or maximized economic beneﬁt from ﬁsheries. Appendix 1 also shows how limited licenses are also very incomplete tools that will not achieve the same outcomes as other market-based instruments. Yet sometimes countries that have not undertaken— or are not contemplating—reform often argue that these instruments are equivalent in impact to other property-rights measures, as they “limit ﬁshing.” This analysis shows how such instruments are not equivalent to other market-based measures, and that they do not affect ﬁshers’ incentives in the same way.

23.5. IMPLICATIONS FOR IMPLEMENTATION: LESSONS FROM OECD EXPERIENCE Fisheries management reform has never been easy. The experience from OECD countries shows that the path toward reform is bumpy, fraught with varied stakeholder expectations and fears, and often requiring difﬁcult political choices. Nevertheless there are key lessons from this analysis and OECD experience—including in-depth case studies—that are useful when moving toward more effective management systems using property rights-like approaches, especially when considered in light of more global debates regarding the use of property rights–like approaches in diverse circumstances. The following highlights some of the key challenges that policy makers have been faced with

Economic Instruments in OECD Fisheries when seeking to introduce economic instruments in their ﬁsheries reform processes. These challenges are very closely related, one to the other.

23.5.1. Ensuring Stakeholder and Political Buy-in A key challenge is the important role played by stakeholders (often with strong links to political decision making) and their willingness to consider reform, including buy-in and acceptance of both reform objectives and means. The objection to the use of property right instruments in ﬁsheries is often grounded in a lack of information to challenge incorrect assumptions, misunderstood objectives and feared outcomes. This includes a lack of understanding of the beneﬁts of change, and the range and ﬂexibility of property rights-based instruments (or combinations of instruments and other policies) in moving to better ﬁsheries stewardship. This can be paralleled by similar problems on the part of management authorities, including regarding options to address speciﬁc policy objectives and documented beneﬁts of change. Addressing such issues may help alleviate the fear of such instruments in ﬁsheries. The analysis and lessons above can contribute to such dialogue. However, the most important lesson from OECD implementation is the necessity of inclusive dialogue to build common understanding and buy-in. Probably the single most recurrent concern among those who argue against property rights-like approaches in principle—and likely very relevant to developing countries—is the concern that economic instruments contribute to a public-owned resource being “privatized.” This is often shared among ﬁshers, environmental NGO community and even politicians.5 Such fears have even led to issues being debated in court, in extreme cases. Clearly, for ﬁsheries managers and policy makers it is an important communication goal to explain that these are use rights and the only property expropriated is the caught ﬁsh, not the ocean space, and to avoid all implications to the contrary. Moreover, a continuum of economic instruments and possibilities exists to meet social and economic objectives. Critically, a move toward their use would make ﬁsheries more efﬁcient and ﬁshers better off.6 For example, CQs can deliver strong property rightslike outcomes that avoid the social issues sometimes associated with individual quota-based regimes. CQ allocation systems with high degrees of exclusivity,

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divisibility, and ﬂexibility are prone to underpin the social cohesion of ﬁshing communities, whereas ITQs that have a broader range of property rights characteristics might provide longer-term incentives for investments and be more efﬁcient at optimizing capacity, but may have social consequences that may be rejected in some contexts. This may be of particular policy relevance to developing countries where community values are often dominant. However, an important policy lesson of the OECD work is that it may be better to have imperfect types of property rights approaches than to avoid reform altogether; second-best solutions are preferable to status quo.

23.5.2. Incremental or Gradual Implementation of Property Rights–like Instruments OECD experience conﬁrms that policy makers often take a gradual approach to reform, unless speciﬁc contexts enable wholesale or “big bang” approaches.7 A gradual approach often reﬂects the need to ensure stakeholder buy-in through sequential successes, scaling up of successful pilots and so forth. Sometimes gradual approaches are used to ensure an orderly transition to new ﬁsheries management regimes. Often successes from partial reform will bring once-skeptical stakeholder demands for further reform. This role of emerging “enlightened self-interest” is evident in analysis of OECD reform experiences.8 In effect, sequencing has often built up bundles of characteristics adaptively, as experience and buyin has been gained (e.g., the sequence of reform in Norway is very clear on this point). Even slight changes in the structure of economic instruments can provide outcomes that are easier to digest in a particular context for certain stakeholders, until experience is gained and fears are reduced. In terms of the sequences most often chosen, reform in OECD countries has often been sequenced to ﬁrst eliminate overcapacity through individual quotas, vessel allocations, or effort quotas, with full transferability following at a later stage once buy-in has been achieved. The costs of such approaches, in terms of not maximizing efﬁciency at the outset, are often outweighed by the ability to actually start the reform process (see next section). Moreover, as some ﬁsheries are easier to reform with purer forms of market-based instruments than are others (see below), we often see that OECD

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policy makers have also learned from experiences in one ﬁshery before moving to the next. Generally, small-boat inshore sectors seem to be last to reform using property rights-like approaches, compared to larger, more industrialized offshore operations. This reﬂects both operational and social concerns. In extreme cases of very large small-boat sectors, such as those often found in developing countries, it is recognized that additional work is needed to advise policy makers of options for reform, as traditional rights approaches will often not be practical.

23.5.3. There Is No “OneSize-Fits-All” Approach to the Implementation and Use of Property Rights–like Instruments By their very nature, all ﬁsheries are different, including different species and habitats, gear, ﬂeet, and ﬁshing community characteristics (including variations in the industrial nature and social and cultural role of ﬁsheries). This reality calls for consideration of ﬂexibility in reform approaches and, indeed, in the ﬁnal choice of a given economic instrument for each ﬁshery. Furthermore within given countries, a variety of ﬁsheries may operate under a different set of objectives; small-scale ﬁsheries, for example, may be very different in their objectives than industrial ﬂeets. For instance, Canada has a combination of CQs in some areas and individual-based quotas in others, depending on the circumstance. This is not unusual in OECD countries. Likewise, in countries with a large coastal zone highly dependent on ﬁsheries for employment, the choice of economic instrument may be delivered in quite a different context than where the ﬁshing industry is marginal compared to the rest of the economy. The examples in boxes 23.1–23.3 show that such ﬂexibility exists even in approaches that have relatively high property rights-like characteristics. This lesson is especially important for encouraging the better use of economic instruments in developing countries, where the social risks of approaches like individual quotas can be offset by use of community approaches, as seen through the example of ﬁsheries cooperatives in Japan.

23.5.4. Pragmatic Use of Market Forces Policy makers are often confronted with choices with respect to the effects of economic instruments, and how to deal with them. For example, and as

noted above, restrictions on transferability of quotas will affect the time over which improvements in overcapacity will take effect. But at the same time, transferability can dramatically affect the value of quota holdings, which can sometimes be perceived as an unfair windfall if initial allocations were free (see section 23.6). One factor inhibiting use of purer forms of economic instruments has been resistance to potential income distributional effects of transferable quotas (i.e., the perceived risk of excessive consolidation). As noted above, policy makers in the OECD have often—or at least initially—sought to enable reductions in overcapacity while restricting transferability in order to avoid issues such as concentration of income.9 It should be noted that, in light of the speciﬁc ﬁsheries settings, it is a policy decision whether or not to use a purer form of property right-like instrument (i.e., including full transferability) and enact other policies to manage the distribution of income as done in some countries, versus use of a less economically efﬁcient instrument to avoid such issues altogether (e.g., nontransferable quotas). Limits or “caps” on individual quota holdings are regularly used in OECD countries, including in New Zealand, which is commonly associated with pure economic approaches. Restricting transferability, for example, through caps on quota holdings, may introduce economic inefﬁciencies among producers and associated loss of competitiveness. Commonly, restrictions are linked also to the protection of national interest. For example, many OECD countries restrict or prohibit the international transfer or lease of quota, in order to preserve beneﬁts to domestic ﬁsheries operators. But this loss would be preferable to forgoing any transferability, or worse, not introducing reform at all for fear of these effects. Policy makers should be aware of both the conservation and efﬁciency costs entailed by restriction on speciﬁc property rights characteristics (e.g., transferability) and options for dealing with undesirable outcomes in certain contexts, as an incentive to completing policy reform as opportunities arise.

23.5.5. Dealing Pragmatically with Trade-offs and Using the Demonstration Effect One lesson emerging from the above discussion is that, in the face of political or other challenges to reform, small moves toward more sustainable and responsible ﬁsheries by incorporating some

Economic Instruments in OECD Fisheries property rights characteristics may provide important initial gains. Once some positive signs and results have been achieved, it is likely that the taste for reform will spread and that it will then become easier to move forward. This has been the common experience in OECD ﬁsheries reform.

23.6. EMERGING CHALLENGES 23.6.1. Carefully Designing the Process to Allocate Rights One of the important issues in moving to property rights-like approaches has been the issue of initial allocations—one of the most sensitive issues in bringing economic instruments into place. This has close links to other issues such as consolidation risks, or even the role of public expropriation of part of the increased value of quotas brought about in rightsbased regimes (rents). Such issues are even emerging in subsidies discussions, where some argue that a lack of payment for the true value of resource access could be deemed a subsidy. The issue of allocations may be one reason why we do not see, as yet, use of transferable quotas in international allocations in regional ﬁsheries management organizations (RFMOs), even in new ones (i.e., where a change in historical allocations is not implied). Most OECD countries allocate initial quotas on the basis of historical catch records. This is closely related to the acceptability constraint on policy makers; free quotas may serve as an incentive to get the reform process under way. However, some OECD countries are beginning to experiment with the use of auctions to allocate quota, in order to increase the efﬁciency of the system, and to extract some rents from the public resource to use in the broader national interest.10 More analysis and experience are needed on this front, in particular to better understand the link between the initial allocation of rights, reform processes, and the ultimate success of the new management system in delivering on their stated objectives.

23.6.2. Use of Economic Instruments in International Fisheries Efﬁcient and effective international ﬁsheries management is bedeviled by issues related to preoccupations with access to high-seas resources. These access and allocation issues often divert attention from effective

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management, similar to domestic ﬁsheries, but can be even more costly because high-seas ﬁsheries management depends on effective international cooperation (i.e., through RFMOs). Anything that impedes effective operation of these arrangements puts collective high-seas resources as great risk, and in some cases, frustration about national economic determination can threaten conservation cooperation. Property rights-like approaches are in use by national authorities to allocate national quotas granted in international ﬁsheries and to help reduce international high-seas overcapacity from within a given state, but the use of economic instruments in allocating international quotas among states is not the norm. Transferable international quotas are increasingly being promoted as a solution to international allocation and overcapacity issues (see, e.g., Crothers and Nelson 2007; Lodge 2007). However, considerable work would be needed on securing an acceptable transition from ﬁrmly entrenched international quota allocations that favor historical ﬁshing patterns and disadvantage newcomers (including developing coastal states). It would seem that the ﬁrst place to try such a regime would be in a new RFMO, and preferably on high-seas discrete stocks that are not complicated by coastal state rights on straddling or migratory stocks.

23.6.3. Economic Instruments in the Context of Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries The emerging conservation challenge in ﬁsheries has moved beyond management of single stocks to the emerging priority of ecosystem approaches to ﬁsheries, nested in the broader issue of integrated management of oceans space. Property rights approaches improve conservation outcomes because those with exclusive access rights can expropriate the beneﬁts of their stewardship, which alters their incentives to use the resource in a responsible and sustainable way. Irrespective of “ecosystems approaches” to ﬁsheries management, the use of property rights approaches alone is a major down payment on better ecosystems outcomes, by improving conservation outcomes. But while in many cases necessary, it is not sufﬁcient. Ecosystem-based approaches to ﬁsheries involve a better accounting of external factors affecting ﬁsheries ecosystems and ﬁsheries planning, accounting for intraecosystem interactions in ﬁsheries planning, and accounting for and managing the impacts of ﬁsheries on ecosystems (see chapter 10). Property rights approaches, in principle,

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would contribute to such outcomes where avoiding harm to breeding areas, habits, and other ecosystem aspects demonstrably affects the quality and value of quota holdings. However, in reality, lack of information or sensitivity to such linkages—and their long-term implications—serves to make even rights-based ﬁsheries somewhat myopic. Notably, user allocations need to be allocated on the basis of shares of overall quota or effort (rather than speciﬁc amounts) in order to provide the ﬂexibility to accommodate new ecosystem information requiring changed overall levels of exploitation. Even pure property rights-like ﬁsheries instruments are not likely to be aligned with full societal values on broad biodiversity outcomes, especially if these are related to values such as representativity,11 as opposed to harm to vulnerable ﬁshing-related ecosystems that might damage the quota asset. In such cases these values are not perceived to be expropriated to the ﬁsher, and rights-based regimes will necessarily need to be nested in broader set of policies and regulations focused on biodiversity or ecosystem services. Even states with mature rightsbased regimes need, and have in place, increasingly rigorous policies intended to regulate adverse benthic impacts, bycatch, and so on. As for the broader use of right-like approaches, sometimes bycatch quotas can complement quotas on target species with considerable success.12 As for broader oceans regulation, considerable work is needed to see how rights-based approaches can directly contribute to managing multiple use settings.13

23.7. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS As an intergovernmental organization dealing with economic policy issues, the OECD has always promoted the view that economic instruments and the alignment of incentives must be a key part of the policy tool kit, including in ﬁsheries. Economic instruments can be designed ﬂexibly to meet numerous policy contexts and societal preferences. Policy makers, and ﬁsheries stakeholders more generally, should be aware of the conservation and efﬁciency costs entailed by restrictions on speciﬁc property rights characteristics, to better understand the need to complete policy reform as opportunities arise. In OECD work both on impediments to ﬁsheries policy reform and on the use of economic instruments in ﬁsheries management, a key message has been

recurrent: the importance of ensuring that stakeholders are fully involved in and understand the stakes and options in the reform process. The introduction of new management instruments will naturally give rise to uncertainties for key players in the sector, whether ﬁshers, processor, consumers, and other stakeholders (e.g., environmental nongovernmental organizations). Successful reform is characterized by early consultations of all stakeholder groups to ensure buy-in and the perception of joint ownership in the new management regime. After all, it is the stakeholders that are most affected by the consequences of the new regime, and they often have creative solutions to problems. Moreover, their tolerance to change is often underestimated, when solutions to key issues can be put in place. It is often better to start reform and complete it as experience grows, than to avoid reform altogether. Such adaptive implementation is more the norm than the exception in OECD ﬁsheries. In this respect, it is useful to consider the distribution, both of different groups and especially over time, of the costs and beneﬁts of reform. The frequent negative attitudes toward reform are often nested in the fact that costs are easily identiﬁed, are immediate, and concern speciﬁc groups (who can often block reform), while beneﬁts are of a longer term nature and may be more widely spread and largely unquantiﬁed.

APPENDIX 1: MAPPING OF AN OECD AVERAGE SCORE ACROSS KEY PROPERTY RIGHTS CHARACTERISTICS OF MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS ANALYZED

Flexibility

Exclusivity 5 4 3 2 1

Duration

0

Divisibility

Quality of Title

Transferabilty TURFs FIGURE

23.2 Key characteristics of TURF systems

Flexibility

Exclusivity 5 4 3 2 1

Duration

Flexibility

0

Exclusivity 5 4 3 2 1 0

Divisibility

Quality of Title

Divisibility

Transferabilty

Quality of Title

Transferabilty

CQs FIGURE

ITQs

23.3 Key characteristics of CQ systems

FIGURE

23.6 Key characteristics of ITQ systems

Exclusivity 4

Exclusivity 4 3

3 Flexibility

2

Duration

Flexibility

2

1

1

0

0

Divisibility

Duration

Divisibility

Quality of Title

Quality of Title

Transferabilty

Transferabilty

LLs

VCs FIGURE

Duration

23.4 Key characteristics of VC systems

FIGURE

23.7 Key characteristics of limited LL

systems

Flexibility

Exclusivity 5 4 3 2 1

Duration

Flexibility

Quality of Title

Divisibility

0

Divisibility

Duration

Quality of Title

Transferabilty

Transferabilty IQs FIGURE

Exclusivity 5 4 3 2 1 0

LTLs

23.5 Key characteristics of IQ systems

FIGURE

321

23.8 Key characteristics of LTL systems

322

Case Studies in Governance Exclusivity 4 3

Flexibillity

2

Duration

1 0

Divisibility

Quality of Title

Transferabilty IEs FIGURE

23.9 Key characteristics of IE systems.

Flexibillity

Exclusivity 5 4 3 2

Duration

1 0

Divisibility

Quality of Title

Transferabilty ITEs FIGURE

23.10 Key characteristics of ITE systems

Acknowledgments The authors acknowledge the signiﬁcant contribution of Bertrand Le Gallic and Anthony Cox to the initial work on economic instruments. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors alone.

Notes 1. The OECD is an intergovernmental organization with 30 member countries. Work considers primarily economic policy issues in various policy areas, including in ﬁsheries, with a view to identifying best practice, and on a case-by-case basis, through peer review. The OECD also seeks to coordinate domestic and international policies.

2. In the 2001 and 2002 meetings of the OECD Council at Ministerial Level, ministers— when discussing policy responses to challenges in sustainable development—called broadly for more extensive use of market-based instruments to serve conservation goals. This general political encouragement augmented that which was already being implemented in leading examples of ﬁsheries reform in some OECD countries. 3. This analysis did not look at the entire range of instruments in use in OECD countries. It thus does not stand as a report card on the introduction of marketlike instruments in OECD countries. The goal was to demystify marketlike instruments in use, not to rate their adoption. The illustrative marketlike instruments in OECD countries were examined irrespective of how “typical” they were in management overall. 4. This work was based on extensive contributions by OECD member countries on their management regimes, which allowed the committee to focus on illustrative economic instruments in the OECD. For a full description of the ﬁsheries management systems in OECD countries, see www. oecd.org/document/15/0,3343,en_2649_33901_34 427151_1_1_1_1,00.html 5. Certain environmental nongovernmental organizations oppose the use of property rights– based management regimes on social grounds, often preferring to use alternative environmental and oceans tools such as no-take zones for conservation. 6. For example, the OECD’s Committee for Fisheries (OECD 2000) surveyed a number of cases of ﬁsheries management reform and their subsequent biological, economic, social, and administrative outcomes. Also, OECD (2006) highlights a number of cases showing that better economic outcomes (in term of economic efﬁciency) are associated with the use of market based economic instruments. 7. Such as crisis or broader political/economic reform enabling “big bang” reform, as was the case for New Zealand in the second half of the 1980s. Recently, the Danish ﬁsheries management system has undergone profound change using economic instruments, against a critical situation of low harvesting proﬁtability. 8. Such as under current research in the ﬁsheries committee on the Political Economy of Fisheries Reform. 9. This has been an issue when policy makers have contemplated the use of ITQs where concentration of income in the ﬁsheries sector may be an issue. 10. Although one can also extract rent in other ways such as through access fees—both domestically and internationally—even though such fees are not common in national policy in the OECD.

Economic Instruments in OECD Fisheries Canada is one country that has made use of access fees to account for the privilege of using a public resource. Access fees are more commonly associated with access of foreign ﬂeets (often distant-water ﬂeets to resources within another state’s exclusive economic zone). 11. Yet much of the focus in international oceans debate is on representative marine protected areas, for example. 12. It should be noted that this implies a certain tolerable limit of bycatch—whether nontarget species or benthic species such as corals—which conﬂicts with the sentiments of environmental groups who have a lower tolerance for any incidents of harm. 13. There has been one example in the United States of a quota being purchased by environmental groups and not ﬁshed, as a contribution to conservation. References Crothers, G.T., and L. Nelson (2007). High seas ﬁsheries governance: A framework for the future. Marine Resource Economics 21: 341–353. Devlin, R.A., and R.Q. Grafton (1998). Economic Rights and Environmental Wrongs: Property

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Rights for the Common Good. Birmingham, U.K.: C.W. Henderson. Lodge, M. (2007). Are present international highs seas governance structure sufﬁcient to reap the beneﬁts of globalisation? In Globalisation and Fisheries: Proceedings from an OECDFAO Workshop. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development/Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. OECD (2000). Transition to Responsible Fisheries: Economic and Policy Implications. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. OECD (2006). Using Market Mechanisms to Manage Fisheries: Smoothing the Path. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Scott, A. (1988). Development of property in the ﬁshery. Marine Resource Economics 5: 289–311. Scott, A. (2000). Introducing property in ﬁshery management. In: Use of Property Right in Fisheries Management, Proceedings of the FishRights99 Conference, Fremantle, Western Australia, 11–19 November 1999. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

24 The Chilean Experience with Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries GUSTAVO SAN MARTÍN ANA M. PARMA J.M. (LOBO) ORENSANZ

24.1. INTRODUCTION The implementation of territorial use rights in ﬁsheries (TURFs) in Chile was prompted by an overﬁshing crisis in the loco (Concholepas concholepas)1 ﬁshery, historically the most important benthic shellﬁshery in the country (Stotz 1997). More than 14,000 ﬁshers (divers and boat operators) harvest loco and a variety of benthic invertebrates and algae along the entire coast of continental Chile, from approximately 18° S (border with Peru) to 56° S (Cape Horn) (ﬁgure 24.1). In contrast to other marine TURF systems that evolved gradually from customary tenure (Christy 2000; Johannes 1978), the Chilean system was established de novo by legislation, after traditional practices had been distorted by the introduction of individual quotas in the loco ﬁshery. Historically, commercial diving developed as a de facto open-access ﬁshery, regulated only by size limits and seasonal closures on some species. Prior to the mid-1970s, catches of loco were sustained at less than 5,000 tons. A surge in the international demand and neoliberal policies (Schurman 1996) led to a rapid expansion of the ﬁshery, with catches soaring to more than 20,000 tons in 1980 (ﬁgure 24.2). A drop in catch rates precipitated a management crisis, and the ﬁshery was closed in the entire country between 1989 and 1992, leaving a sequel of economic hardship and social unrest. The ﬁrst attempt at addressing the problems derived from open access was the introduction of

a license moratorium and individual (nontransferable) quotas for loco, following the reopening of the ﬁshery in 1993. Difﬁculties with enforcement and uncontrolled harvest rates led to a new crisis: by 1998, loco abundance in some of the main traditional producing areas was at a historical low (ﬁgure 24.3) (González et al. 2006). The Ley General de Pesca y Acuicultura (LGPA), a ﬁshing Act passed in 1991, contemplated TURFs for the management of inshore benthic ﬁsheries. The precipitous failure of the quota system put strong pressure on the ﬁsheries administration to implement the new instrument, which had wide support from the ﬁshing sector and the scientiﬁc community. The mandate confronted ﬁsheries managers with a daunting challenge: to design a process for the introduction of TURFs where they were not established by tradition. The move required replacing a system of individual permits and catch quotas with a system that granted ﬁshers’ organizations exclusive privileges to harvest benthic shellﬁsh resources from tracts of seabed. Thousands of artisanal ﬁshers and their families,2 whose livelihoods depended on harvesting benthic resources, would be affected. The transition from individual quotas to TURFs, known in Chile as AMERBs,3 proceeded at a fast pace: the two regimes coexisted during only one year (1999), after which harvesting of loco outside the AMERBs was banned (González et al. 2006). The system expanded rapidly in terms of both total number of AMERBs and the extension of seabed

324

FIGURE 24.1 Map of Chile showing the country’s 14 administrative regions with coastline. The recently established Regions XIV and XV are subsumed here under the old Regions X and I, respectively

TAC

Open access

TURFs

Catch (tons)

25000 20000

Total Region 4

15000 10000 5000

0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

24.2 Ofﬁcial landing statistics for loco in the whole country and in Region IV, central Chile, under three management regimes: open access, individual quotas, and TURFs

FIGURE

325

TAC

Open access

5000

350 TURFs 300 250

3000

200 150

Closure

2000

CPUE

Catch (tons)

4000

100 1000 50 0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

0

24.3 Reported landings of loco from Region IV and catch per unit of effort (in number of locos per hour of diving) from a representative landing site or caleta (Caleta Hornos) during three periods: (1) collapse of the ﬁshery in the 1980s under open access, leading to the closure of the ﬁshery, (2) failure of a quota-based system introduced after reopening, and (3) implementation of TURFs

FIGURE

Cummulative number of TURFs

(a) 800 700 600 500

designated with baseline study with approved management plan

400 300 200 100 0 1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006

(b)

Area within TURFs

250 200 150 100 50 0 1996

1998

2000

I II III

2002

Region IV V VII

2004

2006

VIII X XI

FIGURE 24.4 Expansion of the TURF system in Chile, expressed as cumulative number of designated tracts over time (a) and cumulative total area (in square kilometers) occupied by tracts that have loco as a target species (b). Thick line corresponds to Region IV

The Chilean TURF Experience claimed, with more than 700 tracts designated by 2007 (ﬁgure 24.4). The fact that the TURF system was launched after a series of crises and in response to a failure to control harvest rates conditioned the design of the implementation process: priority was given to the achievement of biological sustainability. Ten years after the inception of TURFs, a mixed record emerges. On some accounts, the system has been extremely successful (Agüero 2002, as cited in Agüero 2004; Defeo and Castilla 2005). Certainly, loco abundance recovered within many of the tracts, leading to increased public and private beneﬁts (González et al. 2006; Grafton et al. 2008). Consequently, management moved away from a reactive mode imposed by the recurrent crises that punctuated the history of the ﬁshery. But the degree of success in achieving biological sustainability has been uneven, and problems are surfacing related to broader economic and social management objectives (Castilla et al. 2006; Cinti 2006; González et al. 2006). The current challenge is to move from a system that has provided right incentives for resource conservation within the TURFs to one that fulﬁlls a more integrated vision of ﬁsheries management, promoting appropriate institutions and capabilities to achieve effective governance and sustainable development (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 1989). The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the Chilean TURF system, review its successes and failures, and discuss some key steps needed in order to meet that challenge.

24.2. THE ARTISANAL BENTHIC FISHERIES OF CHILE 24.2.1. Geographical, Social, and Ecological Settings Continental Chile spans about 38 degrees of latitude and is divided into 15 administrative regions (ﬁgure 24.1). This extensive coast is naturally split into two distinct realms: north of approximately 41° S (central and northern Chile: Regions I–IX, XIV–XV, and northern end of Region X) the coast is nearly linear, while to the south (Regions XI–XII and most of Region X) it becomes convoluted, a maze of islands, channels, and fjords. Along the northern and central coasts, caletas (coastal locations that serve as operational bases for local artisanal ﬂeets) and their adjacent ﬁshing grounds constitute the social-geographical-ecological template of the artisanal ﬁshery.

327

In rural areas, caletas are equivalent to ﬁshing villages; in urban areas, ﬁshers and their families are part of larger communities (Castilla et al. 1998). There are 436 caletas along the coast of Chile, 215 of which are in the northern and central regions. Most of them include divers and coastal gatherers that exploit benthic resources. Fleets are composed of 7- to 8-meter-long boats without decks or cabins. The natural unit formed by the caleta and its adjacent ﬁshing grounds is almost nonexistent in much of the southern part of the country (Regions XI–XII), where ﬁshers reside in townships such as Quellón, Melinka, or Punta Arenas, far from the most signiﬁcant ﬁshing grounds. In this case, groups of 10–20 boats are organized into faenas by operators that tow or lead them to remote temporary camps, from which they make daily ﬁshing trips; their catch is transported back to port by tender boats. Fishing units tend to be larger, including (besides boats) 12- to 15-meter-long vessels with a cabin. Fleet operators and processors have a proximate role in the ﬁshing process. Chilean benthic ﬁsheries target more than 50 species of benthic invertebrates and seaweed (Orensanz et al. 2005). In a typical caleta of central Chile diving for shellﬁsh coexists with longlining for ﬁnﬁsh; individual ﬁshers have variable levels of mobility between the two sectors. Other artisanal ﬁsheries include purse seining for small pelagics (mostly in northern Chile), coastal gathering of seaweed and shellﬁsh, and crab pots. Alternative uses of the coastal zone vary greatly along the Chilean coast, with salmon aquaculture being the main competing activity in the south.

24.2.2. Institutional Stakeholders The primary participants in the Chilean artisanal ﬁshery include (1) artisanal ﬁshers and their organizations, (2) the ﬁsheries authorities, (3) providers of scientiﬁc and technical support (including agencies, universities, and consultants), and (4) organizations with a mandate to promote economic development. The Undersecretary of Fisheries (SUBPESCA) is the core ﬁsheries agency with responsibility over ﬁsheries management in the whole country; the National Fisheries Service, SERNAPESCA, compiles statistics and is in charge of control and enforcement. Both are centralized agencies with zonal or regional delegations. The Institute for Fisheries Development, a semigovernmental body, monitors some benthic ﬁsheries under contract to SUBPESCA. The LGPA established a social fund for the promotion of artisanal ﬁsheries, which contributes to the

328

Case Studies in Governance

infrastructural improvements, maintenance of gear, capacity building, and so forth. Fishers are generally well organized; local organizations based at the caletas are grouped in regional federations, and these compose two national confederations.

24.2.3. Evolution of Management Regimes Artisanal ﬁshers have exclusive access to commercial ﬁshing in the coastal zone (5 nautical miles) plus the fjords and channels of southern Chile. Fishers have to be ofﬁcially registered in a resourcespeciﬁc Registry of Artisanal Fishers (RPA) to work in a single region under a speciﬁed category of activity (diver, coastal gatherer, etc.). The registries for many of the important commercial species have been closed for several years. The ﬁrst to be closed was the loco registry, which had about 10,000 divers in 1995 when the moratorium was established, shrinking to 6,000 in 2002 following elimination of inactive participants. The total number of registered commercial divers has gradually crept up from 12,599 in 2002 to 13,862 in 2008 (ofﬁcial statistics from SERNAPESCA 2003, 2009); almost half of them are in Region X. Artisanal rights are vested on ﬁshers, not vessels, and are not transferable. A vessel loses the license when transferred to a person that is not a registered artisanal ﬁsher. Before the loco crisis, management of Chilean benthic ﬁsheries did not contemplate formal access privileges. The LGPA of 1991 introduced two speciﬁc management regimes for controlling access to benthic ﬁsheries: the Regime for Benthic Exploitation (RBE) and AMERBs. The RBE consists of individual quotas assigned to divers that are ofﬁcially registered for exploiting a speciﬁc resource in a region. It was contemplated only for species declared as “fully exploited” and applied to the loco ﬁshery for 1993–1999, after the four-year closure was lifted. Implementation of TURFs started in 1997, once the failure of the RBE was evident. AMERBs give exclusive ﬁshing privileges of access to speciﬁc benthic resources within a designated tract to a ﬁshers’ organization upon request. Territorial privileges are nontransferable, and can be renewed every four years subject to compliance with regulations. Besides these two regimes, background ﬁshing areas outside AMERBs (áreas históricas)4 remain open to all ﬁshers registered in the region, subject to resource-speciﬁc regulations. Although loco harvesting has been allowed only

within AMERBs since 2002, illegal ﬁshing in background areas creates a de facto open-access regime that coexists with the TURFs.

24.3. RETROSPECTIVE: ORIGINS AND IMPLEMENTATION OF TURFS 24.3.1. Origins and Regulatory Framework The AMERB system had multiple historical roots (Gelcich et al. 2005b; Orensanz et al. 2005). Rationales evolved through a number of experiments conducted by a few well-organized ﬁshing communities, sometimes working cooperatively with scientists, which showed that loco recovered rapidly after protective measures were implemented (Aviléz 2003; Aviléz and Jerez 1999; Castilla et al. 1998). Although the system was legally introduced in the LGPA of 1991, its implementation was delayed until 1997 (San Martín et al. 2003) due to political and institutional uncertainty regarding how to proceed with such a transcendental change at such a large scale. An interpretive document published in 1995 (Subsecretaría de Pesca 1995) speciﬁed administrative procedures and requirements for requesting an AMERB. Those requirements were largely shaped by ecologists, who emphasized conservation concerns over economic and social performance (Meltzoff et al. 2002; Schumann 2007). Designation of an AMERB is initiated by petition from the ﬁshers. The proposed boundaries are evaluated to avoid overlap with other spatial destinations (e.g., other AMERBs, claims by indigenous peoples, aquaculture concessions, tourism, navigation lanes) in consultation with other agencies involved with territorial planning and other uses of the coastal zone. Criteria to resolve conﬂicting claims were introduced in the interpretive document (Subsecretaría de Pesca 1995). Once this process is completed, the AMERB is formally designated by the central ﬁsheries authority. AMERBs are granted to organizations of artisanal ﬁshers through a formal agreement with the ﬁshing authority. Fishers’ organizations must be legally established, and their members registered in the RPA. In order to be granted a tract, organizations are required to complete a baseline ecological study, including a detailed map of bottom types and communities, and survey-based estimates of abundance of all target species. They must propose a management

329

The Chilean TURF Experience plan to be approved by SUBPESCA, and sign a use agreement with SERNAPESCA. Every year the ﬁshers are required to conduct a follow-up survey of the grounds; resulting abundance estimates are used to establish annual catch quotas for the target species. A certiﬁed consultant must be hired for the preparation of baseline studies, management plans, and follow-up reports. So far, these studies have been subsidized almost entirely by the state through different agencies and programs. A territorial tax is stipulated, as well as the conditions under which privileges expire (noncompliance with the management plan or tax payments). Besides top-down government regulations, the system incorporates self-imposed rules, internal to each organization, and also informal agreements between organizations. Internal arrangements within each AMERB vary among organizations and are virtually invisible to the ﬁsheries authority. They regulate how beneﬁts are distributed among members of the organization, the percentage destined to communal needs (school, celebrations, maintenance, vigilance, etc.) and elementary forms of welfare (contribution to widows, elders, or sick/ injured ﬁshers), and, very important, access (entry/ exit rules) and penalties for violations. Commissions in charge of administration, vigilance, and commercialization are established. This is a tier of the management system that, although fundamental, is still poorly understood.

24.3.2. Current Status: A Diversity of Situations By 2007, 732 tracts had been designated for AMERBs, 509 of which had completed a baseline study and 237 had an approved management plan including loco as a target resource (ﬁgure 24.5). In addition, there were about 257 more pending requests under review by different government bureaus with jurisdiction over the coastal zone. Functioning AMERBs involved 14,324 registered ﬁshers; 3,290 more were members of organizations associated with AMERBs at earlier stages of the assignation process. Productivity of and income generated by AMERBs vary greatly in relation to target resources, quality of the ﬁshing grounds, extension, etc. (Orensanz et al. 2005; Thiel et al. 2007; Zuñiga et al. 2008). The great majority of the tracts (~80 percent) encompass subtidal rocky habitat and have loco among the main target resources. Some are held by organizations of coastal gatherers who harvest seaweed or clams. Individual TURFs are small—most less than 250 hectares—but they contain the majority of the prime ﬁshing grounds, with the exception of the extended region of fjords in the south of Chile. Fishers and their organizations, mostly in the central-north part of the country, were a key element in the implementation of TURFs. This resulted in a geographic staging of the process, starting in the central regions (Regions IV–VIII), later spreading to the north (Regions I–III),

300 with loco quota

250

with baseline study designated requested

200 150 100 50 0 I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

24.5 Total number of AMERBs at various stages of implementation in 2007. AMERBs with loco quota have an approved management plan that includes loco as a target resource. Other categories correspond to all AMERBs. (Data from SUBPESCA)

FIGURE

330

Case Studies in Governance

and recently reaching the south (Regions X–XII) (ﬁgure 24.4b). Allotment of territorial privileges in the central-north regions was facilitated by the existence of a natural unit predating the TURFs, composed of the caleta and its adjacent historical ﬁshing grounds. In Region IV, for example, the (effort-weighted) areas ﬁshed by boats from different caletas had only a small overlap prior to the TURFs (González et al. 2006). When more than one organization existed in a caleta, they often negotiated the partition of the ﬁshing grounds before requesting the tracts. Conﬂicts between TURFs are mostly related to poaching (Cinti 2006; Gelcich et al. 2005a; Schumann 2007). Fishers’ organizations have strict self-imposed regulations and severe penalties to transgressors, and make a signiﬁcant investment in the vigilance of their TURFs. The degree of success of different organizations in managing their TURFs has been variable depending on several factors, including productivity of the tract (Thiel et al. 2007), leadership, and community organization (Cereceda and Czischke 2001; Schumann 2007). Information from the loco ﬁshery of Region IV (the cradle of the system) indicates that abundance within TURFs increased rapidly after establishment of TURFs and then stabilized (ﬁgure 24.6) (González et al. 2006). Resource status within TURFs is in sharp contrast to background areas, which show high levels of depletion, comparable to those encountered at the time when TURFs were established (González et al. 2006). If TURFs are objectively diverse, so are in the subjective perception of the various groups of 1.40 1.20 Loco density

1.00 0.80 0.60 0.40 0.20 0.00 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 FIGURE 24.6 Density of locos (locos per square meter) within tracts showing recovery of the resource after TURF implementation. Data correspond to the zone of Los Vilos in Region IV. The solid thick line corresponds to the average for the zone. (Data from baseline studies and annual follow-ups provided by SUBPESCA)

stakeholders. Managers, most scientists and many ﬁshers share a positive view of the system, albeit for a variety of reasons. Interview surveys have documented heterogeneity of attitudes and perceptions among ﬁshers (Cinti 2006; Gelcich et al. 2005a, 2005b, 2007; Schumann 2007), showing that AMERBs may be supported for reasons other than the explicit rationales of the policy (e.g., capturing funds from donor nongovernmental organizations or gaining inﬂuence). Acknowledging and understanding the diversity of discourses and perceptions are important to interpret ﬁshers’ behavior in response to the policy. The situation in southern Chile is far more complex. Regions X–XII concentrate more than half of the total number of registered shellﬁsh divers in the country (7,475 in 2006, compared to 6,045 in all other regions combined), and historical ﬁshing practices do not lend themselves to a natural split of territories among ﬁshers. Fishing grounds close to urban centers (e.g., Ancud in Chiloe Island, Region X) are visited by ﬁshers from many organizations, and also by many ﬁshers who are not formally organized. Granting exclusive ﬁshing privileges to single organizations on some productive grounds within Ancud Bay led to an uprising of local ﬁshers who claimed that the bay should be open to all ﬁshers in the commune (Chevalier et al. 2007). Remote ﬁshing grounds, on the other hand, cannot be effectively policed by the ﬁshers’ organizations which are based in the towns. As a result, TURFs designated in remote areas, far from the urban centers where ﬁshers live (e.g., in Region XII), often end up being abandoned. A recent amendment to the ﬁsheries act allows small-scale aquaculture within the TURFs. This is particularly signiﬁcant in southern Chile, where coastal topography and environmental conditions create opportunities for those operations, mostly mussel culture. Many have perceived this as distortive, as it deﬂects the intended focus of TURFs from resource conservation toward an activity that traditionally had a separate regulatory regime.

24.4. DIAGNOSIS AND PROSPECTIVE The overriding priority placed on biological sustainability channeled the regulatory scheme into a reactive focus, placing overly jealous requirements

331

The Chilean TURF Experience for biological monitoring and use of conservative exploitation rates, and restricting the types of activities allowed within the TURFs. On the other hand, regulations left unattended some key components related to the evolution of the ﬁshing capacity, the distribution of beneﬁts, and the development of institutional and local capacity for co-management. Below we identify a number of critical issues that will need to be considered in order to transition to a better outcome. These issues belong into ﬁve main

themes (table 24.1) discussed below. The themes identiﬁed in our diagnostics are by no means a complete list of problems. There are other issues that in some cases have been a source of recurrent conﬂicts. Among them is the need for clariﬁcation of the reach of use privileges and exclusion of other potential activities within the AMERBs, such as exploitation of pelagic resources, or even benthic resources not included in the management plan, and recreational activities.

24.1 Main themes and problems that need to be addressed in order to facilitate transition to a better outcome

TABLE

Theme

Diagnosis of Problem

Recommendations

Access

Access loophole: Although the loco registry is closed, access requirements for AMERBs have allowed entry of new participants enrolled in the ofﬁcial registry under other species/activities. No oversight by management authority: Mechanisms used by different organizations to control access to the AMERBs have been invisible to the ﬁsheries administration and there is no oversight. Lack of criteria: No criteria exist about what constitutes an acceptable balance between economic efﬁciency and social equity (number of beneﬁciaries in line with sustainable yields to avoid rent dissipation and weakening of incentives). Weak enforcement: vigilance by the ﬁshers is only a deterrent.

Technical support

Lack of ﬁshers’ participation in the design and analysis of assessment and management options. Distortion of consultant’s role. No technical support for economic improvement and innovation. High costs. No oversight of assessment quality. Lack of standardization of monitoring strategies. Pertinent data dispersed over a multitude of repositories under a variety of incompatible formats. Management plans restricted to annual quota setting (tactical, short-term advice). Lack of regional assessments.

Introduce new criteria for the allotment of AMERBs that take into account membership and performance of the organizations. Improve understanding of mechanisms in place to regulate intra-AMERB access (entry/exit rules). Evaluate ﬁshing capacity within the organizations. Investigate economic viability of AMERBs along the different regional realities. Develop criteria for the regulation of access at the intra-AMERB level through consultation between stakeholders. Require that local management plans incorporate provisions for the intraAMERB regulation of access and ﬁshing capacity. Strengthen government enforcement and sanctions. Promote a more encompassing role for the technical advisers along the lines of “barefoot ecologists.” Standardize monitoring protocols to assure temporal and spatial consistency. Integrate information management. Convene technical working groups to evaluate management strategies at the regional level (provision of strategic advice), including broader aspects of commercialization and diversiﬁcation.

(continued )

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24.1 Continued

Theme

Diagnosis of Problem

Recommendations

Regional integration

Management plans for AMERBs negotiated individually, ignoring biological connectivity. Exploitation in background areas ignored by the administration. Many organizations make uncoordinated commercial deals. Lack of ambits for sharing experiences and discussing management options among organizations. Poor regional planning.

Institutional coordination

Poor coordination among institutions that deal with different management aspects (e.g., data collection, enforcement, funding, commercialization, resolution of zoning conﬂicts). Poor coordination between ﬁshers’ organizations and government institutions. Taxation based on surface area not accounting for differences in productivity among tracts. AMERBs unsuited for situations where (1) territorial partitioning among historical users is not feasible, (2) ﬁshing grounds are geographically separated from locations of landing and residence, and (3) other forms of effective tenure exist that would be disrupted by introduction of AMERBs. Many AMERBs requested as a tactic to claim ﬁshing grounds away from other, competing uses (e.g., aquaculture).

Identify geographically bound clusters of AMERBs deﬁned by meaningful commonalties. Establish permanent committees at an appropriate scale to foster networks of AMERBs. Encourage agreements between ﬁshers’ organizations for commercialization. Fine-tune the scale of management, moving toward regional integration that acknowledges connectivity between harvested populations, ﬁshing communities and markets. Develop zoning plans to accommodate different activities and societal goals. Establish an ambit for institutional coordination, delegating some management decisions to the regional level.

Suitability: one size doesn’t ﬁt all

24.4.1. Theme 1: The Control of Access The limited entry imposed on the loco ﬁshery when the registry was closed in 1995 effectively broke down due to a loophole in the requirements for TURF allocation. All members of organizations requesting TURFs must be ofﬁcially registered artisanal ﬁshers, but they can be registered for any resource and activity, independently of the actual resources targeted in the requested tract. This opened a door for individuals with no history of loco harvesting to gain access to the ﬁshery through the AMERB system. It is not clear how many

Reconsider taxation system to scale taxes to production. Other management instruments may be more suitable when landings are concentrated in a few larger ports, making enforcement possible. Traditional tenure systems should not be ignored. Conﬂicts between alternative uses of the coast need to be resolved at the political level.

members of TURF-holding organizations were not active loco ﬁshers before TURF implementation. The operational costs (labor and money) of AMERBs are high, including costs of enforcement, follow-up studies and reports, consultant fees, and taxes. The income generated from the AMERBs is markedly diverse (SERNAPESCA 2005), and there is an obvious but unattended trade-off between economic efﬁciency and social equity. At the extremes of the gradient, there are a few very productive AMERBs where beneﬁts are distributed among relatively few organization members, while others do not produce enough to bear the operational costs and end up being abandoned. Between these two extremes, there

The Chilean TURF Experience is a range of situations where the relative income per capita varies widely as a function of the tract’s productivity and the number of members. While issues of social equity favor a wide distribution of beneﬁts among as many historical ﬁshers as possible, there is a clear risk that as the number of members increases, the rent dissipates and incentives for protecting the AMERBs and for actively participating in their management weaken. Intra-AMERB access has been left entirely in the hands of the ﬁshers’ organizations; it is unclear whether the access-control rules developed internally will achieve a viable balance between economic efﬁciency and social equity. A large drop in loco price over recent years had a strong impact on the net income derived from the AMERBs, tilting the balance and jeopardizing the economic viability of less productive AMERBs. Activities and developments leading to increased net revenues from the AMERBs need to be encouraged. These include lowering operating costs, coordinating commercial deals among organizations to obtain better prices, diversifying activities, and adding value to the products (Cereceda and Czischke 2001). An unknown part of the ﬁshers’ income (up to 50 percent according to some accounts) (González et al. 2006), even of those who belong to TURFholding organizations, is derived from illegal ﬁshing in background areas. Thus, the access system is dual, as AMERBs coexist with a de facto open access system in the background. Concerns about the overexploitation of resources in background areas, and its possible impact on the productivity of AMERBs, have prompted new initiatives to involve the users in search for solutions.

24.4.2. Theme 2: Technical Support Worldwide there is growing support from many sectors to devolve ﬁsheries management responsibility to local institutions. Such calls tend to downplay the difﬁculties associated with designing a system of technical support that is adequate to inform both tactical decisions at the local level, and strategic management decisions at the regional scale. Central agencies clearly lack the capacity to conduct stock assessment surveys at the scale of TURFs. Thus, involving the ﬁshers directly in monitoring resources within their tracts is the most sensible approach (Parma et al. 2003). The Chilean government delegated the responsibility of assessing stock status and recommending

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catch quotas to the ﬁshers’ organizations, but required that a consultant be hired to coordinate the work and prepare reports. In many instances, this led to a gradual distortion of the consultant’s role, as the latter are not hired to provide advice on how to manage the resources sustainably but to satisfy a legal requirement to obtain a quota. The demand for consultants created a new business opportunity, bringing a new stakeholder to the scene. The overall result is a costly and ineffective system of technical support, a far cry from the one envisioned when regulations were developed, aimed at fostering capacity building and communication of knowledge. Furthermore, the quality of the assessments may be compromised by a tendency to accept the least expensive bids. Advice, perceived as an administrative requirement, is not always valued by the ﬁshers (Cinti 2006; Schumann 2007), and the information collected is often underutilized. Incentives should be introduced to elicit more participation and genuine interest on the side of ﬁshers. For this to happen, the consultant’s role should expand from quota appraisal to coordination and facilitation while also attending to other aspects of community development, perhaps along the lines of the “barefoot ecologist” proposed by Prince (2003). Another problem is that monitoring protocols are not standardized, and there is no spatial—in many cases not even temporal—consistency of methods. Each AMERB is dealt with independently of others with the goal of providing short-term tactical advice to set annual quotas. There is a need to establish clusters of AMERBs that coordinate their monitoring and management plans using standardized methodologies, comparable across space and over time. Coordination of monitoring activities and technical support among TURFs could lead to economy-of-scale cost reductions. An additional advantage of standardizing monitoring methodologies is that data management and availability would be facilitated, and the estimation of performance indicators simpliﬁed. At present, the relevant information required for the assessment of the system (biological, economic, social) is scattered over a multitude of repositories and institutions, under a variety of incompatible formats, and for the most part inaccessible. While millions of dollars have been spent to collect data through different regular monitoring programs and research endeavors, the integration of the available information is a daunting task. The latter has been a stumbling block to the conduction of much needed reviews of system performance.

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24.4.3. Theme 3: Regional Integration In the formal process of AMERB allotment, each area is negotiated individually on a ﬁrst-come-ﬁrstserved basis. Once granted, each AMERB is managed independently of others. Biological connectivity has been acknowledged but not yet attended. Because the spatial scale of the management areas is small relative to likely ranges of larval dispersal, actions in one tract affect recruitment in other tracts and vice versa. As a consequence, incentives for conserving resources within a TURF may be weakened by the fact that a locally overexploited stock may still be replenished from outside sources creating a sort of “tragedy of the larval commons” (Orensanz et al. 2005). Likewise, the illegal ﬁshing and overexploitation of resources in the background—a problem largely ignored until recently—may end up affecting the sustainability of the TURFs. Beyond biological sustainability, commercialization deals tend to be negotiated independently by each organization. Cooperative agreements should be encouraged for marketing (for examples, see Gelcich in Castilla and Gelcich 2006; Castilla et al. 2006). As the number of territorial-use conﬂicts among ﬁshers and ﬁshers’ organizations multiply, the need for instances to resolve such conﬂicts is becoming clear. Although no formal institutions exist for addressing inter-organizational conﬂicts, ad hoc working groups or commissions have been established under the umbrella of communal governments to address regional issues, mostly dealing with the allocation of space to alternative uses. Those commissions advise the regional ﬁsheries administrations (Consejos Zonales de Pesca) and have a strong voice in the process of TURF allotment. Once they start to operate, their role tends to diversify gradually becoming involved in the administration of the set of participating AMERBs. While these instances were not contemplated in the design of the AMERB system, they constitute important embryos of the kind of intermediate-scale institutions that are needed to facilitate regional coordination of assessment, management and commercialization plans, to encourage social learning networks, and to facilitate dialog between the central ﬁsheries administration and the local organizations. Reconsideration of the system as a whole, from biological, economical, and social viewpoints, cannot be accomplished without involvement of all stakeholders. Because ecological and social realities,

as well as goals, vary along the Chilean coast, management issues and strategies should be considered at an intermediate scale that best reﬂects existing natural boundaries. The ﬁrst step would be to identify geographically bound clusters of AMERBs deﬁned by meaningful commonalties. The establishment of regional committees at that level could have a central role in fostering coordinated networks of AMERBs. At a higher level, competing—extractive and nonextractive—uses of the marine environment and conservation strategies (Fernández and Castilla 2005) need to be integrated through the development of zoning plans that balance the diversity of societal values.

24.4.4. Theme 4: Institutional Coordination Many institutions are involved in the different aspects of the AMERB system, from data collection and enforcement, to evaluation of requests and management plans, to ﬁnancial planning and identiﬁcation of research priorities, to coastal zoning. These institutions are largely uncoordinated, leading to underutilization of resources, data management problems, difﬁculties in conducting evaluations of system performance at various levels, and poor strategic planning. A funding policy for the AMERBs is not clearly established, and research efforts are often discontinuous, with outcomes that fail to be used to improve management. Many of the feedback loops needed for adaptive management are not closed. There is an urgent need to establish an ambit for institutional coordination, delegating some management decisions to the regional level.

24.4.5. Theme 5: Suitability—One Size Does Not Fit All The Chilean TURF system originated in central Chile, where caletas and their adjacent ﬁshing grounds form the social/geographic/ecological template of the artisanal ﬁshery. Success in bringing the loco ﬁshery under management control has led to the widespread application of this instrument for other regions and resources. This one-size-ﬁts-all approach can be problematic. In southern Chile, where ﬁshing grounds are geographically separated from locations of landing and residence, vigilance of the TURFs by the ﬁshers would be ineffective. Yet, many requests for tracts have been ﬁled, but the motive often has been to claim ﬁshing grounds

The Chilean TURF Experience away from other competing uses such as salmon aquaculture. A large number of requests and recent designations in Regions X–XI (ﬁgure 24.5) ﬁt in that category, and all AMERBs established in Region XII have been discontinued. Intersectoral conﬂicts about the use of the coastal zone ought to be resolved at a higher political level. Other situations also exist that would make TURFs unsuitable. A revolt of ﬁshers of Ancud Bay, Region X, against the introduction of TURFs (Chevalier et al. 2007) illustrates the difﬁculties inherent to the partition of ﬁshing territories when a large number of ﬁshers have harvested historically the same grounds. In that case an agreement was reached to return some of the designated tracts and to stop allocating new TURFs within the bay. In some ﬁsheries the introduction of AMERBs could jeopardize traditional forms of successful tenure systems. This was the case of some communities that harvest bull kelp in Region VI, using a lottery to regulate access (Gelcich et al. 2006). Traditional tenure systems should not be ignored; legal adjustments may be needed to contemplate customary systems whose performance is comparable to or better than formal policies. Even when AMERBs are suitable management instruments, regulations should better account for the diversity of resources and harvesting practices, and for variable productivity.

24.5. CONCLUDING REMARKS The introduction of TURFs in Chile addressed the most pressing problems that had led to recurrent crises in the loco ﬁshery: unenforceability of regulations and lack of control of harvest rates. Having been granted secure and exclusive access to tracts of seabed, ﬁshers had the incentives to protect their resources. Loco abundance within TURFs increased, and the ﬁshery transitioned from chaos to order. While the “tragedy of the commons” was addressed at the global scale, there is a risk of going from one tragedy to three tragedies: (1) rent dissipation and weakening of incentives within AMERBs, (2) open access and overﬁshing in background areas, and (3) a “tragedy of the larval commons” resulting from a mismatch between the medium/large scale of biological connectivity and the small scale of the management areas. A major

335

overhaul of the system is required to transition from a collection of individual arrangements for the control of local harvest rates to a regionally integrated management system that acknowledges the connectivity between harvested populations, ﬁshing communities, and markets. The system for provision of technical advice needs to be revamped to encourage real participation of ﬁshers in assessments, management, and setting of objectives and to attend to aspects of commercialization and diversiﬁcation. The focus needs to be broadened from ecological sustainability toward sustainable ﬁsheries development and acknowledgment of multiple societal values. AMERBs are not a panacea for the management of Chilean benthic ﬁsheries. Other legal instruments are needed to accommodate traditional practices that have proven to be sustainable, and to regulate common-pool resources when TURFs are unsuitable. Conﬂicts for competing uses of the coastal zone need to be resolved at a higher political level through the development of zoning plans that balance the diversity of management goals. Notes 1. Loco is a valuable commercial snail of the Muricidae family, superﬁcially resembling an abalone. 2. According to the Chilean national ﬁsheries service, SERNAPESCA (www.sernapesca.cl), in 1992 there were 16,048 ﬁshers harvesting benthic resources, including 10,821 divers and 5,227 coastal gatherers. This ﬁgure is a gross underestimate because many ﬁshers were not included in the ofﬁcial registry. 3. AMERBs, the ofﬁcial name for the Chilean TURFs, is an acronym for areas de manejo y explotación de recursos bentónicos. 4. This is known in Chile as “open access,” although access is more restricted than in the usual meanings of the term (Charles 2001).

References Agüero, M. (2004). Chile. In: Review of the State of World Marine Capture Fisheries Management: Paciﬁc Ocean, pp. 453–494. FAO Technical Document. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Aviléz, O. (2003). Experiencia en el manejo y explotación de las áreas de manejo de recursos bentónicos en las caletas artesanales de la IV

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Región. In: G. San Martín, A. Pinto, M. Montecinos, A. González, and J.A. Guerra (eds). Taller de Áreas de Manejo—Experiencias y Proyecciones, pp. 1–6. Valparaíso: Unidad de Areas de Manejo. Departamento de Pesquerías, Subsecretaría de Pesca. Aviléz, O., and G. Jerez (1999). Gestión sustentable de recursos marinos bentónicos en caletas de la IV Región. Ambiente y Desarrollo (Chile) 15: 6–10. Castilla, J.C., and S. Gelcich (2006). Chile: Experience with management and exploitation areas for coastal ﬁsheries as building blocks for large-scale marine management. In: Scaling Up Marine Management—the Role of Marine Protected Areas, pp. 45–57. Report 36635GLB. Environment Department, Sustainable Development Network, Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Castilla, J.C., S. Gelcich, and O. Defeo (2006). Successes, lessons, and projections from experience in marine benthic invertebrate artisanal ﬁsheries in Chile. In: T.R. McClanahan and J.C. Castilla (eds). Successes in Marine Coastal Resource Management, pp. 25–42. Oxford: Blackwell. Castilla, J.C., P. Manriquez, J. Alvarado, A. Rosson, C. Pino, C. Espóz, R. Soto, D. Oliva, and O. Defeo (1998). Artisanal “caletas” as units of production and co-managers of benthic invertebrates in Chile. In: G.S. Jamieson and A. Campbell (eds). Proceedings of the North Paciﬁc Symposium on Invertebrate Stock Assessment and Management, pp. 407–413. Canadian Special Publications in Fishery and Aquatic Sciences 125. Ottawa: NRC Research Press. Cereceda, L., and D. Czischke (2001). Nueva modalidad institucional para el desarrollo sustentable del sector pesquero artesanal. Ambiente y Desarrollo (Chile) 2001(June): 40–49. Charles, A. (2001). Sustainable Fishery Systems. Fish and Aquatic Resources, Series 5. Oxford: Blackwell Science. Chevalier, J.M., C. Tapia, and D. Buckles (2007). Towards a Management Plan for the Common Fishery Zone of Ancud, Chile. Social Analysis Systems 2 1.0, Technique Report 14. idlbnc. idrc.ca/dspace/handle/123456789/26782 Christy, F.T.J. (2000). Common property rights: An alternative to ITQs. In: R. Shotton (ed). Use of Property Rights in Fisheries Management, Proceedings of the Fish Rights 99 Conference, Freemantle, Western Australia, 11–19 November 1999, pp. 118–135. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 404/1. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Cinti, A. (2006). Las areas de manejo desde la perspectiva de pescadores de pequeña escala de

la IV Región, Chile. M.Sc. diss., Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile. Defeo, O., and J.C. Castilla (2005). More than one bag for the world ﬁshery crisis and keys for co-management successes in selected artisanal Latin American shellﬁsheries. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 15: 265–283. Fernández, M., and J.C. Castilla (2005). Marine conservation in Chile: Historical perspective, lessons, and challenges. Conservation Biology 19: 1752–1762. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (1989). Sustainable Development and Natural Resources Management. Conference, C 89/2, Sup. 2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gelcich, S., G. Edwards-Jones, and M.J. Kaiser (2005b). Importance of attitudinal differences among artisanal ﬁshers towards comanagement and conservation of marine resources. Conservation Biology 19: 865–75. Gelcich, S., G. Edwards-Jones, and M.J. Kaiser (2007). Heterogeneity in ﬁshers’ harvesting decisions under a marine territorial user rights policy. Ecological Economics 61: 246–254. Gelcich, S., G. Edwards-Jones, M.J. Kaiser, and J.C. Castilla (2006). Co-management policy can reduce resilience in traditionally managed marine ecosystems. Ecosystems 9: 951–966. Gelcich, S., G. Edwards-Jones, M.J. Kaiser, and E. Watson (2005a). Using discourses for policy evaluation: The case of marine common property rights in Chile. Society and Natural Resources 18: 377–391. González, J., W. Stotz, J. Garrido, J.M. Orensanz, A.M. Parma, C. Tapia, and A. Zuleta (2006). The Chilean turf system: How is it performing in the case of the Loco ﬁshery? Bulletin of Marine Science 78: 499–527. Grafton, R.Q, Hilborn R, Ridgeway L, Squires D, Williams M, Garcia S, Groves T, Joseph J, Kelleher, K., T. Kompas, G. Libecap, G.G. Lundin, M. Makino, T. Matthiasson, R. McLoughlin, A. Parma, G. San Martin, B. Satia, C. Schmidt, M. Taita, and L. Zhang (2008). Positioning ﬁsheries in a changing world. Marine Policy 32: 630–634. Johannes, R.E. (1978). Traditional marine conservation methods in Oceania and their demise. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 9: 349–364. Meltzoff, S.K., Y.G. Lichtensztajn, and W. Stotz (2002). Competing visions for marine tenure and co-management: Genesis of a marine management area system in Chile. Coastal Management 30: 85–99. Orensanz, J.M., A.M. Parma, G. Jerez, N. Barahona, M. Montecinos, and I. Elías (2005). What are the key elements for the sustainability of

The Chilean TURF Experience “S-ﬁsheries”? Insights from South America. Bulletin of Marine Sciences 76: 527–556. Parma, A.M., J.M. Orensanz, I. Elías, and G. Jerez (2003). Diving for shellﬁsh and data: Incentives for the participation of ﬁshers in the monitoring and management of artisanal ﬁsheries around southern South America. In: S.J. Newman, D.J. Gaughan, G. Jackson, M.C. Mackie, B. Molony, J. St. John, and P. Kaiola (eds). Towards Sustainability of Data-Limited Multisector Fisheries, pp. 8–31. Australian Society for Fish Biology Workshop Proceedings, Bunbury, Australia, 23–24 September. Publication 5. Perth, Australia: Department of Fisheries. Prince, J.D. (2003). The barefoot ecologist goes ﬁshing. Fish and Fisheries 4: 359–371. San Martín, G.A., A. Pinto, M. Montecinos, A. González, and J.A. Guerra (2003). Taller de Áreas de Manejo—Experiencias y Proyecciones. Valparaíso: Unidad de Areas de Manejo, Departamento de Pesquerías, Subsecretaría de Pesca. Schurman, R.A. (1996). Snails, southern hake and sustainability: Neoliberalism and natural resource exports in Chile. World Development 24: 1695–1709. Schumann, S. (2007). Co-management and “consciousness”: Fishers’ assimilation of management principles in Chile. Marine Policy 31: 101–111. SERNAPESCA (2003). Anuario Estadístico de Pesca 2002. Valparaiso: Servicio Nacional de Pesca, Ministerio de Economía y Fomento y Reconstrucción, Gobierno de Chile. SERNAPESCA (2005). Evaluación Técnica y Económica del Impacto de las Áreas de Manejo

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y Explotación de Recursos Bentónicos. www. fondofomento.cl/latinpesca/pal_doc/chile/ admi_pesquera/evaluacion_de_economica_de_ las_areas_de_manejo_en_chile.pdf SERNAPESCA (2009). Registro Pesquero Artesanal. www.sernapesca.cl/index.php?option=com_co ntent&task=view&id=84&Itemid=222. Stotz, W. (1997). Las áreas de manejo en la ley de pesca y acuicultura: Primeras experiencias y evaluación de la utilidad de esta herramienta para el recurso loco. Estudios Oceanológicos 16: 67–86. Subsecretaría de Pesca (Chile) (1995). Reglamento sobre áreas de manejo y explotación de recursos bentónicos. Diario Oﬁcial de la República de Chile 35253: 2. Thiel, M., E.C. Macaya, E. Acuñ, W. Arntz, H. Bastias, K. Brokordt, P.A. Camus, J.C. Castilla, L.R. Castro, M. Cortés, C.P. Dumont, R. Escribano, M. Fernández, J.A. Fajardo, C.F. Gaymer, I. Gómez, A.E. González, H.E. González, P.A. Haye, J.E. Illanes, J.L. Iriarte, D.A. Lancellotti, G. LunaJorquera, C. Luxoro, P.H. Manríquez, V. Marín, P. Muñoz, S.A. Navarrete, E. Pérez, E. Poulin, J. Sellanes, H.H. Sepúlveda, W. Stotz, F. Tala, A. Thomas, C.A. Vargas, J.A. Vásquez, and J.M. Alonso Vega (2007). The Humboldt Current system of northern and central Chile. Oceanographic processes, ecological interactions and socioeconomic feedback. Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review 45: 195–344. Zuñiga, S., P. Ramirez, and M. Valdevenito (2008). Situación socioeconómica de las áreas de manejo en la región de Coquimbo. Latin American Journal of Aquatic Research 36: 63–81.

25 Australia’s Commonwealth-Managed Fisheries RICHARD McLOUGHLIN NICK RAYNS

25.1. INTRODUCTION Australia’s economic exclusion zone is extensive, spanning some 40° of latitude and 60° of longitude and ranging from tropical to Antarctic waters (ﬁgure 25.1). The continent itself is bounded by the Tasman Sea and Paciﬁc Ocean to the east, the Southern Ocean to the south, and the Indian Ocean to the west, enclosing a diverse range of marine environments and species groups. However, despite having the world’s third largest ﬁshing zone (the Australian Fishing Zone), Australia ranks only around 50th in ﬁsheries catch in terms of metric tons of ﬁsh landed (Larcombe and McLoughlin 2007). While many hundreds of species are regularly landed, 20 ﬁsheries are managed by the Australian government, with about 90 species comprising the bulk of targeted catches. These catches represent, in turn, about 15 percent of the gross value of production of Australian ﬁsheries and aquaculture. Trawling, longlining (both pelagic and demersal) and purse seining are the main ﬁshing methods employed. These ﬁsheries produced 57,000 metric tons valued at A$293 million in 2006/2007, a 5 percent increase in value from the previous year, and just four ﬁsheries produced 65 percent of that value (northern prawn, southern blueﬁn tuna, eastern tuna and billﬁsh, and southern and eastern scaleﬁsh and shark ﬁsheries). In fact, the real value of production from Commonwealth ﬁsheries had been falling since 2000/2001, from a high of A$563

million, representing a 48 percent decline in value in just four years (Newton et al. 2007). This decline in gross value resulted from a shift in the terms of trade for many seafood producers in export based sectors, particularly when allied with an appreciating currency during the same period. Along with declining biological performance, the declining economics of ﬁshing contributed many of the pressures that led to a need for signiﬁcant reform of the approaches to management described in this chapter.

25.2. BRIEF HISTORY OF COMMONWEALTH FISHERIES MANAGEMENT AND THE CREATION OF THE AUSTRALIAN FISHERIES MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY The evolution of Commonwealth ﬁsheries management and policy has been reviewed by the Australian government (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry 2003) and also by Smith et al. (1999). In summary, a government white paper produced in the late 1980s (Department of Primary Industries and Energy 1989) identiﬁed wide-ranging problems with “standard” approaches to ﬁshery management at the time. This included both the institutional arrangements (government department seeking many ﬁsheries management decisions

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25.1 Location of Australia’s Commonwealth managed ﬁsheries and relative catch levels. (Larcombe and McLoughlin 2007)

FIGURE

from a minister) and the approaches to ﬁshery management at that time (mostly input controls or open access). The new model was an independent statutory authority—the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA)—controlled by a board composed of industry and other ﬁshery experts and operating under its own legislation that mandated the pursuit of ecological sustainable development (ESD) as an objective for ﬁsheries management, a strong co-management approach, implementation of tradable property rights, and substantial cost recovery from industry for operational costs of ﬁsheries management. Government policy also proposed that the preferred approach to ﬁsh stock management was individual transferable quotas (ITQs), although this was not mandatory.

25.3. AFMA MANAGEMENT OF FISHERIES (1992–PRESENT): RESULTS OF THE CO-MANAGEMENT MODEL By 2004 conﬁdence in the efﬁcacy of the AFMA ﬁshery model was being widely questioned. Despite

signiﬁcant annual investment by both industry and government in ﬁsheries research and stock assessment, the number of domestically managed stocks assessed as being overﬁshed rose rapidly from the mid-1990s, reﬂecting management performance in the previous decade or more. In 1996, only two domestic managed stocks were classiﬁed as overﬁshed or experiencing overﬁshing (of 12 assessed), while in 2005 it was 14 (of 17 assessed). Importantly, many of the classiﬁcations of stocks as overﬁshed resulted from improved assessments using better information and analysis. In particular, many ﬁnﬁsh stocks targeted by trawl ﬁsheries in southeastern Australia during the 1990s had been overﬁshed, with deep-water species such as orange roughy, deeper water sharks, and oreo dories severely impacted (Bax et al. 2005). Allied with the spatial expansion of the ﬂeet into deep waters was an increase in overall ﬁshing power, resulting from investments in both new vessels and vessel upgrades to take advantage of the discovery of orange roughy in the late 1980s and pelagic species (broadbill swordﬁsh) on the east coast in the late 1990s. In short, the main trawl and longline ﬁsheries in southeastern and southern Australia were

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showing signs of stock depletion and declining economic performance. Anecdotally, ﬁshery participants were describing signiﬁcant economic hardship, competition on ﬁshing grounds, difﬁculty in meeting higher costs of fuel and crew, and strong competition in markets from imported products. The picture was not consistently bad, however; elsewhere, there were some positive ﬁshery (stock) management outcomes. The major northern prawn ﬁshery, based on effort controls, recovered two stocks (brown tiger and grooved tiger prawns) following signiﬁcant cuts to effort levels, but the continued use of input controls resulted in effort creep, and the management response to this necessarily had a further negative impact on the economic efﬁciency of the ﬂeet. The tradable nature of the input controls did provide for some autonomous adjustment, but economic performance was not signiﬁcantly improved. Overall, despite having spent over a decade in implementing what were considered as the “best” ﬁshery management instruments backed by signiﬁcant investment in research and stock assessment, both the biological and economic performance of many ﬁsheries was declining, and the ﬁshery governance arrangements in place were under question. While there was widespread agreement that the instruments were the generally the right ones (i.e., ITQ management, co-management approaches, ESD principles, etc.), it had become clear that the operational settings for the instruments (e.g., total allowable catches [TAC]) or the instruments themselves (e.g., many ﬁsheries remained under input controls) were not delivering the required outcomes. While a legislative framework mandating sustainability was in place, it gave little or no guidance for the level of risk to stocks or the level of economic performance that was acceptable. Also, while government policy was for ITQ management in all Commonwealth ﬁsheries, less than half the ﬁsheries had implemented quota management by the mid 1990s because of resistance by industry mostly based on concerns about impacts on revenues and higher management costs. In effect a ‘policy’ of avoiding signiﬁcant negative economic impacts on industry had been applied, resulting in a large number of ecologically high risk decisions over many years. The outcome was more overﬁshed stocks and more stocks subject to overﬁshing.

25.4. OVERFISHING AND GOVERNMENT/MANAGEMENT RESPONSE The new Australian government policy is the Harvest Strategy Policy (HSP) for key commercial ﬁsh species under Commonwealth jurisdiction (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry 2007). The HSP was agreed by both the ﬁsheries and environment ministers and deﬁnes the acceptable risk boundaries within which Commonwealth ﬁsheries must be managed. The HSP focuses on harvest strategies for key commercial species.

25.4.1. Prelude to the Policy As with many signiﬁcant policy changes much of the groundwork was laid in the years preceding the policy announcement by the government. Use of decision rules in ﬁsheries management, evaluation of the success or failure of management actions, and using risk assessment to prioritize future management measures are not of themselves new, but their application in ﬁsheries management is relatively so. For Australia’s Commonwealth-managed ﬁsheries, a harvest strategy developed by the Commonwealth Scientiﬁc and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and AFMA was ﬁrst applied in 1994 to an ITQ-managed orange roughy stock in the southeast trawl ﬁshery (Phillips and Rayns 1995). While applied by AFMA managers and industry, it was not formally agreed to by the AFMA board. The reasons for this are not recorded, but as noted above, constraining debate around catch levels through decision rules was contrary to the management paradigm at the time; this was for a broader discussion and negotiation process about catch levels and ﬁshery management issues generally, which in turn was based on the assumption that a strong property rights regime would tend to lead to industry moderating the risks it would take in recommending sustainable catch levels for ﬁsh stocks. The formal use of risk assessment in Australia’s Commonwealth-managed ﬁsheries was ﬁrst considered in about 2000 as a means of dealing with the complex array of issues required to be addressed under the “strategic assessment” of Commonwealth ﬁsheries under the Australian government’s broader environment legislation—the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act of 1999.

Australia’s Commonwealth-Managed Fisheries It drew on work done by others, including the ESD subprogram (Fletcher et al. 2002) established by the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC) and that of the CSIRO (Fulton et al. 2004), which has itself drawn on international developments in this ﬁeld. The early work of the Bureau of Rural Sciences in this area (Chesson and Clayton 1998; Garcia et al. 2000) is also relevant. The combination of a harvest strategy for key commercial species (including management strategy evaluation) and ecological risk assessment formed the core of much of the work undertaken by CSIRO for AFMA in the period 2002–2007. While both complex and challenging, they have proven a turning point in ﬁsheries management decision making. The focus of this work has been on the key commercial species, by-product species, and bycatch, although much work remains to be done in the areas of habitat and community risk assessment. These new tools present new challenges, especially as they identify both for ﬁshers and for managers that there are more competing interests in seabed access and management than the ﬁsh stocks and commercial ﬁshers alone.

25.4.2. Ministerial Direction During the 1990s, AFMA’s negotiations with its stakeholders, particularly the ﬁshing industry, became more difﬁcult. The main reason for this was their unbounded nature, in that every potential ﬁshery management issue could be revisited every year in management discussions, particularly when setting catch levels for the coming year. While the Fisheries Management Act gave AFMA a mandate to pursue sustainable ﬁshing, it did not deﬁne the limits to risk that the government (and through it the public) was willing to accept in the utilization of ﬁshery resources. More speciﬁcally, it had not expressed what the ﬁshery sustainability limit and target points were, unlike, for example, the limit of 10 percent of the preexploitation level of biomass and target of maximum sustainable yield (MSY), respectively, implemented in New Zealand. Furthermore, ﬁsheries management was lagging in other key areas such as bycatch management, habitat interactions with ﬁshing gear, and discarding or high grading of quota-managed and other target species. The Ministerial Direction of December 2005 issued under section 91 of the Fisheries Administration Act (FAA) changed the Commonwealth

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ﬁsheries landscape by compelling focused and immediate action to comprehensively address these issues and speciﬁed acceptable risk boundaries around the utilization of ﬁsh stocks (ﬁgure 25.2). The FAA contemplates this being done only under exceptional circumstances, with the December 2005 Direction being the only one ever issued to AFMA in its seventeen-year existence. Signiﬁcantly, included in the Direction was the need to create management arrangements that, within sustainability bounds, maximized the net economic returns to the Australian community. To further emphasize and improve this point, the government reframed AFMA’s legislated economic objective in November 2005 and changed the deﬁnition of ecologically sustainable development (ESD) to that of the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act) to better align ﬁsheries and environmental law. This was not the only link to the EPBC Act; the HSP (which the Direction stated must be developed and implemented) drew together the decision-making processes under both ﬁsheries and environmental law. The HSP was signed by both the ﬁsheries and environment ministers in September 2007. The only limitation to the policy was that it could not fetter the discretion of ministers under either legislation, but it does give clear guidance on what circumstances would cause the Environment Minister (or his or her department) to act on populations of stocks deemed to have been overﬁshed. Thus far, greater clarity now exists about when a species subject to the Fisheries Management Act will be considered as needing intervention for conservation purposes under the EPBC Act. The views of stakeholders to these initiatives were mixed; the ﬁshing industry was concerned on two counts: the prospect of reduced catch levels under the HSP, and having AFMA become involved in ﬁshery economics. The ﬁrst matter has largely subsided, offset by large injections of government monies ($A220 million) for a ﬁshing concession buyback, onshore business assistance, three years of relief from ﬁshing concession (license) levies, and support for additional science. The second lingers with industry, not yet convinced of the proposition of pursuing maximum economic yield (MEY); that is, taking less ﬁsh than MSY can result in greater proﬁts because of decreased ﬁshing costs. The theoretical model is that reduced costs arise from greater catch rates (because generally MEY > MSY means a higher biomass or more dense ﬁsh stocks)

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FIGURE 25.2 Indicators of stock status utilized in Australian Commonwealth managed ﬁsheries. (Larcombe and McLoughlin 2007)

and less cost (less time searching, therefore lower fuel and labor costs, and being able to ﬁsh closer to port) (Grafton et al. 2006). However, one of the most substantial issues was not the target itself but the transition path to MEY and who would pay the costs. There was little disagreement that a target that maximizes ﬁshery proﬁts over time is desirable, but there was substantial interest in how quickly the target was to be achieved. There also remains the issue of how accurately MEY can be estimated, how often it is to be recalculated, and so forth. The HSP says that once a stock reaches a biomass that generates maximum sustainable yield (Bmsy), rebuilding should continue toward a biomass that generates maximum economic yield (Bmey). However, the HSP also speciﬁes that the rate of rebuilding

should consider the appropriate balance between short-term losses and longer term economic gains, which provides for a recognition of the transition issue. Conservation and scientiﬁc groups, however, were strongly supportive of increasing target stock size and, more generally, the MEY target. Early data do show an increase in catch rates and catch per boat. However, this is not because of stock rebuilding (as this would take at least several years to materialize), but because far fewer boats are now ﬁshing following the government’s ﬁshing concession buyback, meaning less competition on the ﬁshing grounds. Interestingly, industry claims that ﬁsh are simply more numerous due to natural changes in the availability of ﬁsh, which is hard to prove one way or the other. Regardless, the

Australia’s Commonwealth-Managed Fisheries government’s expectation is that the management regimes AFMA has in place for Commonwealth ﬁsheries will capture the beneﬁts of the buyback so as to maintain the improved economic (as well as biological) circumstances of the ﬁshery. This is a challenging proposition, especially if industry’s reasoning is correct.

25.4.3. Implementation Issues While AFMA was aware that the government was going to direct it to do certain things, the Ministerial Direction came at relatively short notice and, while appropriately funded, required immediate action. Within a week of the Direction being given to AFMA in December 2005, the Authority had released its document Future Operating Environment for Commonwealth Fisheries (FOE) (AFMA 2005). This was a useful clariﬁcation of many aspects of the Ministerial Direction’s implementation, but the manner in which it was done resulted in two things: industry was affronted at being told by AFMA what was going to happen without its advice being sought beforehand (and therefore no ability to change its content), and insufﬁcient thought was given by AFMA to some of the statements made in the FOE. The ramiﬁcations of both of these matters were signiﬁcant for industry as it clearly represented a shift in what they had previously experienced with AFMA in terms of co-management. AFMA formed an implementation team and established several steering groups with stakeholders (especially industry) to help implement the Direction. A complicating factor was that the Direction contained an interim harvest strategy that was to be set aside once a more considered HSP was developed and agreed by ministers. This led to periodic confusion with stakeholders in terms of applying an interim strategy while developing a longer term one, particularly as 21 months elapsed between the issuing of the Direction and the completion of the HSP, during which time AFMA had to decide on two rounds of sustainable catch or effort levels. A second signiﬁcant issue for AFMA was the ability to form an implementation team with the required set of skills and experience. This meant taking existing AFMA staff off less important duties with the same process occurring in CSIRO (AFMA’s major source of scientiﬁc advice) and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (which provides policy advice to government and

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oversees AFMA’s performance). The advantage to AFMA was that it already had a successful template for harvest strategy development in the southern and eastern scaleﬁsh and shark ﬁshery that could be applied in modiﬁed forms to other ﬁsheries. However, this proved a particular challenge in small ﬁsheries (<$5 million gross value of production per annum), for which data often were sparse or completely absent. A speciﬁc set of projects and processes were undertaken to address this (Dowling and Smith 2007; Dowling et al. 2007). A third complicating factor was the concurrent implementation of the Direction and an industry distracted with a large government-funded ﬁshing concession buyback scheme. The entire management advisory committee (MAC)/Resource Assessment Group (RAG) process was in jeopardy for the best part of a year as industry members participated in making recommendations on the future management of a ﬁshery to the AFMA board when many of them were considering leaving the industry via the buyback. This proved to be a difﬁcult process, with some MACs permanently short of industry members and ongoing concerns by MAC participants about the motives of some other industry members for taking particular positions on management issues.

25.4.4. Consultation, Advice, and Communication The Direction required simultaneous and immediate action on a number of issues that industry in particular saw as threatening (see above). It also resulted in a period of top-down management by AFMA on the basis of AFMA necessarily putting its implementation strategy forward following receipt of the Ministerial Direction and challenging stakeholders to propose a more efﬁcient or effective approach or accept AFMA’s proposed response. While industry found this confronting, it had general support from other stakeholders (scientists, environmental nongovernmental organizations, and recreational ﬁshers), some of which had long held the view that AFMA gave industry too much latitude in its negotiations on the setting of TACs and other ﬁsheries management issues. In the circumstances effectively engaging industry in this process was difﬁcult. MACs and RAGs (the existing co-management structures) were one answer, but some of these groups met only once or twice a year, which was inadequate when the timeline

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for a decision was usually a few months. Several workshops with stakeholders were held on the HSP and other aspects of the Direction, but without the extensive background to make sense of the complex issues involved meaningful engagement with stakeholders was difﬁcult. An HSP steering committee was formed and worked quite successfully, but it was many (difﬁcult) months before industry leaders came to fully understand what was being proposed. The subsequent role they played in reassuring many others in industry that it was reasonable and that there was no hidden agenda from government was central to the eventual signing of the policy by both ministers.

25.4.5. Science and Management Issues Scientists working with ﬁshery managers had historically considered one or more aspects of a harvest strategy, but it was only in the southern and eastern scaleﬁsh and shark ﬁshery that this had successfully come together and been applied. In the heat of implementation and with the possibility of signiﬁcantly reduced catches, science and management became the focus of industry’s displeasure. Science was accused of hiding behind uncertainty and assumptions in ﬁshery models to produce results at odds with ﬁshers’ observations. Management was accused of breaking trust and a partnership approach that it had built over many years with industry. However, the scientists’ approach to assumptions in ﬁshery models had not changed, nor had AFMA’s willingness to engage with industry as a result of the HSP. But once the acceptable risk boundaries (to stock levels) had been deﬁned by government, there was a narrower range of choices for MACs and RAGs to discuss regarding the catch levels of any species, particularly in the area of avoiding economic impacts on industry itself. That the HSP has beneﬁts for industry by providing a more certain outcome for business planning is yet to be realized, with industry remaining skeptical until its members see the results of several years of TAC decisions. AFMA has recognized that the science–industry– AFMA relationships have been tested as a result of implementing the Direction and has put considerable efforts into rebuilding trust and conﬁdence with the ﬁshing industry for the co-management model. However, expectations that the old way of doing business can be returned to unbounded

annual negotiations on TAC setting have been largely extinguished. In regard to science–industry relations, the key focus now is ﬁnding better ways of drawing the previously anecdotal industry advice of stock status more formally into the assessment process. This would better recognize its value and highlight areas of difference that need to be managed through the HSP.

25.4.6. People as Leaders Success in implementing any major policy change comes in part through vision and leadership often of only a few people. In this case science, management and industry worked together because of a common interest in a sustainable and proﬁtable ﬁshing industry. However, while the goals were agreed, their emphasis differed markedly. Industry was very much seeking a structural adjustment package to relieve the ﬁnancial stress the industry was under (fuel price rises and import competition for seafood commodities), while retaining the ﬂexibility inherent in a strong co-management model of ﬁsheries management. Management wanted a longterm sustainable ﬁshery, which meant lowering catch levels of some species signiﬁcantly and which would be more easily achieved if some in industry received ﬁnancial assistance to depart the ﬁshery. Both were seeking long-term economic viability. AFMA had also been working with science and industry for some time to ﬁnd solutions to these key issues. The absolute necessity for some individuals to be willing to take a leadership role—requiring at times considerable personal courage and a commitment to change—across the interests of all the stakeholder groups in order to progress the necessary change management became a feature of the whole process. As in most change management processes, it was a key factor leading to success.

25.4.7. Maintenance A new policy approach cannot be simply implemented and forgotten. It requires maintenance and review. The HSP is to be formally reviewed every ﬁve years by the government, but AFMA’s performance will be measured against it annually by central government agencies and its expertise (science and economics)–based review agencies. AFMA is currently working with these agencies and environment protection ofﬁcials to ensure consistent evaluation criteria are applied.

Australia’s Commonwealth-Managed Fisheries One of the medium term hoped-for beneﬁts of having MEY as a target for Commonwealth ﬁsheries is to increase their resilience to changing circumstances, for example, market ﬂuctuations or climate change. Pursuing MEY is the best way that AFMA can assist, but it is by no means the full answer. Industry also carries much of the responsibility and in some ﬁsheries is becoming more cohesive and designing its own future. As one prominent industry participant put it at a combined AFMA–industry forum on the Ministerial Direction in 2006, “Without a vision for our future we have nowhere to go and we place our livelihoods in the hands of others.” In terms of ﬁnancial costs and beneﬁts after the buyback and HSP, catch per boat is generally up by 20–30 percent, and asset (ﬁshing concessions) values have also increased by 20–100 percent (Pascoe and Gibson 2008). While the buyback has deﬁnitely contributed to these improved indicators, it is not the only reason. Recently, higher ﬁsh prices on the domestic market and the greater catchability of several species in 2007/2008 have played a signiﬁcant role. AFMA will continue to monitor the economic trends in its ﬁsheries to ensure the beneﬁts of the government’s $A220 million investment are not diminished. Management costs are likely to rise slightly as a result of the HSP as it requires more stringent analysis, justiﬁcation, and reporting. However, there are choices to be made via the application of the “risk-catch-cost trade-off” paradigm (Keith Sainsbury, personal communication), and with a smaller ﬁshing ﬂeet, AFMA is adopting more efﬁcient ﬁshery management processes.

25.5. CONCLUSION While a number of aspects of the new policy are yet to be fully implemented, there is already a noticeable change in industry approach to issues in a majority of Commonwealth-managed ﬁsheries. The buyback in combination with the HSP and other policybased decision rules has sped up the natural adjustment process. It has also increased the likelihood of formation of effective ﬁshery-based industry bodies, which are now calling for greater co-management within the boundaries of the policy settings. Most MAC/RAG discussions on setting catch levels are more focused and shorter, with the 2008 TACs all being accepted by industry. The outcome of the TAC

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setting process is more predictable, with industry starting to look to the medium term for catch (and income) stability via multiyear TAC setting. Overall, the HSP is already providing considerable beneﬁts to the Commonwealth ﬁshery resource, the ﬁshing industry, the government, and the Australian public. While the process of implementation has been imperfect at times. the policy has begun delivering what was expected.

Acknowledgments The authors extend their appreciation to Dr. James Findlay of the Bureau of Rural Sciences for use of ﬁgures 25.1 and 25.2. Similarly, we extend our appreciation to the board of AFMA and the many members of the ﬁshing industry, scientiﬁc community, environment groups, and government colleagues who assisted or were directly part of the reforms described in this chapter.

References AFMA (2005). Future Operating Environment for Commonwealth Fisheries. Australian Fisheries Management Authority. www.afma.gov.au Bax, N.J., R. Tilzey, J. Lyle, S.E. Wayte, R. Kloser, and A.D.M. Smith (2005). Providing management advice for deep-sea ﬁsheries: Lessons learned from Australia’s orange roughy ﬁshery. In: R. Shotton (ed). Deep Sea 2003: Conference on the Governance and Management of DeepSea Fisheries. Queenstown, New Zealand, 1–5 December. FAO Fisheries Proceedings. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Chesson, J., and H. Clayton (1998). A Framework for Assessing Fisheries with Respect to Ecologically Sustainable Development. Canberra, Australia: Bureau of Rural Sciences. Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (2003). Looking to the Future: A Review of Commonwealth Fisheries Policy. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (2007). Commonwealth Fisheries Harvest Strategy. Policy and Guidelines. www.daff.gov. au/ﬁsheries/domestic/harvest_strategy_policy Department of Primary Industries and Energy (1989). New Directions for Commonwealth Fisheries Management in the 1990s—a Government Policy Statement December 1989. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Dowling, N.A., and D.C. Smith (2007). Development of Harvest Strategies for AFMA’s Small

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Fisheries. Final Report for Project 2006/820. Canberra: Australian Fisheries Management Authority. Dowling, N.A., D.C. Smith, and A.D.M. Smith (2007). Finalisation of Harvest Strategies for AFMA’s Small Fisheries. Final Report for Project 2007/834. Canberra: Australian Fisheries Management Authority. Fletcher, W., J. Chesson, M. Fisher, K.J. Sainsbury, T. Hundloe, A.D.M. Smith, and B. Whitworth (2002). National ESD Reporting Framework for Australian Fisheries: The “How To” Guide for Wild Capture Fisheries. FRDC Report 2000/145. Canberra: Fisheries Research and Development Corporation. Fulton, E.A., M. Fuller, A.D.M. Smith, and A. Punt (2004). Ecological Indicators on the Effects of Fishing: Final Report. AFMA Final Research Report. Hobart, Australia: Commonwealth Scientiﬁc and Industrial Research Organization Marine Research. Garcia, S.M., D.J. Staples, and J. Chesson (2000). The FAO guidelines for the development and use of indicators for sustainable development of marine capture ﬁsheries and an Australian example of their application. Ocean and Coastal Management 43: 537–556.

Grafton, R.Q., J. Kirkley, T. Kompas, and D. Squires (2006). Economics for Fisheries Management. Ashgate Studies in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. Larcombe, J., and K. McLoughlin (eds) (2007). Fishery Status Reports 2006: Status of Fish Stocks Managed by the Australian Government. Canberra, Australia: Bureau of Rural Sciences. Newton, P., R. Wood, D. Galeano, S. Vieira, and R. Perry (2007). Fishery Economic Status Report. ABARE Report 07.19. Canberra, Australia: Fisheries Resources Research Fund. Pascoe, S., and A. Gibson (2008). Assessment of the Use of Boat Statutory Fishing Rights in Commonwealth Fisheries. Draft Report. Canberra: Australian Fisheries Management Authority. Phillips, B., and N. Rayns (1995). AFMA establishes new approach to managing ﬁsh stocks. Australian Fisheries February: 6–8. Smith, A.D.M., K.J. Sainsbury, and R.A. Stevens (1999). Implementing effective ﬁsheries management systems: Management strategy evaluation and the Australian partnership approach. ICES Journal of Marine Science 56: 967–79.

26 Evolving Governance in New Zealand Fisheries ROBIN CONNOR BRUCE SHALLARD

26.1. INTRODUCTION The modern era of governance of New Zealand ﬁsheries was established in 1986 with the implementation of the quota management system (QMS) based on individual transferable quota (ITQ). This important example of management by individualized catching rights is well documented in its fundamental characteristics (Annala 1996; Batstone and Sharp 1998; Clark and Duncan 1986; Clark et al. 1988; Falloon 1993). It is these characteristics that have driven key structural changes to the management system since then, as well as enabling several examples of innovation in governance of individual ﬁsheries. These include stakeholder led cross-sector planning in the rock lobster ﬁsheries, devolved management responsibility and private stock enhancement in the scallop ﬁsheries, a devolved quota registry and contracted catch reporting system run by an industry-owned company, and collaborative processes of research planning and stock assessment with research delivered by a combination of government and private sector providers. Despite this seeming foment of innovation, the core governance system remains government dominated, with virtually all legally binding catch limit and regulatory decisions made by the Minister of Fisheries. Attempts to provide support for further or more general innovation and change in governance through legislation have been frustrated and partial. Further, while engagement between

government and stakeholder groups is frequent, working relationships across stakeholder groups, and between them and government agencies have exhibited little positive growth over the last decade. Further tensions are evident between government agencies with different responsibilities and objectives in the marine environment, slowing progress on resolving issues to enable ﬁsheries and aquaculture activities. Tensions in the system are running high, and changes to the core governance system are required. However, the challenge is very signiﬁcant, and the direction is not at all certain. This chapter traces the development of aspects of ﬁsheries governance in New Zealand over the period from the introduction of quota management in 1986. The view taken of governance is one of institutional structure and process that supports coordination of both private and public interests in ﬁsheries and involves both public-sector and private-sector actors. Private interests can respond to measures put in place by government, may devise their own means to coordinate behavior, and may work in cooperation with government to agree on principles and devise rules. Successful governance and management of ﬁsheries relies critically on the effectiveness of incentive structures and normalized behaviors tuned to achievement of agreed goals. Much individual behavior is difﬁcult or expensive to observe directly, so rules that are not supported are difﬁcult to enforce. This emphasizes the need for a high

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level of commitment from ﬁshers to the rules. Such commitment is enhanced by governance systems that support regular and cooperative participation in their formulation. However, ﬁsheries governance needs to work across a range of private interests and organized groups of stakeholders and government. In turn, governments need to coordinate among their own agencies on policy and set priorities for supporting ﬁsheries governance cognizant of the needs of other sectors, while interest groups must deal with often dispersed and disparate interests of their members. This complexity alone makes the agreement of common goals and objectives challenging. When combined with the complexity and uncertainties inherent in marine ecosystems and their observation, dealing with ﬁsheries governance and management in a holistic manner can become overwhelming. Thus, a desire for simplicity may become a significant barrier to the building of effective systems of ﬁsheries governance. Parties retreat to their corners, resigned to roles as combatants in a ﬁeld of competing interests, with little empathy for the plight of those knights of a different banner. Debates become polarized and parties litigious, and the possibility of common goals and objectives for ﬁsheries management is lost in the smoke of the battleﬁeld. In a world irrevocably changed by the reality of climate change, and with peak oil looming, sustainability now means a lot more than catch limits that prevent stock collapse. The transformation of the ﬁsheries frontier toward considered and collaborative stewardship requires further work. New Zealand made an early breakthrough in institutional reform for ﬁsheries but has struggled in the new sustainability era.1 The ﬁsheries are in reasonable shape, but the governance system, while on sound foundations, has failed to cultivate a contented constituency. After brieﬂy introducing the New Zealand ﬁsheries, this chapter describes the basic statutory building blocks for the governance system and then discusses the effort to develop the system toward greater stakeholder roles in management and delivery of services. This provides some background to the current tensions. Section 26.5 provides an analysis of the current dilemma for leadership in ﬁsheries governance in New Zealand and sees little choice but to move to a more inclusive, multisector collaborative and transparent model. This suggests the need for the government and its agencies to

adjust their roles to become more facilitative agents of change, seeking consensus regarding approaches to achieving mutually agreed objectives. The concluding section discusses two new developments in New Zealand ﬁsheries governance that represent important opportunities to advance a collaborative approach.

26.2. NEW ZEALAND FISHERIES The estimated maximum sustainable yield for New Zealand’s 4.4 million square kilometer exclusive economic zone, declared in 1978, is something over half a million metric tons, with about one-third of the zone ﬁshable by modern demersal methods. The ecosystems of the zone are diverse and of medium productivity. The largest single ﬁshery in New Zealand is hoki (Macruronus novaezelandiae), a grenadier. This species has accounted for up to one-third of the total catch by weight, supporting a peak total allowable commercial catch (TACC) of 250,000 metric tons from 1986 through 1990, and again from 1996 through 2001, with an annual export value up to NZ$300 million. The current TACC is 90,000 metric tons. The variation in the TACC follows ﬂuctuations in recruitment, which are suspected to be linked to water temperatures and climatic cycles. Orange roughy (Hoplostethus atlanticus) is another valuable deep-water ﬁshery, with a TACC of around 13,500 metric tons and export value of up to NZ$125 million per year. Other deep-water species include oreos,2 hake (Merluccius australis), ling (Genypterus blacodes), and squid (Nototodarus spp.). These bulk ﬁsheries are generally caught by bottom or midwater trawling. Several tuna species are caught by longline and purse seine, and jack mackerels and kahawai are also caught by seining. Important inshore species include snapper, rock lobster, paua (abalone), grouper, tarakihi, and several small sharks.3 New Zealand has some 1,300 registered commercial ﬁshing vessels, 1,600 quota owners, and direct employment in the industry of more than 7,000 full-time equivalent positions. Total annual seafood exports exceed 300,000 metric tons, with earnings in recent years in a range from $1250 million to $1500 million. Noncommercial ﬁshing has always been important as a source of food and recreation for a signiﬁcant proportion of the population. New Zealand

Evolving Governance in New Zealand Fisheries is a small island state with a long coastline relative to the land area. The noncommercial ﬁsheries have been largely unregulated in the past, although daily bag limits on amateur take are signiﬁcantly restricting in some ﬁsheries. The lack of regulation has gone hand in hand with a paucity of information on participation and catch in this sector. It is estimated that up to 30 percent of the population participate to some extent in amateur ﬁshing (about one million ﬁshers), but this rate is uncertain as are estimates of catch, with results from successive nationwide surveys differing by up to 300 percent (Kearney 2002).

26.3. BUILDING BLOCKS FOR GOVERNANCE: THE QUOTA MANAGEMENT SYSTEM The New Zealand QMS has been documented and analyzed adequately elsewhere (see, e.g., Annala 1996; Clark and Duncan 1986; Clarket al. 1988; Connor 2001) and is only summarized here. The implementation followed closely the synthesis that emerged from the Powell River Symposium (Moloney and Pearse 1979). At the time of the introduction, ITQ were referred to as exclusive and perpetual property rights (see, e.g., Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries 1984: 9). However, they were not referred to directly as property in the Fisheries Amendment Act 1986, but were characterized by the attributes and conditions created in the Act. These elements established the character of the ITQ as private property in the right to harvest ﬁsh from a given stock—not in the ﬁsh stocks themselves—and a clear understanding of this character has become generalized in New Zealand since 1986. The speciﬁc nature of quota rights was destined to be signiﬁcantly changed in the short term and continue to be adjusted over time. The QMS immediately proved successful in its primary objectives. The system was born of dual motivations: concern for the stress on stocks being imposed by rapidly expanding effort in inshore ﬁsheries, and the desire for a mechanism to allow the domestic industry to capture rents and build capacity in the deep water sector, dominated in the past by foreign ﬂeets. Efﬁciency in the ﬂeet was clearly a concern, but overcapitalization was only becoming evident in the most proﬁtable inshore ﬁsheries. The initial allocation of quota was based on the basic principle that quota entitlements should

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reﬂect established commitment to the ﬁshery. This was generally taken to be reﬂected in the history of ﬁshers’ reported catch. Through mechanisms of assessment designed to ensure fairness, and because some ﬁsheries needed catch reductions, initial allocations needed to be reduced for many important inshore stocks. The government bought initial allocations back from ﬁshers before the commencement of the QMS, paying out some NZ$42 million to achieve the reductions (Connor 2001). Additional deep-water quota initially held by the Crown was sold to industry, yielding in excess of NZ$80 million. However, by 1989 new information became available on the biology of the star of the deep-water stocks, orange roughy, and it became evident that serious quota reductions were required. This implied a potential cost to government of hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce orange roughy TACCs. This situation promoted a rethinking of the tonnage-based system of quota, and in 1990 an amendment to the legislation changed the nature of the quota right to a proportion of the TACC. From that time the government has been able to change TACCs to reﬂect sustainability constraints without compensation, and the catch available to quota holders is adjusted proportionately. The quasi-judicial processes for appeal of quota allocations—the Quota Appeal Authority (QAA)— ran for a decade following initial allocations. This contributed to signiﬁcant increases in the TACC for important species, particularly snapper, which had been the most expensive to reduce in the quota buyback. Eventually, proportional TACC reductions largely took account of this, but the recovery of key stocks was undoubtedly delayed—the largest snapper stock has taken two decades to rebuild to a level that will produce the maximum sustainable yield. On the other hand, the appeal processes provided for in the QMS legislation arguably contributed signiﬁcantly to ﬁsher acceptance of the introduction of ITQs. The cuts in snapper quotas in the mid-1990s, in part required to compensate for the awards of quota by the QAA, were to trigger a major court case brought by the industry against the Minister of Fisheries. This case would—along with the structural reforms that created a separate Ministry of Fisheries (the Ministry), implementation of cost recovery, and a new Fisheries Act—mark a watershed in ﬁsheries politics in New Zealand.

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26.4. A BRAVE NEW WORLD: THE PATH TO DEVOLVED MANAGEMENT The 1990s was a busy decade in ﬁsheries governance in New Zealand. General public sector reform themes set in the 1980s were coming to fruition. Structural change began with a “policydelivery split” within the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. This established a separate policy unit whereby ﬁsheries policy and ﬁsheries management had separate reporting lines, introducing a new internal tension within the Ministry and more complexity to relationships with stakeholders. The new policy capability produced more property rights analysis and extended the existing model to include a vision for a more independent ﬁsheries sector with a reduced role for government. The ﬁsheries management planning framework set up in the 1983 Fisheries Act was abandoned as being fundamentally incompatible with the property rights approach. The future was held to lie in the incentive structures inherent in the property rights of ITQs. These would allow transfer of much of the responsibility of ﬁsheries management to stakeholders. The underlying conviction was that there could be a state of institutional settings—a fully speciﬁed set of rights—that would provide incentive compatibility with the public policy objectives for ﬁsheries management. Preparation of a new Fisheries Act began, and the structural reform continued with plans for a new Ministry of Fisheries.

26.4.1. Cost Recovery In 1994, before the new Act was ready, a commercial cost recovery regime was introduced to replace the existing resource rentals regime. This was driven by the comprehensive settlement of Maori claims to ﬁsheries that had successfully challenged the notion that the Crown owned ﬁsheries resources. Rather than continue to tax rights in the name of state ownership of the resource, this system would attempt to recover the actual costs of management from rights holders—thus internalizing actual costs of ﬁshing. This system would give rise to a new dynamic in the relationship between the government spenders and the industry payers. The Ministry was required to be more transparent in regard to its budget, and the industry took a keen interest in Ministry priority setting and the efﬁciency and effectiveness of the expenditure of “their” money. At the same time,

the public could be assured that the ﬁshing industry was not being subsidized through taxpayer funding of all ﬁsheries research, management, and compliance costs, when the returns to ﬁshing quota were evidently substantial. In practice, however, it proved very difﬁcult for the Ministry to account separately for a range of functions on a stock-by-stock basis across hundreds of QMS stocks. This made some sort of aggregation and smoothing of cost allocation to stakeholders inevitable, making the system less than transparent in detail, and setting the scene for escalation of tensions when economic circumstances deteriorated. The cost recovery process itself spawned signiﬁcant new costs in a double round of statutory consultation over the nature and extent of services to be provided. The principles for setting cost recovery charges were always the subject of controversy and friction, and the system has been under almost constant scrutiny since its inception. Where the line should be drawn between private and public beneﬁts of ﬁsheries management is a key source of contention. To some extent, energy that could have been better directed to reducing costs through identifying efﬁciencies and better priorities has been directed toward rent seeking through adjustment of the criteria for charging. It seems that getting the incentives right was to be harder than at ﬁrst imagined.

26.4.2. New Ministry—New Act In 1995, structural reform continued with the establishment of the separate Ministry of Fisheries, with a new management style that deliberately kept its distance from the commercial ﬁshing industry and other stakeholders. Following quickly behind, policy work culminated with the passing of the new Fisheries Act in 1996. This new statute conﬁrmed the pre-eminence of the QMS as the dominant component of the ﬁsheries management system. The new Act introduced a new modiﬁcation to the ITQ right. It effectively split quota into two separate rights by the creation of annual catch entitlement (ACE). ACE was the new currency in rights to land ﬁsh. It was valid only for the ﬁshing year of issue and was freely transferable. ITQ remained the perpetual transferable right to a share of the harvest, and each year ACE would be issued to ITQ owners in tonnage units determined by their ITQ share and the current commercial catch limit.

Evolving Governance in New Zealand Fisheries

26.4.3. Quota Owner Associations In anticipation of assuming more responsibility for management and delivery of services, quota owners began forming associations and companies based on their ITQ holdings. The intention was to have a basis for raising levies from quota holders, making and enforcing management rules, representing their interests in government policy and management processes, and defending and strengthening their rights (Harte 2001). The Challenger Scallop Enhancement Company provided the early model. Following depletion through open access ﬁshing in the 1970s, the southern scallop ﬁshery was subject to limited entry, and an experimental enhancement scheme was developed in a collaborative effort between the Ministry and the industry. By the end of the 1980s, the ﬁshery was back up to full production, and the enhancement technology was proven successful. In 1992 the Challenger scallop ﬁshery was brought into the quota system, and two years later the enhancement program was transferred to a newly formed company owned by the quota holders. The company operations were funded by a compulsory levy on landings from the ﬁshery. Along with the enhancement program, the company developed a full management plan for the ﬁshery, coordinating harvest in a rotational scheme designed to produce the highest possible value from the ﬁshery. Fishers signed contracts with the company that bound them to harvesting rules, and the company enforced compliance and began conducting their own research on stock growth and condition to optimize harvesting and reseeding operations (Mincher 2008). Nine of the new quota owner associations were formed by the quota holders in the rock lobster ﬁsheries. These ﬁshers had been engaged in multistakeholder management processes already under the auspices of the National Rock-Lobster Management Group. This work had proved successful, particularly in the Gisborne ﬁshery, in bringing together commercial, amateur, and iwi4 interests in their own communities, with Ministry representation, and coming up with innovative solutions to difﬁcult management problems (Breen and Kendrick 1997; Yandle 2008; see also chapter 54). In 1997, the top level of industry representation reformed itself on a corporate model. The Seafood Industry Council was formed as the new peak representative body for the industry, with a board of

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directors made up of representatives from the newly formed quota owner groups—later to be rebadged as commercial stakeholder organizations. This new model was seen as more suitable for taking on devolved responsibility for management functions and service provision from government than the old model of multiple industry associations and a statutory board.

26.4.4. Devolution Realized? The ﬁrst attempt to devolve a major management or service function was the quota registry. The computer system run by the Ministry to keep records of quota ownership and track catch was outdated and incapable of being modiﬁed to cope with the advent of ACE and inclusion of new species in the QMS under the 1996 Act. The system needed to be replaced, and after much debate and costing of alternatives, it seemed clear that private sector provision was going to be more cost-effective. Devolution still required statutory backing, however, and this was put forward in a bill to Parliament in 1999. The Select Committee inquiring into the bill became concerned about the scope of activities that might be devolved and asked the Ministry to consult with stakeholders on a list of functions and services that could be included in a schedule to the Fisheries Act as able to be devolved. Eventually, this list was reduced to one project: the quota registry. The replacement of the registry was an urgent need, and the legislation was required for it to proceed, but after a decade of building enthusiasm, this outcome was a clear setback for the aspirations to devolve management functions to stakeholders. By this point, the desire for transfer of the provision of services away from government to the private sector was deriving much of its impetus from the cost recovery system. The industry, and many in government, believed it would simply be a whole lot cheaper to provide services commercially, and that there was no reason why the functional attributes of the services could not be maintained or improved in the process (Ministry of Fisheries 1997). The planning for the registry system seemed to vindicate this, with initial estimates of build costs for the system differing by a factor of four. Prior to this point, while there had been an expectation that devolution was only a matter of time, the annual round of negotiating the nature and extent of services and consequential costs to quota owners was

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reasonably amicable and focused on identifying efﬁciencies. However, as the tide went out on the devolution project, cost recovery—and what the industry was prepared to pay for—became ever more contentious. Following the failure of the general move to a devolved framework, the emphasis shifted to options for direct purchase of services by the Ministry (outsourcing). Where accountability for service provision under devolution was to reside with the provider, under direct purchase the Ministry retained responsibility for the delivery of the service. Fisheries observer services are a signiﬁcant cost for industry and were proposed as a service amenable to external provision. However, the government of the day was not enthusiastic about outsourcing services involving a compliance role and decided that any direct purchase of services would need to be based on having an approved ﬁsheries plan in place for the ﬁshery in question. Attention thus switched to the development of ﬁsheries plans.

26.4.5. Fisheries Plans Although also part of the 1999 amendment to the Act, the provision for ﬁsheries plans (section 11A) contained no operational detail. The general model was that the Ministry would establish a set of standards that ﬁsheries plans would need to comply with, particularly in terms of their objectives. The plans would then set out how the objectives for the ﬁshery would be achieved. The idea was that any group of stakeholders could develop a plan, that the proponents would undertake public consultation, and that eventually the approval of the Minister of Fisheries would be sought. The plan would then provide the basis for the provision of services such as research and enforcement in the ﬁshery, and guide advice on ministerial decisions such as setting the total allowable catch (TAC).5 Such plans, in theory, could deal with just a subset of issues in the ﬁshery. This meant that, for example, commercial stakeholders could develop a plan that covered stock management targets, environmental impacts, bycatch issues, and so on, but not have to deal with issues of recreational bag limits or other matters that were of little concern to the proponents. In turn, other stakeholders and Maori would be able to develop plans to deal with their own issues, and mutual consultation processes would deal with overlaps and externalities.

The path to ﬁsheries plans was not to be a smooth one either, however. The effort and resources required to identify and develop the required sets of standards was very signiﬁcant, while the Ministry needed to maintain business as usual under the existing ﬁsheries management system. With limited resources to develop the required standards and a fair degree of skepticism about the potential beneﬁts on the part of stakeholders, the stakeholder-led approach lost momentum. In response the Ministry introduced a new element, “stock strategies.” These were to be developed by the Ministry as the default plans where stakeholders were not taking the initiative. Stock strategies focused on government statutory objectives for stock management and were likely to be less amenable to stakeholder preferences. To some extent, stock strategies were expected to provide an incentive for the industry to develop their own plans to address smaller scale ﬁsheries issues. The Ministry had just started to make some practical headway with this new approach when the emphasis was shifted again. The dichotomy of the system had highlighted the lack of a middle road. Under a newly revised approach, the Ministry would lead stakeholders in the development of ﬁsheries plans. This more collaborative model would develop multistakeholder plans (involving all interests), and aggregate across groups of species, with a total of 26 plans to cover all ﬁsheries. Independent stakeholder plans are still possible, but are not being relied on by the Ministry, particularly where there is signiﬁcant sharing of the ﬁshery between stakeholder groups.

26.4.6. The Other Parties There is not the space here to do justice to the other key stakeholder groups involved in the drama over these years—each has played a critical role from time to time. The environmental nongovernmental organizations, although severely constrained in resources, have had critically important inﬂuence on occasions in ongoing ﬁsheries management and governance issues and in the devolution debate. They have worked hard and won ground on a range of nonﬁsh bycatch issues (seabirds, fur seals, sea lions, dolphins) and, in the areas of environmental certiﬁcation of ﬁsheries, the Ministry’s policies on managing the environmental effects of ﬁshing and the benthic impacts of trawling.

Evolving Governance in New Zealand Fisheries On the amateur or recreational ﬁshing side there has also been a history of struggle since the mid1990s. The judicial review proceedings over catch limits for snapper (1995–1997) made it clear that there were difﬁculties in running a commercial ITQ system for a high-value ﬁshery where about a third of the total catch from the stock was estimated to be taken by amateurs. The commercial ﬁshery was overallocated due to quota appeal awards, was still well below the target biomass, and needed rebuilding. Amateurs felt they were being disadvantaged due to low abundance caused by high commercial take, while commercial ﬁshers felt that reducing their catch limits and not the amateur limits was a reallocation of their rights to noncommercial use. This case brought forward arguments for deﬁning and capping the amateur right quantitatively. In response, amateurs argued they had a birthright to ﬁsheries access and raised strong public opposition to any change to their existing rights. Consistent policy-level processes since 1997 have failed to result in substantive progress, because proposals have been opposed politically, by either the amateur sector or the ﬁshing industry. Amateur ﬁsher activists using Web sites to coordinate opposition effectively halted government efforts to reform their rights in 2000 and have continued to prove inﬂuential since (see, e.g., www.option4.co.nz). In 2006 the amateur sector instigated judicial review proceedings against the decisions of the minister for the kahawai ﬁshery, raising their activism to a new level (see, e.g., www.kahawai.co.nz). Indigenous Maori interests in ﬁshing are very substantial, in both commercial and noncommercial realms. The 1992 settlement of historical Treaty of Waitangi claims against the Crown provided Maori with a signiﬁcant proportion of commercial quota and company assets such that Maori collectively control around 30 percent of the industry today. The use of commercial ﬁsheries quota for the settlement, and the ongoing obligation of the Crown to protect the integrity of the settlement, have provided a new relationship link between government and general commercial ﬁshing interests that may prove to be particularly powerful.

26.5. WHERE TO FROM HERE? The commentary here is not intended to diminish the major achievements of the New Zealand ﬁsheries governance system. This system has demonstrated,

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beyond doubt, the beneﬁts of management by ITQ, including effectively constraining catches, efﬁciency in resource allocation to high valued uses, generating sufﬁcient surpluses to pay for research and management services, and reinvestment in the industry. Returns have also funded signiﬁcant investment in representative structures, policy development, lobbying, and litigation for the protection and development of rights. The conditions also clearly exist in some ﬁsheries under quota for the incentives of ownership to drive innovation in management and genuine investment in sustainability. ITQs alone, however, do not comprise a governance system. New Zealand has attempted to develop governance around ITQs in several ways. A central thread has been the sustained attempt over nearly two decades to enable a model of selfgovernance. However, despite some policy effort around the concept of “completing the rights-based framework”—that is, to develop an integrated quantiﬁed rights system across all ﬁsheries and stakeholders to facilitate market allocation between sectors—the main effort has been on the potential for industry participants to achieve greater selfgovernance. There have been groundbreaking successes in this effort. The corporate structures established for industry representation, although they have not progressed as far as anticipated to assuming management responsibilities are still worthy developments and are serving vital coordination and useful policy functions. The devolved registry and the Challenger Scallop Enhancement Company are successful models but of a more limited precedent nature than was envisaged by advocates of more widespread devolution. Although some of the principles involved can surely by generalized, the particular context of the scallop ﬁshery and the nature of the registry services have made these successes possible.

26.5.1. Barriers to Further Progress By strictly deﬁning the parties with a joint interest in a commercial ﬁshery, ITQs lower transaction costs of organization. They identify the individuals involved, thus separating them from other interests in the ﬁshery, and quantify their relative investments. This provides a solid basis for bargaining within the group, predetermines the due shares of any costs and beneﬁts of collective action, and

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prevents their investments being undermined by new entrants (nonquota owners). There are still signiﬁcant challenges faced within groups however, and these are increased by large numbers of rights holders and diversity in catching methods and business models. These issues are well summarized by Townsend and Shotton in the introduction to their 2008 volume, and these authors speciﬁcally highlight the reasons why more sedentary and high value species such as shellﬁsh (scallops, rock lobster, prawns) are overrepresented in their case studies of self-governance. These ﬁsheries tend to be spatially limited, making the beneﬁts of collective action clearer and more able to be captured exclusively, compared with ﬁn ﬁsheries. In the Challenger scallop ﬁshery, the stakeholder company was able to work with noncommercial ﬁshers and provide for their interests in exchange for political support, for these same reasons. But in broader application, the self-governance model becomes weaker. As the stakeholder group becomes more numerous, widespread, and heterogeneous, the negotiation of collective interest becomes exponentially more difﬁcult and expensive. The rights-based perspective suggests that governments need to better deﬁne rights to reduce these transactions costs. Within ITQ systems, for example, a corporate model with statutory backing has been suggested. With one share, one vote and a simple majority rule, many issues of difference between quota holders would be easily resolved (Townsend and Shotton 2008). This could work well in ﬁsheries with low concentration of catching rights. However, in New Zealand where more than 50 percent of ITQ shares in a stock are commonly held by two or even single companies, such rules could easily result in anticompetitive behavior and the effective reduction in the strength of individual rights of minority shareholders. It is possible that a simple majority rule could lead to less—not more— efﬁcient outcomes, but so can a few holdouts that prevent a majority-supported change. Where interests in a ﬁshery are wider than just commercial ﬁshing, the prescription has been to create a system of rights for noncommercial interests that are commensurate with ITQ and enable transactions between sectors. This has been vigorously rejected by noncommercial stakeholders in New Zealand. With up to one million participants, the transactions costs of organizing noncommercial interests have been overwhelming, with individual

incentives to become involved in advocacy very low. Acceptance of quantiﬁed rights under these circumstances appears extremely risk prone to sector leaders. How such rights would be held (individually or collectively) is a signiﬁcant question, but either way, formation and administration of a representative structure to deal with issues of negotiation of sector allocations and potential transfer of rights are formidable challenges. These problems are not necessarily insurmountable. However, the general amateur extractive sector is only one of the noncommercial interests in ﬁsheries in New Zealand. Another is the Maori customary noncommercial ﬁshing sector, where the rights are speciﬁcally not capped in quantitative terms. This deﬁnes the character of the right recognizing a priority in historical cultural use. The recognition of this right in turn tends to reinforce the amateur ﬁshers’ claim to priority over commercial use on the grounds of social and cultural values. Then, there is the broad set of values held within society in general for the environment and notions of sustainability. These values, as has been apparent over the last two decades, are growing in magnitude and evolving in character and speciﬁcity over time. They are likely to continue to do so. Where a combative environment exists in ﬁsheries policy, such as has been particularly apparent in the United States, organized environmental public interest groups and politicians feeling the heat of constituency concern can be very effective at opposing institutional change desired by the ﬁshing industry or ﬁsheries regulators. Having said that, the World Wildlife Fund US has recently adopted a proactive and positive stance on the use of property rights and other economic instruments in ﬁsheries governance, indicating that the principled arguments for this approach are making ground in this sector.

26.5.2. Improving Outcomes The improvement of ﬁsheries governance is a long game. Despite governments seeming to hold the keys to institutional change, in New Zealand there is a missing ingredient that makes it difﬁcult for the government to effect such change. That ingredient is a social consensus about direction for further elaboration of the system. In the 1980s in New Zealand, there was both a case for change clearly articulated by a dominant interest group and the direct power of a majority government to implement whatever they decided

Evolving Governance in New Zealand Fisheries was desirable. Two decades on the landscape has changed signiﬁcantly. Now, a greater emphasis is required on consensus building before change is possible. That consensus needs to account for a wider range of interests through a process that will rely on investments in social capital—processes, relationships, goodwill, networks, trust. Social capital has been built across the commercial sector with the formation of commercial stakeholder organizations and the Seafood Industry Council, and individually in other sectors through such developments as the instruments under Maori customary ﬁshing regulations,6 and among the environmental and amateur sector organizations. In a few special cases, intersector cooperation has resulted in improved outcomes (e.g., in rock lobster). However, efforts to establish multistakeholder interaction at the national level have been limited. Most policy and regulatory development by the Ministry involves consultations with all stakeholder groups, but most often on a sector-by-sector basis. For many issues, consultation consists of the publication of documents for comment. Where they are conducted, public meetings allow limited exchanges between stakeholders but do not provide a forum for ongoing interaction and the building of understanding and trust. Multisector ﬁsheries liaison groups were established in the mid1990s reforms, but these have survived only in a limited form in a few areas, generally for discussion of local issues. We suggest that the lack of investment in multisector stakeholder processes and consequent building of social capital among stakeholder groups at both local and national levels is a key barrier to moving on from the current frustrated stasis. Ultimately, governance systems will have to evolve the means of including and dealing with a multiplicity of stakeholders (Bavinck et al. 2005: 26). Central among the players with damaged relationships is the Ministry of Fisheries itself. This has become such a concern that the Ministry has adopted “credible ﬁsheries management” as one of three core outcomes contributing to its strategic goals. A recent (and ongoing) series of judicial reviews of ministerial decisions by the industry (and one by the recreational ﬁshing sector) has shown the system of advice and decision making to be less than robust, and clearly stakeholders do not feel that their views are being accommodated. This culture of litigation has in turn led to more defensive approaches to decision making by central

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government, and something of a strategic stalemate in terms of system improvement. A key factor that has changed over the period is the strength of executive government. In 1993, the electoral system in New Zealand changed from a simple majority party “ﬁrst past the post” system to a mixed-member proportional representation system. This has led to an increase in the number of minor parties and the advent of minority-led multiparty governments. Achieving policy and legislative change is now much more dependent on consensus among legislators, and hence among a range of stakeholders, than it was in the past. Contrary to the suggestion that the government could change institutional settings to enable better outcomes, it seems that it is the multiple stakeholder groups that need to ﬁnd common ground before the government is able to do much at all with the statutory settings. What the government could do, however, is change its approach toward facilitation of collaboration across the sectors. Processes are required that bring opposing sides together, restore conﬁdence in the potential for solutions, and start to build the trust and respect required so that mutual agreement on goals becomes possible. This is not going to be easy or fast. But if we can learn one thing from the past decade, it is that a lot of time can be spent going nowhere pursuing ineffective strategies. From the ﬁshing industry perspective, there is frustration at not being able to meet regularly with the Minister of Fisheries and with senior Ministry of Fisheries managers in open informal processes that would allow for “day-to-day” decision making on sector issues. They see their industry as still being one of the most regulated in New Zealand despite the QMS and some steps to devolution. As such, their commercial business activities are still “interfered with” by statute and regulation. In other words, there is some lack of acceptance that ﬁsheries now involve a number of signiﬁcant interests engaging with government, of which commercial ﬁshers are but one. There is an acknowledgment that the litigious approach by some has led to distrust by government and other stakeholders. The industry also acknowledges its differences with the other stakeholder groups, and some believe this could be better handled by the types of cross-sector approaches we suggest above. The Ministry will have to change its approach to accommodate this move, and stakeholders will similarly need to respond in kind.

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26.5.3. Lessons on Process Learning drawn from studies of institutional change for sustainable development may assist in moving on. Sustainability is a principle that is underdeveloped in the current New Zealand ﬁsheries management framework. Since the inception of the QMS, sustainability has grown hugely in stature in world affairs and in resource management. One conception of sustainability is that of a high-level principle of governance, potentially taking a place at the constitutional level alongside principles of justice and democracy (Connor and Dovers 2004). However, such a signiﬁcant development requires a social discussion or discourse to take place, and one appropriate locus of such a discourse is in policy processes for ﬁsheries management. Particularly (but not exclusively) in our nearshore shared ﬁsheries, aspects of the sustainability debate are intrinsic to solutions. Social, cultural, economic, and ecological values are all of high importance and need to mutually accommodate each other if we are to move away from a “winner-takes-all” mentality. The ﬁrst step to such integration is through an ongoing discussion, and this needs to be hosted somewhere. A discursive space is required, both at the local and at the national levels. An important principle gleaned from processes that have succeeded with policy integration of sustainability concerns is reiteration (Connor and Dovers 2004). Complex problems with shifting values and information bases are not likely to be dealt with once and for all in a linear process. We should be providing for ongoing processes that are able to continue at a reasonably low level of urgency and stress, discussing and anticipating potential problems and developing more sophisticated understanding across participant groups. Such a process could be punctuated regularly by an output, say, a management plan for a ﬁshery or a complete policy framework at a national level that represented the current level of consensus among the parties—say, every ﬁve years. A ﬁnal principle for sustainable management systems that we suggest is subsidiarity: The principle of subsidiarity encapsulates the view that, in a hierarchical democratic governance system (and particularly in large, diverse systems), a decision should be taken at the level at which it can be most effective. This is

important for political reasons—e.g. representation of affected parties in decision-making, constituency buy-, political accountability; for administrative reasons—e.g. economies of scale in decision-making, reducing unnecessary work load and consideration of issue detail at higher levels; and for substantive reasons—e.g. information availability, signiﬁcance of the problem and the values at stake. (Connor and Dovers 2004: 219–220) Subsidiarity provides a commonality between the self-governance agenda and the joint ownership of complex problems through multisector stakeholder processes, as discussed here. Self-governance is appropriate where the groups affected by the decisions of the governing body are all represented in the process. This means the scope of decision making and membership must be well deﬁned. Where a scope of decision making for a ﬁshery can be constrained so as to affect only one cohesive group of stakeholders, they may be empowered to make their own management decisions. Likewise, where diverse interests are involved but representatives are able to agree on appropriate measures through processes that have brought integration of concerns, multisector groups could be empowered to make management decisions. From the current situation in New Zealand, however, there is some way to go to rebuild conﬁdence among the players in ﬁsheries management, including the government, that it is safe to change the locus of decision making from the status quo. Despite a strong view in government that making large numbers of regulatory decisions at the ministerial level is inappropriate, the ability and tendency of opposing stakeholder groups to block initiatives at the political level have ensured that real change has remained elusive.

26.5.4. New Directions Two current initiatives are being taken by the Ministry of Fisheries that present opportunities to build required social capital among stakeholders. The ﬁrst, ﬁsheries plans, has been discussed above. This management modality is still being developed, although it is beginning to gain momentum. Fisheries plans remain open to being formed into a cross-sector collaborative mode of management, particularly in shared ﬁsheries. Here, issues of concern to more than one sector such as abundance

Evolving Governance in New Zealand Fisheries management, allocation, local depletion, or environmental impacts, could be worked through and resolved, and understanding developed across the sector divides. In other words, ﬁsheries plans could be the venue for the long-term building of social capital required to bring the disaffected to the council table at the ﬁshery level. Fisheries management plans are recognized as powerful instruments for drawing actors into a commonly accepted system. Traditionally, there has been a strong emphasis or even a bias toward managing with “technical” instruments. Gear controls, licensing, quota systems, to mention a few, are found in the tool kits of ﬁsheries managers all over the world. However, to be effective, governance requires that all the actors be informed of and involved in the development or choice of ﬁsheries management plans (Bavinck et al. 2005: 36). One potential danger for this process is that stakeholders treat the ﬁsheries plan forum as a venue for gaming the other parties engaged in the process. In the inshore shared-ﬁsheries planning groups, the industry is signiﬁcantly outnumbered by iwi, environmental, and amateur sector representatives, most of whom are underresourced to be able to participate in informed debate. In addition, the current model has such groups positioned in an advisory role only in the development of the plans, with no assurance of movement toward a real role in decision making. This may mean that stakeholders in these planning groups make little real contribution, and plans could instead become a process for “legitimizing” government choices. On the other hand, regular exposure of stakeholders from all sides to each other can breed respect and understanding and be empowering for the group. Outcomes are likely to depend critically on the processes structured and run by the Ministry of Fisheries. With sufﬁcient ﬂexibility and a strategy to deliberately develop the groups toward a decision-making role, inshore ﬁsheries plans could provide an important new governance component. In commercial-only ﬁsheries such as hoki, ﬁsheries plans may look much more like industry selfgovernance with a residual government role in standard setting and collaboration in compliance strategies. However, for this to happen, a similar process of building social capital, and particularly trust, is required to enable government and industry personnel to align their understanding and expectations.

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Environmental organizations will remain as stakeholders in these commercial-only ﬁsheries as well, and will need to be satisﬁed that their concerns are incorporated into management. In less resilient, and in some cases information poor, deep-water ﬁsheries such as orange roughy, it is less likely that anything close to self-management will be enabled in the foreseeable future. Incentive problems in such slow-growing ﬁsheries mean that there are some clear conﬂicts between economic imperatives and generalized social concerns for biodiversity protection and stock sustainability. In another initiative that could move things onto a more positive path, the Ministry has begun a Vision and Strategy planning project at the national level to draw all stakeholder groups into a process to establish long-term goals for, and approaches to, management. This process has the potential to serve multiple roles in • providing the venue for the discussion on the multiple values and perspectives involved in contemporary ﬁsheries management (discursive space), • establishing a steering group and working groups for a continuous collaborative strategy and planning process, and • a reiterative process of political approval of jointly produced strategy and planning documents to periodically lock in the consensus. This initiative provides a much needed opportunity to establish a permanent venue for open and transparent strategic conversations among key stakeholders and senior ofﬁcials. The Ministry has struggled to deﬁne its role in moving governance forward over the past decade. It is now time to reorient not only away from the top-down mode toward a more distributed model, but toward one that involves all stakeholders in joint processes that allow real integration of concerns by those that hold them. Government needs to recognize and better deﬁne its role in the new order—as both facilitator and representative of very dispersed but still substantial interests of the public and future generations in a broader notion of sustainability. Bavinck et al. (2005) sum up the need for a change in approach: [G]overnance perspectives emphasise that the dividing lines between public and private sectors are blurred, and that interests cannot be

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assumed to be either public or private, but are frequently shared. In this connection, it is generally more appropriate to speak of shifting, rather than shrinking, roles of government. A reorientation of government tasks and an acknowledgement of the role of other societal actors do not make government obsolete. It implies a growing awareness, not only of the limitations of the command-and-control form of governing, but also of the fact that many societal problems and opportunities require the commitments of a broader set of actors and approaches. (31)

Notes 1. The QMS has gone a long way to ensure sustainable productivity of ﬁsh stocks in New Zealand. The broader notion of sustainability developed since the mid-1980s, however, is one of an integrated optimization process across all social values, taking account of environmental impacts and uncertainties. 2. Allocyttus niger, Neocyttus rhomboidalis, Pseudocyttus maculatus. 3. Pagrus auratus, Jasus edwardsii, Haliotis spp., Polyprion spp., Nemadactylus macropterus, Mustelus lenticulatus, Galeorhinus galeu. 4. Iwi are tribal groupings of New Zealand indigenous Maori people. Iwi have assumed greater importance in modern representation of Maori interests than was generally the case in the indigenous polity, where sub-iwi groupings—hapu and whänau—often maintained greater independence. 5. The Fisheries Act provides for a TAC to be set to constrain total extractions from the stock. The TACC is a subset of the TAC, set while making allowances for noncommercial use and other ﬁshing related mortality. 6. The customary regulations provide a framework for co-management where Maori hapu and iwi are able to issue customary ﬁshing licenses that operate outside standard rules for amateur harvest and to propose areas to be managed by the group for cultural harvest purposes and exclude commercial ﬁshing. For further details, see Hooper and Lynch (2000).

References Annala, J.H. (1996). New Zealand’s ITQ system: Have the ﬁrst eight years been a success or a failure? Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 6: 43–62.

Batstone, C.J., and B.M.H. Sharp (1998). New Zealand’s quota management system: The ﬁrst ten years. Marine Policy 23(2): 177–190. Bavinck, M., R. Chuenpagdee, M. Diallo, P. van der Heijden, J. Kooiman, R. Mahon, and S. Williams (2005). Interactive Fisheries Governance. Delft: Eburon. Breen, P.A., and T.H. Kendrick (1997). A ﬁsheries management success story: The Gisborne, New Zealand, ﬁshery for red rock lobsters (Jasus edwardsii). Marine and Freshwater Research 48: 1103–1110. Clark, I.N., and A.J. Duncan (1986). New Zealand’s ﬁsheries management policies—past, present and future: The implementation of an ITQ-based management system. Pp. 107– 139 in N. Mollett (ed). Fishery Access Control Programs Worldwide: Proceedings of the Workshop on Management Options for the North Paciﬁc Longline Fisheries. Orcas Island, Washington April 21–25, 1986. Fairbanks: Alaska Sea Grant College Program, University of Alaska. Clark, I.N., P.J. Major, and N. Mollett (1988). Development and implementation of New Zealand’s ITQ management system. Marine Resource Economics 5: 325–349. Connor, R.D. (2001). Initial allocation of individual transferable quota in New Zealand ﬁsheries. Pp. 222–250 in R. Shotton (ed). Case Studies on the Allocation of Transferable Quota Rights in Fisheries. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 411. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Connor, R.D., and S.R. Dovers (2004). Institutional Change for Sustainable Development. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar. Falloon, R. (1993). Individual transferable quotas: The New Zealand case. In: OECD Committee for Fisheries (ed). The Use of Individual Quotas in Fisheries Management. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Harte (2001). Opportunities and barriers for industry-led ﬁsheries research. Marine Policy 25: 159–167. Hooper, M., and Lynch, T. (2000). Recognition and provision for indigenous and coastal community rights using property rights instruments. Pp. 199–205 in R. Shotton (ed). Use of Property Rights in Fisheries Management. Proceedings of the FishRights99 Conference, Fremantle, Western Australia, 11–19 November 1999. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 404/2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Kearney, R.E. (2002). Review of Harvest Estimates from Recent New Zealand National Marine Recreational Fishing Surveys. Canberra, Australia: University of Canberra.

Evolving Governance in New Zealand Fisheries Mincher, R. (2008). New Zealand’s Challenger Scallop Enhancement Company: From reseeding to self-governance. In: R. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Self-governance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. (1984). Inshore Finﬁsh Fisheries: Proposed Policy for Future Management. Public consultation document. Wellington: New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Ministry of Fisheries (1997). Fisheries Registry Administration: The Devolution Model. A report prepared for the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Fisheries. Wellington, N.Z.: Ministry of Fisheries.

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Moloney, D.G., and P.H. Pearse (1979). Quantitative rights as an instrument for regulating commercial ﬁsheries. Journal of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada 36: 859–866. Townsend, R., and R. Shotton (2008). Fisheries self-governance: New directions in ﬁsheries management. In: R. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Self-governance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Yandle, T. (2008). Rock lobster management in New Zealand: The development of devolved governance. In: R. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Selfgovernance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

27 Norwegian Fisheries Management STEIN IVAR STEINSHAMN

27.1. INTRODUCTION The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the size and structure of the harvesting sector in Norway and its economic performance in relation to the ﬁshery policy. Emphasis in the Norwegian ﬁshery policy has changed over time. The objectives of the ﬁshery policy have been ofﬁcially stated in several white papers. The main priority in the ﬁshery policy in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was to secure the wages of the ﬁshermen, often at the expense of sound resource management. Efﬁciency and economic performance in the ﬁsheries sector were given very little priority. In 1964 a general agreement between the Norwegian Fishermen’s Association and the Ministry of Fisheries was established. This agreement entailed government subsidies to the ﬁsheries sector over the next couple of decades primarily in order to increase the ﬁshermen’s wages. The subsidies increased over time and peaked in the early 1980s at a level of about four billion (109) NOK, which was close to 40 percent of the ﬁrst-hand value of the ﬁsheries. During the 1990s, the subsidies were gradually decreased, and from 1994 onward the subsidies have been negligible. In 2004 the subsidies accounted for no more than 0.5 percent of the ﬁrst-hand value, and at the end of that year the general agreement was ofﬁcially abandoned. Over time, these subsidies resulted in huge overemployment and overcapacity in the sector.

In the 1990s, typical objectives of the ﬁshery policy included (1) preserving the existing pattern of settlement, (2) achieving sustainable yield of marine resources, (3) giving people secure and good employment, and (4) increasing the value added in the ﬁsheries sector (Nakken et al. 1996). Emphasis was still on settlement and employment; efﬁciency was only indirectly mentioned under the last point, but at least it was mentioned. Gradually this has changed toward more emphasis on efﬁciency and proﬁtability, as it has become clear that good and secure employment cannot be achieved without proﬁtability. In the present decade, typical goals for the ﬁshery policy are stated as securing employment and settlement through increased efﬁciency and proﬁtability subject to sustainable resource management. Even the present left-wing government (currently 2008) states that proﬁtability is a necessary condition for continued settlement along the coast but not as a sufﬁcient condition (Pedersen 2006). In other words, the main priority is efﬁciency, sound and sustainable resource management, and equity and fair distribution. The special emphasis on equity is due to the heterogeneous structure of the ﬁshing ﬂeet, with a combination of small coastal vessels and large ocean-going vessels, including trawlers, longliners, and purse seiners. This structure represents a possible source of conﬂict and competition for resources and therefore needs to be handled with delicacy.

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Norwegian Fisheries Management The shift in priorities has obviously affected the ﬁshery policy and the choice of policy instruments over time. High subsidies had obvious negative effects in the form of overcapacity with respect to both labor and capital, which again resulted in constant pressure on the resource base and were therefore abandoned. Today, typical policy instruments include individual quotas combined with a variety of the other instruments, rules, and regulations. This is due to the combined priority on efﬁciency and equity. This chapter starts with a broad overview of the Norwegian harvesting sector and includes facts and ﬁgures about the role of ﬁsheries in the Norwegian economy, in both relative and absolute terms. Some aspects of the regulations of the ﬁsheries sector are then described and discussed, focusing on the way that quotas are determined and how they are allocated. The second part of the chapter looks at a number of studies that evaluate quota and stock development against their optimal values in order to provide an estimate of how far from the optimal situation the ﬁsheries have been, and how successful the management has been. We will also refer to a study that considers the efﬁciency of the Norwegian ﬁsheries sector with respect to ﬂeet structure, capacity, and quota allocation. Finally, we review some of the measures that have been taken in order to improve the efﬁciency and evaluate how successful they have been.

27.2. OVERVIEW OF THE NORWEGIAN FISHERIES SECTOR 27.2.1. The Most Important Fish Species The ﬁsh stocks of interest for Norway recorded their highest levels following World War II and continued at a relatively high level during the 1950s. From the 1950s onward, ﬁsh stocks have experienced a downward trend in stock biomass, recording their lowest levels in the 1970s and 1980s. Interestingly, this corresponds with the introduction of total allowable catches (TACs). Despite the emphasis on sound stock levels, few of the ﬁsh stocks have returned to their previously high levels. Economically, the most important ﬁsh species in Norway are northeast Arctic cod, saithe, and haddock in the demersal sector and herring and mackerel in the pelagic sector. In volume, capelin used to

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be an important species in the pelagic sector, but the stock has been in a poor state for many years. In recent years, blue whiting has become increasingly more important. In 2006, six species—cod, saithe, haddock, herring, mackerel, and blue whiting— accounted for 81 percent of the total ﬁrst-hand value of Norwegian ﬁsheries, which was US$2.34 billion (11.7 billion NOK).1 The demersal sector accounted for 58 percent of the ﬁrst-hand value, and the pelagic sector accounted for 36 percent; the rest was crustaceans. In volume, however, the pelagic species accounted for 68 percent of the landings. The most important species are all shared with other countries. In the demersal sector the northeast Arctic cod and haddock in the Barents Sea are shared with Russia. Saithe can be divided into two separate stocks: one in the North Sea that is shared with the European Union, and one north of the 62nd latitude that is managed by Norway alone.2 In the pelagic sector, capelin in the Barents Sea is shared with Russia and mackerel is shared with the European Union and the Faeroe Islands. Herring can be divided into two separate stocks: North Sea herring and Atlanto-Scandian herring (also called Norwegian spring spawning herring). The AtlantoScandian is by far the most important, as the Norwegian quota in 2008 was 925,000 tons, whereas the Norwegian quota of North Sea herring was 55,000 tons. The North Sea herring is shared with the European Union, whereas the Atlanto-Scandian herring is shared with Russia, Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, and the European Union. The Atlanto-Scandian herring stock collapsed in the late 1960s, and it took almost 30 years to rebuild. During this period, adult herring were found only in Norwegian waters, whereas juvenile herring could be found in Russian waters. A strict Norwegian management regime, combined with harvest moratorium on juvenile herring in Russian waters, contributed to rebuilding the stock. In 1996 a protocol between Norway, Russia, Iceland, and the Faeroe Islands was established for the purpose of sustainable exploitation of Atlanto-Scandian herring. Due to the differences in climate, North Sea herring typically recovers from collapse much faster than Atlanto-Scandian herring.

27.2.2. The Size and Structure of the Fishing Fleet The Norwegian ﬁshing ﬂeet in 2007 consisted of just more than 7,000 registered vessels, but only 5,750

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were reported to be active. Of the active vessels, 3,073 were vessels smaller than 10 meters, and 217 were vessels larger than 28 meters. Only 30 percent of the active vessels were operated full time, yet 94 percent of the large vessels exceeding 28 meters were operated full time, and only ten percent of the small vessels smaller than 10 meters were operated full time. Of the vessels in between these ranges, about 50 percent were operated full time. In 2007, there were 13,336 registered ﬁshermen in Norway, of whom 80 percent had ﬁshing as their main occupation and 20 percent had ﬁshing as a secondary occupation. Of the registered ﬁshermen, 8,600 were employed on vessels operated full time. The development in the number of ﬁshermen and ﬁshing vessels is illustrated in ﬁgure 27.1. The numbers of ﬁshermen and vessels have steadily declined over time. However, despite the fact that the number of ﬁshing vessels has decreased from 12,500 in 1960 to 7,000 in 2007, the effective ﬁshing capacity, as measured by total engine power, has remained more or less constant.

27.2.3. Relative and Absolute Economic Importance In 2006 capture ﬁsheries in Norway generated export revenues amounting to US$3.4 billion (17 billion NOK), whereas the total export revenues from ﬁsh and ﬁsh products including aquaculture amounted to US$7 billion (35 billion NOK). It should be noted that this was the ﬁrst year aquaculture accounted for more of the export revenues than the traditional ﬁsheries. In this chapter, we concentrate on traditional ﬁsheries. The ﬁrst-hand

60000 50000

Fishermen Vessels

40000 30000 20000 10000 0 1950

1960

1970

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1990

2000

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27.1 Number of ﬁshermen with ﬁshing as their main occupation and number of ﬁshing vessels over time

FIGURE

value from the harvesting sector, US$2.34 billion, represents about 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). If ﬁsheries-related activities, such as ﬁsh processing, supply of equipment, and export activity, are taken into account, the contribution to GDP will be close to double that amount. More than 90 percent of all ﬁsh and ﬁsh products are exported abroad. The export value originating from traditional ﬁsheries represents 1.6 percent of total exports. By comparison, the petroleum sector accounts for 25 percent of the GDP and 47 percent of total exports. Although the economic importance of ﬁsheries in Norway is small, especially compared to the petroleum industry, it is an important source of employment in some parts of the country. In northern Norway, for example, full-time employed ﬁshermen account for 1.3 percent of total employment. In western Norway, they account for 0.5 percent, and in Norway as a whole they only account for 0.25 percent of total employment. If we add ﬁsheries-related activities, these differences become even more pronounced.

27.3. THE NORWEGIAN MANAGEMENT REGIME 27.3.1. How TACs Are Determined in International Negotiations As much as 90 percent of Norwegian ﬁsheries are based on stocks shared with other nations. Therefore, negotiations and agreements with these nations, especially Russia, the European Union, Iceland, and the Faeroe Islands, are of paramount importance for successful management of these stocks. The size of the TACs and the allocation between Norway and other countries are usually decided in bilateral or multilateral negotiations based on advice from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). Cooperation with the Soviet Union dates back to the 1950s, and in 1975 the Norwegian-Russian Fisheries Commission was established. At the commission’s annual meetings total catch, as well as distribution of the catch between Norway, Russia, and third countries, is decided based on advice from ICES. The distribution, however, is fairly constant over time. Lately the commission has agreed on new management strategies that emphasize stability and predictability. For example, quotas

Norwegian Fisheries Management for cod are not allowed to vary more than plus or minus 10 percent from year to year. Similar strategies are in place for the other shared stocks with Russia, including haddock, capelin, and king crab. Mutual access of ﬁshing vessels within each other’s economic zones is an important part of the agreement with Russia. Fisheries cooperation with the European Union is based on a bilateral agreement that was signed in 1980 (although the negotiations had ﬁrst taken place in 1976). This treaty also allows mutual access within each other’s respective zones based on annual decisions about quota size and quota allocation. Norway and the European Union have annual quota agreements regarding the species in the North Sea, Norwegian catch west of Great Britain and off Greenland, and European Union catch in the Barents Sea. Many of the demersal species in the North Sea are, at present, in a poor state due to overexploitation, in particular the North Sea cod. The stock has not shown any signs of recovery, and the European Union and Norway have been forced to gradually reduce the quotas since 2002. The 2007 quota of less than 20,000 tons was an all-time low. The stocks of sandeel and Norway pout have also been in a poor state for some time. There are differences between Norway and the European Union that create some speciﬁc challenges. For example, discarding is prohibited for Norwegian vessels by the Norwegian government, whereas discarding of undersized ﬁsh or ﬁsh that is caught outside the quota is mandatory for E.U. vessels. Negotiations with Iceland are based on a treaty from 1999, in addition to multilateral arrangements in which both Norway and Iceland participate. One of the greatest challenges in relation to Iceland has been to regulate the ﬁshery in the so-called Loophole, an area of 67,000 square kilometers in the Barents Sea that is not covered by any country’s economic zones. In the late 1990s, the quotas of northeast Arctic cod were overﬁshed due to Iceland’s and other countries’ harvest in the Loophole. This was more or less brought to an end in 1999 by a treaty among Norway, Iceland, and Russia. Iceland has also agreed not to ﬁsh capelin in the Barents Sea. In return, Iceland has been allocated a certain proportion of the quota of cod in the Barents Sea as a third country. Norway also has a bilateral agreement with the Faeroe Islands of 1979 and with Greenland of 1991. These agreements do not determine TACs

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but rather focus upon exchange of ﬁshing quotas and access to ﬁshing grounds. It should be noted that, as a general phenomenon, countries have a tendency to engage in strategic behavior prior to negotiations or renegotiations of quota agreements. This has resulted in quite interesting behavior on behalf of Norway as well as their negotiation partners. Examples of this include Norway’s recent demonstration of its ability to harvest blue whiting and Iceland’s recent demonstration of its ability to ﬁsh mackerel.

27.3.2. How the Norwegian TACs Are Allocated After the international negotiations are ﬁnalized, the question arises about the allocation of the Norwegian part of the quotas. The TAC is usually divided into group quotas, which again may be divided into individual vessel quotas. All the main species—cod, saithe, haddock, mackerel, herring, and blue whiting—are now regulated by individual and, at least in principle, nontransferable vessel quotas. Most other ﬁsheries are only regulated by group quotas, implying more competition as the ﬁshery is open for all belonging to the group until the group quota is fulﬁlled. For the ﬁsheries with individual quotas in addition to group quotas, there are two versions. In some cases the individual quotas add up to the group quota and the individual quotas are therefore “guaranteed quotas,” implying that each ﬁsher is guaranteed that he or she can fulﬁll the quota. This eliminates competition. In other cases the individual quotas add up to more than the group quota, and the individual quotas are only so-called “maximum quotas.” In the latter case, the ﬁshery will be closed when the group quota is fulﬁlled, whether or not the individual quotas are fulﬁlled. In this case there is no guarantee that individual quotas will be fulﬁlled, so there is a higher element of competition. In addition to group quotas, there is also something called structure quotas, which are associated with the government’s decommissioning scheme that is in place in order to reduce overcapacity. The decommissioning scheme consists of direct monetary compensation for voluntary destruction of ﬁshing vessels and returning ﬁshing rights. This compensation is ﬁnanced through a so-called “structure fee” that is paid by the ﬁshermen. The structure quota is a compensation for the same

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thing in the form of increased quota for remaining vessels. In other words, the structure-quota scheme allows an owner of more than one vessel to transfer quota from a vessel that is demolished to his or her remaining vessel(s). This opens the possibility of buying a vessel with quota in order to destroy the vessel and transfer the quota to another vessel. Hence, structure quotas represent, in principle, a version of transferable quotas, and it is encouraged by the government because it helps to reduce overcapacity. It is, however, only possible to do this within deﬁned vessel groups, and not between vessel groups. The structure-quota scheme, therefore, is not a perfect alternative to an individual transferable quota (ITQ) scheme. The duration of the transfer is long term but not inﬁnite. In practice, this means that they have a duration varying from 13 to 20 years before the transferred quota must be returned to the vessel group. Short-term leases of the quotas are not allowed. Cod is allocated among trawlers and coastal vessels according to the so-called quota ladder, where the trawlers get close to one-third and the coastal vessels get close to two-thirds of the Norwegian quota, but where the proportion allocated to trawlers increases with increasing size of the total quota. Haddock is shared approximately 60:40 between coastal vessels and trawlers, and saithe is shared among three vessels groups: coastal vessels (38 percent in 2008), trawlers (37 percent), and seining (25 percent). The Atlanto-Scandian herring is also allocated between three groups: coastal vessels (37 percent in 2008), trawlers (11 percent), and purse seiners (52 percent), and so is mackerel (21, 3, and 72 percent, respectively). The remaining part of the mackerel quota is allocated to research. Blue whiting is divided between purse seiners (75 percent) and trawlers (25 percent). The distribution formulas are set up such that in years with small quotas the smaller vessels are favored. This implies that the variation in quotas is felt more heavily by the larger vessels than by the smaller vessels.

27.3.3. Other Regulations In principle, ﬁshing vessels can only be owned by people who are active ﬁshermen according to a certain deﬁnition; in other words, nonactive ﬁshermen cannot own ﬁshing vessels. At present, the requirement is that one should at least have

participated in the ﬁshery three out of the ﬁve previous years in order to take over a ﬁshing vessel. The idea behind this is to reserve the right to own ﬁshing vessels for those who actually participate in the ﬁshery. One side effect, however, is that it prevents vertical integration. In practice, there are many exceptions to the law, and some parts of the ﬁshing ﬂeet, for example, purse seiners and trawlers, are for a large part owned by the ﬁsh processing industry. In order to participate in any kind of commercial ﬁshing, both the vessel and the ﬁshermen must be registered. Participation in particular ﬁsheries may, however, be further restricted for vessels of certain size categories, vessels with certain equipment, by geographical areas, or with certain time restrictions. Such regulations are usually decided each year. One of the most common requirements is earlier participation in the ﬁshery. These regulations deﬁne the groups that can participate in the ﬁshery. Some ﬁsheries have strong requirements on participation, while others require only registered ﬁsherman with a registered vessel in order to participate. Some ﬁsheries are divided in two groups: one closed group that is strongly deﬁned and one open group, with vessels in the closed group allocated higher quotas than those in the open group. This is, for example, the case for the cod, saithe, and haddock ﬁshery north of the 62nd latitude. In the majority of the ﬁsheries, it is not sufﬁcient for the vessel to be registered in order to participate; the vessel must also have a license. Although such licenses in principle are not tradable among individuals, it has become a practice in many ﬁsheries to treat the licenses as tradable permits. As vessel quotas are often associated with the license based on certain size characteristics of the vessel, this can be regarded as a substitute for ITQs. This possibility to transfer quotas from less efﬁcient vessels to more efﬁcient vessels has contributed to higher efﬁciency and less total capacity in some ﬁsheries, not least within the purse-seining ﬂeet.

27.4. PERFORMANCE OF THE NORWEGIAN FISHERIES SECTOR 27.4.1. Stated Objectives The stated objectives of the ofﬁcial Norwegian ﬁsheries management policy are manifold. On the one

Norwegian Fisheries Management hand, the ﬁsheries are supposed to contribute to employment and settlement in rural areas; on the other hand, objectives such as efﬁciency and proﬁtability are mentioned, and these cannot always be combined or achieved simultaneously. Earlier, more emphasis was put on employment and settlement, while today, more and more emphasis is put on efﬁciency and proﬁtability in light of the fact that an inefﬁcient and unproﬁtable ﬁshery is not a good provider of safe and secure employment. In addition equity is also of high priority in the Norwegian management. This is reﬂected in a number of additional rules and regulations, many of which are only found in Norway, such as the special rules for allocation of quotas to small vessels and vessels with particular equipment.

27.4.2. Biological Overﬁshing Currently, the biological state of the ﬁsh stock varies from poor to fairly sound. For example, the Atlanto-Scandian herring has a spawning stock biomass estimated at 12 million tons, which is the same as its highest levels in the 1950s. The northeast Arctic cod is also in a fairly good state, although the stock is below the long-term average. The spawning stock, on the other hand, is above the long-term average. The other demersal stocks, saithe and haddock, are currently recording good levels, but the other pelagic species are under threat. Blue whiting recorded a peak in 2003, and the stock is now in rapid decline. According to biologists, the stock will soon reach dangerously low levels if the total harvest is not reduced signiﬁcantly. The mackerel stock is also close to the precautionary level, and harvest must be reduced if the stock is to return to safe biological limits. The stocks that are under the most threat are the demersal stocks in the North Sea, particularly cod, but these stocks are of little economic importance for Norway. All in all, it seems that the most important stocks are in fairly good biological shape, and the more important stocks are in better shape than the less important ones. This does not mean that the stocks are not overexploited from an economic point of view. Although the harvest is sustainable, it may not be the optimal harvest when it comes to maximizing the net revenue from the ﬁshery. Usually, the bioeconomic optimal stock size is higher than the purely biologically optimal stock size, which is typically represented by the maximum sustainable yield stock level.

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27.4.3. Economic Overﬁshing There is an important difference between biological and economic overﬁshing. Biological overﬁshing is harvest at a nonsustainable level (weak deﬁnition) or harvest at a sustainable level but such that the same harvest could have been taken at a higher stock level (strong deﬁnition). Economic overﬁshing, on the other hand, is any harvest that does not maximize the long-term sustainable net return from the ﬁshery. It is also important to keep in mind that a ﬁshery is not sound from an economic point of view until the capacity and cost structure are optimally adjusted. This involves maximizing the resource rent.3 A ﬁshery is not optimal even though the harvest and stock level are optimally adjusted to the prevailing cost structure as long as this cost structure reﬂects overcapacity. For a ﬁshery to be in an economically optimal long-term steady state, the stock and harvest must be at their optimal steadystate levels and capacity and costs must be optimally adjusted to this level. What, then, is the situation in the Norwegian ﬁsheries? To answer this, we will refer to some recent studies. Agnarsson et al. (2008) studied biological and economic overﬁshing in three countries, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark, in a comparative perspective. We concentrate on the results for Norway. This study is a follow-up of Arnason et al. (2000, 2004). In the 2008 study, new aspects such as uncertainty and multispecies interaction were taken into account. In Arnason et al. (2000), performance indicators for economic and biological overﬁshing were developed. These indicators compare actual variables to the optimal value of the same variables on average over a certain time period. The optimal value is found by applying a bioeconomic dynamic optimization model described in Sandal and Steinshamn (2001). The model is based on optimal control theory and solved as a feedback control law. The variables are simply the harvest level and the stock biomass level. Optimal harvest is found for each year given the prevailing stock. The performance indicator for that year is deﬁned as actual harvest relative to optimal harvest. The optimal value of the performance indicator therefore = 1. A performance indicator > 1 indicates harvest overexploitation, and an indicator < 1 indicates harvest underexploitation.

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When it comes to measuring the stock overexploitation, there is no such thing as an optimal stock for each year except in the long-term optimal steady state. Therefore, the actual stock relative to the long-term optimal steady state is used as performance indicator for stock overexploitation. In this case, a performance indicator value < 1 implies stock overexploitation, and a value > 1 indicates stock underexploitation. Arnason et al. (2000) calculate these indicators for northeast Arctic cod and Atlanto-Scandian herring. New and updated results for cod are found in Arnason et al. (2004) whereas Agnarsson et al. (2008) look at stochasticity and species interaction. In the Norwegian case, biological interaction between cod and capelin is considered. The harvest indicator reported in Arnason et al. (2004) for cod was 2.73 for the period from 1946 to 2000, which indicates a harvest that on average has been 2.73 times higher than the optimal. The stock indicator for the same period was 0.77, indicating that the stock on average has been 23 percent lower than it should be. TAC regulation for this stock was introduced after adoption of extended economic zones in 1977. Agnarsson et al. (2008) look at the period 1978–2004, which can be used to analyze the situation after introduction of TAC regulation. They report a harvest indicator of 3.42 and a stock indicator equal to 0.61. This indicates a trend toward increasing overexploitation over time and also shows that introduction of TAC regulation has not helped to prevent overexploitation in this case. It is further seen from Agnarsson et al. (2008) that adding a simple stochastic term to the biological submodel has very little effect on the results. Adding species interaction, on the other hand, does alter the results. Applying a bioeconomic predator– prey model with cod and capelin reduces the stock indicator for cod from 0.61 to 0.46 and increases the harvest indicator from 3.42 to 3.56. It is also interesting to notice that exploitation of capelin should be less in a predator–prey setting in order for some of the capelin to serve as food for the cod. For capelin, the harvest indicator increases from 2.24 to 3.71 and the stock indicator decreases from 0.35 to 0.31 when species interaction is taken into consideration. This illustrates that both stocks should be less exploited with species interaction. In the Norwegian case, it also illustrates that the capelin stock is more overexploited than the cod stock. However, we cannot generalize from the last result.

Whether adding species interaction implies lower optimal exploitation of both stocks depends on the relative costs and prices of the species and whether it is a predator–prey or a competition model. In a competition model, the less valuable species should typically be more exploited in order to reduce the competitive pressure. The economic exploitation pattern of AtlantoScandian herring was also studied by Arnason et al. (2000). The study began by looking at the period 1950–1997 and found a harvest overexploitation indicator of 1.97 and a stock indicator of 0.41. This means that the harvest on average had been twice its optimal level and the stock on average had only been 40 percent of its optimal level. By isolating the period 1960–1997 they excluded the “golden years” in the 1950s and put more emphasis on the troublesome period starting in the late 1960s, including the long era of harvest moratorium. This resulted in a harvest indicator of 1.78 and stock indicator of 0.23. As we can see, the harvest indicator suggested less overexploitation while the stock indicator indicated a more overexploited stock in this period. Initially, this may seem contradictory, but it can be easily explained. As the last period put greater emphasis on the era with moratorium, actual harvest was zero in many of these years and therefore the harvest overexploitation indicator was smaller. Yet the stock itself was in a poor state for the majority of this period—after all, this was the reason for the moratorium—and therefore the stock indicator suggested a high degree of overexploitation. In summary, while most of the stocks, especially the most important ones, are within safe biological limits at present, the stocks are still heavily overexploited from an economic point of view. This illustrates the old truth that economists are usually more conservative regarding ﬁsheries management than are biologists.

27.4.4. Efﬁciency of the Fisheries Sector Thus far, we have looked at biological and economic overﬁshing by comparing actual harvest and stock levels with their optimal counterparts derived from dynamic optimization. That is, harvest has been treated as an endogenous variable. In this section we look at the question of whether the ﬁshery is efﬁcient for a given harvest. Harvest is now treated as an exogenous variable, and we look at

Norwegian Fisheries Management the problem of inefﬁciency due to overcapacity and excessive effort. The question addressed is whether Norwegian ﬁsheries perform efﬁciently or whether the resource rent is exhausted due to excessive levels of capital and labor. This topic has been investigated by Steinshamn (2004) in a study for the Norwegian Ministry of Fisheries. The study applied a linear programming model for the Norwegian harvesting sector. The objective function in the model was to maximize resource rent deﬁned as the gross revenue derived from harvesting minus ﬁxed and variable costs. Fixed costs were associated with the vessels and variable costs with the harvest. The main side constraint was that the given harvest quotas could no be exceeded, nor could the physical catching capacities of the individual vessels. In addition, there were various technical constraints regarding bycatch as well as speciﬁc constraints for the individual runs of the model. The study covered 10 different ﬁsh species and 29 vessel groups with individual variable costs and prices for each vessel group for each species and individual ﬁxed costs for each vessel group. The endogenous variables in this model were the number of vessels in each vessel group and catch per vessel of each species. In other words, the model determines optimal size and structure of the ﬂeet and optimal quota allocation between the vessel groups. The conclusions from the study were that with the present ﬂeet structure and catch distribution, there is virtually no resource rent that is realized. All the potential proﬁt from the ﬁshery is wasted on excessive catching capacity and inefﬁcient allocation of the catch between vessels. If the vessels were allowed to freely redistribute catch between themselves and reduce the number of vessels accordingly, and the restriction on the reallocation from coastal vessels to large oceangoing vessels or vice versa was retained, then the resource rent would increase from virtually zero as it is at present, to between 34 and 41 percent of the ﬁrst-hand value depending on the capital cost.4 If, in addition, the restriction on reallocation between coastal vessels and large vessels were removed, the resource rent would increase to between 40 and 46 percent of the ﬁrst-hand value. If today’s ﬁshing ﬂeet is replaced by the most efﬁcient vessels available within each vessel group, this by itself would increase the resource rent from zero to between 26 and 32 percent of the ﬁrst-hand value, even when the catch allocation among vessel

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groups is exactly the same as it is today. However, in this model the investment costs in new vessels are not taken into account. In a new, updated ﬂeet, if vessels are allowed to redistribute catch among themselves—but not between coastal vessels and large vessels—the rent will increase further by between 53 and 58 percent of the ﬁrst-hand value. If all restrictions on catch allocation were removed, the resource rent may reach more than 60 percent of the ﬁrst-hand value. In one sense, this study shows what is to be expected if the present catch allocation scheme is replaced by transferable quotas. The various outcomes illustrate two alternatives: the ﬁrst involves transferable quotas only within the broader groups consisting of coastal vessels and large ocean-going vessels, and the second involves transferable quotas without restrictions. In addition, the effect of replacing the present vessels by new and more efﬁcient vessels is also analyzed. In the case with fewest restrictions and new and more efﬁcient vessels, the resource rent may increase from virtually zero to almost US$1.5 billion out of a landed value of US$2.5 billion. In other words, almost US$1.5 billion is wasted on excess capital and labor in the present situation. Similar results have been found by Asche et al. (2009) in an econometric study of the cod trawlers: by removing about two-thirds of the vessels in the ﬂeet, a resource rent of about 60 percent of the ﬁrst-hand value can be realized as opposed to virtually zero today. The implications of these studies call for fewer vessels and reduced number of ﬁshermen. The present number of ﬁshermen on full-time operated vessels at the time of the study was just above 10,000. Redistribution of catch would reduce this number by more than 50 percent. However, it is interesting to note that if the vessels were replaced by the most efﬁcient vessels within each vessel group, the number of ﬁshermen would slightly increase. This is due to some of the smallest vessels in the demersal ﬁsheries becoming so cost-efﬁcient that if they were renewed they would receive quotas from the less efﬁcient trawlers and hence total labor employment would increase.5 In fact, with free redistribution within the broader groups, but not among them, total labor employment is almost 6,000 people and slightly less with completely free redistribution. This represents a reduction of 40 percent, which is less than if the vessels are not renewed. A renewal of all vessel groups will, in other words, give room for quite a few small vessels and hence higher labor employment.

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The question of whether reduced employment is positive or negative can be discussed. On one hand, there may be little alternative employment in some rural areas where ﬁshing is an important part of the economy. On the other hand, the situation in Norway has for some time been characterized by excess demand for labor rather than unemployment. If the transition toward fewer vessels and ﬁshermen is accomplished through an ITQ scheme, the process will be voluntary and it may take some time. In the end, the labor that is released from the ﬁsheries sector can be used for more productive purposes. The next question that arises is whether there are any signs that the potential resource rent will be realized or whether it will continue to be virtually zero. There is no doubt that the Norwegian authorities are aware of the problem associated with overcapacity in the harvesting sector. Although individual vessel quotas in principle are not transferable, they have in practice been so for a long time. This is performed by selling a vessel together with the quota, and in many cases the vessel itself is sold back without quota. The authorities have done nothing to stop this practice, and in some ﬂeet segments the practice has contributed to a signiﬁcant reduction in overcapacity. Decommissioning schemes for old vessels ﬁnanced by the government have been in place for various ﬂeet segments for many years. In recent years, this has been ﬁnanced partially by a so-called structure fee where the ﬁshermen themselves pay 50 percent and the government pays the remaining 50 percent. The revenue from this is used to compensate ﬁshermen for destruction of vessels combined with returning ﬁshing rights. This, together with the structure quotas described above, has contributed to a signiﬁcant reduction in overcapacity, although proﬁtability is low and overcapacity still exists within certain ﬂeet segments. The variation in proﬁtability is still high between vessels and also between those ﬂeet segments where the capacity has been adjusted to quotas compared to the ﬂeet segments without such adjustment. This illustrates that the various schemes that have implemented by no means represent perfect substitutes for individually transferable quotas.

27.5. SUMMARY In this chapter we have given a short description of the Norwegian ﬁsheries sector and a review of Norwegian ﬁsheries management. The most important

ﬁsh species have been described as well as the size and structure of the ﬁshing ﬂeet. How quotas are determined and allocated, as well as other more speciﬁc aspects of the Norwegian management regime, has been described. Regarding performance of the ﬁsheries sector and the management regime, some studies analyzing biological and economic overexploitation have been reviewed. The conclusions drawn from these studies are that while most of the stocks at present are within safe biological limits, they are far from being at their bioeconomic optimum levels. This result was found by comparing actual stock development and harvest patterns over time with the optimal development of the same variables based on dynamic optimization. A study analyzing the potential resource rent from the Norwegian ﬁsheries sector and whether this potential has been realized was also reviewed. The conclusion from this study is that, at present, the realized resource rent is virtually zero, although the potential resource rent may be up to US$1.5 billion, which is equivalent to 60 percent of the ﬁrsthand value. In other words, there is a high degree of inefﬁciency due to overcapacity and suboptimal quota allocation among vessel groups. The Norwegian government has implemented a number of measures to reduce overcapacity and increase efﬁciency. Some of these measures, for example, the so-called structure quotas, can be considered as substitutes for ITQs, as ITQs do not seem to be politically acceptable in Norway. However, as they are only substitutes, they have not achieved the same improvement in efﬁciency as would be realized in a fully developed ITQ system.

Acknowledgments The author is grateful to Rögnvaldur Hannesson, Per Sandberg, and an anonymous referee for very useful suggestions and comments on an earlier draft of this chapter and to the Norwegian Research Council for ﬁnancial support. The author is, of course, solely responsible for any remaining errors and shortcomings.

Notes 1. Throughout this chapter, we use an exchange rate of US$0.2 per NOK. 2. The 62nd latitude represents an important dividing line in Norwegian ﬁsheries management.

Norwegian Fisheries Management 3. Resource rent is deﬁned as return that comes in addition to normal return on capital and labor due to the existence of a natural resource, in this case ﬁsh stocks. 4. The highest estimate is calculated with 5 percent return on capital, whereas the lowest estimate is calculated with 10 percent return on capital. 5. There are three different trawler groups in the model.

References Agnarsson, S., R. Arnason, K. Johannisdottir, L. Ravn-Johnsen, L.K. Sandal, S.I. Steinshamn, and N. Vestergaard (2008). Comparative Evaluation of the Fisheries Policies in Denmark, Iceland and Norway: Multispecies and Stochastic Issues. SNF-Report 25/07. Bergen, Norway: Institute for Research in Economics and Business Administration. Arnason, R., L.K. Sandal, S.I. Steinshamn, N. Vestergaard, S. Agnarsson, and F. Jensen (2000). Comparative evaluation of the cod and herring ﬁsheries in Denmark, Iceland and

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Norway. TemaNord 2000: 526. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers. Arnason, R., L.K. Sandal, S.I. Steinshamn, and N. Vestergaard (2004). Optimal feedback controls: Comparative evaluation of the cod ﬁsheries in Denmark, Iceland and Norway. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 86(2): 531–542. Asche, F., T. Bjørndal, and D.V. Gordon (2009). Resource rent in individual quota ﬁsheries. Land Economics 85: 279–291. Nakken, O., P. Sandberg, and S.I. Steinshamn (1996). Reference points for optimal ﬁsh stock management: A lesson to be learnt from the north-east Arctic cod stock. Marine Policy 20: 447–462. Pedersen, H. (2006). The New Fishery Policy. Speech by the Minister of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs, 13 July. Oslo: Ministry of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs. Sandal, L.K., and S.I. Steinshamn (2001). A simpliﬁed feedback approach to optimal resource management. Natural Resource Modeling 14: 419–432. Steinshamn, S.I. (2004). Ressursrenten i norske ﬁskerier [in Norwegian]. SNF-Report 06/05. Bergen, Norway: Institute for Research in Economics and Business Administration.

28 Fisheries Management in the United Kingdom SEAN PASCOE DIANA TINGLEY

28.1. INTRODUCTION Although small in terms of contribution to the gross domestic product, ﬁshing remains an important industry in the United Kingdom. Along with agriculture, ﬁshing is one of the oldest industries in the United Kingdom, as might be expected from an island nation. The United Kingdom is one of the main ﬁshing nations within Europe in terms of value of production and ﬂeet size. In certain regions within the United Kingdom, particularly the more peripheral regions, such as the Scottish Western Islands, Cornwall, and Wales, ﬁshing remains an important source of regional employment. As a result of its social and employment importance, ﬁsheries management in the United Kingdom aims to provide a balance between ensuring sustainability of the resource and the sustainability of regional communities dependent on ﬁshing. Management measures are complicated through interactions with adjoining European member states. Exclusive legislative jurisdiction to regulate ﬁshing was given to the European Community under Article 102 of the 1972 Act of Accession of Denmark, Ireland, Norway, and the United Kingdom1 (De Santo and Jones 2007). Under the agreement (and originally developed in the 1964 European Fisheries Convention), member states have exclusive ﬁshing rights to waters within 6 nautical miles of their coast. Other European member states with a history of ﬁshing within United Kingdom territorial

waters have limited access rights within 12 nautical miles under Article 17.2 of Council Regulation (EC) 2371/2002. Beyond 12 nautical miles, access is open to all member states and managed through collaboration with the other European member states. The European Community’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) provides a framework for the coordinated management of these common ﬁshing waters. However, individual member states are responsible for the implementation, monitoring, and enforcement of these management policies in offshore waters for their national ﬂeets. Individual member states are also fully responsible for the management of ﬁsheries that occur fully within their territorial waters and are not affected by CFP regulations (e.g., inshore potting ﬁsheries).2 However, regulations implemented under the CFP (e.g., quotas, gear restrictions) are also applicable within the territorial waters. This chapter outlines ﬁsheries management and ﬁsheries policy in the United Kingdom and identiﬁes the successes and failures. The chapter starts with an overview of the ﬁshing sector in the United Kingdom, followed by a review of the key challenges facing managers. The institutional structures are next examined, and the successes and failures are placed in context. Finally, the key challenges that differentiate ﬁsheries management in the United Kingdom from that in other countries are discussed, and the lessons that may be learned.

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28.2. UNITED KINGDOM FISHERIES For management purposes, the U.K. ﬂeet is differentiated in terms of vessel size, with vessels 10 meters or less length (henceforth referred to as the <10-m ﬂeet) being subject to different management systems than those longer than 10 meters in length (>10-m ﬂeet). The ﬂeet size has reduced steadily over the last two decades as the result of a series of decommissioning schemes and declining economic conditions. Between 1983 and 1997, around 900 >10-m boats were removed as part of the European Commission’s Multiannual Guidance Programs (MAGPs) (Pascoe and Coglan 2000), with at least a further 600 vessels leaving through natural attrition and consolidation.3 Subsequent decommissioning programs have been undertaken in the United Kingdom unilaterally, which, together with natural attrition and consolidation, have removed a further 740 vessels. Between 1990 and 2006, the number of >10-m vessels declined by almost 60 percent (ﬁgure 28.1), while the number of <10-m vessels declined by almost 30 percent. In the latter case, no active decommissioning scheme was in existence, so the decline in numbers was a direct response to declining economic conditions in the ﬁshery. In 2006, the U.K. ﬂeet was composed of 6,758 ﬁshing vessels employing 12,934 ﬁshers. Vessels <10-m in length are primarily inshore

vessels. Although this group comprises more than 75 percent of the total U.K. ﬂeet, they produce only about 11 percent of the total catch by weight and around 17 percent by value (table 28.1). In contrast, the vessels >10 m contribute the bulk of landings, although they comprise only around 25 percent of the total ﬂeet. Not surprisingly, management measures have focused primarily on the larger vessels. In terms of vessel numbers and employment, the largest ﬂeet is based in England and Wales, although the ﬂeet is dominated by smaller vessels (ﬁgure 28.2). In contrast, the Scottish ﬂeet is dominated by larger vessels that take a disproportionately large share of the catch (i.e., the proportion of total catch taken by the Scottish ﬂeet is greater than the proportion of total vessels in the Scottish ﬂeet). In 2006, the total value of U.K. landings was £610m, composed of a wide range of demersal (£242m), pelagic (£124m), and shellﬁsh (£244m) species. Haddock, monkﬁsh/anglers, cod, sole, and plaice accounted for slightly more than half of total value of demersal landings, with around 80 other species contributing to the remainder. Nephrops also caught by the demersal trawl ﬂeet, made up nearly half (48 percent) of the total shellﬁsh landings, with crab, scallops, and lobster accounting for a further 40 percent. Pelagic landings were dominated by two species—mackerel and herring—which accounted for 92 percent of the total value.

12000 10 metres and over

Vessel numbers

10000

under 10 metres length

8000 6000 4000 2000

19 90 19 91 19 92 19 93 19 94 19 95 19 96 19 97 19 98 19 99 20 00 20 01 20 02 20 03 20 04 20 05 20 06

0 Year FIGURE

371

28.1 Changes in U.K. ﬂeet size, 1990–2006. (MFA 2007)

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28.1 Main activity of the U.K. ﬁshing ﬂeet, by gear type and size: 2006

TABLE

Landingsb

Numbera

Main Gear Type >10 m Pelagic (purse seine) Beam trawl Demersal trawls and seines Lines and nets Dredges Pots Total >10 m

15 100 854 187 173 268 1,597

<10 m length Pelagic (purse seine) Beam trawl Demersal trawls and seines Lines and nets Dredges Pots Total <10 m

114 1054 1610 152 2292 5,222

Total United Kingdom

6,819

Quantity (1,000 metric tons) 264.9 21.2 177.2 12.1 24.3 20.6 520.4

67.7 588.0576

Value (million £ ) 104.7 42.8 260.9 23.8 26.8 32.2 491.1

101.2 592.29

a

Registered ﬂeet at 1 January 2007. Catch quantity and value derived from logbook data for >10-m boats (DEFRA 2006). Quantity and value for <10-m vessels estimated as the residual between total landings (MFA 2007) and the logbook data, adjusting also for the catch of distance water ﬁshing vessels.

b

100%

Share of total

80%

60%

40%

20%

0% Vessels

Fishers Demersal Pelagic Shellfish (£242m) (£124m) (£244m)

England and Wales

Scotland

Northern Ireland

28.2 Sector characteristics in terms of number of vessels and ﬁshermen and landings value by main species type. (MFA 2007)

FIGURE

The quantities of ﬁsh landed over the ten-year period from 1997 to 2006 declined by about 45 percent, while the real value of landings declined by 22 percent. Much of the decline in catch was due to falling stock levels. Over the same period, total boat numbers declined by 20 percent, and total engine power in the ﬂeet declined by 15 percent. However, considerable overcapacity existed in the ﬁshery, and the removal of vessels resulted in a less than proportional reduction in harvesting capacity of the ﬂeet. Although harvesting capacity had not been greatly reduced, catch quotas for cod—one of the main U.K. demersal species—declined by more than 75 percent over the same period due to substantial overexploitation of the stock (Pascoe and Burnett 2007). Fleet capacity in the United Kingdom is generally considered to be more in line with allowable catches of key ﬁsh resources than it was in the early 1990s, although considerable excess capacity remains in the <10-m ﬂeet (Pascoe and Tingley 2006; Tingley and Pascoe 2005). As a result,

Fisheries Management in the United Kingdom the economic performance of some sectors has generally improved. The pelagic sector in particular is generally regarded as being in robust health with operating proﬁt margins reported to be in excess of 40 percent of revenue (Cabinet Ofﬁce 2004). This is in large part due to the consolidated nature of the ﬂeet (table 28.1)—a consequence of the management system in place. Target stocks of mackerel and herring are also thought to be in relatively good health. Similarly, the proﬁtability of the shellﬁsh sector is also believed to be relatively good (Cabinet Ofﬁce 2004), and the status of the majority of stocks was relatively stable. Nephrops vessels consistently achieved operating proﬁts of around 20 percent of revenue on average over the period 2001–2005 (Anderson et al. 2008). The export market for the higher value species—particularly Nephrops, lobster, crab, and scallop—is an important driver of proﬁtability. In contrast, whiteﬁsh ﬂeets (mostly demersal trawlers, seiners, and beam trawlers) were reported to be experiencing signiﬁcant ﬁnancial and economic difﬁculties (Anderson et al. 2008; Cabinet Ofﬁce 2004; Tingley 2005, 2007) due to a combination of reductions in quotas for the overﬁshed target whiteﬁsh species of cod, haddock, and whiting and imposition of effort restrictions—particularly in the North Sea—as well as low quayside prices and increased costs. Fuel prices and quota-leasing costs have increased markedly in recent years, putting further pressure on these ﬂeets. For the <10-m ﬂeets, standard measures of profitability (e.g., rates of return to capital) can provide a misleading indicator of the incentives to remain in the ﬁshery (Boncoeur et al. 2000). Although the vessels were earning reasonable returns on average, with cash operating proﬁts (i.e., excluding noncash costs such as depreciation and opportunity cost of capital) at around 20 percent of revenue over the period 2001–2005 (Anderson et al. 2008), the returns to the skipper labor were generally low, and below what might be earned elsewhere in the economy. As noted above, the number of vessels in the ﬂeet segment has declined over time even without additional incentives to encourage this created by management. In addition to problems of depleted stocks and increasing fuel prices, the industry has been confronted with increasing environmental concerns about the effects of ﬁshing on the marine environment. In 2000, the OSPAR Convention (Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment

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of the North East Atlantic) ranked human activities in the North Sea in terms of the severity of their impact on the environment. Three of the top six related directly to ﬁsheries: removal of target species by ﬁsheries, seabed disturbance by ﬁsheries, and effects of discards and mortality of nontarget species by ﬁsheries (OSPAR Commission 2000). Fishing was identiﬁed by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (2004: 3) as the “greatest individual threat to the [marine environment] in the seas around the United Kingdom,” with concerns being raised about the impact of the ﬁshing industry upon ﬁsh stocks as well as the wider ecosystem. In response to these concerns, a coherent European ecological network of special areas of conservation—both terrestrial and marine, known collectively as Natura 2000—is also being established under the European Habitat Directive (Council Directive 92/43/EEC of 21 May 1992 on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and ﬂora). The program aims at including at least 20 percent of all marine habitats in the marine reserve network by 2010 (Natura 2000 2007).

28.3. FISHERIES MANAGEMENT IN THE UNITED KINGDOM 28.3.1. Institutional Structures The legislative and organizational structure used to manage U.K. ﬁsheries is complex for a variety of reasons, including the interactions with other European countries in the shared ﬁsheries, the devolved nature of ﬁsheries management to separate ﬁsheries administrations in the United Kingdom, and the role of the inshore ﬁsheries management bodies. The structure of research for management advice is also complicated for similar reasons, adding to the complexity. European ﬁsheries are characterized by shared ﬁsheries that have historically been exploited by a number of countries. For example, North Sea ﬁsheries are exploited by the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and Norway; English Channel ﬁsheries by the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium; and the Celtic and Irish Seas ﬁsheries exploited by the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, and Belgium. Similarly, the United Kingdom is actively involved in ﬁshing in the northeast Atlantic, along with other members of the European Union as well as Norway and Iceland.

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Given the multinational characteristics of these ﬁsheries, the CFP was developed in order to ensure the conservation of the resources in these shared waters and to ensure “relative stability” in access to the resources.4 The CFP is primarily focused on the waters linked to the Atlantic (including the English Channel and North Sea), although similar management measures are in place in the Baltic and also the Mediterranean (both in which the United Kingdom has little involvement). Although E.U. legislation supersedes national legislation, member states can impose additional restrictions on activities within their 12-mile limit (e.g., engine size limits). Measures such as total allowable catches (TACs) apply to all ﬂeets irrespective of where they ﬁsh (i.e., inside or outside the territorial waters). This legislation generally affects U.K. vessels targeting the most commercially important species that are shared with other, mostly E.U. nations and for which TACs are set under the CFP. It also covers vessels operating in ﬁsheries that are subject to CFP recovery plans for endangered stocks, which tend to make use of temporal and area-based closures.5 Although quotas and, more recently, days-atsea restrictions are set at a European level and distributed to member states on a share basis, each individual member state is responsible for how its catch and effort quotas are to be implemented and enforced. This may give rise to different management systems being employed for different national ﬂeets on a common ﬁshing ground (e.g., some ﬂeets may be subject to individual quotas, while others may operate under competitive quota systems). Within the United Kingdom, ﬁsheries are managed by a variety of administrations depending upon the regional waters in which the activity is taking place. The Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has overall responsibility for setting policy and legislation for English ﬂeets. It also takes the lead in the negotiation of all U.K. ﬁshing interests at the E.U. level. The Marine and Fisheries Agency (MFA) has responsibility for enforcing all sea ﬁshing activity off the coast of England and Wales, and for U.K. vessels operating outside of U.K. waters. The MFA also allocates (and reallocates where necessary) ﬁshing opportunities on a transparent basis agreed between U.K. ﬁshing administrations and monitors the level of quota uptake. The MFA oversees the administration of the licensing scheme for all U.K. commercial ﬁshing vessels, administers any ﬁshing vessel decommissioning schemes intended

to reduce the capacity of the English ﬁshing ﬂeet, and undertakes an advisory role and general liaison with ﬁshing industry. In Scotland, the counterpart national administration to DEFRA is the Marine Directorate of the Scottish government. Legislative responsibility for ﬁsheries and aquaculture management was devolved to the Scottish parliament upon its creation in 1998 under the Scotland Act. In Wales, the National Assembly for Wales Agriculture Department is the responsible administration, and in Northern Ireland it is the Department for Agriculture and Rural Development for Northern Ireland (DARDNI). The MFA undertakes enforcement and other duties in respect of sea ﬁshing activities in Welsh waters, while the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency undertakes these duties in Scottish waters. DARDNI undertake similar activities directly in Northern Irish waters. Departments in the Isle of Man and Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey are responsible for administering and enforcing ﬁshing activities in their respective areas. The inshore ﬁsheries of England and Wales (out to 6 miles from the coast) are regulated by 12 sea ﬁsheries committees (SFCs). SFCs were established in the 19th century and are empowered to make bylaws for the management and conservation of their districts’ ﬁsheries. In 1995, their powers were widened to include the control of ﬁsheries in their districts for environmental reasons. In some coastal areas and estuaries of England and Wales, the Environment Agency has the powers of an SFC to enable them to manage diadromous ﬁsh, such as salmon, sea trout, and eels, which travel between salt and fresh water. Inshore ﬁsheries management in Scotland is carried out by the Inshore Fisheries Branch (IFB) located within the Scottish Government. The IFB has responsibility for regulation, management, and enforcement of ﬁshing activity out to the 12-mile limit for all species—except, of course, where superseded by CFP legislation. DARDNI manages inshore ﬁsheries internally. Research activities are similarly dispersed. The Centre for Environment, Fisheries, and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS) is an executive agency of DEFRA carrying out scientiﬁc research and acting as an advisory center working in ﬁsheries management, environmental protection, and aquaculture—mainly in respect of English issues. The Scottish equivalent is the Fisheries Research Services, an agency of the Scottish Government Marine Directorate, which provides expert scientiﬁc and technical advice to

Fisheries Management in the United Kingdom the government on marine and freshwater ﬁsheries, aquaculture, and the protection of the aquatic environment. The Agri-food and Biosciences Institute is a nondepartmental public body that carries out an extensive marine science program on behalf of DARDNI. Basic biological data from ﬁsh landings and observer and research vessel surveys is collected annually by the various responsible agencies and administrations, analyzed by national science bodies, and then used further by the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) working groups to assess the state of the most commercially important ﬁsh stocks. Assessments performed by the working groups are then considered by the ICES Advisory Committee on Fishery Management (ACFM), which decides upon the ofﬁcial ICES advice for the management of the stocks, including recommendations for setting TACs for stocks managed in this way.6 Unlike the biological sciences, there is no formal government economic research group within the United Kingdom. The closest quasi-government economics research institution is the economics group within the Seaﬁsh Industry Authority (SFIA)—a statutory authority located in Scotland and funded through a levy on landings, with activities aimed primarily at marketing. The economics group within SFIA has recently been given responsibility for economic data collection relating to the U.K. industry, in particular, costs and earnings surveys (e.g., Anderson et al 2008).7 Some economic research is also undertaken by SFIA, particularly marketing related research, while other economics research is undertaken in universities. Biological advice developed by the ICES ACFM, along with economic information provided by member states, is considered by the European Commission’s Scientiﬁc, Technical and Economic Advisory Committee on Fisheries, which considers the implications of alternative management controls. Management advice is also proposed by regional advisory committees that consist of industry representatives, other relevant stakeholder group representatives, and government ofﬁcials from the member states with interests in the different regions. The advice from these groups forms the basis of the proposed TACs put by the European Commission to the E.U. Council of Ministers at their negotiations held each December in Brussels (the European Commission headquarters). The ﬁnal TACs do not necessarily correspond to the

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proposals, however, as they are also inﬂuenced by political considerations.

28.3.2. Management Instruments Fisheries management involves a combination of input and output controls. These measures vary by ﬁshery and size of vessel.

28.3.2.1. Output Controls As noted above, TACs for most main commercial species are determined on a stock-level basis and allocated to member states in ﬁxed proportions under the principle of relative stability. Technically, quotas are not transferable among the member states, but quota swaps have been negotiated in certain circumstances. Each member state is free to allocate the quota to its ﬁshers however it likes. In the United Kingdom, the relevant ﬁsheries departments calculate annual quota allocations for individual ﬁshers of vessels >10 m in length based on their holdings of ﬁxed quota allocation units (FQAs). These are ﬁxed shares of the proportion of the total TAC of each species allocated to the United Kingdom (effectively the U.K. TACs). The FQA system was introduced in 1999 to replace a cumbersome system of calculating quota entitlements based on the rolling previous three-year average catch of quota species, and was an attempt to reduce the incentives to race to ﬁsh. Vessels <10 m in length that ﬁsh for quota species do not have FQAs but ﬁsh against a competitive aggregated quota that is usually deﬁned monthly and which is administered by Government. Since 1984, most quotas have been allocated indirectly to ﬁshers via the U.K.-wide system of producer organizations (POs) (Hatcher 1997). These POs tend to operate in one of two main fashions. In some POs, members ﬁsh against their own individual allocations, while in others, members “pool” their quotas within the PO, and individual members ﬁsh against this collective pool. In both instances, the PO has responsibility to monitor quota uptake and dictate when ﬁshing should halt. If individual ﬁshers did not wish to be PO members, they can still ﬁsh for quota species against a collective pool of quota made up of all non-PO members’ quota entitlements; this group of ﬁshers is collectively known as the “nonsector.” FQAs allow ﬁshers to catch a speciﬁed proportion of the TAC for certain species but do not

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convey a legal ownership title of the right to the ﬁshing opportunity. Ownership of the right to ﬁsh the resource is retained by government. However, a leasing trade in FQAs has developed among individuals within some POs and among POs themselves. The ﬁshing entitlement remains attached to the original vessel and license but can be leased entirely or in part to one or several other vessels during the year. The leasing system burgeoned in the years following the introduction of FQAs in 1998 (Read 2000). A one-off permanent reallocation of FQAs was permitted in 2001 to realign permanent FQA holdings with the increasingly complicated system of ﬁshing entitlement leases, cross-leases, and transfers. There is a general perception that the growth of this trading system has developed so much that individuals can probably claim a “legitimate expectation” (under European law) in respect of their “ownership” of the ﬁshing opportunity (Cabinet Ofﬁce 2004). While reducing the incentives to race to ﬁsh, the FQA system does not provide adequate incentives for autonomous adjustment mainly due to the complexities involved in trading quota. A major review (the U.K. Quota Management Change Program) of the quota management system is current under way. The review aims to consider who can hold FQAs, letting ﬁshers choose who manages their quota, improving the quota trading mechanism whilst safeguarding wider social and economic goals, improving compliance with quota limits, and improving the management of the nonsector and <10-m ﬂeets.

28.3.2.2. Licensing and Input Unitization Nontransferable ﬁshing vessel licenses were ﬁrst introduced into the United Kingdom in 1971 for the North Sea herring ﬁshery to enable managers to implement season closures (Hatcher and Cunningham 1994). From this point on, licenses were gradually introduced to other ﬁsheries as the need to control ﬁshing pressure arose (i.e., Western mackerel, North Irish Sea herring, and important North Sea and West of Scotland demersal stocks). Following the admission of the United Kingdom to the European Union and CFP in 1983, the licensing system was expanded to include all vessels ﬁshing for species that were subject to quota under the CFP.

The U.K. licensing system evolved over time from a system that aimed to control effort, by restricting a vessel’s activity according to target species, ﬁshing areas, ﬁshing time, and method/gears, to one that attempted to limit levels of capacity in the ﬂeet, as well as its use. This was achieved by placing a moratorium on the granting of new licenses, and the development of a capacity unitization system that invoked a range of penalty unit forfeitures when licenses were transferred or aggregated. The ﬁshing vessel unitization scheme was introduced in 1990, based on vessel capacity units (VCUs), which were calculated as L*B+0.45kW, where L is overall vessel length, B is breadth, and kW is the engine power expressed in kilowatts.8 They were expected to place an upper limit on output by controlling physical ﬂeet capacity. A complex transfer system evolved during the 1990s incorporating a range of penalties that reduced the number of VCUs being transferred depending on whether single licenses were being transferred between vessels or multiple licenses were being aggregated. Penalties and restrictions varied depending on whether license transfers were for whiteﬁsh or pelagic vessels, vessels <10 m or >10 m in length, or to correct or adjust undeclared engine power. The VCU system was the primary mechanism by which decommissioning schemes were implemented during the era of the E.U. MAGP and subsequent national schemes. Offers to leave the ﬁsheries were made on the basis of £/VCU, and capacity targets in terms of VCUs were set nationally. The E.U. MAGP system was reviewed in 2003 and replaced by an “entry/exit” regime, the aim of which is to limit the level of entries to the ﬁshing ﬂeet to ensure that they are matched by ﬂeet exits where appropriate. This E.U. entry/exit regime is very similar to the existing licensing regime in the United Kingdom, which prevents the creation of new ﬁshing capacity by ﬁxing the pool of available licenses and requiring new vessels to acquire licenses from that ﬁxed pool. However, ﬂeet capacity in the revised European scheme is deﬁned in terms of total gross tonnage and total engine power, with separate limits placed on all member states. The VCU system was effectively abandoned in 2007 as a capacity management system in favor of the European system that limited aggregate (at the national level) gross tonnage and engine power separately. Penalties on vessel replacement were retained at 5 percent of both gross tonnage and engine power. The introduction of a new vessel

Fisheries Management in the United Kingdom required the removal of sufﬁcient gross tonnage and engine power from elsewhere (i.e., another vessel or set of vessels) to ensure the aggregate level was not exceeded and the appropriate penalty could be met.

28.3.2.3. Effort Restrictions Additional measures to protect declining stocks of cod were introduced by the European Commission for the ﬁrst time in 20019 and affected U.K. vessels >10 m in length. In particular, ﬁshing effort restrictions were implemented in 2003 for vessels >10 m in length. This restricted the number of days per month different types of vessels (i.e., using different gear types) could employ in different areas (Council Regulation [E.C.] 671/2003). These restrictions were originally nontransferable but were made transferable in 2004. Transfers between differentsized vessels are controlled by ensuring that the total kilowatt-days ﬁshed are not exceeded. For example, a vessel with a 100-kW engine would need to transfer 10 days to a vessel with a 1,000kW engine in order to allow it to ﬁsh for one extra day (Pascoe and Burnett 2007).

28.4. CONSERVATION MEASURES AND THE MARINE BILL In the United Kingdom, a variety of marine protected areas (MPAs) have been set up to help conserve marine biodiversity, in particular, species and habitats of European and national importance. The main types of MPA in the United Kingdom are special areas of conservation for habitats of European importance, special protection areas (SPAs) for birds, and marine nature reserves (but only three have been created in the last 20 years) for nationally important habitats and species. A number of voluntary and nonstatutory MPAs also exist. These MPAs have had an increasing effect on, and interaction with, inshore ﬁshing activities over the last few years. The United Kingdom is working toward the development of a network of newly created MPAs aimed at biodiversity conservation and promoting the sustainable use of resources to meet its international obligations as set out under OSPAR and Natura 2000. In April 2008, the draft Marine and Coastal Access Bill was introduced that aims to establish a more comprehensive marine planning system.10

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A number of aspects of the draft marine bill could introduce legislation that will have a signiﬁcant effect on the U.K. ﬁsheries sector—both practically and also in terms of shifting the way in which the ﬁshing sector is perceived as one of many users of the marine environment. In particular, the new marine planning system could lead to the creation of spatial marine plans at a more local level, based on information about speciﬁc areas and their uses of the sea. Legislation could be introduced that provides for the designation of marine conservation zones, both for the protection of individual habitats and species and for the creation of a network of protected sites representing marine ecosystems around the United Kingdom. Designation would take account of environmental, social, and economic criteria and provide measures to prevent activities from damaging sites once designated. The draft bill also includes measures to reform inshore ﬁsheries management, replacing SFCs with newly created inshore ﬁsheries and conservation authorities, as well as enhancements to legislation underpinning sea ﬁsheries conservation and shellﬁsh management. Measures are also proposed to increase the ﬂexibility in the government’s existing power to charge for commercial ﬁshing licenses. Enforcement powers could be streamlined and modernized by introducing a common set of powers so that ofﬁcers enforcing ﬁsheries, nature conservation, and licensing legislation would have access to a core set of enforcement powers for the purposes of inspection and investigation. Finally, civil sanctions could be introduced for licensing and nature conservation offences and an administrative penalty scheme for domestic ﬁsheries offences. In combination with enforcement tools ranging from advice to prosecution, these will give the ability to address offences in a proportionate, ﬂexible, and risk-based manner.

28.5. LIMITING FACTORS IN FISHERIES MANAGEMENT IN THE UNITED KINGDOM Fisheries management in the United Kingdom is administratively complex, with different administrations interacting at different levels. For most policy decisions, the different ﬁsheries administrations within the United Kingdom collaborate to ensure a consistent framework. However, the development of policy through consensus results in a relatively

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slow rate of advancement. Policy reforms proposed by the U.K. Cabinet Ofﬁce (2004) have had little impact on U.K. ﬁsheries policy to date. Attempts at developing a ﬁsheries vision (e.g., DEFRA 2007) have been limited in their scope as they have been conﬁned to only part of the national ﬂeet. The different administrations create additional difﬁculties in areas such as research. Logbook data are collected separately by each administration and not combined into a single database. As a result, CEFAS are unable to include information from Scottish boats in their analyses, for example, while Fisheries Research Services are unable to include English vessels, even though the ﬂeets may be targeting the same species using the same gears. Informal collaborate arrangements have enabled integration of some analyses, although at a high transactions cost. The main role of ﬁshing in both the United Kingdom and Europe as a whole is seen to be a key employer in remote or vulnerable communities. Considerable debate has recently been held in the United Kingdom and Europe about increasing the transferability of quota at the individual ﬁsher level. While many recognize the economic beneﬁt and incentive correction that such schemes can generate, strong concerns have been voiced about such issues as ensuring that the viability of ﬁsheries-dependent communities is maintained and concerns about excessive quota consolidation and concentration. In 2007 the European Commission initiated a public consultation and open debate on rights-based management (RBM) tools in ﬁsheries. In 2008 the European Parliament announced that they supported consideration of the possibility that RBM tools could be included in the CFP. In 2005 the United Kingdom began implementing a Quota Management Change Program that sought to modernize the present U.K. quota management system and deliver the beneﬁts of increased transferability, increased certainty of individual ﬁshing rights, and improved transparency in quota trading. However, this program was suspended in 2007 when the Scottish government announced that the “current joint United Kingdom quota and licensing management arrangements are not working” (Scottish Government 2008a) and that it intended to establish its own Scottish Quota Management and Licensing System, which would in particular “seek to maintain ﬁshing rights in traditional ﬁshing communities” (Scottish Government 2008a). The Scottish government also announced in 2008

that it is seeking to withdraw from the CFP with the intention of returning greater responsibility for ﬁsheries management to Scotland (Scottish Government 2008b). Some E.U. member states, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, have implemented a full individual transferable quota (ITQ) system in at least some of their ﬁsheries. Perversely, inaction in protecting declining stocks of cod and plaice at the European level has probably had a greater negative economic impact on coastal ﬁshing communities than quota transferability would ever have had.11 Yet this inaction was a direct result of political pressures to keep ﬁsheries open at high levels in an attempt to maintain ﬁshing activities in these communities. The United Kingdom has undertaken substantial ﬂeet reductions through government-funded decommissioning over the past two decades, both as part of the E.U. MAGP as well as unilaterally. This has been at great cost to society in terms of the public monies spent on the decommissioning schemes. However, the positive side of this is that much of the overcapacity in the ﬂeet has been removed, and the industry now appears to be in a better position to improve economically, if and when key stocks start to recover. However, restricting trade in quotas is likely to handicap the extent to which economic recovery of the industry is possible based on the premise that free and ﬂexible trade in quota will enable ﬁshing rights to be traded into the hands of the most efﬁcient and effective ﬁshers. Restriction on trade in quotas among countries within the European Union is a sacred cow and derives loosely from the principle of relative stability (i.e., if quota trading were permitted, then relative stability could not be maintained). Current restrictions on quota transfers between countries has resulted in “quota hopping,” where nationals of other member states (particularly Spain and the Netherlands) buy and operate U.K. vessels and licenses in order to access its quotas, effectively operating them as a ﬂag-of-convenience vessel. Although the impact of this on the U.K. industry has likely been small (Hatcher et al. 2002), it has caused considerable resentment in the industry. Objections to this practice are largely on emotive and nationalistic grounds (i.e., “they are taking our ﬁsh”), and measures have been introduced to ensure that at least some of the economic beneﬁts (i.e., community-related beneﬁts) of using the quotas are retained in the United Kingdom. Since quota-hopping can be taken as evidence of a desire

Fisheries Management in the United Kingdom to trade internationally in ﬁsh quotas, maintaining the present system of ﬁxed national quota shares is likely to be resulting in inefﬁciencies (Hatcher et al. 2002).

28.6. TRANSITIONS TO BETTER OUTCOMES Many of the complexities in ﬁsheries management in the United Kingdom, and Europe in general, arise as a result of the ﬁshing industry being considered a social activity rather than an economic activity. Impediments are created aimed at protecting the industry from change. In the United Kingdom, this has resulted in the use of FQA, which are primarily aimed at ensuring quota remains in regional communities, and as evidenced by the desire of the Scottish government to withdraw from the CFP and to set up its own Scottish Quota Management and Licensing System. Quota leasing partially overcomes the constraint of FQAs, but permanent quota transfer (both within the United Kingdom as a whole and with other E.U. member states) would enable ﬁshing ﬂeets to conﬁgure themselves more sustainably in the long run. At the European level, the divergences in the agreed annual TACs from those recommended by ICES are also usually a result of “social considerations,” mainly relating to the regional employment implications of reducing quotas in the countries affected by the quota change. Further, restrictions on quota transfers are embedded in the policy of “relative stability,” which aims to ensure that each member state receives its share of the catch irrespective of economic efﬁciencies that may arise through specialization and trade in quota. Despite this, as with any command-and-control mechanism, ﬁshers have managed to access the quota of other countries through quota-hopping. This has resulted in higher transactions costs than otherwise might have occurred had international trading been permitted. Fisheries management in the United Kingdom or Europe, however, cannot be considered a success even from the perspective of the objective of maintaining regional employment. The decline in stocks and proﬁtability has resulted in ﬂeet restructuring programs that have reduced the number of ﬁshers as well as vessels. For the smaller vessels, ﬂeet numbers have declined even without additional government assistance. A key lesson is that attempting to maintain unviable ﬁshing activities for the sake of

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coastal communities does not provide any lasting beneﬁts to these communities. Perpetuating overcapacity to maintain employment is, at best, a short-run option, as declining stocks result in either forced exit of vessels through economic forces (e.g., bankruptcy) or the need for intervention through buyback programs, both of which result in reduced regional employment in the ﬁshing industry. Investment in other (nonﬁshing) activities and providing alternative employment activities are likely to result in more beneﬁts to both the coastal communities and the ﬁshing industry by enabling it to adjust. Enhancing transferability of quota within the United Kingdom, and even among countries, is likely to provide economic and resource beneﬁts. While this may result in adverse regional employment implications, the current management system is only delaying these changes, and imposing additional costs on the industry in the mean time. Enhancing transferability between countries will require some form of regional, rather than national, management system. Of primary concern is that TACs are set appropriately for stocks in a given area irrespective of who might eventually harvest them. For example, this might involve managing the North Sea as a ﬁshery (or set of ﬁsheries) rather than just allocating quotas to contiguous countries. Given that stocks of most species fall within broad geographic areas, and the existence of regional advisory councils, regional management is feasible and would avoid inconsistencies in management systems among countries as well as competition in the political arena among countries. Rather than create an additional layer of administration, regional management authorities could be established that replace many of the functions undertaken by the different agencies in each country, avoiding duplication of resources and also enabling better coordination of research activities. Such regional management and the potential for quota trade among countries will require a change in mindset of both the industry and national governments. Without such a change in mindset, however, the industry will continue to be hamstrung by the complexity of management systems within which it has to operate, developed to achieve objectives that are impractical in the longer term. Recent events in Scotland suggest that U.K. ﬁsheries are unlikely to make the transition to a better outcome in the near future. Finally, the continued pressure from environmental lobby groups and the United Kingdom’s

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draft marine bill are likely to result in signiﬁcant changes to the way in which marine ﬁshing activities are managed. In particular, environmental and conservation groups will have a substantial input into marine management, including ﬁsheries. As a consequence, it is likely that the ﬁshing industry will become increasingly marginalized in the public debate about how the marine environment should be protected, both spatially (e.g., in terms of the establishment of an increasing number of MPAs and/or no-take zones) and in terms of limiting damage to resources and habitats (e.g., through the closure of certain ﬁsheries or the banning or restriction of destructive ﬁshing gears).

Acknowledgments We thank the anonymous reviewer for their useful comments on the earlier draft of this chapter.

Notes 1. 1972 Act of Accession of Denmark, Ireland, Norway, and the United Kingdom to the EC, OJ L73, 27.3.72, p. 1. 2. Member states are fully responsible for marine conservation within their 200-nautical-mile economic zone. Only ﬁsheries management responsibility has been passed to the European Community (De Santo and Jones 2007). 3. The actual decline in vessel numbers due to natural attrition and consolidation between 1983 and 1997 is uncertain as the way in which ﬁshing vessel were registered (and hence counted) changed in 1990. The estimate of 600 vessels is based on known changes in vessel numbers between 1990 and 1997 over and above the decommissioned vessels. 4. The principle of relative stability is fundamental to the CFP and ensures that each country’s level of access to the resource is constant (in relative terms) over time. This is implemented through ﬁxed shares of the total allowable catches (agreed in 1982) being allocated to each country. 5. Other closures also exist that are not necessarily related to recovery plans. 6. Final TACs are determined annually by the Council of Ministers (the ministers responsible for ﬁsheries from each member state) following advice from ICES, the European Commission (which in turn has input from the Scientiﬁc, Technical, and Economic Committee for Fisheries), and industry (through lobbying). TACs often diverge from the scientiﬁc advice as a result of the political negotiation process.

7. The SFIA has undertaken economic surveys of U.K. ﬁsheries since the early 1990s. Earlier surveys were primarily of the Scottish ﬂeet. Broader surveys of the whole U.K. ﬂeet were introduced more recently, with the 2001 survey being the ﬁrst comprehensive U.K. ﬂeet economic survey. 8. Details on the development of the VCU system are given in Pascoe and Coglan (2000), along with an analysis of the incentives created under the system and implications for ﬂeet restructuring. 9. This took the form of a temporary area closure to protect the spawning stock of cod in the North Sea. A longer term cod recovery plan was developed in 2002. 10. The Marine and Coastal Access Bill completed its Committee stage on 21 April 2009. It is currently (May 2009) in the House of Lords. 11. As noted earlier, the U.K. ﬂeet has contracted over and above the decommissioning program as low stock levels of the key species have reduced the proﬁtability of the industry and forced a number of vessels out. Had stock levels been maintained at a higher level, potentially fewer vessels would have exited even under an ITQ scheme, vessels exiting would have been able to do so with a ﬁnancial reward rather than bankruptcy, and higher incomes may have offset the negative impacts of ﬂeet reductions in coastal communities.

References Anderson, J., H. Curtis, R. Boyle, and K. Graham (2008). 2005 Economic Survey of the UK Fishing Fleet. Edinburgh: Seaﬁsh Industry Authority. Boncoeur, J., L. Coglan, B. Le Gallic, and S. Pascoe (2000). On the (ir)relevance of rates of return measures of economic performance to small boats. Fisheries Research 49(2): 105–115. Cabinet Ofﬁce (2004). Net Beneﬁts: A Sustainable and Proﬁtable Future for UK Fishing. London: Cabinet Ofﬁce Strategy Unit. DEFRA (2006). Making Changes to Your Fishing Vessel Licence. London: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Publications. DEFRA (2007). Fisheries 2027: A Long-Term Vision for Sustainable Fisheries. London: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Publications. De Santo, E.M., and P.J.S. Jones (2007). Offshore marine conservation policies in the north east Atlantic: Emerging tensions and opportunities. Marine Policy 31: 336–347. Hatcher, A.C. (1997). Producers’ organizations and devolved ﬁsheries management in the United Kingdom: Collective and individual quota systems. Marine Policy 21(6): 519–533.

Fisheries Management in the United Kingdom Hatcher, A., and S. Cunningham (1994). The Development of Fishing Rights in UK Fisheries Policy. CEMARE Research Paper 69. Portsmouth, U.K.: University of Portsmouth. Hatcher, A., S. Pascoe, J. Frere, and C. Robinson (2002). “Quota-hopping” and the foreign ownership of UK ﬁshing vessels. Marine Policy 26(1): 1–11. MFA (2007). UK Sea Fisheries Statistics 2007. London: Marine and Fisheries Agency. Natura 2000 (2007). Guidelines for the Establishment of the Natura 2000 Network in the Marine Environment: Application of the Habitats and Birds Directives. ec.europa.eu/ environment/nature/natura2000/marine/docs/ marine_guidelines.pdf. OSPAR Commission (2000). Quality status report, 2000. London: Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North East Atlantic. Pascoe, S., and A. Burnett (2007). Recovering from overexploitation: The European ﬁsheries of the North Sea. International Journal of Global Environmental Issues 7(2/3): 158–173. Pascoe, S., and L. Coglan (2000). Implications of differences in technical efﬁciency of ﬁshing boats for capacity measures and reduction. Marine Policy 24(4): 301–307. Pascoe, S., and D. Tingley (2006). Economic capacity estimation in ﬁsheries: A nonparametric ray approach. Resource and Energy Economics 28: 124–138. Read, A. (2000). International quota trading. In: A. Hatcher and D. Tingley (eds). International Relations and the Common Fisheries Policy. Proceedings of the fourth workshop

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held in Bergen, Norway, 26–28 October. EU FAIR Concerted Action on Economics and the Common Fisheries Policy: Perspectives for the Future Economic Management of Europe’s Fisheries. Portsmouth, U.K.: Centre for the Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources. Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (2004). Turning the Tide—Addressing the Impact of Fisheries on the Marine Environment. www.rcep.org.uk/ﬁshreport.htm Tingley, D. (2005). Northern Ireland Fleet Futures Analysis (2004–2013)—Methodology and Results. Belfast: Sea Fisheries Division, Department of Agriculture and Rural Development Northern Ireland. www. dardni.gov.uk/index/publications/pubsdard-fisheries-farming-and-food/fisheries-niﬂeet-futures-analysis.htm Tingley, D. (2007). Measurement and management of short-run excess capacity in the Scottish ﬁshing ﬂeet. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Portsmouth. Tingley, D., and S. Pascoe (2005). Factors affecting capacity utilisation in English Channel ﬁsheries. Journal of Agricultural Economics 56(2): 287–305. Scottish Government (2008a). Future Scottish Quota Management and Licensing System (SQMLS). www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/ Fisheries/Sea-Fisheries/17681/SQMLS Scottish Government (2008b). Safeguarding Our Fishing Rights: The Future of Quota Management and Licensing in Scotland—A Consultation Paper. www.scotland.gov.uk/ Publications/2008/05/19155732/2

29 Governance of Fisheries in the United States DANIEL S. HOLLAND

29.1. INTRODUCTION The United States is the world’s third largest producer of wild ﬁsh catch (Food and Agriculture Organization 2007). Landings from U.S. commercial ﬁsheries exceeded 4.3 million metric tons worth $4 billion in 2006 (National Marine Fisheries Service [NMFS] 2007). Commercial ﬁsheries in the United States support more than 300,000 full-time jobs in ﬁshing and processing. Marine ﬁsheries also provide recreational ﬁshing to almost 17 million users and support a large sport-ﬁshing industry. While ﬁsheries are a very small part of the overall U.S. economy, they are an important economic driver and a key part of the cultural identity in some coastal states. General public interest and concern over management of marine resources in the United States has grown over the last decade as environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become increasingly active in advocacy, litigation, and public education aimed at promoting conservation of ﬁsheries and marine biodiversity. In general terms, the governance system and primary objectives for ﬁsheries management in the United States have remained relatively unchanged since the late 1970s. However, there have been substantial shifts in management approaches and priorities over that period, and change continues. In 1976, the Fishery Conservation and Management Act1 (FCMA) established the exclusive management

authority of the United States over ﬁshery resources within 200 miles of its coast. The FCMA brought vast ﬁshery resources in U.S. federal waters under the control of a new governance system anchored on eight regional ﬁshery management councils. The council system implemented a form of decentralized co-management, giving ﬁshing industry stakeholders a signiﬁcant degree of control over management. The councils were given primary authority for managing offshore ﬁsheries in their regions under the oversight of the Secretary of Commerce. Fisheries within three miles of the coast remained under the control of state governments. The FCMA requires the councils to develop ﬁshery management plans (FMPs) that are consistent with broad national guidelines but leaves the councils considerable ﬂexibility in designing management measures and allocating access to resources. Under the management of the regional councils, U.S. ﬁsheries have transitioned through different management approaches reﬂecting changing priorities. The initial priority of the FCMA was development of domestic ﬁsheries and ﬁshing capacity. By the early 1990s when the process of “nationalizing” ﬁsheries in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) was complete,2 many important ﬁsheries were overexploited, and the ﬁshing capacity licensed to participate in many ﬁsheries far exceeded that needed to harvest the ﬁsheries efﬁciently (Garcia and Newton 1994; Holland 1999; NMFS 1996). The focus of policy and ﬁshery

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Governance of Fisheries in the United States management quickly switched from ﬁshery development to controlling catch and ﬁshing capacity.3 More recently, priorities have shifted toward developing management systems that are more economically efﬁcient, which has led to implementation of “rights-based” management approaches such as individual ﬁshing quota (IFQ) systems and harvest cooperatives now referred to in legislation as limited-access privilege programs (LAPPs).4 Increasing concerns and legal requirements to account for ﬁshery impacts on habitat and the function of marine ecosystems are driving further changes in U.S. ﬁshery governance and management that are only beginning to take shape. Implementation of ecosystem-based management (EBM) is likely to be difﬁcult and contentious as it may require fundamental changes in the governance structure, the organization of management planning, and the delineation of access privileges. This chapter discusses and evaluates the evolving governance structure and management approaches for U.S. ﬁsheries since passage of the FCMA in 1976. The chapter discusses current trends in U.S. ﬁshery management and identiﬁes constraints that are impeding progress in developing and implementing improved ﬁshery management approaches that address current and emerging management priorities. The focus of the chapter is commercial ﬁsheries in federal waters, with some reference to governance of state water ﬁsheries and interaction with recreational ﬁsheries.

29.2. THE FORMAL GOVERNANCE SYSTEM The Secretary of Commerce working through the NMFS which is a branch of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has ultimate authority over marine ﬁsheries in U.S. federal waters. However, much of the responsibility for designing management plans for speciﬁc ﬁsheries is delegated to local stakeholders through the council system. The FCMA established eight regional ﬁshery management councils and gave them authority to recommend management policies for ﬁsheries in federal waters in their respective regions. The councils provides a forum in which knowledgeable local stakeholders can participate in crafting management systems that are responsive to the particular conditions and stakeholder interests for each ﬁshery. Policies must be approved by the

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Secretary of Commerce and are then implemented by federal regulations and enforced by NMFS with assistance from the U.S. Coast Guard. For some protected and highly migratory resources, NMFS develops management plans directly. The councils are composed of voting members from the states with coastlines in that region or historical participation in the ﬁsheries (e.g., the North Paciﬁc Council includes voting members from Washington and Oregon). The voting members of the council are primarily individuals appointed by the Secretary of Commerce based on recommendations of the governors of the coastal states in the region. The directors of the state ﬁshery agencies and the regional director of NMFS are also voting members. Council members are paid, but only for the time actually spent on council activities and most have other jobs or businesses. The great majority of appointed council members represent commercial or recreational ﬁshing interests or related industries. Many members are active ﬁshermen or own vessels that are active in the ﬁsheries their council manages. Some councils include representatives of environmental NGOs, academics, and representatives of Native American groups, but these represent a small minority of council seats. No single state has majority control of any council, with the exception of the North Paciﬁc Council, where Alaska has a majority of council seats. The councils have professional, federally funded staffs that draft and analyze the management actions proposed by the councils and facilitate the extensive set of public meetings in which the council and its committees design policy proposals and receive public input on them. The councils develop policy in a public process with extensive regulatory review. Policy development and implementation can be extremely slow, often taking several years for a major change in management. Committees of council members for each FMP develop management measures for that ﬁshery in meetings that are open to the public and provide extensive opportunity of public input as decisions are taken. Policies agreed to by the councils must then be approved by the Secretary of Commerce and implemented through a federal rule-making process that allows further public comment. For major actions, there is an extensive regulatory review process, including preparation of social and environmental impact statements required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.

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29.2.1. Interjurisdictional Issues Control of ﬁsheries in waters out to three miles has, in general, been left to the respective states, which apply a wide range of approaches to governing and managing these ﬁsheries. Since many ﬁsh stocks straddle two or more state jurisdictions and/or federal waters, various arrangements have been put in place to facilitate cooperative management of these resources. For some ﬁsh stocks that are prosecuted primarily in federal waters but span more than one council jurisdiction, councils are given joint jurisdiction, with a lead council designated to develop the management plan. In some cases the states have been delegated management authority over ﬁsheries that straddle state and federal waters (e.g., crab, salmon, and herring ﬁsheries in Alaska). In other cases the councils have taken over the primary management role in ﬁsheries that extends into state waters (e.g., groundﬁsh ﬁsheries in most jurisdictions).5 Regional interstate management commissions have been created to facilitate cooperative management of ﬁsh stocks that straddle state boundaries. These commissions have varying levels of authority. State compliance with plans developed by the Paciﬁc and Gulf States marine ﬁsheries commissions is voluntary. However, the Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act of 1994 authorized the Secretary of Commerce to close ﬁsheries that the Atlantic States Commission determines are out of compliance with its management plan. The United States has sharing agreements with Canada for managing some transboundary stocks. For example, the International Paciﬁc Halibut Commission determines total allowable catches (TACs) for each country, though each country regulates their own ﬂeets. The United States and Canada also have sharing agreements for Paciﬁc salmon and whiting and, since 2003, for transboundary stocks of cod, haddock, and yellowtail on Georges Bank in the Northwest Atlantic. For other transboundary stocks, there is cooperation on stock assessment but no formal sharing agreement. The United States also maintains membership in a number of regional ﬁshery management organizations that manage various high-seas ﬁsheries.

29.2.2. Legislative Mandates for NMFS and the Councils The FCMA includes a number of broad national standards that guide (and restrict) the management

decisions of the councils and NMFS implementation of them. These standards and other language in the FCMA are interpreted by NMFS in guidance for councils and in federal regulations. The original FCMA include seven standards, and three more were added in 1996. National Standard 1, the most important and overriding standard, states: “Conservation and management measures shall prevent overﬁshing while achieving, on a continuing basis, the optimum yield from each ﬁshery for the United States ﬁshing industry.” Optimum is deﬁned as “that which will provide the greatest overall beneﬁt to the nation, particularly with respect to food production and recreational opportunities, and taking into account the protection of marine ecosystems; is prescribed as such on the basis of the maximum sustainable yield from the ﬁshery, as reduced by any relevant economic, social, or ecological factor; and, in the case of an overﬁshed ﬁshery, provides for rebuilding to a level consistent with producing the maximum sustainable yield in such ﬁshery.” Other standards dictate use of the best scientiﬁc information available; that an individual stock of ﬁsh shall be managed as a unit throughout its range; and that management measures shall not discriminate between residents of different states, shall consider efﬁciency, shall allow for variations among, and contingencies in, ﬁsheries, ﬁshery resources, and catches, and shall, where practicable, minimize costs, and avoid unnecessary duplication. The three newer standards require management decisions to take into account the importance of ﬁshery resources to ﬁshing communities in order to provide for their sustained participation and minimize adverse economic impacts on them, minimize bycatch and bycatch mortality, and promote the safety of human life at sea. The ten standards can sometimes conﬂict, and, while there is no ofﬁcial hierarchy to them, NMFS and the councils have operated under the assumption that National Standard 1 trumps all others. Councils have had more ﬂexibility to address priorities of other standards when conﬂicts arise.

29.2.3. Reauthorizations and Amendments of the FCMA Several important changes have been made to the FCMA during reauthorizations in 1996 and 2007. The 1996 reauthorization of the FCMA explicitly required NMFS to identify ﬁsh stocks that are

Governance of Fisheries in the United States overﬁshed or where overﬁshing is occurring and, within one year, to prepare a plan to end overﬁshing and rebuild overﬁshed stocks with a rebuilding time frame not to exceed ten years when feasible. The terms “overﬁshing” and “overﬁshed” are deﬁned as the mortality rate and the biomass level, which jeopardizes the capacity of a ﬁshery to produce the maximum sustainable yield on a continuing basis, respectively. Another critical element of the 1996 reauthorization was a four-year moratorium on the submission or approval of any new IFQ programs. The moratorium was put in place to address concerns by legislators from key states (particularly Alaska; see, e.g., Jung 1996) that consolidation and structural change under IFQs would be harmful to some segments of the ﬁshing industry and ﬁshing communities. Although this moratorium was only meant to last four years, no new IFQs were implemented until 2006. In 2004 the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy released a report with several recommendations that were subsequently included in the 2007 FCMA reauthorization. Perhaps most important, it required the councils to set annual catch limits below allowable biological catch limits that do not allow overﬁshing and will rebuild overﬁshed stocks. Councils must develop accountability measures that ensure either that the allowable catch limit is not breached or that the FMP automatically corrects and compensates for any overage. The 2007 reauthorization reafﬁrms the ability of councils to implement LAPPs, which include but are not limited to IFQs. Although the moratorium on IFQs was lifted, a number of new standards and requirements have been added that may restrict the ﬂexibility of IFQs and increase the difﬁculty of implementing new ones. The reauthorization requires the New England and Gulf of Mexico councils to go through a referendum process to get approval from ﬁshery stakeholders (permit holders and potentially crew members) to implement a new IFQ system. For the Gulf of Mexico, a simply majority vote is required, but in New England a two-thirds majority must approve any new IFQ. Other provisions limit the duration of privileges, require setting consolidation limits, and require consideration of allocations to communities and crew. The 2007 reauthorization requires the Secretary of Commerce to establish an advisory panel that will “expand the application of ecosystem principles in

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ﬁshery conservation and management activities.” It also requires the secretary to undertake “a complete a study on the state of the science for advancing the concepts and integration of ecosystem considerations in regional ﬁshery management.” It does not, however, create speciﬁc new requirements for councils to implement EBM or provide additional funding to support EBM.

29.3. A PROGRESSION OF PRIORITIES AND MANAGEMENT APPROACHES IN U.S. FISHERIES The ﬁshery management approaches and tools used by the councils for different ﬁsheries are diverse, both between and within regions. They include various combinations of gear, size, and sex limitations, effort and catch limitations applied at the individual and aggregate level, closed areas and seasons, limited entry licensing, individual quotas, and harvest cooperatives. There have been noticeable shifts in the types of approaches used over time reﬂecting changing conditions in the ﬁsheries and changing priorities both of local stakeholders and as dictated by national legislation. Over the last thirty plus years following implementation of the FCMA in 1976, most major ﬁsheries in federal waters progressed from essentially open access ﬁsheries, primarily ﬁshed by foreign ﬂeets, to tightly regulated ﬁsheries with access limited to a relatively small and still shrinking set of U.S. permit holders. Most ﬁsheries took one of two routes initially, applying either an input or an output oriented approach at the aggregate industry level (ﬁgure 29.1). With either approach this was followed by implementation of limited access in some form and, in most cases, a process of reducing the numbers of vessels with access. As the need to constrain catches and prevent negative outcomes of competition for limited resources increased, input controls were added to output control systems, and vise versa, leaving most ﬁsheries with highly complex and often inefﬁcient management systems. This helped spur development of so-called “rights-based” systems of management, which are now referred to as LAPPs. These programs, which provide individuals or groups with dedicated access to a speciﬁc share of the TAC, directly limit catch but eliminate many of the regulatory constraints on the ﬁshery and provide the incentive and opportunity for ﬁshermen to maximize the net value of

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Input Controls

Aggregate Output Control

Access Limits

Rights-Based Management (Limited Access Privilege Programs) IFQs

FIGURE

Cooperatives

29.1 The progression of management approaches in U.S.

ﬁsheries

their allocation of catch by reducing harvest costs, increasing landed value, or both. This progression of management approaches occurred on different timelines for different ﬁsheries, depending on how quickly they developed and became overcapitalized. Movement toward rights-based approaches was delayed for some ﬁsheries by the moratorium on new IFQ programs that went into effect in 1996.

29.3.1. Americanization When the United States extended its EEZ to 200 miles in 1976, a stated purpose of the FCMA was to promote development by the U.S. ﬁshing industry of ﬁsheries that were not fully utilized by U.S. ﬁshermen—the “Americanization” of ﬁshery resources in the U.S. EEZ. Americanization began by limiting the catches of foreign participants and eventually led to their exclusion from the ﬁsheries within the U.S. EEZ (see, e.g., Megrey and Wespestad 1990). Like most countries that extended their EEZ out to 200 miles, the United States did not immediately exclude all foreign ﬁshing vessels, but did so gradually as domestic capacity to prosecute the ﬁsheries and process and market the catch was developed. In most regions, foreign ﬁshing was phased out in the 1980s, though in some ﬁsheries in the North Paciﬁc foreign harvesting was not eliminated until

1988 and joint venture operations continued until 1991 (NMFS 1996). Development of domestic ﬁshing capacity, which was necessary to displace foreign ﬂeets,6 was actively promoted by U.S. policy. The Federal Fisheries Investment Study (Federal Fisheries Investment Task Force 1999) documents a wide variety of federal policies and programs that contributed to development of ﬁshing capacity in U.S. ﬁsheries, including favorable tax treatment and subsidized lending for investments in ﬁshing vessels.7 These incentive programs along with the economic opportunities offered by free access to bountiful ﬁshery resources, were hugely successful at motivating the rapid development of domestic ﬁshing and processing capacity throughout U.S. ﬁsheries.

29.3.2. From Fishery Development to Fishery Constraint By the early 1990s, many U.S. ﬁsheries already had substantial excess ﬁshing capacity, and many ﬁsh stocks were being ﬁshed at unsustainable levels (NMFS 1996). In some cases, this was the result of a failure to rebuild stocks after overexploitation by foreign ﬂeets, but the simple fact remained that exploitation rates were too high and ﬁshing

Governance of Fisheries in the United States capacity was much greater than required to harvest at sustainable levels. Even for ﬁsheries that were biologically well managed, as many in the North Paciﬁc were, excess capacity undermined the economic viability of the ﬁsheries and caused other problems. Although moratoriums on entry were implemented in most U.S. ﬁsheries by the early 1990s, the doors were typically not closed before a substantial surplus of permit holders and ﬁshing capacity had been permitted. The need to reduce catches in many ﬁsheries and the resulting cuts in catch per vessel or the amount of time they were allowed to operate spurred calls for direct reductions in ﬁshing capacity. In many cases council’s simply took away access for inactive permit holders, but this was often insufﬁcient, and several ﬁsheries implemented vessel or license buyback programs, in most cases funded by taxpayer dollars. These were used both as a means to increase the proﬁtability of the remaining ﬁshers and to provide economic assistance in times of crisis such as a stock collapse or major reallocation of catch to another sector (Holland et al. 1999). Signiﬁcant vessel and permit buyback programs were undertaken in the West Coast salmon ﬁsheries, the New England and West Coast groundﬁsh ﬁsheries, the Gulf of Mexico shrimp ﬁsheries, and the Bering Sea pollock and crab ﬁsheries. Councils took diverse paths to addressing the need to control overﬁshing. The Paciﬁc and North Paciﬁc councils favored output controls (e.g., TACs), while the other councils tended to rely more on effort controls and technical measures. But in most cases, the ﬁsheries eventually ended up with a complex combination of controls on who could ﬁsh, when and where they could ﬁsh, and the gear they could use. The alternative input- and outputoriented approaches pursued by councils on opposite coasts are well illustrated by the New England groundﬁsh ﬁshery and the Paciﬁc halibut ﬁshery, respectively. By 1991, key groundﬁsh stocks in New England were at record low biomass levels, and there were no effective constraints on catch or effort (New England Fishery Management Council 1996). A lawsuit ﬁled by the Conservation Law Foundation led the council and NMFS to develop a new system of individual effort controls with vessels allocated a set number of days at sea (DAS) designed to keep catch below target TACs (Conservation Law Foundation 2008). The system, which was implemented in the mid-1990s, was unsuccessful at limiting

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ﬁshing mortality on some key species, and a progressive series of cuts in DAS were implemented, leaving the average vessel with less than 50 days to ﬁsh by 2004 (New England Fishery Management Council 2006). To avoid even deeper cuts in DAS allocations, the council had implemented trip limits for cod and yellowtail ﬂounder, year-round and seasonal closures in areas with historically high catch rates of those species, and increases in mesh size. By 2006 it appeared that mortality on most groundﬁsh stocks had ﬁnally been constrained below overﬁshing thresholds, but most of the ﬂeet had been driven to the edge of economic viability, and trip limits were resulting in large amounts of discarding of marketable ﬁsh. Even the most adamant supporters of the DAS system were ready to consider other options, including individual quotas, which had previously been an anathema in New England. While overﬁshing was widespread throughout many of the regions, it was not universal. For example, catches in many of the North Paciﬁc ﬁsheries were generally contained to sustainable levels with “hard” TACs that closed ﬁsheries when the TAC was reached. However, an excess of ﬁshing and processing capacity fueled a “race for ﬁsh” that undermined the economic viability of the ﬁshery and created a host of other problems. A classic example of this was the Paciﬁc Halibut ﬁshery. As participation increased in the 1980s, it became difﬁcult to monitor catch in real time, so managers would set short openings designed to keep catches within TACs. Season lengths decreased continually until, by 1990, they were down to one 24-hour period in many areas and more than 3,000 vessels were participating in the ﬁshery (Hartley and Fina 2001). Excessive harvesting and processing capacity increased costs and led to poor quality and market gluts that reduced the value of catches. Vessels were ﬁshing in unsafe conditions to avoid missing short openings, and lost gear and ghost ﬁshing by that gear were widespread problems.

29.3.3. Rights-Based Management In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of the ﬁshery management councils began to experiments with individual quota systems as a way to improve proﬁtability and safety in ﬁsheries that already had developed excess ﬁshing capacity. The Mid Atlantic Council implemented the ﬁrst U.S. IFQ for the surf clam and ocean quahog ﬁshery in 1990, with goals of improving economic efﬁciency and safety and

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better managing catch (National Research Council [NRC] 1999).The South Atlantic Council implemented an IFQ in the wreckﬁsh ﬁshery in 1992 in response to a rapid rise in catch and participation between 1987 and 1991 that was leading to a shortening season and a “derby” ﬁshery (NRC 1999). An IFQ program was recommended by the North Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council for the halibut and sableﬁsh ﬁxed-gear ﬁsheries in 1991, though it was not implemented until 1995. The IFQ program for halibut and sableﬁsh was intended to address a variety of problems stemming from the “race for ﬁsh,” including allocation conﬂicts, gear conﬂicts, deadloss due to ghost ﬁshing by lost gear, excessive bycatch and discards, excess harvesting capacity, reduced product quality as reﬂected in prices, poor safety, lack of economic stability for ﬁshery participants and communities, and a lack of rural coastal community development (North Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council 1997). Each of these ﬁsheries had substantial excess capacity, which was a primary reason for implementing IFQs; however, the consolidation that inevitably followed was controversial. In the case of the surf clam/ocean quahog ﬁshery, this consolidation was relatively unhindered, and ownership of ocean quahog quota became highly concentrated. This “highlighted tradeoffs involved in terms of loss of jobs, decreased opportunities for young people and hired captains to become vessel owners, and loss of markets for independent harvesters to ﬁnd markets” (NRC 1999). When the halibut/ sableﬁsh IFQ was developed, the council deliberately sought to limit consolidation. A number of restrictions were put on quota ownership, use, and transfer to mitigate concerns that traditional ﬁshing communities would be hurt by consolidation and that the ﬁshery would become industrialized and run for the beneﬁts of absentee quota holders. Still, the halibut IFQ was very controversial, and it would prove to be the last IFQ in the United States for many years. The 1996 reauthorization of the FCMA put a four-year moratorium on new IFQ programs in response to concerns that consolidation and structural change under IFQs would result in industrialization of ﬁsheries, would put smaller ﬁshing communities at risk, and would disadvantage processors with stranded capital. It also mandated a national study of IFQ management by the National Academy of Sciences. With new IFQs at least temporarily prohibited, harvest cooperatives emerged as an alternative

mechanism to realize many of the beneﬁts of IFQs. The use of harvest cooperatives as a rights-based management approach began with the development of a cooperative of catcher-processors in the Paciﬁc whiting ﬁshery. The catcher-processor ﬂeet as a whole had been allocated an exclusive share of the whiting TAC. A small group of companies owned all of the permitted vessels and was able to negotiate a contractual agreement among themselves to allocate shares of the total allocation to the individual companies. This enabled them to avoid competing and to reduce capacity in the ﬁshery and increase the quality of harvest. The agreement did not require a council action, though the group did seek and acquire a ﬁnding from the Justice Department that the cooperative would not be deemed illegal for anticompetition reasons. The companies involved in the whiting cooperative were also involved in the Bering Sea pollock ﬁshery and saw even greater beneﬁts from a similar arrangement in that ﬁshery (Criddle and Macinco 2000). However, because the catcher-processor ﬂeet did not have an exclusive allocation of pollock, governmental assistance was necessary to implement cooperatives. This was done directly by Congress through the American Fisheries Act of 1999, which authorized the formation of ﬁshery cooperatives for catcher-processors and an associated ﬂeet of catcher vessels, and for the ﬂoating processor and inshore sectors in 2000. The American Fisheries Act identiﬁed an exclusive group of vessels and processors eligible to participate in harvesting and processing Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands pollock and made speciﬁc allocations to the cooperatives. The cooperative systems implemented were quite similar to an IFQ system in practice. The industry was able to reduce capacity and costs (partly with a vessel buyback ﬁnanced with a federal loan). With a slower ﬁshery and higher quality catch, the industry was able to increase the value of the ﬁshery by shifting substantial production from surimi (a ﬁsh paste used to make seafood analog products such as imitation crab) to higher valued ﬁllets. The harvest cooperatives on the West Coast served as a model for development of a management tool called “sectors” in the New England groundﬁsh ﬁshery. In 2004 the New England Council enabled self-selecting groups of ﬁshermen to apply for allocations of groundﬁsh (based on their catch history) and to develop their own plans for managing their catches within those allocations. The Georges Bank hook sector was implemented in 2004, followed

Governance of Fisheries in the United States by the Georges Bank ﬁxed gear sector a few years later. A large number of new sector proposals were submitted to the council in 2007, and the council began an amendment to approve new sectors and modify the policies for sectors including provisions for sectors to trade allocations. The council developed policies for use of sectors in other federally managed ﬁsheries in New England, though speciﬁc authorization will still be required for each FMP. By 2005, with expiration of the IFQ moratorium and the expectation that new IFQ programs would be explicitly authorized in the next FCMA reauthorization, most of the councils began considering new IFQ programs again. The North Paciﬁc Council implemented an IFQ for Bering Sea crab ﬁsheries in 2006. The Gulf of Mexico snapper ﬁshery IFQ was implemented in 2007. The New England Council approved an IFQ for its small-scale “general category” scallop ﬁshery in 2007. Development of the Paciﬁc groundﬁsh IFQ, which will be the ﬁrst multispecies IFQ in the United States, is under way with an expected implementation in 2010. The South Atlantic Council is now considering an IFQ for its grouper ﬁshery. Despite this resurgence of rights-based management in the United States, concerns and critics remain, and there are serious challenges in implementing rights-based systems in many ﬁsheries. Many people remain concerned that traditional ﬁshing communities will be hurt by LAPPs if consolidation is allowed, yet consolidation and increased efﬁciency will be required for ﬁsheries to compete in the global market place, particularly as fuel costs rise. There is resistance to gifting public trust resources to ﬁshermen or processors. The costs of monitoring and enforcement are likely to present a serious problem for IFQs and cooperatives in multispecies ﬁsheries, particularly for ﬁsheries with small vessels where paying observers may represent a large proportion of revenue. Greater use of electronic monitoring (cameras, sensors, location tracking) may provide a cost-effective means of monitoring catch, having been implemented with apparent success in the British Columbia groundﬁsh ﬁshery.

29.4. A NEW AGE OF ECOSYSTEM-BASED MANAGEMENT? FMPs, stock assessments and access privileges in the United States are organized around single

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species or groups of jointly caught species (e.g., a groundﬁsh complex). However, scientists, ﬁshery managers and ﬁshermen have begun calling for greater acknowledgment of the human and natural linkages between separately managed species and the larger marine ecosystem, and there are already some legislative mandates to do so. The 1994 amendments to the marine mammal protection act required the Secretary of Commerce through NOAA to implement take reduction plans that reduce incidental catch of marine mammals. A large number of marine species have been listed as threatened or endangered under the 1973 Endangered Species Act, including several species of marine turtles, a variety of marine mammals, a number of andronomous ﬁsh, one species of abalone, and one species of sea grass. These listings require the regulating agencies (NOAA or the Department of Fish and Wildlife) to implement recovery plans, many of which include ﬁshery management measures. Citing habitat damages as “one of the greatest long-term threats to the viability of commercial and recreational ﬁsheries,” the 1996 FCMA reauthorization required the councils to minimize to the extent practical the adverse impacts of ﬁshing on essential ﬁsh habitat. The councils have generally deﬁned essential ﬁsh habitat and are now designating “habitat areas of particular concern” in which certain ﬁshing activities and gears are likely to be restricted. To date, regulatory actions that might be characterized as EBM have been primarily to impose gear restrictions and area closures to reduce environmental impacts of ﬁshing (Holland 2007). However, there are examples of management plans, and actions intended to account for the biological interactions of species and calls for these are increasing. For example, the aggregate TACs of the different species in the Bering Sea groundﬁsh ﬁshery are capped in recognition that not all can be ﬁshed at maximum sustainable yield. Herring TACs in the Gulf of Maine have been reduced and midwater trawls banned during summer out of concerns that local depletion and dispersal (from the midwater trawling) of this migrating stock are negatively affecting various species that prey on herring, including tuna and whales—though a scientiﬁc evidence for this assertion is at present lacking. With growing calls for EBM by scientists and environmental groups, and the mandates in the 2007 reauthorization, it seems likely the trend toward EBM will accelerate. However, there are considerable

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hurdles that will hinder implementation, not least a lack of agreement on what constitutes EBM. The delineation of access privileges by species or species complex naturally creates resistance against tradeoffs that involve one ﬁsheries sacriﬁce even when overall beneﬁts are increased. In most cases, there is presently insufﬁcient understanding of ecosystem processes and biological interactions to create stock assessment models that incorporate these factors, so management actions to account for them tend to be somewhat ad hoc and subject to challenges of their scientiﬁc credibility. In addition, long-term changes in ecosystems resulting from climate change make it difﬁcult to determine how and whether to try to conserve ecosystem integrity.

29.5. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS The governance system for U.S. ﬁsheries can be characterized as ﬂexible and participatory. Local stakeholders have had and will continue to have a substantial say in how ﬁsheries are managed. Management approaches will likely remain diverse and will adapt to changing priorities. In response to stronger legal requirements to end overﬁshing, councils are implementing more conservative management that can be expected to reduce if not eliminate overﬁshing and rebuild overﬁshed stocks. Interest and participation in the management process by recreational ﬁshing interests and environmental NGOs are broadening the focus of management beyond maximizing commercial yields. Councils are beginning to integrate broader ecosystem considerations into management plans, including considering the role of some species as prey for other target species and for marine mammals. The governance system is, however, slow, litigious, and reactive, driven by crisis, threats of law suits, and short-term biological and economic considerations. Economic performance of U.S. ﬁsheries is generally poor outside the North Paciﬁc. And NOAA and the research community lack the resources to provide the scientiﬁc information needed to implement EBM. Greater use of rights-based management through IFQs and harvest cooperatives should increase the ability of ﬁshery stakeholders to more quickly adapt management to threats and opportunities. It should also bring efﬁciency gains that will be necessary to compensate for rising fuel prices and recovery of management costs. These efﬁciency gains will

inevitably be accompanied by consolidation that will displace some individuals, disadvantage some communities, and change the culture of ﬁsheries, but they should create a healthier and more resilient industry and reduce the need for government ﬁnancial assistance. Constraints on consolidation and limits on security of property rights intended to address these concerns may substantially undermine efﬁciency gains, but there may be other approaches to achieving these social objectives that will be more effective and efﬁcient. Better access to ﬁnancing for purchase of quota or permits is critical to enable individual and perhaps small ﬁshing communities to compete with larger corporate entities. Ownership of ﬁshery assets through quota or permit banks can enable communities to maintain access to ﬁsheries. Ironically, the FCMA language tends to undermine the security of the property right associated with LAPPs, making it harder to acquire private ﬁnancing. To even the playing ﬁeld with larger corporate entities with ready access to capital, there may be a role for governmental assistance in ﬁnancing through direct ﬁnancing or loan guarantees. Growing demands to address ecosystem impacts of ﬁsheries present more fundamental and difﬁcult problems for U.S. ﬁshery management. The singlespecies orientation of ﬁshery science and even the legal requirements to manage species to individual maximum sustainable yield objectives restrict managers ability to make trade-offs between ﬁsheries that may yield overall beneﬁts. Legislative mandates to implement EBM may encourage councils to better account for environmental impacts of ﬁshing and linkages between ﬁsheries, but access rights deﬁned along single-species lines will create strong resistance to actions that reduce productivity or proﬁtability of individual ﬁsheries even when they result in overall system gains. Market mechanisms that allow stakeholders that beneﬁt to compensate those who lose may reduce resistance to trade-offs between ﬁsheries or alternative uses of resources. For example, in an IFQ context it might be possible for quota owners of a predator species to collectively purchase and shelve a portion of quota of a prey species if doing so would lead to net gains. Environmental NGOs might purchase easements on permits or quota in return for implementation of more environmentally friendly ﬁshing practices. The Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense have already begun to use this approach with a pilot program in Morrow Bay, California.

Governance of Fisheries in the United States There is the potential to substantially increase the net beneﬁts the U.S. public (including commercial ﬁshery stakeholders) derive from marine ecosystems inside the U.S. EEZ. Realizing these gains will require greater investments in ﬁshery management and research. Monitoring and compliance systems associated with rights-based management are more costly but yield better data for management and greater efﬁciency. A healthier industry should be able to shoulder the increased costs as proﬁtability increases. Improved understanding of marine ecosystems will require increased research and data collection. Some of these costs should be recovered from commercial stakeholders that beneﬁt from well managed ﬁsheries, but many of these beneﬁts are public goods that validate public expenditures. The required expenditures are small relative to overall U.S. government expenditures and the longterm importance of the marine ecosystems.

Notes 1. This is often referred to as the Magnuson Act or the Magnuson-Stevens Act. 2. Alaskan Pollock and groundﬁsh ﬁsheries were the last to phase out foreign and then joint-venture operations, completing the process in 1991. In other regions and ﬁsheries foreign operations were eliminated more quickly. 3. As evidenced by the entry moratoriums, effort and capacity reduction programs and hard catch limits implemented by the councils in the early to mid-1990s and the emphasis on ending overﬁshing and rebuilding overﬁshed stocks in the 1996 reauthorization of the FCMA. 4. This is evidenced by the development of cooperative and IFQ programs by nearly all of the councils and the active promotion of IFQs and other LAPPs by NMFS since early in the G.W. Bush administration. 5. States often continue to license some smallscale ﬁshermen who operate solely in state waters, but regulations in federal FMPs apply to federally license ﬁshermen in state and federal waters. 6. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 62, Utilization of Living Resources: “Where the coastal State does not have the capacity to harvest the entire allowable catch, it shall, through agreements or other arrangements and pursuant to the terms, conditions, laws and regulations referred to in paragraph 4, give other States access to the surplus of the allowable catch.” 7. These included the capital construction fund program, which allowed vessels to place a portion

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of proﬁts untaxed into funds for building or upgrading vessels, and the Fishing Vessel Obligation Guarantee Program, which provided loan guarantees for vessel acquisition.

References Conservation Law Foundation (2008). The Road to Groundﬁsh Collapse and Turning the Corner to Recovery: A Brief History of the New England Fisheries Crisis (1976–1997). www. clf.org/programs/cases.asp?id=406 Criddle, K.R., and S. Macinko (2000). A requiem for the IFQ in US ﬁsheries? Marine Policy 24(6): 461–469. Federal Fisheries Investment Task Force (1999). Federal Fisheries Investment Task Force Report to Congress, July 1999. Washington D.C.: Federal Fisheries Investment Task Force, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Food and Agriculture Organization (2007). The State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2006. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization. Garcia, S.M., and C. Newton (1994). Current situation. Trends and prospects in world capture ﬁsheries. Paper presented at the Conference Fisheries Management, Global Trends, Seattle, Wash., 14–16 June 1994. Hartley, M., and M. Fina (2001). Changes in ﬂeet capacity following the introduction of individual vessel quotas in the Alaskan Paciﬁc halibut and sable ﬁshery. Pp. 186–207 in R. Shotton (ed). Case Studies on the Effect of Transferable Quota Rights on Fishing Fleet Capacity and Concentration of Ownership of Harvesting Rights. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 412. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization. Holland, D.S. (1999). On direct and indirect management of ﬁshing capacity. Marine Resource Economics 14(3): 263–267. Holland, D.S. (2007). Managing environmental impacts of ﬁshing: Input controls versus outcome oriented approaches. International Journal of Global Environmental Issues 7(2–3): 255–272. Holland, D., E. Gudmundsson, and J. Gates (1999). Do ﬁshing vessel buyback programs work: A survey of the evidence. Marine Policy 23(1): 47–69. Jung, H. (1996). Stevens seeks lid on quota, moratorium would stall pollock ﬁshery overhaul. Anchorage Daily New, 31 January. Megrey, B., and V.G. Wespestad (1990). Alaskan groundﬁsh resources: 10 years of management under the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and

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Management Act. North American Journal of Fisheries Management 10(2): 125–143. New England Fishery Management Council (1996). Final Amendment #7 to the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan Including a Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. In consultation with National Marine Fisheries Service, 7 February. Newburyport, MA: New England Fishery Management Council. New England Fishery Management Council (2006). Final Framework 42 to the Northeast Multispecies FMP. In consultation with National Marine Fisheries Service, 21 April. Newburyport, MA: New England Fishery Management Council. NMFS (1996). Our Living Oceans. The Economic Status of U.S. Fisheries, 1996. NOAA Technical

Memorandum NMFS F/SPO-22. Silver Spring, Md.: National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Department of Commerce. NMFS (2007). Fisheries of the United States 2006. Current Fishery Statistics No. 2006. Silver Spring, Md.: Ofﬁce of Science and Technology, National Marine Fisheries Service. North Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council (1997). Development of the Individual Fishing Quota Program for Sableﬁsh and Halibut Longline Fisheries Off Alaska. Anchorage, Alaska: North Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council. NRC (National Research Council) (1999). Sharing the Fish: Toward a National Policy on Individual Fishing Quotas. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

30 Canadian Marine Fisheries Management: A Case Study L. SCOTT PARSONS

30.1. INTRODUCTION

30.2. NATURE AND STATUS OF CANADA’S MARINE FISHERIES

This chapter describes major trends in Canada’s marine ﬁsheries and their management in recent years. In just 30 years from 1960 to 1990, these ﬁsheries went from underdevelopment to a situation of substantial overcapacity. Regulatory interventions mushroomed during the 1970s and 1980s. These included the introduction of seasonal total allowable catches (TACs), allocation of access among ﬂeet sectors, limited-entry licensing, and ultimately individual quotas (IQs), some transferable. Initially, major beneﬁts appear to ﬂow from Canada’s extension of ﬁsheries jurisdiction to 200 miles in 1977. These were dissipated by overexpansion in both the harvesting and processing sectors. The bubble of euphoria burst in July 1992 with the dramatic collapse of the Newfoundland and Labrador northern cod ﬁshery that had sustained Atlantic Canadian coastal communities for hundreds of years. Most Atlantic groundﬁsh stocks were placed under moratoria by 1993–1994. Paciﬁc salmon also underwent a dramatic downturn in the late 1990s. Draconian measures were implemented to address conservation concerns. In contrast, the major shellﬁsh stocks on the Atlantic became extremely abundant. A decadeslong surge in Atlantic lobster landings continued, and there were major increases in the abundance of shrimp and snow crab. These ﬁsheries replaced groundﬁsh in many areas of Atlantic Canada.

30.2.1. Trends in Canada’s Marine Fisheries Canada has important ﬁsheries on both the Atlantic and Paciﬁc coasts, in the Inland lakes and small ﬁsheries in the Arctic. The regional impact has historically been the most signiﬁcant in the provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. In British Columbia, the ﬁsheries are economically relatively less important than the Atlantic. Historically, in the Atlantic, groundﬁsh and lobster were the prominent commercial species ﬁshed. On the Paciﬁc, salmon was king, particularly sockeye. The harvest of Canadian commercial ﬁsheries peaked in 1988 at 1.6 million metric tons landed. From 1990 to 1995, landings declined to 850,000 metric tons, largely due to the collapse of Atlantic groundﬁsh stocks. Landings then began a slow rise from 1995 onward to about 1.1 million metric tons in 2004 (ﬁgure 30.1). The landed value increased dramatically, more than doubling between 1980 and 1987, and reached a peak of $2.2 billion in 2003 (ﬁgure 30.1). In the 1980s groundﬁsh dominated Atlantic landings quantities, but shellﬁsh (shrimp, lobster, and crab) constituted more than half the landed value (ﬁgures 30.2 and 30.3). In the Paciﬁc, salmon

393

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Case Studies in Governance Atlantic (Q) Pacific (Q) 2,500,000

Atlantic+Pacific (V)

Annual Landings Quantities (metric tonnes)

Pacific (V)

2,250,000

1,600,000

2,000,000

1,400,000

1,750,000 1,200,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 1,250,000 800,000 1,000,000 600,000

750,000

400,000

500,000

200,000

250,000

Annual Landed Value (in thousands $CDN)

1,800,000

0

19 7 19 6 7 19 7 7 19 8 7 19 9 8 19 0 8 19 1 8 19 2 8 19 3 84 19 8 19 5 8 19 6 8 19 7 8 19 8 8 19 9 9 19 0 9 19 1 9 19 2 9 19 3 9 19 4 9 19 5 9 19 6 9 19 7 9 19 8 9 20 9 0 20 0 0 20 1 0 20 2 0 20 3 0 20 4 05 20 0 20 6 07

0 Years

30.1 Atlantic, Paciﬁc, and total Canadian ﬁsheries landings and landed value, 1976–2006. (Data from Fisheries and Oceans, Statistics Division, Ottawa, Ontario)

FIGURE

accounted for 33 percent of the Paciﬁc catch (annual landings), while Paciﬁc groundﬁsh species constituted 44 percent. Salmon was king of landed value, at 60 percent of total average annual Paciﬁc landed value (ﬁgures 30.4 and 30.5). Almost 20 years later, in 2004, the situation had changed signiﬁcantly following major upheavals and stock collapses in both the Atlantic groundﬁsh and the Paciﬁc salmon ﬁsheries. The species composition of the Atlantic ﬁsheries had completely transformed. Groundﬁsh had dropped to only 14 percent of landings and 8 percent of landed value. Shellﬁsh species were dominant, accounting for 54 percent of landings and 87 percent of landed value, with crab and lobster landings leading the way in 2004 at 32.5 percent and 31.3 percent, respectively (ﬁgures 30.2 and 30.3). The Paciﬁc ﬁsheries had also changed. In 2004, Paciﬁc groundﬁsh species accounted for 71 percent of landings, with salmon accounting for only 10 percent. Groundﬁsh also accounted for 39.2 percent of landed value, with shellﬁsh a close second at 36.3 percent. Salmon had dropped to only 15 percent (ﬁgures 30.4 and 30.5).

30.2.2. Status of Canada’s Major Fish Resources 30.2.2.1. Atlantic Groundﬁsh Commercial ﬁsheries for most of Canada’s Atlantic groundﬁsh stocks were placed under moratoria by 1994, thereby reducing the annual Atlantic groundﬁsh landings. Many of these moratoria remain in place 15–16 years later. In the interim, there have been some very limited reopenings of small commercial ﬁsheries for cod. Many of the straddling stocks of cod and other groundﬁsh on the Grand Banks also remain under moratoria (Parsons 2005a) (ﬁgure 30.2). There has been considerable debate about the reasons for the collapse of northern cod. Some argued that overﬁshing was the primary reason for stock collapse (Hutchings and Myers 1994; Myers et al. 1996, 1997). While overﬁshing was clearly a contributing factor, it was not the only one. Others have suggested that the collapse was caused by a combination of overﬁshing and detrimental environmental conditions that reduced the stock’s productivity (Atkinson et al. 1997; Mann and

Annual Landings Quantities (metric tonnes)

1,600,000

Lobster Shrimp

1,400,000

Crab Groundfish

1,200,000

Other

1,000,000 800,000 600,000 400,000 200,000

19 7 19 6 7 19 7 7 19 8 7 19 9 8 19 0 8 19 1 8 19 2 8 19 3 84 19 8 19 5 86 19 8 19 7 8 19 8 8 19 9 90 19 9 19 1 9 19 2 9 19 3 9 19 4 9 19 5 9 19 6 9 19 7 9 19 8 9 20 9 0 20 0 01 20 0 20 2 0 20 3 04 20 0 20 5 0 20 6 07

0

Year FIGURE 30.2 Canadian Atlantic landings by ﬁshery (metric tons), 1976–2006. (Data from Fisheries and Oceans, Statistics Division, Ottawa, Ontario)

Landed Value (in thousand of $CDN)

2,500,000

2,000,000

Lobster Shrimp Crab Groundfish Other

1,500,000

1,000,000

500,000

1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

0

Year FIGURE 30.3 Canadian Atlantic landed value by ﬁshery (nominal CA$), 1976–2006. (Data from Fisheries and Oceans, Statistics Division, Ottawa, Ontario)

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Drinkwater 1994; Parsons and Beckett 1997; Rose et al. 2000). Harsh environmental conditions can be linked to the changes that occurred in the North Atlantic Oscillation Index (Parsons and Lear 2001). Drinkwater (2002) also provided evidence that ocean climate conditions, cold temperatures in particular, played an important role in the decline of cod. The environmental changes affected many species other than cod, for example, capelin and Atlantic salmon, were negatively affected, while various shellﬁsh species, particularly lobster, crab, and shrimp, experienced population booms. Halliday and Pinhorn (2009) concluded that the occurrence of a sudden large-scale ecosystem disruption in the early 1990s provides a more coherent explanation for all the biological changes observed in groundﬁsh populations at that time. In contrast, there does not appear to have been enough ﬁshing effort to cause the precipitous declines in groundﬁsh biomasses about 1990. They proposed that environmental, not ﬁshing, effects were paramount in determining the changes in groundﬁsh populations in the early 1990s.

30.2.2.2. Atlantic Shellﬁsh During the 1990s, shellﬁsh landings rose to record high levels. Lobster, crab, and shrimp became the most lucrative Atlantic ﬁsheries (ﬁgures 30.2 and 30.3). 30.2.2.2.1. Lobster Lobster landings increased dramatically through the 1980s, peaking at 53,000 metric tons in 2006 (ﬁgure 30.2). These increases occurred during a period when the exploitation rate was high on juvenile lobsters. The synchronized increases in landings (ﬁgure 30.2) suggest that the increased recruitment was driven by environmental inﬂuences (Mann and Drinkwater 1994). Atlantic lobster was reviewed by the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (FRCC) in 1995. The council recommended measures to increase the level of egg production and to reduce signiﬁcantly both exploitation rates and the ﬁshing effort (FRCC 1995). In 2006, the FRCC reviewed the 1995 Conservation Framework in the most comprehensive recent analysis of the lobster ﬁshery (FRCC 2007). The FRCC reiterated the need for the industry to adjust and control ﬁshing effort to maintain a balance with the available resource, and continued to warn that further increases in ﬁshing effort represented a threat to sustainability of the

lobster resource. While the lobster ﬁshery has so far deﬁed doomsayers, it is hard to conceive how it can continue to prosper as currently structured. The question is not if, but when, the lobster bubble will burst. As a result of the worldwide economic downturn in 2009, lobster prices dropped dramatically, prompting ﬁshers to call for ﬁnancial assistance. 30.2.2.2.2. Crab During the 1990s, Atlantic snow crab (or queen crab) abundance also increased dramatically. Atlantic-wide, landings rose rapidly from 26,000 metric tons in 1990, peaking at 106,000 metric tons in 2002. By 2006 there was a drop in landings to 89,000 metric tons. The question is whither from here (ﬁgure 30.2). Snow crab prefers cold water. A substantial expansion of the areas of cold water off Newfoundland in the late 1980s and early 1990s may have assisted in the unprecedented growth of the snow crab stocks. The impact of the cod collapse on the increase in snow crab remains unknown. Recently, there has been a warming of bottom waters. This may have a negative impact on the crab stocks (Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada [DFO] 2000). Dependence on snow crab has become very high. In some areas, ﬁshing enterprises depend on snow crab for between 90 and 100 percent of their incomes (FRCC 2005). Following the snow crab boom from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, there are now signs of a downturn. Landings have declined somewhat. TACs for snow crab have declined in recent years in several areas. Crab prices declined between 2004 and 2006, leading to a 61 percent reduction in landed value (ﬁgure 30.3). The surging Canadian dollar has also adversely affected proﬁtability (Gardner Pinfold Consulting 2006a). Thus, resource abundance is declining when markets are weak and costs of ﬁshing effort are rising (e.g., fuel). 30.2.2.2.3. Shrimp Shrimp populations also increased dramatically off Newfoundland and Labrador during the 1980s and 1990s. Landings virtually quadrupled in a decade, rising from about 45,000 metric tons to 175,000 metric tons (Gardner Pinfold Consulting 2006b). Favorable environmental conditions have probably led to the increase in shrimp stocks (Koeller 2000; Parsons and Colbourne 2000; Parsons and Lear 2001). The surge in shrimp abundance also coincided with the decline in groundﬁsh, releasing predation pressure (Lilly 2006) (ﬁgure 30.2).

397

Canadian Marine Fisheries Management Shrimp are managed by TACs, subdivided into individual quotas (IQs) or individual transferable quotas (ITQs) for the inshore sector, and enterprise allocations (EAs) for the offshore. The number of participants expanded as TACs increased, ﬁrst through temporary permits, and then the conversion of these to regular licenses. The resource outlook for shrimp remained positive in 2006–2007. The exploitation rate remains low (about 10–20 percent). The major challenge facing the shrimp industry is steadily declining prices, by 40–50 percent over the last decade, and declining ﬁnancial viability (Gardner Pinfold Consulting 2006b).

30.2.2.3. Paciﬁc Salmon Historically on Canada’s Paciﬁc coast the salmon ﬁsheries have been the most valuable and the most complex. Traditional management has been based on ensuring an escapement of salmon to natural spawning beds to maximize subsequent recruitment, and on augmenting natural production by artiﬁcial propagation and improvements to spawning and nursery habitat. All ﬁve Paciﬁc salmon species supported valuable commercial ﬁsheries. Through the 1980s, Paciﬁc salmon, accounted for 50–70 percent

of the landed value of the British Columbia commercial catch when abundance was high (Healey 1993) (ﬁgure 30.5). Over the past two decades many Paciﬁc salmon populations have come under increasing stress. By the late 1990s, conservation became the dominant priority. Paciﬁc salmon abundance decreased substantially during the late 1990s. Commercial ﬁshery landings declined from 107,000 metric tons in 1985 to only 17,000 metric tons in 1999 (ﬁgure 30.4). By the mid-1990s, aquaculture of Atlantic salmon along the Paciﬁc coast and elsewhere in the world, notably Norway and Chile, had increased the supply of cheap salmon to the point where the economic viability of the commercial Paciﬁc (wild) salmon ﬁshery was being questioned. Concurrently, changes in the environment attributed to signiﬁcant decreases in marine survival rates for all wild species of Paciﬁc salmon, resulting in sharp declines in the abundance of Canadian salmon stocks, as well as some salmon stocks in the United States (Beamish et al. 1999; Noakes et al. 2002). Due to conservation concerns about coho and chinook populations, severe ﬁshing restrictions have virtually eliminated all commercial ﬁsheries targeting coho and have substantially restricted the harvest of chinook. These two species now account

Annual Landings Quantity (metric tonnes)

350,000 Salmon

Other

300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000

19 7 19 6 7 19 7 7 19 8 7 19 9 8 19 0 8 19 1 8 19 2 8 19 3 8 19 4 8 19 5 8 19 6 8 19 7 8 19 8 8 19 9 9 19 0 9 19 1 9 19 2 9 19 3 9 19 4 9 19 5 9 19 6 9 19 7 9 19 8 9 20 9 0 20 0 0 20 1 0 20 2 0 20 3 0 20 4 0 20 5 0 20 6 07

0

Year

30.4 Canadian Paciﬁc landings by ﬁshery (metric tons), 1976–2006. (Data from Fisheries and Oceans, Statistics Division, Ottawa, Ontario)

FIGURE

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Landed Value (in thousand of $CDN)

600,000

Salmon

500,000

Other

400,000

300,000

200,000

100,000

19 7 19 6 7 19 7 7 19 8 7 19 9 8 19 0 8 19 1 8 19 2 8 19 3 8 19 4 8 19 5 8 19 6 8 19 7 8 19 8 8 19 9 9 19 0 9 19 1 9 19 2 9 19 3 9 19 4 9 19 5 9 19 6 9 19 7 9 19 8 9 20 9 00 20 0 20 1 02 20 0 20 3 0 20 4 05 20 0 20 6 07

0 Year

30.5 Canadian Paciﬁc landed value by ﬁshery (nominal CA$), 1976–2006. (Data from Fisheries and Oceans, Statistics Division, Ottawa, Ontario)

FIGURE

for less than 5 percent of the total catch. Sockeye salmon ﬁsheries have also been curtailed due to conservation concerns (Noakes et al. 2002). By 2004, salmon accounted for only 15 percent of the landed value of the commercial ﬁshery (ﬁgure 30.5). Paciﬁc “other” stocks, including Paciﬁc groundﬁsh, herring, and invertebrates (all together), in 2004 accounted for 71 percent of landings, with salmon accounting for only 10 percent. Other Paciﬁc stocks had 85 percent of the landed value in 2004, while salmon landed value had dropped to only 15 percent (ﬁgures 30.4 and 30.5).

30.3. GOVERNANCE OF MARINE FISHERIES IN CANADA The federal–provincial division of powers over ﬁsheries in Canada was established in the Constitution Act of 1867 (Department of Justice Canada 1867). Section 91 of the Constitution Act assigned exclusive legislative authority over “sea coast and inland ﬁsheries” to the federal government. Provinces could legislate on matters regarding property

and civil rights in ﬁsheries such as transfers, rights of inheritance, or conditions of leasing a provincially owned ﬁshery. The federal government was given the authority to regulate the conservation and preservation of ﬁsheries resources, including such matters as type of ﬁshing gear, limits on the amount of catch, close seasons, and the species and size of ﬁsh that may be caught. Federal jurisdiction on these matters encompasses all Canadian waters, both marine and inland to the present (Parsons 1993a). The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans exercises the authority to manage the ﬁsheries under the Fisheries Act, originally passed in 1868, and regulations made under this act (DFO 1985). The minister is accountable for the protection and sustainable use of ﬁsheries resources and their habitat. The minister also exercises broader powers under the Oceans Act of 1997 (DFO 1996) and has certain responsibilities under the Species at Risk Act of 2002. The minister’s authority includes the discretion and powers necessary to regulate access to the resource, to license, and to impose conditions on harvesting and the enforcement of regulations.

Canadian Marine Fisheries Management Under the Oceans Act, the minister is also authorized to conduct scientiﬁc research and operate vessels and laboratories for the purpose of meeting the obligations of the Act. Government laboratories conduct most scientiﬁc research in support of ﬁsheries management. Systems for management of the marine ﬁsheries developed differently in different regions of Canada (Parsons 1993a). The system has been described by some as a primarily “command-and-control system” responsible for the research, assessment, allocation, licensing, regulation, and enforcement aspects of the ﬁshery (de Young et al. 1999; Lane and Stephenson 1998).

30.4. EVOLUTION OF FISHERIES MANAGEMENT The 1960s through the 1990s were decades of dynamic change in the management of Canada’s marine ﬁsheries. From World War II until the early 1960s, development and modernization were emphasized. During this period, the regulatory regime was relatively laissez-faire. In the late 1960s, the emphasis shifted to the pursuit of conservation and economic/social objectives. During this period, it became evident that major stocks were being threatened by intense ﬁshing pressure. Regulatory interventions mushroomed over the next two decades.

30.4.1. Limited-Entry Licensing The federal government moved to limit entry into the ﬁsheries, commencing with the Atlantic lobster and Paciﬁc salmon ﬁsheries in 1967 and 1968. By the mid-1970s, limited-entry licensing had been extended to virtually all major ﬁsheries in Canada. Federal ofﬁcials expected this to both reduce ﬁshing pressure on threatened ﬁsh stocks and foster a more proﬁtable industry. Limited-entry licensing has had limited success in curbing overcapacity and overinvestment in Canadian ﬁsheries (Parsons 1993a). The Paciﬁc salmon limited-entry licensing program has been judged unsuccessful by various analysts (Fraser 1979; Pearse 1982). The experience in the Atlantic lobster ﬁshery was more positive. In this effort controlled ﬁshery, limited-entry licensing constrained additional entry when lobster abundance increased substantially in the 1980s and 1990s.

399

Consequently, limited licenses have certainly acquired a capital value, in many cases quite substantial. Ofﬁcially, the license is a privilege, which confers no property rights. In practice, the license holder can determine the recipient of the transferred license when he retires from the ﬁshery (Parsons 1993a). The very high “prices” that limited-entry licenses now bring to those leaving the ﬁshery is strong evidence that limited-entry licensing has helped to improve ﬁshermen’s incomes in many ﬁsheries. This leaves the major challenge of reducing ﬁshing capacity where signiﬁcant overcapacity exists. Limited license buyback schemes have been tried in various ﬁsheries. Overall, buyback programs have not been successful in reducing overcapacity (Holland et al. 1999).

30.4.2. Catch Quotas The other major change in the 1970s was Canada’s push for direct controls on the amount of catch to limit ﬁshing mortality. The government had already introduced catch quotas in the British Columbia herring ﬁshery, following the moratorium on ﬁshing from 1968–1970. Canada was instrumental in securing agreement within the International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries in the early 1970s to introduce TACs accompanied by national allocations of these TACs, a now universally accepted practice in regional ﬁsheries management organizations. These initial TACs were set too high. The immediate objective following the 200-mile limit in 1977 was to rebuild ﬁsh stocks that had been reduced to low levels. Canada adopted a more conservative reference level of ﬁshing mortality for setting TACs for most ﬁnﬁsh stocks (Gulland and Boerema 1973). While there was some stock rebuilding initially, in hindsight it is clear that this was not achieved. A constant spawning escapement strategy continued to be pursued for Paciﬁc salmon, leaving the residual available for harvest. This strategy was also not successful for sustaining Paciﬁc salmon stocks.

30.4.3. Access and Allocation Major battles occurred over the acquiring access to the limited resource. Allocations apportioning access among ﬂeet sectors developed in parallel with limited-entry licensing as ways to deal with problems arising from the classical “race for ﬁsh.” This

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race arises from the designation of ﬁsh as “common property” (Hardin 1968, 1998). The effects of open access to ﬁsh resources became known as the “tragedy of the commons.” The underlying idea is that ﬁsh belonged to no one in particular and everyone in general. Resource allocation is concerned with dividing a limited pie among many conﬂicting interests that have acquired access rights for stock exploitation. The pie is rarely large enough to satisfy all those seeking shares. The common property (or, more appropriately, the “common pool”; Ostrom 1990) nature of the resource promotes overcapacity in both the harvesting and processing sectors. A lack of intervention at an early stage in the development of a ﬁshery inevitably compounds the problem. Overcapacity generates enormous conﬂict as interest groups compete for their “fair share” of the resource. To most groups, “fair share” means meeting their needs at the expense of others. On the Paciﬁc, resource allocations involved disputes not only among commercial ﬂeet sectors but also between the respective needs and beneﬁts of the commercial and recreational sectors, and between these two sectors and the developing allocations for First Nations’ ﬁsheries. Conservation, native food ﬁsheries, adjacency to the resource, and community dependence have been the dominant criteria in resource allocation decisions. Through extensive consultations, consensus on some resource allocation issues was achieved. But there are always problem stocks where consensus is not possible. The problem then becomes one that the federal government is compelled to resolve. Historically, a large number of such access and allocation issues ended up on the minister’s desk. On the Atlantic, an independent panel was established in 2001 to review allocation criteria. Following that report, sharing arrangements and allocation criteria have been formalized. On the Paciﬁc, sharing arrangements for Paciﬁc salmon shifted in the late 1990s as a result of the conservation crisis. Controversy over the share allocated to First Nations continues to this day.

30.4.4. Individual Quotas When it was concluded that limited-entry licensing systems were not achieving the beneﬁts envisaged and stocks continued to decline, many switched horses in the 1980s and became fervent advocates of the use of IQs and, in particular, ITQs. In Canada, IQs were ﬁrst introduced in 1972 in the Lake

Winnipeg ﬁshery and, in 1976, in the Bay of Fundy herring ﬁshery (Munro 2000). Contrary to popular perception, Canada was a world pioneer in introducing IQs for managing ﬁsheries. A large-scale experiment with EAs (company quotas) was introduced in the Atlantic offshore groundﬁsh ﬁshery for 1982. Following a restructuring in 1983, a system of EAs was adopted as a ﬁve-year experiment in this ﬁshery (Parsons 1983). This was subsequently adopted for ongoing management of the offshore groundﬁsh ﬁshery. By the end of the 1980s, IQs had been widely introduced in Canada’s Atlantic ﬁsheries (Burke and Brander 2000). On the Paciﬁc coast, the concept had been tried in some small-scale ﬁsheries. But perhaps the most famous British Columbia examples are the Paciﬁc halibut and sableﬁsh ﬁsheries where individual vessel quotas (IVQs) were introduced in 1990. This application is widely regarded as successful (Turris and Sporer 1994). Burke and Brander (2000) reported that IQs were then in place for more than 40 Canadian ﬁsheries or ﬁshing ﬂeets, accounting for half of the value of Canadian ﬁsh landings in 2000 (table 30.1). By 2000, most quota-managed (TAC) ﬁsheries had been placed on IQs. The major non-IQ ﬁsheries at that time were Paciﬁc salmon (escapement) and Atlantic lobster (effort controls), neither of which was managed by setting TACs. In 2008, IQ ﬂeets accounted for an estimated 58 percent of Canadian landed value, and competitive ﬁsheries for 42 percent of landed value (Leslie Burke, DFO, personal communication). Advocates of ITQs stress certain features necessary to achieve beneﬁts, including security of title, exclusivity, permanence, and transferability (Scott 1997). Security of tenure for license holders in Canadian marine ﬁsheries is implicit but tenuous. Licenses are issued annually, and, under Section 7 of the Fisheries Act, the minister has “absolute discretion” with respect to the issuing of licenses. Licenses are, however, rarely revoked, and the government has on several occasions sought to buy back licenses. (It avoids the legal conundrum of buying what it owns by offering compensation for voluntary retirement of licenses.) With respect to transferability, government practice is to accept the recommendation of the departing ﬁsher on who should beneﬁt from the reissue of his license or quota. Of the cases listed in table 30.1, half had permanent transferability of quota, often with conditions attached. With respect to exclusivity, generally the number of licenses has remained stable. But in instances

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Canadian Marine Fisheries Management TABLE

30.1 IQ/EA programs in Canada 2000

Area and Species

Fleet or Fishery

Year Adopted

Permanent Transfers?

Atlantic Groundﬁsh

Pelagic Shellﬁsh

Mobile gear < 65 ft 4Ta (Gulf/Laurentian) Mobile gear < 65 ft 4VWX+5 (Scotia-Fundy) Fixed gear 45–65 ft (Scotia-Fundy) Fixed gear cod < 65 ft, 3Ps Area 10 Fixed gear cod < 65 ft, 2J3KL Mobile gear < 65 ft 4RS3Pn (Newfoundland) Mobile gear cod < 65 ft, 3Ps Offshore groundﬁsh EA Midshore groundﬁsh EA Herring seiners > 65 ft 4RSTVn (Gulf, Newfoundland) Herring seiners 4WX+5 (Scotia-Fundy) Snow crab areas 18/19, 25/26 (Gulf) Offshore clam EA Midshore snow crab—zone 12 (Gulf/Laurentian) Snow crab area 13–17 (Laurentian/Newfoundland) Snow crab (Newfoundland) Snow crab areas 20–24 (Scotia-Fundy) Offshore scallop EA (Scotia-Fundy) Scallop Middle North Shore (Laurentian) Bay of Fundy scallop Offshore lobster (Scotia-Fundy) Shrimp 4RST (Gulf/Laurentian) Northern shrimp EA Shrimp 4VWX (Scotia-Fundy) Shrimp 4R (Newfoundland/Laurentian) Sea urchin (Scotia-Fundy)

1989 1991 1997 1998 1999 1984 1998 1982 1987 1983 1976 1979 1987 1990 1992

All commercial freshwater ﬁsheries in Ontario Lake Winnipeg quota entitlement Cedar Lake IQ

1984 1972 1982

Yes Yes

Sableﬁsh IVQ Halibut IVQ Groundﬁsh trawl IVQ Herring spawn on kelp IQ Geoduck IVQ Abalone IQ program (closed) Red sea urchin IQ Green sea urchin IQ Sea cucumber IQ

1990 1991 1997 1975 1989 1980 1994 1996 1996

No Yes Yes No Yes No Yes Yes Yes

1994 1986 1991 1998 1977 1991 1987 1996 1995

Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No No No No No No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No

Lake Fisheries

Paciﬁc Groundﬁsh Pelagic

Shellﬁsh

a

Numbers and letters indicate designations for statistical areas based on zones established by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization.

Source: Adapted from Burke and Brander (2000).

where there have been dramatic increases in resource abundance (e.g., Atlantic crab and shrimp), the issue of “sharing the wealth” has arisen. The government has been pressured to grant new access, particularly to ﬁshers negatively impacted by the groundﬁsh

collapse. So-called “temporary” licenses were issued in a number of these crab and shrimp ﬁsheries. Recently, these temporary licenses have been made permanent in the Newfoundland crab and shrimp ﬁsheries. These new licenses are IQ licenses.

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There is no formal government policy to move in the direction of IQs. Instead, IQs are allowed to develop as extensions of ﬁshing licenses where a signiﬁcant proportion of license holders in a ﬁshing ﬂeet requests IQs and where they can reach agreement on a sharing arrangement and a ﬁshing plan (Burke and Brander 2000; Peacock and Hansen 1999). Has the use of IQs yielded beneﬁts? Grafton et al. (2007) concluded that British Columbia’s multispecies groundﬁsh trawl ﬁshery was much better managed than prior to the introduction of individual harvesting rights. The program led to better economic outcomes for vessels within the ﬂeet. Turris and Sporer (1994) showed that revenues increased, and costs decreased, after the introduction of IVQs in the British Columbia halibut and sableﬁsh ﬁshery. IVQs in the Paciﬁc halibut and sableﬁsh ﬁsheries (Munro 2000) and ITQs in the Atlantic offshore scallop ﬁshery (Peacock and Hansen 1999) resulted in substantial reductions in the number of active vessels. IQs can be developed in a piecemeal form, or as parts of ﬁsheries, or as parts of ﬂeets (e.g., separated by gear type, ﬁshing areas, or ﬁshing periods) at a time. Furthermore, IQs are possible without enabling legislation, provided that there is no legislation speciﬁcally prohibiting such development (as occurred in the United States) (Burke and Brander 2000).

30.5. EFFORTS TO REFORM THE GOVERNANCE SYSTEM, 1980–1995 The so-called “command-and-control” system of ﬁsheries management in Canada has come under criticism from several sources. One feature most criticized is the allocation and access or licensing system, in particular, the minister’s absolute discretion under the Fisheries Act. Two major external reviews in the early 1980s (the Pearse Commission on Paciﬁc salmon, and the Kirby Task Force on the Atlantic Fisheries) suggested that allocation and licensing be done by an independent body. Peter Pearse, Commissioner of the Paciﬁc Fisheries Inquiry, in his 1982 report on Paciﬁc salmon ﬁsheries proposed that limited-entry licensing be replaced by 10-year quota licenses in “those ﬁsheries where it is feasible to do so.” He proposed limiting limited-entry licenses and quota licenses to terms of 10 years, adopting competitive bidding

procedures to allocate the total capacity for limitedentry ﬁsheries and the TAC for quota ﬁsheries, and creating a Paciﬁc Fisheries Licensing Board as a Crown corporation (Parsons 1993b) Pearse’s proposals were comprehensive, bold, and imaginative, but they touched off a ﬁrestorm of protests from commercial ﬁshermen’s associations. Fisheries Minister Pierre de Bane rejected the auction idea and the proposal for a Crown corporation, stating: “I am not prepared to delegate to an outside body decision-making authority entrusted to Parliament” (quoted in Vancouver Sun February 19, 1983, as cited in Parsons 1993b). Following a change of government later in 1983, demands for ﬂeet rationalization diminished with the resurgence of the Paciﬁc salmon ﬁshery during the mid-to late 1980s. The 1982 Task Force on the Atlantic Fisheries, chaired by Michael Kirby, proposed a system of quota licenses that could be sold or traded (Kirby 1982). It also proposed establishment of “a quasijudicial Atlantic Fisheries License Review Board that would act in a review and appeal capacity for the current licensing system, as well as for the system of enterprise allocations and quota licenses” (Kirby 1982). When the Kirby report was released, the government announced it had accepted most recommendations. One recommendation that was rejected was the proposal for a quasi-judicial licensing agency (Parsons 1993b). In October 1991, then DFO Minister John Crosbie proposed the establishment of two agencies or boards, separate from the DFO, responsible for licensing and allocation matters. Minister Crosbie described the existing system requiring the minister to make all the decisions as “simply archaic” and “too political.” The rationale was the need to replace an anachronistic system of decision making based on ministerial discretion with a fairer, more impartial system responsive to the needs and views of industry. In 1993, Crosbie tabled legislation in Parliament to implement the reform proposal. Unfortunately, this proposal died when an election was called later that year (Parsons 1993a).

30.6. INSTITUTIONAL CHANGES AFTER THE GROUNDFISH COLLAPSE, 1992–1995 Minister Crosbie did make some fundamental changes in the way conservation advice was

Canadian Marine Fisheries Management developed for a minister’s consideration. The Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Scientiﬁc Advisory Committee (CAFSAC), the peer-review body for government scientists, and the Atlantic Groundﬁsh Advisory Committee, the Atlantic-wide consultative body for groundﬁsh, were both dissolved (Parsons 1993a). The government established a new body, the FRCC, to provide independent and public advice on Atlantic ﬁsheries conservation matters to the minister. The FRCC was a consultative body and the minister retained the decision-making power. Initially, the FRCC focused on groundﬁsh. Its mandate was restricted to conservation. It consisted of 15 individuals with a background in the ﬁshing industry or academe, as well as provincial delegates and federal ﬁsheries ofﬁcials as ex ofﬁcio members. Initially, the FRCC followed up on the 1992 northern cod moratorium by recommending the closure of many other groundﬁsh ﬁsheries and substantial TAC reductions in others. Associated with the creation of the FRCC, other changes were implemented in the scientiﬁc process inputting into the advisory process. CAFSAC was replaced by local-level regional advisory process in each DFO region. This process provided for greater involvement in the stock assessment process by ﬁshing industry participants and included the participation of interested academics. Overall, ﬁshermen and industry became much more involved. Rice (2005) evaluated the approaches that tried to bring experiential knowledge and transparency into ﬁsheries science advisory processes. He concluded that inviting ﬁshers as individuals, not as representatives of an organization or sector, was most beneﬁcial. Another initiative involved “sentinel ﬁsheries,” organized by scientists and ﬁshing organizations, for the groundﬁsh stocks where ﬁsheries were closed. These were restricted ﬁsheries that emulated commercial ﬁsheries practices. They were designed by DFO ﬁsheries scientists to provide ongoing statistically valid information on catch per unit effort (a proxy stock size parameter), stock areal distribution, and biological characteristics. By 1995, some 500 ﬁshermen were occupied in sentinel ﬁsheries at 114 locations throughout Atlantic Canada (Doubleday and Powles 1997). The ﬁshing industry also became more centrally involved, for example, by substantially increasing its contribution to ﬁsheries monitoring. The coverage by the At-Sea Observer program was extended from large offshore vessels to a broader range of

403

ﬁshery sectors, including the smaller “midshore” ﬂeets. Dockside monitoring programs were introduced to many ﬁsheries, to verify landings information previously obtained from sales slips and vessel logbooks. Industry organizations managed funds collected directly from individual vessels or enterprises and contracted directly for the services of observers and dockside monitors. These use standards set out by DFO for data quality and coverage. These programs have improved the quality of data on ﬁshery removals, reduced bycatch, and enhanced population sampling characteristics (Doubleday and Powles 1997). Comprehensive Joint Project Agreements were also used in some key ﬁsheries during this period. A prime example of this was the industry-funded survey for snow crab in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. Other examples include the test ﬁsheries for salmon and herring in British Columbia. These arrangements have, however, fallen on hard times since the Federal Court of Appeal of Canada’s (2006) decision on Larocque v. Canada. The court held that the DFO cannot use ﬁsh allocations to ﬁnance scientiﬁc and ﬁsheries management activities. The DFO has had to scramble to ﬁnd additional funding for such initiatives, pending revision of the Fisheries Act. The FRCC took very conservation-oriented decisions in its ﬁrst few years (to 1996), but after 1997 came under criticism for recommending the reopening of some ﬁsheries prematurely. In particular, ﬁsheries for four cod stocks under moratoria resumed in 1997/1998, based on FRCC advice that they could sustain small ﬁsheries. But the TACs advised by the FRCC for these cod stocks were unsustainable. In 2007, DFO Minister Loyola Hearn opened a so-called “stewardship ﬁshery” for northern cod. What little rebuilding that might have taken place during the moratoria was quickly curtailed or reversed by the reopened directed ﬁsheries (Shelton 2007). There is little or no prospect for recovery of these stocks under current removal levels, even though these are low.

30.7. NEW LEGISLATIVE AND POLICY INITIATIVES, 1996–2005 New legislation, focused on the “partnering” concept, was brought to Parliament in 1996 by DFO Minister Fred Mifﬂin. The approach would have enabled binding agreements whereby industry

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Case Studies in Governance

members could take formal responsibility for some aspects of management. The legislation proposed the establishment of new tribunals to impose administrative sanctions such as ﬁnes, quota reductions, or license suspensions. Another election in 1997 derailed this legislative initiative. The “partnering” initiative had aroused hostility among certain members of the ﬁshing industry. DFO Minister David Anderson set up a panel chaired by academic Donald Savoie to examine the issue. Responding to negative feedback from parts of the ﬁshing industry, the panel urged the minister not to go forward at that stage with the partnering legislation (Savoie et al. 1998). Meanwhile, major policy renewal initiatives were launched on the Atlantic coast from 2001 to 2004 and on the Paciﬁc Coast in the late 1990s, continuing to the middle of this decade. The Atlantic Fisheries Policy Review, initiated in 2001, culminated in a 2004 report (DFO 2004) that emphasized giving resource users a stronger role in the stewardship of the resource and making the access and allocation decision-making process more transparent and predictable, although authority was to remain in the hands of the DFO minister. It envisaged a transition whereby the role of DFO would evolve from one involving day-today management of ﬂeets and ﬁshing activities, to one concerned primarily with developing policy, setting direction, and evaluating performance. To achieve this, certain ﬁsheries management responsibilities would be delegated to resource users. The DFO would continue to provide “sound scientiﬁc advice,” establish required conservation measures, and ensure compliance. It was envisaged that the access and allocation of ﬁsheries resources would be more stable and predictable, and decisions would be made and conﬂicts resolved through fair, transparent, and rules-based processes. The 2004 policy framework, however, contained no reference to independent allocation and licensing agencies. Early in the Atlantic Fisheries Policy Review process, the minister established an Independent Panel on Access Criteria. It recommended that an independent Atlantic-wide Advisory Board be established as a default mechanism to address decisions regarding access that could not be resolved in a satisfactory manner within Atlantic Canada (Independent Panel on Access Criteria 2002). While most proposals were endorsed, the government rejected the proposal for an independent Atlantic-wide Advisory

Board. The minister would “continue to make the ﬁnal decisions on all access and allocation matters” (Independent Panel on Access Criteria 2002). On the Paciﬁc, with the resurgence in salmon in the late 1980s, the concept of major reform was dropped, and managers got on with their normal business. One exception was the introduction of IVQs and ITQs, spreading to many ﬁsheries, except Paciﬁc salmon. By the mid-1990s chinook and coho stocks, the backbone of the growing recreational industry, were experiencing major declines. Some sockeye stocks were also in trouble. In 1994, Paciﬁc salmon catches started plunging and declined to less than 20,000 metric tons. In the late 1990s, catches were curtailed because of the stringent conservation measures taken to protect chinook and coho. In 1998, then DFO Minister Anderson released a “New Directions” discussion document on Paciﬁc salmon (DFO 1998). This was followed by other documents on a policy for wild salmon, allocation, selective ﬁshing, and improved decision-making processes. The ﬁrst New Directions document emphasized principles that fell into three categories: conservation, sustainable use, and improved decision making. Conservation of Paciﬁc salmon stocks would be the primary objective, a precautionary approach would be applied, the department would aim for a net gain in habitat, and an ecological approach would guide management. Regarding decision making, the document promised that future salmon management would be “based on partnerships with clients, governments and other parties.” It also committed to pursue enhanced community, regional, and sectorwide input to decision making “through a structured management and advisory board system.” In October 1999, DFO released its allocation policy for Paciﬁc salmon, which included provisions for an impartial Allocation Board (DFO 1999). In March 2001, the Institute for Dispute Resolution at the University of Victoria identiﬁed certain concerns regarding the planned Allocation and Licensing Board among commercial and recreational stakeholders and First Nations representatives (Institute for Dispute Resolution 2001). After this report it appears that this particular proposal was abandoned. In 2005, DFO Minister Gerald Regan released a policy statement for wild Paciﬁc salmon (DFO 2005a). This document was silent on the governance process for dealing with allocation and licensing issues. It was clear that the concept of

Canadian Marine Fisheries Management arm’s-length allocation and licensing boards was dead on both coasts.

30.8. FISHERIES ACT REDUX In 2006, a new government revived the concepts of legislative change and ﬁsheries management agreements. In December 2006, Minister Hearn tabled in Parliament a proposed overhaul of the 138-year-old Fisheries Act. Highlights of the legislation included an expanded role for ﬁsheries participants in decision making, the adoption of clear principles dedicated to sustainable development, and a new sanctions system to be called the Canada Fisheries Tribunal, aimed at promoting more responsible ﬁshing behavior. The minister noted that the words “absolute discretion” had been removed from the new Act. The tribunal proposal for dealing with offenders in a manner potentially faster and more efﬁcient than the slower and more expensive court system was carried over from previous attempts to amend the Act. After the initial proposal was rejected, Minister Hearn introduced a revised version of the legislation in November 2007. This took into account some of the criticisms voiced in the interim. One key change proposed in the preamble to the Act was an afﬁrmation that the “ﬁsheries are a common property resource.” The claimed beneﬁts of the proposed new Act were that it would provide for, among other things, a greater role for ﬁsh harvesters in the management of the resource, stability and predictability in access and allocation decisions, and transparent decision making in the ﬁshery sector. The minister would retain full authority to decide access and allocation in the coastal ﬁsheries but at the level of policy, not by deciding individual cases. The minister would be obliged to take certain guiding principles into account. There would be a move a way from the current regime where licenses are issued by the minister. The minister could set policy that would be binding on DFO for the issuance of licenses, including eligibility criteria. Licenses would be issued by license ofﬁcers, delegated by the minister. A key point is that licenses would not be considered to be property. (A possible complication is a recent ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of RBC v. Saulnier. The Court declared that, in the case of bankruptcy, licenses were legitimate collateral. In so doing, they appeared to reject the DFO “ofﬁcial”

405

notion of “license as privilege,” but this is subject to further litigation.) New provisions would allow the minister to allocate, for up to 15 years, shares of ﬁsh to ﬂeets or groups in commercial, recreational, and Aboriginal ﬁsheries. The process would be transparent. The new Act would also provide authority for the minister to enter into legally binding ﬁsheries management agreements. These would provide a greater opportunity for collaboration between DFO and responsible groups. There appears to be widespread support for the proposed Fisheries Tribunal and an administrative sanctions system. The tribunal would also handle appeals of licensing decisions. This legislation, introduced by a minority government, died when a new election was called in 2008. It is unclear whether, if reintroduced, it would be endorsed by Parliament given another minority government result.

30.9. OCEANS-TO-PLATE POLICY, 2006–2008 In April 2007, Minister Hearn announced a new policy named “Oceans to Plate” as the approach for viable commercial ﬁsheries and aquaculture (DFO 2007). He described the policy as one where all sectors would be working together toward a common goal of “a sustainable, economically viable, and internationally competitive industry.” In addition, the minister stated that “regulatory tools will be developed to self-rationalize,” that is, “to adjust industry size to market and resource realities in a fair and efﬁcient manner.” One of the principles stated: “Fisheries policies and programs should foster selfreliance and resilience in the seafood sector, such that communities, harvesters, processors and other sector participants are able to address economic challenges and opportunities and adapt to changing resource and market conditions, without government assistance” (DFO 2007, emphasis added). The emphasis on self-rationalization, and adaptation without government assistance, appeared to represent a departure from the approach of recent decades. This did not, however, mean a rush to corporate privatization of the ﬁshery. At the same time, the minister reafﬁrmed the government’s commitment to preserving the independence of the inshore ﬂeet in Canada’s Atlantic ﬁsheries (DFO 2007). Control of the ﬁshery and the beneﬁts from harvesting were slipping from the hands of inshore

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Case Studies in Governance

ﬁshers as certain “controlling trust agreements” were weakening owner-operator and ﬂeet policies. Minister Hearn announced measures to arrest this trend by creating a new “independent core” license holder category. This would be available only to ﬁshers who retain control over the decision to request a “transfer” of the licenses they hold. The “Oceans-to-Plate” approach also involved an increased focus on market demands as they relate to managing Canada’s ﬁsheries. The reference was to development of “ecolabels” and processes for certifying seafood products as coming from sustainable ﬁsheries. This was generating increasing pressure on Canada’s ﬁshing industry and DFO to prove that these ﬁsheries were being managed sustainably. The government committed to the greater integration of precautionary and ecosystem approaches in Canadian ﬁsheries management. It also committed to develop “sustainability checklists” for all commercial ﬁsheries. The checklists would evaluate the status of management measures and their contribution to conserving ﬁsh stocks. They would measure and review biological aspects of ﬁsheries sustainability and would also report on the progress being made to incorporate the precautionary and ecosystem approaches (DFO 2007).

30.10. FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE FOR CANADA’S FISHERIES ON THE ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC COASTS The statement in the Oceans-to-Plate policy that the ﬁshing industry would be expected to become selfreliant and adapt to changing resource and market conditions without government assistance would, if implemented, represent a radical departure from the practice of previous decades. Crowley et al. (1993) reviewed federal assistance to the Canadian ﬁshing industry from 1945 to 1990. This included regular programs and special initiatives. Many of the programs had exacerbated excess capacity in the industry. The regular assistance programs were discontinued by the early 1990s.

30.10.1. Atlantic Fisheries Restructuring In the early 1980s, the federal government had intervened to restructure the offshore groundﬁsh industry. This had been plunged into ﬁnancial

crisis by debt ﬁnancing of processing plant expansion at high interest rates. The federal government expended several hundred million dollars for this purpose. The restructuring involved combining various Newfoundland companies into Fisheries Products International. The two major Nova Scotia–based companies, H. B. Nickersons and National Sea Products, were restructured into a new National Sea Products (Nickerson’s Newfoundland assets had been absorbed into Fisheries Products International).

30.10.2. Assistance and Adjustment Programs in the 1990s The Atlantic groundﬁsh industry was again plunged into crisis in the early 1990s due to the groundﬁsh collapse. The ﬁrst in a series of assistance and restructuring programs over the next several years was the 1990 Atlantic Fisheries Adjustment Program (AFAP). This provided $584 million over several years. Gough (2008) concluded: “Overall, the AFAP money went to useful work, but did little to reshape the industry in a major way.” The Northern Cod Adjustment and Recovery Plan (NCARP) followed. The government then broadened assistance with the Atlantic Groundﬁsh Assistance Program (AGAP). Altogether, AFAP, NCARP, and AGAP spent $510 million on income support, for which nearly 40,000 qualiﬁed at the outset, although several thousand soon found other work. Another $281 million went toward adjustment in the form of training and community economic development. The programs also devoted $26 million to license retirement. This added up to approximately $834 million in direct aid related to groundﬁsh. These programs had a marginal impact on removing people and licenses from the industry, affecting mostly marginal operators (Gough 2008). In 1994, DFO Minister Brian Tobin announced another $1.9 billion for the Atlantic Groundﬁsh Strategy (TAGS). TAGS provided funds for income support, employment counseling and training, and long-term community economic development. It also set a goal of reducing ﬁshing capacity by 50 percent. In 1998, Minister Anderson announced a ﬁnancial assistance program for both coasts, the Canadian Fisheries Assistance and Restructuring (CFAR) program. CFAR provided another $730 million on the Atlantic. About $180 million went

Canadian Marine Fisheries Management to TAGS clients in lump-sum payments to compensate for the earlier-than-scheduled termination of TAGS; $250 million was allocated for an Atlantic groundﬁsh license retirement program to buy ﬁshers permanently out of the ﬁshery through reverse auctions. NCARP removed about 1,300 ﬁshermen, TAGS about 800, and CFAR about 2,500 ﬁshermen for a total of 4,500 retirees. But most were smaller operators or even marginal participants. Gough (2008) concluded that the license retirement programs probably had no major effects on the viability of the remaining ﬂeet. The upsurge in shellﬁsh, particularly snow crab, in the 1990s was what restored viability for the remaining enterprises. Meanwhile, the various Atlantic groundﬁsh adjustment programs had cost more than $4 billion. On the Paciﬁc, from the 1970s to 2000 there were ﬁve vessel/license buyback initiatives. Two of these occurred during the 1996–2000 period. In 1996, Minister Mifﬂin introduced an $80 milliondollar “voluntary license retirement program.” This program removed nearly 800 licenses, 19 percent of the ﬂeet. In 1997, Minister Anderson secured another $200 million (CFAR) for ﬂeet reduction. This removed another 1,400 salmon licenses at a cost of $192 million, about 30 percent of the original ﬂeet. During the period 1984–1999 the number of vessels in British Columbia was reduced from 7,000 to about 3,900; the number of unregistered ﬁshermen, from 18,200 to 8,700 (Gough 2008). The remaining ﬂeet still had the capacity to harvest many times the available catch. Grafton and Nelson (2005) examined the effects of buyback programs in the British Columbia salmon ﬁshery. They concluded that the beneﬁts would be short-lived, and ﬁshing effort will creep back up over time. While buybacks may have reduced the severity of the problem and may have created an opportunity for change, they suggested that buybacks had not provided a lasting solution.

30.10.3. Unemployment Insurance Apart from these initiatives, the largest government ﬁnancial assistance program nationally was ongoing, namely, Fishermen’s Unemployment Insurance (FUI), now known as Employment Insurance. FUI came into being in 1957. Over the ensuing decades it led to thousands remaining in the ﬁshery who would otherwise have left for “greener pastures,”

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few though these opportunities were most of the time. The Kirby Task Force “sunset” provision for FUI was rejected (Kirby 1982). In 1987, ﬁshermen and their buyers, as their “employers,” nationally paid in $17 million and received beneﬁts of $223 million. Plant workers receive beneﬁts as well; the beneﬁts in 1988 were $226 million. About 47,000 ﬁshers engaged in the commercial ﬁshery from 2002 to 2005, approximately half the number of 1988. Only 12,000 of these were designated as core ﬁshers. Schrank (2005) conducted the most comprehensive study of the impact of FUI on participation in the ﬁshery. He examined the Newfoundland ﬁshery 10 years after the northern cod moratorium. He concluded that the perverse incentive effects of FUI kept ﬁshermen from leaving the industry. He also observed that, despite the reforms, the system was more generous in 2002 than it had ever been. He concluded that the inshore harvesting sector of Newfoundland continues to be a commercially nonviable entity, dependent upon government transfers for survival. In the absence of government transfers (FUI), it is probable that the Canadian ﬁsheries would be transformed substantially. But, given the commitment by politicians to continue to provide such government transfers, the situation is not likely to change signiﬁcantly, no matter which party is in power.

30.11. ABORIGINAL PARTICIPATION IN THE FISHERY The question of the nature and extent of Aboriginal participation in commercial ﬁsheries became a major lightning rod on both the Paciﬁc and Atlantic coasts in the 1980s and 1990s. This led to major user conﬂicts on both coasts, particularly in British Columbia. A historic decision by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1990, the Sparrow decision (Supreme Court of Canada 1990) concluded that Native peoples had a right to harvest salmon for food, social, and ceremonial purposes. In 1992, DFO developed an Aboriginal ﬁshery strategy to foster greater Native participation in the ﬁshery in an orderly manner. DFO began to grant communal (band) licenses to take ﬁsh for food, social, and ceremonial purposes. It also took steps to encourage Native participation

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in the commercial ﬁsheries. It helped Native people acquire about 200 licenses in British Columbia and 600 on the Atlantic. By 2000, about $60 million had been spent, mostly in British Columbia, helping Natives acquire licenses, vessels and ﬁshing gear (Gough 2008). The Native food ﬁshery became a major bone of contention as nonnative ﬁshers argued that the increased food ﬁshery served as the guise for a commercial ﬁshery, with Natives selling the catch. Conﬂict between the Natives and nonnative ﬁshermen often became intense. In September 1999, the Supreme Court, in the Marshall decision, declared that Marshall, who had been charged with illegally ﬁshing eels and selling them commercially, had a right to sell the eels stemming from treaties in 1760 and 1761 (Supreme Court of Canada 1999). These gave Natives in the Maritime provinces a right to ﬁsh commercially. Faced with an uproar from commercial ﬁshermen and riots in some areas, DFO Minister Herb Dhaliwal decided that there would be no ﬂeet expansion, nor would anyone be forced out of the existing ﬂeet to make room. Instead, compensation would be offered to existing ﬁshermen to give up licenses on a voluntary basis. These would be reissued to Native bands, which would decide who would ﬁsh and how to share the beneﬁts. The department entered into negotiations with the aim of reaching agreements with the 34 bands affected by the Marshall decision. About 200 commercial ﬁshermen voluntarily relinquished their licenses. DFO made agreements with the majority of bands. Confrontation occurred with two bands, but overall the situation was resolved amicably. Although there are occasional ﬂare-ups on both coasts, Native ﬁshermen are being integrated into the commercial ﬁshery. The Native food ﬁshery for Paciﬁc salmon remains a bone of contention in British Columbia.

30.12. NEW APPROACHES TO FISHERIES MANAGEMENT IN CANADA The downturn in Atlantic groundﬁsh and Paciﬁc salmon stocks emphasized the need for new management approaches. There has been a renewed emphasis on conservation as the ﬁrst priority and the need for a broader approach to the concept of

sustainable use. The precautionary approach and an ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries have become prominent features of Canada’s marine ﬁsheries management system in the ﬁrst years of the 21st century. In December 1996, the Canadian Parliament adopted the Oceans Act (DFO 1996). This was the ﬁrst comprehensive oceans management legislation in the world. The Act provides for the development and implementation of a national oceans management strategy based on the principles of sustainable development, integrated management, and the precautionary approach (Parsons 2005b). Canada’s 2002 Oceans Strategy statement emphasized the principle of integrated management, a commitment to planning and managing human activities in a comprehensive manner (DFO 2002). The strategy also emphasized the promotion of an ecosystem-based approach to management and introduced the concept of large ocean management areas. In 2004, DFO deﬁned 17 (later modiﬁed to 19) marine ecoregions for the purpose of ecosystembased integrated management. Actions envisaged included a new national network of marine protected areas (MPAs) in all three of Canada’s oceans. Initial pilot MPA areas had been identiﬁed in 1998. A decade later, some of these have only recently come to fruition (DFO 2005b). Overall progress on implementing MPAs has been slow. This has been attributed to the need to undertake extensive stakeholder consultations, but a lack of adequate funding in the early years also contributed to the slow pace of implementation. Canada’s approach to ecosystem-based management under the Oceans Act is broader than the ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries management promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and other agencies. A number of international ﬁsheries legal instruments now make explicit references to ecosystem considerations. While there has been general agreement on the need to take ecosystem considerations into account in managing ﬁsheries, there is no clarity or consensus on how this can best be done. Perhaps the best-known framework is that articulated by FAO (2003). Parsons (2005b) provided a comprehensive review of recent initiatives with respect to an ecosystem approach in marine ﬁsheries management globally. Parsons concluded that an ecosystem approach is not inconsistent with, nor a replacement for,

Canadian Marine Fisheries Management Cautious Zone

Healthy Zone

R em ov al

Upper Stock Reference

Limit Reference Point

Removal Rate

Critical Zone

409

Reference

Stock Status FIGURE 30.6 Fisheries management framework consistent with a precautionary approach. (DFO 2006)

existing ﬁsheries management approaches. Nor is it a panacea for the problems confronting world ﬁsheries. Parsons suggested that, realistically, we can only move to an ecosystem approach incrementally, starting with more rigorous/cautious application and extension of single species methods, while taking other considerations into account. A key element of an ecosystem approach would likely be to set harvest rates for target species at even lower, more conservative levels than might be suggested by single species analysis. Fisheries management measures should also ensure the protection not only of target species but also of nontarget, associated, or dependent species. Canada has developed a federal framework for the precautionary approach to ensure the precautionary concept would be applied consistently across disciplines governmentwide (Privy Council Ofﬁce 2003). There have been several initiatives in Canada to deﬁne the precautionary approach for ﬁsheries, to identify benchmarks consistent with the approach, and to apply it in ﬁsheries management. The Canadian precautionary approach framework prescribes three stock status zones for ﬁsh stocks: a critical zone, a cautious zone and a healthy zone, determined by limit reference points, an upper stock reference point and a removal reference (ﬁgure 30.6) (DFO 2006).

The precautionary approach and elements of it have already been applied to some ﬁsheries in Canada. Initial work has focused on the identiﬁcation of reference points for the biomass and, in some cases, removal references. Sustainability checklists are also being developed, dealing with both science and ﬁsheries management. This approach appears progressive, but it is too early to assess the implementation. Shelton (2007) argues that action has not matched the statements about the commitment to use the precautionary approach. He contends that there has been an underutilization of science capacity to provide risk-based assessments and to evaluate management strategies for robustness to uncertainty and compliance with a precautionary approach.

30.13. CONCLUSIONS Several groundﬁsh stocks have failed to recover 15 years after the moratoria were initially imposed. Also, many stocks of Paciﬁc salmon are at low levels, and the challenge remains of how to manage ﬁsheries that intercept both abundant and threatened stocks of different species. Also there are concerns that the shellﬁsh abundance (snow crab, shrimp, and lobster) on the Atlantic Coast, which is currently supporting much of the Atlantic

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ﬁshing industry, could take a downturn. The factors behind the increased abundance in shellﬁsh are not well understood, although clearly there was an ecosystem shift off Newfoundland and Labrador, in particular, during the late 1980s to early 1990s (Rice 2002; Halliday and Pinhorn 2009). Oceanographic conditions have since reverted to an earlier pattern. This might not augur well for the sustainability of the current ﬁsheries for crab and shrimp. Lobster remains a mystery. Despite repeated warnings over the past two decades about a possible imminent decline, lobster landings continue at record levels. Should the shellﬁsh bubble burst, the implications could be catastrophic for Atlantic coastal communities and ﬁshers as they have now become extremely dependent on lobster or crab, depending on the area. The social assistance, industry restructuring, and science augmentation programs that were introduced at the time of the collapse were designed to last for ﬁve years. The substantial expenditures on income support, retraining, and vessel and license retirements amounted to nearly $4 billion. A review by Canada’s Auditor General indicated that beneﬁts were hard to measure (Ofﬁce of the Auditor General 1997). Some coastal communities survived, but this was due more to the lucrative new ﬁsheries for crab and shrimp than to the government assistance programs during the early years of the moratoria. The review concluded that vessel and license retirements had been concentrated in the older vessels and ﬁshers (and marginal participants). The proﬁts from the upsurge in shellﬁsh were being reinvested in new technologically sophisticated vessels capable of participating in many ﬁsheries, including cod if it recovered. This occurred despite the vessel replacement constraints in effect that time. Overall, the Auditor General’s report concluded that, despite the expenditure of nearly $4 billion to “adjust” the Canadian Atlantic groundﬁsh ﬁshery, effective ﬁshing capacity was 160 percent of what it had been in the early 1990s. The major cod stocks will take a long time to rebuild to historical levels, if ever. Recent productivity over the northern part of the range had been much lower than 20 years previously when several stocks recovered from less severe declines. The main contributing factors were identiﬁed, in order, as increased natural mortality (due to predation), decreased body growth and, in some cases, reduced recruitment rates. Continued ﬁshing in small directed and bycatch ﬁsheries was also identiﬁed

as an important factor. Shelton et al. (2006) suggested that the small amounts of surplus production resulting from the combination of low stock size and low stock productivity were being dissipated by the limited cod ﬁsheries and by catch in other ﬁsheries. A vast economic literature suggests that the move to incentive-based approaches based on property rights would foster the development of economically viable ﬁsheries. There are notable instances in Canada where this in fact has occurred, for example, Paciﬁc halibut, sableﬁsh, multispecies groundﬁsh trawl ﬁshery, and southern Gulf crab and offshore scallops in Nova Scotia. In many other ﬁsheries, IQs are being used to curtail the race for ﬁsh. But incentive-based approaches will not bring back the depleted cod stocks or prevent a potential resource downturn in Atlantic shellﬁsh should changing environmental conditions reverse the recent surge in productivity of lobster, crab, and shrimp. In Atlantic Canada one major constraint on achieving economically viable ﬁsheries in the long term is the continued dependence of hundreds of coastal communities on ﬁshing for survival. There is also a prevalent ﬁshing culture that reﬂects that ﬁshing is the preferred way of eking out a living. This is abetted by the generous income support available through the employment insurance system. Ministers of differing political stripes chose, in the case of the upsurge in crab and shrimp abundance in the 1990s, to “share the wealth” rather than to make the existing license holders “obscenely wealthy.” This was done by issuing temporary licenses, which, when the high resource abundance continued, were converted into permanent licenses. This particular choice reﬂects the dominant paradigm of making every effort to sustain coastal communities dependent on the ﬁshery and to achieve “equity” in the ﬁsheries sector. The government in 2008, which participated in a “share-the-wealth” decision by making temporary licenses permanent, has indicated that it is pursuing “ecologically sustainable, economically viable and internationally competitive ﬁsheries” (DFO 2007). Its proposed revisions to the Fisheries Act contains some tentative steps in that direction, but these fall far short of enshrining the ITQ approach widely favored by the world’s ﬁsheries economist community. Indeed, the proposed new Act states that licenses are not property. In Canada, the

Canadian Marine Fisheries Management ultimate decision makers, politicians elected by the voters, no matter what their political stripe, do not share the economist’s devotion to economic efﬁciency, in favor of nonspeciﬁed, equity-based socioeconomic objectives. Canada’s marine ﬁsheries continue to be plagued by instability due to various problems and constraints (Parsons 1993a): • Natural resource variability, often environmentally determined • The common-property nature of ﬁsheries resources and the resultant overcapacity/ overﬁshing • Market ﬂuctuations/dependence on export markets • Recurrent conﬂict among competing users • Conﬂicting objectives for ﬁsheries management • Few alternative employment opportunities in coastal communities • Social programs (e.g., FUI) that motivate ﬁshers to stay in the ﬁshery Various combinations of these factors have contributed to recurrent boom-and-bust patterns in Canada’s marine ﬁsheries. While some progress has been made in the past 15 years, there is still an urgent need to bring harvesting and processing capacity into balance with sustainable resource levels. There has been some limited progress made on this front due to the greater use of IQs/ITQs approaches in many ﬁsheries. Buyback initiatives appear to have had some favorable impacts in British Columbia but have failed miserably to reduce capacity in Atlantic Canada. Periodic ﬁsheries crises and demands for government assistance can be expected to continue unless alternative economic opportunities can be developed in the coastal regions of Canada. Most attempts at regional economic development have failed to generate lasting viable economic opportunities. Recent offshore oil and gas development has made some entrepreneurs rich and provided employment to others. Also there has been some outmigration to other provinces, particularly oil-rich Alberta. But this has not alleviated the dependence of ﬁshers and coastal communities on the ﬁsheries, both as a source of income and the means to access the Social Security net provided by the Employment Insurance program. Nor has it reduced the social pressure on governments to maximize employment in the ﬁshery.

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Acknowledgments I express my appreciation to Tim Downing for research assistance and, speciﬁcally, preparation of the ﬁgures. Thanks also to Dan Lane for his helpful comments and suggestions for improvement of the manuscript. Finally, many thanks to my late wife Loretta for her support and encouragement over many years.

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Report 2000/G2-01. Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada. DFO (2002). Canada’s Oceans Strategy: Our Oceans, Our Future. Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Oceans Directorate. DFO (2004). A Policy Framework for the Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast. Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada. DFO (2005a). Canada’s Policy for Conservation of Wild Paciﬁc Salmon. Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada. DFO (2005b). Canada’s Federal Marine Protected Areas Strategy. DFO/2005-799. Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada. DFO (2006). A Harvest Strategy Compliant with the Precautionary Approach. Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat Science Advisory Report 2006/023. Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada. DFO (2007). Ocean to Plate Approach to Commercial Fisheries and Aquaculture, and Several Related Backgrounders. www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/ media/archive/back-ﬁche2007_e.htm (accessed 22 November 2008). Doubleday, W.G., and H. Powles (1997). Recent steps in the evolution of ﬁsheries resource conservation institutions in Canada. Second World Fisheries Congress, pp. 707–712. Victoria, Australia: Commonwealth Scientiﬁc and Research Organization. Drinkwater, K.F. (2002). A review of the role of climate variability in the decline of northern cod. American Fisheries Society Symposium 32: 113–130. FAO (2003). Fisheries Management 2. Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries 4, Suppl. 2, Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Fraser, G.A. (1979). Limited entry: Experience of the British Columbia salmon ﬁshery. Journal of Fisheries Research Board Canada 36: 754–763. FRCC (1995). 1995 Conservation Framework for Atlantic Lobster. Ottawa: Fisheries Resource Conservation Council. FRCC (2005). Strategic Conservation Framework for Atlantic Snow Crab. Ottawa: Fisheries Resource Conservation Council. FRCC (2007). Sustainability Framework for Atlantic Lobster. Ottawa: Fisheries Resource Conservation Council. Gardner Pinfold Consulting (2006a). Overview of the Atlantic Snow Crab Industry. Halifax, N.S.: Gardner Pinfold Consulting. Gardner Pinfold Consulting (2006b). Proﬁle of the Atlantic Shrimp Industry. Halifax, N.S.: Gardner Pinfold Consulting. Gough, J. (2008). Managing Canada’s Fisheries from Early Days to the Year 2000. Sillery, Quebec: Septentrion.

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Canadian Marine Fisheries Management gc.ca/en/2006/2006fca237/2006fca237.html (accessed 22 November 2008). Lilly, G.L., D.G. Parsons, and D.W. Kulka (2000). Was the increase in shrimp biomass on the northeast Newfoundland shelf a consequence of a release in predation pressure from cod? Journal of Northwest Atlantic Fishery Science 27: 45–61. Mann, K.H., and K.F. Drinkwater (1994). Environmental inﬂuences on ﬁsh and shellﬁsh production in the Northwest Atlantic. Environmental Review 2: 16–32. Munro, G.R. (2000). The effect of introducing individual harvest quotas upon ﬂeet capacity in the marine ﬁsheries of British Columbia. Pp. 208–220 in Case Studies on the Effects of Transferable Fishing Fights on Fleet Capacity and Concentration of Quota Ownership. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 412. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Myers, R.A., J.A. Hutchings, and N.J. Barrowman (1996). Hypotheses for the decline of cod in the North Atlantic. Marine Ecology Progress Series 138: 293–308. Myers, R.A., J.A. Hutchings, and N.J. Barrowman (1997). Why do ﬁsh stocks collapse? The example of cod in Atlantic Canada. Ecological Applications 7(1): 91–106. Noakes, D.J., R.J. Beamish, and R. Gregory (2002). British Columbia’s Commercial Salmon Industry. NPAFC Document 642. Vancouver: North Paciﬁc Anadromous Fisheries Commission. Ofﬁce of the Auditor General (1997). 1997 Report of the Auditor General of Canada. Chapters 14 and 15. www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_199710_e_1147.html (accessed 22 November 2008). Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press. Parsons, D.G., and E.B. Colbourne (2000). Forecasting ﬁshery performance for northern shrimp on the Labrador Shelf. Journal of Northwest Atlantic Fishery Science 27: 11–20. Parsons, L.S. (1983). Enterprise Allocations for the Atlantic Offshore Groundﬁsh Fisheries. Ottawa, Ontario: Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Parsons, L.S. (1993a). Management of marine ﬁsheries in Canada. Canadian Bulletin of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 225: 763. Parsons, L.S. (1993b). Shaping ﬁsheries policy: The Kirby and Pearse inquiries process, prescription and impact. Canadian Bulletin of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 226: 385–409. Parsons, L.S. (2005a). Governance of Straddling Stocks in the Northwest Atlantic. A Review of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization for the Advisory Panel on Straddling

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Stocks. Background Report for the Advisory Panel on Straddling Stocks. Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Parsons, L.S. (2005b). Ecosystem considerations in ﬁsheries management: Theory and practice. International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 20(3): 318–422. Parsons, L.S., and J.S. Beckett (1997). Fisheries management in Atlantic Canada: The case of Atlantic groundﬁsh. American Fisheries Society Symposium 20: 73–79. Parsons, L.S., and W.H. Lear (2001). Climate variability and marine ecosystem impacts: A North Atlantic perspective. Progress in Oceanography 49: 167–188. Peacock, F.G., and J. Hansen (1999). Community management in groundﬁsh: A new approach to property rights. In: Use of Property Rights in Fisheries Management. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 404/2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Pearse, P.H. (1982). Turning the Tide: A New Policy for Canada’s Paciﬁc Fisheries. Vancouver: Commission on Paciﬁc Fisheries Policy. Privy Council Ofﬁce (2003). A Framework for the Application of Precaution in Science-Based Decision Making about Risk. Ottawa, Ontario: Privy Council Ofﬁce. Rice, J. (2002). Changes to the large marine ecosystem of the Newfoundland-Labrador Shelf. Pp. 51–103 in K. Sherman and H.R. Skjoldal (eds). Large Marine Ecosystems of the North Atlantic: Changing States and Sustainability. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Rice, J. (2005). Bringing experiential knowledge into ﬁsheries science advisory processes: Lessons learned from the Canadian experience of participatory governance. Pp. 249–268 in T.S. Gray (ed). Participation in Fisheries Governance. Dordrecht: Springer. Rose, G.A., B. de Young, D.W. Kulka, S.V. Goddard, and G.L. Fletcher (2000). Distribution shifts and overﬁshing the northern cod (Gadus morhua): A view from the ocean. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science 57 (3): 644–663. Savoie, D.J., G. Filtreau, and P. Gallaugher (1998). Partnering the Fishery: Report of the Panel Studying Partnering. Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Schrank, W.E. (2005). The Newfoundland ﬁshery: Ten years after the moratorium. Marine Policy 29: 407–420. Scott, A.D. (1997). The ITQ as a property right: Where it came from, how it works, and where it is going. In: B.L. Crowley (ed). Taking Ownership Property Rights and Fishery Management on the Atlantic Coast. Halifax, N.S.: Atlantic Institute of Marketing Studies.

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Shelton, P.A. (2007). The weakening role of science in the management of groundﬁsh off the east coast of Canada. ICES Journal of Marine Science 64: 723–729. Shelton, P.A., A.F. Sinclair, G.A. Chouinard, R. Mohn, and D.E. Duplisea (2006). Fishing under low productivity conditions is further delaying recovery of Northwest Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua). Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science 63(2): 235–238. Species at Risk Act (2002). c. 29. laws.justice.gc.ca/ en/showdoc/cs/S-15.3///en?page=1 (22 November 2008).

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31 Shared Rules for a Shared Sea: Multilevel Fisheries Governance in Italian Fisheries Management MASSIMO SPAGNOLO

To make this issue clear, it will sufﬁce to look at some of the main characteristics deﬁning the Mediterranean ﬁsheries:

31.1. MEDITERRANEAN FISHERIES: A DIFFICULT MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE SYSTEM As in any other E.U. Mediterranean country, Italian ﬁsheries are characterized by quite a number of peculiarities. Among others, the number and position of bodies participating in the management decisionmaking process and their relevance deﬁne a multilevel ﬁsheries governance system. Admittedly, this feature does not explain strengths and weaknesses of the whole ﬁshery management policy in Italy, but it intends to shed some light on hidden factors whose importance is often underestimated. Measures to be implemented within a management policy decided by different bodies could take different forms, and the initial priorities could become rather stinted as more and more decisional levels become involved. Each management level, in fact, even when sharing the objectives set by the policy, is the expression of different interests that do not necessarily coherently contribute to the same goal. One example is the case of biological stock recovery measures decided within large management bodies, whose implementation responsibility is shifted onto other bodies at a more local level. The latter, of course, will also take economic and social dimensions into consideration when implementing policy measures. When this is the case, resource management is not necessarily doomed in achieving the foreseen targets. 415

• Biological resources in the area are exploited by ﬂeets belonging to E.U. and non-E.U. countries. • The European Union has the general jurisdiction for ﬁshery management regulations and is responsible for the implementation of the Common Fishery Policy. E.U. member states may take initiative for the conservation and management of stocks in waters under their sovereignty or jurisdiction provided that measures apply solely to ﬁshing vessels ﬂying the ﬂag of the member state concerned and registered in the community and are compatible with the objectives set out in the Common Fishery Policy and no less stringent than existing Community legislation. Moreover, in Italy, as in some other countries in the Mediterranean, following a constitutional modiﬁcation entered into force in 2001, administrative regions are competent for ﬁnancial support to ﬂeet modernization, small-scale ﬁsheries, and onshore investments and services. • Mediterranean territorial waters extension is, with some minor exceptions, limited to 12 miles from the coast, meaning that outside this limit resource exploitation is governed by a high-seas legal regime. In fact, exclusive economic zones (EEZs) cannot be introduced due

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Case Studies in Governance to the limited distance existing among countries facing each other. This implies that ﬁshing grounds are often shared among E.U. and non-E.U. ﬂeets, each of them having a speciﬁc management regime. The General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM), which is a regional ﬁsheries organization gathering all (E.U. and non-E.U.) Mediterranean countries, has consultative powers and is also active in the area. Member countries of the GFCM are “suggested” to adopt GFCM “recommendation” in their regimes, but, as far as E.U. countries are concerned, “recommendations” automatically turn into E.U. rules and become compulsory for E.U. ﬁshing ﬂeets, thus introducing distortions in the ﬁshery. Fishing capacity in most of the non-E.U. countries is steeply increasing, while E.U. ﬁshing capacity is strongly decreasing. Most ﬁsh stocks are fully or heavily overexploited. Overall demand and per capita consumption for ﬁsh products, as well as international ﬁsh trade, are steeply increasing in the whole area, and the resulting price increase is a major factor driving the nonsustainability of Mediterranean ﬁsheries.

Of course, these characteristics play a different role and contribute differently to the actual degree of management difﬁculties depending on stocks and ﬁshing grounds. However, as for the multilevel decision-making approach, the Italian ﬁshing ﬂeet can be broken down into the following groups (Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture Economic Research [IREPA] 2004): • Coastal ﬂeets exploiting pelagic and demersal stocks; while E.U. policy sets most of the management measures, nonetheless there is also room for another two decision levels, states and regions, each of them having jurisdictions and powers in the ﬁsheries sector domain. • More distant ﬁshing ﬂeets, exploiting pelagic and demersal stocks outside 12 nautical miles, often share grounds and stocks with other nations’ ﬂeets. Once again, the management process involves the European Union, GFCM, national authority, and administrative regions. • For ﬂeets exploiting migratory species, the picture needs to be integrated by introducing International Commission for the Conservation of

Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT), the regional ﬁsheries organization competent for migratory species in Atlantic and Mediterranean. • Fleets exploiting sedentary species such as clams and bivalve mollusks are actually selfmanaged, even if E.U. Mediterranean policy has introduced some technical limits (distance from the coast). Each of these segments deserves a speciﬁc analysis in terms of management efﬁciency since results have shown to be signiﬁcantly different. As for coastal ﬂeets exploiting pelagic and demersal stocks, ﬁshing effort regulation (capacity and activity) is the main management tool to allow for stock recovery. In this respect, E.U. and national rules have had a positive, but not yet sufﬁcient, impact. As for measures concerning the economic and social dimension, whose goals depend on the local political priorities, administrative regional bodies play an important role since they are responsible for most of the ﬁnancial resources in the ﬁshery sector. The need for supporting ﬂeet modernization or supporting ﬁshermen incomes can prove to be incoherent with the state priority in terms of stock recovery. As for more distant ﬁshing ﬂeets, the actual E.U. policy unilaterally limits effort exerted by its own ﬂeet, by reducing capacity and introducing technical measures, while it is not able to negotiate for an overall common management regime with non-E.U. Mediterranean countries. This aspect is becoming a major source of conﬂict among different ﬂeets ﬁshing the same grounds traditionally ﬁshed by the Italian ﬂeet. In fact, some non-E.U. Mediterranean ﬂeets are growing very fast and expanding their activities, sometimes also ﬁshing inside Italian waters. Furthermore, in Italy, the ﬁshing effort regime in place is strengthened by introducing management plans calling for further ﬁshing capacity and activity reduction, which will bring to an even larger imbalance between E.U. and non-E.U. ﬂeets. As for migratory species, an ICCAT resolution brought the introduction of a total allowable catch (TAC) approach among contracting parties (States) ﬁshing blueﬁn tuna (Thunnus thynnus), while technical restrictions apply in case of the swordﬁsh ﬁshery. Concerning the latter, based on a U.N. resolution, a moratorium has been imposed on driftnet ﬁshery. Following a long and difﬁcult negotiation, the European Commission decided to withdrawal all driftnets registered in E.U. Mediterranean countries. The rule heavily hit the Italian driftnet ﬂeet, since

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Multilevel Fisheries Governance in Italian Fisheries this was by far the most important driftnet ﬂeet in the Mediterranean. Results have been poor, as was easily foreseen; non-E.U. ﬂeets substituted for the Italian ﬂeet and exported swordﬁsh to Italy. Concerning tuna, it is of utmost interest to note that, as largely expected by previous experience, increase of ﬁshing capacity started with the introduction of the new approach based on quota. Since then, national and international rivalry has exponentially increased, together with capital stufﬁng and the “race to ﬁsh.” As for sedentary species, since 1996 a self-management approach is in place based on territorial user rights in ﬁsheries (TURFs), and a moratorium on the number of licenses has been introduced. In this case, the decision-making process involved the national management authority, the national ﬁshermen association, and local ﬁshermen groups. The level of cohesion among local ﬁshermen groups and the implementation of two management plans (1996, 1998) resulted in a consistent increase in income per vessel and value of licenses.

31.2. MANAGEMENT REGIMES AND MANAGED RESOURCES 31.2.1. Coastal Resources: Is Effort Regulation the Solution? Fleets exploiting resources within 12 nautical miles from the coast are important in the Italian ﬁshing industry and involve all ﬂeet segments. Fishing is carried out by vessels that account for more than 80 percent of the small-scale ﬁshery (i.e. vessels < 12 meters in length using passive gear). With the exclusion of the hydraulic dredges that exploit

TABLE

exclusively bivalve mollusks, the remaining 20 percent of vessels that exploit coastal resources are spread mainly between trawlers and multipurpose vessels (see table 31.1). Landings of the small-scale ﬁshery account for more than a quarter of the national production, employing 44 percent of Italian ﬁshermen. Average incomes are low and are generally decreasing over time. Nevertheless, this ﬁshery represents an important economic resource in some geographical areas with a high level of dependence on ﬁsheries. The trawler ﬂeet, composed of vessels that operate exclusively in coastal waters inside 12 nautical miles, accounts for 10 percent of the coastal ﬂeet. In 2007 landings of trawlers exploiting coastal resources accounted for 21 percent of national catches and 30 percent of the national value of landings. The segment of multipurpose vessels is composed of polyvalent vessels using passive gear (mainly nets) in combination with mobile gear (mainly trawls) according to season, demand, and ﬁshing grounds. In 2007, they accounted for 4 percent of national total number of vessels and tonnage and represented 3 percent of national landings in volume and value. The common property of the resource enhances the rivalry feature among small enterprises themselves and the competition among professional and recreational ﬁshermen (Gambino et al. 2007). In both cases, enforcement and control activities are difﬁcult due to the large numbers of people involved (about 12,000 ﬁshermen, plus hundreds of thousands recreational boats) and the limited dimension of ﬁshing boats. Since the early 1980s, the management of coastal resources has been mainly based on effort (capacity and activity) regulations together

31.1 Composition of the Italian ﬂeet exploiting coastal resources within 12 nautical miles, 2007

Fleet Segment Midwater pair trawlers Longliners Purse seiners Multipurpose Hydraulic dredges Trawlers Small-scale ﬁshery Total Source: IREPA (2007b).

Number of Vessels

%

Crew

Average Gross Tonnage

Average Overall Boat Length

Average Power (kW)

26 80 145 266 703 1,139 8,809 11,168

0.2 0.7 1.3 2.4 6.3 10.2 78.9 100.0

154 274 1.107 798 1.406 3.799 12.403 19.933

34.0 9.6 20.1 10.4 13.2 17.9 1.8 4.7

16.8 12.2 15.0 13.2 13.5 14.3 6.8 8.3

150.9 89.4 145.7 115.5 107.5 131.1 25.3 45.7

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with other complementary technical measures, such as mesh size and area and time closure. Fleet ﬁshing effort policy control falls under the E.U. jurisdiction, even if the implementation responsibility is assigned to member states. Until 2002, E.U. regulations, through the implementation of multiannual guidance programs (MAGPs) established the effort reduction objectives to be achieved for speciﬁed ﬂeet segments according to the stocks exploited and the ﬁshing gear employed. This was a ﬁrst-level decision that, although correct in principle, failed to fulﬁll expectations in terms of stock recovery. In fact, this approach, while meeting the capacity reduction goals, was also used to fulﬁll socioeconomic needs. The industry considered the ﬁnancial aid as a premium for those leaving the ﬁshery—elderly people in particular. The result was that the less efﬁcient and older vessels were scrapped without a real beneﬁt for stock recovery (Spagnolo 2004). This is why the MAGPs have been replaced by a less ambitious but simpler and more ﬂexible scheme through the approval of C.E. Rule 2369/02 allowing for the permanent reduction of the ﬂeet once a vessel was scrapped by not allowing for vessel replacement. In fact, the overall tonnage and power limits set in the previous MAGP’s approach allowed new vessels to be built as long as the ﬂeet size remained under those limits. The new approach ﬁnally eliminated any further support to the construction of new vessels, whatever the ﬂeet size. The same approach has been maintained under the new European Fisheries Fund, which is the new ﬁnancial tool for the 2007–2013 ﬁsheries programming period (E.C. Regulation 1198/2006 of 27 July 2006). At the same time, after the constitutional reform of 2001, many decisions in local ﬁshery matters

TABLE

have been transferred from the central government to regions. In particular, socioeconomic and ﬂeet modernization subsidies fall within the regional jurisdictions, allowing for concurrent jurisdiction between different authorities. The issue here is that the two different management levels have different and not necessarily coherent goals. While, in principle, the European Union and the state share the resource sustainability priority, support to local ﬂeet and ﬁshermen is the regional authority’s goal. In this case, the multilevel decision-making process, through the devolution of management jurisdictions, has resulted in a loss of efﬁciency both because of the different interests existing at national and regional levels and because of the geographical resource distribution, which is not limited to administrative boundaries. In particular, resource management would require coherence and homogeneity when implementing management measures in order to avoid distortion in the production mechanism (IREPA 2002).

31.2.2. Distant-Water Fleet: Shared Rules or Permanent Conﬂicts? The Italian distant-water ﬂeet includes both vessels operating in the Mediterranean and vessels authorized to operate in coastal waters outside 12 nautical miles. In 2007, this ﬂeet consisted of 2,449 vessels, representing 18 percent of the national ﬂeet, with 62 percent of the distant-water ﬂeet composed by trawlers of larger dimensions (1,505 boats). Multipurpose vessels account for about 10 percent of this ﬂeet segment. The remaining 28 percent is distributed between purse seiners, midwater pair trawlers, longliners, and beam trawlers (see table 31.2).

31.2 Composition of the Italian distant-water ﬂeet, 2007

Fleet Segment Purse seiners Longliners Passive gear Multipurpose Beam trawlers Trawlers Midwater pair trawlers Total Source: IREPA.

Number of Vessels

%

Crew

Average Gross Tonnage

Average Overall Boat Length

Average Power (kW)

151 167 167 262 76 1505 121

6.2 6.8 6.8 10.7 3.1 61.5 4.9

1.153 572 572 898 254 5.02 677

102.5 39.1 6.9 17.1 78.9 61.9 83.6

26.4 17.0 10.8 14.4 22.1 20.1 22.9

395.5 233.9 134.8 170.6 347.7 251.7 385.0

2449

100.0

9.145

55.9

19.3

252.3

419

Multilevel Fisheries Governance in Italian Fisheries The primary critical factor in this context is the complete lack of management measures homogeneously applied throughout the Mediterranean Sea. In most Mediterranean areas, there is strong competition among ﬂeets belonging to different countries exploiting the same stock but not subject to the same management, surveillance, and control regulations. While ﬂeets registered in E.U. Mediterranean countries are constrained by E.U. management regimes over the entire area, other ﬂeets are free to operate within their own regime, which has proved to move in quite the opposite direction. In other words, even if all countries have a seat in GFCM, the two management levels do not talk each other, and stock recovery measures adopted by E.U. countries are countered by other management regimes allowing increased ﬂeet ﬁshing effort. This is the usual and legal operating condition experienced by the industry ﬁshing shared stocks in international waters in the Mediterranean. As matter of fact, the Mediterranean Sea is deﬁned as a semiclosed sea and represents a particular case with respect to the principles established by the U.N. Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) in which it is not possible to introduce an EEZ. Implications arising from such features are not minor both in terms of resource management, since it determines the persistence of coastal state jurisdiction limited to only 12 nautical miles from the coast. Outside this limit, management of resources cannot be the exclusive responsibility of individual states, given the international nature of these waters. All ﬂeets have equal access rights to the exploitation. In this context, therefore, nothing is changed with respect to UNCLOS III.

TABLE

1990 ... 1995 ... 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

As previously said, GFCM is not entrusted with any enforcement power but can only formulate recommendations based on stock assessment results. In this respect, GFCM action is essentially guided by the scientiﬁc and technical advice annually received by its Scientiﬁc Advisory Committee and concerning some of the stocks shared by two or more Mediterranean ﬂeets. On the basis of such advice, GFCM formulates recommendations about possible management measures, data collection, ﬁsh stocks monitoring, and the like. Nevertheless, GFCM has indirect powers with respect to E.U. countries (Spain, France, Greece, Slovenia, Malta, Crete, and Italy) since its recommendations are automatically adopted into E.U. rules and become compulsory for E.U. ﬁshing ﬂeets. This multilevel management approach allows for the introduction of distortions in the industry’s allocation mechanism. Fleets without stringent rules will increase their ﬁshing effort, and, whenever possible, some E.U. vessels will ﬁnd it more convenient to register in other Mediterranean countries. This outcome is more than realistic considering that in recent years there has been a trend moving exactly in this direction: as it is shown in table 31.3, E.U. countries are reducing their ﬁshing ﬂeets and their landings, while non-E.U. countries are heavily increasing their effort.

31.2.3. Migratory Species: An Endless War? Migratory species are mainly caught by purse seiners and longlines. The latter include many types of set and drift longliners used to catch different

31.3 Mediterranean capture production in EU and non-EU countries, metric tonnes, 1990–2005 EU countries

Non-EU countries

601.630

473.829

2.529

1.077.988

723.937

449.060

6.790

1.179.787

595.936 584.848 530.773 522.839 517.428 546.458

469.688 515.662 504.462 495.196 491.943 574.200

3.491 3.693 3.909 3.560 5.476 4.117

1.069.116 1.104.202 1.039.144 1.021.594 1.014.847 1.124.774

Source: Fao, Fishstat Plus, GFCM captures, June 2007.

Extra Med countries

Total Mediterranean capture

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species, such as swordﬁshes, blueﬁn tuna, albacore tuna, and hake. The ﬂeet is concentrated in the Tyrrhenian littoral area and particularly in Sicily and represents 5 percent of national landings. The management of highly migratory ﬁsh stock is an emblematic case of multilevel management where jurisdictions are distributed at different levels among ICCAT, the European Union, and member states. ICCAT, unlike the GFCM, has effective enforcement powers, and once adopted, its resolutions enter into effect. With regard to blueﬁn tuna (Thunnus thynnus), since 1997—after the European Community adhered to ICCAT—recommendations including member state quotas, restriction on ﬁshing effort, ﬁsh size, ﬁshing gear, and the like have been adopted and transferred into E.U. rules. In particular, the overall E.U. quota is subdivided among member states traditionally ﬁshing blueﬁn tuna and having an active tuna ﬂeet. The decision mechanism actually in place has shown some drawbacks whose limits are ampliﬁed by the multilevel procedure. At the ﬁrst decisional level (ICCAT) priority is given to the stock recovery measures. An important decision concerns the deﬁnition of the overall tuna allowable quota and its allocation among contracting parties, where the European Union is one of them. Criteria followed by ICCAT to set the quota are based on theoretical models whose consistency and predictive capacity are often questioned. A precautionary approach is therefore integrated in the decision procedure. Fishermen representatives take no part in the decision. The second level concerns the role of European Union in implementing the rules set within ICCAT and the allocation of the overall quota assigned to the European Union among its member states. The European Union allocates the quota on the basis of historic catches. The percentage repartition was established once and for all in 1998. This procedure has been often questioned by those countries that have found themselves penalized by criteria adopted for the initial allocation procedure. As for other management measures to be introduced, the E.U. position takes into consideration the actual structure of the ﬂeet and the biological priority is now mixed with other structural and economic dimensions. The two priorities are not always strictly coherently convergent. The third level concerns the member state decisions about the allocation of individual quotas (IQs) among those engaged in tuna ﬁshing, by

gear and vessel dimension. Of course, this level also concerns IQ allocation depending on the initial biological priority, that is, tuna stock recovery. Nevertheless, the more the decision comes closer to the ﬁnal vessel owner, the more social and economic considerations play a role in the decision mechanism. Control and reporting, in particular, represent areas where state activity has shown to be insufﬁcient, because of information asymmetry and the importance of social and economic dimension in tuna ﬁshery. A conﬂict between the two levels is a possible outcome; for example, based on the precautionary approach, E.U. Commission Regulation 530, issued 12 June 2008, declared the anticipated suspension of the season well before it was expected and well before the total quota was reached. As a matter of fact, the rule gave rise to a dispute between the Italian state and the Italian tuna ﬂeet owners, in the one hand, and the European Commission, on the other, in front of the Court of Justice of the European Union. In other words, while moving from the initial decision level to the last one, the whole process is characterized by an increasing number of variables, where the initial priority is stinted within other decisional issues, whose importance depends on the speciﬁc social and economic environment. So far, some conclusions can be drawn about this speciﬁc management system: 1. The allocation of the overall quota and technical measures by ICCAT are based on biological priority. The same is not necessarily true at the state level, where the implementation of management decisions is taken on and possibly also depends on the industry’s structure and interests. 2. The different national allocation systems in place in each E.U. Mediterranean country (previously TAC, then IQ, now ITQs in Italy) express different interests, not necessarily convergent with the objective of protection and conservation of the tuna stock. An overall problem is related to the use of a management program based on total quota allocation at ICCAT and EU level, which proved to be totally inefﬁcient, especially when applied to the management of migratory species. In the case of blueﬁn tuna, in fact, the period of ﬁshing activity is limited to the seasonal passage of tuna in Mediterranean waters and ﬂeets, and all authorized (E.U.

Multilevel Fisheries Governance in Italian Fisheries and non-E.U.) countries simultaneously exploit this stock. Given the uncertainty related to the duration of this activity—a few days or a few weeks—the rivalry feature is not eliminated even in the case of IQ or ITQ allocation. In the short period allowed by the passage of the stock through the Mediterranean areas, all vessels are engaged in the race to ﬁsh. The harmful effects arising from the introduction of a TAC allocation system can be synthesized as follows: 1. The race to ﬁsh. 2. Overcapitalization in terms of both investment on board and ﬁshing capacity, through the introduction of more sophisticated equipment for research and catch. 3. Illegal, unregulated, and unreported ﬁshing, in particular, companies are encouraged to misreport their catch and their activity, and some ﬁctitious companies are created in order to spread the quota with units that have no quota at all. The results obtained from the application of breakeven analysis to the Italian tuna purse seine ﬂeet longer than 18 meters conﬁrm the potential distorting effects arising from an erroneous allocation of quotas. The break-even analysis is a useful tool for the analysis of the cost–output–proﬁt relationship at varying levels of TAC (Secretariat of the European Commission 2004). On the basis of the

technical and economic features of the Italian tuna purse seine ﬂeet, the break-even point—as the level of production that returns the costs and revenues of individual vessel—was estimated. Results show that break-even point is reached with a production of 235 metric tons (see ﬁgure 31.1), while the average quota of an Italian purse seine vessel in 2005 was 110 metric tons (and 76 metric tons in 2008). Thus, it is quite clear that the current TAC is totally inadequate for the economic needs of the sector (IREPA 2006). With regard to the ban on driftnets used to catch swordﬁsh, it is quite clear that this can be considered as another striking example of inefﬁciency caused by a multilevel governance system, where a number of institutions have participated in the process, each with different interests. In this case there are at least three levels involved: the United Nations, European Union, and Italian government. Administrative regions also play a role by allowing ﬁshermen ﬁnancial support by introducing speciﬁc socioeconomic measures. Following the driftnet moratorium imposed by a U.N. resolution in 1989,1 the European Union introduced a rule banning driftnets in 1991,2 and in 1997 the Italian government approved a driftnet plan calling for the permanent withdrawal of all existing driftnets. The ban on driftnets implied the compulsory participation in the program of license withdrawal concerning driftnet ﬁshery. Measures allowed for the permanent withdrawal of vessels

1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 0

40

80

120 160 200 240 280 320 360 400 440 480 520 Landings (tons) Total costs

Total Revenues

31.1 Break-even point of the Italian tuna purse seine ﬂeet, 2005. (IREPA 2006)

FIGURE

421

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using driftnets from the ﬁshery, and/or the reconversion of ﬁshermen. Out of a total of 850 vessels, 129 vessel withdrawal allowances were granted to ship owners. There were 721 reconversion allowances granted. In other words, ﬁshermen approaching the age of retirement beneﬁted from the opportunity to be granted an unexpected withdrawal allowance that they would not have been granted in the future. Besides, by using the allowances, ﬁshermen intending to continue ﬁshing had the possibility to reconvert to other gear. As a matter of fact, most of the reconversions involved the use of the ferrettara (a small driftnet having less than 2,500 meters net, ﬁshing in territorial waters, and not being allowed to legally ﬁsh swordﬁsh), a gear that allowed ﬁshermen to continue ﬁshing. Generally speaking, given the small dimension of vessels, most of the reconverted ﬂeet shifted their activity to along the coastal areas that were already affected by overexploitation. Some of them continued to ﬁsh swordﬁsh illegally (E.C. Sabatella and Spagnolo 2007). Moreover, non-E.U. Mediterranean countries beneﬁted from the ban on driftnets imposed by the European Union on Italian ﬁshermen. In most of these countries, particularly Morocco and Turkey, a considerable increase in driftnets and swordﬁsh harvesting was recorded. In fact, the ban on driftnet, which involved the Mediterranean countries belonging to the European Union, boosted the activity of driftnet ﬁsheries performed by third Mediterranean countries. Therefore, as demonstrated by the data concerning the harvesting of swordﬁsh in 2006, the Mediterranean area registered a production of swordﬁsh of approximately 12,000 tons, whereas, in 2001, the production amounted to 15,000 (Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2002). The failure of the “driftnet plan” might be synthesized into the following aspects, all of them characterizing a multilevel decision-making process. The ﬁrst issue involves the ﬁrst level of the decisional process, and it might be associated with the approval of the U.N. Resolution. In that context, no distinction had been made between the high seas, deﬁned as the extension of the sea outside the EEZ, and those areas where international waters start after only 12 miles. The result has been that the U.N. resolution establishing a moratorium on large driftnets ﬁshing in high seas has differently affected the nations with or without an EEZ. In this latter case, the implementation of the rule had the effect of eliminating a traditional ﬁshery ﬁshing

outside 12 miles, while in the former case, the vessel had the opportunity to continue ﬁshing in the economic zones, up to 200 miles from the coast. In this latter case, the moratorium has shown to be ineffective, while in former it has been really effective, and a long-lasting contrast with local ﬁshermen is still in place today. Further weaknesses aroused at the second decisional level: the E.U. level. Indeed, mainly political and diplomatic pressures boosted the recognition of the U.N. resolutions, which was ﬁnally adopted by the European Union. However, it is important to note that the European Commission decision was based on the precautionary approach principle. Following this criterion, the European administration adopted measures that were not supported by any scientiﬁc data concerning the actual incidence of bycatches and accidental catches of marine mammals made by driftnets in the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, several available studies on the above-mentioned issues had demonstrated the groundlessness of the evaluations made against driftnets but were not used at all to support the decision process. Finally, the third decisional level concerned the state, which was requested to enforce the E.U. regulation under extremely critical social circumstances. Actually, it is remarkable that each state (Italy and partially France) involved in the “driftnet affair” attempted to minimize, as far as possible, the damages caused by the U.N. resolution and the European regulation pursuant to it. Once again, the whole process conﬁrms the existence of a multilevel decision-making process, where the initial decision is weakened with each step down the process as it moves to the ﬁnal level.

31.2.4. Sedentary Resources: Property Rights and SelfManagement In Italy the bivalve mollusk sector has been characterized by intense regulatory activity, aimed in particular to restore the status of clams (Chamelea gallina), seriously compromised by an excessive ﬁshing pressure and frequent environmental crisis. The ﬂeet segment concerned is that of hydraulic dredges, ﬁshing gear used almost exclusively for the clam ﬁshery, but also the main cause of resource depletion. The spread of hydraulic dredges from the beginning of the 1970s, along with an extraordinary technical development, has generated a serious overﬁshing. Clam landings, which in 1984

423

Multilevel Fisheries Governance in Italian Fisheries amounted to more than 100,000 tons, within a decade has fallen by more than 70 percent, with heavy social and economic consequences especially along the Adriatic coast, where Italian exploitation is concentrated. The management of this resource has undergone three different phases. After a ﬁrst phase based on a centralized management scheme, the central authority launched two clam plans in 1996 and 1998. The basic features of the ﬁrst clam plan were as follows (R.F. Sabatella and Spagnolo 2007):

31.4 Main indicators for clam ﬁshery with hydraulic dredges (1996–2002)

TABLE

Incomes/vessel (000 euro) Gross proﬁt/vessel (000 euro) Added value/vessel (000 euro) Incomes (mill. euro) Gross proﬁt (mill. euro) Added value (mill. euro) Licence value (000 euro)

1996

2002

D%

42 4 30 34 12 25 130

96 39 77 64 26 52 500

129 179 157 88 117 108 285

Source: Irepa

• Partition of the Adriatic Sea in 12 ﬁshing areas. • Introduction of a voluntarily buyback scheme, with a minimum number of vessels initially to be withdrawn in each ﬁshing area. • Institution of “clam ﬁshery consortia” in each area, where at least 80 percent of all vessel owners operating within the ﬁshing area had to register. The powers and activities of the consortia were deﬁned by ministerial decrees. In particular, they were entitled to decide, among themselves, about control and surveillance procedures, rotation of ﬁshing areas, restocking areas, temporary closures, and any other restrictions on the limitations that were previously decided by the central authority. • Introduction of subsidies for clam restocking and other related activities. Other important management measures were adopted with the second clam plan. The initial and most important step was the strengthening of the role of consortia and their credibility among ﬁshermen. Consortia were, in fact, given the power to decide, together with the state, their own regulatory measures. With the second plan, the co-management experience was ﬁnally replaced by a complete selfmanagement approach, where rules were settled by the consortia themselves. Results show that the experience of the clam ﬁshery can be considered a success case of self management that was based on TURFs. Other management consortia that have been set up to deal with other mollusk species successfully followed the same approach. In the initial case of clams, the stock fully recovered after years of decline, and the resource rent and proﬁts greatly increased (Spagnolo 2007). Furthermore, between 1996 and 2002, the number of licenses decreased from 818 to 673. Over the same period, consortia were able to agree on basic commercial rules, bringing to a reduction in the

overall production level corresponding to a rise in the clam price positively affecting the salable gross production, which started to increase. As table 31.4 shows, income per vessel almost doubled (42,000 euro in 1996 vs. 96,000 euro in 2002), while the license value reached 500,000 euro in 2002 against a value of 130,000 euro in 1996.

31.3. TOWARD A BETTER MANAGEMENT APPROACH: CRITICAL FACTORS LIMITING AN EFFICIENT GOVERNANCE SYSTEM So far, some features and results of traditional command-and-control approach versus participatory management in the Mediterranean ﬁsheries have been highlighted, the latter reducing the decision levels, and the former having a multilevel decision making process. Can we conclude that territorial rights-based management tools are a panacea? From what has been said so far, a preliminary conclusion is quite straightforward. It clearly appears that, generally speaking, the number of decisionmaking bodies and their distance from the ﬁsheries to be managed represent important factors of nonsustainability that limit the governance system. Of course, whatever the state of the stock(s) involved, it is the ecological and biological structure of the ﬁshery, its geographical dimension, and the economic, social, legal, and institutional characteristics that need to be considered when choosing the appropriate management strategy to put in place. In other words, the heterogeneity of factors deﬁning a ﬁshery represent a limit to an efﬁcient command and control approach either because measures introduced may have quite a different

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impact in different ﬁsheries, and because the larger the geographical area to be managed, the more will be the number of decisional levels involved, each of them not necessarily sharing the same goal. As it has been shown in this chapter, in this case the lower would be the efﬁciency of the resource management strategy chosen. These observations point to the conclusion that a command-and-control system is not the most appropriate strategy for Mediterranean ﬁsheries where ﬂeets belonging to many states are also characterized by a number of speciﬁc factors, regarding differences of biological nature, morphology of the sea bed, and range of gear. Social, legal, and institutional factors can also be quite different. Given these circumstances, in this rather diversiﬁed and fragmented area, the Italian management authority has chosen its own policy by drawing and implementing some 21 “national management plans.” In each of the seven homogeneous areas (geographical subareas) deﬁned by the GFCM, management plans have been drawn to be adopted by main ﬂeet segments (i.e., trawlers, purse seiners, other gear). speciﬁc management plans. Each plan is characterized by measures meant to recover the main target species in each area through an effort management approach and by accompanying social and economic measures required to support ﬁshermen in the transitional period. However, it is also true that, as for shared stocks in the Mediterranean ﬁshed in extra territorial waters, national management plans should be brought at the appropriate scale in order to allow for the implementation of management and control rules. In other words, this calls for a stronger role of the GFCM. It must be admitted that, in this case, while introducing a multilevel process, the real issue is more political than technical. The need for a stronger regional ﬁsheries organization—having the possibility to decide and the means to enforce shared management rules—is of outmost importance. By the same token, the Italian strategy has also foreseen the possibility for local organized ﬁshermen (cooperatives, consortia, producer’s organizations) to implement “local management plans,” which are drawn on a much smaller scale and concern few ﬁshing grounds close to the coast. Implementation and control fall under the responsibility of small-scale local ﬁshermen organizations, while monitoring is realized by scientiﬁc bodies. In principle, the idea here is to move toward a self-management approach for coastal ﬁsheries, by combining territorial property

rights and shared exploitation rules, thus eliminating the rivalry feature of the resource common property. While totally different in terms of property rights, national or local management plans ﬁnd common ground in the underlying idea that efﬁciency depends on the homogeneity of factors deﬁning the structure of the ﬁshery as far as well tailored and shared measures can be implemented. Furthermore, whenever a management plan refers to a relatively small area, technical and accompanying measures can also be tailored and the participation of ﬁshermen in the drawing of the plan is an important and fruitful feature. The latter has shown to be of fundamental importance in previous plans adopted in Italy. In particular, the clam plan has shown excellent results through the introduction of territorial property rights that have been correctly used by the ﬁshermen themselves. Of course, a possible drawback of this scheme concerns the quasi-monopolistic position of those having a license and included in the group owning the right to exploit the mollusks. Outsiders willing to enter are, of course, excluded, and this could become a possible cause of conﬂict among ﬁshermen. The introduction of property rights cannot be considered as the panacea able to solve all management problems. The blueﬁn management approach in the Mediterranean is a paradigmatic example of a management scheme where resource property rights have been introduced together with a strong command-and-control approach, and results have proved to be very poor. As matter of fact, very stringent E.U. rules exist in the case of blueﬁn tuna, which should allow for the complete traceability of the ﬁsh caught. Production, either directly sold by vessels or by cage plants, should now be monitored through a cross-checking system, from the net to the cages to the ﬁnal wholesale buyers. Nevertheless, so far all attempts have failed to address the excess capacity and production issue. Apart from the drawbacks arising from a multilevel decision making process, reason for this result can also be found in the biologic approach which brought to the implementation of a policy which failed to consider the economic and social dimension of sustainability. On a Mediterranean scale, critical factors rely on the international competition existing among ﬂeets ﬂying different ﬂags, with different capacity and efﬁciency. On a micro scale, a problem is the difference existing between the quota allocated to each vessel and the minimum quantity of tuna needed to cover the vessel costs, in particular, to cover debts that have steadily grown

Multilevel Fisheries Governance in Italian Fisheries to sustain investments in new ﬁshing capacity after the introduction of the quota system. In most cases, this has proved to be a strong incentive to cheat and move toward an illegal, unregulated, and unreported ﬁshery. By the same token, the introduction of resource property rights, in the form of individual transferable quotas, together with the increase of the minimum quota attributed to each vessel, could prove to be a solution. However, the international competition for the exploitation of this species would not necessarily contribute to the solution of the problem. In this respect, an individual transferable quota scheme could at least, contribute to the concentration of the industry, allowing for a better control (IREPA 2007a). In conclusion, limiting the analysis to the Italian ﬁsheries, and without any generalization, the most important factors that have proven to offer some positive results can be found in the implementation of management plans with the following characteristics: • The operational scale allows a single decision level. • The factors deﬁning the area are as homogeneous as possible; single plans associated with speciﬁc gear seem to allow for better results. • Cohesion among ﬁshermen is also important, and in principle, this is true among ﬁshermen using the same gear in a homogeneous area. • Fishermen participate in the drawing of the plan and the choice of measures to be introduced; this could be one of the factors better contributing to the success of the plan. Notes 1. U.N. Resolution 44/225 of December 1989. 2. EEC Regulation 345/92, 28 October 1991, which established that the maximum length of nets at 2,500 meters. References FAO (2002). FAO FishStat—GFCM Captures. Rome: Fisheries and Aquaculture Information and Statistics Service, Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gambino, M., L. Malvarosa, E.C. Sabatella, and M. Spagnolo (2007). Evaluation of the capital value, investment, and capital cost in the

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ﬁshery secvtor. Proceedings of the XVIIIth Annual European Association of Fisheries Economists (EAFE) Conference. Reykjavik: European Association of Fisheries Economist. IREPA (2002). Fishery Governance. The efﬁciency of multi-level decisional system. In XX Irepa Anniversary. Conference on Fishery Management and multilevel decisional systems. Salerno: Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture Economic Research. IREPA (2004). A bio-economic model based approach. Proceedings of the Workshop on Biological Reference Points. GFCM-SAC, Seventh Session. Rome: Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture Economic Research. IREPA (2006). Assessment of the Blueﬁn Tuna Industry: Regulation, Management, Operational Implications. Report to Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Forestry. Rome: Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture Economic Research. IREPA (2007a). L’economia e la gestione della pesca nel Mediterraneo. In Verso un sistema di regole comuni per la pesca nel bacino del Mediterraneo. ISMEA Rapporti. Roma: Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture Economic Research. IREPA (2007b). Osservatorio economico sulle strutture produttive della pesca marittima in Italia. Salerno: Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture Economic Research. Sabatella, E.C., and M. Spagnolo (2007). The impact of the EU buy-back scheme on the Italian Fleet: The northern and central Adriatic bottom trawler case. In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fisheries Buybacks. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. Sabatella, R.F., and M. Spagnolo (2007). Driftnets buy back program: A case of institutional failure. In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fisheries Buybacks. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. Secretariat of the European Commission (2004). The Potential Economic Impact on Selected Fishing Fleet Segments of TACs Proposed by ACFM for 2005 EIAA-Model Calculations. Commission Staff Working Paper 1710. ec.europa.eu/ﬁsheries/publications/factsheets/ legal_texts/sec_2004_1710_en.pdf Spagnolo, M. (2004). Efﬁciency in multilevel decision making systems: A comparative analysis of buy-back programs. Proceedings of the XII Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade IIFET. Tokyo: University of Marine Science and Technology. Spagnolo, M. (2007). The decommissioning scheme for the Italian clam ﬁshery: A case of success. In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fisheries Buy Back. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell.

32 Red Sea and Gulfs Fisheries ELIE MOUSSALLI IZZAT H. FEIDI

Institutions are the rules of the game and organizations are the players. The interaction between the two shapes institutional change. —Douglass Cecil North (Nobel laureate)

32.1. INTRODUCTION The marine region in the north Indian Ocean comprises the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian/Persian Gulf, and the Gulf of Aden and extends into the Red Sea. This area is sometimes referred to as the Arabian Seas (Chifﬁngs 1995).1 This term encompasses the continuous coastline from the Iran–Pakistan border, including the gulf, through the highly productive Oman–Yemen coast of the Arabian Peninsula, to the Red Sea and Djibouti (ﬁgure 32.1). Even though the title of this chapter refers to the two water bodies on both sides of the Arabian Peninsula, the inclusion of the Oman-Yemen coastline is imperative because it is the major area of ﬁsh production. Although distant from the location of the central government in the respective jurisdictions (Muscat and Sana’a), improved ﬁsheries governance along this coast is key to their sustainability. The region is quite heterogeneous in that it comprises some of the wealthiest countries in the world as well as some of the poorest and least developed. The systems of governance of ﬁsheries in these jurisdictions are similar, and the region is located in a more-or-less homogeneous cultural sphere. This region is an interesting case study in ﬁsheries governance because the ﬁsheries organizations, be they ministries or smaller units, reﬂect the wider societal governance institutions. The latter cover the range from local and decentralized forms to highly centralized bureaucracies. With the exceptions of Eritrea, Iran, Oman, and Yemen, the ﬁsheries sector tends to

be quite a minor part of the domestic economic landscape. The region offers the opportunity for multilateral aid to shape the governance institutions through focused capacity building. Two decades’ worth of such attempts through multilateral and bilateral projects (discussed below) have yielded, at best, mixed results. The reasons may have to do with fundamental conﬂicts between forces of modernity and the status quo. Put differently, piecemeal attempts at reform in one sector have not translated into institutional reform across government bureaucracies.

32.1.1. Deﬁnition of the Region Starting from the top of the Red Sea, ﬁve countries— Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia— collectively cover more than 99% of its coast. Israel and Jordan at the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba have but a short span of coastline (less than 40 km combined), with a minor contribution to the ﬁsheries of the Red Sea. Djibouti at the southern entrance also has a very short coast line and is also a minor player. The Red Sea lies in an arid zone and is connected to the Mediterranean by the narrow and shallow Suez Canal in the north, where water exchange at this end is negligible. Much more important is the connection of the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Northern Arabian Sea because the exchange introduces nutrient-rich water masses into the Red Sea. The Gulf of Aden (including waters off the Yemen– Oman coastline) is a highly productive region with oceanic and coastal upwelling comparable to that of

426

427

Red Sea and Gulfs Fisheries

32.1 Red Sea and gulfs: geographical coverage. (Modiﬁed from www.fao.org/ﬁshery/rfb/recoﬁ) FIGURE

Chile–Peru coast in the Paciﬁc Ocean. The eastern part of the region consists of the two marine water bodies that lie between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran. To the north is the Arabian/Persian Gulf, and the Gulf of Oman (Oman Sea) lies to the south. The two gulfs are separated by the Strait of Hormuz,

TABLE

which is restricted to 56 km at its narrowest point. Its depth averages 35 m, and most of the basin is less than 60 m deep. It is generally deeper in the southwest, where depths of 100 m are found, and it is deepest near the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. The eastern part is very shallow, with extensive

32.1 General length of coastline and continental shelf area for Red Sea and Gulfs countries

Country Bahrain Egypt (Mediterranean) (Red Sea) Eritrea Iran (Gulfs) (Caspian Sea) Iraq Kuwait Saudi Arabia (Gulf) (Red Sea) Sudan Oman Qatar UAE Yemen

Length of Coastline (km) 200 1,100 1,320 1,900 1,700 740 58 195 483 1,760 717 1,750 700 740 2,350

Continental Shelf (to maximum length of 200 m), km2 6,800 87,120 56,000 196,000 2,000 7,200 53,000 70,000 22,300 58,000 35,000 64,000 41,000

The continental shelf areas border on more than one neighbor’s shelf area and are given only for comparison reasons. The shelf area ﬁgures are estimates based on “hypothesis of median line” and therefore have no legal implications. Source: FAO Fisheries Country Proﬁles, various dates and proﬁles (www.fao.org).

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intertidal areas (<5 m deep) up to 5 km wide. Eight countries border the two gulfs: from the north the Republic of Iraq, from the western coastline the State of Kuwait, Kingdom of Bahrain, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, State of Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and to the south the Sultanate of Oman. The Islamic Republic of Iran borders the entire eastern coastline of both gulfs. The total marine area to which the two gulfs belong is approximately 1,545 km long and 200–300 km wide.

32.1.2. Description of the Physical Oceanographic Features of the Region The Red Sea extends for 2,100 km from Suez in the north of Egypt to Bab El Mandab, the narrow strait connecting it to the Gulf of Aden. It covers an area of 440,000 km2 with an average depth of 500 m; some deep trenches reach 2,000 m. Most of the Red Sea lies in a rift valley that separates the African and Arabian tectonic plates. Lacking any signiﬁcant freshwater input from rivers and with negligible rainfall and high rates of evaporation, the Red Sea is notable for having some of the hottest and most saline water in the world. Sea surface temperatures can reach 30°C in the summer, and salinity can be as high as 46 parts per thousand in the northern and middle zones. The Red Sea receives nutrient-rich upwelled water from the Gulf of Aden, replacing evaporative loss, during the southwest monsoon, resulting in substantial commercial ﬁsheries that have supported coastal communities over many generations (Kensler 1996). The Red Sea has a variety of ecosystems along its shores with well-developed coral reefs—some of the most spectacular in the world ocean—in the middle and northern segments. There are marshes and wetlands along the Saudi Arabian and Sudanese coasts. There are mangroves, sea grass beds where dugong are found, sandy beaches where turtles spawn, and rocky shores. The Red Sea has high species diversity with a high degree of endemism; approximately 20 percent of the species are found nowhere else. Though rich in commercial species, ﬁsheries tend to be minor contributors to national economies of countries bordering the Red Sea, but remain very important to the livelihood of coastal communities. The Arabian/Persian Gulf is a shallow, semienclosed basin with a single constricted entrance on the Strait of Hormuz, leading to the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea. The gulf is around 1,000 km long

and up to 340 km wide. It is relatively shallow; few areas are more than 50 m in depth (average depth 36m), and these are along the eastern Iranian coast. Rivers in the north marginally inﬂuence sedimentation, salinity, and current ﬂow. These include the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun rivers that empty into Shatt al Arab waterway, in addition to some minor rivers that ﬂow in from Iran. However, only Shatt al Arab has a complex ﬂood plain system that supports an abundance of estuarine organisms. Colder, less saline seawater enters the gulf through the Strait of Hormuz and circulates counterclockwise, becoming warmer and more saline and ﬁnally sinking to exit the gulf beneath the inﬂowing surface water. Gulf surface and coastal waters experience wide temperature changes in response to seasonal and daily climatic changes, with mean surface temperatures ranging from less than 15°C in February to 32°C in August. Salinities are always high, averaging about 40 ppt but increasing to more than 70 ppt in hypersaline lagoons. The Gulf of Oman is part of the open Indian Ocean and is characterized by great depths and narrow continental shelves. It is about 545 km long. The area is affected by two monsoon seasons. Because of the direction and strength of the stronger southwest monsoon, some of the most productive waters in the world occur in the Gulf of Oman along the coast of Oman. Associated with the monsoons are heavy sea conditions such that larger vessels are required to operate in offshore waters (Carpenter et al. 1977).

32.1.3. Historical Summary of the Development of Fisheries in the Region Up to around the middle of the 20th century, commercial ﬁsheries were in state of underdevelopment around the coastal communities of the region, except for Iran. Even now, except for local threats to coral reefs, especially along the coastal areas of the Egyptian resort cities of Sharm El-Sheikh and Horghada, where tourist establishments and urban development projects were built during the last two decades, the Red Sea remains one of the areas of the world least affected by human development. With few localized exceptions, notably in Saudi Arabia, there is little industrialization along its shores. This is not the case for the gulfs, as discussed below. In the Red Sea, the ﬁshing sector supports approximately 110,000 primary full-time ﬁshermen

429

Red Sea and Gulfs Fisheries and 50,000 part-time secondary or seasonal ﬁshermen using more than 20,000 ﬁshing craft and a variety of ﬁshing gear. There are also some semiindustrial ﬁshing vessels, mostly concentrated in Egypt and Yemen. Information about ﬁsheries resources in the Red Sea is sketchy and incomplete. Their management, as understood to target conservation and economic sustainability as a policy objective, is so weak as to be essentially absent. Available evidence suggests that the northern part of the Red Sea is overexploited while the southern part is less so. This is consistent with the presence of many industrial trawlers, primarily Egyptian and Saudi Arabian, active in southern latitudes of the Red Sea basin (35 in Eritrea and 70 in Yemen, though this ﬁgure is variable). Although industrial ﬁshing is banned in Yemen, anecdotal evidence suggests that some poaching still takes place. The middle decades of the 20th century witnessed dramatic developments in the gulfs and some countries coastal to the Red Sea, especially in Saudi Arabia. Demand for ﬁsheries products grew fast, as did the ﬁsheries sectors. Taken as a whole, the ﬁsheries sector in the gulfs region witnessed dramatic developments beginning the 1960s, when foreign shrimp ﬁshing ﬂeets operated until the gulfs were heavily overﬁshed and the shrimp stocks declined. Currently the local ﬁshing ﬂeets of the eight countries combined consist of more than 36,000 traditional, artisanal, semi-industrial, and industrial ﬁshing vessels some are made of steel others of wood and ﬁberglass using

a variety of ﬁshing gear. This variety of ﬁshing craft and gear are operated by more than 75,000 primary full-time ﬁshermen and also more than 23,000 parttime secondary or seasonal ﬁshermen. In the industrial sector of the ﬂeet there are more than 7,500 ﬁshermen using 1,600 ﬁshing vessels that can stay at sea for 3–4 weeks (Chifﬁngs 1995).2 The trajectory of development of ﬁsheries in the Red Sea is more recent than that of the gulfs area. Table 32.2 indicates the historical development of total marine ﬁsh landings from the Red Sea (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] Subarea 51.1) and the gulfs (FAO Subarea 51.2 and 51.3) beginning in 1970 to the latest FAO available data for 2006. Major commercial species landed in the region are listed in table 32.3.

32.1.3.1. Early Stage The ﬁsheries sector of the eight countries bordering the gulfs and the ﬁve countries bordering the Red Sea, especially before the discovery of oil, may be described as artisanal and small scale. The sea was the most important source of wealth for the people living in the coastal communities throughout the region. Their activities were mostly in maritime trade, shipbuilding, pearl ﬁshing, and the foodoriented ﬁsheries. Fishing activities, which were carried out with small nonmotorized boats with simple gear or traps and no use of ﬁsh preservation devices or ice, were carried out by artisanal

32.2 Development of ﬁsh landings in Red Sea and Gulfs countries (metric tons), 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2004–2006

TABLE

Country Bahrain Djibouti Egypt Eritrea Iran Iraq Jordan Kuwait Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia Sudan UAE Yemen Total

1970

1980

1990

2000

2004

2005

2006

3,500 300 6,200 0 18,051 1,500 100 4,700 92,000 1,500 21,700 800 40,000 27,400 217,751

5,115 251 14,783 0 40,068 8,400 56 3,689 106,000 2,178 24,775 950 64,600 78,444 349,309

8,105 360 39,924 0 199,007 3,754 2 4,454 119,783 5,702 40,695 1,500 95,129 77,310 595,725

11,730 270 75,972 12,712 264,550 12,389 150 7,323 120,421 7,140 51,166 5,010 105,458 114,750 789,041

14,342 260 63,914 7,404 323,068 2,355 144 4,933 165,585 11,134 64,284 5,008 90,570 256,300 1,009,301

11,857 260 50,732 4,027 347,069 6,359 160 5,037 150,744 13,945 71,848 5,508 87,304 263,000 1,017,850

15,596 260 46,970 8,813 380,147 12,959 135 5,646 154,078 16,376 77,630 5,708 87,570 250,000 1,061,888

Source: FAO FIGIS (Fisheries Geographical Information System) database.

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Case Studies in Governance TABLE

32.3 Major commercial ﬁsh species landed by Red Sea and Gulfs countries

Arabic Name(s)

English Common Name(s)

Scientiﬁc Name

Bream, “sweetlips” Cobia Emperor ﬁsh Goatﬁsh, red mullet Golden jack/trevally Gray mullet Grouper King mackerel Little tuna Milkﬁsh Parrotﬁsh Pomfret Porgy, seabream Queenﬁsh Rabbit ﬁsh Scad Seabream Shark Snapper Rubberlips Trevally, jacks Yellowtail tuna

Acanthopagrus cuvieri Rachycentron canadum Lethrinus sp. Upeneus, Parupeneus sp. Gnathanodon speciosus Mugil cephalus, Liza sp. Epinephelus, mainly E. coloides Scomberomorus commerson Euthynnus afﬁnis Chanos chanos Scarus sp. Parastromateus Argyrops spinifer Scomberoides Siganus javus, S. canaliculatus Atule sp., Trachurus sp., Selar sp. Acanthopagrus sp Carcharhinus sp. Lutjanus sp. Plectorinchus sp Caranx sp. Thunnus albacares

Shrimp Crab Crawﬁsh, lobster Crab

Penaeus sp., Metapenaeus sp. Portunis pelagicus Panulirus homarus, Panulirus ornatus Cancridae, Portunidae

Squid, calamari, cuttleﬁsh Sea cucumber

Sepia spp. Holothuria sabra

Finﬁsh Sobaity Sekel Sheiri Hamar, hedie Zreiday Biah, arabi, al maid Hamoor, samaan Canad, khubbat Turban Nemara, eiffah Gain Zobeidy Kofar Alsain, zelaa, bassar Saﬁ Derdman, haramoh Shaam Jargoor Hamrah, neisarah Yanam, farsh, sobaity Jash, sal Gaider Crustaceans Rubian Abu magass, cabouria Umm al-rubian, sharkha, jarad el-bahr saltaon, gubgub Cephalopods Habbar, Khathaq Khiar el-bahr

Source: FAO Fisheries Country Proﬁles, various dates and proﬁles (www.fao.org).

ﬁshermen restricted to the shallow inshore waters of the continental shelf area, and therefore the extent of suitable shallow shelf area for ﬁshing is very important. Overexploitation has drastically reduced ﬁshing in these accessible areas. Still the artisanal ﬂeet landings amounted to 80–85 percent of all landings in the region. After the discovery of oil, which brought about investment capital, several local semi-industrial ﬁshing companies associated with foreign companies, especially during the 1960s, were established for the exploitation of the shrimp resources mainly for the export market. Past conﬂicts in the area (the closure of the Suez Canal after 1967, the Iran–Iraq war in the

1980s, the invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent operation Desert Storm) severely affected the ﬁsheries, through both disruption of ﬁshing activity and environmental effects arising from oil pollution. For example, in 1991 there was a complete failure of spawning by grouper caused by effects from the burning of oil, and in the following years, shrimp landings declined signiﬁcantly. On the other hand, the long war in Eritrea resulted in relatively unexploited ﬁsh stocks in that part of the Red Sea. Political instability and armed conﬂicts such as the revolution in Iran and the drawn-out Iran–Iraq war have had profound effects, both direct and indirect, on ﬁsheries resources and their governance.

Red Sea and Gulfs Fisheries With only 58 km of coastline, Iraq’s marine ﬁsheries are quite minor; most of Iraq’s ﬁsh production is from the freshwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates. The commercial ﬁsheries of Kuwait support an artisanal ﬁshery and semi-industrial ﬁshery. The ﬂeets have always ﬁshed primarily for penaeid shrimps, but landed other species groups as well, albeit with decreasing amounts. With slight variations, this characterization holds true for the other gulf countries as well, in decreasing amounts. Saudi Arabia’s ﬁsheries sector extends to shores of the Gulf and the Red Sea, with shrimp and demersal ﬁsh being the primary targets. Even before the discovery of oil, Iran’s ﬁsheries have diversiﬁed. They included signiﬁcant ﬁshing operations all along the eastern shorelines of the Gulfs area.

32.1.3.2. Development Stage After the discovery of oil, which began around 1940s, increased urbanization and the inﬂux of expatriates and foreign labor to the oil-producing countries and the inﬂow of capital has helped the creation of investment opportunities especially in the development of various sectors of the economies of these countries. The infrastructure of many sectors, including that of ﬁsheries, underwent signiﬁcant development especially because ﬁshing is primary source of employment, income, and food. This approach required involving international agencies concerned such as the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Mariculture was introduced to the region but remains minor, with shrimp farming operations in the Iranian side of the gulfs and in Saudi Arabia and Yemen along the Red Sea.

32.1.3.3. Joint Collaboration Stage The exploitation of the ﬁsheries resources of the gulf countries was carried out on individual country basis until the late 1960s. The region lacked an institutional framework under which a meaningful regional program for the development and management of the ﬁsheries sector could be carried out. While individual countries continued to exploit ﬁsheries independent of others, the FAO established in 1967 the Indian Ocean Fishery Commission (IOFC) under Article VI-1

431

of its constitution. Three priorities for action were identiﬁed: (1) improvement of ﬁshery statistics, (2) management of heavily exploited stocks, and (3) development of international programs in the Indian Ocean regime. The IOFC proposed the establishment of the Indian Ocean Program (IOP) (Marashi 1996). Its purpose was to increase the contribution of ﬁsheries to the social and economic welfare of the countries bordering the Indian Ocean, particularly by making more food available, improving the standard of living of ﬁshing communities, and earning foreign exchange. The oft-cited results of this program have not, unfortunately, been emulated by participating countries. This is likely due to failures of ﬁsheries governance institutions to implement similar programs. Under the IOP, the FAO began to carry out stock assessments in the region with the objective of promoting ﬁshery development and management of ﬁsheries resources. These projects are listed in table 32.4. They had several components, and the activities were carried out on a regional basis. In 1972, the IOFC created the Gulfs Committee as a subsidiary committee to the IOP to coordinate and advise on the ﬁsheries activities in the region and later to advise the UNDP/FAO on the Regional Fishery Survey and Development Project, also referred to as the Gulfs Project, established between 1975 and 1979 to serve the eight countries that composed the Gulfs Committee. After the termination of the Gulfs Project in 1979, the Gulfs Committee continued as a subsidiary body of the IOFC. In 1999 the FAO in consultations with the members of the abolished Gulfs Committee, decided to abolish the IOFC and created its successor, the Regional Commission for Fisheries (RECOFI) three years later after many meetings, thus establishing an intergovernmental regional ﬁsheries body. An initial core budget of US$40,000 was allocated. The agreement for the establishment of RECOFI under Article XIV of the FAO Constitution, which allows continued links with FAO, entered into force in February 2001. The ﬁrst session was held in Muscat, Oman, in October 2001. The FAO maintained the Secretariat of RECOFI at the headquarters of the FAO Regional Near East Ofﬁce in Cairo, Egypt. The fourth session was held in May 2007 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and the ﬁfth session took place in May 2009 in UAE (FAO 2008; documents of this session

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32.4 Main regional and country ﬁsheries projects executed in Red Sea and Gulfs countries

Title of Project

Donor/Agency

Period

Budget (US$)

UNDP/FAO

1975–1979

7,199,252

UNDP/FAO OPEC/UNDP

1975–1983 1978–1984

2,350,000 13,100,000

UNDP/FAO

1986–1990

2,626,006

IFAD/Arab Fund/FAO

1990–1994

630,000

UNDP/GEF

Not available

6,100,000

ADB French Aid

1998– 1997–2002

18,150,000 FF 15,600,000

USAID Arab Fund USAID

1984–1991 1985–1990 1991–1996

5,000,000 10,500,000 12,500,000

Trust fund/FAO European Union

1982–present 1991–1992

3,653,290 (phase 6) 2,538,500

Regional Projects Regional Fishery Survey and Development Project (Gulfs Project) Sub-regional Fisheries Training Center Development of Fisheries in Areas of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Fish Marketing Information, Promotion and Technical Advisory Services for Arab Countries INFOSAMAK, phase 1 INFOSAMAK, phase 2 Country Projects Eritrea Coastal Marine and Island Biodiversity Management Project Fisheries Infrastructure Development Project Fisheries Resources Assessment Project Oman Fisheries Technical Assistance Fisheries Development Fisheries Development and Management Saudi Arabia Fish Farming Center, several phases Establishment of Marine Sanctuary for the Gulf Region

Source: FAO Fishery Management Information System (FIMIS) (FAO 2005).

may be found at ftp.fao.org/FI/DOCUMENT/RNE/ RECOFI_2009_5th/default.htm).

32.1.3.4. Regional and Country Projects A review of the past and present regional and country projects in ﬁsheries and aquaculture shows a large number of projects being executed over the years since early 1970s. Most of these projects were jointly ﬁnanced by the governments and UNDP and with technical execution by the FAO. These projects resulted in hundreds of valuable scientiﬁc, technical, industrial, economic development, and planning reports and surveys, covering a wide range of ﬁshery subjects that provided the basis for further ﬁsheries development.

32.1.3.4.1. Main Regional Projects • Sub-regional Fisheries Training Center Project: 1975–1983. The ﬁrst major joint attempt to develop the ﬁsheries of the gulfs was the establishment of this project. Supported by a trust fund, it was an FAO initiative in the early 1970s. The main objective of was to create national cadres for the professional exploitation and better management of national ﬁsheries resources. • Regional Fishery Survey and Development Project (Gulfs Project): 1975–1979. This was the ﬁrst and only regional trawl project of ﬁshery resources ever taken in the gulfs area. All eight countries of the gulfs were participants in this project. The main objectives were

Red Sea and Gulfs Fisheries

•

•

•

•

to (1) identify major demersal and pelagic ﬁsh resources; (2) determine their abundance, distribution, seasonal variation, and estimate optimum resources; (3) assist on measures for management of shrimp resources; (4) carry out experimental ﬁshing to identify most suitable ﬁshing methods, gear, and potential rates; and (5) provide advice based on results obtained the rational development and avoid overexploitation of resources. Gulfs Project Follow-up: 1980–1981. Some additional shrimp “survey” work in the gulfs was undertaken as part of the UNDP/FAO project. The Pelagic Fish Assessment Survey of the North Arabian Sea: 1975–1976. This was carried out by the research vessel Dr Fridtjof Nansen from February 1975 through December 1976. It did not include any work in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The international survey was part of the FAO Indian Ocean Fishery and Development Program and covered an area in the Indian Ocean from Somalia to Pakistan, including the south cost of Yemen, the southwest of Oman, and the Gulf of Oman. Development of Fisheries in Areas of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden:1978–1984. This regional project was carried out in three phases beginning June 1978 and lasting through June 1984, with a total budget of US$13.1 million contributed mainly by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the UNDP, supplemented by governmental contributions in cash and kind. Seven Red Sea countries participated in its activities, which had the major objective of developing all sectors of marine ﬁsheries to a level of efﬁciency that will allow effectively and rationally the exploitation and utilization of marine resources of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and help diversify the economies of the participating countries (Feidi 2002). Center for Marketing Information and Advisory Services for Fishery Products in the Arab Region (INFOSAMAK): phase 1 lasting from 1986 to 1990, and phase 2 from 1990 to 1994. This regional project was established in March 1986 with initial membership of 13 Arab countries. Initially it was funded by UNDP and technically executed by FAO. Other phases followed with smaller budgets from other donors outside the U.N. system but with continued technical support from FAO/GLOBEFISH. The rationale behind its

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execution is to make more efﬁcient use of the Arab region’s ﬁshery resources, coupled with increased inter-Arab trade, and to substantially reduce the ﬁsh and ﬁshery products supply and demand gap that exits in the Arab region as a whole. INFOSAMAK is a part of the global Fish Marketing Information Network established by the FAO. It is aimed at providing technical assistance to promote ﬁsh trade and strengthen economic cooperation in the Arab region, especially in the areas of domestic marketing information services, trade promotion services, technical advisory services, training and human resources development, and small-scale ﬁsheries investment identiﬁcation and promotion activities. INFOSAMAK was originally established in Bahrain, but after becoming an intergovernmental institution in 2000, it was relocated to Casablanca, Morocco, and continued to serve ﬁsh trade in countries in the Red Sea and the gulfs.

32.1.3.4.2. Main Country Projects Several country projects were executed in the countries of the Gulfs and the Red Sea since the early 1980s. These projects were ﬁnanced jointly by the governments with various donors and U.N. agencies. Their main activities were in marine ﬁsheries policy and institutional development, assistance with the design and development of the national plans, substantial technical assistance in a broad range of ﬁsheries related area, and training in marine ﬁsheries resources and environmental research, impact, and management studies. The most signiﬁcant projects were as follows (FAO 2003): Oman • Fisheries Technical Assistance, 1984–1991, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), US$5 million budget • Fisheries Development, 1985–1991, funded by Arab Fund, US$10.5 million budget • Fisheries Development and Management, 1991–1996, funded by USAID, US$12.5 million budget Saudi Arabia • Fish Farming Center, 1981–present), several phases (phase 6 ongoing), funded through the Saudi Trust Fund Project with the FAO

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• Establishment of a Marine Sanctuary for the Gulf Region, 1991–1992, funded by the European Union, US$2.538 million budget Eritrea • Coastal, Marine, and Island Biodiversity Management Project, planned for 5 years, funded by UNDP’s Global Environmental Facility (GEF), and local sources, US$6.1 million total budget • Fisheries Infrastructure Development Project, begun 1998, funded by a loan from the African Development Bank (ADB), US$18.15 million total budget • Fisheries Resources Assessment Project (1997– 2002), funded by French aid, FF15.6 million total budget

32.1.4. Main Problems Facing Fisheries in the Region If ﬁsheries management is taken to mean the cyclical and iterative process implementing FAO’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, with sustainability and conservation being a primary objective, then ﬁsheries management does not exist to any signiﬁcant extent in countries of the Red Sea basin. The institutions of governance and organizations for the effective formulation and implementation of ﬁsheries policy and strategies are still evolving. Access to the ﬁsheries resources is essentially open, with no effective limits on entry, and on the whole, ﬁsheries policies are expansionary with emphasis on tonnage landed rather than extracting higher values by processing. Fisheries bureaucracies tend to be overstaffed with insufﬁcient resources allocated for the development of skills needed for ﬁsheries management. In general, national ﬁsheries authorities, in spite of recent developments, do not have enough scientists with the needed training to develop and implement and adaptively update management plans. It is not surprising that ﬁsheries research in both the Gulfs and Red Sea countries has largely been undertaken by multilateral organizations within technical assistance contexts. Whereas in the previous section several ﬁsheries projects are well documented, the Red Sea projects were more focused on conservation of unique habitat, such as the UNDP/GEF project in Eritrea. Unlike the gulfs, where the countries through the existence of RECOFI has progressed well in

providing management programs of their ﬁsheries resources, a similar competent forum is lacking in the Red Sea, such as a regional ﬁsheries commission, where ﬁsheries authorities along the Red Sea can jointly manage resources based on accepted principles such as ecosystem-based ﬁsheries management, with allocations of access rights to various gear/ boat combinations, or restrictions on gear/season among others, throughout the Red Sea. Whereas these tools of management had become familiar to gulfs ﬁsheries establishments, their enforcement remains inadequate. The Regional Organization for the Conservation of the Environment of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, a functioning regional organization for the conservation of the environment of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, is based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a mandate to implement the Jeddah Convention for the conservation of the environment of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Regional and local integrated coastal zone management initiatives have been undertaken by this organization. There is no equivalent body for Red Sea and Gulf of Aden ﬁsheries. In contrast, and as elaborated earlier, RECOFI, whose members are countries coastal to the two gulfs, has been in existence since 2001. Anecdotal evidence supports a suggestion of overexploitation in the northern part of the Red Sea compared to, until recently, the lightly exploited stocks in the southern parts, primarily in Eritrea, especially around the restricted trawling grounds in the vicinity of the Dahlak Archipelago. That has changed rapidly since Eritrea’s independence in 1993. For example, recent evidence from local Yemeni ﬁshermen through informal interviews suggests that sharks are severely overexploited. Yemeni ﬁshermen along the Red Sea now have to sail far into Sudanese and Eritrean waters risking, occasionally, having their boats conﬁscated. Other ﬁshermen, given open entry, are forced to relocate to the Gulf of Aden and ﬁsh in Somali waters exposing themselves to piracy.2 Where there is system for gathering information about the ﬁshery, the primary objective is to produce annual statistical tables of tonnage landed and value realized. Information about ﬁshing effort, if collected whatever the gear, is not regularly published in a way that is usable for management. Nor is there, in general, a coupling between analysis of information and formulation of rules and regulations to govern ﬁshing activities (though there are a few exceptions, e.g., shrimp in Saudi Arabia and cuttleﬁsh in Yemen).

Red Sea and Gulfs Fisheries Objectives of ﬁsheries policies are rarely enunciated in other than vague and general terms, but past and current practices do not support long-term sustainability of ﬁsheries resources. Though economic data on ﬁshing ﬂeets are not easily available (cost/ earning surveys are not usually conducted), it can be posited that overcapacity, especially of industrialscale ﬁshing craft, may well be contributing toward rent dissipation, where the aggregate cost of ﬁshing equals or exceeds the aggregate revenue of the total catch, not to mention declining catches. Joint ventures are concluded at high levels in a manner consistent with rent-seeking behavior on the part of ﬁsheries organizations. The conjecture of rent dissipation should be systematically investigated in each jurisdiction with a uniform and comparable description of overall ﬁshing ﬂeet capacity. Notable in this regard is Yemen’s outright banning of industrial trawlers. On the other hand, entry into the traditional ﬁsheries sector receives subsidies lowering the cost of entry. These policies are consistent with casting the ﬁshery as an employer of inﬁnite capacity. The regular collection of catch and effort data and their interpretation and use face severe logistical constraints in such a physical environment where many types of gear are used on ﬁshing trips of short duration where ﬁsh are landed over a long coastline. The resulting databases, where available, are fraught with uncertainties and errors that render doubtful their usefulness. Both the accuracy and precision of ﬁsheries data in the region are, at best, questionable. Artisanal ﬁshermen are the backbone of the countries of the region’s ﬁshing sector. Most of them usually do not have access to improved catching methods or ﬁshing gear, or have much knowledge of even the basic elements of postharvest ﬁsh-handling techniques, storage, processing, marketing, and distribution. What these ﬁshermen lack in modern skills, they make up in sheer numbers involved in the ﬁshing sector and the total collective landings from their small individual daily catches. The artisanal ﬁshermen, however, are the ﬁrst to suffer when ﬁshery landings decrease. The demand for ﬁsh, especially for export to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, is quite strong and not very discriminating of quality. As a result ﬁshermen do not see higher prices when they take ice and deliver higher quality. The incentives to improve quality and prices, admittedly a difﬁcult problem, appear to be a low priority for policy makers. Other problems faced by the ﬁshermen is shortage of training in more modern, more efﬁcient

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ﬁshing methods and techniques, information and extension services, consultancy services on handling, marketing, available sources of assistance, ﬁshing gear and boat maintenance and repair, postharvest handling of ﬁsh and shrimp. Quality preservation, processing, marketing and distribution, and so on, are all tools which the ﬁshermen need to acquire to allow them play a better and more professional role in their trade.

32.2. FISHERIES GOVERNANCE Governance in ﬁsheries is the manner in which power and inﬂuence are wielded for their access and management. As in other parts of their respective societies, ﬁsheries communities in the region had traditional institutions of governance that were tribal and conservative in nature. There were no organizations as such for the management of ﬁsheries, just a set of generally accepted rules of conduct. Examples of this traditional system used to be found, as an example, along the relatively densely populated northern coastline of Oman (Al Batinah), where, during the monsoon season shoaling of sardines, villages would have clearly marked segments of coastline allocated to their members only.3 However, with the availability of ﬁnancial resources, governments set up credit schemes through ﬁshermen’s encouragement funds for the purchase of boats, engines, and equipment, and given the open and unregulated access, the traditional governance system came under strain. New and modern organizational structures had to be introduced. It is not surprising that traditional institutions may have been overwhelmed, breaking down under accelerated expansion of the ﬁsheries sector and the necessary organizations for management. Where the organizations of ﬁsheries governance are relatively unconstrained by ﬁnancial limitations (e.g., those in the gulfs area), they face constraints of technical capacity and political will. For the countries of the Red Sea (other than Saudi Arabia), ﬁnancial constraints are faced as well.

32.2.1. Current Regimes Governing Fisheries and Their Management The legal framework governing ﬁsheries in the Red Sea is uneven and generally weak in many states. Even when available, ﬁshing regulations are rarely

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enforced, though in the recent past some states (Eritrea, e.g.) have strengthened such frameworks through delineation of authorities and provision of some resources for enforcement. Some countries have a reasonably functioning monitoring, control, and surveillance corps that monitor distant-water ﬂeets and contracted ﬁshing operations. Compliance and enforcement of regulations are not relevant to domestic ﬂeets. For the most part, however, ﬁsheries management is a top-down process that tends to be expansionary with the explicit objective of generating foreign exchange for the country, increasing food security, and increasing employment opportunities in coastal communities. In Yemen, with coastlines on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the regime is largely based on ﬁshermen’s societies, or cooperatives. The optional membership in local ﬁshermen’s societies confers beneﬁts such as access to credit and loans to purchase gear and other inputs. Some ﬁshermen’s societies command substantial ﬁnancial resources that are deployed for such beneﬁts as medical insurance and other services one associates with governments. Irrespective of the progressiveness of the legal frameworks and the degree to which they are designed to protect the long-term productive capacity of ecosystems, enforcement of ﬁsheries laws and regulations through monitoring, control, and surveillance throughout the region is inadequate. There are some exceptions, notably Eritrea, where a system is applied that minimizes collusion between on-board observers and unscrupulous captains of industrial trawlers. Harmonization of the legal framework and the monitoring, control, and surveillance structures of respective governments is one starting point of cooperation among ﬁsheries jurisdictions in the region; this appears to be a low priority.

32.2.1.1. National Regimes In each of the gulfs countries various organizational structures exist for the leading and management of the ﬁsheries sector. Some countries have a dedicated ministry, such as in Oman and Yemen; others have directorates for ﬁsheries affairs linked with other ministries, mainly ministries of agriculture, as in Saudi Arabia, or ministry of the environment, as in the UAE. The ﬁsheries departments are mostly concerned with issuing decrees for regulating the ﬁsheries and are also tasked with conducting

ﬁsheries research and responsibility for assessment and management of ﬁsheries. In Bahrain, the General Directorate for the Protection of Marine Fisheries Resources within the Public Commission for the Protection of Marine Resources, Environment, and Wildlife formulates and implements regulations in collaboration with other ministries and relevant organizations. The research is conducted in cooperation with the Bahrain Center for Scientiﬁc Research. The main concern in Bahrain is the management of its demersal ﬁsheries, such as grouper, which are overexploited, while large pelagic species, mainly kingﬁsh, are harvested seasonally. Shrimp management is also a major concern for Bahrain. An annual biological rest period of four months is regularly enforced. In Iran, the Iranian Fisheries Research Organization (IFRO) is one of the institutions of Ministry of Jihad-e-Agriculture. Four research centers in four provinces along the Iranian coast of the Gulfs were established by the IFRO established in the early 1990s to conduct ﬁsheries research. Most of the research is concentrated on demersal resources (ﬁnﬁsh and shrimp), small pelagics, and mesopelagic resources in the Gulf of Oman and large pelagics such as king and Spanish mackerel and tunas. Generally speaking, ﬁsheries management in Iran is rather recent, and most of the regulations to manage the ﬁsheries were imposed in the last few years, except for the shrimp ﬁshery, which has been regulated since the in early 1980s. There are only two main active ofﬁcial ﬁshery research centers in Iraq, which are under the Ministry of Agriculture. The Fish Research Center in Zaafaraniyah, near Baghdad, has ﬁve sections— Culture, Nutrition, Diseases, Water Environment, and Artiﬁcial Propagation—to serve the two operating ﬁsh farms and a hatchery. The Marine Science Center in Basra focuses on marine sciences and conducts research work on biological and ecological studies, aquaculture, and food nutrition. The ofﬁcial governmental department for the ﬁsheries sector in Kuwait is in the Public Authority for Agriculture and Fisheries. However, much of the ﬁsheries research and management is carried out by the Mariculture and Fisheries Department of Kuwait Institute for Scientiﬁc Research. In the last three decades or so, management of the shrimp resources is the major concern since the stocks showed overexploitation and decline. Management regulations were imposed in the 1980s, such as closed seasons, closed areas (Kuwait Bay

Red Sea and Gulfs Fisheries and three-mile zone), mesh size, and, in effect, little effort limitations. Likewise, actions were taken for the management of ﬁnﬁsh stocks, especially for the silver pomfret, grouper, and snapper. Reduction of bycatch by using reduction devises in the shrimp ﬁshery and various other measures were employed, as well as precautionary measures taken to protect silver pomfret spawning grounds. The ﬁsheries sector of Oman is of high importance, for which a dedicated Ministry of Fisheries was established in 2007 that was formerly part of the Directorate of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. General administration of the sector is in the ministry, while ﬁsheries research is conducted by the Marine Science and Fisheries Research Center in Muscat, the Raysut Research Laboratory in Salalah, and the Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, where ﬁsheries biology, stock assessment, and oceanography studies are carried out. Serious concerns have repeatedly been raised about sustainability of the demersal stocks and the welfare of the traditional ﬁshery sector. These concerns were based on reports of illegal industrial trawling in closed areas, use of illegal mess size, underreporting of catches, high and illegal discards by industrial vessels, falling traditional-sector catches, and falling traditional-sector income. Several species are overexploited. Entry to these ﬁsheries is not allowed, and ﬁshing licenses are issued to enforce management. The FAO executed a ﬁsh resources assessment survey project using the research vessel R/V Rastrelliger for a period of one year (November 1989 to November 1990). The survey covered demersal ﬁsh resources, small pelagic ﬁsh resources, and mesopelagic resources (lantern ﬁsh). This survey continued earlier work, including the surveys carries in the period 1975–1975 and 1983–1984 by the R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen Surveys and the Gulfs Project in the period 1976–1979. The surveys estimated that demersal, small pelagic, and mesopelagic stocks were of high signiﬁcance and abundance in different areas of Omani waters. Most signiﬁcant among these resources is the mesopelagic ﬁsh, with an estimated biomass of about 4.5 m metric tons, of which around 400,000 metric tons was in the Gulf of Oman. The Fisheries Department of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Agriculture is the ﬁsheries authority in Qatar to manage the sector. The Marine Science Department of the University of Qatar conducts ﬁsheries biology and oceanography research projects within the territorial waters. Demersal resources are the prime stocks exploited,

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while the large pelagic (king mackerel) are ﬁshed on seasonal basis. Fisheries regulations that control inputs are in place, but compliance has been limited. The combination of increased ﬁshing effort, limited coastline, and coastal environmental issues makes for very limited development prospects for the wild ﬁshery. In Saudi Arabia, the Marine Department of the Ministry of Agriculture directs the ﬁsheries research and management. In its efforts to control overexploitation of the resources, Saudi Arabia introduced management measures along its coastline in the gulf, such as closed season for shrimp ﬁshery (January–August), mesh size restrictions for gill nets, temporary suspension of issuing ﬁshing licenses, and establishment of marine protected areas. This is in addition to modernizing the traditional ﬁshing sector. The most important resources are the demersal ﬁshery and, to a lesser extent, large pelagic species, mainly kingﬁsh. Research on marine ﬁsheries is carried out by the Marine Research Centers of the Directorate of Fisheries in the Ministry and by universities such as King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dammam. Furthermore, the ministry, in cooperation with the FAO, established the Fish Farming Center in 1982 as a trust fund project in Jeddah along the Red Sea to carry out research studies on aquaculture in order to identify the most suitable ﬁsh and shrimp species for culture and provide research results, information, and technical advice to individuals or companies interested in investing in private ﬁsh farms in the country. Fisheries management and research in the UAE is the responsibility of the Directorate of Fisheries in the Ministry of Environment and Water. The ministry deals with the authorities in the seven emirates in a cooperative manner to develop ﬁsheries policies and legislation enforce regulations and undertake research. Each emirate, however, has some legislative responsibility for regulating ﬁshing activities in its area of jurisdiction, so regulations are not necessary consistent with the other emirates. There is no management of particular ﬁsh stocks, but there are general regulations such as closed areas around islands, closed seasons for major species according to results of research investigations. Trawling is banned in UAE waters since 1970s in an effort to protect marine habitat. Although the use of drift nets is also banned, their illegal use is common, particularly during the season for large pelagic species such as Spanish mackerel.

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Research is carried out at the Marine Resources Research Center at Umm Al-Quwain. Its research work is mostly oriented toward mariculture to produce ﬁngerlings of local species for release into the sea to replenish stocks. Additional research, especially on stock assessment, ﬁsh landing surveys and ﬁsh aging, is carried out by the Marine Environment Research Center (MERC) of the Environmental Research and Wildlife Development Agency in Abu Dhabi. MERC is also responsible for administering ﬁsheries management and licensing in Abu Dhabi. In Egypt, the ﬁsheries of the Red Sea are based on a long-standing traditional ﬁshery where coral reefs spread along the Red Sea coast and Gulf of Aqaba with relatively shallow ﬁshing grounds with ﬂat sandy bottoms in the Gulf of Suez, the only area suitable for trawling. However, the coastline is under severe and increasing pressure from rapid, unsustainable development. Nevertheless, the Egyptian ﬁshing ﬂeet is modernizing. Production expanded with an increase in unit effort. The ﬁsheries of Sudan on the Red Sea may be characterized by high biodiversity of aquatic life; exploitation has been historically placed on the harvesting of wild mollusks and ﬁnﬁsh. Both activities are largely of a traditional subsistence nature. The other highly valued resources are either untapped or only occasionally ﬁshed. Sudan’s future prospects are in diversiﬁcation and intensiﬁcation of its Red Sea offshore as well as in the high seas. In Yemen the ﬁsheries industry that operates in the waters of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden has made signiﬁcant progress during the past twenty years. The sector is considered to be the third in order of importance to the national economy. Fish is a growing food item in Yemen and can be exploited to a far greater degree in order to meet both local and export markets. It also could absorb a greater portion of the national workforce. A Ministry of Fisheries is dedicated to the administration of the sector while the Marine Science and Research Center provides scientiﬁc data and information for the development of the sector.

32.2.1.2. Regional Regimes During the 1970s the gulfs countries cooperated jointly in two regional ﬁsheries projects: the Training Center based in Kuwait and the Gulfs Project based in Qatar. However, with regard to joint ﬁsheries governance the eight gulfs countries constituted the membership of the IOFC Gulfs Committee, which

was established in 1972, and its successor, RECOFI, which was established in 2001. Its geographic coverage is bounded in the south by the following rhomb lines: from Ras Dharbat Ali (16° 39′ N, 53° 3′30′ E) to 16° 00′ N, 53° 25′ E, then to 17° 00′N, 56° 30′ E, then to 20° 30′ N, 60° 00′ E, then to Ras Al-Fasteh (25° 04′ N, 61° 25′ E). RECOFI, following in the footsteps of its predecessor the Gulfs Committee, carries out its main objective, which is to promote the development, conservation, rational management, and best utilization of living marine resources, as well as the sustainable development of aquaculture within its area of agreement. Its main functions and responsibilities are to (1) constantly review the resources, (2) formulate and recommend measures for the conservation and rational management, (3) review economic and social aspects of the industry, (4) supervise training and extension activities, (5) undertake and recommend research and development activities of resources, (6) disseminate information and publications issued, and (7) promote aquaculture and ﬁsheries enhancement.

32.2.2. Organizational Structures and Management of Fisheries The responsibility for management of ﬁsheries resources tends to be diffused among several national authorities within the government of each country. With the exception of Eritrea, Oman, and Yemen, where they are centralized, ﬁsheries authorities tend to be below the cabinet level, either a directorate within a ministry of agriculture or an independent agency (e.g., Egypt’s General Authority for Fisheries Resources Development). The various participants, such as the research centers (e.g., National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries in Egypt), the policy-setting bodies, the licensing, and the enforcement arms are not organized with sufﬁcient coherence to affect long-term sustainability of ﬁsheries resources. With the probable exception of Saudi Arabia, recurrent budgets are largely consumed by salaries and maintenance, with insufﬁcient funds left over for carrying out meaningful and regular programs of data collection or surveys. Fisheries surveys have been carried out, however, by either international development entities from industrialized Western countries or by international organizations such as the FAO. One of the current pressing issues in the region’s ﬁsheries, as elsewhere, is illegal, unreported, and

Red Sea and Gulfs Fisheries unregulated (IUU) ﬁshing. Adoption of protocols to deter and eliminate IUU ﬁshing, by either local or distant-nation ﬁshing ﬂeets, remains weak or lacking. To be fair, however, little is done by governments to curb IUU ﬁshing by national ﬂeets.

32.2.3. Limiting Factors That Constrain Good Governance In the report of the fourth session, held in May 2007, the members agreed that RECOFI, as its predecessor, the Gulfs Committee, had a unique role as the main ﬁsheries forum in the region. Both had successfully formulated and implemented activities despite serious chronic budget limitations. There are also indications that RECOFI is gaining momentum in addressing important issues of capture ﬁsheries and aquaculture in the years to come. It should be noted that the negative constraints that in the past hampered the implementation of activities and programs of the Gulfs Committee are mostly eliminated now that RECOFI is established. This is mainly because the level of commitment and competence of the members has much improved over the years, a permanent secretary from FAO for RECOFI has now been assigned, and a higher budget from unspent resources has been approved. However, the positive comments made in the fourth session do not hide the fact that there are still several factors that limit a more active role by RECOFI. The major factors are as follows: (1) RECOFI’s role is not fully understood by some decision makers, thus delaying actions and staff commitment; (2) delegates to sessions and meetings often lacked competence and preparations and were replaced often; (3) provision of data, statistics, and information lacks accuracy and proper methodology in documentation; (4) delays in commitment and allocation of extrabudgetary funds have affected timely implementation of activities; and (5) logistical support caused various delays in holding sessions, decisions on venues, and visa issuing. In short, the limiting factors for good governance in the region may be summarized as follows: • The ﬁsheries institutions, that is, the set rules governing the management of ﬁsheries within the countries and across the region, in general, have not kept up with the pace of change needed to manage the complex mix of traditional and industrial ﬁsheries. An example would be the manner of granting access rights to foreign

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ﬁshing boats and their enforcement—these decisions are made at the top of the hierarchy. • The organizations that are charged with ﬁsheries and their management lack, in general, technical, managerial, and enforcement capacities of the quality required to run modern and complex systems that characterize ﬁsheries. • Annual budgets to run these organizations are inadequate.

32.2.4. Dealing with the Constraints 32.2.4.1. Bilateral Assistance Technical assistance projects under governmentto-government agreements were carried out in Red Sea countries by donor agencies with in-kind contributions from beneﬁciary countries. An example of that is the U.K. Overseas Development Agency (now the Department for International Development) project in the Sudan in the early 1980s. Another is a project of the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea in Eritrea in the mid-1990s. These projects were of relatively short durations lasting no more than one year and often only a few months. Research vessels with equipment on board were left behind in the host country. Subsequent use and maintenance of such gifts are uneven and variable. Results of such efforts, such as reports, are not easily available. The preceding sections detail such projects for the gulfs. If past efforts are critically evaluated according to some indicators, they are likely to reveal temporary and unsustained accomplishments. Fisheries are a much more complex proposition than other development projects, such as building roads. There is room for continued bilateral country approach to deal with capacity constraints. This would be a step in the right direction if member countries choose to establish internal ﬁshery bodies that would deal with matters of internal nature such as staff and ﬁshermen’s training on various ﬁsheries aspects, establishment of laboratories to develop measures for quality control and ﬁsheries research, market inspection, and various other aspects that would help to better organize and manage the local issues of ﬁsheries governance. Local ﬁsheries bodies established should be given sufﬁcient powers to be allowed to function and establish sound regulatory measures as well as implementing them.

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32.2.4.2. Multilateral Assistance A good example of this category of assistance is the work carried out by the FAO, whose result is a technical report by Sanders and Morgan (1989). Another example, going back to the mid-1980s are the cruises undertaken by the Norwegian research vessel R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen. Other surveys in the Red Sea were undertaken earlier in Egyptian waters by Japan International Cooperation Agency. Examples of such projects in the gulfs are given in preceding sections. The bilateral country-to-country approach should support the next level of organizational development, namely, multilateral joint approaches. Collective measures should be taken to deal with ﬁsheries governance in a homogeneous region where ﬁsh stocks are shared. A critical list of these stocks would include the migratory (and high-value) large pelagic species and the equally high-value lobster stocks. This joint approach does not exclude the fact that subregional approaches may also be necessary such as the case of the joint mesopelagic stocks in the Gulf of Oman, where Iran and Oman, and to some extent UAE, are involved. This is the role of paramount importance that RECOFI can play to function successfully as a regional ﬁsheries body for the gulfs countries. The important role of ﬁshery bodies in the management of marine ﬁsheries resources has been long recognized. They are the most appropriate means available through which most effective conservation and management of shared ﬁshery resources can be achieved through the transformation of institutions of governance. Regional ﬁsheries bodies, however, can only accomplish their objectives after national authorities in the region are prepared to invest more in human capital. As pointed out in the country’s ﬁsheries review above, proper measures for an effective conservations and management should be taken to combat depletion. In fact, lobster ﬁshermen in Al-Mahra Governorate of Yemen (next to the border with Oman) have requested the authorities to close down the ﬁshery completely. The same may be said of the southern part of the Red Sea, where sea cucumber is almost extirpated. Most major commercial species may be fully exploited with the strong possibility that those showing declining catches are overexploited. It appears that the conservation and management, in the absence of more accurate and reliable data, based on the precautionary principle

may be required to avert a drastic fall in catches or the collapse of certain ﬁsheries. RECOFI should have the capability and means to ensure that ﬁsheries in the gulfs area are carried out on a sustainable basis. A similar regional ﬁsheries management organization (RFMO) is needed for the Red Sea, though the problem here is not of shared stocks but of limiting effort in the face of poverty and low alternative employment opportunities, and of improving quality and marketing. Whereas these surveys provided valuable information about a little-known body of water, they were piecemeal. They also provided much needed technical assistance to beneﬁciary countries but were not part of a long-term strategy for building capacities. To be fair, however, capacity building was not the primary function of such projects. The one counterexample is the projects funded by USAID in Oman, where training and building of technical capacities were integral objectives. Where such projects fall short is the development of organizations.

32.3. SUGGESTIONS FOR THE FUTURE IN GOVERNANCE 32.3.1. Near-Term Strategies (3–5 Years) For the Red Sea, a commitment is needed from a consortium of donors and multilateral organizations for a program focused on the Red Sea ﬁsheries. One such regional group already exists for the conservation of the environment. Fortunately, one such program has been in preparation for many years and is about to start (a recruitment process was in place in November 2008). Spearheaded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and FAO with several donors such as the OPEC International Development Fund and the Islamic Development Bank, this is a ﬁve-year project focused on the management of ﬁsheries resources in the Red Sea. How this project will evolve over these ﬁve years remains to be jointly determined by countries coastal to the Red Sea basin and the FAO. But one can envisage, in addition to the technical assistance in support of ﬁsheries management, some component for assistance in administrative reform and governance. This could be done through collaboration among national jurisdictions to manage the water body as a single collection of shared ecosystems.

Red Sea and Gulfs Fisheries Capacity building of cadres may be accomplished through the participation of representatives of multiple stakeholders in the process of setting objectives, the formulating management plans, and their review and implementation. It is through such working groups that collaborative governance may be fostered. There is evidence that such efforts have borne positive results in the ﬁeld of conservation such as marine protected areas. The conditions exist to replicate this regional governance model to the ﬁsheries of the Red Sea that would lead eventually to the establishment of an RFMO for the Red Sea. This model of RFMOs has worked elsewhere and has every chance of being replicated for the Red Sea. On the other side of Arabian Peninsula, RECOFI, as its predecessor the Gulfs Committee, has met some successes in achieving several objectives. This is mainly due to the increasing commitment of the member countries and the efforts of FAO Secretariat. However, to achieve more of the objectives, there are various other activities that RECOFI has to dedicate itself to carry out as a short-term strategy for the conservation and management needs. As a near-term strategy for the next 3–5 years, it is advisable to carry out a full-ﬂedged sea survey program taking the results of the survey conducted by the Gulfs Committee as a guideline to cover the RECOFI area. Most members now have capable scientists/research staff to design the survey as well as research vessels with minimum expatriate technical assistance. Most of these countries have now well established local colleges, universities, and research institutions from which a cadre of researchers and other scientiﬁc staff have graduated with specialization in relevant ﬁsheries topics. Some of these graduates continued their studies abroad and returned home to occupy managerial and scientiﬁc positions.

32.3.2. Medium-Term Strategies (5–10 Years) The medium-term strategy that may take up to 10 years could be designed to take two approaches: the national approach and the regional approach, with RECOFI being the main reference and focal point for both approaches. On the national front, member countries are to carry out activities as suggested in the near term to upgrade their respective ﬁsheries governance, while on the regional approach member countries to implement individually or jointly

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the results and recommendations of the ﬁsheries survey proposed in the near term. Fisheries governance and management in the gulfs countries would substantially beneﬁt during a ten-year period of programmed and focused ﬁsheries governance on a rational and responsible basis. The key ingredient for the success of the putative RFMO of the Red Sea is a signiﬁcant and gradual increase in budget allocations to national ﬁsheries entities, be they ministries or parts thereof, through cost recovery, earmarked cost recovery, and the like. Like other regional organizations elsewhere, such as RECOFI, an RFMO for the Red Sea can be self sustaining through serious contributions from member countries with support from a technical secretariat that acts as an adviser and facilitator. With some ﬁne-tuning and increased funding, this model is already functioning in the gulfs region.

32.4. CONCLUSIONS Increased exploitation of ﬁsheries resources calls for more effective modalities of governance. The Gulfs region already has an active regional ﬁsheries body that is entrusted to provide technical assistance in management of resources as well as a mechanism to extend advice relating to the conservation and rational development. The Red Sea, however, which is a unique tropical and semienclosed sea bordered by countries that for the most part lack such an effective regional governance structures for its ﬁsheries. As a case study, the Red Sea presents an opportunity to enhance the collective ability of these countries to self-govern and manage these ﬁsheries resources collectively. Many of the lessons learned from the Gulfs area may be of use here. The main problems facing the region as a whole— both collectively and to varying extents within each country—may be summarized as follows: • Inadequate and outdated governance institutions and organizations that can effectively formulate and implement management policies and strategies for the ﬁsheries sector, that is, come up with adequate and fair rules and enforce them. Financial and material resources are, in general, inadequately allocated by governments to organizations in charge of ﬁsheries management. • Insufﬁcient resources allocated to the development of technical, managerial, and

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enforcement expertise by ﬁsheries personnel. Shore-based facilities, in general, are less than adequately maintained. • Fisheries research has received insufﬁcient attention from national authorities, so funding to ascertain status and trends of stocks or potential yields is lacking even in the jurisdictions with longest coastlines. • The generally inadequate monitoring, control, and surveillance capabilities of governments, combined with a weak and regionally incoherent legal framework, have left the door open to IUU ﬁshing. • Although some countries have adopted international conventions (e.g., the International Plan of Action against IUU ﬁshing), the means and ability to implement these arrangements remain weak. Countries of the Red Sea need assistance in developing the capacity of their ﬁsheries organizations. A decade’s commitment by a donor/U.N. consortium is needed for the institutions within each country to develop to the point where such self-governance is effective through an RFMO. Indeed, this is a challenge, but one that has had a precedent in the gulfs region—the RECOFI—that functions adequately. Fortunately, a well-funded project with several donors has the potential to be the nucleus of transformation in the institutions of governance and management of Red Sea ﬁsheries. Focused exclusively on the Red Sea, and after years of preparation, this project is about to be implemented by FAO. The Red Sea offers a unique case study for the effective and cooperative regional governance of ﬁsheries.

Notes 1. The current number of ﬁshermen is likely much higher—in Yemen alone estimates put the number of ﬁshermen at 60,000–80,000; however, this ﬁgures includes the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, Hadramawt, and Al-Mahra coast. 2. This is especially true of Yemen, where half of the population is younger than sixteen years of age (Blindheim 1984). A discussion of employment in the ﬁsheries sector would not be complete without looking at other issues such as internal political dynamics and regional stability. An example is a recent look on Yemen from Chatham House (see www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/677/).

3. An inland example of these traditional use rights, also from Oman, is the auctioning of access rights to water from a complex—sometimes underground—system of irrigation channels (aﬂaaj, singular falaj).

References Blindheim, J. (1984). Fishery Resources Surveys in the P.D.R. Yemen, Somalia and Ethiopia [now Eritrea], 11 February–21 March 1984. Preliminary Cruise Report, R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen. Bergen, Norway: Institute of Marine Research. Carpenter, K.E, F. Krupp, D.A. Jones, and U. Zajonz (1997). FAO Species Identiﬁcation Guide for Fishery Purposes. Living Marine Resources of Kuwait, Eastern Saudi Arabia. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Chifﬁngs, A.W. (1995). Marine Region 11: Arabian Seas. In: A Global Representative System of Marine Protected Areas, vol. 3, p. 39. Washington, D.C.: International Bank for Reconstruction/World Bank. FAO (2008). Report of the Fourth Session of the Regional Commission for Fisheries. FAO/RNE Fisheries Report 847. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2003–). Fishery Country Proﬁles. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. www.fao.org/ﬁ FAO (2005). Fishery Management Information System (FIMIS). Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Feidi, I. (2002). Post-evaluation Study of the Indian Ocean Fishery Commission: Committee for the Development and Management of the Fishery Resources of the Gulfs. Cairo: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Kensler, C.B. (1996). Review of the General Fisheries Sector in the Gulf and Red Sea Regions of the GCC States. Rome: International Fund for Agricultural Development. Marashi, S.H. (1996). The Role of FAO Regional Fisheries Bodies in the Management of High Seas Fisheries. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. North, D.C. (2003). The Role of Institutions in Economic Development. Discussion Paper Series No. 2003.2. United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Geneva, Switzerland. Sanders, M.J., and G.R. Morgan (1989). Review of the Fisheries Resources of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 197. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

33 The Challenge of Fisheries Governance after UNFSA: The Case of the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission HANNAH PARRIS ANDREW WRIGHT IAN CARTWRIGHT

The charm of ﬁshing is that it is the pursuit of that which is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope. —John Buchan

33.1. INTRODUCTION The Convention on the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stock in the Western and Central Paciﬁc Ocean came into force as international law in mid-2004, amid much optimism that this would herald a new regime for oceanic ﬁsheries governance and tuna ﬁsheries management in the western and central Paciﬁc Ocean (WCPO). In the four years that has since elapsed, a more sobering reality has emerged within the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), the intergovernmental body established as the decision-making and implementation forum for the convention. Despite a broad consensus that such international cooperation was overdue to conserve vulnerable ﬁsh stocks, the success of the commission so far has been mixed. While progress is being made, there are troubling signs that commission’s members, cooperating nonmembers, and participating territories (hereafter referred to as CCMs)1 have failed to capitalize on the new structure, and a possible stalemate looms, particularly with respect to agreement on measures to meet the responsibilities for conservation and management measures (CMMs).

Failure to further progress CMMs is not the result of disputed science. Indeed, the WCPFC is a notable exception among the regional ﬁsheries management organizations (RFMO) in that, to date, the science has received broad acceptance from all stakeholders. Nor is the failure a result of a poor decisionmaking framework—the WCPFC convention is widely considered to provide an excellent basis for decision-making within an RFMO context. In this chapter we review the status of implementation of the convention and propose three possible explanations for what many consider is a lack of progress. The ﬁrst factor, common to the experience of other cooperative management arrangements, revolves around the interplay among divergent national economic and political interests that inﬂuence the scope and quality of debate within the WCPFC negotiation room. The second factor is the process of interpreting the convention itself beyond its framework language and into practical mechanisms for management. The third factor is the challenge of day-to-day governance that arises in a region with limited human and ﬁnancial capacity for implementing complex governance arrangements. We contend that all three factors inﬂuence the relative costs and beneﬁts facing CCMs as they

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determine their level of compliance to existing conservation measures as well as their political willingness to craft new measures. This chapter concludes by reﬂecting on what governance scholars could learn from the experiences of the WCPFC and considers some options for addressing overﬁshing and other threats to the sustainability of the stocks.

33.2. THE TUNA FISHERIES AND TUNA MANAGEMENT IN THE WCPO The WCPO is the world’s largest and most productive ﬁshing ground for four commercially important species of tuna: yellowﬁn tuna (Thunnus albacares), skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis), albacore tuna (Thunnus alalunga), and bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus) (Gillett et al. 2001; Williams and Reid 2005). Responding to changing oceanographic conditions, these highly migratory species travel large distances across the WCPO, moving frequently in and out of the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of coastal states and high-seas areas (see ﬁgure 33.1) (Hampton et al. 2006; Langley and Hampton 2005; Langley et al. 2005, 2007). Unique among the world’s major tuna ﬁsheries, Paciﬁc tuna ﬁsheries are characterized by a large proportion of the total catch being taken within the EEZs of coastal states, the vast majority of whom are Paciﬁc Island countries (PICs). Tuna resources are primarily harvested by distant-water ﬁshing nations (DWFNs; Japan, Korea, Taiwan, United States) although domestic harvesting by PICs, supported by substantial foreign investment, is also signiﬁcant (for a more complete description, see Aqorau 2001; Barclay and Cartwright 2007; Hamilton 2006). While generally in better biological condition than other ﬁsheries, tuna stocks in the WCPO are now increasingly heavily ﬁshed, with overﬁshing occurring on bigeye and yellowﬁn tuna (WCPFC 2006, 2007a). Evidence suggests that signiﬁcant threats to future stock sustainability now exist, and there is a general acceptance that overcapacity in the ﬁshing ﬂeets exists within the region (see Bertignac et al. 2000; Kompas and Che 2006; Reid et al. 2003). Evolution of international law over the last 25 years has seen the development of two themes in tuna management in the Paciﬁc: (1) conditional ownership rights provided to coastal states, through the establishment of the EEZ regime under U.N.

Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS),2 and (2) acceptance that tuna stocks, as highly migratory species, are shared resources requiring cooperative management over their biological range (for an overview, see Aqorau 2002). PICs responded to these two issues with a twopronged strategy of asserting their in-zone sovereign rights, in order to gain economically from tuna through ﬁshing access agreements (Schurman 1998; van Santen and Muller 2000), as well as coordinating the administration of ﬁshing ﬂeets across the region through the formation of the Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA)3 (Aqorau 2001, 2002; Cordonnery 2002; Tsamenyi and Aqorau 1999; van Santen and Muller 2000; Wright et al. 2006). The development of EEZ rights in the late 1970s changed the nature of the involvement of DWFNs in the region, with all countries gradually recognizing sovereign rights of coastal states and paying license fees to access their waters to ﬁsh (Aqorau 2007). More recently, under the domestication policies of the FFA states, many DWFNs have also been obliged to engage in strategic investments in Paciﬁc-based tuna industries and supporting ﬂeets. Since the implementation of the UNCLOS regime, the need for a regionwide cooperative regime for the collaborative management of highly migratory and shared ﬁsh stocks throughout the WCPO was recognized by all major stakeholders. However, progress was delayed by the FFA states that resisted pressure from DWFNs to broaden FFA membership and activities to reﬂect the kind of management regime envisaged under Article 64 of UNCLOS (Tarte 2002). The primary reason for this was their concern that the negative experiences of small developing states in other RFMOs would be replicated in the Paciﬁc and their interests subsumed by the more powerful ﬁshing nations. During the 1990s, this position began to change in response to the conclusion of the U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA),4 which the PICs felt was progressing on terms favorable to them. Interpreting the UNFSA as placing them in a stronger legal position to negotiate a WCPFC that reﬂected their interests (Tarte 2002), the FFA countries overcame their reluctance and agreed to participate in a broader regional negotiation for a WCPO ﬁsheries management organization. Starting in 1994 this process culminated in 2000 with the agreement to the text for the Convention on the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Paciﬁc Ocean.

The Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission

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FIGURE 33.1 Map of the convention area of the WCPFC. (Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission)

33.3. GOVERNANCE IN NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND THE FRAMEWORK OF THE “TUNA CONVENTION” The idea of governance in natural resource management is a multidimensional concept that captures both the processes associated with policy development and the actual policies themselves—that is, the rules put in place that seek to alter the pattern of human interaction with the environment (see Lemos and Agrawal 2006). Conceived more broadly than simply the range of activities within the domain of government, the idea of governance incorporates the concept of collaborative decision making, cooperative actions, and mutual responsibility among stakeholders—however deﬁned—ranging across the public

(i.e., government, community) and private (i.e., enterprise, individual) spheres (Carlsson and Berkes 2005; Lemos and Agrawal 2006; Ostrom 1990). Scholarship and practical experience with governance arrangements for natural resource management have grown exponentially in the last 30 years, and a clearer vision of what constitutes good governance—at least in terms of approaches and principles—is beginning to emerge. This is particularly the case for ocean’s governance conducted at the international level (see, e.g., Tsamenyi et al. 2004; for an alternative view, see Hanna 1999). On the theoretical side, several streams of intellectual thought have inﬂuenced both the conceptualizations of governance of large-scale oceans commons resources—such as WCPO tuna resources—and the actual content of how a governance regime may work. Key ideas from this

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scholarship include the idea of hierarchical and mutually supportive governance regimes, designed to link global management with appropriately scaled institutions to address regional issues; the recognition of the complexity and variability of large-scale commons and the related problems of managing with limited control and under uncertainty; the recognition of the importance of incentives in shaping stakeholder behavior; and the idea that policy must be adaptive and learn from experiences within the commons situation (see, e.g., Berkes 2006). Although they have a different genesis, many of these ideas have been incorporated—in practical terms—into the architecture of international maritime law and related agreements. For example, the idea of an ecosystem-based management approach, precautionary approaches, and cooperative decisions are ideas written into many inﬂuential international legal ﬁsheries related instruments including Agenda 21 (1992), UNFSA, and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (Kaye 2001; Tsamenyi et al. 2004; van Houtte 2002). The most striking example is the hierarchical framework of “nested” international legal agreements starting with the 1982 UNCLOS, its subsidiary agreement UNFSA, and the international process it generated in gradually moving to more ﬁner scales of international collaborative management that match the governance institution with the geographical range of the ﬁsh stocks under management. From this perspective, an RFMO is a midscale institution that forms a bridge between the higher aspirational goals of ﬁsheries management (e.g., under UNFSA) and the decision-making space found at the point where cooperation among states intersects with the principle of national sovereignty exercised by states within their national waters. RFMOs in this context can be interpreted as the ﬁrst meaningful stage of encouraging cooperation and the agreement of measures among states and incorporating its consequences into national management of ﬂeets that operate throughout the range of the stocks. One outcome of delaying the negotiation of the WCPFC convention until after UNFSA was concluded was that the timing of the negotiations process both compelled and encouraged participating delegations to incorporate progressive concepts regarding cooperative international ﬁsheries governance that was promoted by UNFSA and through broader environmental governance debates at

the time (e.g., those expressed in the Agenda 21 document.5 The existence of the UNFSA text and several features of the WCPFC negotiation process (including being guided by the same chairperson) meant that, in many ways, the WCPFC convention mirrored the philosophy and language of the UNFSA text. This was a deliberate strategy by the FFA states to ensure that the potential beneﬁts of the UNFSA would be preserved in any future regime to apply to the WCPO (Tarte 2002). FFA states were also conscious of, and incorporated into the negotiation process, their own perspectives on regional management. Primary among these was that the WCPFC convention should build upon the 20 years of FFA experience in harmonizing national approaches to administering foreign ﬁshing activity and that the convention favorably recognize and protect the position and aspirations of the participating FFA states. Drawing together the broad range of developments in ocean’s governance, the concept of a model RFMO was explored in detail under a recent report by the Independent Panel to Develop a Model for Improved Governance by Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (Lodge et al. 2007). The key recommended characteristics are set out in table 33.1, alongside the key features of the convention text and the extent to which the regulations have implemented them. As suggested there, the structure of the convention compares favorably to the concept of an ideal RFMO, making the convention text, at least in theory, an excellent framework for securing agreement for the sustainable management of tuna ﬁsheries in the Paciﬁc.

33.4. FISHERIES GOVERNANCE OUTCOMES UNDER THE WCPFC Four years’ experience in international cooperative mechanisms is a short time frame within which to observe substantial changes in ﬁsheries management, so evaluation of the full implications of the WCPFC convention on ﬁsheries management is premature. Nevertheless, the pace of development of management measures in the commission to date, and their subsequent implementation, provides grounds for some concern. On the positive side, the commission is consolidating earlier work of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA; a subgroup of the FFA countries) in developing a policy framework for managing

TABLE

33.1 Summary of ideal RFMO and the WCPFC convention text Follow Through in Conservation and Management Measures?

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Components of an Ideal RFMO

Does the WCPFC Convention Text Allow for This Action?

Objective of long-term sustainability for the RFMO incorporating an ecosystem based management perspective and the prudent risk management (i.e., precautionary approach) strategies Management of ﬁshing capacity commensurate with longterm sustainable utilization Robust methods for collecting relevant data, assessing data, and incorporating into the decision-making processes Allocation mechanisms incorporate all parties with interests, developed in a way that deals with new entrants and separate from decisions regarding total allowable catch Has in place a comprehensive and cost effective system for monitoring, compliance, and surveillance, including, inter alia, ﬂag state responsibilities, vessel register, centralized vessel monitoring and surveillance, monitoring of transhipment, port state measures scheme, mechanisms for promoting compliance and for punishing violators; should consider observer programs Transparency in decision making: open to outside scrutiny, with clear rules of procedure and robust mechanisms for review and dispute settlement procedures Has in place processes for recognizing the special needs of developing country members, including reliance on stocks under management; support for participation and development aspirations The RFMO and its secretariat is adequately resourced, has appropriate expertise, and has in place appropriate and transparent mechanisms for the budget and long-term planning processes The RFMO is subjected to performance reviews and works collaboratively with other relevant regional organizations

Yes, Articles 2, 5, 6, 10

Interim measures in place only—not consistent with scientiﬁc advice regarding conservation

Yes, Articles 5, 10

Interim only

Yes, Articles 5, 6, 10,12, 11, 15, 23, Annex 4

Yes—but problems with compliance

Yes, Article 10 (allocation and new entrants) 32

No

Yes, Articles 10, 14, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, Annex 3 (terms and conditions for ﬁshing)

Developing or under active discussion

Yes, Articles 20, 21, 31 (refers back to UNCLOS), Annex 2

N/A

Yes, Articles 5, 7, 10, 30

Yes but not done in a way consistent with long-range conservation of vulnerable stocks

Yes, Articles 15,16, 17, 18 (except for long-term planning— undertaken as initiative of secretariat)

No

Yes, Article 22 (working with other organizations), no speciﬁc articles relating to review but promoted as an initiative of the secretariat

Yes (working with other organizations) and under consideration

Source: Lodge et al. (2007) and WCPFC convention text.

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the purse seine ﬂeet through a Vessel Day Scheme,6 and some progress has been made on implementing interim measures for other gears and stocks (see WCPFC 2007b). Better progress has been made in addressing the monitoring, compliance, and surveillance needs of the commission and a nascent framework has begun to be implemented. Key features include systems for vessels records, ﬁshing authorizations by ﬂag states, a regional observer program, a satellite based vessel monitoring system, and a process for facilitating boarding and inspection of vessels operating on the high seas (see www.wcpfc.int). In addition, active discussion is ongoing regarding harvest related documentation schemes and for port State measures to co-opt the power of major off-loading ports to monitor vessels for illegal activity (WCPFC 2007c). From the CMM perspective, however, the experience of the commission has been less positive and several stakeholders have expressed concerns that the convention has not lived up to expectations (see WWF and TRAFFIC 2007; see also comments from J. Anderton and G. Joseph in Johnson 2007). Recent analysis by Parris (2009) has suggested that the CMMs—the primary tool for implementing the principles of sustainable governance—are lacking in several ways. First, the conservation measures adopted so far are inconsistent with the range of available scientiﬁc and economic advice regarding “sustainable levels of harvests and effort” that have been forwarded to the commission by the commission’s own scientiﬁc committee. A summary comparing the CMMs with this available advice is provided in table 33.2 and indicates gaps between recommended actions and scientiﬁc advice where the appropriate analysis has been developed. Second, that the current set of exemption clauses extended to small island developing states (SIDS)—as a way of recognizing their aspirations to promote their domestic industry development—are untested, unclear, and, unless effectively monitored and administered, expose the WCPFC to a signiﬁcant expansion in ﬁshing effort—that is, moving away from sustainable ﬁshing levels. For example, analysis by Parris (2009) suggests that management measures for bigeye tuna could lead to overﬁshing on this stock of up to 68 percent over maximum sustainable yield (MSY) levels if all developing state members exploited the clause that allows them to increase their catch as a means of supporting local industry development. This issue is

further confounded by the language of the CMMs, which is ambiguous and opens up scope for endless debate on textual interpretation. Third, the CMMs, by focusing on single-species conservation, and selecting simple measures of ﬁshing effort, do not adequately address the multispecies nature of the ﬁshery, nor the multidimensional nature of ﬁshing capacity. For example, there are several CMMs that deal with bigeye tuna and yellowﬁn tuna and separate CMMs to address conservation needs of swordﬁsh and albacore tuna—but all four species may be targeted by longline gears or taken as by catch during a trip. The CMMs do not address how to manage the interactions among species when vessels may switch targeted species or how or when to count the species taken as bycatch but which itself is subject to conservation measures. In addition, by selecting the concept of “days” or “vessel numbers” or “ﬁshing effort” in the CMMs, the WCPFC has essentially not recognized the problem of “effort creep” in the ﬂeets. It appears that the WCPFC CCMs have also been willing to accept exemptions to key capacity measures on an ad hoc basis in order to accommodate the needs (development aspirations) of the individual members. Hanich (2008) highlighted the recent case of Kiribati that was granted a 12-month waiver to license nine Latin American vessels in its EEZs, contrary to the CMM requiring WCPFC members not to license non-WCPFC member vessels. While Kiribati licensed the vessels and sought an exemption post facto, the ﬁshing arrangements for vessels were facilitated by E.U. nationals with strong commercial ties to the Latin American processors and producers that manage the vessels concerned in the Paciﬁc Ocean. In addition, some important early management strategies to address overcapacity in major ﬂeets and the ecological consequences of ﬁshing were agreed in the weaker form of resolutions (see WCPFC 2005) that do not impose binding actions on commission members. A positive development has been the agreement that, from 2006, all decisions agreed by the commission will be binding. Although this provides a stronger basis for promoting compliance, it does not guarantee that CCMs will implement them. Recent analysis by the WCPFC secretariat has also highlighted issues of noncompliance by commission members of with current CMMs. These relate primarily to reporting obligations and a recent report to the WCPFC 2007 annual meeting

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The Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission TABLE 33.2 Comparison of conservation and management measures against available scientiﬁc and economic advice

CMM

Target Stock

2005–01 Skipjack tuna

Bigeye and yellowﬁn tuna

Unit of Control Fishing days

“Fishing effort” and “catch” (bigeye tuna only)

Reference Limit in Recommendations for Effort Measure Reduction for MSYa Effort: 2004 (“current levels”) Effort: 2004 (“current levels”) Catch: 2004 levels or 2000 metric tons (whichever is higher) Average 2001– 2004 or 2004

2006–01 Bigeye and yellowﬁn tuna 2005–02 Southern albacore tuna

“Total capacity”

2005–03 Northern albacore tuna

“Fishing effort”

2006–04 Striped Marlin

“Fishing vessels”

One year between 2000 and 2004

2006–03 Swordﬁsh

“Fishing vessels”

One year between 2000 and 2005

“Fishing vessels”

Current (2005) or recent (2000–2004) levels “Current levels” (2004)

Capacity/Effort Permitted Relative to MSY?

Fishing mortality below that consistence with maximum sustainable yield (MSY) Yellowﬁn tuna: ﬁshing mortality = MSY Reductions needed to increase biomass above biomass consistent with MSY /risk management purposes Bigeye tuna: 25% reduction from 2001–2004 levels

Lower than MSY

As above Current levels sustainable or slight increase but will result in declines in catch per unit of ﬁshing effort Current (2004) levels not increased Likely that further reductions in ﬁshing effort required, depending on policy objectives Precautionary measure: maintain current levels (stock assessment uncertain) Precautionary measure: maintain current levels (stock assessment uncertain)

As above

Equal to or higher than MSY

Equal to or slightly lower than MSY Unknown— advice follows precautionary approach Unknown— advice follows precautionary approach Unknown— advice follows precautionary approach

a Maximum sustainable yield (MSY) estimates are calculated on the basis that the current mix of gear type remains constant over time and are sourced from WCPFC (2006, 2007).

(WCPFC 2007b) indicates that several parties have not met commitments (in part or total), and/or it is not possible to verify the quality of the reported information (WCPFC 2007b). This raises questions regarding accuracy and comprehensiveness of collected data and adversely affects the scope and quality of information available to monitor the dynamics of the ﬁshery and status of stocks. Lack of compliance to current CCMs suggests unwillingness to comply and/or the lack of capacity to comply (through poor human and ﬁnancial resources at the national level), a factor likely to exist in both developed and developing state CCMs and, as a result, suggest that some countries are

free-riding on the conservation efforts of others. Whatever the reason, poor compliance with existing CCMs will impede the future progress of the WCPFC: if CCMs cannot meet these basic requirements, it raises doubt about the degree to which they will meet the reporting/action requirements of more sophisticated management measures. To a certain extent, the limited range of current CMMs may be in interpreted as interim measures that responded to the immediate need to cap capacity migration into the region while more robust, longer term measures are put in place.7 This was a reasonable response by the commission, but the current struggle for CCMs to move beyond this

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interim framework points to more fundamental divisions that could impede the convention’s conservation objectives in the longer term.

33.5. THE GAP BETWEEN EXPECTATIONS AND PRACTICE The overall situation in implementing the WCPFC convention text suggests that, while progress has been made, this progress is mixed, and there are signs of increasing challenges in building more comprehensive CMMs. Some stakeholders have characterized the current situation within the WCPFC as the result of insufﬁcient political commitment by commission parties to implement the provisions of the convention text and the misgivings of environmental nongovernmental organizations in this regard are clear: The two most valuable tuna species in the Paciﬁc are no closer to recovery than they were before . . . yet again short sighted economics continues to rule the day putting the environment, ﬁsh stocks, Paciﬁc Island economies and the ﬁshing industry itself at risk. This ﬁsheries commission is now failing miserably just like all the others. (Greenpeace 2007) While these views may have merit, they fail to acknowledge the full range of factors that is blocking meaningful progress in the negotiation room. Four years of operation of the commission demonstrate there are at least three such factors that work interdependently to constrain the scope and quality of debate, each of which is discussed below.

33.5.1. The “Strategic” Inﬂuence of Domestic Development Agendas The most obvious factor adversely affecting progress can be found in divergent and, at times, opposing, domestic and regional development agendas that act to inﬂuence, shape, and ultimately constrain national negotiating positions. Working from insistent domestic economic pressures to underpin ﬂeet viability, processor proﬁtability, and employment opportunities and maintain regional power relationships—as well as promoting favorable balances of power within the commission itself— these agendas are multidimensional, complex, and

ﬂuid. Several broad drivers emerge as the principle factors inﬂuencing decision making: • Heavy investment in canneries and related processing throughout the region (e.g., Japan, Philippines) and expressed desire to increase capacity in developing country CMMs, particularly in Papua New Guinea • Aspirations by developing country CMMs— particularly the FFA group—for the expansion and development of their domestic tuna industries • Recognition by DWFNs and others of the strategic importance of the tuna ﬁsheries and strategic positioning to secure access • Heavy investments in particular ﬁshing technologies that favor one form of conservation method over another • Strong political and economic links among PICs and bilateral donors that are also DWFNs, and the inﬂuence of short-run domestic political cycles that favor short-run outcomes from ﬁsheries management As the WCPFC seeks to develop measures for the CMMs for vulnerable bigeye and yellowﬁn tuna stocks, this diversity of interests, combined with the geographical distribution of the stocks creates, an uneven pattern of “winners” and “losers” in alternative policy options. For example, reductions in purse seine effort to conserve bigeye tuna and yellowﬁn tuna—as originally recommended by the commission’s scientiﬁc committee—places a heavy cost burden of compliance on the rich skipjack tuna ﬁsheries that are of principle interest to many Paciﬁc Island CCMs. By contrast, the beneﬁts from an improved bigeye resource accrue predominately to DWFNs ﬁshing on the high seas and those members heavily invested in longline ﬁshing techniques (Reid 2006)—often not the same countries as those with purse seine interests. Whilst negotiations at the commission will inevitably be heavily inﬂuenced by individual CCMS aiming at securing a maximum share of resources, these pressures are reshaping the work of the commission in a way that is preventing the development of effective CMMs. In this way, national support for conservation measures are being driven by, and conditional on, the economic advantage that such measures would give to the proponent. A commission-endorsed allocation mechanism would address many of the threats posed by the ongoing effort by CCMs to secure their presence in the ﬁshery based

The Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission on historical levels of participation while accommodating efforts to increase shares as ﬁshery development aspirations are pursued. However, recent efforts to progress discussions of allocation issues stalled and is likely to do so for some time as CCMs have recently rejected opportunities to openly discuss allocation in commission sponsored forums (for example Government of Japan 2007).

33.5.2. Practical Implementation of the Convention Text Through close alignment with the UNFSA text, the convention contains many features that would be considered integral parts of an ideal RFMO negotiated as a general collective arrangement. This was positive at one level, but failure to develop some of the principles of UNFSA into more concrete outcomes in the context of the Paciﬁc has meant that the ﬁnal WCPFC convention text retains a series of broad generalized statements designed to seek common ground among the divergent interests. While this secured the political support required for the ratiﬁcation, the resulting text is now presenting the commission with serious difﬁculties as it attempts to implement the provisions of the convention. Rather than clarifying the nature of the management task, many aspects of the convention text act, instead, as ambiguous guidelines that set out the parameters for further negotiations about how to collectively manage the ﬁshery. It is becoming increasingly clear that this ambiguity can be found in many central aspects of the convention and that, in essence, the political and economic conﬂicts played out at the strategic level (as discussed above) are embedded within the text itself. Two issues are central to this dilemma. Firstly, the scope of the commission’s jurisdiction and the related issue of the relative power of coastal states in dominating commission activities regarding CMMs. The second issue arises over the interpretation of the special needs provisions of the convention designed to address the particular circumstances of SIDS CCMs and its related debate over which CCMs should bear the signiﬁcant costs for conservation of vulnerable stocks. Articles 7 and 8 of the convention relate to the issues of compatibility—that is, while recognizing the sovereignty of coastal states, the highly migratory status of the stocks means that, in order to be effective, conservation measures need to be consistent among waters under national jurisdiction and

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the high seas and apply throughout the range of the stocks. Potentially, issues arise when no such measures are in place or the jurisdictions have incompatible measures in place in the context of meeting overall sustainability objectives.8 However, in practice since coastal states participate in decision making on the high seas, it is unlikely that measures for high seas areas would be more stringent than those put in place by these states for their own waters. The experience of the WCPFC so far has been seen an increasing tendency for some coastal states—primarily the FFA group—to resolve the compatibility issue through the adoption of measures for their coastal state waters which is then either retrospectively adopted by the commission (as happened with the Vessel Day Scheme) or without reference to the commission at all. For example, in response to slow progress on conservation measures for bigeye and yellowﬁn tuna in the WCPFC, the PNA subgroup of the FFA recently announced its own suite of three measures, designed to curb purse seine capacity (through use of observers, bans on the use of ﬁshing with ﬁsh aggregating devices, closures, and use of access arrangements to effectively close “high seas pockets”) and will to apply to purse seine vessels operating in its own waters.9 This decision by the PNA signiﬁcantly progresses the conservation agenda of the commission by putting in place measures that the broader CCMs where unwilling to do and also clariﬁes some of the ambiguity found in Articles 7 and 8 (i.e., coastal states establish their own mechanisms that are retrospectively adopted by the commission). Unilateral coastal state measures can, however, create some uncertainties because they do not necessarily account for the full range of ﬁshing activities (e.g., measures to cover longline effort that is absent from the PNA decision)10 that place pressures on vulnerable stocks, nor do they take account of the legitimate interests of other CCMs. It is also not clear how (potentially disparate) coastal state driven measures can be combined at a “regionwide” level to ensure that, over all, the total level of ﬁshing pressure is contained within levels advised by commission scientists.11 The second issue regarding the rights of SIDS concerns the fundamental challenge of balancing the right to develop, within sustainable bounds, and the interests of ﬁshing states in securing access. The FFA parties argue that since both the UNFSA text and Article 30 in the convention recognize and protect their rights to development, they are

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(and should be) exempt from certain management measures relating to capacity and harvesting constrains. Moreover, to give practical expression to these aspirations, the commission must recognize their sovereign right to enter into joint-venture and chartering partnerships with developed countries in the procurement and operation of vessels and related onshore facilities (see, e.g., statement by the Republic of the Marshall Islands in WCPFC 2007c). This position is inﬂuential within the commission because of the heavy reliance of the purse seine and, to some extent, longline ﬂeets on securing access to the EEZs of the FFA states in order to secure ﬁshing opportunities. In response, other WCPFC parties argue that SIDS exemption opens up the ﬁshery to effort creep and loopholes for ﬁshing effort to escalate when attempts are being made to ensure that ﬁshing is managed within sustainable limits. Analysis by Parris (2009) suggests that this issue is real: should SIDS take full advantage of the exemptions extended to them under the management measure for bigeye tuna, the total amount of harvest for this species could increase from 31 percent above MSY levels (the basis of the measure) to 68 percent above MSY levels. PICS have long sought to address effort creep through securing a corresponding reduction in effort from DWFNs and the current Vessel Day Scheme could be used for this purpose. However recent capacity increases in some CCM ﬂeets and increased WCPO activity by Latin American ﬂeets suggest that such compromise will be difﬁcult to achieve in the current political environment.

33.5.3. The Challenge of Day-toDay Governance It is generally recognized that the Paciﬁc states face signiﬁcant human and ﬁnancial resource constraints that limit their capacity for managing and monitoring the tuna resources within their EEZ (Hanich et al. 2008). This “lack of capacity” is also a factor within the WCPFC itself—extends across both developed and developing country CCMs—and is actively limiting progress in negotiating both the outstanding issues discussed above and in developing alternative management measures. The capacity deﬁcit is both broad and deep and manifests in multiple ways, for example, through the lack of sufﬁcient suitably skilled people to undertake critical analytical and managerial tasks for individual national governments, particularly in the case

of the SIDS CCMs, or the lack of available funds to grow commission secretariat stafﬁng to appropriate levels. Small budgets and competing opportunities elsewhere also impede the recruitment and retention of suitability skilled staff in the ﬁsheries administrations of SIDS members, suggesting that this problem is likely to continue in the future (see Hanich et al. 2008). The disparity in governance resources is particularly evident in the size and professional composition of delegations that attend WCPFC meetings and in the ability of the smaller sized delegations to appropriately negotiate across a relatively large number of complex issues that are usually under simultaneous consideration within the time-constrained annual meetings of the commission. The pace and complexity of the annual meeting process also present some non-English speaking delegations (e.g., the delegations from Japan and Korea) with the challenge of negotiating technical matters in their secondary language of English, thus adding further obstacles in seeking mutual understanding and agreement among CMMs. This issue has been recognized by FFA, and for its members, at least, considerable efforts are being expended each year in undertaking regional workshops to build capacity and promote and understanding of key issues to be addressed at the commission. However, this kind of support is not available to other SIDS Members of the commission. The experience of the WCPFC suggests that issues regarding time availability, logistics, management overload, technical understanding of issues, and the ability to cope with the sheer level of paperwork produced in support of commission deliberations represent real limits for the ability of the WCPFC to meets its management tasks. Rather than being a secondary issue to the “strategic issues” discussed above, this “day-to-day” tactical governance issue is a key constraint for achieving governance reform because it undermines the ability for PICs to meet, debate, and understand the implications of collectively agreed management arrangements.

33.6. DISCUSSION The experiences of the WCPFC raise some critical challenges for the study of complex large-scale resource commons and for the crafting of policy solutions to meet their CMM demands. Primary among these is the observation that even in

The Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission situations where real-world, theoretically consistent and mutually agreed upon governance frameworks exists, this does not necessarily lead to sustainable outcomes in resource management. As the WCPFC shows the reasons for these blockages operate at many different levels ranging from protection of national interests, to the detriment of overall returns from (the sustainable management of) the ﬁshery, differences in interpretation of the convention text, and what is termed here day-to-day governance— or the limits to the human and ﬁnancial capabilities available to commission CCMs. Addressing these challenges requires looking beyond the generalized blueprints of ﬁsheries governance, for example, as set out in the independent panel to develop a model for improved governance by Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (Lodge et al, 2007) and toward a tailored approach that can address the speciﬁc problems and conﬂicts facing the CMMs as situations unfold. In the case of the WCPFC, these speciﬁc problems are ﬁnding ways through the differences in interpretation of the text and addressing the real challenges posed by the dayto-day governance constraint. Unlike the radical redesign approach proposed by Chand et al. (2003) or Grafton et al. (2006), this approach recognizes that policy progress toward more sustainable forms of governance in the WCPFC will be a slow and transformative process driven by developments in the ﬁshery, changes in capacity and time. Proposals about governance reform, therefore, should focus on supporting this process rather than seeking the ultimate “ﬁx.” To this end the following strategies could be pursued by the commission in progressing its responsibilities to implement the terms of the convention. First, effort could be directed toward developing a stronger constituency within WCPFC CCMs for better governance through robust analysis that seeks to highlight both the beneﬁts of greater cooperation, within the context of the commission, and the potential costs associated with noncooperation. Central to this will be the independent technical analysis to examine the trade-offs in costs and beneﬁts among different CCMs, and opportunity costs forgone with particular policy options against the diverse range of interests highlighted in this chapter. These types of analyses need to be evaluated using a range of expert and national view points, but in particular, special care needs to ensure that a DWFN perspective is incorporated into the analysis. Many analysts place particular attention on

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policy options that meet the aspirations of SIDS members of the WCPFC, in particular, those of the FFA—and this is supported by an active and vocal FFA secretariat. By contrast, relatively less attention is given to explore policy options that meet the needs of the non-FFA group—many of whom are also coastal states with signiﬁcant domestic ﬁsheries. Such an initiative will help draw into the policy debate the broader range of interests highlighted in this chapter and provide a robust process for exploring alternative interpretations (and their implications) of the convention text. A second strategy that could be pursued would be to build the capacity of the secretariat and the commission itself in order to strengthen its regional identity among CCMs and reinforce the monitoring, compliance, and surveillance functions. This would encourage both a stronger political culture of compliance by CCMs—and thus help address some of the commitment issues raised in this chapter—and could also provide a robust information database to support trade-related, port-state, and other market-based measures to track down and identify noncompliant vessels. A better resourced secretariat would also have the capacity to assist CCMs in the practical problems of engaging with the number of issues contained in the voluminous amounts of papers, analysis, and data that are generated and circulated every year by the commission and its various technical, scientiﬁc, and policy processes. Such work could focus on relatively pedestrian, but nevertheless valuable, work of developing mechanisms for standardizing and summarizing papers considered by the commission and simpliﬁed processes for recording commission decisions and proceedings and processes for communicating these among CCMs. A third strategy would be to develop a more robust policy development process within the context of the commission itself. Many CCMs argue that policy making is the domain of sovereign states in the commission and not the role of the secretariat. While generally this is the case, there is, nevertheless, room for the commission to have more structured, but relatively informal, forums for CCMs to actively consider, in greater depth, the merits of alternative policy options and their implications for the diverse interests of all CCMs in the WCPFC. To minimize the burden on already stretched delegations, such a mechanism should take the form of a semiformal panel of independent experts that is convened to look at speciﬁc

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policy proposals and provide advice as appropriate. Such a panel could incorporate representatives of CCMs, as well as independent “experts,” and be empowered to consult widely with CCMs through in-country visits and by receiving submissions. This type of panel would have no powers of decision making or recommendation, but act as a think-tank of the commission—and thus provide an additional source of advice without increasing the day-to-day governance burden on CCMs. If developed, the ﬁrst item for consideration by such a panel should be the form and content of appropriate management reference (limit and target) points for the commission, incorporating in turn the different perspectives offered by the diverse members in this multispecies and multigear ﬁshery.

33.7. CONCLUSION In many ways, the experience of the WCPFC is unique: it was one of the ﬁrst RFMOs developed post-UNFSA and the biophysical and geographical characteristics of the ﬁsheries under its jurisdiction incorporate both the largest and richest countries in the world (Japan, United States) and some of the smallest (e.g., Nuie, Nauru, and Tuvalu) in its membership. The convention meets the obligations of UNFSA signatories to work collaboratively for the purposes of pursuing CMM of shared ﬁsh stocks and may be considered a “good” example of cooperative ﬁsheries management as envisaged under the UNFSA. But the experience of the commission, so far, demonstrates that issues pertaining to different interests, textual interpretation, and capacity to manage day-to-day governance tasks at national and commission levels are presenting real blockages to an effective implementation process. The chapter thus highlights that, despite the apparently good framework provided by the convention text, implementation is proving challenging for reasons beyond expected issues associated with “differences in interests” among stakeholders. In developing potential policy responses, we argue here that initiatives should recognize that institutional change over time is gradual and slow. Three such initiatives are suggested that may assist in this process and focus on building a broader constituency for and understanding of reforms in ﬁsheries management. While these will be useful, they

ultimately only support the development of, and do not replace, the political commitment and leadership required over the longer term for the commission’s success.

Acknowledgments The views expressed in this chapter are the author’s own and do not necessarily reﬂect the views of the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission or the Australian National University.

Notes 1. The current membership of the WCPFC comprises the Forum Fisheries Agency Group of Countries (Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Cook Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati, Nauru, Nuie, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Palau) and Japan, Korea, China, Chinese Taipei, United States, European Union, France, Canada, and the Philippines. The Paciﬁc Territories of American Samoa, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, French Polynesia, Guam, New Caledonia, Wallis, and Futuna also participate in their own right. Belize and Indonesia have cooperating nonmember status. 2. United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, Montego Bay, 10 December 1982, entered into force 16 November 1994. 3. The Paciﬁc Island Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) is the RFMO formed as an active response to the granting of EEZ rights, with the following countries as members: Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. Not all Paciﬁc Islands are members of the FFA, for example, French Polynesia, New Caledonia or Wallis, and Futuna. 4. The full name is the 1995 Agreement for the Implementation of the Provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 Relating to the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks. 5. The Agenda 21 document is the centerpiece agreement made at the United Nations Conference on Environment Development in Rio De Janeiro in June 1992 and was designed as a global plan for “ecologically sustainable development” in the 21st century. A copy of the text may be found at www. un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21/english/ agenda21toc.htm. 6. The Vessel Day Scheme is a management regime put in place by the PNA subgroup of the

The Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission FFA to cap total purse seine effort allowed to operate across the EEZs of Palau, Papua New Guinea, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, and the Solomon Islands (Dunn et al. 2006; FFA 2007). 7. Putting in place a set of interim measures to cap capacity expansion in the WCPO was considered one of the most urgent tasks of the new commission because, by comparison with other major tuna ﬁsheries, the region was relatively underregulated, and there were concerns that vessels who were no longer able to operate elsewhere would migrate to the WCPO. For a full set of CMMs, see www.wcpfc.int/ 8. The issue has recently been complicated by the Papua New Guinea position that their archipelagic waters in the Bismarck Sea lie beyond commission jurisdiction (although it is biologically part of the tuna ﬁshery) and therefore not subject to commission management measures. In essence this amounts to an increase in it allocation of purse seine effort under the Vessel Day Scheme. In acknowledging the potential impacts of this move on bigeye tuna and yellowﬁn tuna mortality—and hence stock sustainability—Papua New Guinea is actively exploring more stringent management regimes for the use of ﬁsh aggregating devices. This position can and may be adopted by other WCPFC CCMs that claim archipelagic status (Fiji, Indonesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Philippines, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu) (United Nations 2008). 9. In full, these measures are as follows: • Total (100 percent) observer coverage on purse seine vessels operating in their EEZs • Three-month closure on the use of ﬁsh aggregating devices in the third quarter of the year • Development of access arrangements that effectively close pockets of high seas ﬁshing to many purse seine vessels See FFA (2008) for more details. 10. The physical overlay of the EEZs of the PNA group and the physical distribution of the stock has enabled the PNA to implement these measures and, as a consequence, exert considerable inﬂuence over all purse seine ﬂeets operating in the WCPFC Convention Area. Such leverage, however, was absent over the longline ﬂeets, whose pattern of operation generally lies outside the waters of the PNA. Consequently, the PNA decision could not include the longline ﬂeets, and thus the PNA could not be expected to lead policy development in this area. 11. The PNA Vessel Day scheme cap, provided it is set at an appropriate level and reinforced by other measures (e.g., restrictions on the use of ﬁsh aggregating devices), will be helpful in this regard.

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Overﬁshing. Press Statement Circ08039. www. ffa.int/node/1083 Gillett, R., M. McCoy, L. Rodwell, and J. Tamate (2001). Tuna: A Key Economic Resource in the Paciﬁc Islands. Manila, Philippines: Asian Development Bank; Honiara, Solomon Islands: Forum Fisheries Agency. Government of Japan (2007). Letter from Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries to Executive Secretary of WCPFC. www.wcpfc.int Grafton, R.Q., R. Hannesson, B. Shallard, D. Sykes, and J. Terry (2006). The Economics of Allocation in Tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organisations. Australian National University Environment and Economics Working Paper EEN 0612. Canberra: Australian National University. Greenpeace (2007). Weblog, 8 December. www. greenpeace.org Hamilton, A. (2006). Production, resources and management of tuna in the western and central Paciﬁc Ocean. Paper presented at the Infoﬁsh Tuna 2006 Conference, Bangkok, Thailand, 25–27 May. Hampton, J., A. Langley, and P. Kleiber (2006). Stock assessment of bigeye tuna in the western and central Paciﬁc Ocean, including an analysis of management options WCPFC-SC2-2006/ SA WP-2. Paper presented at the Scientiﬁc Committee Second Regular Session, Manila, Philippines, 7–18 August. Hanich, Q. (2008). Control, cooperation and “participatory rights” in the western and central Paciﬁc Ocean tuna ﬁsheries. Presentation to the Conference on the Legal and Policy Trends in the Implementation of International Fisheries Instruments in the Western and Central Paciﬁc Region, Nadi, Fiji, 7–9 April 2008. Hanich, Q., F. Teo, and M. Tsamenyi (2008). Closing the Gaps: Building Capacity in Paciﬁc Fisheries Governance and Institutions. Honiara, Solomon Islands: Forum Fisheries Agency; Canberra: Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. Hanna, S. (1999). Strengthening governance of ocean ﬁshery resources. Ecological Economics 31: 275–286. Johnson, G. (2007). Tuna Commission stalemate hurting Paciﬁc, ofﬁcial warns. Paciﬁc Magazine 13 December. Kaye, S.B. (2001). International Fisheries Management. The Hague, Netherlands: Kluwer Law International. Kompas, T., and N. Che (2006). Economic proﬁt and optimal effort in the western and central Paciﬁc tuna ﬁsheries. Paciﬁc Economic Bulletin 21: 46–62. Langley, A., and J. Hampton (2005). Stock assessment of albacore tuna in the South Paciﬁc Ocean. Presented at the ﬁrst meeting of the

Scientiﬁc Committee of the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission WCPFC-SC1 Noumea, New Caledonia. Langley, A., J. Hampton, P. Kleiber, and S. Hoyle (2007). Stock Assessment of Yellowﬁn Tuna in the Western and Central Paciﬁc Ocean, Including an Analysis of Management Options. WCPFC-SC3-SA SWG/WP-01. Honolulu: 3rd Regular Session of the WCPFC Scientiﬁc Committee. www.wcpfc.int/system/ﬁles/documents/ meetings/scientific-committee/3rd-regularsession/stock-assessment-swg-working-papers/ WCPFC-SC3%20SA-SWG%20WP-01.pdf Langley, A., J. Hampton, and M. Ogura (2005). Stock assessment of skipjack tuna in the western and central Paciﬁc Ocean. Presented at the ﬁrst meeting of the Scientiﬁc Committee of the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission WCPFC-SC1, Noumea, New Caledonia. Lemos, C.M., and A. Agrawal (2006). Environmental governance. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 31: 297–325. Lodge, M., D. Anderson, G. Munro, K. Sainsbury, T. Lobach, and A. Willock (2007). Recommended Best Practices for Regional Fisheries Management Organisations: Report of an Independent Panel to Develop a Model for Improved Governance by Regional Fisheries Management Organisations. Royal Institute for International Affairs. www.chathamhouse. org.uk/publications/papers/download/ -/id/523/ﬁle/10394_rfm00807.pdf Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press. Parris, H. (2009). Fishing for Future? Governing for Sustainability in the Western and Central Paciﬁc Tuna Fisheries. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian National University. Reid, C. (2006). Economic implications and tradeoffs in achieving maximum sustainable yield for bigeye and yellowﬁn tuna in the Western and Central Paciﬁc Ocean. Paciﬁc Economic Bulletin 21: 31–45. Reid, C., D. Squires, Y. Jeon, L. Rodwell, and R. Clarke (2003). An analysis of ﬁshing capacity in the western and central Paciﬁc Ocean tuna ﬁshery and management implications. Marine Policy 27(6): 449–469. Schurman, R. (1998). Tuna dreams: Resource nationalism and Paciﬁc islands’ tuna industry. Development and Change 29: 107–136. Tarte, S. (2002). A duty to cooperate: Building a regional regime for the conservation and management of highly migratory ﬁsh stocks in the western and central Paciﬁc. In Ocean Yearbook, Vol. 16, pp. 261–299. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission Tsamenyi, M., and T. Aqorau (1999). The institutional framework for regional cooperation in ocean and coastal management in the South Paciﬁc. Ocean and Coastal Management 42(6–7): 465–481. Tsamenyi, B.M., S. Rajkumar, and L. ManarangiTrott (2004). The International Legal Regime for Fisheries Management. UNEP Workshop on Fisheries Subsidies and Sustainable Fisheries Management. www.unep.ch/etu/Fisheries%20Meeting/FM2004SubPap.htm United Nations (2008). Maritime Space: Maritime Zones and Maritime Delimination Data Base. Table of Claims to Maritime Jurisdiction (As at 28 May, 2008). www.un.org/Depts/los/ LEGISLATIONANDTREATIES/PDFFILES/ table_summary_of_claims.pdf van Houtte, A. (2002). Legal Aspects in the Management of Shared Fish Stocks—A Review. Presented at the Norway–FAO Expert Consultation on the Management of Shared Fish Stocks, Bergen, Norway, 7–10 October. FAO Fisheries Reports. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. van Santen, G., and P. Muller (2000). Working Apart or Together: The Case for a Common Approach to Management of the Tuna Resources in Exclusive Economic Zones of Paciﬁc Island Countries. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. WCPFC (2005). Commission for the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Paciﬁc Ocean Second Regular Meeting: Final Report. Pohnpei: F.S.M.: Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission.

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WCPFC (2006). Report of the Scientiﬁc Committee, second regular session, Manila, Phillippines, 7–18 August. WCPFC (2007a). Report of the Scientiﬁc Committee, third regular session, Honolulu, Hawaii, 13–23 August. WCPFC (2007b). Information paper to support the commission’s review of existing conservation and management measures. WCPFC42007/13. Tumon, Guam: Secretariat for the Fourth Regular Session, Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission. WCPFC (2007c). Commission for the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Paciﬁc Ocean Third Regular Meeting: Final Report. 11–15 December. Apia, Samoa: Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission. Williams, P., and C. Reid (2005). Overview of Tuna Fisheries in the Western and Central Paciﬁc Ocean, Including Economic Conditions 2004. Presented at the ﬁrst meeting of the Scientiﬁc Committee of the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission WCPFC-SC1, Noumea, New Caledonia, 8–19 August. Wright, A., N. Stacey, and P. Holland (2006). The cooperative framework for ocean and coastal management in the Paciﬁc Islands: Effectiveness, constraints and future direction. Ocean and Coastal Management 49(9–10): 739–763. WWF and TRAFFIC (2007). WWF-TRAFFIC Position Statement to WCPFC-4. www.wwfpaciﬁc.org.fj/publications/marine/WCPFC4_ PositionStmt.pdf

34 Salmon Fisheries of British Columbia DIANE P. DUPONT HARRY W. NELSON

34.1. INTRODUCTION Five species of Paciﬁc salmon are ﬁshed in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province: sockeye, pink, chum, chinook, and coho.1 The salmon ﬁsheries extend geographically from the Paciﬁc Ocean surrounding the Queen Charlotte Islands, an archipelago located to the northwest (53° 00′ N 132° 00′ W) of the British Columbia mainland, to the rivers of the central interior of the province. Paciﬁc salmon are anadromous—they hatch in one of the province’s 105 freshwater river systems, swim to the North Paciﬁc, where they spend between one and four years depending upon the species, and then return as mature adults to their home rivers to spawn and die. Because of this salmon “homing” instinct, ﬁsheries biologists have identiﬁed 9,600 distinct stocks of salmon (Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada [DFO] 2008e). Determining the size of each stock is a difﬁcult process given the timelines of the salmon life cycle and the uncertainty surrounding the many environmental factors that may affect individual stocks during their sojourns in the Paciﬁc. Stock assessment—so crucial to ﬁsheries management—consumes much of the resources directed at the ﬁshery by its government regulator, the DFO. While annual cycles are anticipated, stocks can generally not be estimated until the salmon have begun their journeys to their home rivers for spawning purposes. It is during this period of time (beginning in April/May of any given

year and ending as late as September/October of the same year) that the ﬁsheries are subject to intense pressure from three distinct types of ﬁshing competitors: commercial ﬁsh harvesting, Aboriginal food ﬁshery requirements, and recreational/sports ﬁshers. Returning salmon stocks are managed ﬁrst to ensure adequate numbers of ﬁsh actually reach their spawning grounds in the headwaters and tributaries of rivers, or what the DFO deems to be the appropriate escapement level. Once these numbers have been established, DFO ofﬁcials then need to ensure that enough ﬁsh remain to provide for the food, social, and ceremonial (FSC) purposes of First Nations peoples.2 Whatever is left (total allowable catch) can then be divided between recreational3 and commercial ﬁshers (both American and Canadian) and among the three Canadian commercial gear types (gillnet, troll, and seine). The recreational/sports ﬁshery is typically allocated around 5 percent of the total allowable catch and has priority in the catching of two desirable angling species: coho and chinook (DFO 2008c; MMK Consulting Inc. 2007). Of the total catch allocated to the commercial ﬁshing sector, 16.5 percent is allocated to American ﬁshers since salmon that spawn in the rivers of nearby Washington State comingle with salmon returning to Canadian rivers (Paciﬁc Salmon Treaty 1995).4 Participation by Canadian vessels in the commercial salmon ﬁshery is limited through a restriction on the overall number of

458

Salmon Fisheries of British Columbia licenses granted to vessels. These licenses give owners the right to compete for an unspeciﬁed number of ﬁsh per license. The overall salmon ﬂeet catch is controlled by restrictions on ﬁshing methods, gear type, allowable harvest times, and areas (DFO 1998). Through these tools DFO has tried to allocate the remaining allowable catch among the three competing gear types in the following approximate proportions: 40 percent to seine, 38 percent to gillnet, and 22 percent to troll vessels. The commercial salmon ﬁshery has historically been one of British Columbia’s most lucrative. In 1990 the ﬁshery represented 55 percent of the total landed value of provincial commercial catches (DFO 2007i). However, the ﬁshery has suffered a decline in both the quantity caught and its value over the last couple of decades. In a one-year period (1994–1995), the total landed value of salmon declined 66 percent (Gislason 1997), and as recently as 2005 it made up only 10 percent of the value of the commercial catch (DFO 2007i). The total landed value in 2007 amounted only to $30 million in 2006 constant Canadian dollars (DFO 2007a),5 which represents a 43 percent decline from an historical average (CA$52,640,000) taken from 2002 to 2006. The most obvious reason for the decline in commercial catches is sustained decreases in returning stocks, particularly the sockeye stocks, upon which the commercial sector is so reliant.6 For example, the 2009 forecasts of returning sockeye are estimated around 10.5 million ﬁsh, which is also well below the long-term average of 13.1 million ﬁsh. (DFO 2007h, 2009). Moreover, two sockeye stocks, Sakinaw Lake and Cultus Lake, are ofﬁcially listed as endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (2008).7 While adverse ocean and environmental conditions are implicated as contributing to these declines, they are not the only forces at work. Long-standing conﬂicts relating to the allocation of ﬁsh among the three broad competitors for the salmon and, more important, the “race for ﬁsh” mentality that exists within the commercial sector have taken a toll on the ability of the ﬁshery to be sustainable. Reliance on outdated management programs, speciﬁcally, the limited entry program, which does not sufﬁciently prevent the incentives for overcapitalization, combined with a continuance of inefﬁcient harvesting practices, all lead to indiscriminate ﬁshing that also dissipates rent8 (Dupont 1990). These problems, especially the lack of current economic viability of

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the salmon ﬁshery as it is currently structured, have only been exacerbated by the decline in prices for their product over the past decade. Increasing competition from farmed salmon (both locally farmed and in other countries) in both domestic and foreign markets has led to price declines for wild-caught salmon and corresponding overall reductions in revenues for the commercial ﬁshery year to year.

34.2. BRIEF HISTORY OF KEY REGULATORY ASPECTS Table 34.1 provides a brief chronology of important events relating to the regulation of the British Columbia salmon ﬁshery. The key features that set the stage for the later discussion of pressing problems are highlighted in this section beginning with the evolution of the commercial salmon ﬁshery. It was open access until 1968 and subject to the inefﬁciencies and problems, as highlighted in Gordon (1954). Although managed according to escapement targets, there were no limits on either the number of vessels permitted or on the catches per vessel. In 1969, the DFO, in an effort to rationalize the ﬁshery, implemented a management program (the Davis Plan), intended to limit effort through entry restrictions. Only vessels with recorded historical catches received a license to catch salmon. Around 5,800 licenses were initially issued. Within two years DFO realized that the scheme had not served to limit the effort being directed at the ﬁshery as vessel owners used their licenses granting permission for one (but not a speciﬁc) vessel to ﬁsh to invest in larger vessels with more sophisticated electronic gear. DFO subsequently introduced size or tonnage restrictions on each of the licensed vessels to discourage this practice. The remainder of the decade proved to be one of reaction for the regulator as ﬁshers sought to circumvent each new regulation and managers responded by developing new rules in what were largely unsuccessful attempts to prevent any further increases in capacity and consequent overﬁshing. A Royal Commission report (Pearse 1982) focused most of its attention on rationalization of the salmon ﬁshery. It recommended a reduction in the overall salmon ﬂeet by half (about 2,500 vessels) to occur within ten years and the introduction of ﬁsheries royalties as a means of discouraging rent dissipation through capital stufﬁng. Although there was a downturn in catches and landed values in the early 1980s, followed by an

460 TABLE

Case Studies in Governance

34.1 Chronology of important events relating to the salmon ﬁsheries of British Columbia

Year

Event

1949 1960

International Paciﬁc Salmon Fisheries Commission established to manage sockeye escapement Sinclair Report identiﬁes untenable increase in salmon ﬂeet numbers and recommends reduction in number of licenses and area restrictions Davis Plan: introduction of licensing into the salmon ﬁshery for the ﬁrst time Canada unilaterally declares extended ﬁsheries jurisdiction (200 mile zone) based on the third U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea Report of the (Pearse) Royal Commission (established in 1980) to investigate ways to improve sustainability and economic performance in the ﬁshery; signiﬁcant ﬂeet reductions recommended along with area licensing and shorter term harvesting rights Amendment to British Columbia ﬁshing regulations restricts Aboriginal harvests for food, cultural, and ceremonial purposes Canada ratiﬁes Canada/U.S. Paciﬁc Salmon Treaty of 1985 Sparrow decision by the Supreme Court of Canada conﬁrms right of Aboriginals to ﬁsh Introduction of the Aboriginal Fishing Strategy and Pilot Sales; U.S./Canadian agreements under the Paciﬁc Salmon Treaty expire, and competitive harvesting of each other’s stocks commences; Fraser River sockeye runs fall far short of what was expected Fraser Report issued on 1992 sockeye runs Mifﬂin Plan introduces changes to licenses, including introduction of area licensing and the ﬁrst round of buybacks; salmon aquaculture review undertaken by Provincial Environmental Assessment Ofﬁce Coho restrictions in Georgia Strait and Vancouver Island followed by closure of coho ﬁshery coastwide due to concerns about low returns DFO issues policy document “A New Direction for Canada’s Paciﬁc Salmon Fisheries” setting out 12 principles based upon three elements: conservation, sustainable use, and improved decision making; and introduces test Selective Fishing Program as part of new direction with focus on salmon ﬁsheries. British Columbia Fisheries Survival Coalition organizes protest on Fraser River against Native-only ﬁsheries Second round of buybacks under the Mifﬂin Plan DFO introduces selective ﬁshing policies; pink salmon runs collapse in the Broughton Archipelago on northern Vancouver Island; sea lice identiﬁed as causal factor and attributed to nearby salmon farms Pilot sales halted Supreme Court Haida decision sets out duty of Crown to consult and accommodate Aboriginal interests where rights and title might be infringed DFO releases wild salmon policy Agreement reached on new draft Canada/U.S. Paciﬁc Salmon Treaty

1969 1977 1982

1981 1985–1989 1990 1992

1994 1996 1997–1998 1998

1998–2000 2001 2003 2004 2005 2008

Source: Ainsworth and Pitcher (2005), DFO (1998, 1999, 2005a, 2007b, 2008f), Hume (2008), Pearse (1982).

increase in the late 1980s and a decrease in the early 1990s (Gislason 1997), little was done to change the management structure. In particular, the Royal Commission’s recommendations for the implementation of a royalty tax and ﬂeet reduction were seen as politically impossible. Catches began to decline sharply in 1991 and again in 1994 (MMK Consulting Inc. 2007). By the mid1990s, however, concern was felt by all parties that the ﬁshery was no longer viable under the existing conditions. Habitat loss and degradation were identiﬁed as a more serious problem than originally thought. In addition, a newly recognized factor, climate change, was acknowledged as a likely cause of long-term alterations in ocean

conditions that would reduce future survival rates, resulting in lower stocks (David Suzuki Foundation 2008). Table 34.2 shows the extent to which salmon landings declined between 1985 and 2006, with the largest impacts being felt upon the two species most exploited by the commercial sector: pinks and sockeye. Table 34.3 shows the negative impact upon landed value over the last decade. Table 34.4 illustrates the evolution of the ﬁshery in 2007 compared with the earliest part of the decade and illustrates the central problem in the salmon ﬁshery: precipitous declines in both landings and real revenues for the 2007 ﬁshing season, with a much smaller reduction in licensed effort.

461

Salmon Fisheries of British Columbia TABLE

Year 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

34.2 Salmon landings (thousand metric tons) Chinook Chum Coho Pink 5.4 5.0 5.2 5.9 5.2 5.2 5.0 5.3 4.8 3.5 1.5 0.4 1.7 1.4 0.8 0.5 0.7 1.7 2.2 2.4 2.0 1.8

23.6 25.2 11.0 30.3 9.3 17.1 10.2 17.9 17.2 20.3 12.1 6.5 8.7 19.9 5.0 2.8 5.8 12.4 13.7 14.3 10.5 9.8

8.9 13.2 8.4 7.1 8.7 10.6 10.0 7.3 4.3 7.7 4.8 3.4 0.8 <0.1 <0.1 <0.1 0.1 0.5 0.8 1.2 1.2 0.5

37.7 29.5 26.9 32.2 31.0 26.2 35.1 14.9 16.0 3.4 19.7 8.3 12.2 3.9 9.5 7.1 10.9 8.6 15.5 3.6 12.6 1.4

Sockeye

Total

31.5 30.8 15.0 11.9 34.4 37.1 25.2 20.9 42.5 30.8 10.5 15.5 25.3 5.1 1.7 8.5 7.2 10.1 6.4 4.4 0.9 10.0

107.1 103.7 66.5 87.4 88.6 96.2 85.5 66.3 84.8 65.7 48.6 34.1 48.7 30.4 17.1 19.0 24.7 33.3 38.6 25.9 27.2 23.5

Source: Ministry of the Environment, Oceans and Marine Fisheries Division (2007a, 2007b), Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries (2000).

In 1995, the Paciﬁc Policy Roundtable (DFO 1997) was formed to plan for the future of the commercial salmon ﬁshery. Participating stakeholders included representatives from the commercial, Aboriginal, and recreational sectors, as well as processors and organized labor. The key recommendation was a proposed reduction of between 25 and 50 percent in the number of licensed vessels. In 1996 a comprehensive plan— the Paciﬁc Salmon Revitalization Plan, or Mifflin Plan (after the then Minister of Fisheries and Oceans)—was put into place with CA$80 million

TABLE

in funding9 to support a voluntary program of salmon license retirement (“vessel buybacks”).10 Under this scheme, the regulator would purchase the license. Since ﬁshing licenses were by this time uniquely attached to individual vessels, this meant the removal of a license from the salmon ﬂeet. The resulting retirement of 797 salmon licenses meant a 19 percent reduction in ﬂeet numbers. A further 1,404 licenses were retired in 1998 under the Canadian Fisheries Adjustment and Restructuring Program, at a total investment of CA$195 million. Together the two programs reduced the size of the commercial salmon ﬁshing ﬂeet by about 50 percent, the high end recommended 16 years earlier by the Royal Commission report (Pearse 1982). A complete understanding of the regulatory changes relating to the commercial salmon ﬁshery cannot be had without recognition of the increasingly important role played by the Native ﬁshery. Aboriginal peoples have a long history of reliance on the salmon ﬁsheries of British Columbia, utilizing them for sustenance, cultural, and spiritual purposes. Salmon also underpin traditional Aboriginal economies, with trading of salmon and other goods taking place throughout the Paciﬁc Northwest (Copes 2000; Haggan et al. 2006). Following contact, Aboriginals living on the British Columbia coast continued their participation in the ﬁshery, with the men participating in the ﬁshery while women and children provided labor for the canneries that were initially set up along the coast in the late 19th and early 20th century. However, the development of on-vessel freezer technology replaced the need for local canning, ending it as a signiﬁcant source of employment in coastal Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal ﬁshermen participation in the ﬁshery also dwindled over time as ﬁshing became more

34.3 Salmon landed value (million CA$, 2006 constant dollars)

Species

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

Chinook Chum Coho Pink Sockeye Total

7.0 7.8 2.2 8.0 107.4 132.4

6.6 15.3 0.1 3.3 39.3 64.5

4.8 4.8 0.1 6.7 14.6 30.9

3.2 3.9 0.1 5.4 45.2 57.6

3.5 6.4 0.1 4.8 26.7 41.4

7.7 6.5 1.2 3.1 44.0 62.5

8.7 9.7 2.7 4.7 26.1 51.8

15.4 11.7 4.1 1.1 23.1 55.4

12.6 10.3 3.6 4.3 3.9 34.7

13.7 10.1 2.1 0.5 32.4 58.8

Source: Ministry of the Environment, Oceans and Marine Fisheries Division (2007a).

462 TABLE

Case Studies in Governance

34.4 Changes in the commercial salmon

ﬁsherya Measure Total landings (metric tons) Value of landings (million CA$) Number of commercial salmon licenses

Percent Change –33.8 –40.5 –3.2

a

Percent change from 2002 to 2006, four-year average to 2007.

Source: DFO (2005c, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007e, 2008a, 2008b, 2008d).

capital intensive, an indirect consequence of the commercial licensing systems that were introduced to manage access to the resource (as vessels and licenses became more expensive) (Haggan and Brown 2002). This trend has been reversed in recent years, due to a series of Supreme Court decisions that have in turn led to the implementation of a number of new policies designed to provide greater access to salmon for Aboriginal peoples. This access is intended not only for food and cultural purposes but also for economic purposes. Two Supreme Court of Canada decisions, Regina v. Sparrow (1990) and Delgamuukw v. the Queen (1997), are responsible for dramatic changes that continue to today and continue to excite controversy. In 1990, the Sparrow decision recognized the importance of the Aboriginal food ﬁshery as a right enshrined in the Constitution. The 1997 Delgamuukw decision afﬁrmed the right of Aboriginals to a commercial ﬁshery (DFO 2008f). Following the Sparrow decision, DFO developed an Aboriginal Fishing Strategy (AFS) in 1992 that has subsequently been modiﬁed in response to further Court decisions and legal challenges (DFO 1997). Under the AFS, DFO establishes agreements with different First Nations peoples around interim management of the ﬁshery as it relates to FSC needs (DFO 2007g). The AFS also provides the backbone needed for the development of co-management processes either through the funding Aboriginal groups or implementation of processes. One notable feature of the AFS was the introduction of a “Pilot Sales” program that allowed for limited commercial harvesting by Native ﬁshers. In 1995, three First Nations groups in the lower mainland received commercial licenses under the program. This program, which faced strong opposition from existing commercial

ﬁshers, was challenged in court and subsequently halted in 2003 following a provincial court decision (Regina v. Kapp et al.) that found it to be contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. A more recent British Columbia supreme court ruling has recently overturned this decision, and the Pilot Sales were reinstated as interim economic ﬁshing arrangements, only to be challenged again. Given the increasing imperative provided by various court decisions to recognize the economic interests of Native Fishers in the commercial salmon ﬁshery, alongside declining resource stocks, the DFO needed to ﬁnd a way to increase Aboriginal participation in the ﬁshery while not putting increased pressure on the resource. It introduced the Allocation Transfer Program in 1994–1995. This allowed for commercial licenses that had been voluntarily retired to be converted to “communal commercial licenses.” These were then issued to First Nations ﬁshers. More than 250 licenses have been issued. The current allocation of commercial salmon licenses for the most recent year (2007) is shown in table 34.5.

TABLE 34.5 British Columbia commercial salmon licenses, 2007

Gear

Licensea

Seine

Full fee Reduced fee Communal F Subtotal Full fee Reduced fee NNFC Communal F Subtotal Full fee Reduced fee Communal F Subtotal

Gillnet

Troll

All licenses

Number of Licenses 221 18 37 276 848 163 254 141 1,406 483 23 32 538 2,220

a Full fee licenses (category A) consist of salmon by gillnet, salmon by seine, and salmon by troll, and the majority of commercial salmon licenses are issued to a vessel. There are also reduced fee category A license eligibilities that are held by vessels owned by an Aboriginal, who pays a lower annual fee. There are 254 “N” licenses that are issued only to the Northern Native Fishing Corporation (NNFC) for vessels designated by the corporation. Category F (Communal Commercial ) licenses are allocated to First Nations under the Allocation Transfer Program, and First Nations must designate vessels to hold “F” licenses.

Source: DFO (2007e).

Salmon Fisheries of British Columbia

34.3. CURRENT STATE OF GOVERNANCE Governance in the salmon ﬁshery is largely concerned with two key aspects: determination of the appropriate escapement level so that conservation objectives can be met while balancing harvesting opportunities and the allocation of those opportunities across competing user groups each year. Traditionally, the main concern of DFO was the allocation across the three gear types, seine, troll, and gillnet, although this has increasingly become less important than the determination of the overall escapement level and the allocation of catch between the traditional commercial sector and Aboriginal ﬁshers and the recreational ﬁshery (DFO 1999). The complexity and cyclicity of salmon stocks provide many challenges, and the government has chosen to take a precautionary and conservative approach. In order to understand the circumstances of the ﬁshery, a brief review of how stock allocations are made is helpful. Salmon return to spawn in the spring of each year. At that point, estimates are made of the size of the “salmon run” as they begin to migrate down the coast from the North Paciﬁc. Approximate numbers of ﬁsh are obtained through information gathered from “test ﬁsheries,” that is, where a selected set of vessels ﬁsh in a consistent manner with similar gear year to year in the same area to determine changes in relative abundance. Historically, test ﬁsheries were self-funded by the sale of ﬁsh caught under the ﬁshery. This is no longer possible under a recent federal court decision (Larocque v. Canada 2006), and the DFO now has to allocate funds on an annual basis to support the test ﬁsheries. Treaties with First Nations, such as the Nisga’a Final Agreement and the Douglas Treaties, ensure that allocations for the Aboriginal food ﬁshery have highest priority. Preseason allocations are made initially in terms of overall percentages of catches going to particular commercial gear types. The allocations are then further broken down into the ﬁve species of salmon and ﬁshing areas. These percentages are translated into numbers of ﬁsh, and a target catch in numbers of ﬁsh is then established for each gear type in each of the ﬁshing areas. In order to ensure that targets are not overshot, particularly for stocks that are deemed to be particularly fragile, supplementary regulations governing ﬁshery openings (times of the week or day when ﬁshing can take place) are also used for seine

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and gillnet vessel types. The problem is that, as ﬁsh swim toward spawning areas but are still in saltwater, fragile stocks are not distinguishable from ﬁsh that belong to stocks that are not endangered. Until the moment of spawning in particular rivers downstream, it is not certain which ﬁsh are which. Commercial ﬁshing generally relies on catching the ﬁsh while they are still in the ocean, not in their freshwater home streams and rivers. Because of this difﬁculty and the complex nature of the allocation task, targets are often missed, causing conﬂict among the competing harvesters. Past practice tended to over allocate stocks, leaving ﬁshers unsatisﬁed. The more recent trend to understate targets has meant more ﬁsh have escaped capture than have been deemed necessary for spawning purposes. To deal with this, DFO has introduced the Excess Salmon to Spawning Requirements License in 1996 that provided an opportunity only for First Nations to harvest ﬁsh excess to escapement requirements. Insofar as the commercial salmon ﬁshery is concerned, the major management innovation since the 1969 introduction of limited entry licensing occurred in 1996 in the form of area-speciﬁc ﬁshing licenses. This was an effort to control not only the amount of effort directed at particular ﬁsheries but also the type of gear used to target certain stocks. A total of eight very broad geographical areas were identiﬁed. License owners were required to identify the single broad area in which they would ﬁsh for the next four years. In order to further control effort, the DFO permitted seine vessels (the largest of the three vessel types) to choose between one of two areas. Gillnet and troll vessels were each given a choice of three areas. By making areas speciﬁc to particular gear types, DFO in effect removed any opportunities to transfer licenses across gear types. Despite the introduction of this new management tool, DFO continues to employ ﬁshing day restrictions in order to assist in escapement for spawning purposes.11 After four years of experience with area licenses, the DFO permitted registered license holders the opportunity to switch their chosen ﬁshing area in 2000. This time the choice of area was to last six years.12 The DFO had area reselection processes in the spring of 2006 and the fall of 2007. In 2007 the DFO announced the Paciﬁc Integrated Commercial Fisheries Initiative (PICFI), a ﬁve-year initiative with a budget of CA$175 million. Its goal is to support long-term viability of commercial ﬁsheries in British Columbia through reform efforts that will ensure

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sustainable ﬁsheries resources. While the program is not directed speciﬁcally at the salmon ﬁsheries, their management does fall under its direction. Four key elements have been noted as contributing to successful reform: the increasing collaboration of resources users in decision making as it relates to commercial ﬁsheries, even greater participation of Natives in British Columbia’s ﬁsheries through voluntary commercial license retirement, capacity building in First Nations to support commercial ﬁshing operations, and better monitoring and catch reporting to facilitate management.

34.4. PRESSING PROBLEMS AND LIMITS TO BETTER OUTCOMES 34.4.1. Environmental and Ecological Factors In the 1990s, environmental concerns around the salmon ﬁshery started to materialize on a broader basis, especially with some highly publicized events. These included widespread restrictions on coho ﬁshing—a popular recreational/sports ﬁsh— in 1997 and an effective closure of a targeted coho ﬁshery in 1998, as well as several rounds of lower than expected escapement levels for sockeye in the Fraser River during the 1990s. Of these, the ﬁrst in 1992 when there were major discrepancies between high initial estimates of returns and signiﬁcantly fewer actual spawners, which elicited front-page news stories and leadoff items on the television news and subsequently a special commission and follow-up reports (Fraser River Sockeye Public Review Board 1995; Report of the Auditor General of Canada 1999). A second source of environmental controversy is salmon ﬁsh farming industry in British Columbian waters. Salmon farming in British Columbia started on a small scale in 1972, paralleling the development of open farming of Atlantic salmon in Scotland and Norway (Sylvia et al. 2000). As the industry grew globally, the industry in British Columbia started to expand in the mid-1980s. Its development was facilitated in large measure by provincial and federal policies. While the aquaculture industry was growing in economic importance, however, public concerns about the effect of farmed salmon stocks on local wild stocks was also increasing. In response to these environmental concerns

the provincial government established a moratorium on the issuance of new licenses in 1995. It also undertook a review of the salmon aquaculture industry that led to a series of recommendations and the establishment of the Salmon Aquaculture Implementation Advisory Committee. It subsequently lifted the moratorium on the issue of new licenses in 2002. This coincided with a collapse in some local wild pink stocks in 2002 on the northern tip of Vancouver Island that was caused by a sea lice infestation. Aboriginal and environmental groups attributed the infestation to the increasing reliance upon the farming of salmon in ocean pens in the area and improper farming techniques. The controversy over salmon farming has continued to this day. Alarm is often expressed about the potential for farmed salmon to escape and displace wild stocks. There are frequent calls for both new regulations and techniques that would prevent the possibility of escape and sea lice infestation, while some groups also call for a permanent moratorium in certain regions. Ironically, the value of farmed salmon in British Columbia at CA$407 million (in constant 2006 dollars) for the 2006 ﬁshing season (Ministry of Environment, Oceans and Marine Fisheries Division 2007a) reveals that salmon aquaculture has a higher revenue base.13

34.4.2. Allocation Factors: Domestic and International The loss of wild stocks due to past overﬁshing and possible changes in the ocean environment and the potential for farmed salmon to have a negative impact upon the wild stocks have contributed to a sense that the salmon ﬁshery has been in ecologic crisis since the start of the 21st century. These ecological concerns appear to have made an impact upon governance of the salmon ﬁsheries by DFO. While conservation of the ﬁve salmon stocks has always been an important goal for escapement purposes, the DFO has indicated that its key priority will be the protection and enhancement of wild stocks (through habitat protection and enhancement) of paramount importance. This includes developing a robust management framework that will stress reporting and monitoring. It signals a change in the DFO’s mission since it involves moving away from past goals that involved balancing the use of the ﬁsheries with resource conservation toward a goal where the management of individual stocks is now emphasized and escapement policies have become

Salmon Fisheries of British Columbia more risk-averse (if necessary the DFO will reduce harvesting opportunities further in order to ensure adequate spawning levels). In order to support this policy, it appears that DFO intends to shift a greater share of the harvest toward those ﬁshers using more selective ﬁshing techniques (DFO 2001), such as Native ﬁshers that employ some form of terminal capture technique. This involves capturing the salmon before they have spawned, so necessarily must take place in the streams and rivers in the interior of the province. This is clearly not consistent with the ocean-based harvesting techniques of the commercial ﬁshers. In addition, a greater focus by DFO upon the survival of particular stocks has further policy implications for the implicit allocation between commercial and native ﬁshers. If the DFO adopts a precautionary principle to ﬁshing, then when stocks are mixed this may result in not only restrictions relating to the ﬁshing of weaker stocks but also overall restrictions on ocean capture. To some extent this reliance on greater selectivity of catches is consistent with changes in the governance of the salmon ﬁshery made during the late 1990s and early 2000s in respect of Native participation. First Nations now have a much larger role to play in the salmon ﬁshery, and DFO has moved toward making more ﬁshing opportunities available through its new selective ﬁshing polices (DFO 2007b, 2007f). First Nations may now negotiate ﬁshing rights under the treaties (DFO 2007c), lobby for a greater role in ﬁsheries management, and be issued commercial licenses. The federal government may also provide commercial opportunities through negotiated harvest agreements that provide a renewable harvesting right for a period of time but are not part of any treaties and as such are not constitutionally protected. Governments may also make ﬁshing rights available through agreementin-principle (an interim step in the treaty process). As a consequence of these policy changes, harvesting opportunities for First Nations can be expected to increase, especially as treaties are settled, with potential scope to enjoy in any associated economic beneﬁts. Historically, there has been no intersectoral allocation between the commercial and recreational sector. This reﬂected in the past the relatively smaller recreational catch, and the fact that recreational ﬁshers preferred chinook and coho, while the commercial ﬂeet targeted the other species (although chinook and coho are also important to the troller ﬂeet). As chinook and coho catches fell during the

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late 1980s and into the 1990s, friction grew and in the 1990s the DFO moved to try to resolve the allocation issue. It was not until 1999 that the DFO released a policy based on relative abundance that gave a priority to chinook and coho to the recreational ﬁshery, permitting the commercial ﬂeet to operate when the recreational ﬂeet was at its limit. (Daily limits restrict the number of chinook and coho an individual angler can catch and how many ﬁsh an angler can possess.) In addition, the recreational ﬁshery was assigned a 5 percent cap combined of the other species (Gislason 2006a). The discussion to date has focused upon catch allocation among Canadian salmon ﬁshers, both commercial and native. There are also international allocation issues. Salmon stocks do not respect international boundaries, and commercial and sports ﬁsheries from both the United States and Canada catch salmon originating in each other’s countries. To the north, Alaskan ﬁshers intercept salmon returning to Canadian waters, while Canadian ﬁshers intercept salmon returning to streams and rivers south of the border. The two countries have recognized this mutual exploitation and reliance upon one another’s stocks for nearly as long as the commercial ﬁsheries have been operating, with negotiations between Canadian and American ofﬁcials going back more than 100 years. The ﬁrst formal institution was the establishment of the International Paciﬁc Salmon Fisheries Commission (IPSFC) to manage sockeye in the Fraser River (Woodey 2000). In 1985 the Paciﬁc Salmon Treaty replaced the IPSFC in which Canada and the United States reached an agreement to manage the stocks together through the Paciﬁc Salmon Commission. The equitable allocation of harvests between these two neighboring countries has been a contentious issue throughout the history of the salmon ﬁshery, and this has especially been the case in the shared waters of the North Paciﬁc. The treaty states that harvest sharing should “provide for each Party to receive beneﬁts equivalent to the production of salmon originating in its waters” (as quoted in Sands and Hartman 2000). The political difﬁculty in negotiating agreements is that not just the U.S. federal government but also the governments of Alaska, Washington, and Oregon, and Treaty Tribes in the Paciﬁc Northwest all have a voice in how the resource is managed, along with British Columbia and Canada. The challenge lies in the relative abundance of different stocks and associated harvesting opportunities, where

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ﬁshermen can intercept different stocks as they travel down the Paciﬁc Coast. Historically, it is those ﬁsheries farthest to the south that both face the highest risk of interception and have the weakest stocks. In 1994, concerns were expressed over weak stocks to the south of the Canada–U.S. border between British Columbia and Washington State and the effect of Canadian ﬁshing on those stocks. Long-term Canadian complaints about Alaskans taking more than their share of the harvest and increasing friction with the British Columbia salmon ﬁshery over the allocation of harvest opportunities contributed to a breakdown in how the ﬁshery normally operated on the Fraser River, a key part of the treaty arrangement. This contributed to several years of competitive ﬁshing by both countries, particularly opportunistic targeting of each other’s stocks. It was not until 1999 that an interim agreement was reached. Concerns still persist to this day over how to share the beneﬁts, and it is only recently that both countries have announced that a new draft agreement has been reached (Hume 2008).

34.4.3. Factors Limiting Transitions to Better Outcomes “The salmon industry is depressed and declining. As it currently exists, the ﬁshery is economically unsustainable; in fact, it is teetering on bankruptcy” (McRae and Pearse 2004, p. 41). Given this dire view of the salmon ﬁshery, and in light of the pressing problems facing it and the DFO, we need to ask whether the proposed new policy directions in governance are sufﬁcient to lead to better outcomes and a sustainable ﬁshery in the future. If the answer is no, then what factors are likely to limit the effectiveness of these policies? In our view, the proposed policies are insufﬁcient to accomplish the desired outcomes, especially around improving the economic opportunities for commercial ﬁshers. The simple reason is that the issue of salmon allocation has not been fully dealt with. It is clear that conservation concerns are now a priority, followed by Aboriginal rights for FSC purposes. However, turning to the provision of salmon for commercial and recreational purposes, priorities and rights are not as clear. Aboriginal rights for salmon are being broadened to include a component for economic purposes. Will these take a priority over other

commercial uses? How will different species be allocated to the commercial versus recreational sector? How will the species be allocated across the different gear types? The move to area-based licensing has also compounded the problem, as the opportunities vary from year to year, with no ability to rebalance between areas or gear types or over time. Gislason (2006b) points to the lack of established allocations14 as underpinning a series of interrelated problems that all contribute to the poor economic state of the ﬁshery: The commercial salmon ﬂeet is not viable under its present management system, and the lack of formal allocation is a signiﬁcant factor underlying this non-viability . . . individual ﬁshermen and ﬂeet subsectors are reluctant to conduct marketing and product development initiatives without a ﬁrm allocation process . . . ﬁshing costs are higher than necessary because allocations are not secure e.g., a ﬂeet subsector cannot determine and implement an optimal ﬂeet size . . . [and] the salmon ﬂeet has much more difﬁculty in attracting ﬁnancing . . . The lack of viability . . . has (also) stymied cohesive industry action and prevented signiﬁcant progress on comanagement. (p. 6) Gislason goes on to state that it is not surprising that the outcome is a “fractious industry, and a culture of paternalistic, taxpayer subsidized management” and contrasts it with other Paciﬁc ﬁsheries where allocation issues have been resolved and the ﬁsheries are healthier both ecologically and economically. The many difﬁculties presented by allocation issues are apparent in reviewing a consultative process undertaken by DFO among the different subsectors. The goal was to see if they could arrive at some kind of share-based formula for the salmon ﬁshery. The convener concluded at the end of the report “Consensus on a comprehensive share-based salmon management program is not close at hand . . . [and] the economic issues facing the salmon industry are urgent, complex and crippling, and will be exacerbated as PICFI and commercial Treaty ﬁsheries are implemented” (Diamond 2008). In the process, the report identiﬁed two alternative paths on how to implement reform advanced by different constituent groups and noted that there was not sufﬁcient overlap between the two to develop a consensus. Instead, the authors recommended that the DFO select one

Salmon Fisheries of British Columbia path and noted that, in their view, the DFO would have to demonstrate leadership in the absence of a consensus (Diamond 2008).

34.5. CONCLUSIONS The British Columbia salmon ﬁshery has undergone some profound shifts in direction in the past decade affecting not only what management objectives are being set but also in how the ﬁsh are allocated (DFO 2005a, 2005b). Increasingly, environmental concerns are becoming predominant, emphasizing the protection and conservation of individual wild stocks. At the same time, legal decisions, supported by a greater willingness to address Aboriginal concerns, are shifting not only the share of the harvest but also some of the management responsibilities to Aboriginal groups. A direct consequence of this is changes in how the ﬁshery is managed and the attendant implications for the commercial ﬂeet. Moves toward more selective ﬁshing policies, recognition of Aboriginal rights through treaty settlements and harvest agreements, and continued recognition of the recreational/sports ﬁshery are all combining to change the landscape for commercial ﬁshers (DFO 2008g). At the same time, commercial ﬁshers are also facing unprecedented challenges as harvest levels and harvest values decline precipitously. Looking forward, key policy challenges remain. Aside from the implementation of many of the DFO’s announced policies, there are still unresolved issues. What can be done to resolve the biological uncertainty and regulatory uncertainty around allocation between user groups and gear types? Effective monitoring of salmon harvests has yet to be implemented regardless of gear type, an essential step toward building a framework of accountability and monitoring as envisaged by the DFO. Yet the key questions are even more fundamental: Can the economic fundamentals of the commercial salmon ﬁshery be improved? What role might there be for a commercial ﬁshery—whether Aboriginal or not—going forward into the future? Can the DFO provide the leadership to move toward a more sustainable ﬁshery? Or will the politics of the ﬁshery prevent the substantive change that needs to take place in order to ensure the long-term viability of an industry that has been both historically and culturally important?

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Acknowledgments We thank Indra Hardeen for her excellent research assistance. All errors and omissions should be attributed to the authors. Notes 1. Strictly speaking, a sixth species of salmon, steelhead, is also ﬁshed, although not commercially—it is a highly prized sports ﬁsh. 2. The First Nations peoples are the descendants of the ﬁrst peoples of Canada who are neither Inuit nor Metis. They consist of more than 600,000 people, the largest Aboriginal group in Canada. 3. Recreational ﬁshers are required to hold a license and face daily limits on their total daily catches of Paciﬁc salmon from either tidal or nontidal waters (DFO 2008d). There has been a decrease in the annual number of recreational licenses sold from 400,000 in 1994 to 326,000 in 2004 and an even larger decrease—from 320,000 to 236,000—in the number of “salmon conservation stamps” purchased, which are afﬁxed to a recreational ﬁsher’s license, if the angler does not intend to release all salmon caught and permit the catching of salmon (DFO 2008h). 4. The Paciﬁc Salmon Treaty covers those runs and stocks that pass through waters where they can be intercepted by each country and, as such, covers the major salmon stocks in British Columbia. Examples are those stocks passing through areas such as the Dixon Entrance and the Juan de Fuca Strait. Stocks not covered are local coastal stocks. 5. These values are even more shocking when put into the context of the early decade of the 1980s. For example, in 1987—a typical year during the 1980s—the landed values of salmon was $212 million in 1987 Canadian dollars (equivalent to CA$338 million in 2007 constant dollars), with salmon accounting for 50 percent of total landed value and 35 percent of total quantity landed (Ministry of the Environment 1998). 6. It should be noted, however, that increasing reliance on a precautionary approach to management by the DFO during the 1990s meant that, for a given run size, a smaller share was available for harvest. Thus, lower current catches are not necessarily caused simply by smaller run sizes. 7. However, they have not been given legal protection under the 2003 Species at Risk Act, which gives the Canadian government leave to take action to protect endangered species. 7. Funding of CA$100,337,458 in 2007 dollars. 8. Fishery rent is the net economic beneﬁt (difference between revenue and harvesting costs) obtained from exploiting the ﬁshery. 9. This was not a completely novel program. In fact, the ﬁrst buyback scheme was employed with the introduction of limited licensing requirements

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into the salmon ﬁshery in 1969 in an effort to rationalize catching capacity. Overall, buybacks of either licenses or vessels were used in the ﬁshery ﬁve separate times (Grafton and Nelson 2007). 10. There have been several pilot salmon individual quota demonstration programs, for example, Area F troll chinook (2005–2007), Area B seine chum (2005), Area H troll sockeye (2006), and Area H troll chum (2007). 11. Recently, the DFO has been monitoring area reselection procedures prior to the next anticipated change date of 2012. 12. This includes both Atlantic and Paciﬁc salmon species being farmed in British Columbia, with the majority of the value—about 90 percent— coming from the Atlantic ﬁsh. 13. In 2005, the DFO introduced a demonstration ﬁshery using an individual transferable quota (ITQ) program for vessels. ITQs were, in fact, the solution proposed by McRae and Pearse (2004) report and examined ten years ago by Grafton and Nelson (1997). The demonstration ﬁshery has continued to operate for the last two ﬁshing seasons. It is a voluntary program that pertains only to troll gear. Early review of the program has been mixed (DFO 2007d; G.S. Gislason and Associates 2007; Gulf Trollers Association 2007). The key difﬁculty in the establishment of a successful ITQ program for Paciﬁc salmon is the cyclicity of stocks that leads to uncertain escapement and, hence, uncertain catch levels on an annual basis.

References Ainsworth, C.H., and T.J. Pitcher (2005). Estimating illegal, unreported and unregulated catch in British Columbia’s marine ﬁsheries. Fisheries Research 75(1–3): 40–55. Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (2008). Wildlife Species Search. www. cosewic.gc.ca/eng/sct1/SearchResult_e.cfm?co mmonName=&scienceName=&boxStatus=3 &boxTaxonomic=4&location=1&Board=All &change=All&Submit=Submit, Salmon Coho, Salmon Sockeye. Copes, P. (2000). Aboriginal ﬁshing rights and salmon management in British Columbia: Matching historical justice with the public interest. Pp. 75–91 in E.E. Knudsen, C.R. Steward, D.D MacDonald, J.E. Williams, and D.W. Resier (eds). Sustainable Fisheries Management: Paciﬁc Salmon. New York: CRC Press. David Suzuki Foundation (2008). An Upstream Battle, Declines in 10 Paciﬁc Salmon Stocks and Solutions for Their Survival. Vancouver: David Suzuki Foundation. Delgamuukw v. the Queen (1997). 3 S.C.R. 1010.

DFO (1997) Backgrounder, the Paciﬁc Salmon Revitalization Strategy. www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/media/ backgrou/1997/hq-ac3-3_e.htm(accessed October 1997) DFO (1998). Backgrounder, the Paciﬁc Salmon Fishery: A Fifteen Year Perspective. wwwcomm.pac.dfo- mpo.gc.ca/pages/release/bckgrnd/1998/persp_e.htm (accessed June 1998). DFO (1999). An Allocation Policy for Paciﬁc Salmon: A New Direction. Ottawa, Fisheries and Oceans Canada. DFO (2001). Salmon Update, Selective Fishing. www-comm.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/pages/release/ p-releas/2001/nr040_e.htm (accessed October 2007). DFO (2005a). A Discussion Paper on the Implementation of Paciﬁc Fisheries Reform Vancouver: Fisheries and Oceans Canada. DFO (2005b). Canada’s Policy for Conservation of Wild Salmon. Vancouver: Fisheries and Oceans Canada. DFO(2005c).CommercialSummaries,AnnualReports. www-sci.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/sa/Commercial/ Summaries/AnnualReports/ANNUAL05_user. htm. DFO (2006a). Commercial Summaries, Annual Reports. www-sci.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/sa/ Commercial/Summaries/AnnualReports/ ANNUAL06_user.htm. DFO (2006b). Commercial Licences, Paciﬁc Information, Number of Commercial Fishing Licences Issued by Paciﬁc Region, 1995–2004. Statistical Services. www.dfo- mpo.gc.ca/communic/statistics/commercial/licensing/paciﬁc_ info/pac95-04_e.htm DFO (2007a). Commercial Summaries, Annual Reports. www-sci.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/sa/ Commercial/Summaries/AnnualReports/ ANNUAL07_user.htm DFO (2007b). Paciﬁc Region Treaty and Aboriginal Fisheries Programs, Economic Opportunities. www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/tapd/economic_e.htm DFO (2007c). Treaty Arrangements. www.pac.dfompo.gc.ca/tapd/tr_arrang_e.htm DFO (2007d). 2006 Salmon License Area F Troll Demonstration Individual Transferable Chinook Quota (ITQ) Fishery Review. Vancouver: Fisheries and Oceans Canada. DFO (2007e) Salmon Licences by Count, Category and Gear and DFO, Commercial Licence Status Report-Paciﬁc Region. www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/ ops/fm/Licensing/StackingStatsNov2007.pdf DFO (2007f). Paciﬁc Region Treaty and Aboriginal Fisheries Programs, Treaty Arrangements Regarding Fish. www.pac. dfo-mpo.gc.ca/tapd/tr_arrang_e.htm#Harvest percent20Agreements DFO (2007g). Paciﬁc Region Treaty and Aboriginal Fisheries Programs, Food, Social and Ceremonial. www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/tapd/fsc_e.htm

Salmon Fisheries of British Columbia DFO (2007h). Preseason Run Size Forecasts for Fraser River Sockeye Salmon in 2008. Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat Science Advisory Report 2007/049. www-sci.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/ psarc/SSRs/Salmon/sar2007-049_e.pdf DFO (2007i). Commercial Landings, Seaﬁsheries. Statistical Services. www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/communic/statistics/commercial/landings/seaﬁsheries/s1990pv_e.htm DFO (2008a). Salmon Licences by Count, Category and Gear and DFO, Commercial Licence Status Report-Paciﬁc Region. www.pac.dfo-mpo. gc.ca/ops/fm/Licensing/Default_e.htm DFO (2008b). Commercial License Reports by Fishery. www-ops2.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/Ops/ VRNdirectory/LicReportSelect.cfm DFO (2008c). Points to Remember When Salmon Fishing. www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/recﬁsh/Law/ salmonpoints_e.htm DFO (2008d). First Nation, Recreational, and Commercial Salmon Licensing. www.pac. dfo-mpo.gc.ca/species/salmon/salmon_ﬁsheries/licensing_e.htm DFO (2008e). Paciﬁc Salmon Fact. www.pac. dfo-mpo.gc.ca/species/salmon/default_e.htm DFO (2008f). Paciﬁc Region Treaty and Aboriginal Fisheries Programs, Links, Court Decisions, Delgamuukw v. BC. www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/ tapd/links_e.htm DFO (2008g). Fisheries Management Paciﬁc Region, Management Areas—Paciﬁc Region. www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/ops/fm/Areas/ areamap_e.htm DFO (2008h). First Nations, Recreational and Commercial Salmon Licensing. www.pac. dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fm-gp/species-especes/salmonsaumon/ﬁsheries-peches/licence-permis-eng. htm DFO (2009). Pre-season Run Size Forecasts for Fraser River Sockeye and Pink Salmon in 2009. Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat Science Advisory Report 2009/022. www.meds-sdmm. dfo-mpo.gc.ca/csas/applications/Publications/ processSearch_e.asp Diamond Management Consulting (2008). Salmon Management Reform. Report to Commercial Salmon Advisory Board’s Committee on Options for Review and Evaluation [SCORE] to Reform the Management of the Paciﬁc Salmon Fishery Off the West Coast of Canada. Victoria, B.C.: Diamond Management Consulting. Dupont, D.P. (1990). Rent dissipation in restricted access ﬁsheries. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 19(1): 26–44. Fraser River Sockeye Public Review Board (1995). Fraser River Sockeye, 1994: Problems and Discrepancies. Report of the Fraser River Sockeye Public Review Board. Ottawa, Ont.: Canadian Government Publishing.

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Gislason, G. (1997). The BC Salmon Fleet: Financial Returns 1976 to 1995. Vancouver: Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Gislason, G. (2006a). Commercial vs recreational ﬁsheries allocation in Canada: Paciﬁc herring, salmon and halibut. Presented at the Sharing the Fish 06 Conference, Fremantle Western Australia, February 26 to March 2. Gislason, G. (2006b). Allocation within commercial ﬁsheries in Canada: Paciﬁc herring, salmon, and groundﬁsh. Presented at the Sharing the Fish 2006 Conference, Fremantle, Australia, February 26 to March 2. Gordon, H.S. (1954). The economic theory of a common-property resource: The ﬁshery. Journal of Political Economy 62(2): 124–142. Grafton, R.Q., and H.W. Nelson (1997). Fishers’ individual salmon harvesting rights: An option for Canada’s Pacific fisheries. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 54: 474–482. Grafton, R.Q., and H.W. Nelson (2007). The effects of buyback programs in the British Columbia salmon ﬁshery. Pp. 191–201 in R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fisheries Buybacks. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. G.S. Gislason and Associates Ltd. (2007). The Area H Troll sockeye demonstration ﬁshery in 2006. Vancouver: Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Gulf Trollers Association (2007). Catch Validation Project for ITQ and Traditional Fishery Participations: Questionnaire Results. www.gulftrollers.com/Misc/Validation.pdf. Haggan, N., and P. Brown (2002). Aboriginal ﬁsheries issues: The west coast of Canada as a case study. Pp. 17–20. in D. Pauly and M.L. de Palomar (eds). Production Systems in Fisheries Management. Fisheries Centre Reports 10(8). Vancouver: UBC Fisheries Centre. Haggan, N., N. Turner, J. Carpenter, J.T. Jones, Q. Mackie, and C. Menzies (2006). 12,000+ Years of Change: Linking Traditional and Modern Ecosystem Science in the Paciﬁc Northwest. Working Paper 2006-02. Vancouver: UBC Fisheries Centre. Haida Nation v. British Columbia (Minister of Forests) (2004). 3 S.C.R. 511, 2004 S.C.C. 73. Hume, M. (2008). Canada, US reach overﬁshing deal. The Globe and Mail, May 22. www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/ RTGAM.20080522.wsalmon0522/BNStory/ International/home. Larocque v. Canada (2006). Federal Court of Canada Appeals 237. McRae, D.M., and P.H. Pearse (2004). Treaties and Transition, towards a Sustainable Fishery on Canada’s Paciﬁc Coast. Vancouver: Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

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Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Fisheries (2000). Fisheries Production Statistics of British Columbia 1996. www.env.gov.bc.ca/omfd/ reports/Fish-Production-Stats-1996.pdf Ministry of the Environment, Marine Resources Branch (1998). Fisheries Production Statistics of British Columbia, 1987. Victoria, B.C.: Ministry of the Environment. Ministry of the Environment, Oceans and Marine Fisheries Division, (2007a). B.C. Seafood Data Tables and Graphs. www.env.gov.bc.ca/omfd/ ﬁshstats/graphs-tables/wild-salmon.html Ministry of the Environment, Oceans and Marine Fisheries Division (2007b). B.C. Seafood Data Tables and Graphs, B.C. Wild (Capture) Salmon Production. www.env.gov.bc.ca/omfd/ ﬁshstats/graphs-tables/wild-salmon.html MMK Consulting Inc. (2007). Economic Impacts and Prospects of the Salmon Farming and Wild Salmon Industries in British Columbia. www. leg.bc.ca/cmt/38thparl/session-3/aquaculture/ reports/Rpt-AQUACULTURE-38-3-Volume22007-MAY-16.pdf Pearse, P.H. (1982). Turning the Tide: A New Policy for Canada’s Paciﬁc Fisheries. Final Report of the Commission on Paciﬁc Fisheries Policy. Vancouver: Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Report of the Auditor General of Canada (1999). Fisheries and Oceans—Paciﬁc Salmon:

Sustainability of the Fisheries, Chapter 20. Ottawa, Ont.: Auditor General of Canada. www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_ oag_199911_20_e_10149.html Regina v. Sparrow (1990). 1 S.C.R. 1075. Sands, N.J., and J. Hartman (2000). A simulation model to assess management and allocation alternatives in multi-stock paciﬁc salmon ﬁsheries. Pp. 435–450 in E. Eric Knudsen, Cleveland R. Steward, Donald D. MacDonald, Jack E. Williams, and Dudley W. Resier (eds). Sustainable Fisheries Management: Paciﬁc Salmon. New York: CRC Press. Sylvia, G., J.L. Anderson, and E. Hanson (2000). The new order in global salmon markets and aquaculture development: Implications for watershed-based management in the Pacific Northwest. Pp. 393–405 in E. Eric Knudsen, Cleveland R. Steward, Donald D. MacDonald, Jack E. Williams, and Dudley W. Resier (eds). Sustainable Fisheries Management: Pacific Salmon. New York: CRC Press. Woodey, J. (2000). International management of Fraser River Sockeye Salmon. Pp. 207–217 in E. Eric Knudsen, Cleveland R. Steward, Donald D. MacDonald, Jack E. Williams, and Dudley W. Resier (eds). Sustainable Fisheries Management: Paciﬁc Salmon. New York: CRC Press.

35 European Union Fisheries Management HANS FROST

35.1. BACKGROUND FOR THE CURRENT STATE OF GOVERNANCE 35.1.1. The European Union The European Union consists of 27 member states, from Finland at the Baltic Sea in the north to Romania at the Black Sea in the south. Of these members, 22 have access to the sea. With total annual landings (live weight) at around 6 million metric tons, yet being a net importer of ﬁsh and ﬁsh products, the European Union is the second largest player on the ﬁshery scene after China. A review of the E.U. ﬁsheries management must take into account that the system is very complex, involving political decision making, administrative preparation procedures, and scientiﬁc data collection, processing of information, and submission of advice (see, e.g., Aranda et al. 2007). A further complicating factor is the legal basis, which means that no rule may be introduced unless it is based on the Treaty of the European Union. Finally, the rights of the citizens must be considered, which requires that all management rules and procedures are written down, speciﬁcally taking into account various derogations from the main rules. Development and implementation of ﬁsheries management in such a large system is a long process and reviews of the E.U. Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) are not particularly positive (Daw and Gray 2005; Gray

and Hatchard 2003; Holden 1994; Karagiannakos 1995; Sissenwine and Symes 2007; Symes 2005). This review mainly looks at the interaction between the scientiﬁc recommendations that come from economic and biological research and analyses, the administrative handling of this advice, and the way it is forwarded by civil servants to the political system of the European Union. The ﬁnal political decisions often derogates from the scientiﬁc advice for many reasons, which are investigated below. Despite that, the scientiﬁc advice plays a very important role in the decision making. The northeast Atlantic is the most important ﬁshing area, and 15 of the E.U. member states conduct ﬁshing in this area (see ﬁgure 35.1). The northeast Atlantic is constrained by the 36° N latitude and the 42° W longitude. The Mediterranean is important for ten of the member states, including Malta and Cyprus. In terms of landings volume, the northeast Atlantic contributes 75 percent. The Mediterranean contributes 11 percent, while other areas, in particular, the east central Atlantic, contribute 14 percent—Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Latvia, and Lithuania exploit this area with their highseas ﬂeets. The northeast Atlantic is shared with Iceland, Norway, the Faeroe Islands, and Greenland, which are not members of the European Union. Around 50 percent of the total landings in volume from this area are taken by the European Union. All

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35.1 Fishing grounds of the E.U. member states. (EUROPA 2009)

states maintain 200-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs). The ﬁsh stocks are managed jointly by these countries by use of total allowable catches (TACs). The management covers around 30 different species in different regions, adding up to a little less than 200 stock-management areas. Contrary to this, only a few stocks, with tuna and hake the most important, are subjected to TAC and shared management in the Mediterranean.

35.1.2. Development of the Common Fisheries Policy of the European Union To understand the development of the E.U. CFP, it is necessary to apply a long-term perspective. With respect to the European Union, the CFP dates back

to the Treaty of Rome (1957) agreed on by six countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands. Basically, the CFP was part of the agricultural policy, and the objectives of this policy also covered the ﬁsheries policy. Consequently, during the ﬁrst 25 years of the CFP, the objectives for ﬁsheries were to increase the production of ﬁsh as part of the general desire to increase food production. At that time, there was no understanding of the differences between agriculture and ﬁsheries production among the six countries, as the signiﬁcant breakthrough for ﬁsheries economics ﬁrst came a few years before the Treaty of Rome was agreed: The economists Gordon (1954) and Scott (1955), disregarding Warming’s article of 1911 (Andersen 1983), pointed out that one ﬁsherman’s exploitation of the ﬁsh resource leads to a

European Union Fisheries Management decrease in the stock and thereby an increase in the ﬁshing costs of other ﬁshermen in both the short and long run. As the ﬁsherman cannot take the ﬁsh stock reduction (external effect) into account in his own planning, the ﬁshing effort for the whole ﬁshery tends to be higher than what is desirable from society’s point of view. In 1970, speciﬁc objectives for ﬁsheries were introduced about market organization including minimum prices (Council Regulation 2142/70) and about structural development of the sector (Council Regulation 2141/70). But these objectives were very similar to the objectives of the agricultural policy of the European Union. A main reason for the adoption of these two speciﬁc council regulations for ﬁsheries was the admission of Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom in 1973 (Holden 1994). Since then, one of the obstacles has been to maneuver within a treaty that is not designed to take into account the characteristics of ﬁsheries. Fisheries management in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, in particular, was a hot topic of the discussion already before World War II. In the 1960s, a comprehensive cooperation about ﬁsheries management in the northeast Atlantic (Area 27) took place within the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC). The members of NEAFC included 14 countries.1 The North East Atlantic Fisheries Convention came into force in 1964. It should be noted that before NEAFC a North Sea Convention and a Baltic Sea Convention were in force, and that three conferences about the law of the sea were held by the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1958 and 1960 and in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1972. In principle, the conferences covered topics that were dealt with by NEAFC. The objectives of NEAFC were (1) supervision of the area, (2) conservation measures concerning rational exploitation of the ﬁsh resources; (3) third countries’ reactions to proposals about negotiations put forward by an NEAFC member state about conservation of the ﬁsh resources, and (4) suggestions based on scientiﬁc research with respect to the management measures that could be considered by NEAFC: (a) minimum mesh sizes of ﬁshing gear, (b) minimum size of ﬁsh, (c) preservation and marine reserves, (d) other measures apart from the above mentioned, (e) improvement and enhancement of the ﬁsh resources of the sea, and (f) measures to limit the catches and ﬁshing effort if two-thirds of the present members agreed and all members approved afterward.

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Not all members would necessarily beneﬁt from the proposed measures, but rather had been beneﬁting from “free-riding.” No institution had the authority, however, to enforce the management rules if the member state opposed, and if objections were raised within 90 days, the objecting member state was not obliged to follow the rule. After the enlargement of the European Union in 1973 with Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom (Norway decided not to join after a referendum) a gradual enlargement took place,2 but this subsequent enlargement did not inﬂuence the CFP to any major extend. In the 1970s, the E.U. ﬁsheries management was guided by three legs: (1) the agricultural policy of the European Union, (2) the ﬁsheries management suggested by NEAFC, and (3) the law of the sea conferences organized by the United Nations. The agricultural policy inﬂuenced the CFP even after the revision in 1976 (Council Regulation 100/76 [revision of 2142/70]) for the organization of the market, and the agricultural policy was also maintained for the industry structure (Council Regulation 101/76 [revision of 2141/70]). The main principles were protection and development of the ﬁshing industry by providing grants according to development plans (multiannual guidance programs [MAGPs]) for modernization and construction of ﬁshing vessels. These objectives of Council Regulations 100//76 and 101/76 fundamentally contradicted the results of conventional ﬁsheries economics analyses (see, e.g., Gordon [1954] for ﬁsheries and Hardin [1968] for grazing on common hillsides for demonstrations of that open access would lead to overexploitation of the resources [“the tragedy of the commons”]). The result of this policy was that the ﬁshing ﬂeet capacity of the European Union more than doubled if measured in tonnage from 0.8 million gross registered tons (GRT) in 1970 to 1.6 million GRT in 1987. The engine power tripled from 2 million kW in 1970 to 6 million kW in 1987 (Holden 1994, p. 22). It was not until 1976 that the Directorate General of Fisheries was established. Before that, ﬁsheries were dealt with by a small unit in the Directorate General of Agriculture. In 2008, the directorate was renamed the Directorate General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries after a period with rumors about integrating the Directorate General for Environment and Directorate General for Fisheries. In the 1970s, the scene for resource management was set by NEAFC and the negotiations at the U.N.

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law of the sea conferences. In the 1970s, Iceland gradually extended its EEZ from 12 nautical miles in 1958 to 50 in 1972, and ﬁnally to 200 nautical miles in 1975. When Norway did the same in 1977, the European Union recommended its member states extend their EEZs as the European Union did not have any authority to do it on behalf of the member states. That implied that non-E.U. countries were gradually expelled from E.U. waters. Gradually, TACs were also introduced by NEAFC. In 1974 the ﬁrst TAC was introduced for herring in the North Sea, followed by a total ban in 1977–1983. From 1976 more species were subjected to TACs, and bycatch rules were imposed on the industrial ﬁshery (species for ﬁshmeal and ﬁsh oil). Although the European Union, before 1983, was not able to enforce the resource management a system to allocate TACs among member states was developed. The “relative stability system” used as a starting point the member states’ share of the total landings of the different species as the key. However, a certain reallocation needed to be made (the so-called Hague preferences) and a key for comparison of species of different value, the codequivalent, was developed. These systems are still a key factor in the allocation of the TACs within the European Union. It was a major drawback for the CFP that the resource management basically took place in NEAFC “outside” of the European Union, and the market and the structural policies took place “inside” and, in particular, that they contradicted each other so much. There were no links between the two policy areas.

35.2. CRITICAL FACTORS LIMITING THE TRANSITION TO BETTER OUTCOME 35.2.1. Objectives and General Measures The principle of relative stability, or in other words, the limited access to the ﬁsh resources of one member state by others based on only historical rights, is in principle contradicting the treaties’ rules about free movement of labor and capital within the European Union. The limited access implies that member states wanted to set and to enforce rules for their own ﬁsh resources, which lead to gametheoretic problems about ﬁxing the quotas, of

which the Norway pout box (a dispute between the United Kingdom and Denmark about the ﬁshery in a closed area near Scotland) is an example. The Norway pout box (reserve) was an area unilaterally introduced by the United Kingdom, in which only large-mesh-size ﬁshing trawls were permitted to protect juvenile haddock and whiting. This prevented Danish ﬁshermen from exploiting Norway pout, which could be caught only with small mesh sizes. Norway pout is used for ﬁshmeal and ﬁsh oil (Holden 1994, pp. 51–53). At the end of the 1970s, the E.U. Court of Justice ruled that the competence of all ﬁsheries matters was to be transferred to the European Union. This made it possible for the European Commission to take the ﬁrst steps to propose and enforce conservation measures on behalf of the member states. The principle of relative stability has been ruled as being in agreement with E.U. law as well. By this ruling, the obstacles for an improved management of the exploitation of ﬁsh resources were removed. Despite this, it was, in reality, not until the 1992 revision of the CFP that this principle materialized in improved management. It could even be argued that the period until 2002 was a period of transition in which the poor reputation of the CFP was created. Poor management is not the case any more, however, and the rest of this chapter will focus on the development since 2002. In the period 1983– 2002, the main management measure was output restrictions in terms of TACs and quotas allocated to member states supplemented by technical measures such as increased mesh size of the ﬁshing gear and marine reserves (boxes). Effort management was introduced as a possibility with the revision in 1992, but it was never utilized with respect to resource management apart from important initiatives about creating a vessel licensing scheme, a ﬂeet register, and programs for ﬂeet development. The agreed revision in 2002, in force until 2012, was formalized in a Council Regulation 2371/2002 that was approved by the E.U. Council of Ministers for ﬁsheries. In association with that, the European Commission (2002) prepared a “Road Map,” including background information and, in particular, plans and time schedules for the implementation of the revisions. The Road Map speciﬁes the objective of the CFP, which is to ensure exploitation of living resources that provides sustainable development in environmental, economic, and social conditions (Council Regulation 2371/2002, art. 2).

European Union Fisheries Management The CFP shall apply the precautionary approach to protect the living resources and progressively implement an ecosystem-based approach to ﬁsheries management. The principles applied for this ten years period are (1) a clear labor division among E.U., national, and local decision levels; (2) decisions that are based on scientiﬁc advice delivered timely, (3) explicit involvement of stakeholder in regional advisory councils; and (4) consistency with other E.U. policies. By these principles, the CFP reinforces the subsidiarity concept, which means that decisions are made at the lowest possible level. This means, for example, that TACs are ﬁxed at the E.U. level and allocated to member states as quotas. The member states can manage the quotas as they ﬁnd best, ranging from individual transferable quotas (ITQs) to no action apart from securing that the quotas are not exceeded. It also reinforces the use of scientiﬁc advice. Finally, by involving the ﬁshermen (ﬁshermen’s associations), nongovernmental organizations, and other parties, the aim is to produce information and to increase the responsibility with respect to how the ﬁsh resources are exploited.

35.2.2. The Management Procedure and Management Strategy Evaluation Since 1983, the European Union has used scientiﬁc advice extensively in the management of the ﬁsh resources. For many years, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has carried out stock assessment of the northeast Atlantic, which made it possible to come forward with quantitative assessments that could be transformed into speciﬁc European Union and national policies in terms of TACs and benchmarks in terms of ﬁshing mortality rates. The economists have never been in such a position because of lack of funds, cooperation, and data. Economists have always been invited by the European Commission to come forward with advice. But as long as the only advice has been to introduce measures that would aim at increasing the resource rent, but not speciﬁcally how this advice should be implemented, economics have never played any important role equal to the biological advice. The demand to economists is then to carry out quantitative analyses of what’s best and, in particular, “what if” scenarios. The European Commission and the Council of Ministers were aware that such work would require

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economic information in terms of statistics that was not available, and a Council Regulations 1639/2001 and 1543/2000 were therefore adopted making it mandatory for all member states to deliver costs and earnings statistic for the ﬁshing industry from the year 2004. While stock assessments for many years have been carried out for the northeast Atlantic, this was never the case for the Mediterranean Sea. Nevertheless, the general principles of E.U. ﬁsheries management policy also apply to the ﬁsheries management of the Mediterranean Sea (e.g., stock conservation, ﬂeet policy [reference levels], and technical measures). However, the implementation of these principles must take into account that stock assessment (or very limited assessment) does not occur, and that there are several highly migratory ﬁsh stocks and other shared stocks in that area. Proposed management scheme decisions, especially for shared stocks, are based on effort limitation, encouraging of cooperation in the Mediterranean, for example, between ﬁshermen’s associations and national management, and initiatives aiming at strengthening the international cooperation for ﬁsheries management in the region are taken. This is, in particular, done through the concerned regional ﬁsheries organizations. The applied management measures take into account game theoretical issues. The major changes of the CFP from 2003, compared to earlier periods, are the focus on long-term recovery and management plans, including stock assessments and economic repercussions. This is contrary to previous periods’ focus on single stock assessment. Further, much more focus is put on effort and capacity limitation aiming at harmonization with the ﬁsh stock preservation measures, and ﬁnally, the CFP encourages the use of economic incentives on the E.U. as well as on the national level.

35.2.3. Scientiﬁc Advice for Fisheries Management The European Commission has launched measures aiming at improving the quality and the continuity of scientiﬁc advice to ﬁsheries managers (Communication from the Commission 2003). These measures include (1) improvement in data collection including environmental impact assessment; (2) improved support at national and E.U. levels for scientiﬁc work in scientiﬁc advisory bodies and implementation of appropriate validation and

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peer-review processes; (3) reinforcement of E.U. structures for scientiﬁc advice, in particular, the Scientiﬁc Committee for Fisheries and Aquaculture, which includes industry representatives; (4) closer coordination between the European Commission and national ﬁsheries research laboratories; and (5) development of a European Center for Fisheries Assessment and Management, bringing together scientiﬁc expertise at the E.U. level. These developments must be seen in relation with the standing advisory committee, the Scientiﬁc, Technical, and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF), which includes biologists, gear technologists, and economists from various national research institutes. The STECF has a number of working groups speciﬁcally set up to investigate certain issues (e.g., TACs, economic repercussion of various management measures, and the effects of marine reserves). Most of the objectives outlined above have been achieved, although in slightly different forms. For example, large research programs within ﬁsheries management are conducted in 2004–2009 at a total budget exceeding €30 million. The proposed center for ﬁsheries assessment and management has not been fully established, but the Joint Research Center is functioning as secretariat for the STECF and is responsible for collating data to be used by the STECF and its working groups. The speciﬁc measures applied to achieve the objectives should be based on scientiﬁc advice, including, in particular; the STECF: (1) long-term recovery plans for heavily overexploited species; (2) management plans involving a multispecies; multiﬂeet approach; (3) target for sustainable exploitation of stocks; (4) TACs; (5) ﬁxing licenses for ﬁshing vessels; (6) limiting effort; (7) technical measures such as gear speciﬁcations, closed areas, and time periods; and (8) economic incentives, for example, ITQ schemes and schemes designed to limit discard of ﬁsh. Economic advice plays an increasing role. A concerted action program ﬁnanced by the European Commission for “promotion of common methods for economic assessment of E.U. ﬁsheries” has since 1998 collected costs and earnings statistics for selected ﬂeet segments and produced an annual economic report. The ﬁrst diluted start actually dates back to 1992 for a few member states (Davidse et al. 1993). The project expired in 2004, and Joint Research Center has since then been responsible for retrieving economic data from member states

according to the data collection regulation (Council Regulation 1543/2000). The last published annual economic report (Joint Research Center 2005) covered 70 ﬂeet segments for the E.U.(15) and more than 100 ﬂeet segments for the E.U.(25), Norway, Iceland, and the Faeroe Islands. As part of the concerted action, a short-term projection model named the EIAA model (Economic Interpretation of ACFM3 Advice) has been developed to calculate economic repercussions of the biological advice (STECF 2004a, 2004b). A full description of the model is found in Frost et al. (2009) and Hoff and Frost (2006). A similar but less complicated approach was used for the Icelandic individual quota system (Danielsson et al. 1997). The EIAA model is based on costs and earnings statistics of the ﬂeet segments published in the annual economic report, and it uses biological assessments of ﬁsh stock abundances and TACs. Based on a number of assumptions the model is used for medium-term projections on ﬂeet segment level of the economic effects of changes in stock abundances and TACs. The projections are carried out by two working groups of the STECF. First, the Subgroup on Resource Status (SGRST), is working with the TAC and quota advice and, second, the Subgroup for Economic Affairs (SGECA), is working with procurement of economic data and the economic repercussion of the proposed TACs. The work is carried out within narrow time restrictions in the end of October each year prior to the STECF plenary meeting in the beginning of November. That implies that the EIAA assesses all quota combinations put forward as part of the biological advice. The TAC/quota advice for 2002–2004 used an ambitious multispecies, multiﬂeet approach named “multicriterion” TACs, or MTACs. MTAC takes the stock-based advice (i.e., the single-species TACs proposed by ICES) as a starting point and then uses ﬂeet information on catch combinations to propose alternative TACs, again for each species, but taking into account the multispecies nature of the ﬁsheries. These new MTACs will only rarely be equal to the original proposed single-species TACs, and may even exceed these for some species. But by including assessments of the overexploitation of the different stocks the model tries to keep the new multi species TACs equal to or below the single-species TACs for the heavily threatened species (e.g., cod; see ICES 2004; Vinther et al. 2004).

European Union Fisheries Management A number of exogenous decisions must be made regarding ﬂeet speciﬁc reduction factors, for example, how a reduction factor should be divided between ﬂeets and species priority weights, and how big a priority should be given to the need for recovery of each species. These exogenous factors can be determined from biological as well as from economic information. The “policy statements” that are reﬂected in the weights associated with the ﬁshing mortality adjustment factor have, however, caused concern with respect to using MTAC. Economist would often propose to handle such problems through an optimization procedure by maximizing a proﬁt measure by use of various sets of market or shadow prices and by use of linear/nonlinear programming (Frost and Kjærsgaard 2003). Mainly three TAC/quota scenarios have been used: (1) single species assessment, (2) mixed ﬁsheries, and (3) management plans as the European Commission requested the group to make mixed species/ﬁshery (MTAC) model runs with speciﬁc targets for the North Sea and for the Irish Sea stocks. As such, a mixed ﬁshery is the basis of the EIAA model. Although the MTAC approach and the EIAA approach went well in hand and formed the basis for developments of economic advice, the economic calculations from 2005 were no longer based on MTAC, as the MTAC approach was not supported by ICES (ICES 2006). Still, a multispecies, multiﬂeet approach is used, but the level of ambition is less than the one embodied in the MTAC. The use of integrated bioeconomic assessment models is under development, however. While the short-term projection may be useful for the industry and the managers, long-term projections are required for proper management. Longterm biological stock projections are inﬂicted with some uncertainty, and the corresponding economic performance is impacted by that. The ﬁrst steps have been taken with respect to the recovery plans stipulated by the CFP, so far for a limited number of species such as sole, plaice, and Northern hake, but the ﬁeld is under development (STECF 2006b, 2007, 2008).

35.2.4. Measures to Limiting Fleet Capacity The European Commission has since the agreement of the CFP from 1983 laid down guidelines

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for the management of the ﬁshing ﬂeet capacity in the MAGP, which sets up target levels for the ﬁshing capacity expressed in engine power (kilowatts) and tonnage (gross tonnage) for each member state. In this way, there is an overall restriction on the member states’ options as regards the drawing up of the MAGP. The MAGP expired laying down the ceiling for ﬂeet capacity at the end of 2002. From 2003, the ﬂeet management became integrated into the resource management with the 2002 capacity ceilings as base (Council Regulation 2371/2002). In 2008, the capacity of almost all member states was lower than these ceilings. Conditions for entry/exit of capacity are ﬁxed (Commission Regulation 1438/2003), and every member state must hold a vessel register containing technical information about each vessel (Commission Regulation 26/2004). The E.U. ﬂeet register, which is necessary for ﬂeet management, was introduced in 1989 and gradually implemented from the mid-1990s. The register is now openly accessible (ec.europa.eu/ﬁsheries/ﬂeet/index.cfm). Information must upon request be made available to the European Commission. The information is, for example, used to assess if the member states adhere to the capacity ceilings. Every year before May, the member states must provide the European Commission with a report about the ﬂeet capacity. These reports contain information on capacity indicators, however, not always in format that is compatible with the landings (catch) information provided by other statistical sources. Any new entry of capacity will have to be accompanied by at least an equivalent withdrawal of capacity (entry/exit ratio of 1:1). When capacity is withdrawn with public subsidies, the reference ceilings will automatically be adjusted downward by the amount of withdrawn capacity. The member states whose ﬂeets do not comply with these reference ceilings or do not comply with reporting obligations on ﬂeet capacity and withdrawal of capacity with public aid will have all public aid withheld, with the exception of normal aid for scrapping, until they comply with the obligations. Failure to meet the obligations may also result in a reduction in the allocation of ﬁshing opportunities or ﬁshing effort. The European Commission and member states regularly exchange information on and monitor progress in the reduction of the capacity of the E.U. ﬁshing ﬂeet toward lower levels that correspond to sustainable ﬁshing mortality rates. A review process is implemented to ascertain that

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the ﬂeet capacity obligations are met. The European Commission will provide greater public transparency of member states’ performance in respect of the rules of the CFP by regularly publishing a “Compliance Scoreboard,” in which information concerning national catch and ﬂeet reports, inspection activity and other relevant indicators of compliance with CFP rules will be made available. Other subjects for peer review will include the economic and social aspects of ﬁsheries management.

1.4 1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2

The E.U. subsidies to the ﬁshing industry have been declining and have in particular changed toward less harmful subsidies (see Astorkiza et al. 2006; Brown 2006; Clark et al. 2005). The CFP ﬁshing ﬂeet policy may be compared to the resource policy, meaning that TAC/quotas and ﬂeet capacity ceilings are determined for each member state. Contrary to the resource management’s use of command and control in terms of TACs, the ﬂeet policy uses subsidies to inﬂuence capacity. The strongest criticism of subsidies to the ﬁshing ﬂeet is connected with grants for modernization and construction of new vessels. With the revision of the policy from 2003 this has been changed to avoid increases in ﬁshing effort in particular in ﬁsheries not subject to TAC/ quota management. It has become impossible to obtain subsidies for purposes other than improvements of safety and crew welfare onboard ﬁshing vessels. This has been formalized in the Council Regulation 2371/2002 and Commission Regulation 1438/2003. Further, member states’ programs should be adapted to give priority to measures that will permanently reduce the ﬁshing capacity. The reduction of ﬁshing capacity (kilowatts and gross tonnage) in response to the ﬁshing effort limits should be the responsibility of the member states. The Road Map states that overcapacity in the ﬁshing ﬂeet not only constitutes a risk to the survival of ﬁsh stocks, but also produces negative economic effects in the ﬁshing industry and reduces the ability of each vessel to remain proﬁtable, which in turn reduces the possibility of paying for the modernization, which is necessary for competitiveness. An overall reduction in the level of capital in the catching sector is the ﬁrst essential step toward improving economic performance. The European Commission recognizes that public aid to investments in the ﬁshing ﬂeet works against

2006

2002

1998

1994

1990

0

35.2.5. Subsidies to the Fishing Fleet

Tonnage

No. of vessels

Engine power

Landings, live weight

FIGURE 35.2 The development in capacity for E.U.(15) (except Austria, Finland, and Sweden; index 1995). Landings are shown for 1995–2006. (Data from Eurostat 2009, Statistics, Fisheries, 1995–2009)

this objective and promotes oversupply of capital by artiﬁcially reducing the costs and the risks of the investments. It also recognizes that each subsidized ﬁshing vessel reduces the productivity and proﬁtability of all other vessels in the concerned ﬁshery. If the outcome of the CFP is measured against the objective to maximize the resource rent it has not, generally, been successful so far. Although ﬁshing capacity measured in either tonnage, engine power or number of vessels has declined at a rate of approximately 2 percent per year over the last two decades (see ﬁgure 35.2), this decline is counterweighted by the increase in productivity which is often supposed to be 2–3 percent per year, but it is hardly higher than 1 percent per year (Frost et al. 2009). Still, further reduction is required. However, the instruments necessary for that are available with the CFP for 2003–2012, where only subsidies for decommissioning are allowed, and if this measure is applied the capacity ceiling will automatically be adjusted downward accordingly. The landings of E.U.(15) have decreased approximately 3 percent per year from 7.2 million metric tons in 1995 to 4.9 million metric tons in 2006 (Eurostat 2009). This picture conceals large differences among the member states and the species. The value of the species is very different, and some of the species that have been subject to signiﬁcant

European Union Fisheries Management 70 60 50 40 % 30 20 10

Demersal

Pelagic

05 20

00 20

19

95

0

Industrial

35.3 The share of landing from species outside safe biological limits. (Eurostat 2009, Sustainable Development Indicators, Natural Resources, 1995–2009)

FIGURE

decreases are the short-lived cheap species caught by the industrial ﬁshery for ﬁshmeal and ﬁsh oil. The drop here is around 1 million metric tons for the period. If the development is corrected for that a decline is still seen at around 2 percent per year. Eurostat estimates, based on information from ICES, that 30 percent of the landings of demersal species (living at the bottom) in 1995 came from stocks outside safe biological limits as deﬁned by ICES (Eurostat 2009). In 2005 this share increased to 50 percent (see ﬁgure 35.3). For the pelagic species (herring, mackerel, sprat, etc.) the situation was less severe compared to the demersal species. Also, the short-lived industrial species have been in a bad shape in recent years (ﬁgure 35.3). Eurostat explains that a stock is considered being within safe biological limits if its current biomass is above the value corresponding to a precautionary approach advocated by ICES.

35.2.6. The Subsidiarity Principle and Economic Management In the Road Map, the European Commission states that the ﬁsheries sector is still characterized by speciﬁc features that make the application of normal economic conditions, such as free competition between producers and freedom of investment, difﬁcult to apply in the short term. The European Commission is now fully aware that the speciﬁc features

479

are the external effects as referred to earlier in this chapter, and that these must be “internalized” or rectiﬁed by use of various appropriate measures. If the European Union, as intended, takes action to address these issues, it will gradually create a climate that will be more favorable to the introduction of more normal economic conditions. Further, it will create bases for an elimination of barriers to normal economic activity such as national allocations of ﬁshing possibilities and the principle of relative stability. Meanwhile, the European Commission will consider ways in which the economic dimension of ﬁsheries management can contribute better to the objectives of the CFP. The European Commission has organized workshops on economic management with representatives from ﬁsheries administrations, the ﬁsheries sector, and other interest groups to discuss the scope for provisions within E.U. and/or national ﬁsheries management systems for a system of tradable ﬁshing rights (individual or collective), payment for the right to ﬁsh, and/or recovery of ﬁsheries management costs from the ﬁshing sector. The E.U. Directorate General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries has established a homepage for debating this ﬁeld of management instruments. As examples of economic managements measures based on the subsidiarity and the relative stability principle, the Netherlands has operated an ITQ system since 1976, and Denmark has introduced the system by a decision passed by the Danish Parliament. Other member states operate quota systems with elements of transferability. A brief glance at the Danish experience shows that it has been introduced in two phases. First, from 2003 the system was introduced for the pelagic ﬁshery that is conducted mainly by large purse seiners and pelagic trawlers on a limited number of species. Vessels that left this ﬁshery after the introduction of ITQ were not allowed to enter into other ﬁsheries. From 2007, the demersal ﬁshery mainly conducted by small trawlers and gillnetters on a large variety of species were included in the ITQ system. Prior to that, the entire Danish ﬁshery was managed almost solely with individual nontransferable quotas and restrictions on days at sea. As expected, the number of active vessels declined. The reductions in the number of vessels and sea days have taken place since the beginning of the 1990s, but for the demersal ﬂeet it slowed down during the period of preparation for the ITQ system from 2004 to 2006, when the annual reduction in

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number of vessels was around 5 percent. In 2007, the reduction was 25 percent. A calculation by use of the EIAA model for the ﬂeet divided into 12 length-gear segments shows that in mid-2008 the number of active vessels was, at full capacity utilization, reduced to the lowest possible level required to catch the Danish quotas with the current technology. Due to the model’s assumptions of ﬁxed technology, and that quota trade is possible only within a segment and not between ﬂeet segments, the model overestimates the number of small vessels and underestimates the number of large vessels. These results are supported using a linear programming model that maximizes the resource rent of the Danish share of the TACs (Frost and Kjærsgaard 2005). Data envelopment analyses indicate that a further reduction is possible over time by the introduction of new technology.

35.2.7. Limiting Factors for Further Development The E.U. management policy is based on three pillars. First, the TAC/quota management based on annual determination of TACs is ﬁxed by the European Union and quotas are allocated to the member states by use of the relative stability. The member states can manage their ﬁshery by use of all measures as long as the national quotas are adhered to. Second, the structural policy set by the European Union speciﬁes member state ceilings (reference levels) for ﬁshing ﬂeet capacity. The aim is to reduce capacity parallel to the required reductions in ﬁshing mortality to bring the stocks within safe biological limits. The member states are free to select measures to adjust the ﬂeet; the European Union provides decommissioning subsidies that are released without notice if the member states coﬁnance. Third, the technical measures (closed areas, minimum mesh size, minimum ﬁsh size, bycatch rules) are set by the European Union as these concern all member states (Council Regulation 850/98). The member states can use supplementary measures that do not violate the commonly agreed measures, for example, higher minimum mesh sizes or higher landing sizes for ﬁsh. Within the E.U. framework, member states are granted the obligation and opportunities to manage their ﬁsheries. The member states will be responsible for the allocation of quotas and ﬁshing effort between national vessels. In other words, the labor division is that the European Union will take care

of stock recovery and the overall capacity of the ﬁshing ﬂeets, and the member state will have to manage within that framework. Stock recovery will mainly take place by reducing TACs, and hence ﬁshing mortality rates. The European Commission is fully aware of the biological and the economic characteristics of the exploitation of the ﬁsh resources. However, the demand for uniform E.U. regulation, which also comprises areas where no stock assessments takes place, paired with the complexity of the system, has entailed greater emphasis on ﬂeet capacity reductions in order to extract the resource rent. The problem facing the CFP is the complexity of the multispecies, multiﬂeet ﬁsheries, which makes it impossible to ﬁx quotas on a single species level and requires value judgments with respect to the priorities given to regions and ﬂeet segments. Little help is found in the general objectives of the CFP that are contradicting one another and formulated in broad terms. The Treaty of the European Union that forms the basis for all legislation is not designed to deal with the market failures that characterize the exploitation of the ﬁsh resources. However, the labor division between the European Commission and the national administrations alleviates this disadvantage. The decision process is extremely comprehensive and dates back to the years where the negotiations about the TAC/quotas were the main political issue. Managing ﬁsheries is very dependant on research results, and the way they are submitted to the decision makers. Undoubtedly, the European Commission is very aware of the importance of this, but the ﬁnal decisions on rather detailed matters are still the responsibility of the Council of Ministers, which naturally will have national interests.

35.3. TRANSITION TO BETTER OUTCOMES 35.3.1. The Magnitude of the Problem (How Much Resource Rent Is Lost) While conventional ﬁsheries economics theory offers an excellent understanding of the problems in the exploitation of the ﬁsh resources and indicates that substantial resource rent (i.e., remuneration of the ﬁsh stocks) may be gained by proper

European Union Fisheries Management management, a number of practical problems arise once the theory is used in speciﬁc ﬁsheries (ﬁgure 35.4). In biological population models catches are calculated as a function of the ﬁshing mortality rates for each age group. Often costs are assumed to be linear in ﬁshing mortality, which, assuming constant prices, results in the revenue and costs curves (ﬁgure 35.4a). The resource rent is the distance between the revenue and the cost curves. This forms the basis for the impression that it is possible to obtain a substantial resource rent. The assumption that costs are linear in ﬁshing mortality is crucial, and the resource rent is mainly obtained by reducing costs equivalent to reducing the ﬁshing effort. If, however, it is assumed that costs are nonlinear in ﬁshing mortality, equivalent to saying that ﬁshing mortality is nonlinear in ﬁshing effort, the picture resembles that of ﬁgure 35.4b. The assumption applied here is that landings are a function of ﬁsh stock abundance and effort according to a CobbDouglas production function (Eide et al. 2003). If the stock effect (stock-output elasticity) is low and the effort effect (effort-output elasticity) is high, the shape of the cost curve will follow the shape of the revenue curve.

Revenue and costs

a. Costs are linear in fishing mortality 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

1.2

1

1.2

F level Revenue

Costs

Revenue and costs

b. Costs are nonlinear in fishing mortality 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

F level Revenue

Costs

35.4 Different costs assumptions in linear (a) and nonlinear (b) bioeconomic models of ﬁshing mortality

FIGURE

481

This result does not contradict the result from ﬁsheries economics theory, but the problem is that the gain from reducing effort is much smaller than anticipated. If time preferences are also taken into account, it may not be beneﬁcial to reduce effort as it will take a number of years for the stocks to recover and be able to produce a higher yield, and ﬁshing effort is subjected to “sunk costs”; that is, costs will in any case have to be paid (see Conrad and Clark [1994, p. 75] for “the golden rule” of capital accumulation, and Clark et al. [1979] for irreversible investments).

35.3.2. The Obstacles in the Process: Best and Second-Best Solutions The European Union has initiated studies under the STECF about the recovery of sole, plaice, and Northern hake. These studies are performed in such a way that the default situation (i.e., status quo management) is compared with situations with decreasing ﬁshing mortality rates in age structured biological models. The results depend (among other things) on the assumption of the production functions and to the extent that the ﬁxed costs are considered sunk costs. Further, the results are tested against different recruitment functions ranging from the assumption where the recruitment is increasing with increasing ﬁsh stocks to the assumption that recruitment is independent of the stocks size above a certain minimum level of the stock size (often denoted Beverton Holt, Ricker or “hockey stick” recruitment functions). In general, the investigations showed that relatively small gains could be achieved from the recovery programs. If there are no alternative employment for the ﬁshing vessels (the opportunity costs are zero), these recovery programs would not pay off compared to the baseline case where the ﬁshery continued as it were. These results were sensitive to the assumption about the production function, and they were opposite to what was expected from bioeconomic calculations where costs are assumed to be a linear function of the ﬁshing mortality rates. Obviously, if ﬁshing mortality is reduced, costs in this case will go down proportionately (STECF 2006b, 2007, 2008). In general, the bioeconomic results show rather small economic gains, and the time proﬁle shows losses in the beginning of the period. That makes it difﬁcult to implement recovery programs as

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command-and-control measures. If the risk of being detected and the penalties are small, there are strong incentives for the ﬁshermen to continue as hitherto. The cost and earning statistics (Joint Research Center 2005) also show structural problems in many ﬂeet segments in the meaning that the relative prices and catch rates disadvantage ﬁshermen: the opportunity cost of labor is too high, the ﬁsh prices are too low, and the catch rates are too low. If these structural problems are not alleviated through constant technological development, ﬁshermen and society will not beneﬁt from recovery plans and reductions in the ﬁshing ﬂeets. Correct economic incentives may help, but in some cases it is not enough. While it may be sensible to preserve the ﬁsh stocks above critical biological limits, it is an underlying misperception to believe that large economic gains can be achieved, as indicated by several E.U. case studies. The misperception is founded on, ﬁrst, the assumption about linearity in certain bioeconomic models between ﬁshing mortality and costs. Second, the difference between private costs and society’s costs (socioeconomic costs) complicates practical investigations and recommendations based on bioeconomics. As an example, the socioeconomic costs may be reduced by use of an ITQ management scheme, but the ﬁshermen will not be affected by this reduction. To them, the capitalized costs in the vessel in a nontransferable quota system will be moved from the vessel to the quota rights but remain at the same or even higher.

35.3.3. Proposed Solution Long-run socioeconomic objectives include maximum economic yield (i.e., maximizing resource rent), optimal ﬂeet structure, and maximum sustainable yield commitment for all ﬁsh stocks (see United Nations 2005, section IV, for the implementation plan of World Summit of Sustainable Development 2015, Johannesburg 2002). The multiobjectives of the CFP (Regulation 2371/2002) comprise (1) biological/environmental, (2) economic, (3) social, and (4) sustainable development/exploitation goals. These are contradicting and therefore extremely demanding to pursue (STECF 2006a). The ﬁshermen’s objectives are to make money from ﬁshing. Making money in the short, medium, and long run involves the risk of depleting the stocks, while closure of ﬁsheries “depletes” the ﬁshing ﬂeet.

There is a trade-off, and the demanding task is to ﬁnd a common indicator. One possible route is to put more emphasis on ﬂeet development reference points parallel to what has been done for the stocks. In our investigation of the CFP, emphasis has been placed on the scientiﬁc advisory process with reference to the bioeconomics underlying the preparation of the management schemes proposed by the European Commission. The route to this has been quite long ranging from the mid-1960s to today. A signiﬁcant development has taken place, although the results, manifested in higher ﬁsh stock abundances and improved economic performance of the ﬁshing ﬂeets, are difﬁcult to observe. As indicated above, the expected gains in developed ﬁsheries such as the E.U. ﬁsheries are maybe set too high. Further, the success of the CFP has so far been measured against the ﬁsh stock abundance and the yield from the stocks. The CFP framework is designed to allow for command and control management as well as economic management that change the perverse incentives to overexploit the stocks. Further, the management system is supported by comprehensive data collection programs and a common vessel register together with a rather extensive scientiﬁc support system. The latter is, however, dependent on institutions outside the European Union, which, to a large extent, put the European Union into a position where the required information cannot be made available or even purchased in due time for the E.U. provision of the general measures necessary as benchmarks for the member states’ management. A long-term framework is required in which yearly TACs, quota, and capacity ceilings are substituted by long-run targets. The introduction in the European Union of recovery plans for stocks showing reduced reproductive capacity and of management plans for stocks selected for recovery, the wish for the implementation of harvest control rules, and the wish for developing long-term management strategies have changed the way ICES produces results. However, still only limited attention has been given to the development of economic models that can inform the decision making process and make it possible to measure success against other criteria than the biological criteria (STECF 2006a). This work is in progress, however, in E.U.ﬁnanced research projects and STECF working groups, although slowed down by ICES’s dismissal of the MTAC procedure because of the value

European Union Fisheries Management judgments required for the implementation and the slower start of the data collation of economic data as may be intended by the introduction of the data collection regulation. New procedures along the same lines as MTAC and the data collation in the previous concerted action programs of the European Union are under development in E.U. research projects and under ICES. All necessary instruments are in place in the European Union for proper management. The challenge is to remedy the failures experienced until 2002 with respect to reductions in ﬁshing effort and to get the ﬁsh stocks back to a healthy state.

Acknowledgments I am indebted to an anonymous referee for valuable comments and to Susanne Knudsen from my own institute for a language check.

Notes 1. Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Soviet Union, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom. The United States and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) participated as observers. 2. Greece in 1981; Portugal and Spain in 1986; Austria, Finland, and Sweden in 1995; Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic in 2004; and Romania and Bulgaria in 2007. Greenland, part of the Danish Kingdom, left in 1985. 3. ACFM is the advisory committee for ﬁsheries management of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES).

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TACs Proposed by ACFM for 2005 (EIAAmodel calculations). Report of the Scientiﬁc, Technical, and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF), Subgroup on Economic Assessment (SGECA), Brussels, 27–29 October. Commission Staff Working Paper 23.12.2004. ec.europa.eu/ﬁsheries/publications/factsheets/ legal_texts/sec_2004_1710_en.pdf STECF (2004b). Subgroup on Review of Scientiﬁc Advice on Stocks (SGRST)—Mixed Fisheries, Commission Staff Working Paper, Brussels 2004. Ispra, Italy: Scientiﬁc, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries. ec.europa. eu/ﬁsheries/publications/factsheets/legal_texts/ sec_2004_1711_en.pdf STECF (2006a). Report of the Joint SGECA— SGRST Sub-group Meeting on Bio-economic Modelling. Ispra, 4–6 October 2005 and 7–9 March 2006. Commission Staff Working Paper. Ispra, Italy: Scientiﬁc, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries. STECF (2006b). Impact Assessment of Long Term Management Plans for Sole and Plaice. SGECA-SGRST-06-05. Brussels, 26–29 September. Commission Staff Working Paper. Ispra, Italy: Scientiﬁc, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries. STECF (2007). Impact Assessment: Plaice and Sole Long-Term Management. SGECA-SGRST -0701. Copenhagen, 20–23 March. Commission Staff Working Document. SGECA-SGRST-07-01. Ispra, Italy: Scientiﬁc, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries. STECF (2008). Northern Hake Long-Term Management Plan Impact Assessment. SGBRE-0705, Brussels, 3–6 December 2007. Commission Staff Working Document 08. Final Report with STECF opinion. SGBRE-07-05 Northern Hake Follow up Meeting. Ispra, Italy: Joint research Center. Symes, D. (2005). Altering course: Future directions for Europe’s ﬁsheries policy. Fisheries Research 71: 259–265. United Nations. (2005). Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, Section IV. New York: United Nation’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Vinther, M., S. Reeves, and K. Patterson (2004). From single-species advice to mixed-species management: Taking the next step. ICES Journal of Marine Science 61: 1398–1409.

36 International Organizations and Fisheries Governance LORI RIDGEWAY JAKE RICE

36.1. INTRODUCTION Sustainable use of marine resources requires an adaptive governance framework1 that aligns incentives coherently to deliver responsible outcomes; balances the needs of governments, communities, industry, and civil society, among others; and responds to resource variability in a timely way. This implies that the knowledge, interests, and strengths of a broad array of players need to be brought together to inform legal, policy, and program options and encourage decisive, responsive choices. What is the role and contribution of international institutions and organizations in helping to create frameworks to ensure that ﬁsheries are sustainable and coherent with desired outcomes for broader oceans and biodiversity objectives? Institutions help to structure relationships among sectors in society, inﬂuence their preferences, and channel how ideas are brought into decision making processes (Kanie 2004). International institutions assist states in building appropriately integrated and iterative systems of governance both nationally and internationally, and to operate these systems with appropriate scope and scale. Fragmented or incoherent operations by international organizations may impede their contributions to effective outcomes, and the outcomes themselves. The landscape of international environmental governance, including ﬁsheries institutions, is indeed widely considered as fragmented and complex (see, e.g.,

Chambers and Green 2005; Kanie and Haas 2004). International ﬁsheries arrangements often operate in a “siloed,” or isolated way, and often inappropriately disconnected from wider environmental governance. This discussion • Identiﬁes the facets of integration that are important for ﬁsheries and the parameters of an integrated system that require contributions from international organizations • Identiﬁes key types of international organizations implicated and roles they play • Shows how the policy landscape in ﬁsheries extends beyond agreements among ﬁsheries agencies alone • Argues that, despite current risks of fragmentation, other forces should help increase coherence and alignment if institutions are ﬂexible enough to adapt

36.2. SETTING THE FRAMEWORK 36.2.1. The Role and Need for Integrated Approaches In essence, integration is the creation of complete system(s) of interdependent components, embodying unity, wholeness, and soundness.2 It emphasizes mutual dependence and synergy, i.e., systems where

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“the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Integration is a higher standard of coherence than merely cooperation (working together, or “associating”) or coordination, where deﬁnitions reﬂect “relational” values (how to work together smoothly to greater effect).3 Notwithstanding the contributions that increased cooperation can make to ﬁsheries outcomes (i.e., as described in game theory), from a systems point of view, if individual parts remain independent, then rather than adding value, alignment may simply ensure that the “total is not less than the sum of the parts.” Collaboration, with its focus on mutual buy-in and gain, is necessary for more integrated outcomes—the thesis of this chapter. What drives the need for integrated management and governance in relation to ﬁsheries? We consider three illustrative current contexts, among many possible examples.

36.2.1.1. Globalization The challenges of globalization underlie many current heated policy discussions in ﬁsheries. Globalization implies complex linkages among international participants, including states, which must work effectively and responsibly. This increasing global interdependence includes, among other things, • Increased integration and interdependence of markets (e.g., intraregionally/globally/between developed and developing countries) • Globalized value chain of goods, services, and investment (e.g., outsourcing, reexports, and reimports) • Increased mobility of inputs (e.g., labor, capital, including vessels) • Increased “reach” of sophisticated integrated transportation and logistic (e.g., enabling trade among more diverse ﬁshery producers) • Increased transfer of technology and knowledge (e.g., to meet international import standards, developing country capacity-building); • Increased linkages among activities and issues (beneﬁts and risks) needing regional and global institutions and norms (e.g., illegal, unreported and unregulated [IUU] ﬁshing) • Shared global threats needing cooperative solutions (e.g., ﬁsheries sustainability, environmental threats, climate change) A coherent and effective governance system for ﬁsheries would ensure that globalization would

yield net beneﬁts rather than the often-feared net costs for ﬁsheries and ﬁsheries interests.4

36.2.1.2. Ecosystem Approach and Biodiversity The relationship between ﬁshing and biodiversity is dealt with at length in chapter 10, which examines joint obligations, the integrated nature of ﬁshing and biodiversity threats, and solutions through application of ecosystem approaches to ﬁsheries and spatially integrated management in a uniﬁed system of management.5 Looking at this same issue from the point of view of institutions, an ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries (EAF) (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO] 2003; Garcia and Cochrane 2005) acknowledges that the success of ﬁsheries management and policy is affected by the following: • Environmental factors over which management can exert little control, but to which management must respond appropriately: management must have the ﬂexibility to be adaptive, with low transaction costs and rapid mechanisms. • Policy and management activities outside the geographic jurisdiction of the management agency: efforts of adjoining agencies must be collaborative and complementary. • Activities of other industry sectors, which can affect the ﬁsheries resources or habitats for which the ﬁsheries agencies are responsible: efforts of sectoral agencies must also be collaborative, complementary and reciprocal. This implies greater integration among institutions and players that may not have a history of close collaboration.

36.2.1.3. The Domestic/ International Nexus International and domestic ﬁsheries are inextricably linked in both the threats they face and the solutions available to them. For instance, • Overcapacity arising from poor domestic ﬁsheries management regimes (including incentives mechanisms) can migrate into illegal high-seas ﬁsheries. • Preoccupations with international resource allocations for domestic ﬂeets can interfere in international cooperation on high seas ﬁsheries.

International Organizations and Fisheries Governance • High-seas illegal ﬁsheries can displace domestic ﬁsheries directly or through price impacts.6 • International norms are important to domestic policy and regulation.7 • Domestic priorities and challenges will affect the international norms that can be achieved.8 • Fisheries on straddling or highly migratory stocks require compatible management within and outside exclusive economic zones (EEZs). • Global demand for accountability is slowly driving integrated national and international reporting on progress in meeting international standards. These three examples alone show why policy and institutional coherence is essential to properly operating ﬁsheries governance systems. Rarely will any single institution achieve its objectives independent of objectives and strategies adopted by other institutions. Achieving coherence needs timely and directed effort. Explicit planning is essential because differing scopes, mandates, and objectives inhibit natural incentives for convergence on options among institutions. Integration too late in the planning process (i.e., after buy-in by participants to individual institutional approaches) can focus attention on presumed costs—rather than advantages—of integration and joint planning.

36.2.2. Some Dimensions of the Integration Challenge in Fisheries A well-functioning ﬁsheries system needs integration across the following dimensions: • “Horizontal” integration: across different participants (e.g., international institutions/ organizations, states, and stakeholders). • “Vertical” integration: the local–regional–international continuum (Kanie 2004; Strand 2004) or, alternately, a continuum of technical knowledge through policy and management, to political decision making (e.g., science–policy linkages). Failures in accountability at one level can cause confusion or adaptation of accountabilities, which weakens the management system.9 • Integrated “tool kit”: many disciplines are needed: legal frameworks and norms, “soft law” guidelines and policy frameworks, technical management tools, enforcement, economic instruments to align incentives for compliance and stewardship, and integrated knowledge systems supporting all.

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• Spatial integration: ocean threats and biodiversity loss can be addressed, in part, through integrated spatial management at a variety of scales from watershed, through coastal zones, and through EEZs to areas beyond national jurisdiction. New approaches to protecting resources and ecosystems implies moving from ﬁsheries management approaches that are inherently population-based toward ones that are inherently place-based (Rice 2005, 2009). • Domestic/ international integration (described above). • Sustainable development: integration of ecological/environmental, economic and social interests into shared objectives, through effective integrated decision making and reporting. • “Mainstreaming” of widespread threats coherently across a range of issues (e.g., interaction of climatic change with oceans and ﬁsheries). Both capture ﬁsheries and aquaculture are deeply implicated in all of the above. Moreover, these dimensions are interdependent, yet they involve international institutions and organizations and other relevant players in different ways. Interdependence means that intended improvements in one dimension will have consequences for performance on others, yet too often with no assurance that consequences will be considered during planning—or expected by the participants across—diverse forums.

36.2.3. How Do International Organizations Play a Role in Helping or Hindering Such Aspects of Integration? What are the governance roles that institutions and organizations play across the dimensions above, and what opportunities (or impediments) do they present for improved integration? Collaboration is needed across the planning cycle, for example, knowledge generation, problem identiﬁcation/diagnosis, awareness raising, priority setting, analysis and options, implementation, compliance and enforcement, monitoring, and review. Associated with these stages are enabling functions such as capacity building (through ﬁnancial, technological, and knowledge transfer). (See Haas et al. [2004] for alternate taxonomies10 and Dotinga and Molinaar [2007] for perspectives on practical integrated roles for various institutions in particular regions.)

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Whatever the opportunities for collaboration, international organizations make contributions through their key activities and strengths, for example, • Their convening power, i.e., debates they sponsor and encourage. • Direct integration, which they foster through involvement of diverse players/institutions. • Research and knowledge creation that they sponsor and diffuse. • The conceptual, legal, regulatory, and operational frameworks they develop. • The legal and technical tools they help build. • The partnerships they encourage. • Monitoring and review that they encourage or undertake. • Accountability mechanisms that they help build, such as for states and agencies. All of these provide opportunities for integration, but if done poorly also pose potential risks, by impeding debate on key issues, excluding key players from planning processes and failing to support key types of research. When organizations reach out to interact on shared topics, they can be pulled into subjects where they realistically lack some appropriate expertise. This can encourage true collaboration and liaisons among institutions with complementary expertise (e.g., through co-management partnerships, memoranda of understanding [MOUs] between management bodies and expert science organizations). However, interference and blockage can occur if organizations dismiss others’ expertise as biased or irrelevant, or use “homegrown expertise” not credible outside the originating organizations. International organizations play these roles among different communities and disciplines, at different scales, across different but related issues (e.g., ﬁsheries and biodiversity), sometimes collaboratively and sometimes territorially. Appropriate interinstitutional tension can motivate policy and program innovation, but—if extreme or inappropriate—can sometimes lead to bureaucratic overload for states (especially for developing countries) and create unhelpful public and stakeholder confusion and backlash. Several disciplines are involved in international rule making and management across activities sponsored by international organizations: • Scientiﬁc experts (e.g., stock assessment scientists, ecosystem scientists, oceanographers)

• Technical experts (e.g., ﬁsheries managers, enforcement experts, economists and social scientists) • Domestic and international legal experts • Policy experts and diplomats across relevant ﬁelds • Industry participants (e.g., harvesters, processors, buyers) • Media and communications experts Different institutional settings will offer different perspectives of particular disciplinary expertise. A balanced selection of experts from various settings can bring different interpretational perspectives together for more complete debate and more integrated conclusions. Institutional settings include: • National (or subnational) governments • Academia • Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs; including environmental) • International organizations and bodies at various local regional and global scales • The private sector, including the ﬁshing industry itself The diversiﬁcation of expertise within institutions is creating greater opportunity for both integration and competition. This can be seen, for example, in ﬁshing industry members participating in expert science advisory processes and comanagement bodies, or their industry organizations hiring natural and social scientists and management experts. Fisheries-oriented departments and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) are hiring a wider range of social scientists. The framework of this section has provided a perspective to examine the institutional interactions in ﬁsheries and evaluate whether international institutions are reaching their collective potential. The following sections describe the activities of international organizations in this light.

36.3. INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS LINKED TO THE FISHERIES AGENDA 36.3.1. Who Are the Institutional Players? The detailed landscape of international organizations, agencies, and bodies in ﬁsheries and oceans

TABLE

36.1 Mapping of multilateral and regional forumsa

Managing International Fisheries Sustainably

Supporting Environmental Sustainability and Healthy Marine Ecosystems

Science: Building Understanding of Fisheries Select Programs, Subcommittees, and Oceans Resources and Working Groups (illustrative)

States Parties to Law of the Sea Convention

International Seabed Authority (ISA), International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea, Commission on the Limit of the Continental Shelves

U.N. Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and Law of the Sea (UNICPOLOS) U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

U.N. Marine Biodiversity Working Group Beyond Areas of National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)

World Conservation Union (IUCN) Global Oceans Forum (GOF)

Subsidiary Body on Scientiﬁc, Technical, and Technological Advice, Working Groups on Access and Beneﬁts Sharing of Genetic Resources and Protected Areas Working Group on High Seas Governance NAFO, NEAFC, WCPFC, NASCO, IATTC, ICCAT, IPHC, CCAMLR Marine Resource Conservation Working Group, Fisheries Working Group Programs on conservation of biodiversity, etc. Advisory Committee on Fish Management, Advisory Committee on Ecosystems Various research activities on smallscale ﬁsheries and aquaculture Sustainable Fisheries Resolution, Omnibus Law of the Sea Resolution

Regional ﬁsheries management organizations (RFMOs) Asia Paciﬁc Economic Cooperation (APEC)

Commission on Environmental Cooperation International Council for Exploration of the Sea (ICES)

WorldFish Center U.N. General Assembly Resolutions (UNGA) Informal Consultation of States Parties (ICSP) to UNFSA (ICSP) Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) International Maritime Organization (IMO)

Fisheries Committee, Environmental Policy Committee, etc. Marine Environment Protection Committee

International Seabed Authority (ISA) U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) Global Program of Action Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) Arctic Council North Paciﬁc Marine Science Organization (PICES) Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES)

Committee on Fisheries, Subcommittees on Aquaculture and Trade

CITES

Programs on Oceans Sciences, Ecosystem Integrators, ABLOS Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment Working Group Fishery Science Committee, Marine Environmental Quality Committee Animals Committee (Science), Conference of Parties, etc.

(continued)

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36.1 Continued Global Marine Assessment International Hydrographic Organization

World Trade Organization (WTO)

Assessments of scientiﬁc assessments

Ongoing ﬁsh subsidies negotiations under Doha Round, nonagricultural market access negotiations for ﬁsh/seafood, trade policy review mechanism, multicountry negotiations to access to WTO, general agreement on trade in services Work in Fishing Convention, adopted June 2007

International Labor Organization (ILO) International Institute for Fisheries, Economics, and Trade High Seas Task Force World Bank Proﬁsh

Supports sustainable ﬁsheries and ecosystem sustainability initiatives Supports ecosystems and protected areas initiatives, etc.

Global Environmental Facility (GEF) a

For abbreviations that are not deﬁned in this table, please see table 36.2.

globally is too complex to describe fully here. However, one can lay out an illustrative list of organizations (or collections of bodies) across three key indicative functions11 linked to overall ﬁsheries sustainability: 1. Building an understanding of ﬁsheries and oceans 2. Managing for sustainable ﬁsheries 3. Managing for broader marine environment and ecosystem sustainability This is a deliberately narrow framework for illustrating the roles of ﬁsheries-related institutions. A broader sustainable development framework could encompass more social and economic functions for ﬁsheries-oriented institutions (including maintenance of coastal livelihoods, uniting ﬁsheries economics with, among other things, trade and other activities in the value chain and community and coastal zone management).12 For simplicity, these are not addressed here, but would make the need for coherence across policies and thus, institutions even greater. Table 36.1 illustrates how global and regional institutions operate in combination across these three key illustrative functions. Whether mandates or “reach”

are narrow or broad, these institutions contribute to the collective outcome of these combined functions. Moreover, diverse government interlocutors with these agencies are part of the institutional landscape. Tables 36.1 and 36.2 implicate more than two dozen types of institutions as engaged in direct activities of “ﬁshing.”13 Some of these are themselves collectives of individual organizations or bodies (e.g., regional ﬁsheries management organizations [RFMOs]).14 Some are intergovernmental, while others are more informal. These institutions illustrate the potential spectrum of policy, management, research, and science bodies, with ecological, economic, and social mandates. Fishing-speciﬁc policy forums sponsoring formal state-to-state dialogue at a “global” level include, for example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO; global) and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD; mainly developed countries) and their sponsored ﬁsheries-related committees, and the U.N. Informal Consultation of States Parties (ICSP) to the U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA). Broader policy bodies include, for instance, some ﬁsheries-related meetings of the U.N. Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea (UNICPOLOS). Regional approaches rely on,

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36.2 List of acronyms of international organizations

Acronym

Organization

ABLOS APEC CBD CITES CPLP CODEX EJF FAO GEF GEOSS GRAME GOF GOOS IAG ICES IGO IHO ILO IMO ISA IPHC IUCN

IHO/IAG Advisory Board on the Law of the Sea Asia Paciﬁc Economic Cooperation Convention on Biological Diversity Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries Codex Alimentarius Commission Environmental Justice Foundation Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Global Environment Facility Global Earth Observation System of Systems Global Reporting and Assessment of the State of the Marine Environment Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts, and Islands (“Global Oceans Forum”) Global Ocean Observing System International Association of Geodesy International Council for the Exploration of the Sea Intergovernmental Organization International Hydrographic Organization International Labor Organization International Maritime Organization International Seabed Authority International Paciﬁc Halibut Commission The World Conservation Union (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) International Whaling Commission Large Marine Ecosystem International Monitoring, Control and Surveillance Network for Fisheries Related Activities Memorandum of Understanding Marine Stewardship Council Measurement Science Review North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization New Partnership for Africa’s Development Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Partnerships in Environmental Management for the Seas of East Asia North Paciﬁc Marine Science Organization Paciﬁc Islands Forum Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center United Nations U.N. ad hoc open-ended informal working group on Marine Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development U.N. Development Program U.N. Environment Program U.N. Educational, Scientiﬁc and Cultural Organization—Intergovernmental Oceanic Commission U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement Review U.N. General Assembly U.N. Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea (also known as UN-ICP) World Trade Organization

IWC LME MCS Network MOU MSC MSR NASCO NEPAD OECD PEMSEA PICES PIF SEAFDEC U.N. BBNJ UN-CSD UNDP UNEP UNESCO-IOC UNFSA Review UNGA UNICPOLOS WTO

for example, management bodies of RFMOs, the Asia Paciﬁc Economic Cooperation (APEC) Fisheries Working Group, and some aspects of the Marine Conservation Working Group, and other regional ﬁshing-related forums, such as the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC). Science

bodies include appropriate expert groups of the International Council for Exploration of the Sea (ICES), North Paciﬁc Marine Science Organization (PICES), RFMOs, and the WorldFish Center (focusing on small scale ﬁsheries and aquaculture for developing countries).

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These organizations, and others like them, engage ﬁsheries experts in a variety of ways, with both strength and weaknesses. For example, the FAO, OECD, and APEC engage international ﬁsheries policy experts, who may be relatively weaker themselves on technical aspects of ﬁshing. Scientists, operational ﬁsheries managers and, control and enforcement experts are engaged most directly in the RFMOs but may have little connection to international policy priorities driving RFMO accountability. Science bodies, especially within RFMOs, engage the science community, although not necessarily in an integrated way.15 While consultations among UNFSA states parties could lever comprehensive and integrative debate among international ﬁsheries policy experts at the United Nations, some delegations consist of foreign affairs or U.N. legal experts, who may have different preoccupations. Considerable synergy could be realized if collaboration of expert ﬁshing views were brought together more consistently. State delegations to the nonﬁsheries forums in table 36.1 include various mixes of foreign affairs, environment departments, maritime industry and labor departments, and other (nonﬁsheries) disciplines in marine sciences. Such forums are also attended by ﬁsheries experts, but inconsistently across issues and states, depending on diverse governmental approaches. All forums in table 36.1 include different mandates for, and mixes of, stakeholders. Stakeholders also choose the forums they wish to engage in strategically, according to focal themes of the forums, participatory rights they are given, and the receptivity of the forums to their inputs.16

36.3.2. Are International Organizations/Institutions Fulﬁlling Their Potential to Contribute to Integrated Governance? Points of potential institutional collaboration can be identiﬁed across speciﬁc key functions described earlier (e.g., across the planning cycle, for speciﬁc regions). Table 36.3 applies an adapted Kanie-Haas framework (Haas et al. 2004) to illustrate examples of how greater collaboration could be achieved in these key functions.

36.3.2.1. Agenda and Priority Setting At the level of agenda and priority setting within ﬁsheries, there is fairly high coherence. The function sits

mainly in multilateral policy institutions, and their strong networks of interlinked players, sometimes themselves convened in informal processes, such as the Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts, and Islands (GOF). The U.N. General Assembly, through its Sustainable Fisheries Resolution, consolidates and signals comprehensive emerging priorities, even directing work to speciﬁc bodies and sometimes explicitly outlining collaboration needs. As the resolution is generally adopted by consensus, the commitments are robust. The United Nations also hosts discussions, such as the United Nations’ ICSP to UNFSA, as well as an ad hoc open-ended informal working group on Biological Diversity beyond Areas of National Jurisdiction (BBNJ).17 Importantly, through the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the United Nations has the key international mandate for governance in areas beyond national jurisdiction. The ﬁsheries community generally prefers to avoid broad U.N. politics altogether in favor of working within both the specialized U.N. ﬁsheries agency (FAO) and RFMOs (see table 36.4). But for broader issues such as highseas biodiversity, the ﬁshing sector overcomes this reticence and prefers a close association with the United Nations, whereas the biodiversity conservation community prefers the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and related forums. UNCLOS facilitates the ﬁsheries preference for the United Nations by being interpretable as a sectorally based convention, further enabled and detailed by its main implementing agreement UNFSA for straddling and highly migratory ﬁsh stocks. Provisions of UNCLOS itself are also used by the biodiversity community to support their preference for the CBD to address the same issues. The FAO, a U.N. specialized agency, hosts various bodies, such as the Committee on Fisheries (COFI) and its two subcommittees (Trade, Aquaculture). It is the only global ﬁsheries-related institution sponsoring state-to-state debate and negotiations on norms and tools, even though that mandate is nested in a broader food and agriculture/ﬁsheries/forestry mandate. Its secretariat is one of the major international contributors to technical ﬁsheries research and analysis. It has led innovation in new obligations now enshrined in international law (UNFSA), such as the use of the precautionary approach (FAO 1996a, 1996b) and ecosystem approach (FAO 2003). As a global institution with an extensive secretariat, states expect FAO to be the representative “voice” of the ﬁsheries sector in

International Organizations and Fisheries Governance TABLE

493

36.3 Illustrative functions of key international organizations active in ﬁsheriesa

Function

Within Fisheries

Priority Areas Linked to Fisheries

Issues linkage, e.g., across issues, institutions or projects

FAO, OECD, regional forums/treaties (e.g., APEC, Arctic Council, Antarctic, PIF), U.N. (various), IUCN, national governments, WorldFish Center UNGA resolutions, UNFSA Review, BBNJ, UNICPOLOS, FAO, APEC, arctic and other regional forums, ad hoc high-level conferences, IUCN, some NGOs/ENGOs OECD, FAO, ICES, PICES, other scientiﬁc bodies, RFMO scientiﬁc bodies, academics, UNEP, UNESCO-IOC, IUCN, NGOs/ ENGOs, WorldFish Center, PEMSEA, SEAFDEC, national governments FAO, OECD, RFMOs, NGOs/ENGOs, UNEP, WorldFish Center, national governments

CBD, U.N., UNEP, UNDP, IMO, WTO, LMEs, Regional Seas-type organizations, GOF, national governments GOF, CBD, CITES, IMO, UNEP, WTO, UNICPOLOS,

Agenda setting, e.g., including generating political buy-in

Developing usable knowledge, e.g., information for decision-making

Monitoring, e.g., scanning, threats detection, implementation successes and failures

Norm development, e.g., guidelines, codes, best practice delineation

FAO, OECD, industry-led codes of conduct CODEX, ILO, IUCN, private codes (e.g., MSC), ENGOs, EJF, Chatham House Rule making, outcomes of negotiations, U.N., FAO, WTO, CITES, state unilateral can be with sanctions or dispute actions (e.g., technical requirements resolution mechanisms for trade), RFMOs, IWC Policy veriﬁcation, e.g., verifying state FAO, OECD, U.N. Reviews, IUCN, and others’ compliance RFMOs, national governments Enforcement, e.g., sanctions, liability, RFMOs, WTO, CITES, NGOs/ENGOs, shaming national governments Capacity building and technology transfer, e.g., education, technical training, tech assistance

Promoting vertical linkages, e.g., interorganizationally or among decision makers Financing, e.g., ﬁnancing institutions

Ofﬁcial development assistance, partnerships across and within IGOs, regional bodies (e.g., APEC, PIF), NGOs/ENGOs, bilateral and regional MOUs, RFMOs, UNDP, NEPAD, CPLP, MCS Network, WorldFish Center FAO, OECD, NGOs/ENGOs, UNEP, UNESCO-IOC Ofﬁcial development assistance, World Bank, regional development banks, FAO, U.N. trust funds, GEF, multilateral bodies

IMO, ISA, LMEs, Regional Seas-like bodies, UNEP, RFMO scientiﬁc bodies, national governments, UNESCO-IOC, GOOS, GEOSS, Census of Marine Life CBD, GOF, IMO, ISA, UNEP, science bodies, UNESCO-IOC, future Global Marine Assessment, U.N. Atlas, NGOs/ENGOs, regional forums, national governments IMO, ILO, CBD, scientiﬁc codes (i.e., MSR)

IMO, ILO, London Convention, IWC

CBD, UN-CSD, GOF, national governments National government RFMOs, WTO, CITES, NGOs/ENGOs, national governments Ofﬁcial development assistance, partnerships across and within IGOs, regional bodies (e.g. APEC, PIF), NGOs/ENGOs, bilateral and regional MOUs, GOF

GOF, UNICPOLOS, UNEP, CBD, UNESCO-IOC Ofﬁcial development assistance, World Bank, regional development banks, FAO, U.N. trust funds, multilateral bodies

a

For abbreviations that are not deﬁned in this table, please see table 36.2.

broader international debates, as well as advance the complex normative agenda with respect to ﬁsheries governance and management. The FAO is deeply engaged in capacity-building ﬁeldwork for developing countries—often on a regional basis—and is the

deﬁnitive source of the most important integrated ﬁshing data and monitoring globally. The OECD COFI plays a key role as an analytical/ research body for emerging economic issues of importance to member governments and international

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debate. The OECD concerns itself with international cooperation among mainly developed countries, although it increasingly includes major developing states in its activities through various cooperative mechanisms. While its membership is not global, its work has increasing global reach through analysis of topics with high international resonance, and through workshops drawing on broad expertise globally (in ﬁsheries, often in partnership with FAO). Its work is inherently integrating, as its focus is on analytical frameworks and practice that holistically situate current management changes and debates (see chapter 23). At the regional level, various regional umbrella organizations translate global priorities into regional action (e.g., APEC, SEAFDEC, Partnerships in Environmental Management for the Seas of East Asia [PEMSEA]). Ad hoc regional processes are also powerful, such as a recent initiative on IUU ﬁshing among states involved in the newly formed “Coral Triangle Initiative.” When progress lags on key issues in a manner that cannot be solved by ofﬁcials alone, highlevel ministerial meetings may cement priorities at the political level. For example, the ministerially led High Seas Task Force in IUU ﬁshing (2006), launched by the OECD Roundtable on Sustainable Development, helped set in train an IUU agenda that still frames present actions. The St. John’s Conference in Canada, held in 2005,18 is widely credited with having launched an RFMO reform agenda. Initiatives in the South Paciﬁc Islands with Australia on IUU ﬁshing are providing similar leadership and high-level commitment. There is much less coherence in how ﬁsheries are addressed in the broad marine, or oceans “agenda setting,” despite key bodies in the broader debate having “integrative” roles by deﬁnition (see chapter 10). As relates the United Nations, the U.N. Omnibus Resolution on Oceans and the Law of the Sea makes political linkages and crossreferences to ﬁshing as appropriate, but this and the Sustainable Fisheries Resolution address quite different constituencies. The CBD is rooted in an international convention with nearly universal ratiﬁcation that lays out principles for conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, and for sharing of beneﬁts from use. It does not differentiate among marine or terrestrial biodiversity, although it does have a marine program called the Jakarta Mandate. Theoretically, the CBD could be a logical central forum for marine “agenda setting,” necessarily

linked closely with ﬁsheries institutions given that CBD has no jurisdiction for direct management of ﬁsheries (or other activities) in the high seas. Its mandate is for provision of scientiﬁc and technical advice (including on conservation norms) for use beyond national or management jurisdictions, and by states if and as they choose. However, the mutual lack of trust between CBD stakeholders and ﬁsheries critically weakens this integrative role. Delegations to CBD rarely include ﬁsheries experts and ﬁshing stakeholders, whereas environmental NGOs (ENGOs) are numerous. Recommendations unsympathetic—and sometimes contrary—to international ﬁsheries policy direction can ﬁnd greater support in CBD debates. Similarly, delegations to FAO COFI rarely include biodiversity experts, whereas ﬁshing organizations are active. The coherence in policy dialogue within these two settings also can suffer because many states send entirely different government interlocutors (with different views) to the two forums. Such state incoherence confuses other states and the international organizations themselves. It can lead to unhelpful “forum hopping,” where interest groups seek out the forums that will be most sympathetic to their perspective.19 Ideally, coherent national state viewpoints would help allow like issues to play coherently across organizations according to their strengths, and contribute to coherence and closer collaboration among institutions. Similar lack of coherence has occurred in respect of Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), when examining whether trade contributes to endangerment of commercial marine species, and should be restricted. Confusion over actual and proposed mandate expansion of CITES (e.g., into management issues themselves) and incoherent national positions (i.e., between ﬁsheries and environmental agencies within governments) have made some debates very difﬁcult. There have also been strains among secretariats (e.g., between CITES and the FAO) with respect to the use of FAO expert advice as relates ﬁsheries, but these differences are under resolution. Informal forums can be useful in uniting diverse interests and players, as they suffer fewer institutional constraints, including “ofﬁcial” delegations and institutional roles that may inhibit open and free debate. The Global Oceans Forum (GOF) meets approximately every three years to monitor progress on World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) commitments, but is trying to reorient

International Organizations and Fisheries Governance itself as a major integrator and agenda-setter across ﬁsheries, oceans, and biodiversity issues. Notably, it explicitly encourages integration of management from watershed to coastal zone to the high seas. Some ﬁshing policy experts are engaged in the GOF, less so technical ﬁsheries experts, and rarer still, ﬁshing industry interests, unlike other oceans sectors. (Meanwhile, the International Coalition of Fishing Associations is making strategic linkages to new forums outside immediate ﬁshing organizations, and a new multisector industry coalition called the World Oceans Council is under early development. Both are intended to promote an industry voice in agenda setting). The Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) plays a similar role but is much larger and involves state delegations among the various tables, featuring also signiﬁcant ENGO presence. In the absence of interagency MOUs and formal collaborative processes, some of these efforts may not achieve the systematic collaboration needed to ensure efﬁcient leverage of knowledge, experience and resources. Some coordination and information sharing happens through coordinating bodies (UN-Oceans), and informal arrangements among secretariats of international organizations. When structural arrangements fall short of integration and coherence, drawing linkages among broader initiatives can fall to individuals from states, secretariats, or NGOs/IGOs with personal connections across issues, ministries, and international forums, relying on the individual inﬂuence they bring to international debate. NGOs/ENGOs with a global reach can—and sometimes do—play an important integrating role. However when some advocate positions or use language hostile to ﬁshing interests, they foster distrust by the ﬁshing sector, reducing their effectiveness as potential bridge builders.

36.3.2.2. Norms and Rules Generally the same institutions and players engaged in agenda-setting develop ﬁsheries global norms and rules. Within ﬁsheries, coherence is high. However challenges still arise, for instance, from alternate views among states and stakeholders of principles and approaches, such as precautionary and ecosystem-based approaches. With a few exceptions (e.g., ﬂag and port state norms under development), sufﬁcient rules are deemed to be in place within the traditional scope of ﬁsheries to manage well. Key

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shortcomings are, rather, weak implementation and impediments to reform. This has put emphasis on mechanisms for capacity building for developing countries and research in implementing reform. The FAO’s Code of Conduct of Responsible Fishing (CCRF) is a key unifying framework for norms and rules taking into account both technical ﬁsheries issues and developments of UNCLOS, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), and the CBD, and providing key guidelines to assist implementation. However, as operational linkages to the broader biodiversity, oceans trade and development agendas gain priority, FAO members are beginning to demand that the FAO’s active role become more integrative. If, within its current mandate, the FAO is de facto a preexisting “ﬁshing equivalent” of a “World Environmental Organization” supported by a resilient policy framework—deemed by some as a necessary to effective international governance—then FAO needs to ensure it has integrative guidelines and tools that are contemporary, adaptive and sound. The FAO may need to periodically review and update its Guidelines, as international practice continuously adapts to global norms. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a critical institution supporting rules-based, nondiscriminatory trade across many dimensions. A new set of government trade-related norms is under negotiation, including for subsidies that create pressure for overcapacity and overﬁshing. If the Doha Round is ultimately successful and such subsidy discussions succeed (both highly uncertain at the time of writing), then ongoing collaboration between the WTO and FAO may be mandated (regarding deﬁnitions of certain subsidy types, international “standards” for ﬁsheries management that might justify certain kinds of payments, review, or dispute processes). This need for potential institutional collaboration derives from OECD COFI clariﬁcation of conditions under which subsides had negative impacts on ﬁsheries. This example shows the potential for horizontal synergies at the sectoral policy level across three global institutions. Private norms and standards driven by market demand for sustainable products (e.g., ecocertiﬁcation) challenge the coherence of the overall governance system. Such norms and standards normally lie outside the formal state/rules-based global system, offering states little recourse to normal routes of trade recourse and dispute settlement, should market access be blocked by buyers’ refusal of

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nonecolabeled product. The risk is compounded if private standards compete with the current state of practice implied by negotiated global norms.20 This is emerging as a signiﬁcant policy debate as major markets increase demand for such standards-based market measures. The biggest governance controversy regarding norms for biodiversity and integrated oceans use, with implications for ﬁsheries governance, is whether a new implementing agreement under UNCLOS is needed to provide principles and regulatory and institutional vision for high-seas biodiversity outcomes (see Gjerde et al. 2008). Those who advocate such an Agreement argue for a clear legal basis of cooperation for conservation for biodiversity outside national jurisdiction. Widely used ﬁshery-related sectoral tools such as area and timebased closures are already supported by the existing legal and regulatory frameworks in ﬁsheries. Proponents of an implementing agreement argue that no similar mechanisms or principles exist to support state cooperation in achieving nonﬁsheries objectives through integrated management, marine protected areas (MPAs), and so forth, in the high seas. The international community is divided on this option, especially given important implementation gaps for already existing obligations, but the issue arises in international policy debate across a range of forums. Despite the potential implications of this debate for high-seas ﬁshing governance, few in the ﬁshing community seem aware of it. For example, if a new regime mandated a “multisector global or regional convenor” to support high-seas MPAs or set standards for impact assessments on the high seas, RFMO discretion might be affected.

36.3.2.3. Usable Knowledge for Decision Making and Monitoring Both ﬁsheries and environmental policies are science based, providing a potential common foundation on which build integrated policies and strategies. In practice this has too rarely occurred. Although RFMOs and national ﬁsheries management agencies have formal science advisory councils, these councils generally are dominated by ﬁsheries scientists from national laboratories. Likewise experts used by U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), CBD, and related biodiversity/conservation organizations tend to come exclusively from academia and nature or environment ministries. Even working from the

same data, these groups of experts can arrive at different evaluations of risks, and advice on policy and management options. Some differences arise from differential credibility given to different types of data (particularly ﬁshery-dependent and ﬁsheryindependent sources; Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada [DFO] 2007). However, much of the difference arises from different treatment of uncertainty. Biodiversity interests are highly risk averse to “misses” (not acting when there may be a conservation issue and accept a high-false alarm rate (e.g., advising restrictions, which may turn out to have been unnecessary (IUCN 2006). However, ﬁsheries advisors may seek less imbalance between Misses and False Alarms when applying precaution (Rice and Legacè 2007). Recently, these streams of scientiﬁc support are becoming more integrated. Many science advisory processes of RFMOs now include ecologists and participants from academia or civil society. The FAO expert consultation for scientiﬁc and technical guidelines for deep-sea ﬁsheries included experts from conservation IGOs and ENGOs; a recent CBD workshop on ecologically signiﬁcant areas in the high seas had an observer from FAO. ICES has merged three separate advisory committees on ﬁsheries management, marine environmental quality, and ecosystems into a single integrated advisory process. Consistent science is a precursor for coherent policy, so such initiatives must be replicated. Sometimes expert work independent of institutions has a higher chance of being seen as “neutral,” such as the international strategic workshops on criteria for ecologically and biologically signiﬁcant areas (EBSAs) and exercises on bio-geographic mapping. Products are then available to multiple policy communities with the EBSA report taken up by both FAO and CBD high-seas initiatives. Future work applying these criteria is also being planned so the work of science groups of RFMOs and conservation IGOs is complementary rather than competitive.

36.3.2.4. Management and Enforcement: The Weakest Links? The weak links in domestic and international ﬁsheries are both implementation and weak vertical links between technical experts and the policy frameworks that are setting the accountabilities for management. Environment critics argue that RFMOs do not adequately discuss developments in the overall

International Organizations and Fisheries Governance agenda, to which their actions may be accountable (see Meltzer 2005). The international marine conservation community is especially focused on weak RFMO performance, including incomplete coverage across areas and species (especially nontuna species), and the existence of both institutionalized overﬁshing and illegal ﬁshing within and outside RFMOs. Some key states express concern about lack of accountability of RFMOs to any speciﬁc authority. Although there is no consensus on this concern, there is an appetite and an expectation internationally that RFMOs will both form a more strategic network of ﬁsheries governance, and will address, within their mandates, the impacts of ﬁsheries on biodiversity and not just on the target stocks of ﬁsheries.

TABLE

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RFMOs (table 36.4) are products of their contracting parties and face numerous cooperation challenges, including weak scope for independent functioning of their secretariats by capacity or by design. But many have committed to independent review and reform, and tuna RFMOs are collaborating under a 2006 Kobe Action Plan (Anonymous 2006). Innovations include integrated vessels lists (e.g., illegal tuna vessels in one RFMO become illegal vessel in all tuna RFMOs), and similar cooperation occurs between the North West Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) and North East Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NEAFC) in the north Atlantic. Although, most agree that RFMOs are strengthening their regimes,21 many argue that there remains weak oversight and public

36.4 RFMOs and overview maps

Overviews

ICCAT GFCM WCPFC IATTC CCSBT IOTC NAFO NEAFC SEAFO CCAMLR South Paciﬁc RFMO Donut Hole Peanut Hole Loophole South Tasman Rise Arrangement SIOFA

Overviews of straddling ﬁsh stocks http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fgc-cgp/documents/meltzer/maps/ OverviewStraddling.pdf Overview of highly migratory ﬁsh stocks http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fgc-cgp/documents/meltzer/maps/OverviewTuna.pdf International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna http://www.iccat.int/ General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean http://www.gfcm.org/gfc Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission http://www.wcpfc.int/ Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission http://www.iattc.org/HomeENG.htm Commission for the Conservation of Southern Blueﬁn Tuna http://www.ccsbt.org/ Indian Ocean Tuna Commission http://www.iotc.org/English/index.php North West Atlantic Fisheries Organization http://www.nafo.int/ North East Atlantic Fisheries Organization http://www.neafc.org South East Atlantic Fisheries Organization http://www.seafo.org/ Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources http://www.ccamlr.org/ South Paciﬁc Regional Fisheries Management Organization http://www.southpaciﬁcrfmo.org/ Central Bering Sea “Donut Hole” http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fgc-cgp/documents/meltzer/DONUTHOLEﬁnal.pdf Sea of Okhotsk “Peanut Hole” http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fgc-cgp/documents/meltzer/maps/PeanutHole.pdf Barents Sea Loophole http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fgc-cgp/documents/meltzer/maps/LoopHole.pdf South Tasman Rise Arrangement http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fgc-cgp/documents/meltzer/maps/TasmanRise.pdf Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Arrangement (proposed) ftp://ftp.fao.org/ﬁ/DOCUMENT/safr/swiofc_1_2005/inf4e.pdf

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accountability. Some argue that FAO should assume this role, beyond current meetings with secretariats on administrative than management issues.22 However FAO seems not to be keen on a broader supervisory role, and some states oppose any centralized oversight, preferring regional accountability to relevant governments and stakeholders. Thus, there are both horizontal and vertical integration challenges within the RFMO regime. Moreover, failures in domestic policy affect RFMO success, for example, migration of overcapacity in the high seas, and lack of incentives for states to turn from allocation issues to conservation issues. As for the role of RFMOs in broader regional oceans governance, even improved integration among RFMOs is currently inadequate to form a strong management net in the high seas. Unfortunately, the gap cannot be ﬁlled easily. Moreover, currently there are few examples of high-seas multisectoral integrated management mechanisms—thus little experience on how these would accommodate autonomous RFMOs.23

36.3.2.5. Capacity Building and Financing Policy coherence for development is a weakness in ﬁsheries. A key issue undermining incentives for effective ﬁshing and oceans governance is lack of developing-country access to value added from oceans, sometimes including to resources in their own EEZs (e.g., lack of capacity, gear conﬂicts with foreign vessels, or realizing broad beneﬁts from access agreements with distant water ﬂeets). New players have difﬁculty accessing fully allocated ﬁsheries under RFMO management, or to enhance capacity by using chartered foreign vessels. Some states seek new allocations even from depleted ﬁsheries and can block conservation measures in order to keep allocations higher. These challenges are ampliﬁed under capacity reduction priorities of RFMOs and arguments about who should bear the costs of capacity reduction.24 All high-seas ﬁshing states are expected to join RFMOs or ﬁsh in compliance with RFMO rules; membership in some tuna RFMOs has jumped to possibly unmanageable levels and with large capacity-building needs. Some RFMOs, such as the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT), have few members that have ratiﬁed UNFSA, making reform to UNFSA standards more difﬁcult. Addressing and managing the inevitable transition to more inclusive high-seas allocations—and

thus improved incentives for conservation—may be one of the most important analytical questions for high-seas ﬁsheries. The OECD COFI is looking at lessons learned from allocation reforms in other sectors, including market-based approaches to both reduction of greenhouse gases and water reform, but they may be most applicable to new RFMOs without entrenched ﬁshing allocations. Analytical advice is also needed for change management in this charged issue. Capacity building (institutionally and otherwise) for developing states is a difﬁcult issue. Often speciﬁc needs are unclear and funding inadequate. There is already too much global overcapacity, and some developing states already have large or too-large high seas ﬂeets. Other than large trust funds, such as the UNFSA Part VII Fund, there is little transparency in sources of ﬁnancing for management capacity building.25 The World Bank and regional development banks are playing an increasing role. Ofﬁcial development assistance in many states is demand driven and often out of the hands of ﬁsheries ministries to use strategically, unless partnering with aid agencies is high. Often aid, including NGO-delivered programming is used more to create jobs and income than for public institution building, amplifying the problems posed by governance gaps. Large funding sources like the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) tend to ﬁnance large integrative oceans and climate/oceans projects, which may or may not deal with ﬁsheries issues directly. In 2009, UNFSA states parties engaged non-states parties (many of which are developing states) in detail on reasons inhibiting ratiﬁcation of the UNFSA agreement, including policy differences and weak awareness and capacity gaps. Meanwhile, developing states are being asked to share in higher conservation standards and related mechanisms while they face uncertain access to the gains from ﬁsheries recovery; misalignment of incentives is interfering in priority setting and norm setting in international organizations, as well as in adopting precautionary RFMO conservation measures. Legal ﬁshing opportunities would play a role in aligning incentives among all players for conservation. Institutionally, developing countries seem to favor the CBD as the international organization of choice, given its commitment to principles of equity in use of biodiversity, as opposed to the UNCLOS/ UNFSA principles of “freedom of the high seas.” Developing countries also see the CBD featuring

International Organizations and Fisheries Governance issues that they argue are inadequately addressed in UNCLOS (e.g., regulatory regime for use and sharing of biodiversity, including marine genetic resources). Developing states may also favor environmental forums possibly because environmental tools like MPAs are easier to implement than complicated EAF systems and possibly given the propensity of such forums to favor small-scale and lower-tech ﬁsheries exploitation. Consequently, while ﬁsheries are often formally delegated to agriculture, rural, or development ministries, environmental institutions and their preferred tools may be, de facto, the most inﬂuential in determining the conservation measures facing ﬁsheries in developing states.

36.4. ACHIEVING GREATER INTEGRATION 36.4.1. Forces Acting for Increased Integration While aspects of the picture for coherence in ﬁsheries policy may seem bleak, many factors are promoting increased integration, including through the contributions of international organizations. The intensifying oceans and ﬁsheries agenda is stretching the capacities of all states, putting a premium on policy efﬁciency and the seeming lack of policy coherence among international institutions is gaining attention. Consequently, the two oceans-related U.N. resolutions are being used proactively to promote coherence in the international agenda, and they may be a major constructive force in future. The increasing prevalence of integrative oceans policies and strategies (and accountabilities) is exposing states to a broader set of institutions and how they work together. The increasing adoption of ecosystem approaches to ﬁsheries (EAF) and to oceans management is forcing greater integration as well, as agencies confront their inability to achieve broader ecosystem objectives without working in harmony with other diverse institutions. Maturation of informal international governance processes such as UNICPOLOS facilitates open, exploratory dialogue on opportunities for greater integration on sensitive and complex horizontal policy issues related to UNCLOS. Finally, growing public demand for change in marine policy is encouraging a greater political will and industry receptivity to change. Provisions in the highest level agreements, such as in paragraph 83 of the 2006 Sustainable Fisheries

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Resolution, to protect vulnerable marine ecosystems from serious adverse impacts of ﬁshing, are forcing diverse expert communities together. This paragraph gives RFMOs broader responsibilities for biodiversity protection within their ﬁsheries mandates. They must plan their activities in an integrated way, both to use the limited technical expertise of ﬁsheries experts and oceans ecologists efﬁciently and to ensure that various agencies adopt work constructively rather than antagonistically. These activities, in turn, are building new regional networks of interaction, both among RFMOs, and between RFMOs and regional seas-type organizations (e.g., Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Northeast Atlantic [OSPAR]). As these networks begin to deliver collaborative operational products, some of the distrust between traditional ﬁsheries and biodiversity interests may diminish. These factors are being augmented by acceptance of more “inclusive governance,” which ﬁrst brought ﬁsheries stakeholders into larger roles in ﬁsheries assessment and management, and is now bringing the ENGO community into the same settings. (The European Regional Advisory Councils, for example, are directed to have up to one-third “environmental” members.) Accountability for consistent policies and practices domestically and internationally is growing, facilitating better vertical integration, and exposing progress on reform to scrutiny from diverse perspectives domestically and internationally. There is cause for continuing caution as well as optimism, however. Few of the underlying factors that made sustainability of ﬁsheries elusive in older frameworks have disappeared, perpetuating the risk of ongoing sustainability issues in ﬁsheries and continued broader distrust of sectoral solutions. If underlying counterincentives to conservation have not been addressed, no amount of international integrated management can ﬁx the issues. Overcapacity of ﬂeets and undercapacity of many states for science and management continue to be realities. Where compliance and enforcement are weak for ﬁsheries, they will also undermine biodiversity. And decades of distrust between ﬁsheries stakeholders and others will not be overcome quickly, especially if ﬁsheries continue on stocks not showing deﬁnitive signs of recovery. Often the international debate on oceans health is hostile to sectoral issues (including ﬁshing and shipping). Increased calls for “suppression” of ﬁsheries governance in relation to “preferred” oceans or biodiversity tools (e.g., MPAs) as the “only” ways to meet

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societal objectives, creates stakeholder, policy and institutional conﬂict and an inability to emphasize a win–win agenda. Resultant distrust, resistance, and partisan stakeholder pressure ultimately constrain the ability of governments themselves to work across various forums. Further, confronting the “north/south divide” on conservation—and especially use and sharing beneﬁts—of biodiversity (including regarding “common heritage” issues playing through U.N. and CBD debates) can aggravate rather than reduce challenges in related issues such as ﬁsheries, where agendas converge. Lastly, differences of views remain internationally—and are playing out through a number of institutions—on whether ﬁsheries and other biodiversity shortcomings are mainly related to “implementation gaps” regarding existing international obligations, or whether a lack of international rule making and governance is the root of the problem. Sometimes these two approaches are treated as alternate paths to improved governance. Rather they represent a continuum of integrated tools and approaches from “top-down” governance (a unifying law, and unifying “world [marine] environmental organization to manage all aspects of oceans use, popular with the conservation community), to bottom-up (building up from existing approaches— including sectoral—and using less formal methods where implementation gaps are present; supported by most ﬁshing interests).26 Bioregionalization and uniﬁed regional planning provide opportunities for the latter, but both require an effective and integrated international governance as a foundation for implementing their results. This is more likely to bear fruit, as it is, in any case, necessary for better outcomes irrespective of broader governance options, and is more widely supported by states, especially ﬁshing states. Overall, the most practical examples of integrated governance are occurring at the regional level (see section 36.2), to meet speciﬁc regional challenges of local signiﬁcance, and where incentives to cooperate are strongest. Much of this work is supported and funded by international organizations—the challenge now is to integrate the lessons for broader application.

36.4.2. Recommendations for Change It is clear that opportunities for synergies among institutions are huge, but they will not fall into

place without action. Some speciﬁc steps are both warranted and feasible. First of all, there is room for more coherence and integration within ﬁsheries institutions and interests. This needs a completed and robust legal and regulatory framework, including increased adherence and ﬁnalization of speciﬁc supporting regimes: port and ﬂag state measures and extending UNFSA principles into a regime for discrete (as opposed to straddling and highly migratory) ﬁsh stocks. Dialogue is needed among those who have not ratiﬁed international instruments; distinctions need to be made among lack of awareness, lack of capacity to adhere to commitments, policy differences with their obligations, or simple political difﬁculties. Solutions to encourage ratiﬁcations can then be targeted. Progress on other gaps above is necessary, and in some cases is under way. The ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries is a key integrating framework between ﬁsheries and biodiversity, fully within the existing mandates of national and regional ﬁsheries institutions so controversial mandate changes are not implied, and implementation needs to be strengthened urgently. Without deﬁnitive implementation of ecosystem approaches to ﬁsheries, the common goals and objectives of integrated oceans management cannot ﬁnd delivery in ﬁsheries-related institutions and outcomes. Simple oceans tools such as closures or MPAs are not a full solution to the need for a rigorous ecosystem-based approach to ﬁsheries that includes assessment, prediction, and regulation of impacts on nontarget species and habitats, for example. Indeed, overreliance on MPAs as an all-purpose ecosystem tool impedes institutional development of truly effective spatial tools nested in broader ﬁsheries management approaches to avoid displacing effort into even more vulnerable situations (Cochrane 2007). While arguments regarding top-down governance are most familiar in terms of environmental governance (advocating global legal regimes and global institutions to knit agendas together), and remain highly controversial, the ﬁsheries sector already has a global institution that could, within its current mandate, better help integrate the diverse agenda within ﬁsheries. There is scope— possibly a critical need—for FAO to increase its strategic and normative role in international ﬁsheries governance. It should be the integrator of other agendas to the ﬁsheries sector—and vice versa. It does not yet play this role with uniform strength in debates it convenes, although individual experts in

International Organizations and Fisheries Governance the secretariat can have quite extensive professional ties across issues. The FAO may need to continually examine the guidelines implementing the CCRF to ensure the CCRF remains sufﬁciently integrating in its guidance, and the FAO itself remains up-to-date. The FAO needs to reach out to different organizations as the proactive global ﬁsheries voice, particularly for marine biodiversity issues, and it needs to challenge the coherence and outcomes of ﬁshing management and governance more aggressively. More active and integrated assessment of ﬁsheries impacts is needed— especially to help ﬁsheries states understand the various facets of the planning environment of which they have not demonstrated full awareness. Additionally, despite strong engagement of certain individuals, more active systematic leadership in collaboration across forums is needed. A major step forward, however, has been a strategic MOU with CITES to collaborate on the provision of expert advice in the possible listing of ﬁsheries on CITES annexes. There is room to improve regional ﬁsheries governance as well. RFMO reform, already under way, is an increasing priority for states and stakeholders, as is greater horizontal collaboration across states and regions. Aside from tuna RFMOs, the global reach of RFMOs is incomplete, with gaps in nontuna coverage. RFMOs need to be brought together more regularly and strategically, preferably under the auspices of the FAO in the absence of any other formal or accountable mechanism, moving to include those from commissions that can be engaged in strategic discussions. Informal processes for dialogue on ﬁsheries and biodiversity interests should be strengthened where they exist, and should be created where needed. The informal processes must ensure that players in all the roles referenced in section 36.2.3 have forums when candid but serious dialogue identiﬁes opportunities for greater integration and actions take advantage of them, and barriers to integration and means to overcome them. As progress is made on opportunities for integration across sectoral agencies or among regional agencies within sectors, additional strategic MOUs should be developed to institutionalize cooperation. The science advice relied on by ﬁsheries management and biodiversity conservation agencies should come from common bodies and processes where the different scientiﬁc disciplines are fully integrated and interact through all stages in development of the advice.

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Capacity building remains a priority, especially to address the “north/south” differences in capacity, focused on the opportunities for greatest integration at ecologically meaningful regional scales. Policy research and analysis needs to continue and deepen, to provide coherent frameworks under which to understand needs, roles, standards, and best practices. Improvements in ﬁshing are needed, as is analysis of the needs and options for better integrated oceans governance and tools, often currently based on weak analysis and diagnostics. Strategies for integration of ﬁsheries into broader oceans debates should focus on mutual gain to all participants, including improving implementation of existing obligations, before launching into new global negotiations when global views are so diverse. If a vision of mutual gain is not forthcoming, then neither will be trust and buy-in, such as between ﬁsheries and others linked to the oceans and biodiversity agenda. For states, advances on these recommendations will mean greater coherence of policy and management both domestically and internationally, greater accountability for the consequences of all the activities being managed in the seas, and greater beneﬁts from investments in science, management, monitoring, and review. Coherence starts at home. While states may complain about the lack of coherence among multiple players, institutional secretariats cite the lack of coherence among national delegations as a clear impediment to their decision making. National integration vertically and horizontally should be a priority for states, and where entrenched local interests form barriers to integration, full use of the progress at international forums should be brought to bear on these interests.

Acknowledgments All opinions are of the authors alone and cannot be attributed to the Government of Canada.

Notes 1. Benedict (2001), as cited in Haas (2008), offers a useful deﬁnition of “governance”: “A purposeful order that emerges from institutions, processes, norms, formal agreements, and informal mechanisms that regulate action for a common good. Global governance encompasses activity at the international, transnational and regional levels

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and refers to activities in the public and private sectors that transcend national boundaries.” 2. For instance, to combine parts into a whole; complete an imperfect thing through the addition of parts; form, or blend into a functioning or uniﬁed whole. 3. Working in a concerted way, arranging things in a sequence, alignment, rank, and harmonization. 4. “Globalization and Fisheries” is part of the just-completed work program of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Fisheries Committee, to be published in 2009. See OECD (2006) for proceedings of a preparatory workshop on these issues. 5. See Gjerde et al. (2008) for a useful compendium of regulations, institutions, and gaps in relation to ﬁshing and biodiversity. 6. For example, the devastating impact of illegal sea urchin ﬁsheries in Asia on viability of legal North American ﬁsheries. 7. In fact, the seeming ineffectiveness of “soft law” is leading to a renewed interest in binding international minimum “standards to tighten of global norms.” 8. Unwillingness or inability to implement measures domestically may cause opposition to measures when needed in international contexts. 9. For example, unwillingness of the political system to declare its risk tolerances for ﬁsheries, forces management to make choices rather than delineate management options, and may require scientists to take accountability for risks rather than describing them. It can also lead one party in the process to try to usurp the responsibilities of other parties, illustrated by the growth of “advocacy science” as scientiﬁc and technical experts in ﬁsheries and environmental issue try to predetermine the choices among options that are the domain of the policy sector. 10. Which include functions such as issue linkage, agenda setting, developing usable knowledge, monitoring, norm development, rule making, policy veriﬁcation, enforcement, capacity building and technology transfer, promoting vertical linkages, and ﬁnancing. 11. The functions are indicative, and form part of some existing integrating frameworks, such as the Asia Paciﬁc Economic Cooperation (APEC) Bali Plan Action (which unites the Fisheries and Marine Conservation Working Groups) and the Canadian International Governance Strategy. 12. In fact, this has been done in the APEC Bali Plan of Action, adopted by ﬁsheries and oceans– related ministers in 2004, which unites key ﬁsheries and oceans activities into a single sustainable development framework. 13. See Gjerde et al. (2008) for a list of key institutions that match these fairly closely.

14. Table 36.3 provides lists of RFMOs and links to maps and mandates. 15. The Scientiﬁc Council of North West Atlantic Fisheries Organization, for example, has been mainly composed of stock-assessment scientists, not ecosystem experts, limiting its ability to deal with some ecosystem issues. 16. Some environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) have admitted reluctance to raise some issues in the FAO, in order to avoid inducing a contrary on-the-record “sectoral” view. 17. The BBNJ is an ad hoc open-ended informal working group to study issues relating to the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction. 18. Conference on Governance of High Seas Fisheries and the U.N. Fish Agreement (DFO 2005). 19. For example, an ENGO coalition-led promotion of a proposal to declare more than 40 percent of the world’s oceans—including most historical ﬁshing banks—as no-take marine protected areas was promoted ﬁrst at the 8th Conference of the Parties of the CBD. 20. However for wild ﬁsheries the negotiation of ecolabeling guidelines within the FAO was intended by states to reduce this risk, by indicating a standard against which private labels might be judged as more or less legitimate. 21. Assisted in part by the Chatham House, an independent standard developed as part of the High Seas Task Force. See Chatham House (2007). 22. For a detailed review of current mandates, strengths and weakness of RFMOs, see Meltzer (2008). 23. However, it appears that in June 2008, the Commission for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Northeast Atlantic (OSPAR) committed to a high-seas MPA, a breakthrough in regional high-seas integrated management. D. VanderZwaag (2008) describes the relationship between the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC) and OSPAR. However, NEAFC remains generally autonomous under this Arrangement, although NEAFC is takes ecosystem measures consistent with OSPAR priorities. 24. And what it means for states—especially developing coastal states—that aspire to build ﬂeets and access high-seas resources. 25. The Department of Oceans and the Law of the Sea was asked to provide a report in 2009, on behalf of the Secretary General of the United Nations, on the various sources of ﬁnancing available for capacity building, to anchor discussions in the ICSP in 2009. 26. Gjerde et al. (2008) also offer a speciﬁc and practical agenda for increased integration institutionally and across the regulatory framework,

International Organizations and Fisheries Governance globally, trying to bridge such debates into a practical work plan.

References Anonymous (2006). Report of the Joint Meeting of the Tuna RFMOs, Kobe, Japan, 22–26 January. www.tuna-org.org/Documents/other/ FinalReport-Appendices.pdf Chambers, B., and J. Green (eds) (2005). Reforming International Environmental Governance, from Institutional Links to Innovative Reforms. New York: United Nations University. Chatham House (2007). Recommended Best practices for Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. London: Chatham House. Cochrane, K.L. (ed) (2007). Report and Documentation of the Expert Workshop on Marine Protected Areas and Fisheries Management: Review of Issues and Considerations. Rome, 12–14 June 2006. FAO Fisheries Technical Report 825. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. DFO (2005). Conference Report—Conference on Governance of High Seas Fisheries and the United Nations Fish Agreement. Ottawa: Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fgc-cgp/conf_report_e.htm DFO (2007). Assessing Marine Fish Species: Relating Approaches Based on Reference Points with Approaches Based on Risk-of-Extinction Criteria. DFO Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat Proceeding Series 2007/024. Ottawa: Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Dotinga, H., and E. Molenaar (2008). The Mid-Atlantic Ridge: A Case Study on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biodiversity in Areas beyond National Jurisdiction. IUCN Marine Law and Policy Paper #3. Gland, Switzerland: International Union for the Conservation of Nature. FAO (1996a). Precautionary Approach to Fisheries. 1. Guidelines on the Precautionary Approach to Capture Fisheries and Species Introductions. FAO Fisheries Technical Papers 350/1. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (1996b). Precautionary Approach to Fisheries. 2. Scientiﬁc Papers. FAO Fisheries Technical Papers 350/2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2003). Fisheries Management. 2. The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries 4, suppl. 2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Garcia, S.M., and K.L. Cochrane (2005). Ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries: A review of

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implementation guidelines. ICES Journal of Marine Science 62: 311–318. Gjerde, K.M., et al. (2008). Regulatory and Governance Gaps in the International Regime for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biodiversity in Areas beyond National Jurisdiction. Gland, Switzerland: International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Haas, P. (2008). Evaluating the Effectiveness of marine Governance. In: C. Thia-eng, G. Kullenberg, and D. Bonga (eds). Securing the Oceans, Essays on Oceans Governance—Global and Regional Perspectives. Tokyo: GEF/UNDP/ IMO PEMSEA and the Nippon Foundation. Haas P., N. Kanie, and C. Murphy (2004). Institutional design and institutional reform for sustainable development. Pp. 263–281 in N. Kanie and F. Haas (eds). Emerging Forces in Environmental Governance. New York: United Nations University. High Seas Task Force (2006). Closing the Net: Final Report of the Ministerially Led Task Force on IUU Fishing on the High Seas. Paris: OECD Roundtable on Sustainable Development. www.high-seas.org/ IUCN (2006). Guidelines for Using the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria. Gland, Switzerland: International Union for the Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission. Kanie, N. (2004). Global environmental governance in terms of vertical linkages. Pp. 86–114 in N. Kanie and F. Haas (eds). Emerging Forces in Environmental Governance. New York: United Nations University. Kanie, N., and F. Haas (eds) (2004). Emerging Forces in Environmental Governance, New York: United Nations University. Meltzer, E. (2005). Global overview of straddling and highly migratory ﬁsh stocks: Maps and charts detailing RFMO coverage and implementation. International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 20: 3–4. Meltzer, E. (2008). The Quest for Sustainable International Fisheries, Regional Efforts to Implement the 1995 UN Fish Stocks Agreement; an Overview for the May 2006 Review Conference. NRC 46857. Ottawa: NRC Research Press, National Research Council Canada. OECD and FAO (2006). Globalisation and Fisheries. Proceedings of an OECD-FAO Workshop. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Rice, J.C. (2005). Understanding ﬁsh habitat ecology to achieve conservation. Journal of Fish Biology 67 (suppl. B): 1–22. Rice, J.C. (2009). Biodiversity, spatial management, and the ecosystem approach. Pp. 13–31 in R. Beamish and B. Rothschild (eds). The

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Future of Fisheries Science and Management in North America. Fish and Fisheries Series. Berlin: Springer. Rice, J.C., and E. Legacè, È. (2007). When control rules collide—a comparison of ﬁsheries management reference points and IUCN criteria for assessing risk of extinction. ICES Journal of Marine Science 64: 718–722. Ridgeway, L.R. (2009). Governance beyond Areas of National Jurisdiction: Linkages to Sectoral Management. Oceanis 35–1/2. Towards a New Governance of High Seas Biodiversity.

Paris: Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations. Strand, J. (2004). The case for regional environmental organizations. Pp. 71–85 in N. Kanie and F. Haas (eds). Emerging Forces in Environmental Governance. New York: United Nations University. VanderZwaag, D. (2008). Overview of regional cooperation in coastal and ocean governance. Pp. 97–228 in C. Thia-Eng, G. Kullenberg, and D. Bonga (eds). Securing the Oceans, Essays in Oceans Governance. Tokyo: PEMSEA and the Nippon Foundation.

IV

POLICY INSTRUMENTS AND PERSPECTIVES

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37 Fisheries Buybacks DALE SQUIRES THEODORE GROVES R. QUENTIN GRAFTON RITA CURTIS JAMES JOSEPH ROBIN ALLEN

37.1. INTRODUCTION Buybacks of ﬁshing vessels, licenses, access, use or other rights, and gear, sometimes called decommissioning schemes, are a key policy tool to address overcapacity, overexploitation of ﬁsh stocks, and distributional issues in ﬁsheries (Holland et al. 1999). Buybacks are transforming as public good objectives are an increasingly important complement to the traditional concern with managing a common resource (Curtis and Squires 2007; Groves and Squires 2007). Buybacks increasingly contribute to the sustainable use of ecosystems and their services and conservation of marine biodiversity, both public goods. Buybacks also increasingly provide a transition to a more rationalized ﬁshery based on strong rights and enhanced governance. This chapter addresses key design issues for buyback programs, building upon several studies, as well as thirteen case studies presented at a 2004 workshop.1 This chapter concentrates on key lessons learned: the concern with public goods, asymmetric information issues of moral hazard and adverse selection, design of the auction, and buybacks as strategy and a transitional policy instrument.

and pervasive uncertainty and the resulting overcapacity and overﬁshing conservation problems encountered with ecosystems and biodiversity public goods. More concretely, there are at least eight principal reasons for buybacks, not necessarily mutually exclusive: (1) directly increasing economic efﬁciency, (2) modernizing ﬂeets and adjusting their structure and composition, (3) facilitating the transition from ﬁsheries with overexploited stocks and overcapacity to private or common rightsbased conservation and management, (4) providing alternatives when rights-based management is infeasible, (5) providing disaster or crisis relief, (6) addressing compensation and distributional issues, (7) conserving common resources underlying a ﬁshery, and (8) conserving biodiversity and ecological public goods, such as ecological services from coral reefs (as with the buyback of vessels ﬁshing on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef) or existence of sea turtles (paying vessels not to ﬁsh off nesting beaches during nesting season)2 (Campbell 1989; Weninger and McConnell 2000; World Bank 2004; Curtis and Squires 2007).

37.3. CONSEQUENCES OF BUYBACK PROGRAMS 37.2. WHY BUYBACKS? The need most fundamentally arises due to ill-structured property rights, limitations to governance,

Buybacks generate changes in vessel-level behavior, both intended and unintended: (1) short-run advantages accrue to remaining vessels, (2) remaining vessels

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may increase investment or ﬁsh longer, (3) exiting vessels may be the least efﬁcient or ﬁsh the least, creating moral hazard issues, and (4) gainers and losers, with crew members gaining seldom or little. Attitudes, incentives, and cooperation can improve in a transition stage. Attitudes towards further changes in a ﬁshery improved when the Paciﬁc coast groundﬁshery was no longer in a crisis stage after buybacks (P. Leipzig, personal communication, 2005; R. Young, personal communication, 2005). In this ﬁshery plagued by losses, ﬁshers’ attitudes bordered on desperation, incentives favoring cooperation were hobbled, and attitudes were noncooperative. Higher proﬁts, exit of malcontents, and remaining fewer, more committed players facilitated subsequent cooperation. Buybacks restoring proﬁtability gave breathing room to decide further actions and enhance positive economic behavior, since ﬁshers can behave very differently in a proﬁtable ﬁshery and when there are fewer ﬁshers. The fewer players began to coalesce and act like de facto collective owners of the resource. The extent to which this experience can be generalized to other ﬁsheries is unknown but important to corroborate.

37.4. ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION: MORAL HAZARD AND ADVERSE SELECTION Asymmetric information between the authority (principal) and ﬁshers (agents) in the form of moral hazard and adverse selection can arise. During market transactions, the characteristics of goods and services may not be fully observable to all market participants and be asymmetrically held; that is, some participants hold information that others do not. Asymmetric information can give inefﬁcient market equilibriums. Buyback markets are prone to these problems, because owners of vessels, permits, or gear are more knowledgeable about performance and characteristics of their assets than is the buyback agency. With moral hazard, the actions of vessel or license owners are not fully observable by the buyback authority. Buybacks can rescue unproﬁtable enterprises, which otherwise remain or exit the ﬁshery, or sell the vessel, perhaps for substantial losses. Vessel owners then receive a higher price than otherwise, given the buyback-created demand increase. Vessel buybacks can signal that capital losses will always be limited. This reduces the overall risk in

the industry, enticing risk-averse investors to invest more in ﬁshing boats than otherwise.3 Moral hazard may have appeared in Norway (Hannesson 2007a). Anecdotal evidence suggests that boat owners, realizing potential gains from ﬂeet rationalization, quickly shelved a preliminary plan for an industry-ﬁnanced buyback when authorities were prepared to use public money for this purpose. Adverse selection may arise when asymmetric information exists between the buyback agency and vessel or permit owners. Prior to market participation, owners have more information about their vessel, permit, intention to ﬁsh, and performance in the ﬁshery than does the buyback authority. The level of information differs among participants in these potential market transactions, and costs of acquiring information for the purchasing agency may be high or even prohibitive. Owners know if vessels require repairs and maintenance, have high operating costs, and are less effective at catching ﬁsh than other ostensibly comparable vessels. Adverse selection problems can arise. Vessels that are sold are often older, more in need of repair, and less productive at catching ﬁsh. Owners are often older and reaching career’s end. Buybacks then simply accelerate vessel exit, which would nonetheless occur in the near future and, by increasing the demand for vessels and ﬁrming up the market, give the sellers a higher price than they otherwise would have received. Moreover, the rate of ﬁshing capacity reduction is less than it would have been without the confounding effect of adverse selection from otherwise exiting vessels. Owners really desiring to sell can signal information about their unobservable knowledge through observable actions. A market signal is an action with economic consequences, and the buyback agency’s observation of the action may reveal information that is otherwise hidden. For example, a vessel seller could offer to employ a certiﬁed marine surveyor to evaluate the prospective vessel and classify the vessel’s status. Costless tests could reliably reveal a minimum standard or create a signal such that owners with a vessel of at least acceptable quality will submit to the test, and owners who choose not to submit to the evaluation will be treated as being no better than the worst type of vessel. Because sellers with good vessels are more likely to be willing to take such actions, this offer can serve as a signal of quality, which can lead to a market equilibrium that distinguishes classes of owners.

Fisheries Buybacks Alternative market responses to the problem of unobservable vessel quality and productivity can occur, in which the uninformed party, the buyback agency, take steps to distinguish or screen the vessels on the other side of the market. Agencies can develop mechanisms to distinguish vessels or permits and their differing information. Some buyback programs, notably New England, used a screening approach based on a pricing metric. Pricing on a physical capacity basis, such as per vessel, per gross registers tonnage, or per kilowatt, does not fully capture all of the information of a vessel. Pricing on the basis of revenue, estimated ﬁshing capacity, or catch can more closely capture the information on actual and potential catch or ﬁshing capacity. Adverse selection can be exacerbated when public offer prices are lower than otherwise warranted or expected in comparison to existing secondhand market prices or an expected equilibrium price in the buyback market. Only sellers with the worst vessels will offer them for sale. Little trade may occur, and equilibrium is inefﬁcient. Coordination failure can arise if the agency expects that the productivity of vessels accepting a buyback offer is low and, concurrently, only owners of less productive vessels accept the buyback offer price because the price is low. The agency can improve the competitive equilibrium by increasing the offer price. These problems suggest that multiple rounds of pricing or allowing bids rather than setting offer prices can be helpful.

37.5. BUYBACK PROGRAM DESIGN ISSUES 37.5.1. Clear Goals and Objectives There may also be conﬂicting objectives, such as removing ﬁshing capacity and modernizing the ﬁshing ﬂeet, ﬁnanced by public subsidies. The European Union Multi-Annual Guidance Programmes (MAGPs), for example, attempted to simultaneously satisfy the multiple and conﬂicting objectives of reducing ﬁshing capacity and modernizing aging ﬂeets (Cueff 2007; Guyader et al. 2007; Lindebo and Vestergaard 2007).

37.5.2. Clearly Deﬁned Scope of the Buyback Program Which gear types and ﬁsheries, vessel size classes, geographic areas, full-time versus part-time

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(“latent”) vessels, commercial or recreational, licenses and/or vessels, are all questions that arise and which also affect program size and budget. These strategic choices affect the structure of the postbuyback ﬁshery.

37.5.3. Critical Preconditions There are three critical preconditions for an effective buyback program. (1) Proper registration of license and vessels creates a well-deﬁned group of eligible owners and provides well-deﬁned program boundaries. (2) Program organization and communication between regulators and participants and among participants facilitate success. (3) Without measures in place to prevent new entry in place of those removed, funds from purchased vessels or licenses can be used to purchase an upgraded or new vessel, invest in existing vessels, or new participants enter. Public funding exacerbates this due to additional, transferred funds. In the Italian Adriatic trawl buyback, the Italian government introduced a moratorium on new licenses and a limit on construction of new vessels (Spagnolo and E. Sabatella 2007).

37.5.4. Purchase Vessels and Gear or Licenses (Permits)? Should the buyback purchase the vessel and gear, the license, or both? Purchasing only the license is cheaper than purchasing the vessel and gear, which in turn is generally cheaper than purchasing both the vessel and license. License prices may be set at the market rate (although the expectation of increased revenues after a capacity reduction may cause license prices to rise sharply) or at the value required to encourage the chosen proportion of ﬁshermen to surrender their licenses (Read and Buck 1997). Many vessels hold licenses for multiple ﬁsheries. If the program buys back only the license, the vessel remains free to ﬁsh elsewhere and, in so doing, may easily shift its ﬁshing capacity to another ﬁshery. If the program buys back the vessel and gear but not the license, the license, if transferable, can be used with another vessel in the ﬁshery. In this instance, pressures on the ﬁsh stocks and economic rents (total revenue less costs of harvest) may not be abated, and may even increase if the license is used with a vessel that is even more productive than the vessel that was removed.

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Purchasing only the license frequently removes vessels that are inactive or nearly so, but that could potentially increase their ﬁshing as the proﬁtability of the ﬁshery improves. Inactive or low activity vessels may have their primary focus in other ﬁsheries, and hold licenses more as options to ﬁsh, so that the license price reﬂects option value. Licenses can be attached and locked to vessels, precluding a separate market for licenses emerging. The buyback makes no distinction between the vessel and license, and the buyback price includes the values of two assets. Fishing capacity would not be allowed to shift to another ﬁshery. If a boughtout vessel also held licenses for other ﬁsheries, and these licenses were also attached to the vessel, the buyback price could include the license values from the other ﬁsheries and reﬂect the expected proﬁtability from the other ﬁsheries. Multiple licenses for the same ﬁshery may be held with the vessel—or “stacked.” When licenses are attenuated by limits to capacity, stacking then allows a larger vessel or catch. The buyback price can be expected to increase with stacking.

The Italian driftnet buyback allowed vessels to convert to another activity or gear (Spagnolo and R. Sabatella 2007). Vessels might be sold to help ﬁnance the buyback, as in the British Columbia salmon troll buyback (Grafton and Nelson 2007), but this can spillover to other ﬁsheries. A program that does not require scrapping may have an impact on the price of the vessel to be bought out, and secondhand vessel prices may fall, a pecuniary externality.

37.5.5. Voluntary versus Mandatory Participation

37.5.8. Conditions on Fishing Time: Trade-offs between Capital Stock and Services

Most buybacks are voluntary. One of the few mandatory buybacks programs was the Northern Australian prawn ﬁshery (Holland et al. 1999). The Japanese longline buyback allowed mandatory participation should there be insufﬁcient voluntary participation (Kuronuma 1997).

37.5.6. Conditions on Reuse of Vessel, Gear, or License Buybacks limit reuse the purchased vessel, gear, or license to prevent increases in ﬁshing capacity or spillovers to other ﬁsheries. Vessels not scrapped can be used in another ﬁshery, transferring the ﬁsh stock and public good externalities to another ﬁshery. Even if a vessel is not transferred, buyout funds might be used to purchase vessels in other ﬁsheries. Some buybacks allow construction of new vessels if the previous vessel is scrapped. The Italian government introduced a moratorium on new licenses and limited construction of new vessels (Spagnolo and E. Sabatella 2007). Some buybacks restrict the use of the vessel or license in that country, but allow sale abroad, as in Norway (Hannesson 2007a), which exports the problem.

37.5.7. Conditions on Reinvestment of Funds Received Conditions might be placed on reinvestment of buyback funds to limit reinvestment or new investment. In the Australian southeast trawl ﬁshery, the purchase of latent licenses, although partially limiting future increases in ﬁshing effort, appears to have facilitated additional investment in the ﬁshery, since public funds obtained from the sale of inactive licenses were evidently invested by operators in the capacity of active vessels.

Buybacks may limit allowed ﬁshing time to reduce utilization of all stock inputs, notably the stocks of labor and capital, but also limit the use of variable inputs (e.g., fuel) that are closely tied to time. Limits on ﬁshing time attempt to manage the ﬂow of capital services and hence utilization of the capital stock, and ﬁshing capacity in general.

37.5.9. Should Other Conditions Be Placed on Vessels and Licenses That Are Bought Back? Buybacks do not address the underlying property rights issue, but they can be coupled with other measures to align private incentives with socially desired goals. Buybacks can be tied to quotas, as in Norway, or an alternative livelihoods support mechanism (World Bank 2004). Buybacks were tied to the preexisting individual transferable quota (ITQ) program in the Australian southeast trawl ﬁshery (Fox et al. 2007). Buybacks can be tied to gear restrictions, limited access, prohibitions on resale or reuse of vessels, licenses, and gear, and cooperative agreements and self-management.

Fisheries Buybacks

37.6. BUYBACK PRICES AND MARKET Purchase prices for the asset—vessel, license, or gear—must be established through which the buyback program purchases the asset. Four basic systems have been used: one-on-one negotiations, independent valuations, ﬁxed prices, and auctions (Holland et al. 1999). In practice, ﬁxed prices and auctions are the two most widely used frameworks and are less susceptible to collusion and strategic behavior.

37.6.1. Fixed Buyback Prices The buyback authority establishes a ﬁxed offer price (usually on the basis of some criteria established by the authority, e.g., a reservation price) and the seller of the asset accepts or rejects the price. The ﬁxed price can be set in terms of the asset, for example, the entire vessel, or in terms of a metric or weight aimed at a more precise goal, such as price per meter of vessel length. Different ﬁxed prices can also be established for different target categories of the ﬁshery for which there are different asset reduction goals and objectives. Less information is available to the authority than auctions. This approach is susceptible to adverse selection but can be limited, as discussed above. This approach is administratively easier to establish and less costly to administer than auctions, but is generally less cost-effective at removing capacity than auctions and requires the authority to set the price beforehand rather than the asset owners through competitive bidding or auction. Only when the information asymmetry is not too great and vessels are relatively homogeneous will the adverse selection problem be limited in scope. When adverse selection is limited and the ﬁxed price comes close to an efﬁcient price, only then will the buyback be comparatively cost effective in its goal of reducing capacity. The program’s offered buyback price may not equilibrate supply and demand, and the number of applicants can exceed or fall short of the funds available. When there is excess demand or supply corresponding to the ﬁxed offer price, some form of rationing criteria is required. In the Italian Adriatic buyback, the national administration identiﬁed the ﬁrst priority as vessels belonging to ﬂeet segments that had still not attained the buyback objective (Spagnolo and E. Sabatella 2007).

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37.6.2. Auction to Establish Buyback Price Auctions are expected to be more cost-effective than the ﬁxed price approach, largely because more information is established and revealed, with less information asymmetry between the asset owners and the buyback authority, and the asset owners, through competition, set the buyback price rather than the authority.4 That is, auctions help achieve efﬁciency with minimal information required from the agency, since bidders reveal their privately held information. Collusion and entry are considerations, and keeping bidding costs low encourages entry and competitiveness of the buyback market. There are many different types of auctions, but buybacks invariably employ reverse (supply) auctions that drive prices downward rather than forward (demand) auctions that drive prices upward.5 Key features include single or multiple rounds of bidding, open or closed (sealed) bids, rules for determining the winning bidders, potential for collusion, time requirements for preparing and conducting the auction, private value (each bidder knows his or her value of object for sale but keeps the value as private information) or common value (actual value is same for everyone, but bidders have different private information about the actual value), revocable or irrevocable bids, penalties for bid defaults, bids responsive or nonresponsive to criteria and conditions established, and choice of price metric or weights on bids to achieve different policy objectives. Discriminatory auctions are those in which bidders receive the price they bid for each asset, and are the usual case with buybacks. Double auctions, in which the authority (buyer) submits asks and sellers submit bids, have not been used. Externalities between bidders are possible if they care about which competitors submit bids. Prohibitive transactions costs preclude sequential auctions (e.g., with offshore oil leases).

37.6.3. Reverse Auctions Single-bid, reverse, discriminatory auctions are the most common form of buyback auction. In a typical program, the asset (vessel, gear, license) owner submits a sale offer (bid), which the buyback authority ranks or orders on the basis of some metric, such as the highest to the lowest offer price per unit of length, and purchases the lowest bid, next lowest bid, and so on, until the budget

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is exhausted. Bids can be optionally compared to the reserve price, purchasing those falling below, to ensure winning bids satisfy preestablished objectives and reducing incentives for collusion. Multiple-round reverse auctions ﬁrst conduct a single-bid reverse auction, but then publicly reveal information from the previous round, and seek revised bids. This approach provides the most information, but is more costly to operate. Reverse auction winners may be subject to the winner’s curse, receiving less than others after underestimating the value of a sold comparable asset, and may cause everyone to bid cautiously.

37.6.4. Reservation Prices Reserve prices in a reverse auction are the maximum amount the authority will pay. The authority’s reserve price may be existing or previous years’ market prices for secondhand assets obtained from brokers or trade magazines, constructed following a formula, or obtained from appraisers. The 1972 British Columbia salmon buyback purchased vessels after valuation by an independent appraiser (Grafton and Nelson 2007). Vessels in the Washington salmon vessel buyback were purchased at an agreed price based on two appraisals by independent appraisers. License prices were ﬁxed, and gear was valued at a ﬁxed rate of depreciation from original cost. One model used was the present value of expected future net earnings plus the difference between the cost of scrapping the vessel and its salvage value (Kitts et al. 2001).

Increasing the common information available to owners about what are reasonable expectations if they submit a bid should increase the efﬁciency of the price formation process and reduce strategic behavior and transactions costs, especially in sealed bid auctions. The public authority does not necessarily have to release all available information, but can disclose an average bid price and perhaps available funds, criteria such as price metrics, targeted sectors, or capacity target. The British Columbia experience indicates that release of public information is preferable (Grafton and Nelson 2007). The experimental economics literature shows that releasing individual bits of information does not harm the price formation process. Releasing information may help the convergence process to equilibrium, as long as there are enough bidders to preclude collusion. Fishers can practice with computer programs of simulated auctions and markets to fully learn the price-formation process.

37.6.6. Irrevocable Bids and Penalties Bids can be speciﬁed as irrevocable or retractable with opportunity to reconsider participation as in New England (Kitts et al. 2001). Irrevocable bids militate against speculation, which absorbs considerable sums with minimal capacity reduction. Penalties can be imposed on defaulted bids to preclude bidding for options on prizes rather than prizes themselves.

37.6.5. Available Information

37.6.7. Eligibility Requirements and Scoring or Ranking of Bids and Metrics

Fishers form bids or accept offers based on their private information and their assessment of others’ expected or existing bids and valuations. Information acquisition affects both the efﬁciency of the allocation implemented in the auction and the amount of capacity removed by the buyback. Owners hold some private information about their asset’s value, while all potential participants hold some information in common. Information acquisition can be either open or closed; bidders may or may not observe information acquisition by others. Information is a strategic variable with closed information acquisition. The identity of bidders can affect outcomes; that is, different information is revealed depending on whether the identity of bidders is revealed and who is actually bidding.

Price and distribution can be affected by eligibility requirements, bid-ranking systems, bid-weighting criteria, and direct allocation of funds among groups. The scoring or ranking of bids affects who stays and who exits, that is, the composition of the remaining ﬂeet, and the amount of capacity that is reduced. Eligibility requirements can limit the number of participants, opening the way for collusion and strategic behavior. A problem with bid systems involving the sale of a vessel is that everyone offers a different product—there is no homogeneous metric (asymmetric information). Use of units of size, revenue, or capacity militates against this problem. Licenses speciﬁed for a given category are closer in equivalence than simply vessels, and hence easier to judge and require less information.

Fisheries Buybacks In ranking bids, consideration can be given to permit or vessel category, home port, area ﬁshed, primary gear, size, length of time in the ﬁshery, or any other criteria to target buybacks (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 1996). Eligibility conditions and grant size in the Danish buyback depend on vessel tonnage and age (Lindebo and Vestergaard 2007). The Italian clam ﬁshery vessel buyback required a minimum number of vessels to be withdrawn in each ﬁshing area, reﬂecting the spatial distribution of sessile clams (Spagnolo 2007).

37.6.8. Sealed versus Open Bid Auctions with Heterogeneous Bidders Sealed bid auctions are less certain to bidders since rival bids are unknown, and tacit collusion is harder since bidding is not used as a signal. Evidence on the effects of sealed versus open bid auctions from other industries indicates that sealed bid auctions attract more entrants, especially small bidders, shifting the allocation toward weaker bidders, and revenue is frequently higher with sealed bidding. Bidder competitiveness may be an important issue in choice of auction format.

37.6.9. First- or Second-Price Sealed Bid Auctions These auctions are mostly used when a unique and homogeneous item is sold (often sequentially if there are multiple units or items) rather than simultaneous sale of a group of heterogeneous items, such as vessels. In a second-price reverse auction, all bidders submit bids, the bidder submitting the highest bid pays the second-lowest bid, and the bidders bid their true valuation but pay the second-lowest bid. Reservation prices that must be paid at a minimum help ensure against gross discrepancies in lowest and runner-up bids. In ﬁrst-price (best and ﬁnal) auctions, all bidders submit bids, bidders submitting the highest bid wins, and bidders tend to bid below their true valuation but pay the highest bid. Secondprice auctions can be susceptible to collusion.

37.6.10. Uniform-Price Sealed Bid Reverse Auctions All winning bids are paid the lowest (or secondlowest) price actually bid, even if some bids were

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higher. These appear fair but are vulnerable to collusion and can deter entry into an auction. In a variant, bidders can submit willingness to pay for different quantities sold of a homogeneous asset (a demand function). Uniform price auctions can create windfall rents and are more expensive.

37.6.11. Single versus Multiple Rounds of Buybacks Buybacks can occur all in single or multiple rounds, but usually in multiple rounds, including the Taiwan offshore ﬁshery and Norway (Hannesson 2007a; Sun 2007). Buybacks in stages have advantages: revealed common information allows gauging of the bid market and beneﬁcial learning, adjusted payments target particular groups of ﬁshers or desired vessel numbers or capacity level, the criteria for accepting bids can be adjusted, and ﬁshers have the chance to reformulate their bids as they better understand the buyback market and buyback program. Multiple rounds of bidding also help dampen frequency of speculative bids. Buybacks in stages have disadvantages. Prices may increase as multiple rounds progress. With the removal of an asset, supply falls and remaining assets increase in value, partly because fewer assets remain, and partly due to gains in rents capitalized into asset prices. There can be strategic behavior in which the sellers know they can submit bids in later rounds and may try to increase their bids by delaying; that is, there is an option, which can be factored into the price. If reservation prices remain ﬁxed, bidders learn more about this price and can ensure against bid prices much below the reservation price. Vessel and license buyback prices may establish a price ﬂoor in the secondhand market. Buybacks could announce that the longer the delay, the lower the payment in order to reduce the strategic behavior of vessel or license owners who delay participation. Multiple rounds can also raise administrative costs. Availability of funding often determines whether to implement the buyback in one or multiple rounds. Funding may only be available to allow multiple stages. If the buyback is industry funded, do single or multiple rounds better allow the remaining vessels to have the funds necessary to ﬁnance a buyback? A single round allows faster recovery of proﬁts and hence the ability to ﬁnance. No single approach is necessarily best but depends on which approach works best in the situation of concern.

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37.7. FINANCING BUYBACKS Governments have largely funded buybacks. Public funding may be appropriate initially to correct past policy errors and are effectively government subsidies for improved ﬁsheries performance (World Bank 2004). Mixtures of funding have also been used, combining commercial and recreational ﬁshing interests with public funds as in Texas (Riechers et al. 2007). The Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense funded a buyback of bottom trawlers and permits on California’s central coast to protect the ecosystem and its services. Industry-ﬁnanced buybacks fund the program from proceeds that are expected to rise following the expected recovery and can be initially funded by a public loan as with the U.S. Paciﬁc coast groundﬁsh trawl buyback. The public bears a substantial portion of the risk of the loan. The debt obligation of a commercial or recreational ﬁsher-ﬁnanced buyback becomes collective rather than individual and spreads the risk among those remaining (P. Leipzig, personal communication, 2005; R. Young, personal communication, 2005). Payment can be apportioned as the relative share of total economic value: commercial interests pay according to the share of economic rent; recreational anglers fund the share of indirect use values; the public and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) fund the share corresponding to existence and indirect use values of environmental public goods. Buybacks funded by a Pigovian tax on users create a double dividend through a tax addressing stock and public good externalities and the receipts ﬁnancing buybacks.

37.8. BUYBACKS AS A TRANSITION TO A RATIONALIZED FISHERY Buybacks foster a transition to a rationalized ﬁshery based on strong and enforced individual or group rights and governance. Buybacks create a window of opportunity to transform behavior from noncooperative to cooperative as a dominant strategy and align private and social incentives. Buybacks are thus a strategic choice that restructures incentives. When ﬁsheries are mired in debt and without proﬁts, cooperation is difﬁcult to achieve among players. Contributing to the noncooperative behavior, individual discount rates can be exceptionally high as vessel owners scramble to cover vessel

mortgages, keep crews employed and together, and cover operating costs. Restored proﬁtability creates incentives for cooperation. Compensation to potential losers or unmalleable capital with low opportunity costs removes potential blockers of rationalization. Removal of redundant capital, few alternatives and low opportunity cost, and excess capacity is hastened (Newby et al. 2004). Fewer remaining players potentially increase cooperation and ease establishment of rights-based management. Those remaining are those most committed to the ﬁshery, further strengthening incentives for cooperation. Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. Paciﬁc coast groundﬁshery all employed this strategy before ITQs.

37.9. KEY LESSONS AND GUIDELINES A review of buybacks offers a number of lessons (for more extensive discussion, see Groves and Squires 2007): 1. It is far easier and cheaper to prevent overcapacity, overﬁshing, and ecosystem and biodiversity degradation ex ante than reducing ex-post. 2. Buybacks are a strategic choice affecting incentives, and potentially play a strategic role in a transition to a more rationalized ﬁshery based on rights-based management and strengthened governance. Buybacks potentially restructure incentives and relations among participants through improving the economic conditions during a window of opportunity following a buyback. Buybacks potentially restructure ﬁsher strategies and behavior from noncooperative to cooperative and hasten restructuring and rights-based management. Since buybacks do not change the underlying property rights, long-run incentives remain to overinvest in an open- or limited-access ﬁshery and can even be strengthened by growing proﬁts that eventually overwhelm the positive but temporary economic incentives created by buybacks. In short, buybacks create a window of opportunity to rationalize a ﬁshery that erodes over time. Buybacks are potentially a strategic opportunity to induce behavior changes through various program

Fisheries Buybacks

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

design choices. Every substantive choice can affect incentives and thereby behavior of the remaining participants, and even the decision of who chooses to stay and who chooses to leave the ﬁshery through participation in the buyback. Buybacks are more effective at reducing ﬁshing capacity when ﬂeets are smaller in numbers with vessels and permits active at low levels. Buybacks can become expensive and costs rise over time as the ﬂeet becomes smaller and more proﬁtable, and there is growing risk that their cost can exceed the beneﬁts gained. Buybacks can be broad but shallow, with broad eligibility, or narrower but deeper, focusing on a particular group or ﬁshery segment. Every one of these choices is a strategic choice that affects incentives and hence behavior and which shapes the type and structure of the post-buyback ﬁshery. Each buyback design has distributional implications, a strategic choice. Several preconditions are critical, including registration and limited access. Buybacks work best through comanagement, which affects the strategic choice of the program design and participant incentives. Moral hazard and adverse selection arise due to information asymmetry between the buyback agency and ﬁshers. Purchased vessels are frequently older and less productive remaining ones. Buybacks may accelerate departure of marginal vessels otherwise exiting but at a higher purchase price and little improve economic performance and stock recovery. By absorbing risk and establishing a vessel or license price ﬂoor, buybacks may strengthen investment incentives for the remaining vessels. There is often no single, best answer to many program design issues. Nonetheless, clear objectives and a clearly deﬁned scope of the program are critical. A pilot program can also be helpful. One or more champions can play an important galvanizing force. Decisions must be made to ﬁrst purchase active or inactive vessels, and vessels or permits, or both. Buyback beneﬁciaries can contribute to the funding of the program in all or in part. Commercial ﬁshers can enjoy increased proﬁts, recreational anglers can beneﬁt

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from higher catch rates, and the general public and NGOs enjoy strengthened ecosystem health and biodiversity—nonmarket economic beneﬁts. The initial funding, especially for unproﬁtable ﬁsheries, may be government or an international organization for transnational ﬁsheries. Public funding might sometimes be viewed as compensation for past policy errors. Public loans to user groups mean that the public bears the risk of the loan. Public or industry ﬁnancing creates a debt that is a collective rather than individual responsibility. Public or private outlays can be recovered through user fees, such as licenses or entrance fees to marine parks, and landings taxes, so that beneﬁciaries pay. Public funding without repayment from rent increases is ultimately a transfer payment, which can be capitalized into license or vessel values and raises prices and buyback costs. 12. Buyback net economic beneﬁts, particularly public funded, must be compared to net beneﬁts that could be generated by these funds in their next best use elsewhere in the economy, size of the beneﬁts from the buyback in comparison to the program expenditures, and whether there are positive net beneﬁts to society and not just recipients. 13. Partial or completely private-ﬁnanced buybacks may be preferred to full publicﬁnanced buybacks because private funding creates a Pigovian tax that helps to correct the common resource and public good externalities and fund the buyback. Depending on the incidence of the tax, there may be incentives to curtail ﬁsh consumption, since consumers do not currently bear full costs of ﬁsh consumption. Private-ﬁnanced buybacks force industry rather than the public to bear any potential moral hazard, that is, risk and costs from expectations of future bailouts and strengthened secondary markets. 14. Buybacks can offer ﬁxed prices or establish auctions. Bids can proceed in single round or multiple rounds, with advantages to each, but are usually multiple. Bids are typically sealed, reverse bid, discriminatory, private auctions, often on the basis of a metric, including price per meter/estimated capacity/revenue/catch, sometimes by category of ﬂeet. Eligibility requirements and bid rankings are required, including weights for

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15.

16.

17.

18.

Policy Instruments and Perspectives different criteria. Irrevocable bids prevent speculation and penalties less option taking. Providing common information helps form bids and market efﬁciency. Bids are often compared to reservation prices. Selective buybacks can help achieve social objectives other than efﬁciency and resource conservation goals, including accommodation of new entrants or coastal states, aboriginal rights, and shifting capacity regionally, by gear or set type. Buybacks compensate those in industry that would otherwise lose out from rebuilding ﬁsh stocks, industry, and ecosystem public goods, such as the Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense buyback of bottom trawlers and permits on the central California coast. Buybacks have a differential impact on gear types or regions, but maintaining an equitable allocation of harvests among gear types or regions helps ensures political support. Buybacks have largely focused on common resource problems of overcapacity, overﬁshing, raising proﬁtability, and disaster relief, but can address public goods of ecosystem and biodiversity health. Buybacks can compensate ﬁshers for loss of historical use rights from no longer ﬁshing in reserve areas, for example, or target bycatch-reducing methods of ﬁshing. The gains in existence and indirect use values must be weighed against the opportunity cost of public funds (their next best use) used for ﬁnancing, forgone use values for producer and consumer surplus, and whether compensated vessels exit the ﬁshery or merely ﬁsh elsewhere. Transnational buybacks require multilateral cooperation and self-enforcement. Unilateral buybacks face failure. New entrants and nonparticipating free-riders must be deterred and compliance achieved, which requires changes in, at a minimum, customary international law, and requires credible trade measures. Allowing capacity to transfer among individual owners, rather than ﬂag states, increases efﬁciency. Coastal states are typically accommodated for growth, a side payment. Buybacks alone are not the long-term solution to the overcapacity and overﬁshing commons problem in the open-access or limited-access ﬁshery. But buybacks may be the best option for transnational ﬁsheries

given the limitations of international law for rights-based management protected by a strong international treaty. 19. Buybacks address the capital stock and only indirectly the relationship between inputs and catches, but unrestricted inputs can be substituted for restricted inputs, capital and capacity utilization increased from ﬁshing longer, and new technology adopted. Vessel buybacks unaccompanied by comprehensive use rights generate incentives for continued investment, overcapacity, and overﬁshing. 20. The long-run success of a buyback in reducing ﬁshing capacity and mortality without strong use or property rights requires controlling future growth in ﬁshing capacity through restrictions on investment and increased capital and capacity utilization through ﬁshing time. Additional rounds of buybacks may be necessary to counter the ongoing growth in ﬁshing capacity occurring through investment and technical change. 21. Buybacks evaluated to identify lessons learned help improve future programs (U.S. Government Accounting Ofﬁce 2001).

37.10. ASSESSMENT Buybacks of vessels, licenses, access, use, and rights, or gear can be a useful policy tool under certain conditions and for a limited time before the beneﬁts erode. Buybacks are not a panacea or a long-term answer by themselves to the commons problems of overcapacity and overﬁshing or the growing public good problems of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. Nonetheless, buybacks may be the only feasible option for transnational and some other ﬁsheries or social issues, such as disaster relief or aboriginal rights. Buybacks can accelerate the transition to a rationalized ﬁshery, as in Australia and New Zealand prior to rights-based management, provide compensation to those otherwise losing out from rebuilding stocks, industry restructuring, and conserving public goods, including enhanced ecosystem and biodiversity health. At a minimum, an effective buyback needs to be coupled with limited access, scrapping of purchased vessels, limits on reentry through purchases of formerly inactive licenses by owners who have just sold an active license, co-management through partnership with industry, and in situ effective management of the ﬁshery.

Fisheries Buybacks Buybacks by themselves do not resolve “race-toﬁsh” incentives created by incomplete use or property rights, inadequate governance, and uncertainty. Buybacks do not alter these underlying factors. Gains from buybacks are transitory. Unless speciﬁc steps are taken, previously inactive or low activity vessels and permits will activate, investment continue, and the gains from the buyback erode. Continuous, ongoing buybacks and automatic attrition through reductions in some speciﬁed amount of vessel capacity units with every vessel transfer would need to be a permanent feature. Such continuous structural adjustment counters the ongoing increases in ﬁshing capacity as ﬁshers invest in their capital stock, increase capital and capacity utilization by ﬁshing longer, and adopt new technology, driven by the incentives of incomplete property, inadequate governance, and uncertainty over the longer term. In a nutshell, buybacks can potentially create a welfare-improving, second-best strategy to facilitate and hasten the transition to a more rationalized ﬁshery based on strong and enforced individual or group rights and strengthened governance. Buybacks are not a replacement for a ﬁrst-best policy directly addressing ill-structured property and use rights and inadequate governance underlying the problems of common resources and environmental public goods of ecosystems and their services and biodiversity conservation. Buybacks can potentially strengthen and help align private with socially optimal incentives and goals and restructure ﬁsher behavior and dominant strategies from noncooperative to cooperative. Industry-ﬁnanced buybacks create a Pigovian tax and potentially help establish positive economic incentives. Public-funded buybacks can potentially establish willingness to pay for public goods and nonmarket economic values and historical direct use rights, but should be weighed against the opportunity cost associated with the alternative use of funds, any deadweight losses from taxes not speciﬁcally levied to ﬁnance the program, and whether there will be a positive net economic beneﬁt to society.

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and Squires (2007), which includes overview chapters by Groves and Squires (2007) and Hannesson (2007a, 2007b). Campbell (1989), Campbell and Lindner (1990), Weninger and McConnell (2000), and Groves and Squires (2007) address economic welfare. Squires et al. (2007) and Groves and Squires (2007) discuss buybacks in transnational ﬁsheries. The 13 case studies were presented at the 2004 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries–University of California San Diego workshop titled “International Workshop on Fishing Vessel and License Buy-Back Programs” (Cueff 2007; Fox et al. 2007; Grafton and Nelson 2007; Guyader 2007; Hannesson 2007a, 2007b; Kirkley et al. 2007; Lindebo and Vestergaard 2007; Riechers et al. 2007; Spagnolo 2007; Spagnolo and R. Sabatella 2007; Spagnolo and E. Sabatella 2007; Sun 2007; Thunberg et al. 2007). 2. For example, the Australian northern prawn ﬁshery buyback reduced bycatch and protected sensitive sea grass beds (World Bank 2004). Compensation was paid to Australian ﬁshers when the area of “no ﬁshing” zones in the Great Barrier Marine Park was expanded by about a third in 2004. Included in the current two-round Australian buyback of statutory ﬁshing rights is provision for a buyback of ﬁshers who will be adversely affected by the establishment of several large marine protected areas in the southeast marine region. A buyback of nets in the northern Gulf of California is currently under discussion to conserve endangered vaquitas. 3. Clark et al. (2005) suggest that anticipation of buybacks can lead to vessel acquisitions and greater overcapacity than would otherwise occur. 4. Kitts et al. (2001) and Bustic and Bromley (2006) econometrically analyze bids in the New England and Paciﬁc coast groundﬁsh buybacks and discuss the bidding process in considerable detail and the econometric issues involved. This section borrows heavily from Klemperer (2004), Milgrom (2004), and Athey et al. (2004) for theory. 5. Klemperer (2004) distinguishes ascending bids, descending bids, ﬁrst-price sealed bids (each bidder independently submits a single bid, without seeing others’ bids, with sale to the highest bid, and the winner pays the bid—the highest or ﬁrst price), and second-price sealed bid (Vickery auction, where each bidder independently submits a single bid, without seeing others’ bids, with the object sold to the highest bidder, but price paid is second-highest bid or second price).

Notes References 1. The studies are Campbell (1989), Campbell and Lindner (1990), Holland et al. (1999), Squires et al. (2007), Weninger and McConnell (2000), World Bank (2004), and those contained within the comprehensive edited volume by Curtis

Athey, S., J. Levin, E. Seira (2004). Comparing Open and Sealed Bid Auctions: Theory and Evidence from Timber Auctions. Milan: Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.

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Bustic, V., D.W. Bromley (2006). Purchasing a Way of Life: Do Fisheries Buyout Programs Work? Working paper, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Madison, Wisconsin. Campbell, H. (1989) Fishery buy-back programs and economic welfare. Australian Journal of Agricultural Economics 33: 20–31. Campbell, H., R.K. Lindner (1990). The production of ﬁshing effort and the economic performance of license limitation programs. Land Economics 66(1): 56–67. Clark, C.W., G. Munro, U. Sumaila (2005). Subsidies, buybacks, and sustainable ﬁsheries. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 50(1): 47–58. Cueff, J.C. (2007). A case study of ﬁshing vessel capacity management public buy-out schemes: Community experience through the multiannual guidance programmes and ways forward. Chapter 5 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Curtis R., D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Fox, K., R.Q. Grafton, T. Kompas, T. Che (2007). Capacity reduction and productivity: A case study of the Australian south east trawl ﬁshery. Chapter 4 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Grafton, R.Q., H. Nelson (2007). The effects of buy-back programs in the British Columbia salmon ﬁshery. Chapter 12 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Groves, T., D. Squires (2007). Lessons from ﬁsheries buybacks. Chapter 2 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Guyader, O., P. Berthou, F. Daurès (2007). Decommissioning schemes and capacity adjustment: A preliminary analysis of the French experience. Chapter 7 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Hannesson, R. (2007a). Buyback programs for ﬁshing vessels in Norway. Chapter 11 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Hannesson, R. (2007b). Do buyback programs make sense? Chapter 3 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Holland, D., E. Gudmundsson, J. Gates (1999). Do ﬁshing vessel buyback programs work: A survey of the evidence. Marine Policy 23(1): 47–69. Kirkley, J., J. Walden, J. Waters (2007). Buyback programs and industry restructuring

in ﬁsheries. Chapter 15 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell. Ames, Iowa, USA. Kitts, A., E. Thunberg, J. Robertson (2001). Willingness to participate and bids in a ﬁshing vessel buyout program: A case study of New England groundﬁsh. Marine Resource Economics 15: 221–232. Klemperer, P. (2004). Auctions: Theory and Practice. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Kuronuma, Y. 1997. Japan: Part II-2. An economic theory behind the Japanese coastal ﬁsheries management policy on ﬁshing rights in relation to the license system for off-shore and distant-water ﬁsheries. In: Towards Sustainable Fisheries: Issue Papers. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. www.olis.oecd.org/olis/1997doc.nsf/LinkTo/ ocde-gd(97)54 Lindebo, E., N. Vestergaard (2007). Vessel decommissioning in Danish ﬁsheries. Chapter 6 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Milgrom, P. (2004). Putting Auction Theory to Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (1996). The Fishing Capacity Reduction Program (FCRP); notice of proposed program and request for comments. Federal Register 61(108): 28177. Newby, J., P. Gooday, L. Elliston (2004). Structural Adjustment in Australian Fisheries. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics. www.oecd.org/ dataoecd/58/23/33919129.pdf Read, A.G., E.H. Buck (1997). Commercial Fishing: Economic Aid and Capacity Reduction. CRS Report for Congress. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service. www.cnie. org/NLE/CRSreports/Marine/mar-24.cfm Riechers, R., W. Grifﬁn, R. Woodward (2007). The Texas inshore bay and bait license buyback program. Chapter 14 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Spagnolo, M. (2007). The decommissioning scheme for the Italian clam ﬁshery: A case of success. Chapter 8 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Spagnolo, M., E. Sabatella (2007). The impact of the EU buyback scheme on the Italian ﬂeet: The northern and central Adriatic Sea bottom trawlers case. Chapter 10 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Spagnolo, M., R. Sabatella (2007). Driftnets buyback program: A case of institutional failure.

Fisheries Buybacks Chapter 9 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa USA. Squires, D., J. Joseph, T. Groves (2007). Buybacks in transnational ﬁsheries. Paciﬁc Economic Bulletin 21(3): 63–74. Sun, C.-H. (2007). Effectiveness of vessel buyback programs on the offshore ﬁshery in Taiwan. Chapter 13 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA. Thunberg, E., A. Kitts, J. Walden (2007). A case study of New England groundﬁsh ﬁshing capacity reduction. Chapter 16 In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fishery Buybacks. Blackwell, Ames, Iowa, USA.

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U.S. Government Accounting Ofﬁce (2001). Commercial Fisheries: The effectiveness of ﬁshing buyback programs can be improved. Testimony before the Subcommittee on Fisheries Conservation, Wildlife, and Oceans, Committee on Resources, U.S. House of Representatives, May 10. www.gao.gov/new.items/d01699t.pdf Weninger, Q., K.E. McConnell (2000). Buyback programs in commercial ﬁsheries: Efﬁciency versus transfers. Canadian Journal of Economics 33(2): 394–412. World Bank (2004). Saving Fish and Fisheries: Towards Sustainable and Equitable Governance of the Global Fishing Sector. Report No. 29090GLB, Agriculture and Rural Development Department. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.

38 Corporate Governance of Jointly Owned Fisheries Rights RALPH E. TOWNSEND

Indeed, ﬁsheries management conducted by many governments has been found to be both ineffective and expensive. . . . Moreover, there are many indications that [the holders of ITQs] are able to provide these services signiﬁcantly more efﬁciently than the government. . . . Clearly, this sole-owner corporation idea remains a viable solution to the ﬁsheries problem. . . . Scott’s initial emphasis on property rights as the key to the ﬁsheries problem was quickly overshadowed by the more traditional economic perspective in terms of externalities. —R. Arnason

38.2. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

38.1. INTRODUCTION This chapter makes three points. First, while individual transferable quotas (ITQs) have dramatically improved economic performance in ﬁsheries, there remain important opportunities for ﬁsheries rights holders to make collective decisions to increase the economic beneﬁts from ﬁsheries. Second, collective decision making under corporate governance rules is an obvious, but generally overlooked, alternative for collective decision making by ﬁsheries rights holders. Third, the seeming disinterest in corporate governance by economics is due at least in part to how economics has conceptualized the problem of ﬁsheries management. The quotes above (from Arnason 2007a, 2007b) demonstrate that the threads of these three points can already be found in the ﬁsheries economics literature. In the policy arena, the issue of how harvesters can make collective decisions about resource use has also become a signiﬁcant question. This analysis argues that corporate governance complements ITQ rights, so closer analysis of the concept is warranted.

38.2.1. Deﬁning Corporate Governance This section provides a background for the analysis by outlining how corporate governance of ﬁsheries might be structured. The question of why corporate governance of ﬁsheries might be desirable is addressed in later sections. To set up the context for corporate governance, consider the following scenario. A relatively large number of economic agents each own a share in a signiﬁcant economic resource. They must make a number of decisions in order to generate value from the resource, so they are seeking a governance structure within which to make those decisions. We would be unsurprised to ﬁnd that they choose corporate governance. In developed economies with well-functioning legal systems, corporate governance has become the dominant institution for joint owners to manage productive resources. Corporate governance, that is, majority voting under

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Corporate Governance of Jointly Owned Fisheries Rights one-share/one-vote rule with freely transferable shares, has been a remarkably successful institution for decision making over jointly owned resources. The dominance of corporate governance for economic assets raises the question of the application of corporate governance to ﬁsheries. The idea has been proposed on a number of occasions in the literature, including Jones et al. (1980) and Scott (1955b, 1993). Arnason (2007a) suggests that the feasibility of governance of ﬁsheries under a Swiss corporation is self-evident. However, these previous analyses raise the concept at a conceptual level, without providing the institutional details that are required for practical consideration and implementation. Townsend (1997) provides a more detailed analysis of alternative approaches to implementing corporate governance of ﬁsheries. The two general features of corporate governance for ﬁsheries are (1) one-share/one-vote decision making and (2) transferability of both the asset share and the voting right. Corporate governance is conceptually easy to implement in ITQ ﬁsheries, with one-share/ one-vote rights in proportion to the ITQ shares. When an ITQ share is created, the share could also receive not only a right to harvest a speciﬁed percent of the annual quota but also a voting right proportional to that share. Townsend (1995) suggests that voting might be done directly on decisions if the number of shareholders were small or indirectly through an elected board if the number of shareholders were large. While a majority-voting rule, typical of most corporate voting arrangements, seems most obvious, supermajority voting rules (but less than unanimous) might also be speciﬁed. Simple majority voting (i.e., 50 percent plus one) is not obviously superior to some form of supermajority voting, such as two-thirds majorities, in all circumstances. The defects of unanimous voting, notably the dominance of holdout strategies, can be avoided even under supermajority voting. Note that it is not uncommon for corporations to have supermajority voting rules for some decisions, such as take-over approvals. An immediate question is whether majority voting might disadvantage some minority. The share rights would certainly specify that the sharing of beneﬁts, in proportion to share holdings, could not be altered. Corporations do not allow a majority of owners to invalidate minority rights to a share of the proﬁts. Likewise, levies to ﬁnance activities

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of the ﬁsheries management corporation would be required to be in proportion to share ownership. Also, adoption of corporate governance incorporates the accumulated body of law that governs minority rights, so existing legal doctrine would be available to address unforeseen issues of minority rights in a ﬁsheries governance corporation. Townsend (1997) suggested two broad models for corporate governance. First, all management and extraction might be unitized within a single corporation. This would involve both making high-level management decisions, such as the total allowable catch (TAC), and managing day-to-day operations of the harvest vessels. In New Zealand, the owners of deepwater crab quota created just such a soleowner corporation to develop that new resource (Soboil and Craig 2008). As Arnason (2007b) shows, this solution provides perfectly compatible incentives for all rights holders. Each rights holder owns a claim to a predetermined and ﬁxed share of the resource, so the interest of all users is to maximize the present value of proﬁts. Two problems arise under complete unitization, however. First, there may be issues of monopoly power in the output market. Second, agency problems may arise when a corporation attempts to control the at-sea activities of hired vessel crew on a large number of vessels. It is not a coincidence that many ﬁsheries are characterized by small-scale owner-operator harvesting operations. A management ﬁrm will have difﬁculty monitoring the behavior of ﬁshing vessels that, by their nature, operate very independently of shore-based supervisors and that require very independent decision making to respond to the large day-to-day variability in ﬁsheries. Townsend (1997) proposed a second model of corporate governance that involves making the high-level decisions over management within the corporation, but leaving the actual harvest of shares to individual rights holders. If the experience of self-governance in ﬁsheries to date (see section 38.5.2) is an indication, this will probably be the more likely model. Following Arnason (2007b), the most obvious decision might be the TAC.1 But a set of ﬁsheries rights holders might also want to enforce upon each other a range of restrictions on when, where, and how catches are taken to manage various dimensions of resource rent dissipation (see section 38.3). Important aspects for governance might include the level of expenditure on research, administration, and monitoring/compliance.

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Like any institutional innovation, corporate governance faces challenges as well as opportunities. Many of these challenges can be addressed as the concept is developed more fully, but it is the nature of institutional innovation that solutions must be tailored to the speciﬁc problem. For example, mixed ﬁsheries may create complicated issues for corporate governance. In a mixed-trawl groundﬁsh complex under ITQ management, the various rights holders may own different shares of various stocks within the complex. Some kind of layered decision making may be required. While the owners of shares for a species might determine the TAC for that speciﬁc species, there are complexwide management issues that must also be addressed. Optimal rules on mesh size and closed seasons (to manage recruitment, for example) must be determined based upon some maximizing criteria over the complex, even though individual rights owners may not own exactly the same share of every species.

38.2.2. Comparison with Democratic Co-management Participation in ﬁsheries self-governance might occur under institutions other than corporate governance. The most obvious alternative would be some form of one-person/one-vote decision making. As Townsend (1995) argues, there are two core problems with democratic voting. First, an incentive is created to divide shares among more owners, such as family members or employees, in order to increase the voting share. Second, democratic voting will not generally result in sharing of costs in proportion to beneﬁts. When costs are not proportional to beneﬁts, the incentives to make longrun investments, such as stock rebuilding, may be diluted. Corporate governance assumes that ﬁsheries governance decisions can be broken into two broad categories, those that involve generation of resource rents and those that involve external effects on third parties (see section 38.6). The owners of the rights to harvest have an incentive to eliminate rent seeking with respect to resource rents, so that set of decisions can be devolved to private decision making under appropriate governance structures. This is in contrast to co-management governance structures, in which harvesters participate in decision making on all issues with all other stakeholders within democratically deﬁned institutions. By removing some decisions from the public sector,

rent seeking and other issues of government failure can be avoided for that set of decisions. Reduction in the transactions costs of government decision making can increase the net social value generated by the resource, even if exactly the same decision is reached.

38.3. RESIDUAL RENT LOSSES UNDER ITQS With a clearer deﬁnition of corporate governance, we can now ask how corporate governance might improve upon ITQs. ITQs provide a highly efﬁcient regulatory solution to the static problem of efﬁcient harvest of a ﬁxed quota (usually a government-set TAC). The worldwide experience with ITQs certainly supports the conclusion that ITQ management is an enormous improvement over earlier ﬁsheries management regimes (e.g., Arnason 2002; Grafton 1996). The relevant question is whether ITQs can or should evolve into more comprehensive property rights. To answer that question, we must explore the opportunities to capture rents beyond those realized by ITQs. To understand the potential for rent dissipation, it is important to move from the unidimensional conceptualizations of ﬁsheries stocks under the Schaefer (1957) model to multidimensional conceptualizations, such as the Beverton and Holt (1957) dynamic pool. Under the Schaefer (1957) and Gordon (1954) model, ITQ management addresses all dimensions of rent dissipation because optimal management requires only that the optimal amount of harvest be taken at minimum cost. The sum of the ITQ allocations adds up to an optimal TAC. The transferability of the output cap provides economic incentives for the industry to ﬁnd the leastcost harvest strategy. But under the Beverton and Holt (1957) dynamic pool, the distribution of the catch over the year classes matters as well as total catch. And the Beverton and Holt (1957) dynamic pool can be generalized to include seasons and spatial distribution, so the characteristics of the harvest with respect to seasons and space would also matter. Once we conceptualize the stock as having multiple dimensions, rather than a unidimensional biomass, there is opportunity for rent dissipation along any of these dimensions. Several studies have addressed this general area. Bradley (1970) and later Boyce (1992) examined

Corporate Governance of Jointly Owned Fisheries Rights the incentives to race to catch ﬁsh when and where they are easy to catch, in order to reduce the harvest costs. If ﬁsh are easier to catch early in the season due to higher stock densities or easier to catch in some areas than others, excessive effort will be attracted to those periods or areas of lower costs. The total catch will not be taken at minimum overall costs. Costello and Deacon (2007) made the general point that, when ﬁsh stocks are economically heterogeneous, all attributes of the property right must be deﬁned to provide incentives for completely efﬁcient harvest. If, for example, catching females has more impact on stock recruitment than catching males, then separate ITQs for males and females will be required. While the economics of deﬁning more detailed cap-and-trade ITQ rights are mathematically trivial, the practical issues of implementation rapidly become prohibitive. The administrative problems of deﬁning, measuring, recording, and enforcing ITQs that are speciﬁc to area, sex, age, and season (to list only the most obvious dimensions) are so large as to be prohibitive in virtually all cases. An important direction for self-governance is to ﬁnd efﬁcient rules to reduce the residual rent dissipation along these multiple dimension. Beverton and Holt (1957) introduced the idea that mesh size as well as total removals should be regulated to achieve that they called “eumetric” ﬁshing. But there are many other ways to manage selective ﬁshing. While Beverton and Holt (1957) choose to emphasize mesh size, a wide variety of details, such as head-rope height, chafﬁng gear, relative tension on warps, otter trawl door conﬁguration, the speed of trawling, and lengths of tows, can all affect the composition of the catch. Moreover, vessel skippers typically have a sophisticated knowledge of seasonal and areal distributions of different species. And communication among harvesters about the current catch patterns of other vessels can be very important to strategies to harvest selectively. An important dimension for self-governance is to create a joint incentive structure to share this information and to use this detailed knowledge to capture the optimal mix of ﬁsh. A simple example of this arose in the Nova Scotia scallop ﬂeet (Stevens et al. 2008). To maximize yield per recruit, the industry understood that they needed to avoid dredging in areas with small scallops. They agreed on a simple approach: all vessels shared information on their landings of scallops by size

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distribution with all other quota holders. This transparency resulted in a “name and shame” enforcement mechanism that has been highly effective. For some ﬁsheries systems, there may be opportunities to use aquaculture-like technologies to manipulate the system. Natural systems may have “bottlenecks” than be eliminated by selective application of aquacultural techniques. These opportunities seem especially noteworthy in sedentary shellﬁsh systems. In the New Zealand Challenger scallop ﬁshery, the industry ﬁnanced a program of seeding and rotation (Mincher 2008). In sea urchin ﬁsheries, a dynamic balance can be maintained between sea urchins and the seaweed production along a feeding line by selective thinning (Miller 2008). The dynamic problem of determining an optimal time path of harvests and stock sizes is seriously complicated by inherent environmental ﬂuctuations and the limited availability of information. When property rights are complete, a resource owner has appropriate incentives to manage this complicated problem. Management is fundamentally about risk management, an economic issue. Risk management involves assessing the value of alternative uncertain distributions of possible outcomes. In this process, the beneﬁts of acquiring information to reduce uncertainty must be weighted against the costs of the research to generate that information. There may be opportunities for private owners to incorporate knowledge of market dynamics into their decision making. While bioeconomic models typically assume that demand is exogenous, market participants may in fact have information about the dynamics of demand that can be incorporated in the time path of exploitation. At least two speciﬁc examples arise. When severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) disrupted markets for high-value ﬁsheries products in China, such a geoduck, owners had an incentive to leave ﬁsheries products in the water until markets recovered (James 2008). When ﬁsheries sectors providing competitive products have short-term increases (decreases) in supply, ﬁsheries owners should decrease (increase) their own production temporarily to maximize the present value of proﬁts. Finally, generating information about the resource can be an important component of increasing the value of ﬁsheries assets. The obvious issue is the optimal investment in stock assessment. Stock assessment is expensive, and optimal investment in stock assessment must balance the gains from more precise stock estimates against the costs.

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But investments in knowledge about the resource can take other forms as well. In the Nova Scotia scallop ﬁshery (Stevens et al. 2008), the industry invested CA$3.0 million in side-scan sonar imaging of the entire scallop habitat. This investment has the potential both to improve their system of deﬁning beds of scallops to harvest selectively and also to reduce the costs of harvest by up to 50 percent. In summary, ﬁsheries management that maximizes the rents is a complicated task. The set of required decisions is exactly analogous to the complicated set of tasks that the owner of any economic resource must make to maximize proﬁts. Government faces exactly the same limitations in efﬁcient management of ﬁsheries resources that it would face in efﬁcient management of other business operations.

38.4. GOVERNMENT FAILURE The concept of government failure captures the broad set of incorrect economic incentives facing government and those who deal with government in the process of delivery of economic services by government (e.g., Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Government failure limits the extent to which government will achieve the theoretical improvements in economic efﬁciency from government provision of public goods or public regulation of market failure. Among the factors contributing to government failure are incentives for rent seeking (Kreuger 1974; Tullock 1967), limitations on voting mechanisms (e.g., Arrow 1950; Olson 1965), and agency problems with respect to public employees. Because government failure limits the ability of government to intervene efﬁciently to correct market failures, the issue is central to the question of the appropriate role of government in a modern economy. Unfortunately, government failure is inherently difﬁcult to measure. Measuring rentseeking activity, determining the gap between the efﬁcient level of public goods and the actual level, and measuring the transactions costs of government are difﬁcult. The extent of government failure is often in the eye of the beholder. Critics of government intervention see government failure everywhere; advocates of activist government ﬁnd the issue entirely overblown. Fisheries economics has paid very little attention to government failure. Edwards (1994) laid out the case that government failure is an intrinsic feature

of traditional ﬁsheries governance institutions, but very little subsequent work on government failure in ﬁsheries exists. There is some limited experience with private delivery of ﬁsheries management services in Canada and New Zealand. New Zealand contracts for delivery of the accounting services for its ITQ system to an industry-run service bureau, FishServe. That privatized delivery is generally credited with reducing costs to industry by about 50 percent, although skeptics continue to argue that much of this savings was cost shifting rather than cost savings. When Canada allowed contracting for private dockside monitoring, the reductions in costs were also about 50 percent. New Zealand also uses a program of tendering for delivery of a wide range of services, including research and stock assessment. It is much more difﬁcult to document savings under this tendering process. It seems fair to conclude that the analysis of government failure within speciﬁc ﬁsheries deserves considerably more attention from economists. There are, however, reasons to expect that government failure in ﬁsheries management is large. Governments spent amounts that are large in relation to the value of landings in ﬁsheries. That spending has not only failed to generate economic rents in most countries, it also has been unable to prevent biological depletion of stocks. For example, Wallis and Flaaten (2003) found that the average spending for ﬁsheries management in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries was 6 percent of landed value. Spending ranged from 1 percent in Spain, to 18 percent in the United States, to 70 percent in Finland. If potential resource rents are on the order of 10–20 percent of landed value (and that reﬂects the results under New Zealand’s ITQ system), then 6–10 percent of landed value represents 30–100 percent of potential resource rents. While the implementation of the 200mile exclusive economic zone was expected to allow governments to manage their ﬁsheries resources, the state of the world’s ﬁsheries have declined signiﬁcantly since the 1970s (see Myers and Worm 2003; Pauly and Maclean 2003; Pauly et al. 1998; Watson and Pauly 2001). Competitive rent seeking by sectors within nations and between ﬂeets of different nations remains a dominant factor in ﬁsheries governance. The very large subsidies provided to ﬁshing ﬂeets, amounting to US$30 to $34 billion (109) or about 30 percent of landed value (Khan et al. 2007; Sumaila et al. 2008) are reﬂective of successful rent seeking by local ﬁshing industries.

Corporate Governance of Jointly Owned Fisheries Rights

38.5. SELF-GOVERNANCE: THEORY AND EXPERIENCE 38.5.1. Economic Analysis of the Sole Owner and Self-Governance Corporate governance is a particular type of selfgovernance of ﬁsheries, a topic that has received some analysis by economists. Scott’s (1955a) seminal article, which identiﬁed the need to unify decision making under a “sole owner” implicitly raises the question of how institutions might be created for private governance in ﬁsheries. While much of economic analysis assumes government will be that sole owner, the possibility of a private sole owner persists in the literature. But economic analysis has tended to focus on self-governance that arises voluntarily by harvesters under unanimous consent, rather than on how government might deﬁne nonunanimous rules for self-governance. Consequently, corporate governance largely has been overlooked by economics. Scott (1955a) not only introduces the potential for private self-governance, but also is the most persistent advocate for collective governance. Corporate governance is speciﬁcally identiﬁed in Scott (1955b) and in Jones et al. (1980). But Scott (1955a, 1988, 1993) has also tended to treat such widely divergent institutions as cooperatives, corporations, and government agencies as equally appropriate “sole owners,” which suggests he did not appreciate the unique possibilities of corporate governance. As Arnason (2007a) notes, corporate governance has been in the economics literature essentially since the beginning of economic analysis of ﬁsheries, but the idea has been overshadowed by regulatory rights and by ITQs in particular. Arnason’s (2007b) recent analysis of whether ITQ rights-holders have appropriate incentives to set their own TAC is an important development in economic analysis of self-governance. The speciﬁc question examined by Arnason (2007b) is actually rather narrow: Is the proﬁt maximizing TAC the same for all ITQ holders? This is a dynamic problem, because the optimal TAC determines the optimal biomass, and both the biomass and TAC affect the costs of harvest. Arnason (2007b) shows that a cooperative solution is possible under three alternative assumptions: (1) if all harvesters are identical, (2) if harvesters are each allocated a ﬁxed share of the joint proﬁts (which is equivalent to a corporate structure), or (3) if individual proﬁts are increasing

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as joint proﬁts increase. Note that Arnason (2007b) also assumes that all ITQ holders use the same market discount rate in their assessments of the future stream of beneﬁts. As Arnason (2007b, p. 381) notes, extending his analysis to private governance of other aspects of stock management is an obvious generalization. For example, if an optimal mesh size (Beverton and Holt 1957) is required, the private owners will have analogous incentives for joint private decision making. Arnason (2007b) suggests that his results portend an optimistic future for ﬁsheries self-governance. But the results are in fact remarkably narrow with respect to self-governance under unanimous consent. Self-organization apparently requires cooperative games among actors with identical economic interests. Arnason (2007b) tries to ﬁnesse the inherent limitations of these results by arguing that ITQ owners are likely to be homogeneous. But if selfgovernance is to have practical signiﬁcance, then surely it must function when the rights owners have different costs and different incentives. And the issue is not simply whether the ﬁrms are economically different, but rather whether they have different perceptions about the future of the biological system that they must jointly manage. To decide on current quotas is to agree on how to manage risk and uncertainty about the future path of the stock growth, and it is very unlikely that the players will have identical assessments of the future risks. Note also that the Arnason analysis applies to cooperative games with no enforcement problems. The real-world game is almost certainly noncooperative, because incentives and opportunities remain to increase one’s share of the rents by violating any collective rules. Collective decisions that constrain those rent-seeking incentives must be enforced; enforcement is likely to be not only costly but also imperfect. Like Arnason (2007b), economics has tended to assume that self-governance must arise spontaneously under unanimous consent. This ﬂows from Paretian analysis: a solution is unambiguously better only if no one is made worse off. Nonunanimous rules, such as majority share voting, tend to be ignored. But the issue is whether the owners of a share of some resource would prefer to receive a share with the de facto stipulation that unanimous consent is required for collective action or the same share but with the provision that some nonunanimous rule would be available for collective action. For example, shares in a major corporation are almost certain to be more

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valuable under one-share/one-vote rule than under a requirement that all shareholders must unanimously agree on all decisions. Corporate governance is a question of institutional design, and the roots of these institutional questions are found in transactions costs. To selfgovern, ITQ rights holders must self-organize and then bargain with government. Both steps involve signiﬁcant transactions costs, which can block the realization of beneﬁts that are theoretically available. The idea that transactions costs are a signiﬁcant barrier to self-organization is well established in economics. Coase (1960) argued that transactions costs limit the ability of private agents to bargain welfare-improving contracts. Using the speciﬁc case of ﬁsheries, Cheung (1970) argued that the absence of property rights raises the transactions costs of negotiating contracts for efﬁcient use of resources. Libecap (1989) has conducted extensive empirical analysis of the limits to self-organization. There is also growing experience with self-governance of ﬁsheries that indicates that transactions costs do indeed limit the ability of industry to self-organize.

38.5.2. Lessons from Selfgovernance under Unanimous Consent Not only economists have limited their interest in self-governance of ﬁsheries to situations of unanimous consent. Some ﬁsheries agencies have expressed interest in self-governance. But, with rare exceptions, those ﬁsheries agencies have left the organization of self-governance entirely to the industry. In the absence of any mechanism for nonunanimous decision making, the de facto governance structure is unanimous consent. Self-governance has arisen under unanimous consent in both ITQ ﬁsheries and also in limited entry ﬁsheries (without ITQs). Townsend et al. (2008) assembled a worldwide selection of 32 cases of selfgovernance institutions. The introductory essay in that volume (Townsend and Shotton 2008), which draws some conclusions from both these cases and from the broader literature on self-governance, is the source of the following discussion. Past experiences indicate that self-governance can signiﬁcantly improve on traditional government-centered regulation. Notably, those experiences include several instances of self-organized individual quotas by limited entry rights holders. Cases include U.S. tileﬁsh (Rountree et al. 2008),

Oregon’s Yaquina Bay roe herring (Leal 2008), U.S. Paciﬁc whiting (Sylvia et al. 2008), and British Columbia red sea urchins (Featherstone and Rogers 2008). These cases also include a variety of innovative institutional responses, including a selforganized ITQ for a noncommercial bycatch of crabs by the Alaskan weathervane scallop industry (Brawn and Scheirer 2008) and private investment in sonar mapping of the entire ﬁshing area by the Nova Scotia scallop industry (Stevens et al. 2008). Consistent with the analysis above, most cases of self-governance involve management of details of harvesting beyond the TAC. But the empirical evidence on self-organization of self-governance also supports Cheung’s (1970) analysis that transactions costs are a signiﬁcant deterrent to such activity. Townsend and Shotton (2008) ﬁnd that self-governance under unanimous consent has arisen almost exclusively in ﬁsheries where the numbers of rights holders is small, usually less than ﬁfteen. They conclude that transactions costs limit the size of the group that can negotiate and implement self-governance under unanimous consent rules. Moreover, self-governance has been much more common in shellﬁsh ﬁsheries, which offer relatively more closed and predictable biological systems for management. The experience to date with ﬁsheries selfgovernance is at once exciting and discouraging. The prediction that private institutions can ﬁnd innovative solutions that elude governments seems to be validated. But, under unanimous consent rules, the scope for ﬁsheries self-governance is almost certain to be limited to ﬁsheries with small numbers of rights holders. If the beneﬁts of self-governance are to ﬁnd their way to the major ﬁsheries of the world, then rules other than unanimous consent are essential. The most obvious nonunanimous decision structure for governance of economic assets is one-share/one-vote corporate governance.

38.6. EMBEDDING CORPORATE GOVERNANCE WITHIN A REGULATORY FRAMEWORK 38.6.1. Pool versus Downstream Externalities Corporate governance does not address all of the efﬁciency issues raised by ﬁsheries. Government will continue to have an active role in ﬁsheries

Corporate Governance of Jointly Owned Fisheries Rights governance, just as it does broadly throughout the economy. The exact role of government will depend both upon the comparative strengths and weaknesses of private versus public institutions and also upon the extent to which private institutions can internalize appropriate incentives. Economic analysis of ﬁsheries has focused on the “pool externality” (Haveman 1973) that arises under extraction from a common ﬁsheries pool, as users compete to capture the available rents. The externalities are reciprocally imposed by each user on all other users. By allocating the rents among users under an ITQ, the incentive to race to capture the rents is ended. Moreover, the set of competitive users is transformed into a set of collective owners. The incentive for each owner is to maximize the value of the owned share of the pool. Potentially, an incentive is created for those owners to address collectively other sources of rent dissipation. That is the concept underlying the question of ﬁsheries self-governance. This chapter raises the possibility that corporate governance might be an efﬁcient way to address the complicated pool externalities associated with extraction. But ﬁsheries also create “downstream externalities” (Haveman 1973). Harvest may cause incidental mortality of species that are valuable for nonextractive reasons to society, such as marine mammals, birds, and turtles. Harvest methods may disrupt ecosystems by damaging reefs or benthic communities. These downstream externalities imposed on third parties are not resolved by ITQs, nor is a collective interest among harvesters created to solve these externalities. Management of these downstream externalities will remain an issue that may require government regulation. The economic questions of how best to manage these downstream externalities, which must involve balancing the potential advantages of reducing market failure against the costs imposed by government failure, are no different and no easier for ﬁsheries than for other economic sectors. The externalities that are not internalized by well-deﬁned rights to harvest the stock include the existence value of stocks to the broader public. Clark and Munro (1978) presented the possibility that even a sole owner might “mine” a ﬁshery resource to extinction, if the maximum rate of return on a stock is less than the market discount rate. Because a private owner will not incorporate any social existence value into decision making, government regulation may be

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required to prevent extinction. This problem does not arise for stocks where the maximum rate of growth exceeds the discount rate, which probably includes many marine ﬁsheries. And Grafton et al. (2007) suggest that even for stocks with low rates of growth, such as orange roughy, cost conditions in the most ﬁsheries may mean that a sole owner would rarely have an incentive to ﬁsh a stock to extinction.

38.6.2. Contractual Management To establish a corporate governance structure, government must use its rule-making authority to deﬁne three aspects of management: 1. The one-share/one-vote decision-making structure 2. Which decisions will be authorized for devolution under self-governance 3. How to structure the relationship between government and the corporate governance institution over decisions not devolved for selfgovernance, such as downstream externalities A regulatory contract between the corporately governed private interests and the public regulatory agency seems like a particularly attractive vehicle to specify all three dimensions of the self-governance structure. Owners of property rights routinely contract with public and private parties over terms of use of their resources. Regulatory contracting has emerged in some ﬁsheries self-governance agreements, notably in Canada and New Zealand. Some precedents for regulatory contracting can be found in price cap regulation of public utilities and environmental regulatory contracts. Management of residual downstream externalities could, of course, be accomplished by retaining existent regulatory structures. But the creation of a single management corporation presents the opportunity to use regulatory contracting to reduce the scope of government failure in ﬁsheries regulation. A self-governance contract between a ﬁsheries self-governance corporation and the government would specify the rights and obligations of both government and industry and would establish mechanisms to implement the contract. Such a contract might address biological standards for stock management, any government cost recovery for services provided, restrictions on ﬁsheries operations that reduce interactions with other ﬁsheries or with

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threatened species, government obligations to protect the stocks exploited by the rights holders from third-party externalities, performance bonds and penalties for violating contract terms, and reporting and auditing requirements. Contracts are inherently dynamic. They assign risk, specify the bounds within which the contract is valid, and specify arrangements to resolve differing interpretations of the contractual obligations. Welldesigned contracts both address comprehensively all the issues the two parties can foresee and also anticipate the unexpected. Contracts can broadly specify management of many contingencies. For example, new interactions with at-risk species are possible in most ﬁsheries, even though the speciﬁc species may be unpredictable. Industry could be required to report such interactions and to use best practice to avoid interactions. The use of third-party arbitration or independent scientiﬁc panels can manage unanticipated developments more quickly and at less cost than court proceedings. The contracting relationship between the government and a ﬁsheries self-governance corporation is unique, in that the two parties are precommitted to a continuing relationship. The contracting framework must be ﬂexible enough to adjust to changing circumstances and must create incentives for the two parties to agree on new contracts under a bilateral bargaining arrangement. Townsend and Young (2005) argue that evergreen contracts are an appropriate vehicle when two parties want a long-term relationship but recognize that the terms of the relationship must evolve. Under an evergreen contract, the contract renewal occurs not at the end of the contract, but rather at mid-term (or earlier.) For example, a 20-year contract might be renewed at year 10 or even year 5. The mid-term renewal process avoids end-point biases and also creates incentives for the two parties to successfully bargain a renewal. An evergreen contracting approach is more than simply a means to codify existing regulatory practice. Rather, an evergreen contracting process creates the predictability that is similar to that enjoyed by property rights. Property rights in Western political systems limit the ability of governments to arbitrarily redeﬁne those rights. Redeﬁnition and attenuation of rights are possible, but the legal and political system deﬁnes limits on how quickly and how radically those rights may be restricted or redeﬁned. An evergreen contracting approach to management likewise limits the ability of government to subject rights holders to capricious changes.

Contractual arrangements for ﬁsheries governance already exist in a few ﬁsheries in New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. New Zealand uses contracting to devolve substantial authority to the Challenger Scallop Enhancement Company (New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries and the Challenger Scallop Enhancement Company Ltd. 1997). New Zealand also has a contract with an industryowned company, FishServe, for delivery of administrative and accounting functions that implement its quota management system (New Zealand and Commercial Fisheries Services Ltd. 2001). Canada uses joint project agreements with a number of industry groups, including geoduck, sableﬁsh, halibut, and sea urchin ﬁsheries in British Columbia (Blewett 2002). In the northeast United States, the New England Fisheries Management Council has designed a contractual approach for allocation of parts of groundﬁsh quotas to sectoral management contracts. The ﬁrst of these was with the Cape Cod Hook Association.

38.7. ECONOMIC ANALYSIS AND FISHERIES SELFGOVERNANCE It may be useful to understand why corporate governance has been at the fringe of economic analysis of ﬁsheries management. Economists did implicitly assume that self-governance would be a voluntary, Pareto-improving development after individual harvest rights were created. The idea that corporate voting might be attached to ITQ rights a priori did not arise under this conceptualization. And to a large extent, economics has been guided by an inadequate metaphor of property rights. Economists sought to create ﬁsheries rights that were analogous to the completely divisible and separable property rights for land. An analogy to the joint ownership of industrial assets would have been a more appropriate metaphor for the problems of ﬁsheries management, because inherently joint assets will be exploited by ITQ rights owners. But there is a deeper conceptual issue, which is tied to the development of externality theory. Twentieth-century analysis of market failure was a contest between the externality conceptualization derived under the direct-interaction approach of Pigou (1932) and the property rights approach of Knight (1924) (see Mohring and Boyd 1971). Coase (1960) showed that these conceptualizations

Corporate Governance of Jointly Owned Fisheries Rights were very divergent and let to dramatically different policy analyses. The Pigovian analysis, with its assumptions of zero transactions costs and perfect government, led directly to regulatory taxes and other forms of “efﬁcient” regulation. Knight’s analysis of incomplete property rights leads to investigation of how alternative institutions might improve property rights and lower the transactions costs of private bargaining. As Arnason (2007a, p. 336) noted, externality theory from Pigou (1932) displaced property rights analysis of ﬁsheries at an early stage. Rather than refereeing the question of which approach is “right,” it is more constructive to note that different problems may sit more comfortably with one or the other of these competing conceptualizations. Notably, better property rights do not offer very compelling solutions to large-scale environmental problems, such as air pollution and climate change. Regulatory solutions derivative of Pigovian analysis, including pollution taxes and cap-and-trade regulation, present much more feasible approaches. And because externality theory became largely synonymous with environmental analysis in the second half of the 20th century, Pigovian analysis came to dominate the analysis of market failures. While a property right for the entire atmosphere may be impossible, property rights for ﬁsheries resources are entirely possible. For a sedentary shellﬁsh resources, “pins” in the water based on global positioning system (GPS) coordinates are virtually indistinguishable from terrestrial metal pins driven on analogous GPS coordinates. While problems of deﬁning rights get somewhat harder as more mobile marine resources are considered, property rights are still very tractable. But ﬁsheries externalities have largely been conceptualized as a special case of environmental externalities, so the unique opportunities for property rights in ﬁsheries were overlooked.

38.8. SUMMARY Scott’s (1955a) “sole owner” correctly identiﬁed the issue of missing ownership incentives, but steered economics away from ideas of joint ownership of ﬁsheries resources towards sole owners. Because economics has relied heavily on the Schaefer (1957) and Gordon (1954) conceptualization of ﬁsheries systems, the importance of joint decision making on non-TAC dimensions of efﬁcient resource use

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has been underappreciated. Both the possibility and advantages of corporate self-governance have been largely overlooked. Previous experience with selfgovernance indicates that there are many opportunities for resource users to cooperate to improve resource use. But high transactions costs, which increase dramatically with the number of participants, limit the ability to achieve those improvements. Instead of restricting economic analysis of self-governance to voluntary self-organization, economics might consider whether transactions costs warrant speciﬁcation of nonunanimous decisionmaking institutions. Creating a corporate governance model with voting in proportion to ITQ shares is an obvious institutional innovation.

Acknowledgments The author is solely responsible for the views and analysis in this chapter. The views and analysis are not reﬂective of any ofﬁcial position of the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries.

Note 1. While this may be obvious to economists, I suspect that the decision is instinctively suspect from the view of most ﬁsheries managers. Given their prejudices, my realistic expectation is that quota-setting authority might be the last authority to be delegated.

References Arnason, R. (2002). A review of international experiences with ITQs. An annex In: A. Hatcher, S. Pascoe, R. Banks and R. Arnason (eds.) Future Options for UK Fish Quota Management. CEMARE Report R58. Portsmouth, U.K.: University of Portsmouth. Arnason, R. (2007a). Advances in property rights based ﬁsheries management: An introduction. Marine Resource Economics 22: 335–346. Arnason, R. (2007b). Fisheries self-management under ITQs. Marine Resource Economics 22: 373–390. Arrow, K. J. (1950). A difﬁculty in the concept of social welfare. Journal of Political Economy 58: 328–346. Beverton, R.J.H., and S.J. Holt (1957). On the Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations. Fishery Investigations Series II, vol. 19. London: Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

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Blewett, E. (2002). Status Report on Co-managed Fisheries. Prepared for BC Seafood Alliance. www.bcseafoodalliance.com/BCSA/BCSA_ BLEWETT.html Boyce, J. (1992). Individual transferable quotas and production externalities in a ﬁshery. Natural Resource Modelling 6(4): 385–408. Bradley, P.G. (1970). Some seasonal models of the ﬁshing industry. In: A.D. Scott (ed). Economics of Fisheries: A Symposium. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, Institute of Animal Resource Ecology. Brawn, T., and K. Scheirer (2008). The Alaskan Weathervane Scallop Cooperative. Pp. 349–360 in R.E. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Self-governance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Buchanan, J.M., and G. Tullock (1962). The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cheung, S.N.S. (1970). The structure of a contract and the theory of a non-exclusive resource. Journal of Law and Economics 13: 49–70. Clark, C.W., and G.R. Munro (1978). Renewable resources and extinction. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 5: 198–205. Coase, R.H. (1960). The problem of social cost. Journal of Law and Economics 3: 1–44. Costello, C., and R. Deacon (2007). The efﬁciency gains from fully delineating rights in an ITQ ﬁshery. Marine Resource Economics 22: 347–361. Edwards, S.F. (1994). Ownership of renewable ocean resources. Marine Resource Economics 9: 253–273. Featherstone, M., and J. Rogers (2008). The evolution of co-management in the British Columbia red sea urchin ﬁshery. Pp. 383–395 in R.E. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds.). Case Studies in Fisheries Self-governance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gordon, H. S. (1954). The economic theory of a common-property resource: The ﬁshery. Journal of Political Economy 62:124–142. Grafton, R.Q. (1996). Individual transferable quotas: Theory and practice. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 6: 5–20. Grafton, R.Q., T. Kompas, and R.W. Hilborn (2007). Economics of overexploitation revisited. Science 318: 1601. Haveman, R.H. (1973). Common property, congestion, and environmental pollution. Quarterly Journal of Economics 87: 278–287. James, M. (2008). Co-operative management of the geoduck and horse-clam ﬁshery in British

Columbia. Pp. 397–406 in R.E. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Self-governance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Jones, R.A., P.H. Pearse, and A.D. Scott (1980). Conditions for cooperation on joint projects by independent jurisdictions. Canadian Journal of Economics 13: 231–249. Khan, A.S., U.R. Sumaila, R. Watson, G. Munro, and D. Pauly (2007). The nature and magnitude of global non-fuel ﬁsheries subsidies. Pp. 5–7 in U.R. Sumaila and D. Pauly (eds). Catching More Bait: A Bottom-Up Re-estimation of Global Fisheries Subsidies (2nd version). University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre Research Reports 14(6). Vancouver: University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre. Knight, F.H. (1924). Some fallacies in the interpretation of social cost. Quarterly Journal of Economics 38: 582–606. Kreuger, A.O. (1974). The political economy of the rent-seeking society. American Economic Review 64: 291–303. Leal, D.R. (2008). A ﬁshermen’s agreement and co-op in Yaquina Bay roe herring. Pp. 415–423 in R.E. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Self-governance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Libecap, G.D. (1989). Contracting for Property Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press. Miller, R. (2008). A sea urchin dive ﬁshery managed by exclusive ﬁshing areas. Pp. 77–87 in R.E. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Self-governance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Mincher, R. (2008). New Zealand’s Challenger Scallop Enhancement Company: From reseeding to self-governance. Pp. 307–321 in R.E. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Self-governance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Mohring, H., and J.H. Boyd (1971). Analysing “externalities”: “Direct interaction” vs “asset utilization” frameworks. Economica 38: 347–361. Myers, R.A., and B. Worm (2003). Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory ﬁsh communities. Nature 423: 280–283. New Zealand and Commercial Fisheries Services Ltd. (2001). Registry Services Delivery Agreement. Wellingon, N.Z.: Ministry of Fisheries. New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries and the Challenger Scallop Enhancement Company Ltd.

Corporate Governance of Jointly Owned Fisheries Rights (1997). Memorandum of Understanding. Wellington, N.Z.: Ministry of Fisheries. Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Pauly, D., V. Christensen, J. Dalsgaard, R. Froese, and F. Torres, Jr. (1998). Fishing down marine food webs. Science 279: 860–863. Pauly, D., and J. Maclean (2003). In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Pigou, A.C. (1932). The Economics of Welfare. 4th ed. London: Macmillan. Rountree, B., A. Kitts, and P. Pinto da Silva (2008). Complexities of collaboration in ﬁsheries management: The northeast United States tileﬁsh ﬁshery. Pp. 135–147 in R.E. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Self-governance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Schaefer, M. (1957). Some considerations of population dynamics and economics in relation to the management of the commercial marine ﬁsheries. Journal of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada 14: 669–681. Scott, A.D. (1955a). The ﬁshery: The objectives of sole ownership. Journal of Political Economy 63: 116–124. Scott, A.D. (1955b). Natural Resources: The Economics of Conservation. Ottawa: Carlton University Press. Scott, A.D. (1988). Development of property in the ﬁshery. Marine Resource Economics 5: 289–311. Scott, A.D. (1993). Obstacles to ﬁshery selfgovernment. Marine Resource Economics 8: 187–199. Soboil, M.L., and A. Craig (2008). Self governance in New Zealand’s developmental ﬁsheries: Deep-sea crabs. Pp. 269–275 in R.E. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies in Fisheries Self-governance. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 504. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Stevens, G., G. Robert, L. Burke, E. Poullioux, D. Roussel, and J.R. Wilson (2008). The evolution of management in Canada’s offshore scallop ﬁshery. Pp. 111–123 in R.E. Townsend, R. Shotton, and H. Uchida (eds). Case Studies

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39 Managing Small-Scale Fisheries: Moving Toward People-Centered Perspectives PATRICK MCCONNEY ANTHONY CHARLES

39.1. INTRODUCTION This chapter provides a future-oriented perspective on small-scale ﬁsheries (SSF), with a focus on new directions for management. The discussion is based on lessons from successes in SSF, as well as experiences with less successful conventional approaches. There is a high diversity among SSF worldwide, so in this chapter we do not consider all the many forms of SSF or all the relevant issues. Instead, we seek to present a set of themes and approaches that relate broadly to success and failure in SSF management. In doing so, we recognize that extracting lessons from such a diverse array of ﬁshery types and SSF situations necessarily simpliﬁes complex circumstances and interactions. It is important to appreciate, even if not fully understand, the complexity of these ﬁsheries—and to recognize that “blueprint solutions” are not available to resolve complex problems. Furthermore, management options for SSF must bring about changes in attitudes and behaviors in order to succeed. For this, empirical lessons learned in SSF must be sufﬁciently simple to be shared, learned, and institutionalized by a wide variety of stakeholders. These themes thread their way throughout the chapter and mainly concern the incorporation of human dimensions into SSF management (also see De Young et al. 2008). Our analysis here takes a “people-centered perspective”

based on new ideas about how emerging management approaches can improve the sustainability and resilience of SSF. First, we describe the nature of SSF. Then trends in the management of SSF are discussed with emphasis on recent approaches and perspectives that form the context for the remaining sections— which focus on promising directions for the future in managing SSF. These sections examine overarching policy, establishment of effective management systems, and key considerations for management. The chapter closes with some conclusions on the way forward.

39.2. CHARACTERIZING SMALLSCALE FISHERIES There is no one model of a small-scale ﬁshery; rather, they can be seen as ﬁsheries possessing many of the following characteristics:

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• Fishers operate close to shore and are dependent on local resources. • Fishers use vessels that are relatively small and individually owned • The ﬁshery constitutes an integral part of the coastal communities where ﬁshers live. • There is a greater reliance on labor than on capital in the ﬁshery, and correspondingly the

Managing Small-Scale Fisheries capital cost per ﬁshery job is relatively low as is the fuel used per unit of catch. • The participants do not identify themselves as being part of an offshore or industrial ﬁshery. The term “small-scale” describes a spectrum of ﬁshing operations that share the common feature that they are not of an industrial scale. While “small-scale” is sometimes used interchangeably with “artisanal,” “subsistence,” and “inshore,” the latter terms may take on speciﬁc, overlapping meaning within the umbrella of being small-scale. Indeed, Panayotou (1985, p. 11) points out that “although there is no standard deﬁnition of smallscale ﬁsheries, various classiﬁcations of ﬁsheries do exist: small-scale versus large-scale, subsistence versus commercial, artisanal versus industrial, inshore (or municipal) versus offshore.” Almost all SSF have commercial aspects, generally due to the value of ﬁsh as food. Exceptions include (1) subsistence ﬁsheries, ones in which “cash transactions are minimal, but ﬁsh tend to be traded or shared extensively among kinship and social networks,” and (2) sport or tournament ﬁsheries where high income is derived from ﬁshing services rather than the sale of ﬁsh (Berkes et al. 2001). There are SSF in all parts of the world. The term “small-scale” is widely used in developing regions, but even though it is less commonly found in a developed-country context, many ﬁsheries in the latter areas are small-scale. Indeed, the idea of “small-scale” is relative to the location being considered. As Panayotou (1985, p. 11) notes, “it is not unusual to ﬁnd that what is considered a smallscale ﬁshery in one country would be classed as a large-scale ﬁshery in another.” For example, tuna longlining is done at an artisanal level in Caribbean small islands where “small-scale” ranges from outboard-powered open vessels making day trips to 12-meter decked and inboard-powered multiday boats. However, in North America the latter vessels would be at the lower limit of the small-scale range, and 15- to 20-meter vessels comprise the bulk of the inshore ﬂeet—vessels that would be considered industrial in the insular Caribbean. Similar differences occur in other parts of the world in comparing developing to developed countries. Berkes et al. (2001) observe that while smallscale commercial ﬁsheries exploit many of the same stocks as are exploited by the large-scale commercial ﬁsheries, they also exploit a large number of smaller stocks, the ﬁsheries for which may be highly

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modernized and technologically sophisticated. Such ﬁsheries target groups of species such as: • Deep demersal ﬁshes of tropical shelf slopes, typically using nets, lines, and traps • Coastal large pelagic ﬁshes, typically trolling or with small-scale longlines • Coastal demersal ﬁshes of temperate shelves and bays, using traps, nets, and longlines, often exploiting the same stocks as large-scale trawl ﬁsheries operating further offshore, but frequently targeting different life history stages In situations of minimal commercial activity, or subsistence, SSF tend to exploit an even greater variety of very small stocks distributed over numerous management units (Berkes et al. 2001). These ﬁsheries typically use traditional ﬁshing gears such as small nets, traps, lines, spears, and hand collection methods. Although biodiversity of the catch is often highest in these ﬁsheries, partly because of the low selectivity of gears used, there tend to be few discards as everything is utilized. Full utilization is one of the characteristics of areas in which poverty is high (Béné 2003). This category of ﬁshery, common in Africa, Asia, and the Paciﬁc, targets the following: • Fishes, and invertebrates of coral reefs, typically with traps, spears, lines and by hand • Fishes and invertebrates of coastal lagoon and estuaries, typically using nets • Fisheries for marine aquarium species in all habitats The above discussion reveals an important pattern of commonality among SSF worldwide that may allow them to be distinguished from other scales of ﬁshery. This pattern is important as it allows us to share experiences, lessons and policy or management interventions across diverse settings. Although SSF are more deeply embedded in distinct sociocultural conditions than are larger scale ﬁsheries, ones based more in international business and the marketplace, there is no reason to consider them so unique that they are intractable for governance and management. Table 39.1 builds on the analysis of Berkes et al. (2001) to illustrate some useful categories and characteristics relevant to the discussion of SSF that follows in this chapter.

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

39.1 Categories and characteristics of ﬁsheries Category

Fisheries-Related Characteristics

Large-Scale Industrial

Small-Scale Artisanal

Subsistence

Fishing unit

Stable, with division of labor

Ownership

Concentrated in few hands, often nonoperators

Lone operators, or family or community group Owner-operated

Time commitment Boat

Usually full time Powered, much equipment

Equipment types

Machine made, assembled by others

Gear sophistication Investment

Electronics, automation High; large proportion other than by operator Large Sale to organized markets

Stable, small, specialized with some division of labor Usually owned by senior operator, operators jointly, nonﬁshing owner Either full time or part time Small; inboard motor (or small outboard) Partly or wholly machinemade materials, often operator assembled Mechanized and manual Medium to low; entirely by operator Medium to low Organized local sale, signiﬁcant consumption by operators

Catches (per ﬁshing unit) Disposal of catch

Processing of catch Operator’s income level Integration into economy Occupationality Extent of marketing Management capacity of ﬁsheries authority Management units Fisheries data collection Governance situation as business enterprises Strategies for coping with uncertainty in the ﬁshery

Much for ﬁshmeal and nonhuman consumption Often high Formal; fully integrated Full time or seasonal Products found worldwide Considerable with many scientists and managers One or few large units Not too difﬁcult given the authority’s capacity Corporate private sector often with State backing Based on formal business planning, risk assessment

Some drying, smoking, salting; primarily human Middle to lowest brackets Partially integrated Often multioccupational Often national and local Minimal to moderate with few scientists/managers Usually many small units Difﬁcult due to ﬁsheries and authority’s features Mix of types and scales of ﬁrms as small businesses Informal strategies but sometimes well planned

Most often part time None, or small, usually nonmotorized Often hand-made materials, operator assembled Mainly nonmechanized Low Low to very low Primarily consumed by operator, family, and friends; exchange by barter; occasional sale Little or none; all for human consumption Minimal Informal; not integrated Multioccupational Local or district level only Often not managed except by the resource users Very many small units Often no data may be collected due to difﬁculty Individual or kinship units mainly at community level Often very informal and culturally based strategies

Source: Adapted from Berkes et al. (2001).

39.3. CHANGING PERSPECTIVES 39.3.1. A Brief History Fisheries management must balance conservation and development to achieve improvements in quality of life that are sustainable and equitable intergenerationally. However, in the aftermath of World War II, both in developing countries and along the rural coasts of developed countries, attention paid to SSF focused on ﬁsheries investment. This was aimed at economic development via technological change in order to increase harvest and products for commodity markets. It was decades later

that the pendulum swung away from development toward science and increased regulatory conservation (Degnbol 2004)—after it became clear that SSF could suffer overexploitation, through a combination of poor management and overcapitalization, as had been the experience in many industrialized ﬁsheries. Over the course of the 20th century, the dominant position of conventional ﬁsheries management led to an erosion of opportunities for more people-centered approaches to managing SSF. The latter approaches range from civil society participation in so-called “modern” societies, to culturally embedded customary tenure and other systems

Managing Small-Scale Fisheries in “traditional” societies. Fisheries of all scales, in developed and developing countries, are typically still subject to some elements of the commandand-control approach of conventional ﬁsheries management—despite this having been proven to be ﬂawed in many instances (Berkes et al. 2001; Charles 2001). A few well-documented deﬁciencies of conventional approaches include: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Assessments that are often data intense Undervaluation of the human dimensions Narrowly single-species, often single gear Local knowledge often second class Strong biology and economics bias Co-management as a last resort only Ecosystem approaches still new Poor compliance as lacks legitimacy Often underestimates uncertainty Ignores other economic sectors Assumes rational decision makers Separated from social, cultural contexts Top-down, command and control Ignores politics of decision making Control not ﬂexible for adaptation Overlooks the importance of scale

Recent perspectives on SSF have sought to rectify these shortcomings, being oriented more toward human dimensions, as illustrated for example in the attention being paid to the social, cultural, political, and institutional aspects of SSF. This treats humans as agents able to self-organize within complex adaptive systems (discussed below)—linking social systems to ecological systems within the ﬁshery, and linking to each other through social networks (Mahon et al. 2008). In this new perspective, there is a focus on good governance, aiming toward more resilient ﬁshery systems (Chakalall et al. 2007; Charles 2007). We present some of these perspectives below.

39.3.2. Complex Adaptive Systems It is useful to view ﬁsheries as systems—with a ﬁshery system one of interacting components (species, ﬂeets, communities, institutions, etc.) dynamically changing over time (Charles 2001). A complex system is one that exhibits particular characteristics stemming from patterns of interaction internally within the system. When systems also exhibit the capacity to self-organize, learn, and adapt, they are complex adaptive systems (CAS). Typically, SSF exhibit the characteristics of such systems, within

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which the desirable quality of self-organization can be enhanced through appropriate policy inputs (Mahon et al. 2008). This contrasts with conventional ﬁsheries management, which has often been thwarted by self-organization, when attempts to control one part of the system result in unpredicted adaptive responses in other parts. For example, ﬁshers in SSF devise innovative ways to collectively and individually circumvent management regulations, as Hauck (2008) discusses in the case of South Africa. Since SSF are complex and adaptive, coping with complexity should be of particular interest to ﬁsheries managers. Recent approaches to dealing with complexity in human-in-nature systems recognize them as unpredictable and uncontrollable. Treating SSF as CAS leads to very different management approaches, ones with the potential to address SSF management problems where conventional approaches have failed. The emphasis shifts from “command and control” to a focus on enabling of self-organization, learning, adaptive capacity, and resilience (Mahon et al. 2008). New frameworks and models that a SSF manager can use to implement enabling policy are needed if stakeholders are expected to improve SSF systems. An initial challenge is to communicate CAS concepts to stakeholders, including policy makers.

39.3.3. Social-Ecological Systems Parallel to the idea of SSF as CAS, it is also helpful to management to view SSF as social-ecological system (SES). Berkes et al. (2001) note: “We use the term social-ecological system (SES) to emphasize the point that social systems and ecological systems are in fact linked. The delineation between social and ecological (and between nature and culture) is artiﬁcial and arbitrary.” Indeed, interdisciplinary social-ecological management of ﬁsheries is not a luxury but a necessity when dealing with CAS. Managing ﬁsheries with an eye to both the biophysical environment and the socioeconomic environment makes the task of the manager both easier and more difﬁcult. It is easier because such an approach brings the task of management closer to the reality of ﬁsheries and ﬁshers. It is more difﬁcult, because such an approach requires a working knowledge of concepts and ﬁelds not covered in the conventional education of the average SSF manager—essentially a shift in emphasis from technical to “people” skills (Mahon and McConney 2004).

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This shift means that current best practices (good governance, integrated coastal management, adaptive co-management, livelihood approaches, etc.) need to be situated within the conceptual frameworks of CAS and SES. They also need to be transboundary, as McConney et al. (2007) have argued for the ﬁsheries in the Caribbean.

39.3.4. Governance and Adaptive Co-management Governance is a wide-ranging idea that includes the entirety of public and private interactions taken to solve societal problems and create societal opportunities. This includes the formulation and application of principles guiding those interactions, and care for institutions that enable them (Bavinck et al. 2005). In the context of CAS and SES, governance involves dynamic institutions and processes that permit key management interventions at the appropriate scales and times. SSF governance issues occur at international, national, and local levels partly because many governmental and nongovernmental stakeholder organizations in SSF are weak in capacity. Power, or at least a legal mandate, is usually centralized in a government authority and meaningful participation in management by informed civil society is uncommon (Mahon and McConney 2004). Yet, many governments have indicated, often in the context of public sector reform and good governance, their intention to share information, power and responsibility with civil society through decentralization, delegation, or devolution. Governance is increasingly being connected to CAS and SES approaches, with such perspectives referred to, for example, as “interactive governance” or “adaptive co-management.” The former (Bavinck et al. 2005; Kooiman et al. 2005) sees models of CAS and SES as a means to improve institutional arrangements and practices in SSF, while the latter argues that if ﬁsheries are to be managed sustainably within uncertain environments, it is crucial to employ more adaptive and participatory methods of management (Armitage 2008; Armitage et al. 2009; Charles 2007). These methods are ones based on institutionalizing learning and designed to function successfully even given unexpected changes in SES, or an ignorance of SES structures and processes. Adaptive co-management in SSF is of particular interest given its links to resilience (Armitage et al. 2007, 2009).

39.3.5. Resilience of Fishery Systems The aim of management in ﬁsheries and other natural resources, as well as place-based (area) management, is increasingly oriented toward enhancing the resilience of the system. The concept of “resilience” describes the capability of SES—the ecosystem, human, and management systems—to “bounce back” from unexpected shocks and perturbations such that the integrity of the system as a whole is sustained, without collapsing, self-destructing, or otherwise entering an intrinsically undesirable state (Berkes and Folke 1998). Thus in SSF, we can envision a resilient ecosystem, resilient management institutions, and a resilient social system. Conventional management approaches, focusing on control and stability, can be detrimental to resilience, and lead to critical system problems. On the other hand, both the precautionary and the ecosystem approaches (discussed below) are examples of new thrusts to enhance the resilience of ﬁshery systems at policy and other levels (Charles 2001).

39.4. POLICY SCENE AND CONTEXT We turn now to a set of overarching policy themes and contextual aspects that affect and seek to improve SSF management, applying modern perspectives to move beyond what has not worked in conventional ﬁsheries management approaches.

39.4.1. Precautionary Approach and International Instruments Nonprecautionary management has led to the overexploitation and unsustainability of many ﬁsheries (Swan and Gréboval 2005). There is a need for precaution to be explicitly built into policy for SSF, given that within these complex SES, the best available (scientiﬁc) information is always likely to be deﬁcient. This is especially the case when SSF are development-oriented and constraints on shortterm harvest or postharvest opportunities may not be readily accepted. The precautionary approach is enshrined in recent multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Early MEAs ignored SSF, but recent ones acknowledge and address the special circumstances of developing countries, where SSF are prevalent. MEAs and other international instruments

Managing Small-Scale Fisheries (e.g. Convention on Biological Diversity, Millennium Development Goals, World Summit on Sustainable Development, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) provide both rights and obligations, but the impacts upon SSF have often been unknown or uncertain at the time countries sign MEAs. Countries with SSF are now moving to forecast and monitor policy implications partly by informing and involving civil society. This is mainly because nongovernmental organizations are often more in touch with SSF stakeholders than are state agencies, as is the case in many Asia-Paciﬁc regions (Pomeroy and Berkes 1997). In addition, the multistakeholder approach to communication facilitates self-organization within governance arrangements such as co-management (Armitage et al. 2007).

39.4.2. Integration into National Policy and Goal Setting Even where SSF are very visible, such as in small island developing states, their contribution to national economies as measured by standard indices is often so low compared to tourism, the service sector, and so forth, that they are not integrated into national policy in ways that reﬂect their true socioeconomic value. Recent increased use of resource valuations and studies of value-added provide more realistic estimates of the worth of SSF to multiple sectors and policy decisions, as in the case of Barbados (Mahon et al. 2007). This is a promising trend that should involve more stakeholders in goal setting, using participatory research and widely disseminating the results. These approaches can be both informative and empowering to SSF stakeholders.

39.4.3. Decentralization and Devolution Typical regulatory legal-institutional arrangements tend to constrain options and concentrate real power and jurisdiction in the hands of a few at the top. However, top-down governance of SSF has proven difﬁcult due to many of their characteristics described previously. Decentralized and devolved governance holds potential for greater success in SSF (Pomeroy and Berkes 1997), but only if there are adaptive policy environments that enable selforganization, for example, through adoption of a subsidiarity approach that places decision making at the lowest, most local level feasible. Schmidt (2005) provides lessons from Cambodia and the Philippines in this vein.

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39.4.4. Markets, Trade, and Subsidies In many cases, SSF no longer serve purely domestic markets, so although ﬁsheries authorities typically do not have responsibility for trade, ﬁsheries policy must now take into account global trade rules and requirements, price trends, and so on. Ignoring the impacts of global trade and subsidies on SSF is no longer an option, as developed consumer markets are demanding more products derived from SSF. This in turn is changing their market orientation and the nature of the ﬁsh chain. Furthermore, subsidies continue to affect ﬁsheries in both positive and negative ways. There is a real need to better understand how global trends to restrict subsidies, even “good” ones, are affecting incentives both to harvest and to conserve, as well as impacting on postharvest activities (e.g., affecting entrepreneurial incentives). Leadbitter et al. (2006) consider the situation and private sector roles in East Asia.

39.4.5. Food Security, Food Sovereignty, and Poverty There has been a tendency globally to focus on industrialized, larger scale ﬁsheries involved in commodity production and trade, which led to an ignoring of the important role SSF play in supplying food ﬁsh, especially to those in poverty (Béné 2003). However, recent trends to pay more attention to matters of food supply and distribution have increased the signiﬁcance of SSF in international policy (Béné et al. 2007). Notably, the harvesting of ﬁsh in SSF is done with signiﬁcantly less energy input on a per unit production basis. In the context of poverty alleviation, Béné et al. (2007) note that systems are being put in place to facilitate what are often traditional self-organized production and marketing chains, in order to beneﬁt from these lower supply costs that contribute to food security and food sovereignty.

39.5. SETTING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS IN PLACE 39.5.1. Fishery Systems, the Fish Chain, and Cross-Scale Linkages Coastal, small-scale, and/or tropical ﬁsheries are typically multispecies, focused more on an ecosystem and on a community of people trying to make a

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living, rather than an isolated set of ﬁshers exploiting a speciﬁc stock. Thus, the narrow view of a ﬁshery reﬂected in the conventional approach to management—that of a speciﬁc ﬁsh stock and the “ﬂeet” (or set of ﬁshers) exploiting it—is no longer considered acceptable, especially in SSF. Instead, as noted above, management approaches need to pay attention to the broader ﬁshery system, recognizing the pervasive interactions between the core of the ﬁshery (ﬁsh and ﬁshers) and all the other elements of the ecosystem and the human system. There is a need for reasonable comprehension of the interactions among relevant components of the ﬁshery system, but in a cost-effective way (Garcia and Charles 2007). In particular, a key part of broadening the perspective on SSF lies in seeing beyond the harvest sector, paying more attention to postharvest processing, marketing, and distribution (Charles 2001). First, attention to the processing sector within the context of ﬁshery management can help improve livelihoods of ﬁshing households without increasing catches (e.g., with better processing into more manageable forms leading to easier distribution and reduced spoilage). Second, it is increasingly important to examine the various patterns of consumptive or nonconsumptive use, as consumer impacts become better appreciated (e.g., in the live food ﬁsh and aquarium trade). Third, a broader view helps highlight the role of women as active participants in many ﬁshery systems—in ﬁshing itself, in postharvest components, in ﬁshing households and in the community. Aspects of scale are also crucial to consider, since SSF are typically “embedded” within largerscale systems. (For example, community-level ﬁshing in the Annapolis Basin of Nova Scotia, Canada, forms part of a larger ﬁshery in the Bay of Fundy, which in turn lies within the transboundary ﬁshery of the Gulf of Maine, a component of the broader northwest Atlantic.) Local solutions may be most effective, in the spirit of the subsidiarity approach (managing at the most local level possible), but need to be connected with these larger scales, often through “crossscale linkages,” whether these link communities, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and so forth. In particular, if decentralized and/ or local approaches to management are needed to account for local conditions, but the ﬁsh stocks range over larger geographical areas, coordination across boundaries is needed. For example,

decisions concerning a community-based ﬁshery, harvesting a local stock, can be linked through policy and practice to those at a broader geographical scale, whether provincial, national, or even international, as in the case of Caribbean tuna ﬁsheries (McConney et al. 2007).

39.5.2. Fisheries Institutions, Participation, and Empowerment A dysfunctional and ineffective ﬁshery management institution will be unable to shape the ﬁshery so as to meet societal objectives. The legal-institutional systems in many SSF have proven to be too rigid to deal with the changing nature of ﬁshery management, and especially the shocks and disturbances that appear to be impacting all ﬁsheries more frequently. To address such concerns, the principles and concepts of CAS and SES—such as institutional linkages and nested institutions—may offer opportunities to better design SSF arrangements that promote ﬂexibility and the freedom to adapt, within societal norms (Mahon et al. 2008). This involves the creation and nurturing of institutions that can effectively and sustainably self-regulate the use of ﬁshery resources. Desirable institutions (1) are structured properly, with wide-spread support, (2) are seen as fair and just, (3) serve to create social incentives for responsible behavior in ﬁshing, and (4) have inherent resilience. That being said, the “best” institutional arrangement will vary with the context—dependent not only on natural and human realities but also on society’s objectives and the priorities attached to each, as in the case of introducing the ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries (EAF; De Young et al. 2008). A key trend in institutional design lies in acknowledging the value of participation by all ﬁsheries stakeholders, and some level of empowerment of those stakeholders. This move, one that is crucial in supporting self-organization, leads to forms of co-management (described below). It contrasts sharply with conventional management in SSF, which tends to be top-down with minimal stakeholder participation (except that occurring in a consultative or advisory capacity, where power remains vested in a state management authority). Indeed, the perceived lack of legitimacy resulting from a lack of participation and empowerment is among the various reasons why the conventional approach has often not worked (Jentoft 2000).

Managing Small-Scale Fisheries

39.5.3. Learning and Adaptive Capacity Within any form of ﬁsheries management, processes of learning and adaptation will be present to some extent—but in conventional management, these may not be prominent or conceived of in a social context beyond their fairly narrow scientiﬁc basis. This has led to learning and evolution relating to only some aspects of ﬁsheries, typically concentrated on natural systems. What works better for SSF is a broader view in which social and institutional learning is pursued, and adaptation is seen as both a collective and an individual response—on several levels across a number of scales (Armitage 2008). For example, faced with changing conditions in the ﬁshery, adaptation is needed on the part of individual ﬁshers, ﬁshery organizations, other components of the ﬁshery system, and management agencies, from local to international scales as appropriate. While learning processes can lead to a building of capacity over time, there may nevertheless be a lack of capacity at any particular point in time to undertake all aspects of ﬁshery management, from assessments and policy development through to operational management and enforcement. In particular, the capacity of ﬁshers, communities, and other stakeholders within an SSF to engage in management is likely limited. Given these limitations, the tendency to pattern management authorities and arrangements in SSF on those in place for larger scale industrial ﬁsheries has not worked well. Furthermore, the scaling down of larger scale organizations to “ﬁt” SSF has not been necessarily appropriate, if different elements of capacity and organizational orientation are required. Thus, the recurring theme of this chapter applies again: management of SSF may beneﬁt from paying less attention to conventional approaches and more attention to people-centered approaches—ones that correspond more closely to existing capabilities for data and information management, to the availability of local knowledge, and to sustainable levels of technical and scientiﬁc expertise and funding (Lebel et al. 2006).

39.5.4. Uncertainty and Adaptive Management There is often an “illusion of certainty” in ﬁsheries management (Charles 2001, 2007), in which we underestimate the level of uncertainty in the ﬁshery.

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The desired response to this in SSF lies not so much in increasing the sophistication of ﬁshery models, but in “living with uncertainty” by acknowledging the sheer gaps in human knowledge and understanding of these systems, and by including a wider range of stakeholders who may utilize different knowledge systems and be at very different levels of comprehension of ﬁsheries. Charles (2007) illustrates how a lack of this thinking led to past problems for the sustainability and resilience of SSF in Atlantic Canada. We see now that dealing with uncertainty in ﬁsheries is not just a scientiﬁc matter, but one that recognizes how people in SSF have often developed strategies to cope with uncertainties ranging from surprises to absolute ignorance (Berkes et al. 2001). At the organizational level, this approach to uncertainty is called “adaptive management”—which provides a mechanism to follow the precautionary approach and improve the overall resilience of ﬁsheries, through initiatives to overcome unsustainability (Swan and Gréboval 2005). In particular, adaptive management includes the recognition that in ﬁshing, operating plans must be ﬂexible, to allow for the highly uncertain nature of the ﬁsh. Adaptive management (or adaptive co-management) implies suitable processes for continuous learning (through monitoring) and for maintaining the capability and willingness to make appropriate adjustments to management actions as needed (e.g., within a given ﬁshing season) in order to meet conservation and socioeconomic goals. Adaptation is mainly about learning, as Garaway and Arthur (2004) point out in their analysis of situations in South and Southeast Asia. Within SSF management, there is also a need for regular evaluation (whether participatory or not) often via research, so that policies and plans are subject to analytical scrutiny and re-direction (Satia and Staples 2004). Without this, SSF management has gone off course with little or no corrective action taken; this has been wasteful of resources. By acknowledging and using feedback loops and processes, through CAS and SES perspectives, there is more opportunity to incorporate effective monitoring and evaluation into management of SSF (Mahon et al. 2008).

39.5.5. Livelihoods, Households, and Diversiﬁcation Relating to the above discussion of ﬁshery systems, there is a need to deal with inherent linkages

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between ﬁsheries and other human activities, especially in coastal and marine sectors such as aquaculture and tourism, as well as coastal communities and ﬁshing households. A “livelihoods approach” (e.g., Allison and Ellis 2001) broadens ﬁshery discussions to emphasize the entirety of individual, household or community sources of well-being and livelihood (income), and in particular how individuals, households and communities develop “portfolios” of livelihood sources. The notions of livelihoods and household scale decision-making offer more realistic models of how SSF operate, and are linked to improving quality of life (Béné 2003), which is central to much human endeavor and development policy. In particular, since each ﬁshery participant, their household and their community must generate a livelihood one way or another, risks are reduced, and resilience enhanced, if those livelihoods can be achieved from a diversity of sources. For example, SSF that involve multiple species and types of ﬁsheries give ﬁshers a diversiﬁed “portfolio” of options and give management greater capability to reduce harvesting of vulnerable stocks (Charles 2001). Similarly, “occupational pluralism,” arising when ﬁshers and their households engage in both ﬁshing and nonﬁshing activities, reduces risks by reducing reliance on ﬁshing (Allison and Ellis 2001). Finally, measures to diversify the economy in ﬁshery-dependent areas, by creating new, sustainable economic activity outside the ﬁshery sector, can enhance the range of available livelihood choices (Béné et al. 2007).

Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2003) ). Within the context of the complexity of SSF, the EAF can be viewed more broadly as a “systems approach,” one based on CAS and SES perspectives, and with a broader view of governance. This draws on what we already know works better for SSF, relative to experiences with conventional approaches. In particular, by recognizing that a ﬁshery can be only imperfectly controlled, and that there are limitations on what can be achieved through management, the EAF helps us to avoid a “fallacy of controllability” (Charles 2001), a sense that more can be known, and more controlled, than can be realistically expected. The EAF, in paying attention both to the ecosystem around the ﬁshery, and the relevant human dimensions, can be seen also as a ﬁsheries-speciﬁc form of integrated management. Indeed, combining into ﬁshery management both an ecosystem approach and a livelihoods approach (as described above) leads us to draw linkages with integrated ocean and coastal management. This is a natural connection, especially in the context of SSF, since integrated approaches are characterized by a multiplicity of resources and habitats, a range of environmental variables, and a balancing of attention to both natural and human systems and dynamics (Mahon et al. 2008).

39.5.6. Linking to the Ecosystem Approach and Integrated Management

39.6.1. Goals, Objectives, and Directions

In the past, conventional approaches to ﬁsheries management took a rather narrow view of the ﬁshery; this was often focused just on a single species (or a few species) and with a narrow view of economic interactions and human-in-nature connections. It is now recognized that such approaches have proven relatively unhelpful in managing SSF. This recognition has led to a move toward the ecosystem approach to ﬁsheries (EAF, also referred to as ecosystem-based management), which ensures that interactions with the ecosystem are taken into account in managing ﬁsheries, while also considering relevant human dimensions and participatory processes (e.g., De Young et al. 2008; Food and

39.6. KEY CONSIDERATIONS FOR MANAGEMENT

Thinking of SSF as simple or underdeveloped systems has not worked in practice because they are in reality quite complex and sophisticated. In the past, the policy environment was one in which SSF were deemed able to take care of themselves, not because their adaptive capabilities and ability to self-organize were recognized (as in CAS), but because they were treated as economically insigniﬁcant, and the impacts upon them as a result of policy and planning in other sectors were ignored (Berkes et al. 2001). However, SSF involve a multiplicity of social, cultural, political, economic, and ecological objectives. Some common objectives in SSF include: production of ﬁsh, economic efﬁciency, employment,

Managing Small-Scale Fisheries export promotion and foreign exchange generation, industry diversiﬁcation, sociopolitical stability, decreasing rural-urban drift, and/or maintaining a regional balance of development. The real challenge, however, lies not in listing all the objectives but rather in prioritizing the list, and in determining the right balance among them—to determine a suitable balance or blend of objectives that contribute to an overall direction for the ﬁsheries in keeping with societal policy decisions. Indeed, the complexity inherent in SSF requires that attention be paid to the trade-offs among SSF options and opportunities, in order to optimize their contribution to societal goals. This has also resulted in greater interest in decision making and involving ﬁshery stakeholders as part of interactive governance processes (McConney et al. 2007). Overall, an understanding of the objectives at all levels, from ﬁsher through to government, is important in order that ﬁshery policy can help to enable some level of self-organization—since a clear and shared direction helps to orient that collective action, so as to determine the essential level and nature of management intervention (De Young et al. 2008).

39.6.2. Conﬂict Management and Power Dynamics Conﬂict management has not played a major role in conventional management approaches, but with the many stakeholders in socially and culturally embedded social-ecological SSF systems, it is important to manage conﬂict (Graham et al. 2006). Given the diversity of SSF, one must be careful not to rely on prescriptions and to be aware of power disparities in setting up conﬂict management arrangements, which may work better informally. In dealing with conﬂict and the interactions within the SSF, power dynamics need to be considered. This aspect has been largely ignored in conventional approaches, which may have led to unnecessary failures, especially in cases of conﬂict. It is clear that power dynamics play a large role in governance and may be especially important in SSF due to inequity among actors. It is necessary to take power into account and to appreciate how embedded it is in culture and society. These features vary by location, as Bennett et al. (2001) discuss for cases in Ghana, Bangladesh, and the Caribbean.

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39.6.3. Data, Information, and Communication Conventional ﬁsheries management is typically intense in scientiﬁc data demands and only a small portion of data is converted into information that is communicated and used in public or private decision making. The new approach in SSF is to pay more attention to converting data from several sources into information for decision making and communicating the information to all stakeholders—to facilitate the transparency and accountability needed for good governance. However, multistakeholder communication is not without its challenges, as Pomeroy and others (2001) point out for cases of co-management in Asia. Typically there is information that already exists in ﬁshery systems, but has been underutilized in ﬁshery management to date. This usually lies beyond the standard scientiﬁc apparatus, in the realms of local knowledge, “ﬁshermen’s knowledge” and traditional ecological knowledge (Berkes et al. 2001). These sources of knowledge incorporate accumulated information that has built up over time by ﬁshers and coastal communities through regular interaction with their environment. Such knowledge may relate to aspects of the natural world around them, or to what type of resource management arrangements function best within the speciﬁc cultural and belief systems, or to which ﬁshing techniques are most effective, or most conservationist, within the local context. A key challenge lies in integrating this knowledge with modern ﬁshery science and management—this requires developing both the sense of trust and the means of communication between scientists, managers and knowledge holders. The challenge is aided by moves toward more multidisciplinary ﬁshery research, such as has been advocated for SSF (Satia and Staples 2004). In most SSF, there has been little effort to involve ﬁshers in determining research priorities and in the research activity itself. This is changing, however, with the increasing recognition that the support of ﬁshers for management is enhanced if they are involved in dealing with the information available. There are signiﬁcant moves toward participatory research involving ﬁshers, with some partnerships now being institutionalized, for example, community-based ﬁshery management in some SSF often has a built-in participatory research component as one of the ways of overcoming unsustainability (Swan and Gréboval 2005; Wiber et al. 2008).

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39.6.4. Fishery Planning and Management Planning processes in SSF have tended to be fairly centralized, dominated by state authorities, with an early emphasis on economic development plans, then turning more to a focus on conservation and management plans. This is now seen as inefﬁcient and ineffective. Planning processes have become more inclusive and their products more diverse, with emphasis on their active uptake in order to improve legitimacy, compliance, and success (Berkes et al. 2001). The planning process in SSF needs to produce a suitable “portfolio” of management measures— drawing on management tools that may include (1) input/effort controls, regulating what ﬁshers bring into the ﬁshing process, (2) output/catch controls, regulating what comes out of the ﬁshing process, (3) technical measures, to regulate the technology, gear, space and timing used, and (4) ecologically based management, such as marine protected areas (MPAs) and multispecies approaches. Selection of the measures must consider such factors as: overall strategic ﬁshery goals and policy directions, biological aspects of the resource, and the level of uncertainty and complexity in the ﬁshery. Further, a variety of human aspects must be taken into account, such as (1) existing, historical and/or traditional management approaches, (2) cultural and community preferences for management, (3) the current knowledge base and human/ technological capacity for management, and (4) the monitoring and enforcement capability (Charles 2001). Notably, some conventional management tools, ones that may be common in highly regulated and/ or industrialized ﬁsheries, may not be suitable (whether less applicable or more difﬁcult to implement) in SSF. A broad-based ﬁshery assessment (not only a stock assessment) is needed to determine what is or is not appropriate. Success may have as much to do with the context and process of management implementation as with the speciﬁc measures. A major subject of discussion in ﬁshery planning and management is that of overcapacity. A particular approach to this is needed for SSF, one that recognizes their multiple objectives and overall complexity. Thus if there is seen to be a need for capacity reduction, actions must be designed to consider impacts on multiple factors, such as

conservation, ecological balance, rent generation and income distribution, ﬁshing community welfare, and institutional stability. Capacity reduction decisions are likely best considered through targeted and selective approaches that aim toward achieving a desired overall ﬁshery state. One must take into account such factors as the differential capacity and ﬂexibility of gear types and ﬂeet sectors, conservation impacts of harvesting technologies, and the use of local-level approaches to explicitly meet local objectives, as Pascoe and Gréboval (2005) illustrate using international experiences.

39.6.5. Co-management and Community-Based Management Governance arrangements that implement decentralization and devolution are receiving increasing attention as a result of the failure of centralized approaches (Schmidt 2005). There is an entire spectrum of arrangements for sharing authority and responsibility, and multiple phases that they proceed through, from introduction to maturity. Co-management—the development, implementation, and enforcement of management measures by a suitable combination of government, ﬁshers, communities, and the public—is rapidly expanding and evolving in SSF (Pomeroy and Rivera-Guieb 2006). Typically, this involves increasing the role of ﬁshers, their organizations and their communities in managing local resources, for example, through community-based management (Graham et al. 2006). Such approaches, based on sharing decision-making power and the responsibility to ensure ﬁshery sustainability, serve to lessen the conﬂict between ﬁshers and managers that has tended to lead to failure in top-down management regimes. Furthermore, where ﬁsh in the sea are publicly owned, as in most national ﬁsheries, co-management can logically include a role for the public in developing policy concerning the overall use of those resources, if authorities are peoplecentered (Mahon and McConney 2004).

39.6.6. Fishing Rights Fishing rights, when present in the context of effective management institutions, help to clarify the roles and responsibilities of the various players in the ﬁshery, and thereby to steer incentives in desired directions. An appropriate rights system, one that ﬁts well into human realities and management

Managing Small-Scale Fisheries institutions, can enhance a ﬁshery and its sustainability (Charles 2001, 2002). On the other hand, imposition of inappropriate rights systems can lead to undesired consequences, such as a loss of resilience in communities or institutions. Thus it is crucial to emphasize that it is not just a rights system, but an appropriate rights system that must be sought (Berkes et al. 2001, Charles 2002). In particular, among the options for rights-based management, many (e.g., market-driven individual quotas) do not work well in the complex SSF world of multispecies, multigear, multiﬂeet situations. On the other hand, rights of access such as territorial use rights and community-based collective rights may have greater chance of success in SSF. These may well be culturally embedded in tenure systems and customary practices that have existed historically, making them conducive to being revived or adapted within a sociocultural setting (De Young et al. 2008)—such situations have been well documented in SSF of the South Paciﬁc, for example (Ruddle and Johannes 1989).

39.6.7. Marine Protected Areas MPAs are examples of ecologically based management, in that they do not focus on individual species but instead limit human activity throughout a designated area of the ocean. Indeed, they involve more than the ﬁshery sector itself, with implications for a range of ocean use sectors, and the need for conﬂict resolution between such sectors. This is especially so in SSF where they coexist in, or compete for, the marine space occupied by the ﬁsheries. This often leads to coastal conﬂicts, implying the need for consultation, design, implementation and monitoring of the MPA to occur using participatory processes (McConney et al. 2003). MPAs, like other management approaches, have a mixed record of success in ﬁsheries. They seem to have worked for SSF when combined closely with traditional tenure systems, for example, in some parts of Asia-Paciﬁc such as the Philippines, which have suitable local or community-level government involvement (Pomeroy et al. 2001). However, if or how they assist in managing conﬂict, replenishing nearby ﬁsheries or conserving biodiversity depends greatly upon technical design and governance. Conceiving of MPAs as SES (as has been done in this chapter for ﬁshery systems) may improve their ﬁt in SSF.

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39.7. CONCLUSIONS Most of the world’s ﬁsheries, and the vast majority of ﬁshers, are “small-scale.” However, most ﬁshery funding, most research and most writing on ﬁsheries has been from the perspective of large-scale, industrial contexts. This fundamental mismatch has been the source of abundant problems. Furthermore, a key concern is that what attention has been paid to SSF has often been in the form of efforts to apply conventional management approaches, ones developed with large-scale ﬁsheries in mind. This chapter has sought to outline new thinking, new perspectives, that can help overcome this critical barrier to progress in SSF. While conventional management tended to focus narrowly on single species and single ﬁshing ﬂeets, without incorporating aspects of marine ecosystems or human dimensions, new perspectives broaden the picture. In particular, approaching SSF from the perspectives of complex adaptive systems (CAS) and social-ecological systems (SES) provides a suitable framework to more fully address ﬁshery management challenges. These two perspectives are complemented by a shift from a narrow view of ﬁshery management into concepts of governance and adaptive co-management, which can guide policy development and management practices toward increased resilience of ﬁshery systems. The implications of these overarching perspectives have been discussed in three principal settings: 1. The policy scene and the ﬁshery’s context: Key elements include the role of international instruments and the precautionary approach; integration of ﬁsheries into national policy; decentralization and devolution; markets, trade, and subsidies; and considerations of food security and food sovereignty. 2. Structures, processes, and approaches involved in setting management in place: Adopting a broad view of the ﬁshery system, the ﬁsh chain, and cross-scale linkages, it is crucial to address the role of ﬁshery institutions, participation and empowerment, adaptive management, processes of learning, and adaptive capacity among ﬁshers, managers, and other stakeholders. In looking “beyond the ﬁshery,” SSF management needs to consider the role of livelihoods and of livelihood diversiﬁcation, as well as the value of

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connecting with the ecosystem approach and integrated management. 3. The management system: Practical management of SSF requires an understanding of goals, objectives, and directions, notably the multiobjective nature of SSF, and the need for conﬂict management and attention to power dynamics. The availability of data and information, and their effective communication, are key factors, as is selection of a portfolio of management tools. Some management measures common in largescale ﬁsheries may be quite inappropriate in a small-scale setting, whereas positive choices may include co-management and community-based management, recognition or implementation of appropriate locally based ﬁshing rights, and the use of marine protected areas. As noted at the outset of the chapter, SSF have a value to their society that goes well beyond simplistic economic indicators. Thus, while they are certainly challenging to manage, successful management will have a considerable payoff. To this end, the perspectives highlighted in this chapter should provide a suitable framework in which to pursue the shift from conventional management toward more effective approaches and better outcomes for SSF worldwide.

References Allison, E.H., and F. Ellis (2001). The livelihoods approach and management of small-scale ﬁsheries. Marine Policy 25: 377–388. Armitage, D. (2008). Governance and the commons in a multi-level world. International Journal of the Commons 2: 7–32. Armitage, D., F. Berkes, and N. Doubleday (eds) (2007). Adaptive Co-management: Collaboration, Learning, and Multi-level Governance. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Armitage, D., R. Plummer, F. Berkes, R. Arthur, A. Charles, I. Davidson-Hunt, A. Diduck, N. Doubleday, D. Johnson, M. Marschke, P. McConney, E. Pinkerton, and L. Wollenberg (2009). Adaptive co-management for socialecological complexity. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 7: 95–102. Bavinck, M., R. Chuenpagdee, M. Diallo, P. van der Heijden, J. Kooiman, R. Mahon, and S. Williams (2005). Interactive Governance for

Fisheries: A Guide to Better Practice. Centre for Maritime Research (MARE). Amsterdam: Eburon Academic Publishers. Béné, C. (2003). When ﬁshery rhymes with poverty: A ﬁrst step beyond the old paradigm on poverty in small-scale ﬁsheries. World Development 31: 949–975. Béné, C., G. Macfadyen, and E.H. Allison (2007). Increasing the Contribution of Small-scale Fisheries to Poverty Alleviation and Food Security. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 481. Rome: FAO. Bennett, E., A. Neiland, E. Anang, P. Bannerman, A. Atiq Rahman, S. Huq, S. Bhuiya, M. Day, M. Fulford-Gardiner, and W. Clerveaux (2001). Towards a better understanding of conﬂict management in tropical ﬁsheries: Evidence from Ghana, Bangladesh and the Caribbean. Marine Policy 25: 365–376. Berkes, F., and C. Folke (eds) (1998). Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berkes, F., R. Mahon, P. McConney, R. Pollnac, and R. Pomeroy (2001). Managing Small-scale Fisheries: Alternative Directions and Methods. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. Chakalall, B., R. Mahon, P. McConney, L. Nurse, and D. Oderson (2007). Governance of ﬁsheries and other living marine resources in the wider Caribbean. Fisheries Research 87: 92–99. Charles, A. (2001). Sustainable Fishery Systems. Oxford: Blackwell Science. Charles, A. (2002). Use rights and responsible ﬁsheries: Limiting access and harvesting through rights-based management. In: K. Cochrane (ed). A Fishery Manager’s Guidebook. Management Measures and Their Application. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 424. Rome: FAO. Charles, A. (2007). Adaptive co-management for resilient resource systems: Some ingredients and the implications of their absence. In: D. Armitage, F. Berkes, and N. Doubleday (eds). Adaptive Co-management. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Degnbol, P. (2004). Fisheries science in a development context. Pp. 131–156 in B. Hersoug, S. Jentoft, and P. Degnbol (eds). Fisheries Development: The Institutional Challenge. Delft: Eburon. De Young, C., A. Charles, and A. Hjort (2008). Human Dimensions of the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries: An Overview of Context, Tools and Methods. Fisheries Technical Paper 489. Rome: FAO. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2003). The Ecosystem Approach

Managing Small-Scale Fisheries to Fisheries. FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries 4, suppl. 2. Rome: FAO. Garaway, C.J., and R. Arthur (2004). Adaptive Learning: A Practical Framework for the Implementation of Adaptive Co-management—Lessons from Selected Experiences in South and Southeast Asia. London: MRAG Ltd. Garcia, S.M., and A.T. Charles (2007). Fishery systems and linkages: From clockwork to soft watches. ICES Journal of Marine Science 64: 580–587. Graham, J., A.T. Charles, and A. Bull (2006). Community Fisheries Management Handbook. Halifax, Canada: Gorsebrook Research Institute, Saint Mary’s University (www.coastalcura.ca). Hauck, M. (2008). Rethinking small-scale ﬁsheries compliance. Marine Policy 32: 635–642. Jentoft, S. (2000). Legitimacy and disappointment in ﬁsheries management. Marine Policy 24: 141–148. Kooiman, J., M. Bavinck, S. Jentoft, and R. Pullin (eds) (2005). Fish for Life: Interactive Governance for Fisheries. MARE Publication Series No. 3. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Leadbitter, D., G. Gomez, and F. McGilvray (2006). Sustainable ﬁsheries and the East Asian seas: Can the private sector play a role? Ocean and Coastal Management 49: 662–675. Lebel, L., J.M. Anderies, B. Campbell, C. Folke, S. Hatﬁeld-Dodds, T.P. Hughes, and J. Wilson (2006). Governance and the capacity to manage resilience in regional social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society 11(1): 19. www. ecologyandsociety.org/v0111/iss1/art19 Mahon, R., and P. McConney. 2004. Managing the managers: Improving the structure and operation of ﬁsheries departments in SIDS. Ocean and Coastal Management 47: 529–535. Mahon, R., P. McConney, and R. Roy (2008). Governing ﬁsheries as complex adaptive systems. Marine Policy 32: 104–112. Mahon, R., C. Parker, T. Sinckler, S. Willoughby, and J. Johnson (2007). The Value of Barbados’ Fisheries: A Preliminary Assessment. Fisheries Management Plan Public Information Document No. 2. Bridgetown, Barbados: Fisheries Division, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. McConney, P., L. Bunce, and G. Bustamante (2003). Human system connectivity: A need for MPA management effectiveness. Gulf and Caribbean Research 14(2): 199–201. McConney, P., H.A. Oxenford, and M. Haughton (2007). Management in the Gulf and Caribbean: Mosaic or melting pot? Gulf and Caribbean Research 19: 103–112. Panayotou, T. (ed.) (1985). Small-Scale Fisheries in Asia: Socioeconomic Analysis and Policy. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre.

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Pascoe, S., and D. Gréboval (2005). Capacity management and sustainable ﬁsheries: international experiences. In: J. Swan and D. Gréboval (eds.). Overcoming Factors of Unsustainability and Overexploitation in Fisheries: Selected Papers on Issues and Approaches. International Workshop on the Implementation of the International Fisheries Instruments and Factors of Unsustainability and Overexploitation in Fisheries, Siem Reap, Cambodia, 13–16 September 2004. FAO Fisheries Report 782. Rome: FAO. Pomeroy, R., and F. Berkes (1997). Two to tango: The role of government in ﬁsheries co-management. Marine Policy 21: 465–480. Pomeroy, R.S., B.M. Katon, and I. Harkes (2001). Conditions affecting the success of ﬁsheries co-management: Lessons from Asia. Marine Policy 25: 197–208. Pomeroy, R.S., and R. Rivera-Guieb (2006). Fishery Co-management: A Practical Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruddle, K., and R.E. Johannes (1989). Traditional Marine Resource Management in the Paciﬁc Basin: An Anthology. Contending with Global Change Study No. 2. Jakarta: UNESCO/ ROSTSEA. Satia, B.P., and D. Staples (eds) (2004). Advisory Committee on Fisheries Research. Papers presented at the second session of the Working Party on Small-scale Fisheries, Bangkok, Thailand, 18–21 November 2003. FAO Fisheries Report 735, suppl. Rome: FAO. Schmidt, U.W. (2005). Decentralization, governance and poverty: Determinants of unsustainability. Lessons learned from the Visayan Sea, Philippines, and the Tonle Sap Great Lake, Cambodia. In: J. Swan and D. Gréboval (eds.). Overcoming Factors of Unsustainability and Overexploitation in Fisheries: Selected Papers on Issues and Approaches. International Workshop on the Implementation of the International Fisheries Instruments and Factors of Unsustainability and Overexploitation in Fisheries, Siem Reap, Cambodia, 13–16 September 2004. FAO Fisheries Report 782. Rome: FAO. Swan, J., and D. Gréboval (eds) (2005). Overcoming Factors of Unsustainability and Overexploitation in Fisheries: Selected Papers on Issues and Approaches. International Workshop on the Implementation of the International Fisheries Instruments and Factors of Unsustainability and Overexploitation in Fisheries, Siem Reap, Cambodia, 13–16 September 2004. FAO Fisheries Report 782. Rome: FAO. Wiber, M., A. Charles, J. Kearney, and F. Berkes (2008). Enhancing community empowerment through participatory ﬁsheries research. Marine Policy 33: 172–179.

40 Measuring and Managing Fishing Capacity JOHN WALDEN JAMES KIRKLEY ROLF FÄRE

40.1. INTRODUCTION Prior to an international effort by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to deﬁne and measure ﬁshing capacity, ﬁshing effort was typically equated to capacity (Kirkley and Squires 1999). This appears to be primarily because resource managers viewed the inputs as being used in proportion to the capital stock and adequately represented by ﬁshing effort. Also, resource managers appear to have had more experience with managing ﬁshing effort than managing either the capital stock or capacity utilization. Kirkley and Squires (1999), however, clearly demonstrated that ﬁshing capacity should not be viewed in terms of ﬁshing effort. In the traditional economic literature, capacity is deﬁned in terms of output levels satisfying various behavioral objectives and not input levels.1 Deﬁning and measuring capacity in ﬁsheries have been a global concern for well over a decade. In 1995, the FAO adopted the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. In Section 6, General Principles, of the code, the FAO requested nations to conduct assessments of capacity, and in particular, excess capacity in ﬁsheries. Similarly, the U.S. Congress requested an assessment of capacity in all federally managed ﬁsheries in 2005; the assessment report was submitted to Congress in 2008 (National Marine Fisheries Service 2008). Since 1995, capacity for nearly every ﬁshery of every

member nation of the FAO has been estimated (Pascoe and Greboval 2003). Cassels (1937) was among the ﬁrst economists to deﬁne an economic concept of capacity. Capacity, however, was not a major research topic until the 1960s. Klein (1960) published one of the seminal works on deﬁning and estimating capacity. Klein and Summers (1966) provided an early assessment of capacity utilization by American manufacturers. Klein and Long (1973) and Berndt and Morrison (1981) provide a comprehensive economic concept of capacity. Berndt and Fuss (1986, 1989) and Nelson (1989) provided additional concepts and approaches for estimating capacity with both single and multiproduct technologies. Kim (1999) provided a rigorous economic concept of optimal capacity utilization and its determinants. None of the previous works, however, estimated capacity for ﬁsheries. Ballard and Roberts (1977) were the ﬁrst researchers to deﬁne and estimate capacity in ﬁsheries. They adopted the peak-to-peak approach of Klein and Long (1973) to estimate capacity for ten U.S. ﬁsheries. Squires (1987) was the ﬁrst to deﬁne and analyze an economic concept of capacity in ﬁsheries. Segerson and Squires (1990, 1992, 1995) further developed and estimated economic concepts of capacity for ﬁsheries. The FAO and member nations conducted several meetings to vet the deﬁnitions of capacity as well as to develop methods for estimating capacity. In 1998, the FAO sponsored an international meeting

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Measuring and Managing Fishing Capacity in La Jolla, California, the purpose of which was to develop a deﬁnition of capacity and methods for estimating capacity (FAO 1998). In 1999, FAO sponsored a consultation on the measurement of ﬁshing capacity (FAO 2000). Both meetings developed international consensus deﬁnitions of capacity and approaches for estimating ﬁshing capacity. Yet, after more than 10 years of research on ﬁshing capacity, numerous peer-reviewed publications, several international meetings, and a large number of reports by many researchers, ﬁshing capacity still remains confusing to many individuals. Confusion concerning capacity may have arisen because of the various notions of capacity. The metric most often estimated for ﬁsheries has been a primal concept of capacity, which is the least assessed notion of capacity for more conventional industries, where the focus has been based on economic measures of capacity.2 The economic notion of capacity generally deﬁnes capacity as the output corresponding to a tangency between the shortand long-run average cost curves. Capacity corresponding to proﬁt maximization, however, can also be estimated as was done by Squires (1987) and Segerson and Squires (1992). While the economic concepts of capacity are more informative than the primal concepts, it is difﬁcult to estimate these for ﬁsheries because necessary economic data (e.g., fuel, labor, and the cost of capital services) are typically unavailable. We thus restrict our attention to the physical concept of capacity. A widely used physical concept of ﬁshing capacity is based on Johansen’s (1968) deﬁnition but modiﬁed by Färe (1984). Johansen deﬁned capacity as the “maximum amount that can be produced per unit of time with existing plant and equipment provided the availability of the variable factors of production is not limited.” This is referred to as the strong deﬁnition of capacity. Färe’s (1984) modiﬁed notion is a weak deﬁnition of capacity, which requires only that output be bounded as opposed to requiring the existence of a maximum. It is important to stress that this is not the only physical metric, as other concepts and approaches have been applied to ﬁsheries. Felthoven and Morrison-Paul (2004) incorporated regulatory, environmental, and resource conditions into their measure of capacity. Although there are numerous methods for estimating capacity in ﬁsheries, the most widely used approach appears to be data envelopment analysis (DEA) based on the work of Färe (1984) and Färe et al. (1989).3 DEA is a mathematical programming

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approach for determining a reference technology, or levels of inputs and outputs, satisfying some behavioral objective. Solving a DEA problem—calculating the maximum output expansion, limited only by the ﬁxed factors—yields ﬁshing capacity in terms of output levels. Although DEA routines are widely available, a major problem has been how to stratify and adjust data, and interpret estimates so that they make sense. This was a major issue in the most recent assessment of capacity by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA Fisheries). Data stratiﬁcation and identiﬁcation of outliers remain empirical issues for capacity estimation in ﬁsheries. Apart from the International Plan of Action by the FAO, why has there been so much concern about capacity? To a large extent, the concern has been driven by the need for information to facilitate buyback programs or to restructure ﬁshing ﬂeets. The emphasis of buyback programs has been to reduce ﬁshing capacity to levels low enough to prevent overharvesting of the resource, and to a lesser extent, to promote enhanced proﬁtability of ﬁsheries (Curtis and Squires 2007). As illustrated by Walden et al. (2003), Hannesson (2007), and other researchers, buyback programs in the absence of other regulations preventing the reemergence of capacity will seldom be effective for adequately reducing excess harvesting capacity.4 Guyader et al. (2007) showed that even after the implementation of comprehensive decommissioning schemes and a rigorous limited entry program for the French ﬁshing ﬂeet, there was still excess harvesting capacity. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the concept of capacity and the various methods used to estimate capacity. Since this material is widely available elsewhere, we provide a limited introduction to the methods. We next discuss both buybacks and limited access privilege programs (LAPPs)5 as two options for managing excess capacity and capacity utilization.6

40.2. CAPACITY DEFINED The notion of “capacity” appears to be present in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). In the 1800s, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo also referred to productive capacity. In 1934, Edwin Nourse produced the volume “American’s Capacity to Produce,” and numerous academic debates about the concept

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occurred among Joan Robinson, Edward Chamberlin, and Gustuv Cassel in the 1930s. The U.N. Conference on Trade and Development noted that there is no universally accepted deﬁnition of capacity, and this appears to be the consensus among economists. Kirkley and Squires (1999) discuss two basic notions of capacity—an economic concept and a primal concept. The economic concept is deﬁned according to some underlying short-run economic optimization (e.g., cost minimization, revenue maximization, or proﬁt maximization), while the primal concept ignores economic optimization but implicitly incorporates economic behavior through empirical observation. The more common economic concept of capacity is the output corresponding to the tangency between the short- and long-run average cost curves (Morrison 1985, 1985b). The concept most widely used in ﬁsheries is the weak capacity notion offered by Färe (1984).

2004). With this approach, a stochastic frontier is speciﬁed and estimated in terms of output and only the ﬁxed factors of production. Output (y) is speciﬁed as a function of the ﬁxed factors (FF) and two error terms (u, v) terms: y = f(FF) + v – u, where v is a normally distributed error, and u is a one sided error indicating technical inefﬁciency. Estimation is accomplished by maximum likelihood methods, and capacity is estimated as the maximum value of the frontier bounded by the ﬁxed factors. DEA was initially introduced by Charnes et al. (1978). Färe (1984) developed the DEA framework for estimating capacity. DEA is a mathematical programming approach, which can be used to estimate capacity corresponding to different behavioral objectives and expansion possibilities.9 One DEA model for estimating capacity is as follows: max q z, λ

40.3. METHODS OF ESTIMATION Kirkley and Squires (1999) present and summarize a wide array of methods for estimating capacity.7 The methods include the peak-to-peak approach of Klein and Summers (1966), the stochastic frontier, DEA, and surveys. Many E.U. nations with ﬁsheries participate in the Multiannual Guidance Program, which estimates capacity in terms of input metrics reﬂecting ﬁshing power. The peak-to-peak approach of Klein and Summers (1966) is an interpolation of peak values of output per unit input over time, adjusted for technical change.8 Ballard and Roberts (1977) were the ﬁrst to utilize this approach to estimate capacity for ﬁsheries. The method requires calculating the ratio of a composite output to a composite input, identifying the peak values over time, and assuming that these peaks depict the full capacity utilization given normal operating and economic conditions. The peak years are assumed to represent changes in technology over time, and the values during the peaks are adjusted to reﬂect technical change. This approach facilitates the assessment of capacity utilization over time, and is still used by the U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Reserve to calculate capacity utilization. The Census Bureau also conducts a survey of 17,000 plants each year to estimate capacity. The stochastic production frontier has also been used to estimate capacity in ﬁsheries (Kirkley et al.

subject to J

qy jm £ å Zj y jm , m = 1, 2, . . . , M j =1 J

åZ x j

jn

£ x jn , n Î Fx

jn

= λ jnx jn , n ÎVx

j =1 J

åZ x j

j =1

zj ³ 0, j = 1, 2, . . . , J λ jn ³ 0, n ÎVx. where q is the proportion by which outputs can be expanded to yield the capacity output (e.g., if the reported output equaled 100 units and q equaled 1.5, the capacity output would equal 150 units); z is a vector of the intensity variables, which permits the construction of convex combinations of outputs and inputs; l is a measure of the proportionate expansion or contraction of the variable factors, Vx; Fx is a vector of the ﬁxed factors; yjm is the mth output of the jth decision making unit; and xjn is the nth input of the jth decision making unit. The problem, as speciﬁed, imposes constant returns to scale; variableJ returns may be imposed by adding the constraint å zj = 1. The model can be estimated j =1 with or without the constraint on the variable factors. The variable factor constraint ensures that the variable factors do not restrict output, and also facilitates a direct calculation of the variable inputs levels required to produce the capacity output.

Measuring and Managing Fishing Capacity

40.4. PROBLEMS FOR ESTIMATING AND ASSESSING CAPACITY Although the estimation and assessment of capacity appears to be relatively straightforward, it is not. There are numerous issues, which have yet to be explored. First, there is the issue of resource condition. Changes in resource conditions are difﬁcult to distinguish from disembodied and embodied technical change (Kirkley et al. 2004). Another question that often confronts the analyst is whether the metric of capacity should be conditional on resource conditions. The literature tends to suggest that resource conditions should be considered in the estimation and assessment of capacity, yet there are few examples where this occurs. Inclusion of resource conditions raises the important issue of whether the notion of overcapacity should be a major concern. Overcapacity appears to have been developed by NOAA Fisheries, and in general, it corresponds to the ability to produce in excess of desired target levels, such as maximum sustainable yield (National Marine Fisheries Service 2008). That is, overcapacity would be the difference between the maximum producible output given ﬁxed factors, optimum resource levels, and the outputs corresponding to the optimum resource levels. The notion of overcapacity, however, is inconsistent with the basic notion of capacity. Data limitations, inﬂuential observations or outliers, system noise, and the potential need for data stratiﬁcation pose additional problems. For many ﬁsheries, data necessary to estimate the primal notion of capacity are simply unavailable (e.g., no data on engine horsepower, erroneous measures of vessel length and tonnage, and inadequate data on either number, or type of gear). In such cases, analysts must do their best with what is available. Inﬂuential observations, which are observations typically deﬁning the reference frontier, present a major problem for estimating capacity with DEA. Such observations may generate misleading estimates of capacity. Numerous methods and algorithms have been developed to detect inﬂuential observations (e.g., Simar and Wilson 2008), but unfortunately, there has been no apparent attempt to apply these procedures to the estimation of ﬁshing capacity. Most DEA estimates of ﬁshing capacity have, thus far, been deterministic, with no effort made to incorporate stochasticity or noise. A recent text by Sengupta (2003) and work by Simar and

549

Wilson (2000) offer some approaches for incorporating noise, but to a great extent, these proposed approaches have not been utilized.10 Stratiﬁcation is another issue that needs to be addressed because many ﬁsheries consist of groups of operators harvesting different species complexes. For example, many multispecies ﬁsheries are actually several ﬁsheries in which some operators exploit one group of species while other operators exploit other species. The vessels may differ by hull type (e.g., wood, steel, and ﬁberglass), engine type (e.g., gas and diesel), or gear type, size, and placement. These differences raise the issue of whether capacity should be estimated based on distinct groupings of vessel characteristics, as opposed to over all observations. There is no universal consensus on this issue, but for the most part, there appears to be a preference for explicitly recognizing a need for stratifying the data into different groups. Another issue is how to expand the various outputs in the capacity assessment. Most empirical assessments in ﬁsheries assume a radial expansion for all outputs. This need not be the case. In Dupont et al. (2002), capacity output is equal to the technically efﬁcient output determined by a radial expansion plus the value of the slack for each output. Russell (1985) allows for a different expansion of each output without considering the value of slacks. A remaining issue is that of behavioral objectives of vessel operators. Most ﬁshery capacity assessments, thus far, have assumed output maximization; that is, operators attempt to maximize output subject to the ﬁxed factors of production. This assumption has been necessary because economic data are seldom available. Segerson and Squires (1990, 1992, 1995) and Färe et al. (2000), however, provide deﬁnitions and assessments of capacity based on economic optimizing behavior (e.g., revenue and proﬁt maximization). Agar and Kirkley (2008) demonstrate that estimates of capacity widely vary in the Puerto Rican trap ﬁsheries given the objective of maximizing revenue, maximizing output, and minimizing trap theft loss.

40.5. ADDRESSING EXCESS CAPACITY IN FISHERIES Resource managers have seized on the problem of excess capacity. This is somewhat understandable because it conveys the notion of too much

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

effort chasing too few ﬁsh, which has been the long-standing concern by resource managers. In actuality, capacity and excess capacity are simply short-run metrics, which could easily change over a short time period (e.g., we might have excess capacity in one year, but too little harvesting capacity in the following year). To the economist, the problem in need of attention is the absence of private property rights, which is often associated with reduced economic efﬁciency. However, for many resource managers, the major problem is reducing effective ﬁshing effort and controlling ﬁshing mortality. Despite the fact that reducing ﬁshing capacity is merely a short-run solution to excess harvesting, managers have generally recognized a direct correspondence between ﬁshing effort and capacity. Managers have apparently perceived reductions in ﬁshing capacity as equivalent to reductions in ﬁshing effort and ﬁshing mortality.11 This perception is likely one major reason why resource managers have generally been supportive of estimating capacity in ﬁsheries—it provides information about a concept, which they can understand. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has led the world in promoting and understanding the need for capacity reduction programs. Many of the proposed programs involve reductions in the capital stock or reductions in capacity utilization, rather than reductions in capacity. To a large extent, there appears to be widespread agreement that input controls are the preferred method for reducing capacity and ﬁshing mortality (Joseph et al. 2007). Simply, it is postulated that capacity can be limited by restricting the number and capacities of vessels permitted to ﬁsh. Options for reducing capacity include moratoriums, which actually only restrict capacity expansion; licensing schemes, which also mostly restrict capacity expansion; buyback programs, which reduce capacity in the short run, but without additional restrictions may allow capacity to creep back to higher levels; and various LAPPs, such as individual transferable quotas (ITQs). Programs to control capacity utilization typically involve a wide range of command-and-control (CAC) regulations imposed on inputs or components of inputs (e.g., days at sea and gear restrictions). Since traditional CAC regulations for controlling capacity and capacity utilization are widely discussed in other literature, we focus on two broad programs in this chapter: (1) buyback programs and (2) LAPPs. Buyback programs have been

widely used by various nations to address excess harvesting capacity, while LAPPs have been widely advocated, but not widely used outside Australia and New Zealand.

40.6. BUYBACK PROGRAMS The volume Fisheries Buybacks (2007), edited by R. Curtis and D. Squires, presents a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of how buyback programs have been conducted. Holland et al. (1999) and Curtis and Squires (2007) offer up to ﬁve major objectives of ﬁsheries buybacks: (1) restore vessel proﬁts and resource rents dissipated through openaccess or absence of private property rights, (2) restore ﬁsh stocks, (3) change the distribution of wealth and income, (4) conservations of ecosystems and of biodiversity, and (5) creating a transition period for going from a ﬁshery with excess capacity to a rationalized ﬁshery through the use of rightsbased management. For the most part, buyback programs are recognized as nothing more than a short-run solution for reducing excess capacity. They do facilitate a transition period in which a ﬁshery can be more smoothly rationalized (i.e., go from a state of no private property rights to a state having some sort of private property rights). Walden et al. (2003) and Thunberg et al. (2007) provide case studies of two vessel buyout programs in the northeastern United States. The ﬁrst buyback was one in which the government purchased 68 vessels from the groundﬁsh ﬁshery at a cost of $23 million; the vessels were subsequently scrapped. The buyout was accomplished by a reverse auction technique, with vessels ranked based on the ratio of their bid to their average three-year vessel revenue, and vessels were purchased starting with the lowest bid-revenue ratio until all the funds were spent. This approach sought to remove the most “capacity,” at the least cost, and resulted in vessels being removed at an average price of $338,235. Because the buyout equated revenue with capacity, the designers of the buyout believed they had removed 20 percent of the capacity. Walden et al. (2003), however, calculated capacity using DEA for the same vessels, and estimated between 4.8 percent and 14.5 percent of capacity was removed.12 Additionally, a serious ﬂaw in the buyback program was that it did not take steps to prevent the idle vessels from expanding their effort once the buyback took place; this problem was

Measuring and Managing Fishing Capacity addressed by the New England Council in a future buyback program. Walden et al. (2003) concluded that the program had no real conservation beneﬁt; there was no apparent improvement in economic efﬁciency, and what occurred was a very expensive transfer payment program. A second buyout program was more selective in that it purchased only groundﬁsh permits and not the actual vessel. The capacity for each permit was estimated using DEA, and vessels were again ranked on the basis of the ratio of bid to capacity output and bought starting with the lowest ranked permit (Thunberg et al. 2007). This buyout resulted in 245 permits being purchased for an average price of $39,000. Focusing the buyout on removing only groundﬁsh permits may have allowed the winners in the process to upgrade their vessels for use in other ﬁsheries, which could increase capacity in those ﬁsheries. The buyout was successful in that it removed a large amount of latent effort that could have come back into the ﬁshery. However, the latent effort could have also been eliminated through regulations. For the vessels remaining after the buyout, there was a clear beneﬁt in terms of avoiding larger reductions in ﬁshing effort under the next ﬁshery management plan (Thunberg et al. 2007). Both buyout programs did generate a discussion about capacity and capacity reduction programs and led to further talks about ﬂeet restructuring. Currently, the ﬁshery is moving toward more market based approaches for rationalizing the ﬁshery, as days at sea can be leased and transferred, and cooperatives have formed to manage explicit shares of quota. Two difﬁcult questions to answer are that, if a resource is rebuilding, what is the appropriate amount of capacity to buy out, and will there be too much or too little capacity in the future to harvest the resource? Because capacity is a short-term concept, it is extremely difﬁcult to align future capacity with a rebuilt resource, and a number of assumptions are required. One study that attempted to do this was Kirkley et al. (2002), which found that for ﬁve U.S. ﬁsheries, the cost to buy out capacity for the ﬂeets to harvest the future rebuilt resource was approximately $1.0 billion. However, the estimate was conditional on the remaining vessels ﬁshing much more days then they were currently ﬁshing, in essence going from a part-time to a full-time ﬂeet. A ﬂeet conﬁguration that had the vessels ﬁshing less days, effectively reducing their capacity utilization, would have cost less and resulted in larger ﬂeets.

551

As a ﬁnal note on buybacks, it is clear they can be used to help transition a ﬁshery to one based on individual harvesting rights (LAPPs). The issues of whether the transition could be accomplished without a buyback, or a transition period is even necessary, have not apparently been addressed in the existing literature. In addition, there have been no comprehensive assessments of the economic costs, beneﬁts, and associated social and economic impacts of using a buyback program as a transition to rights-based management versus going straight to a rights-based regime.13

40.7. LIMITED ACCESS PRIVILEGE PROGRAMS LAPPs are market-based programs used to manage ﬁsheries. In the past, they were ITQs, or individual ﬁshing quotas. The term LAPP has been used in the United States under the new Magnuson-Stevens Act of 2006 and stresses that what is owned is something less than a complete property right. A comprehensive publication on LAPPs has been recently been released by NOAA (Anderson and Holliday 2007); we touch only brieﬂy on some of their points here in regard to capacity. The “tragedy of the commons,” or lack of property rights (Hardin 1968) has been viewed as the underlying cause of overﬁshing. This leads to a build up of capital and excess capacity. One solution to this is to assign some sort of property right to the resource. Usually this is in the form of a right to harvest a speciﬁed amount of ﬁsh. The NOAA report (Anderson and Holliday 2007) lists four critical characteristics of LAPPs; (1) exclusivity, (2) permanence, (3) security or quality of title, and (4) transferability. A LAPP program does not necessarily imply an ITQ program, although an ITQ is one type of LAPP. An example of a LAPP that is not an ITQ is a harvest cooperative where vessels pool their resources to harvest a ﬁxed quota. Australia and New Zealand have extensive experience with LAPP programs, but the use of LAPPs is limited in the United States. Ten LAPP programs in the United States were highlighted recently by NOAA (Anderson and Holliday 2007). The degree of vessel consolidation in each differs. In the case of the wreckﬁsh ITQ, which began in 1992, two vessels were left with landings in 2003 (Anderson and Holliday 2007). The Paciﬁc sableﬁsh LAPP, which allows vessel permit stacking, started in 2001 with

552

Policy Instruments and Perspectives

164 vessels, and as of 2008 there are 90 vessels (Anderson and Holliday 2007; Kit Dahl, personal communication). The surfclam and ocean quahog ITQ, which was implemented in 1990, was the ﬁrst U.S. ITQ program in federal waters. Prior to implementation, vessels were restricted to ﬁshing six hours every other week. In 1990, ex-vessel revenue was approximately US$44 million, and in 2004, it was US$59.2 million. Between 1990 and 1997, active vessels in the surfclam ﬁshery declined by 74 percent, and active vessels in the ocean quahog ﬁshery declined by 40 percent (Anderson and Holliday 2007). However, a recent assessment of capacity showed that there was still substantial excess capacity in the ﬁshery (National Marine Fisheries Service 2008). For the ocean quahog ﬂeet, the excess capacity rate was 22 percent, and for the surfclam ﬂeet it was 38 percent. LAPPs can be powerful tools for managing ﬁsheries when there is excess capacity. Yet, there may still be excess capacity present long after an LAPP program is implemented. For example, in the case of a harvest cooperative where vessels pool and manage their own quota, overall capacity may still be high because some vessels may be “idle” as their quota is shifted to other vessels. There may also be a long period between implementation of an LAPP, and the time when there is little excess capacity remaining in the ﬁshery. However, when an LAPP program is implemented, the level of excess capacity becomes something that participants in the program are concerned about, rather than government regulators. The LAPP should create incentives to reduce capacity, and ideally internalize the cost of capacity reduction to the participating vessels rather than the government.

40.8. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS The estimation and assessment of ﬁshing capacity are now a global issue. Prior to efforts by FAO to deﬁne and assess capacity, capacity was normally viewed in terms of ﬁshing effort. In this chapter, we deﬁned both primal and economic concepts of capacity, as well as offered methods for estimating capacity in ﬁsheries. Our deﬁnitions were based on the work of Kirkley and Squires (1999) and various FAO meetings (FAO 1998, 2000). However, Squires (1987) and Segerson and Squires (1990, 1992, 1995) estimated economic concepts of ﬁshing capacity well before the FAO initiative on ﬁshing capacity. We

observed that, for the most part, researchers have focused attention on estimating the primal notion of capacity offered by Färe (1984) because appropriate economic data are seldom available, and it is relatively easy to use DEA for the estimation. However, other approaches have also been used to estimate ﬁshing capacity (Felthoven and Morrison 2004; Kirkley et al. 2004). Capacity is little more than a short-run concept, and the concept of overcapacity developed by NOAA Fisheries is inconsistent with the traditional notion of capacity. Although the notion of a longrun concept is appealing, estimating capacity on a routine basis and comparing to various target levels would be extremely informative. These routine assessments would be even more useful if ﬁshery management organizations, such as NOAA Fisheries, routinely collected economic information and estimated the economic concept of capacity. Although there are appealing features with the two approaches for reducing excess capacity, vessel buybacks and LAPPs, caution must be exercised before implementing either. In the case of buybacks, the program must ensure that capacity does not “creep” back into the system, and that the buyback does not result in an expensive transfer payment program. A LAPP program may result in a ﬂeet with excess capacity well after the program is implemented. However, the cost of dealing with that excess capacity becomes internalized to the ﬁshing ﬂeet, rather than being placed on the taxpayers. Despite a long and rich history of peer-reviewed literature on capacity, confusion still remains about the concept and the need for estimating ﬁshing capacity. This is somewhat strange given that nearly all developed nations routinely produce estimates of capacity for their manufacturing industries. However, since FAO developed a global initiative to estimate ﬁshing capacity, it remains an important international initiative. It is important to understand that capacity assessments provide only a short-run picture of the economic status of a ﬁshing ﬂeet. More complete economic assessments should be used to determine how well capacity is matched to resource and economic conditions.

Notes 1. Kirkley and Squires (1999) provide a comprehensive review of various concepts of capacity as well as a discussion on behavioral objectives.

Measuring and Managing Fishing Capacity 2. See Morrison (1985a) for an economic assessment of capacity in the U.S. automobile industry, and Segerson and Squires (1990, 1992, 1995) for an economic assessment of capacity in ﬁsheries. 3. Kirkley and Squires (1999) introduced the DEA approach to ﬁsheries. 4. For additional information, see Groves and Squires (2007), Hannesson (2007), and Curtis and Squires (2007). 5. “Limited access privilege programs” is the latest term used in the United States to characterize a broad range of quasi-private property rights regimes. P. Copes (personal communication) makes a point of distinguishing among rights-based regimes, private property regimes, and quasi-private property rights regimes. 6. Capacity utilization as used here is the ratio of observed output to capacity output. Fishery managers have the ability to reduce capacity utilization through regulations such as restricting days at sea, imposing trip limits, or limiting crew size. 7. Additional methods are also used to estimate the economic concept of capacity. 8. Ballard and Roberts (1977), Kirkley and Squires (1999), and Pascoe and Greboval (2003) discuss this in greater detail. The peak to peak approach is not widely used to estimate capacity in ﬁsheries, so we do not discuss it further. 9. A radial expansion has been assumed for most capacity assessments. Dupont et al. (2002), however, allows for different expansions of each output. Capacity levels (corresponding to output, proﬁt, or revenue maximization) or cost minimization can also be estimated by DEA. 10. Coelli et al. (2005) note that the bootstrapping technique of Simar and Wilson (2000) actually is designed to address sampling variability and not system noise. 11. Reducing or controlling ﬁshing effort equates to controlling capacity utilization. 12. The study estimated capacity per day at sea per vessel, and then these ﬁgures were expanded by either their permitted days, or the number of days they ﬁshed historically. Vessels that were idle had an average capacity per day at sea assigned to them based on a cluster analysis of active vessels. 13. Reichers et al. (2007) conducted a very limited assessment of the social and economic ramiﬁcations of a license, not vessel, buyback program in the Texas shrimp ﬁshery. They noted that the number of licenses was reduced from 3,231 in 1995 to 2,000 in 2003; rents increased, catch per unit of ﬁshing effort increased, and proﬁt per day increased. However, the researchers did not conduct a formal assessment of the social changes, but noted that the objective of reducing licenses without creating excessive social disruptions was achieved.

553

References Agar, J., and J.E. Kirkley (2008). Harvesting capacity in the ﬁsh trap ﬁsheries of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands: A comparative assessment. Unpublished Manuscript, National Marine Fisheries Service, Southeast Fisheries Science Center, Miami, Fla. Anderson, L., and M. Holliday (eds) (2007). The Design and use of limited access privilege programs. NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFSF/SPO-86. Silver Spring, Md.: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Ballard, K., and J. Roberts (1977). Empirical Estimation of the Capacity Utilization Rates of Fishing Vessels in 10 major Paciﬁc Coast Fisheries. Washington, D.C.: National Marine Fisheries Service. Berndt, E.R., and M.A. Fuss (1986). Productivity measurements with adjustments for variations in capacity utilization and other forms of temporary equilibrium. Journal of Econometrics 33: 7–29. Berndt, E.R., and M.A. Fuss (1989). Economic Capacity Utilization and Productivity Measurement for Multiproduct Firms with Multiple Quasi-Fixed Inputs. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 2932. Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research. Berndt, E.R., and C. Morrison (1981). Capacity utilization measures: Underlying economic theory and an alternative approach. American Economic Review 71: 48–52. Cassels, J.M. (1937). Excess capacity and monopolistic competition. Quarterly Journal of Economics 51: 426–443. Charnes, A., W.W. Cooper, and E. Rhodes (1978). Measuring efﬁciency of decision-making units. European Journal of Operational Research 2: 429–444. Coelli, T., D.S. Prasada Rao, C.J. O’Donnell, and G.E. Battese (2005). An Introduction to Efﬁciency and Productivity Analysis, 2nd ed. New York: Springer. Curtis, R., and D. Squires (eds) (2007). Fisheries Buybacks. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. Dupont, D., R. Quentin, J. Kirkley, and D. Squires (2002). Capacity utilization measures and excess capacity in multi-product privatized ﬁsheries. Resource and Energy Economics 24: 193–210. FAO (1998). Report of the Technical working Group on the Management of Fishing Capacity. La Jolla, Calif., 15–18 April. FAO Fisheries Report 586. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2000). Report of the Technical Consultation on the Measurement of Fishing Capacity. FAO

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Fisheries Report 615. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Färe, R. (1984). On the existence of plant capacity. International Economic Review 25(1): 209–213. Färe, R., S. Grosskopf, and J. Kirkley (2000). Multiple output capacity measures and dual indirect distance functions. Bulletin of Economic Research 52: 101–113. Färe, R., S. Grosskopf, and E. Kokkelenberg (1989). Measuring plant capacity, utilization, and technical change: A nonparametric approach. International Economic Review 30(3): 655–666. Felthoven, R., and C. Morrison-Paul (2004). Multi output, nonfrontier primal measures of capacity and capacity utilization. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 86: 619–633. Groves, T., and D. Squires (2007). Lessons from ﬁsheries buybacks. In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fisheries Buybacks. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. Guyader, O., P. Berthou, and F. Daurès (2007). Decommissioning schemes and capacity adjustment: A preliminary analysis of the French experience. In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fisheries Buybacks. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. Hannesson, R. (2007). Do buyback programs make sense. In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fisheries Buybacks. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: 1234–1248. Holland, D., E. Gudmundsson, and J. Gates (1999). Do ﬁshing vessel buyback programs work: A survey of the evidence. Marine Policy 23(1): 47–69. Johansen L. (1968). Production functions and the concept of capacity. In: Recherches recentes sur la fonction de production. Namur, Belgium: Centre d’Etudes et de la Recherche Universitaire de Namur. Joseph, J., D. Squires, W. Bayliff, and T. Groves (2007). Requirements and alternatives for the limitation of ﬁshing capacity in tuna purseseine ﬂeets. In: Methodological Workshop on the Management of Tuna Fishing Capacity, FAO Fisheries Proceedings 8. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Kim, H.Y. (1999). Economic capacity utilization and its determinants: Theory and evidence. Review of Industrial Organization 15: 321–339. Kirkley, J.E., and D.E. Squires (1999). Measuring capacity and capacity utilization in ﬁsheries. In: D. Greboval (ed.). Managing Fishing Capacity: Selected Papers on Underlying Concepts and Issues. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 386. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.

Kirkley, J.E., C.J. Morrison-Paul, and D.E. Squires (2004). Deterministic and stochastic estimation for ﬁshery capacity reduction. Marine Resource Economics 19: 271–294. Kirkley, J., J. Ward, J. Walden, and E. Thunberg (2002). The Estimated Buyback Program Costs to Eliminate Overcapacity in Five Federally Managed Fisheries. Report to Congress, Division of Fisheries Statistics and Economics. Silver Spring, Md.: National Marine Fisheries Service. Klein, L. (1960). Some theoretical issues in the measurement of capacity. Econometrica 28: 272–286. Klein, L., and V. Long (1973). Capacity utilization: Concept, measurement, and recent estimates. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 3: 743–756. Klein, L., and R. Summers (1966). The Wharton Index of Capacity Utilization. Studies in Quantitative Economics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Morrison, C.J. (1985a). Primal and dual capacity utilization: An application to productivity measurement in the U.S. automobile industry. Journal of Business and Economic Studies 3(4): 312–324. Morrison, C.J. (1985b). On the economic interpretation and measurement of optimal capacity utilization with anticipatory expectations. Review of Economic Studies 52: 295–310. National Marine Fisheries Service (2008). Excess Harvesting Capacity in U.S. Fisheries. A Report to Congress. www.nmfs.noaa.gov/msa2007/ docs/042808_312_b_6_report.pdf. Nelson, R. (1989). On the measurement of capacity utilization. Journal of Industrial Organization 33: 51–74. Pascoe, S., and D. Greboval (eds) (2003). Measuring Capacity in Fisheries. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 445. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Reichers, R., W. Grifﬁn, and R. Woodward (2007). The Texas inshore bay and bait license buyback program. In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fisheries Buybacks. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. Russell R. (1985). Measures of technical efﬁciency. Journal of Economic Theory 35: 109–126. Segerson, K., and D. Squires. (1990). On the measurement of economic capacity utilization for multi-product industries. Journal of Econometrics 44: 347–361. Segerson, K., and D. Squires (1992). Capacity utilization under regulatory constraints. Review of Economics and Statistics 25(1): 76–85. Segerson, K., and D. Squires (1995). Measurement of economic capacity utilization for revenue maximizing ﬁrms. Bulletin of Economic Research 47: 77–84.

Measuring and Managing Fishing Capacity Sengupta, J. (2003). New Efﬁciency Theory. New York: Springer. Simar, L., and P. Wilson (2000). Statistical inference in nonparametric frontier models: The state of the art. Journal of Productivity Analysis 13: 49–78. Simar, L., and P. Wilson (2008). Statistical inference in nonparametric frontier models: Recent developments and perspectives. In: H. Fried, C.A.K. Lovell, and S.S. Schmidt (eds). The Measurement of Productive Efﬁciency and Productivity Growth. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Squires, D.E. (1987). Long-run proﬁt functions for multiproduct ﬁrms. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 69: 558–569. Thunberg, E., A. Kitts, and J. Walden (2007). A case study of New England groundﬁsh ﬁshing capacity reduction. In: R. Curtis and D. Squires (eds). Fisheries Buybacks. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. Walden, J.B., J. Kirkley, and A. Kitts (2003). A limited economic assessment of the northeast groundﬁsh ﬁshery buyout program. Land Economics 79(3): 426–439.

41 Strategic Behavior in Fisheries LONE GRØNBÆK KRONBAK MARKO LINDROOS

41.1. INTRODUCTION The aim of this chapter is not just to provide “another review” of ﬁshery economics and strategic behavior; it is merely thought to be an appetizer into the problems of strategic behavior in ﬁsheries. For a review of the literature within ﬁshery economics and strategic behavior several good studies already exist (Kaitala and Lindroos 2007; Kronbak 2005; Lindroos et al. 2007; Sumaila 1999). In particular, this chapter is distinguished from other reviews since it does not require prerequisites in ﬁshery economics or in game theory. After reading the chapter the reader will have a basic knowledge of essential concepts within game theory and an understanding of why strategic behavior is an important and useful framework for many ﬁshery economic problems. The chapter applies some simple problems and examples for illustrative purposes.

41.1.1. What Is Strategic Behavior in Fisheries? To understand the essence of strategic behavior in ﬁsheries, it is useful to understand the two extreme points of ﬁshery economics. On the one hand, we have open access (freedom of the sea) with no management. On the other hand, we have a sole owner, where a single owner of the resource is able to maximize the outcome of the resource (a sort of full management). In open access, it is usually assumed

that every ﬁsherman has free access to the resource. In this situation, positive proﬁt attracts ﬁshermen and negative proﬁt makes ﬁshermen withdraw from the ﬁshery—the result is a situation where economic rents from the ﬁshery are completely dissipated. There are, in particular, two pioneer examples of open access by in ﬁshery economics (Gordon 1954; Warming 1911). Both these examples highlight the fact that “everybody’s property is nobody’s property”; the undeﬁned property right causes the problem. The average product of effort just covers the marginal cost of effort. In the sole owner situation, the externalities in the ﬁsheries are not present (Gordon 1954; Scott 1955). The marginal product of ﬁshing effort equals the marginal costs. The sole owner situation is the social optimal outcome and is often applied as a benchmark or baseline. Having the open access and the sole owner in mind, we are now able to deﬁne the strategic behavior in ﬁsheries. Strategic behavior involves two or more agents having conﬂict or common interest over a common resource, who therefore react not only to consequences of personal actions but also to consequences of other agents’ actions. This means that practically everything between the two extremes involves strategic behavior for analyzing the relevant management problems (ﬁgure 41.1). Note that under conditions of open access, there is no strategic interaction between and among the ﬁshers, because open access carries with it the assumption that the ﬁshing industry is perfectly

556

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Strategic Behavior in Fisheries

Open Access (Warming, 1911) (Gordon, 1954) Inefficient

FIGURE

Sole Owner

Strategic behaviour; conflicts or common interest implies interaction among agents

(Gordon, 1954) (Scott, 1955) Efficient

41.1 Strategic behavior and ﬁsheries

competitive. Under perfect competition, of course, there is no perceptible interaction between and among the ﬁshers.

41.1.2. Importance of Strategic Behavior in Fisheries Following the U.N. third conference on the law of the sea, the coastal states were given the right to extend their exclusive economic zones (EEZs) to 200 nautical miles, the idea being to create ownership of the resources and thereby overcome the problem of undeﬁned property rights. Creating ownership of the resources resulted, however, in another type of management problems involving strategic problems, where one country’s decision interacts with other countries decisions for the same resource. The ﬁshery resources were divided into either shared ﬁshery resources that cross the EEZs of one or more neighboring states, or transboundary resources where the resources cross the EEZs and the high sea. The establishment of the EEZs thus created strategic behavior problems in ﬁsheries, as a game between different owners or exploiters of the same resource. When more owners/countries/ﬁshers (often called “players”) exploit the same ﬁsh stock, then one’s decision will interact with others’ decisions. The actual choice to make depends on how the rules of the interaction model are deﬁned, the number of players in the ﬁshery, and biological factors.

stock externality, meaning that the action available to a subgroup of players is not independent of the actions chosen by other players; thus, if one player harvests from a common resource, then it affects the availability of the stock and thereby the choice of action to the rest of the players. In other models, this is not necessarily the case.1

41.2. BASIC CONCEPTS IN STRATEGIC BEHAVIOR This section aims at giving a basic understanding of some of the concepts when talking about strategic behavior in ﬁsheries, by introducing a simple example illustrating a ﬁshery game, based on a modiﬁed version of the well-known prisoner’s dilemma. Consider two ﬁshermen with a rational behavior (they always chose their individual highest payoff when comparing two alternatives). They are separately asked, before they go harvesting, how much they will harvest on their next ﬁshing trip. Their ﬁshing trips will occur simultaneously (at the same time). They are told the consequences of their own and the other ﬁsher’s choices. Each ﬁsher has two choices: either deplete the ﬁsh stock or conserve the ﬁsh stock. The payoffs from their respective choices are illustrated in ﬁgure 41.2; these payoffs are known for both ﬁshers. Note that the payoffs

Fisher 2

41.1.3. Relation to Bioeconomic Models Strategic behavior models in ﬁsheries are integrated into the bioeconomic models. What distinguishes the strategic behavior models in ﬁsheries from many other strategic behavior models is that the exploitation of a renewable resource creates a

Fisher 1

FIGURE

Conserve

Deplete

Conserve

20,20

–5,30

Deplete

30,–5

2,2

41.2 The ﬁsher’s dilemma: respective

choices

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

are purely illustrative. However, qualitatively the interpretation of the model and equilibrium would remain unchanged for most ﬁsheries cases and models. If ﬁsher 1 decides to conserve the ﬁsh stock, the best action from a rational perspective is for ﬁsher 2 to deplete the ﬁsh stock since that yields him a payoff of 30 compared to 20. If, on the other hand, ﬁsher 1 decides to deplete the ﬁsh stock, then the best rational strategy for ﬁshery 2 is also to deplete the ﬁsh stock since he then has a payoff of +2 compared to a payoff of –5. Thus, the strategy to deplete the ﬁsh stock is always the best for ﬁsher 2 and is called a dominant strategy. If we go through the same exercise for ﬁsher 1, we will see that the deplete strategy is again the dominant strategy.2 The conclusion is based on the fact that if the ﬁshers compete, their best rational choices are for both to deplete the ﬁsh stock and receive a payoff of 2. This solution is referred to as the Nash equilibrium, where unilateral deviation is not optimal for any of the ﬁshers. On the other hand, if the two ﬁshers could from an agreement before going out on their ﬁshing trip, their agreement could be both to conserve the ﬁsh stock; then, would both be better of each receiving a payoff of 20. This is referred to as the cooperative solution. The problem with such an agreement is that each ﬁsher has incentives to “freeride” on the agreement, which means to choose to deplete despite an agreement for both to conserve. The incentives for unilateral deviation are based on the fact that it yields an additional proﬁt for the deviator, which is what creates the incentive to freeride. This is the game-theoretic interpretation of the “tragedy of the commons” (Harding 1968). The conclusions are summarized in ﬁgure 41.3. The above example illustrates how strategic behavior works in ﬁsheries. It illustrates the

common problems or dilemmas that often occur. Cooperation or joint action is the optimal management of the ﬁsheries, but the incentives to free-ride make the competition or noncooperative equilibrium (Nash) the only stable solution. The example is designed as a game in one period (one-shot game) where the payoff function for each ﬁsher is common knowledge to the other ﬁsher (complete information) and is one of the simplest of its type. The strategic interaction becomes far more complicated when creating models for ﬁsheries over time (dynamic models), having more ﬁshers and potential entrants, and/or not having complete information. Ideally, a cooperative solution between owners of a shared resource would give a sole-owner-like, or a ﬁrst-best, solution, but as illustrated above, problems with achieving such a solution can arise primarily because of incentives to free-ride. Opposite the cooperative solution is the noncooperative or Nash equilibrium, where agents maximize their own rents given other agents’ actions. In this static example, the Nash equilibrium results in overﬁshing and some, but not necessarily full, dissipation of rents. The Nash equilibrium does not always correspond to open access, where there is full dissipation of the economic rents. The noncooperative equilibrium is merely on the line between open access and sole owner in ﬁgure 41.1. The strategic interaction models presented so far assume rational behavior, full knowledge about payoffs to individual and other players, simultaneous moves, no potential entrants, and a static game. The rational behavior is a fundamental assumption in neoclassic economics. Full knowledge, static assumption, simultaneous moves, and no potential entrants are, in contrast, assumptions that can easily be relaxed (and often are) in more advanced strategic interaction models.

Fisher 2 Cooperative solution

Fisher 1

Conserve

Deplete

Conserve

20,20

–5,30

Deplete

30,–5

2,2 Nash eq.

Note: The dotted arrows illustrate free rider incentives. ( FIGURE

41.3 The ﬁsher’s dilemma: conclusions

)

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Strategic Behavior in Fisheries

41.3. WHO IS BEHAVING IN A FISHERY? A ﬁshery game involves at least two agents: persons, ﬁrms, organizations, or countries. These two agents may have some common interest or conﬂict in a particular issue related to one or several ﬁsheries. In the case of a common interest, the situation is typically described by a cooperative game, where sharing of gains from cooperation is a crucial issue. In the case of conﬂicts, noncooperative games are used to describe and predict the behavior of various agents; here, the properties of equilibria are interesting issues. Further, many situations consist of both cooperative and noncooperative elements, and also partially cooperative elements. As we saw in the preceding section, these elements are often interlinked, and their relation to each other is one of the central issues in ﬁshery game theory. Fisheries games could potentially be applied at many different levels. We ﬁrst describe the typical players in the ﬁshery games, and thereafter consider possible extensions and other players that may affect the games. Most of the ﬁshery games analyze international ﬁsheries where two or more ﬁshing countries exploit a common ﬁshery resource. The objective of the countries is to maximize their long-term economic value of the ﬁshery. This will include all relevant prices, costs, and discount rates, where the discount rate is used to measure the value in today’s money, which is then called the “net present value.”

Countries may realize that it would be beneﬁcial for them to reduce ﬁshing today to earn more in the future. However, reducing ﬁshing would cause the competing countries to react so that they would increase their ﬁshing. Therefore, there are no incentives for a single country to reduce ﬁshing, since it would just increase the earnings of the other countries, not its own. The same games can also be interpreted as ﬁshing ﬁrm or ﬁsher competition games. Nationally, there may also be some ﬁshing areas that could compete against one another in a similar fashion. Further, the ﬁshery game might involve the formation and operation of producer organizations, which could interact. A number of groups have been completely neglected in previous ﬁshery games. These include the processing industry, recreational ﬁshers, managers and decision makers, nonproﬁt organizations, and consumers. All these groups may have a signiﬁcant strategic effect. How to model the interaction between these groups and how to relate them to the existing are open issues. However, it is quite clear that adding a few of these groups in the ﬁshery game would make the games even more policy relevant. Figure 41.4 might be useful here to think about possible interactions among groups. It is divided into international, national/regional, and individual levels. The individual actions could be those of ﬁshermen, recreational ﬁshers, processing industry, and so on. The managers or decision makers are typically situated on the international, national, or regional level. The dotted circles illustrate joined

International regulation/conventions

National/regional regulation

Individual action

FIGURE

Individual action

National/regional regulation

Individual action

………..

Individual action

National/regional regulation

………

Individual action

41.4 Possible interactions among different groups: a “cobweb.”

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

national or regional interests. Figure 41.4 illustrates both vertical and horizontal strategic interactions among agents and includes all types of interactions, which results in a “cobweb.” So far, we have primarily focused on the “horizontal” games, for example, conﬂicts or common interests among same types of agents. The following section also introduces the “vertical” games, the so-called stage games.

41.4. STATE OF THE ART IN STRATEGIC BEHAVIOR MODELS WITHIN FISHERIES The purpose here is to describe the structures of the ﬁshery games currently applied in the literature. This will include a description of the problems addressed, the levels of the games, and solutions used to overcome the tragedy of the commons.

41.4.1. Sharing Games Sharing games are typically applied when agents have common interest for a shared ﬁshery resource. The agents can by cooperation jointly gain from the resource, but who should have what from the joint action? The objective of games in such a setting is a matter of achieving internal stability in the joint action of the agents, where the internal stability or stand-alone stability is deﬁned by no one having incentives to deviate from the fully joint action (Barrett 2003; Pintassilgo 2003). The conditions for internal stability therefore depend on the sharing of beneﬁts between the agents in the joint action. Several different sharing rules to distribute the aggregate gain exists (Mesterton-Gibbons 2000), but only few considers the stand-alone stability (Kronbak and Lindroos 2007). We have so far been treating each agent as individual players. In sharing games, subgroups of agents, called coalitions, are often assumed. The subgroups allow some agents to join forces and thereby act as a single agent, possible with changes in the prerequisites of their action (for a review of coalition games, see Lindroos et al. 2007). Within the coalition, there is also a sharing game.

41.4.2. Repeated Games Repeated games are games that are repeated over and over again after each period and the outcomes

of all previous plays are observed before the next play begins. Some may have a time limit on the repetition; others may be repeated inﬁnite. Repeated games are a branch of dynamic games, where the game is played in stages. For instance, the evolution of the stock could be considered in a dynamic game, and thereby the game that is played changes over stages. Repeated games are, however, much simpler to deal with. When modeling strategic behavior in ﬁsheries, it is often the yearly cycle of the ﬁsh and the ﬁshery that sets the periods, and the game is repeated since the following year the ﬁshery starts over again, assuming the play is unchanged. In inﬁnite horizon cases, the main theme is to ﬁnd credible threats (or promises) about future actions that can inﬂuence the current behavior; this is referred to as threat strategies. One example of such a threat strategy could be a trigger strategy where agents agree on cooperation until one fails to cooperate, which then triggers a switch to noncooperation. Credible threat strategies have the advantages that they simply by their announcement can prevent the tragedy of the commons. This happens if the net present value from cooperation exceeds the net present value of deviation from the agreed action (Hannesson 1997).

41.4.3. Stage Games Stage games appear when different decisions are made in different stages or different periods of time. It is not the same as dynamic or repeated games, where the same types of decisions are made by the same groups of players over and over again. Stage games are relevant when either (1) one group of agents have the possibility to make decisions before other groups of agents or (2) two different, but interdependent, decisions are made by the same group of agents, one before the other. Within each stage, the games could be cooperative, noncooperative, or coalitional. In ﬁgure 41.4, stage games would be represented by the vertical arrows. An example of a stage game could be two coastal states, with different interest groups within each state, sharing a common ﬁshery resource. The negotiations must occur not only between the two states but also within each of the two states. In ﬁsheries, we often face problems that could be relevant to analyze using stage games. For example, when management schemes are decided before ﬁshermen decide on their effort in the ﬁsheries (Ruseski 1998). Stage games are often applied when several

Strategic Behavior in Fisheries strategic problems have to merge into one setting. On a political level, decisions are made by authorities, and on the ﬁshermen’s level, effort is made by individual agents; in addition, the decision on the political level has an effect on the individual agents (Kronbak and Lindroos 2006). Stages games are traditionally solved backward, with the last stage ﬁrst, and are regarded as a step toward more realistic ﬁshery games.

41.4.4. Partition Function Games Partition function games refer to models that study the emergence of cooperation or formation of coalitions. These games are particularly useful in international ﬁsheries where the countries involved need to decide whether to make cooperative agreements with other countries. These games have two central concepts related to these decisions: (1) internal stability, which means that all countries ﬁnd the existing cooperative arrangement beneﬁcial— that is, their net beneﬁt of being a member of the coalition is higher than their net beneﬁt outside the coalition—and (2) external stability, which means that there are no countries outside of the cooperative arrangement that would like to join. If the two conditions are satisﬁed, the coalition is stable—that is, equilibrium for the countries (for examples of partition function ﬁsheries games, see Pintassilgo 2003; Pintassilgo and Lindroos 2008). Partition function games may also involve sharing rules that may affect the stability of the agreements. In this case, they overlap with sharing games presented above. A distinguishing feature in partition function games compared with sharing games is the stability analysis of all possible coalitions, not just the grand coalition involving all players. In most cases, the grand coalition is not stable, and therefore the analysis of partial cooperation becomes relevant. After all, partial cooperation is biologically and economically better than no cooperation at all. Any mechanism that can change noncooperative behavior toward cooperative behavior can potentially improve the state of the ﬁshery.

41.5. CONCLUSION Shared ﬁshery resources or transboundary ﬁshery resources naturally create conﬂict or common interest over allocation of rights to harvest the resource.

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This yields problems where one agent’s behavior naturally affects other agents’ behaviors, and problems of strategic behavior in ﬁsheries arise. This is true as long as there is more than a sole owner—but still limited access—that exploits the resource. This type of problem was recognized back in the 1970s, ever since the theory on how to solve the strategic ﬁshery problems has evolved, searching for ﬁrst best solution and stability on agreements. Applying the theory today, we are able to deﬁne the conditions that must be satisﬁed for stable agreements to occur in a joint management of ﬁsheries based on the sharing of beneﬁt. The application of partition function games, where coalitions are explicitly taken into account, has recently taken the theory a great leap forward. We are now beginning to understand the basic mechanisms that create either cooperative or noncooperative strategic behavior in the world’s ﬁsheries. However, there is still a great need to develop mechanisms to improve cooperation in real-world cases based on the theoretical work. There are several ways where the models for the strategic behavior in ﬁsheries are still evolving. The general aspect is to bring more realism into the game-theoretic models. This could be done by taking a broader system approach by including more species. Only few studies have considered multispecies and strategic behavior, but it is a more realistic framework bringing the models closer to the broader ecosystem approach and is thus an area that needs more attention. Also, few studies have researched the strategic behaviors on the more political level, since most of the literature focuses on ﬁshermen’s behavior and not the behavior of the regulators. Few studies have taken the stage game approach with authorities being the ﬁrst mover and ﬁshermen being the second movers. More attention is needed on the horizontal games of the authorities; an example could be the allocation of quotas and how this is affected by lobbyism.

Notes 1. An example where this is not the case could be carpooling: if two players decide to carpool, it does not change the possible choice of action for the rest of the players (not considering the limited number of passengers in the cars). 2. This could also be concluded from the symmetry of the game.

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References Barrett, S. (2003). Environment and Statecraft, the Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon, H.S. (1954). The economic theory of a common property resource: The ﬁshery. Journal of Political Economy 62: 124–142. Hannesson, R. (1997). Fishing as a supergame. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 32: 309–322. Harding, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: 1243–1248. Kaitala, V., and M. Lindroos (2007). Game theoretic application to ﬁsheries. Pp. 201–216 in A. Weintraub, C. Romero, T. Bjørndal, and R. Epstein (eds). Handbook of Operations Research in Natural Resources. Springer, New York. Kronbak, L.G. (2005). Essays on Strategic Interaction and Behaviour among Agents in Fisheries. Department of Environmental and Business Economics, University of Southern Denmark. University Press of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. Kronbak, L.G., and M. Lindroos (2006). An enforcement-coalition model: Fishermen and authorities forming coalitions. Environmental and Resource Economics 35(3): 169–194. Kronbak, L.G., and M. Lindroos (2007). Sharing rules and stability in coalition games with externalities. Marine Resource Economics 22: 137–154.

Lindroos, M., L.G. Kronbak, and V. Kaitala (2007). Coalitions in ﬁsheries games. In T. Bjørndal, D. Gordon, R. Arnason, and R. Sumaila (eds). Advances in Fisheries Economics. Blackwell, Oxford, U.K. Mesterton-Gibbons, M. (2000). An Introduction to Game-Theoretic Modeling. Student Mathematical Library, vol. 11. American Mathematic Society, Providence, R.I. Pintassilgo, P. (2003). A coalition approach to the management of high seas ﬁsheries in the presence of externalities. Natural Resource Modeling 16: 175–197. Pintassilgo, P., and M. Lindroos (2008). Application of partition function games to the management of straddling ﬁsh stocks. Pp. 65–84 in A. Dinar, J. Albiac, and J. Sanchez-Soriano (eds). Game Theory and Policy Making in Natural Resources and the Environment. Routledge, Oxon, Canada. Ruseski, G. (1998). International ﬁsh wars: The strategic roles for ﬂeet licensing and effort subsidies. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 36: 70–88. Scott, A. (1955). The ﬁshery: The objective of sole ownership. Journal of Political Economy 63(2): 116–124. Sumaila, U.R. (1999). A review of game theoretic models of ﬁshing. Marine Policy 23(1): 1–10. Warming, J. (1911). Om grundrente af ﬁskegrunde [in Danish]. Nationaløkonomisk Tidsskrift 49: 64–76.

42 Principal-Agent Problems in Fisheries NIELS VESTERGAARD

42.1. INTRODUCTION A “principal-agent problem” arises whenever an individual or public agency or regulator (the principal) has another person, ofﬁce, or ﬁrm (the agent) perform a service on its behalf and cannot fully observe the agent’s actions, inducing information asymmetry. In economics, the traditional example is the potential conﬂict of interest between ownership and management, but any delegation of authority may give rise to this problem. The classic example in ﬁsheries is the relationship between vessel owner and crew members. Principal-agent theory focuses on mechanisms to reduce the “problem” of asymmetric information, such as deﬁning and selecting the “right” types of agents, implementing incentive contracts, including instituting forms of monitoring and various amounts of positive (“carrots”) and negative sanctions (“sticks”). The underlying assumption is that the agent’s interests may differ from those of the principal. Strategies to mitigate the problem produce a type of transaction cost, reﬂecting the fact that without cost, it is impossible for principal to be sure that agents will act in the principal’s best interest. In other words, Pareto efﬁcient allocation cannot be obtained. There have been many areas of applications of the principal-agent paradigm in economics. In an employer-labor setting, an employer serves the role of principal, while workers act as agents. The classic example of the principal-agent relationship

has a landlord monitoring the activities of a tenant farmer. In regulated industries, the regulator acts as principal, designing an incentive scheme or contract for the ﬁrms (agents) whose activities are being regulated. From the insurance sector, the policyholder might change behavior after becoming insured. The applications of principal-agent theory to renewable ocean resources, including ﬁsheries, have been diverse and in some instance superﬁcial. To understand this, let us look at the area of regulation. The economics of regulation can be divided into two main approaches: public interest theory and interest group theory. In public interest theory, the regulations promote overall public interest, while interest group theory views the purpose of regulation as promoting narrow actions and interests of certain groups in the society. The general setup is that the government wants ﬁrms and/or households to adjust their behavior in such a way that certain things are prevented or some speciﬁc goals reached. In reality, it is very difﬁcult for the government to control the actions taken by ﬁrms and/or households. Figure 42.1 shows a very simplistic interaction between different actors in the regulation of ﬁsheries. The ﬁsheries policy is formulated by the politicians and implemented by the ministry of ﬁsheries. An important part of the ministry of ﬁsheries is the section of control and enforcement because this section interacts with the courts to determine the ﬁnal interpretation of the laws. So, it is not sure that the intentions of the

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politicians are put into practice. The ﬁshing ﬁrms may consist of the owners, managers (e.g., the skipper), and a range of employees or crew members. The skipper and the crew members are actually doing the ﬁshing, not necessarily the owner. Even though the ﬁgure is missing the consumer side, it is sufﬁcient to show that the links between the politicians at the one hand and the skipper and crew on the other hand are imperfect. When the government (principal) cannot precisely control the ﬁshermen (agent) has been termed a principal-agent problem. In the political economy literature, the situation in which a state agency (agent) pursues its own interest, which may differ from the interest of the government (principal), is called a principal-agent problem. Here the problem may be connected to the rent-seeking issue that arises when agents from the regulated industry try to inﬂuence the regulation in their favor (e.g., lobbying using resources to acquire subsidies). Both of these problems arise with conﬂicting objectives and strategies between agents and the regulators, and they both contribute to government failure (for an overview, see Edwards 1994). The problem with this approach to regulation is that although it might emphasize that actors who are going to be regulated by the government cannot be expected to adjust passively to the regulation, it does not explicitly state the asymmetric information problem, which is a market failure (see Hanley et al. 1997). In fact, it is the opinion of the author that studies of the interplay between a principal and an agent or the regulator and the regulated should have some kind of asymmetric information problem attached before it can be called a principal-agent study. Otherwise, it is “just” a study where the regulator takes the reaction by the agent into account

Politicians Lobbying Owner Ministry/regulator (control and enforcement) Manager/skipper

Court Crew FIGURE 42.1 Interactions among the politicians, the government, and the ﬁshing ﬁrms

when the regulation is designed, which every sound regulation model has to do. In fact, several of the applications of the principal-agent model in ﬁsheries do not include the information problem, and hence cannot be called principal-agent analyses (see section 42.3).1 Jensen (2008) provides a recent review on uncertainty and asymmetric information in the ﬁsheries regulation economics literature, where the purpose is to distinguish when uncertainty can be interpreted as asymmetric information. This chapter presents principal-agent theory, with an emphasis on identifying the instances when it is suitable to apply the principal-agent approach and what are the gains in knowledge. It then surveys different applications of the principal-agent approach in ﬁsheries.

42.2. PRINCIPAL-AGENT THEORY Kwerel (1977) wrote: In a world of perfect information, optimal regulation of an isolated economic variable would be relatively straightforward. Unfortunately, we do not live in such a world. Regulatory authorities typically ﬁnd that the information which they need during the planning phase is known only by those who are to be regulated. In this situation a serious incentive problem may arise. Unless a system can be designed which makes the objectives of the individual agents coincide with the regulator’s objectives, self-interested agents will systematically deceive the regulatory authority when asked to reveal their information. The economics of information and incentives has developed greatly in recent years. In the economic theory of contracts, agents are characterized by private information that determines their ultimate actions. The two key features of principal-agent problems are that (1) the principals know less than the agents about something important, and that (2) their interests conﬂict in some way (see Sappington 1991; two more recent introductions are MachoStadler and Pérez-Castillo 2001; Laffont and Martimort 2002). There seem to be two sources of asymmetric information problems: • Problems where agents can do some costly action to improve outcomes for the principal,

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Principal-Agent Problems in Fisheries but the principal cannot observe the action. These are known as moral hazard or hidden action problems. For example, this can involve effort in a production process or protection against risk. • Problems where there are different types of agents, and principals cannot distinguish between them.2 These are known as adverse selection or hidden information problems when the types are ﬁxed and the question is which agents will participate. For example, this can include efﬁciency in terms of cost or willingness to pay for a given good. While the type of the agent is unknown to the principal, the latter nevertheless is assumed to have prior information before the contract is negotiated, in terms of the statistical distribution of the type and other relevant characteristics of the agent. The challenge for the principal is to set up a contract scheme enforcing truthful revelation of the private information, thus allowing a second-best optimum to be attained for the economic variable of interest (production level, environmental externality, etc.). This is called the revelation principle.3 In practice, contracts are largely used in domains such as insurance, public regulation, industrial relationships, agricultural production, and employment procedures. This suggests that asymmetric information can be present in many situations and must be taken into account in almost every regulatory and empirical analysis.

The timing of the interactions between principal and agent is shown in ﬁgure 42.2. A contract is offered to the agent, which the agent can either accept or refuse. If the agent refuses, the interaction stops. If the agent accepts, the contract is executed. The sequence of decisions is important because at each point in time the agent and principal have to make decisions based on the available information. Therefore, a correct classiﬁcation of the asymmetric information situation is important (see MachoStadler and Pérez-Castillo 2001). The advantage of the principal-agent approach is that the incentives at stake are highlighted. The focus is on the regulation problem, where the issue is to align the incentives of the private ﬁrms so the social objectives can be met. Put in another way, in ﬁsheries, if the reactions of the ﬁshermen are not taken into account when formulating the ﬁshery policy of keeping, for example, the stock size within optimal size (e.g., assume that the ﬁshermen passively adjust to quota settings), then the policy can lead to suboptimal and unexpected results. Another advantage of the principal-agent approach is that the information problems are explicitly taken into account when setting up the incentive scheme. The principal submits to the agents a menu of contracts that are conditioned on what both the principal and the agent can observe and on what can be veriﬁed in the legal system. In other words, asymmetric information is included explicitly, because the contract cannot be conditioned on what only the agents know.

Adverse Selection Agent knows his type

Principal offers a contract

Agent accept or refuses

The contract is executed

Moral Hazard

Principal offers a contract

Agent accept or refuses

Agent exerts an effort or not

The outcome is realized and the contract is executed

42.2 Timing of contract offers and interactions between the principal and the agent

FIGURE

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42.3. APPLICATIONS OF PRINCIPAL-AGENT THEORY TO FISHERIES The principal-agent model can be applied to different areas in ﬁsheries such as share contracts, international ﬁshing agreements, illegal landings and discards, safety, and invasive species.

42.3.1. Share Contracts Share contracts are used as the main remuneration system in commercial ﬁsheries all over the world. The ﬁshermen or crew are paid not a ﬁxed wage per hour but as a share of the revenue obtained by the catch of the vessel. These systems vary across countries, vessel types, and ﬁsheries. In some systems, some of the common variable costs are deducted before the revenue is divided by the crew and the vessel owner, and in some systems the crew receives some minimum wage combined with a share of the revenue obtained. Sutinen (1979) analyzed the social desirability of the share system and concluded that “the share system of remuneration is viewed as making a signiﬁcant positive contribution to the development of a ﬁshing industry.” This result is driven by riskaverse vessel owners and competitive labor markets. Under the share system, the vessel owners can spread some of the risk to the crew, reducing the risk cost. Sutinen does not explicitly mention the moral hazard problem due to private information about the effort level of the crew, and he does not call the approach a principal-agent analysis. However, he writes that the share system “provides a work incentive that makes it less costly to extract the desired level of labour services from the crew.” The analysis is done in a static framework. In two studies, Hämäläinen et al. (1986,1990) analyzes the issue of share-ﬁshing in a principalagent and a dynamic ﬁshery model. They use the term “Stackelberg game” as interchangeable with the principal-agent model because the principal (called leader in the Stackelberg game) deﬁnes the game and takes into account the reaction of the agent (called follower in the Stackelberg game). Because the principal deﬁnes the game, the reactions of the agents are passive in the sense that they, given the choice of the principal, optimize their behavior. In this model, the agents deﬁne their labor supply as a function of the share contract and the stock level. In both studies, Hämäläinen et al.

use a dynamic ﬁshery model in a principal-agent setup. Again, like other applications, there is no information problem in the model, because there is no asymmetric and private information. They argue that the reason for setting up the model in this way is that a contract based on labor time is not enforceable because of the high transactions cost in, for example, supervision of labor. The issue of risk sharing is not included in the model. In their 1986 paper, Hämäläinen et al. assume myopic behavior, because the owners and the ﬁshermen are not coordinating their actions. In the case of a pure share contracts, they found, with myopic behavior under open access, that the share is equal to the elasticity of harvest with respect to labor input. They analyzed—given the share system—the possibilities to induce social optimal ﬁshing and showed that a combination of licenses and taxation of harvest may lead to the optimal solution. In their 1990 paper, Hämäläinen et al. studied a ﬁshery where cooperative vessel owners (the principal) hire unorganized ﬁshermen (agents) to operate vessels. On each vessel, the ﬁshermen’s salary is a share of the value of the catch. The results show that harvest shares of myopic ﬁshermen will be reduced when cartels are established. The results suggest that share-ﬁshing is a self-adaptive and time-consistent remuneration system as it automatically incorporates differences in individual crews’ labor supplies due to, among other things, ﬁshermen’s skills. They found that optimal regulation is accomplished by a constant subsidy on the price of ﬁsh. Stanley (2007) studies relative payment contracts in a principal-agent framework between larvagathering agents and their boat-owning employer principals who supply seed to shrimp farms. The effort level by the agents is not observable by the boat owners, and the output of the agents is related to the effort level and the unknown and stochastic environmental factors. A relative payment contract is designed such that the payment depends on the relative performance of the agents. That is to say, if the production of an agent is higher than the average production of all agents, the agent receives a bonus payment depending on production level and on whether the vessel owner is earning proﬁt. The study incorporates the sources of production risk creating income shocks to gatherers. Two data sets from a Honduran coastal ﬁshery case were used to test the hypotheses concerning contractual performance across environments. Which contract provides the highest mean income (and variation)

Principal-Agent Problems in Fisheries depends upon the underlying production catch data. A simpliﬁed relative payments contract would perform better in reducing income risk in locations of stronger covariate shocks, but at the price of signiﬁcantly lower mean earnings for gatherers. In areas of shocks, such as localized water pollution, piecerate contracts (a given rate of the total production) would perform better. Objective risk exposure to gatherers was lower under relative payments, supporting the hypotheses.

42.3.2. International Fishing Agreements between a Coastal State and a Distant State Clarke and Munro (1987) claim that their study is the ﬁrst application of the principal-agent theory to ﬁsheries management. They analyzed the situation where a coastal water state (the principal) contracts with the distant water state (agent) to do ﬁshing in the water under the jurisdiction of the coastal water state.4 The setup is that the coastal state allows the ﬂeet from the distant state the return from ﬁshing under the condition that the ﬂeet pays a license fee, for example, through unit taxes on catches and effort. Since they assume complete information for both the principal and the agent, the setup is not a proper principal-agent problem because the principal knows exactly the same as the agent, that is, full information. Therefore, Clarke and Munro (1987) also reach ﬁrst-best solutions in their analysis by implementing a tax scheme. Jensen and Vestergaard (2002a) analyze the principal-agent problem under adverse selection, where the regulator does not know the cost of the ﬁshermen; that is, the regulator does not know the type of the ﬁshermen. They assume that there can be two types, low-cost and high-cost agents. The issue is that the low-cost agents have incentives to pretend to be high-cost, because the ﬁshermen are compensated. The regulator might end up with paying too high compensation. In a steady-state equilibrium analysis, they found that the low-cost ﬁsherman has to be paid an information rent in order to reach a second-best optimum. This optimum is characterized by two restrictions, namely, the participating and the incentive compatibility restrictions. The participating restriction says that the ﬁshermen under the scheme shall be given a payoff corresponding to what they can get elsewhere—reservation utility. The incentive compatibility restriction says that the ﬁshermen receive a higher payoff when

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telling the truth compared to when not telling the truth. That the low-cost agent receives an information rent is a general result, but what is new in a renewable resource setting is that the effort level by the low-cost agent changes under asymmetric and incomplete information compared to the situation with complete information. Because of the resource restriction, where the resource growth in steady state is equal to the total harvest of the agents, the low-cost agent is allowed a higher effort level under asymmetric information than under complete information. As a consequence, the highcost agent is allowed a lower effort level. Finally, because of the total higher cost, the equilibrium stock level is higher under asymmetric information than under complete information. The study is the ﬁrst to apply the standard adverse selection theoretical model to ﬁsheries. The results are obtained under several simplifying assumptions, such as no discounting and no signaling. This area, signaling, could be an interesting future research area. Jensen and Vestergaard (2001) analyze the ﬁshery policy in the European Union under the assumption that the three actors involved—the EU Commission, the member states, and the ﬁshermen—operate in a kind of double principal-agent framework with asymmetric information and hence incentives problems. It is assumed that the member states have information about the cost structure of the ﬂeet, which the European Union does not have. In technical words, there is hidden information about an exogenous variable and hence adverse selection. Jensen and Vestergaard assume that the ﬁshermen can either have low ﬁshing cost or high ﬁshing cost. In the study an economic incentive system, where the European Union taxes the member states based on effort, is formulated. The member states maximize—given short-run production and cost functions—proﬁt minus the tax payment to the European Union. The European Union maximizes overall proﬁts plus the tax revenue corrected for the marginal cost of public funds subject to three types of constraints: (1) the natural growth of the resource, which is equal to the total harvest; (2) the participating constraints; and (3) the incentives or self-selection constraints. The contract European Union offers to the member states is designed in such a way that they have nonnegative proﬁt and also reveal their type, low cost or high cost. Setting the tax requires knowledge about the marginal proﬁt of both types of ﬁshermen, the marginal cost of public fund, the shadow value of the resource

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

stock, and the probability of ﬁshermen being either low cost or high cost.

42.3.3. Safety The issue of safety in ﬁsheries is analyzed by Bergland and Pedersen in 1997. The background is that it is necessary for the public authorities to engage in safety issues to secure a supply of communication and navigation systems used by all vessels, because these are public goods. In addition, to reduce accident risks, the supply of these public services will increase the production possibilities in the ﬁshing industry. However, they found that moral hazard effects might occur because the supply of public services could induce the individual rational ﬁshermen to behave in a way that increases risks because they may insert less of the safety-reducing and more of the safety-increasing private inputs as long as the total losses experienced when accidents happen are higher than the losses each of the ﬁshermen are faced with. Their analysis has no information problem; the market failure in the model is the public good characteristic of safety. As moral hazard is deﬁned in this survey, the adjustment of the ﬁshermen to the provision the public good is not hidden.

42.3.4. Discards and Illegal Landings: Moral Hazard Jensen and Vestergaard (2002b) treat output regulation in ﬁsheries as a moral hazard problem, because the ﬁshermen have private information about their catches. What the regulator normally can observe under reasonable cost is the landings. Observing catches is in many cases too costly.5 With catches as private information, there is an incentive problem, because information about the real catches is important of several reasons. First, if the total real catch is higher than the level set by the regulator, this might represent an unsustainable harvest level, leading to direct long-term economic loss. Second, because the real catch is unknown, the assessment of the stock level will—all things equal—be more uncertain, and again, this can lead to situations where the assessed the stock level is different than the real stock size—a problem that the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has been dealing with for several years (see, e.g., ICES 2007). Third, all this leads to implementation of the comprehensive control and enforcement system to ensure that the total catches are held within the

total allowable catches. In other words, the information about the variable—catches—is typically known only by the ﬁshermen, who are to be regulated. Self-interested ﬁshermen will systematically deceive the regulator, when asked to reveal their information about catches, unless a system can be designed that aligns the motives of the ﬁshermen with the social objectives. Using results from the nonpoint pollution literature (Segerson 1998), an incentive scheme is formulated based on the state of the stock. The basic assumption is that in the case of many ﬁshermen, asymmetric information and uncertainty the regulation of ﬁsheries are a complex problem, where the assessment of each ﬁsherman’s real catches is prohibitively costly. This leads to deﬁning the problem as moral hazard in groups. Solving this problem in the ﬁshery case results in formulating the policy instrument as a function of the state of stock biomass. The tax rate (the policy instrument in this case) is equal to the expected marginal net social cost from exceeding the optimal catch divided by the ﬁsherman’s biological response. The tax structure eliminates “free-riding,” because the ﬁshermen pay on the basis of the full marginal costs that illegal landings generate (the difference in user costs). In this way, compliance with the total quota is ensured—the incentive for illegal landings is avoided. Hansen et al. (2006) address the information problems in the mechanism proposed by Jensen and Vestergaard (2002b). Instead of grounding the tax rate on stock size and individual ﬁshermen’s cost function, Hansen et al. (2006) suggest a tax that depends on knowledge of the principal of the aggregate cost function and total catches of all ﬁshermen. The tax is a function of the aggregate cost function and the ﬁshermen’s ex ante reports of planned catch. Hansen et al. show that this tax system will secure nearly optimal catches, leastcost production, and nearly optimal entry-exit incentives. Jensen and Vestergaard (2007) analyze the issue of discards and illegal landings and moral hazard when there is uncertainty in stock size. The purpose of the study is to analyze incentive contracts as a solution to the stock externality problem, the problem of imperfect and private information about catches and the stock uncertainty problem. So, the incentive problem due to private information about catches, where landings or self-reported catches (e.g., in logbooks) are observable, is addressed in a realistic situation where there is uncertainty about

Principal-Agent Problems in Fisheries the stock size. In other words, there are multiple market failures, and it is well known that with several market failures, multiple policy instruments must be used to secure a ﬁrst-best optimum. The incentive contract offered to the risk-adverse ﬁshermen consists of the two taxes: (1) a stock tax based on the difference between the target year-end stock size and the expected stock size at the end of the year multiplied by an unit stock tax rate that is a declining function of the self-reported catches; and (2) voluntary self-reported catches in logbooks are taxed using a tax-rate in terms of per unit of individual, voluntary self-reported of catches in the ﬁshing period. Given stock uncertainty and risk aversion, the stock tax rate and the self-reported tax-rate both depend on the variance of the uncertain stock size and the risk-aversion function. Further, there is an interaction between the two tax rates. The reason is that tax rates have to be balanced against each other on the margin, because the stock tax rate is a declining function of self-reported catches. The uncertainty and risk aversion make it favorable for the ﬁshermen to have a positive level of the self-reported tax rate. The use of a stock tax alone in a situation with uncertain ﬁsh stocks and riskaverse ﬁshermen allows for a second-best optimum. In this situation, it is not possible to reach a full optimum. However, it is shown in the analysis, if in addition to the stock tax a tax on voluntary selfreported catches is imposed, a ﬁrst-best optimum is reached.

42.3.5. Invasive Species MacPherson et al. (2006) presents a dynamic principal-agent model of aquatic species invasions in which a manager, who is concerned about the spread of invasive species across lakes by boaters, sets management controls on a lake-by-lake basis, and boaters make a series of trip decisions during the course of the season based on the controls imposed by the manager. The results of a simulated invasion of Eurasian watermilfoil (Myriophyllum spicatum) highlight interesting aspects of the optimal management policies under two different management objectives: maximizing boater welfare and minimizing milfoil spread. As such, this study endogenizes resource user behavior in the management decisions related to a plant species invasion by allowing the lake manager, the principal, to anticipate boater reaction to management activity and the invasive species. There are two fundamental

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reasons to endogenize boater movements in a model of the spread of aquatic invasions by boaters: (1) to provide a better forecast of the rate and direction of spread of the invader and (2) to accurately estimate welfare effects. The welfare effect of closing a lake has a direct welfare effect because now access to the lake requires keeping a boat on the lake, but it also has an indirect welfare effect because it shifts the spread of the invasive, which may leave society worse off overall. In the analysis there are no asymmetric or private information problems. Therefore, the approach taken does not belong to the principal-agent approach under asymmetric information and incentive contracts, but the approach is connected to the more general principal-agent principle under the economics of regulation mentioned in the introduction.

42.4. CONCLUSION This overview shows that applications of the principal-agent theory to ﬁsheries have been diverse and not very systematic. The overview also demonstrates that the use of term “principal-agent model approach” has not been consistent in the ﬁsheries literature. The traditional principal-agent approach considers asymmetric information as a market failure problem in the general relationship where the principal wants to induce the agent or agents to do certain things. Several applications have not included the information problem, which changes the research approach toward game theory. From a policy management point of view, regulating assuming full information will create an inefﬁcient allocation of resources, and therefore the regulator has to create an incentive compatible regulation where the agents will reveal their private information. This has a cost, but the allocation is better than just going ahead with regulation assuming full information. The state of the research so far indicates that more work needs to be done with respect to the information requirements for regulation and hence to be much more explicit about what a contract between the regulator and the ﬁshermen may be based on. There is a lot of potential in this area, because regulation of ﬁsheries in many countries is based on licenses that easily could be extended to include more items, for example, ﬁshing behavior. Another area is signaling, where ﬁshermen might be able to signal their type cost-free and in

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this way reduce the information problem. Further, the issue of designing a ﬁshing contract between a coastal state and a distant state has not been fully explored. Two other areas where the principal-agent approach could be applied to in ﬁsheries are invasive species and marine reserves. Invasive species may in some marine areas threaten the marine environment and biodiversity. As a preventive measure, agents that are assumed to have a high risk of transferring species from one marine area to another area could be offered an incentive contract where they are compensated for reducing the risk of moving species to the foreign areas. With respect to marine reserves, the regulator might compensate the ﬁshermen for their loss due to establishment of the reserve, but at the same time they might have less information about the cost and/or actions of the ﬁshermen, raising the problem of setting up a proper incentive scheme (see for a very recent application, Quach 2008).

Acknowledgments I thank Knud Sinding and Anders Skonhoft for helpful comments and suggestions to an earlier draft of this chapter.

Notes 1. One could speculate whether asymmetric information between different units in the government is market failure or government failure. It is not important for our purpose, because we want to look at cases where objectives and asymmetric information conﬂict. 2. In some literature, there is a distinction between whether the agent knows something a priori or will know something (see Mas-Colell et al. 1995). In fact, moral hazard issues and the situation when the agent is coming to know more than the principal is the original sense of the principal-agent problem. Adverse selection then refers to the case where information about some characteristics of commodities is not observable by all the participants. However, in recent years the way we use the term seems to be the most used. 3. The revelation principle says (in words) that whatever outcome you can achieve, you can achieve by giving the agent an incentive to tell the truth, and you do not lose anything by making the agent tell the truth. 4. In Macho-Stadler and Pérez-Castillo (2001, section 3B.2), the same moral hazard model between a coastal and distant state is formulated

with asymmetric information based on Gallastegui et al. (1993). However, since the model is formulated on observed catches, it leads to paradoxical results, where higher catches than allowed are thrown back into the sea. 5. However, in some ﬁsheries a 100 percent observer program is in place to ensure that the catches are reported correctly.

References Bergland, H., and P.A. Pedersen (1997). Catch regulation and accident risk: The moral hazard of ﬁsheries. Marine Resource Economics 12(4): 281–292. Clarke F.H., and G.R. Munro (1987). Coastal states, distant water ﬁshing nations and extended jurisdiction: A principal-agent analysis. Natural Resource Modeling 2: 81–107. Edwards, S.F. (1994). Ownership of renewable ocean resources. Marine Resource Economics. 9(3): 253–273. Gallastegui, M.C., E. Iñarra, and I. Macho-Stadler (1993). Contratos de pesca desde la perspectiva de la teoría de la agencia. Estudios de Economía 20(2): 329–354. Hämäläinen, R.P., J. Ruusunen, and V. Kaitala (1986). Myopic Stackelberg equilibria and social coordination in a share contract ﬁshery. Marine Resource Economics 19: 175–192. Hämäläinen, R.P., J. Ruusunen, and V. Kaitala (1990). Cartels and dynamic contracts in shareﬁshing. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 19: 175–192. Hanley, N., J.F. Shogren, and B. White (1997). Environmental Economics in Theory and Practice. Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. Hansen, L.G., F. Jensen, U.S. Brandt, and N. Vestergaard (2006). Illegal landings: An aggregate catch self-reporting mechanism. American Journal of Agriculture Economics 88(4): 974–985. ICES (2007). Cod in Skagerak. ACFM Advice. International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. www.ices.dk/committe/acom/comwork/report/2007/may/cod-kat.pdf Jensen, F. (2008). Uncertainty and asymmetric information: An overview. Marine Policy 32: 89–103. Jensen, F., and N. Vestergaard (2001). Management of ﬁsheries in the EU: A principal-agent analysis. Marine Resource Economics 16(4): 277–291. Jensen, F., and N. Vestergaard (2002a). A principal-agent analysis of ﬁsheries. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 158(2): 276–285. Jensen, F., and N. Vestergaard (2002b). Moral hazard problems in ﬁsheries regulation: The case

Principal-Agent Problems in Fisheries of illegal landings and discard. Resource and Energy Economics 24(4): 281–299. Jensen, F., and N. Vestergaard (2007). Asymmetric information and uncertainty: The usefulness of logbooks as a regulation measure. Ecological Economics 63: 815–827. Kwerel, E. (1977). To tell the truth: Imperfect information and optimal pollution control. Review of Economic Studies 44: 595–601. Laffont, J.-J., and D. Martimort (2002). The Theory of Incentives. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Macho-Stadler, I., and J.D. Pérez-Castillo (2001). An Introduction of the Economics of Information. New York: Oxford University Press. MacPherson, A.J., R. Moore, and B. Provencher (2006). A dynamic principal-agent model of human-mediated aquatic species invasions. Agricultural and Resource Economics Review 35(1): 114–154.

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Mas-Colell, A., M.D. Whinton, and J.R. Green (1995). Microeconomic Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Quach, N.T.K. (2008). Creation of Marine Reserve and Incentives for Biodiversity Conservation. Unpublished manuscript, Norwegian College of Fishery Science, University of Tromso. Sappington, D.E.M. (1991). Incentives in principalagent relationships. Journal of Economic Perspectives 5: 45–66. Segerson, K. (1988). Uncertainty and incentives for nonpoint pollution control. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 15: 87–98. Stanley, D.L. (2007). Risk management in gathering economies. Journal of Development Studies 43(6): 1009–1036. Sutinen, J. (1979). Fishermen’s remuneration systems and implications for ﬁsheries development. Scottish Journal of Political Economy 26(2):147–162.

43 Allocation Issues in Rights-Based Management of Fisheries: Lessons from Other Resources GARY D. LIBECAP

43.1. INTRODUCTION Ocean ﬁsheries are critical sources of food, employment, recreation, biodiversity, and other ecological services. They also traditionally have been classic examples of the “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968). Under prevailing open-access conditions, the “race to ﬁsh” involving growing numbers of ﬁshers and vessels has resulted in the conditions described by Scott Gordon (1954) and Anthony Scott (1955) more than ﬁfty years ago: depleted stocks, falling catch per unit effort, declining incomes, and overcapitalization. It does not have to be this way. Fisheries can provide a variety of products and services and be long-term sources of wealth. For these outcomes to occur, however, there have to be constraints on entry and institutional arrangements that better align the private incentives of ﬁshers with the social beneﬁts of conserving the stock, restraining harvest, and lowering the cost of harvest. Limited-entry schemes through capacity, timing, or harvest constraints imposed by government regulators or international ﬁshery organizations provide some relief. They reduce the race to ﬁsh by controlling access, inputs, and/or output. Even so, they are only a beginning. To truly address the problems of open access, more explicit property regimes are required. Ideally, property rights include the ability of decision makers to use and invest in a resource and to capture the associated beneﬁts and costs, to

exclude nonowners, and to divide and exchange the asset. The more complete and durable the property rights, the more the private and social net beneﬁts of resource use coincide, reducing externalities and the associated losses of the common pool (Dahlman 1979; Libecap 1989). In ﬁsheries, property rights can motivate investments in the stock through reduced damage to habitat and avoided harvest of juvenile ﬁsh. Property rights can change the timing of harvest and the nature of the product (fresh vs. frozen, larger vs. smaller) because ﬁshers, as owners, can make production decisions that are not dominated by the imperative race to ﬁsh. They can be a basis for exchange among ﬁshers and others concerned about marine resources to reduce the number of vessels, improve efﬁciency, limit bycatch, and promote biodiversity. This exchange generates valuable information about the value of the ﬁshery and thereby improves its management.1 And ownership can be a basis for collateral for accessing capital. The most common form of property rights or rights-based management (RBM) is individual transferable quotas (ITQs) (Hannesson 2004, 56). ITQs are tradable use rights to ﬁsh—ownership of a ﬂow of harvest, rather than of the stock of ﬁsh. With ITQs, a total annual allowable catch is determined, and ﬁshers are granted a quota or share of the allowable catch. ITQs can fundamentally change incentives in the ﬁshery because their value depends upon the state of the stock of ﬁsh. With these tools, ﬁshers

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Allocation Issues in Rights-Based Management of Fisheries are more motivated to protect the stock, to selfmonitor, and to collaborate. Entry into the ﬁshery is provided through ownership of ITQs, and their exchange can be important sources of wealth. The beneﬁcial effects of ITQs are impressive. Grafton et al. (2002), Shotton (2000), Arnason (2002), Newell et al. (2005), and Wilen (2006), among others, report increases in ﬁshery product value, improved efﬁciency, and enhanced stock conditions. Even so, property rights in ﬁsheries remain controversial, limiting or slowing their adoption. Necessarily, some parties must be denied access, and the allocation of rights involves an assignment of wealth and political inﬂuence. Some parties gain, or lose, more than others. Production under a property rights regime has a different composition of inputs and timing than what occurs under open-access or command-and-control regulation, with negative impacts on certain groups of labor, input sellers, service organizations, and processors. These production changes are inherent in the efﬁciency gains of privatization, and in general, the aggregate society beneﬁts from greater levels of wealth, a more vibrant stock, and a healthier marine resource. Property rights are political institutions, and distributional concerns in allocation affect the nature of the rights arrangements that ultimately emerge, their timing, and effectiveness (Libecap 1989, 10–28). These allocation issues have been encountered in other resources, and examining them provides insights into how they may play out in ﬁsheries as RBM is implemented. In this chapter I examine two issues: (1) how limited or asymmetric information affects negotiation over the assignment of rights, and (2) how seemingly short-term compromises can have long-term or path-dependent effects on the property rights structure. I illustrate these issues by examining efforts to constrain open-access withdrawal of oil and natural gas from hydrocarbon reservoirs and the assignment of rights to mineral, range, and agricultural land in North America. The ﬁrst case is examined in detail, whereas highlights are presented in the latter cases.2

43.2. INFORMATION PROBLEMS AND PATH DEPENDENCIES IN THE ALLOCATION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS IN OIL AND GAS Addressing common-pool oil and natural gas deposits illustrates the distributional conﬂicts that take

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place in the assignment of property rights, such as ITQs, the information problems encountered, and how side payments to promote adoption of RBM systems in ﬁsheries can have long-term effects. As with wild ocean ﬁsheries, oil and natural deposits that lie under private lands in the United States are open-access resources. These deposits are lodged in subsurface reservoirs under great pressure. When any part of the surrounding geologic formation is punctured by a well bore, a low-pressure area is created. Natural gas and oil migrate rapidly toward the opening. The extent of migration depends upon subsurface pressures, oil viscosity, and the porosity of the surrounding rock. Reservoirs are not uniform. These characteristics differ across the ﬁeld, generating inherent variation in well and lease productivity. Importantly, migration potentially allows adjacent landowners to extract their neighbor’s oil, and this condition sets up the common-pool potential. The problem is particularly severe where there are many surface land owners (more than 1,000 in the huge East Texas ﬁeld of the 1930s) and, hence, competing ﬁrms. In the United States, because of the fugitive nature of subterranean oil and gas, in situ property rights are not assigned to surface land owners, but instead are granted only upon extraction or capture, as with ﬁsh.3 This ownership rule (rule of capture) to a migratory resource creates conditions for competitive, open-access withdrawal. Land owners grant extraction rights to ﬁrms through oil and gas leases. By this process, multiple ﬁrms gain access to the pool, and the lease, rather than the ﬁeld or reservoir, becomes the unit of production. Many ﬁrms, particularly major producers, obtain multiple leases on a reservoir and have operations on many ﬁelds. Each ﬁrm has incentive to drill competitively and drain to increase its share of oil ﬁeld rents, even though these individual actions lead to aggregate common-pool losses. Rents are dissipated as capital costs are driven up with the drilling of excessive numbers of wells (more than geologic conditions require or price and interest rate projections warrant) and with the construction of surface storage, where the oil can be held safe from drainage by other ﬁrms. Unfortunately, once in surface storage, oil is vulnerable to ﬁre, evaporation, and spoiling. Rapid extraction also increases production costs as subsurface pressures are vented prematurely, forcing the early adoption of pumps and injection wells. Total oil recovery falls as subterranean pressures decline and

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oil becomes trapped in surrounding formations, retrievable only at very high extraction costs. Finally, rents are dissipated as production patterns diverge from those that would maximize the value of output over time. The common-pool problem in oil and gas production in the United States was recognized with the ﬁrst discoveries in 1859, and it plagued petroleum production wherever numerous ﬁrms produced from a single formation. The costs were severe. For example, in 1910, it was estimated that up to 11 percent of California’s (a major producing state) annual oil output was lost due to ﬁre while in surface storage (Libecap and Smith 2002, 592). In 1914, the director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines estimated that the costs of excessive wells equaled about a quarter of the value of total annual U.S. oil production.4 Oil recovery was estimated at only 10–20 percent of the total resource in place, but in many cases, it would have been much less than this overall average (Libecap and Smith 2002, 593). The open-access problem also is found in Canada, where surface ownership is fragmented as in the United States, and parts of the North Sea, the Caspian region, and the Middle East when hydrocarbon deposits cross national boundaries and those of producing ﬁrms. There never was disagreement over either the nature of the open-access problem or the general solutions to it. Rather, the conﬂict has been over the allocation of property rights to oil rents. Buyouts of all but one party on a reservoir to create single ownership or unitization for cooperative production were recognized as the most complete remedies. With unitization production rights to the reservoir are delegated through negotiation to a single ﬁrm—the unit operator. The entire reservoir becomes the productive unit, and individual leases lose their signiﬁcance. With unitization wells can be placed to improve the efﬁciency of oil and gas production, rather than being placed to drain neighbors’ deposits or to guard against such actions. Production no longer is determined by a race for oil. As the only producer on the ﬁeld and a residual proﬁt claimant, the unit operator has incentive to maximize ﬁeld rents. Unit net revenues are apportioned among all parties on the ﬁeld, including those that would otherwise be producing. Indeed, all parties become shareholders in the reservoir, and as a group they are motivated to maximize ﬁeld rents. Accordingly, either sole ownership of

the reservoir or unitization results in important economic gains: a time stream of output that more closely approximates the rent-maximizing pattern, increased oil recovery, and reduced wells and other capital costs. Despite the advantages of buyouts or unitization, neither was widespread during the heyday of oil discovery in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Accordingly, as we see with ocean ﬁsheries, initial formal efforts to address open access turned to state (command and control) regulation to mitigate common-pool losses. Libecap and Smith (2002) describe the pattern of state regulation of oil and gas production. State regulation focused on limiting well drilling and the extraction of oil and gas from them. Annual statewide production levels were set, somewhat similar to the setting of total allowable catches in ﬁsheries. These were then prorated monthly across the producing ﬁelds, and within those directives, individual lease and well quotas were set. The statewide production rules applied uniformly to all oil ﬁelds, even though each ﬁeld had a unique physical conﬁguration and optimum production potential. Regulation was controversial, especially among the very numerous small ﬁrms (independents) that had adapted to open access and produced more than their share of ﬁeld deposits would warrant. Large ﬁrms (majors) tended to advocate for state intervention because they bore more of the ﬁeldwide losses of competitive extraction. As with ﬁshery negotiations, deals were cut to build consensus for regulation, and these had important path dependencies that had long-term effects on the efﬁciency of subsequent unitization and oil production. To elicit the political support of small ﬁrm owners and oil-ﬁeld equipment suppliers for regulation, proponents offered preferential regulations. These political side payments can be viewed as a transfer. They were less transparent and more politically feasible than outright cash payments, but had longterm consequences. For example, under the adopted regulations in Texas, individual well quotas, or allowables, were based on acreage and depth, but the regulatory agency (Texas Railroad Commission) gave more weight to depth, encouraging oil ﬁrms with limited leased acreage to drill deeper. Further, minimum spacing rules were adopted to limit overall drilling, but the commission also routinely granted exemptions to small ﬁrms. Finally, the agency exempted the large numbers of very

Allocation Issues in Rights-Based Management of Fisheries high-cost wells (stripper wells) from any production controls. The costs of these prorationing regulations and special exemptions were criticized. By the early 1960s, energy economist M.A. Adelman (1964, 105) estimated that these costs were substantial, probably exceeding US$2 billion per year. Even so, state regulation of well spacing and well production rates was able to reduce some of the losses of open access. The regulatory advantages granted to small ﬁrms, however, reduced their incentives to support property rights solutions to the common pool through unitization and buyouts. Dissatisfaction with state regulation, however, led to renewed efforts for rights-based solutions. Larger oil and natural gas ﬁrms were the leaders, and they attempted either to buy out their competitors on each ﬁeld or to push for unitization of ﬁelds. Unitization was the preferred solution for many ﬁrms because it maintained their lease ownership in the ﬁeld at a time of considerable uncertainty about long-term lease values that otherwise prevented agreement on sales prices. But lease valuation problems, as well as preferential regulation, hindered unit agreements (Wiggins and Libecap 1985, 368).5 In unit negotiations, the key issue of contention was how shares of the net proceeds of unit production were to be allocated (Libecap 1989, 93–114). Unit shares were property rights to the unit rents and were based on estimated preunit lease values. Contingent updates were not possible because once the unit was formed, individual leases lost their meaning and reservoir production dynamics changed. In unit negotiations, each lease’s share was assigned in part on current and cumulative past production, which advantaged those leases that were oldest and produced the most, over newer leases with more limited production histories. The other allocation factors included estimates of the lease’s future production potential, based on the estimated size of the underlying deposit, predicted oil migration and viscosity, the porosity of the surrounding medium, and other environmental factors. Owners of strategically located leases on the path of oil migration could do well under openaccess production. They often maintained those advantages under regulation. Accordingly, these parties were more likely to hold out in unit agreements unless they were granted shares at least equal to what they could secure under regulation or open

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access. Other lease holders, however, were often reluctant to lock in such beneﬁts as unit shares. There was also contention over estimates of future lease production potential when information was imperfect. Lease owners had private information generated by company engineers that was difﬁcult to credibly convey to other negotiating parties. More public information, such as past production and surface acreage, as alternatives could be poor indicators of lease value and hence were resisted by some owners. The problems of gaining agreement on lease values and unit shares were the greatest for small, strategically located leases with the most production potentials, longest expected lives, and hence, greatest long-term uncertainty. Wiggins and Libecap (1985) examine the bargaining problem underlying unit formation, and Libecap and Smith (1999) describe the nature of a complete unit contract. As a result of conﬂicts over allocation, unit agreements took a very long time to negotiate or broke down, resulting in delay or incomplete units that covered only part of a ﬁeld. In their detailed analysis of seven units in Texas and New Mexico, Wiggins and Libecap (1985) found that they required from four to nine years from the time negotiations began until agreements could be reached. Moreover, in ﬁve of the seven cases the acreage in the ﬁnal unit was less than that involved in the early negotiations. With incomplete units, part of the reservoir remained open-access or was organized into competitive subunits that attempted to drain each other with signiﬁcant losses. Unit agreements were especially difﬁcult to achieve during primary production, when natural subsurface pressures could force oil to the surface. During primary production, both the ﬁeld and its individual leases had productive lives with or without agreement on rights based management. Under these circumstances, some parties concluded that they were better off either with open access or regulation rather than with unitization where their shares of ﬁeld rents were more uncertain. Indeed, Wiggins and Libecap (1985) reported that owners of small, very productive, strategically located leases systematically withheld agreement in order to extract larger shares that better reﬂected what they believed they could get in the absence of unitization. At the same time, ﬁrms with large holdings on a given ﬁeld typically agreed to early unit formation, regardless of allocation. These ﬁrms bore more of the ﬁeldwide losses of competitive extraction. For them, giving up some share allocation was

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

offset by increases in overall production at lower cost. Negotiators for these ﬁrms tended to be more ﬂexible in negotiations over allocation rules. Unitization agreements were more readily achieved as ﬁelds aged and primary production waned. At that time, many leases became unproductive, and others had short futures unless secondary production injection was adopted. Accordingly, more lease owners could conclude that the status quo offered zero or lower returns, relative to unit shares. Secondary recovery required coordination among producers (lease owners) for injecting water, gas, or other ﬂuids to push oil out of the ground and thereby maintain the productive lives of leases. Although not necessary for secondary recovery, unitization agreements made it much more effective. Indeed, secondary recovery and unit agreements often were written jointly. Nevertheless, the losses of competitive production during primary recovery remained unconstrained. The huge Prudhoe Bay ﬁeld in Alaska illustrates the problems of unitization negotiation. It was discovered in 1968, and unit negotiations took more than eight years to reach agreements. Even then, because of disagreements over shares among the main lease owners, the ﬁeld was not effectively unitized. It was partitioned into two competing units or participating areas, one for oil, led by British Petroleum (BP), and one for gas, led by Atlantic Richﬁeld (ARCO). Conﬂicts between the ﬁrms continued because of their differential production incentives. The original unit agreement was signiﬁcantly amended on at least seven occasions during the 1980s and 1990s as the companies settled disputes on a piecemeal basis. By 1988, Prudhoe Bay production began to decline, not because of physical depletion of the underlying oil deposit but because of disagreement about which parties would pay for the facilities required to handle the rising volume of gas that was produced along with oil as the ﬁeld matured. Large, otherwise unnecessary, investments were made as BP and ARCO attempted to maximize production within their respective subunits and maneuver around the other parties. Finally in 1999, BP purchased ARCO and completed the buyout of other major producers on the ﬁeld, 31 years after discovery (Libecap and Smith 2002, S605–S606). In the face of continued open-access losses, state governments intervened to promote unitization by

statutorily lowering the percent of parties required for agreement. These actions, however, were resisted by those small ﬁrms that had received preferential prorationing quotas under state regulation. This illustrates the path dependencies and associated consequences that can arise from political side payments. In Oklahoma, compulsory unitization legislation was enacted in 1945. The law stated that once 85 percent of the leases approved unitization, the remainder could be forced to join. Small ﬁrms opposed the new law, challenged it in court, and attempted repeal it in 1947. By 1951, however, opposition to compulsory unitization in Oklahoma was largely spent, and the original law was amended with little controversy to lower the required majority from 85 to 63 percent. In Texas, however, small ﬁrms successfully resisted the loss of the regulatory advantages afforded them through the state’s prorationing regulation, and because of their large number and political inﬂuence, Texas never adopted a compulsory unitization law. Between the late 1940s and the 1960s, all other oil-producing states adopted some form of forced unitization law to facilitate unit formation. Not surprisingly, Texas has had a lower share of production from fully unitized ﬁelds than has other states. It also has had more highcost producers than other states. For instance, as late as 1975 only 38 percent of Oklahoma production and 20 percent of Texas production came from complete, ﬁeldwide units (Libecap and Wiggins 1985, 702). In sum, the experience of responding to open access in oil and gas reservoirs has implications for efforts to secure RBM in ﬁsheries. First, limited and asymmetric information and resulting uncertainty in estimates of how the parties would fare under property rights regimes, relative to the status quo, delayed action, even in the face of substantial losses. Some parties continued to do well in the absence of any RBM regime. Voluntary, private unitization agreements typically were not adopted until late in ﬁeld productive lives because the parties could not agree on the distribution of property rights or unit shares. Only after a crisis caused by declining primary production could units typically be adopted in order to facilitate coordinated secondary production that extended ﬁeld and lease output. At that time, more parties could see that they would beneﬁt from unit agreements. This pattern is similar to those observed

Allocation Issues in Rights-Based Management of Fisheries in ocean ﬁsheries where ITQs and other rights approaches have been adopted late, only after substantial depletion of the stock has taken place. These conditions have forced consideration of more individualized property rights in light of the failure of regulatory limited entry to successfully address open access. Second, path dependencies were real. The side payments necessary to meet distributional and political demands limited the timing and effectiveness of both state regulation and unitization to limit the losses of the common pool. Preferential quotas granted to some producers not only reduced the ability of regulation to control waste, but they lowered the incentives of those parties to agree to unitize. These practices are also found in ﬁsheries: the ITQs that are adopted are constrained in terms of transferability and in allocation (set asides for communities and processors, e.g.). The record of oil and gas indicates that such compromises can seriously weaken the beneﬁcial performance of RBM regimes.

43.3. PATH DEPENDENCIES IN THE ALLOCATION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS TO OTHER NATURAL RESOURCES In the United States, property rights to resources on the frontier in the 19th century were distributed under the provisions of the public land laws. In the east, the focus was on agricultural land. In the far west, however, there were different resources that private claimants desired. Accordingly, when settlers followed the movement of the frontier across the North American continent, the new conditions they encountered required modiﬁcation of established property rights policies. This situation allowed for local, private arrangements to emerge that in some cases were incorporated into state and federal law and remain in force today, whereas in other cases, they either were constrained by exogenous formal distributional mandates and or never developed ofﬁcially due to limited information about appropriate production and allotment size. The differential effects of these varying institutional responses for resource allocation and use linger today. These experiences suggest that adjustments made in the design and implementation of ﬁshery rights systems are also likely to have long-term implications for their success.

577

43.3.1. Mineral Land Western mineral rights in the United States developed abruptly with the discovery of gold in 1848. Because there were no provisions in the land laws to address mineral deposits, miners devised local, private property arrangements within mining camp rules. For the next three decades or so, other prospectors followed as the gold and silver rush moved to Nevada, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, the Dakotas, and Alaska. Eventually, far more than 600 mining camps were established around the West. Mining camp rules were drafted quickly because the number of individuals in each area was small, and they had relatively homogeneous backgrounds and expectations. Further, there were high expected gains of avoiding disruptive conﬂict over mineral ground. The ﬁrst prospector to arrive at a location thought to have deposits of valuable ore was granted private claiming rights to a portion of the area. All mining claims had to be marked and worked according to local mining camp rules. Although there was variation both across the camps and across time, mining codes always placed a limit on claim size that varied according to the type and expected value of the claim. Importantly, these claim sizes, however, were determined by local factors, not outside government requirements. In general, there also were no restrictions on the private sale of mineral claims. Because of the remote location of the ore, the rapid spread of local rules and the high costs of dislodging them, the federal government had little choice but to accept these local mining camp practices in the Mining Law of 1872 that provided for fee simple title and remains in operation today. There also were no other competing constituencies for federal mining land. Ore discoveries preceded agricultural settlement in most areas, and in any case, mining regions generally were not suitable for farming. This was not to be the case for other western resources, but it allowed miners a relatively open hand in forging local property rules and in galvanizing territorial and state legislatures and courts to respond to the demands of the mining industry and in obtaining federal recognition of their property rights. Importantly, western mineral law established the precedent that individuals in the United States could own minerals and that government did not retain title to them as was the practice in Europe and Spanish America. The accompanying security

578

Policy Instruments and Perspectives

of property rights encouraged exploration and production. Indeed, overall, U.S. industry became more mineral intensive in production than the country’s physical resource endowments would have otherwise suggested.

43.3.2. Range Land There were similar conditions but differing outcomes for range land. As with mining, there was no speciﬁc provision in federal farm land policy for formal ranch claims. Accordingly, to avoid the losses of competitive overgrazing and to reduce conﬂict over land, ranchers, as with miners, divided the land informally. Because of the broken terrain and limited precipitation, livestock carrying capacities of the western range were low. With 25 acres or more required to sustain a single cow for a year, upwards of 10,000 acres were commonly claimed in the West to support enough animals to achieve economies-of-scale in grazing. These allotments were well beyond anything possible formally under the agricultural Homestead Act that governed farm land. Initially, the lack of ability to obtain formal fee simple title to federal range land did not matter. Individual ranches were made up of a combination of fee simple holdings obtained under the land laws, as well as much larger informal claims. There were no restrictions on transfer. Patented ranch properties could be bought and sold, and these included memberships in livestock associations that governed the use of the large land claims. Livestock associations were a type of common property. Common herds were maintained to monitor the drift of livestock and direct them to fresh grass stands, to control breeding within the herd, to cooperate in the branding of young animals, and to block entry by outsiders. By the late 1880s, however, with the entry of homesteaders, ranchers began facing new competitors who wanted to place the land into crops. Conﬂicts over land began. There were opportunities to change the land laws to allow for larger allocations more in keeping with the requirements for successful ranching operations in the far west, but nothing came of them because of strong distributional claims. Federal politicians were reluctant to make major modiﬁcations in the land laws that would constrain the large numbers of politically inﬂuential homesteaders. A strong current of antimonopoly bias in the distribution of property and

a desire to maintain the homestead allotment at 160 acres prevailed. Further, Libecap and Hansen (2002) point out that there was no clear scientiﬁc understanding of the western climate, of the type of agriculture that would be effective there, or of appropriate farm sizes. The quasi-legal practices of ranchers were attacked and their fences removed. As the ability of the livestock associations to control entry declined, the incentives of members to violate internal rules increased, and the groups, along with their informal land allocations, began to break down. In the absence of fencing, the only way that ranchers could maintain their informal claims to land was to reduce the incentive to enter it by overgrazing. But overgrazing to mark and protect rangeland claims was costly. It made cattle herds more vulnerable to drought since grass stands were driven to low levels with little reserve when precipitation was scanty. The costs of overgrazing to deﬁne and enforce land claims against other potential users were reﬂected in lower calf crops, higher death losses, smaller cattle weights, and diminished animal values. Because ranchers could not obtain title to semiarid rangelands and because these lands ultimately also were inhospitable to homesteaders, most were eventually retained under permanent federal ownership in 1934. This reservation of state ownership, pointedly, did not occur in Texas, where the range was transferred to private claimants under state law. Since 1934, various political constituencies, ranging from ranchers to mining companies to conservation and recreation groups, have competed to inﬂuence government policy over access and use. Currently, the federal government administers some 177,053,843 acres of range land in the continental United States. The vast majority of these lands have no important amenity values or other critical externalities associated with their use that would justify government ownership and management. They remain as a legacy of a federal land policy that held private distributions inappropriately small, limiting fee simple titling and the establishment of viable ranches based on it.

43.3.3. Farm Land Unlike miners and ranchers, homesteaders could claim small parcels of federal land using existing laws and gain title. As we will see, these farms were too small and adjustment costs were high. When setters found attractive farm sites, they had to rush

Allocation Issues in Rights-Based Management of Fisheries to ﬁle a “homestead entry” for 160 acres at the local government land ofﬁce before it was claimed by others. There were beneﬁcial use requirements: each entry had to be occupied and improved for 3–5 years before title could be obtained. These 160-acre distributions that had worked well in the Midwest were applied in the West, where unfortunately they turned out to be too small, given regional semiarid conditions. Once title was secured, small homestead consolidation did take place, but only gradually. Migrant farmers with homestead claims had few other employment options, and this condition reduced their incentives to exchange their properties. Consolidation of farms often took place only at death or when the homesteader retired from farming. The adjustment process toward larger farm sizes took a long time. In fact, more than 60 years of farm consolidation was necessary to achieve more optimally sized farms on the Great Plains. Meanwhile, there was dramatic outmigration. The population of many of the 363 Great Plains counties peaked in 1910, and two-thirds had their largest populations in 1930 or earlier (Hansen and Libecap 2004). What prevented the land laws from being changed to allow for larger property rights allocations to reﬂect the more extreme conditions of the West? As noted above, one reason was a lack of understanding of the implications of the region’s climate. Migrants brought with them the cultivation practices, crops, and farm sizes that were familiar and successful in their areas of origin, and as long as there was no drought, these actions worked well. Because homesteaders did not appreciate the importance of larger farms, they typically did not seek greater allocations, nor did they lobby for major changes in the land laws. Indeed, unlike miners and ranchers, homesteaders did not attempt to get around federal policies. One consequence of these small-farm allocations was extensive farm failure. The region became known for periodic “homestead busts” when drought caused wheat yields (the most common crop) to collapse along with farm incomes. Homesteads did not have enough wheat in cultivation to offset the drop in yields and maintain a minimum family income. Small farms also typically did not have cropland in fallow, a practice that could mitigate the effect of drought by collecting moisture and nutrients while the land was left idle. Only larger farms could afford to keep land

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out of production. Additionally, homesteads were too small to diversify from wheat into livestock to smooth incomes. Small Great Plains farms not only were less likely to survive drought but also were more vulnerable to commodity price ﬂuctuations. These farms, inappropriate for the region, were a legacy of a long-standing government policy appeasing distributional pressures through small property rights allocations. In summary, the allocation of property rights to natural resources in 19th-century western United States reveals some important path dependencies. Mineral rights were successfully developed and were recognized subsequently by state and federal land laws. Neither distribution concerns nor information problems inhibited formal property rights development. This was not the case, however, for range and farm land, where a lack of information about appropriate land use and farm size, as well as strong allocation goals, led to the rejection of land claims by ranchers and strict reliance upon small farm allotments. Most of those farms subsequently failed, and much land reverted to federal government ownership and management. Absent important amenity and other public goods values, these lands could have been owned privately and likely more effectively managed. The lesson for ﬁsheries seems clear. What may be viewed as short-term expediencies in the adoption of RBM institutions can have long-term effects. Inefﬁciencies create their own constituencies and, hence, may be very difﬁcult to remedy (Hannesson 2004, 173).

43.4. CONCLUSION Ongoing efforts to mitigate the losses of open access and the costs of ineffectual command-andcontrol regulation have brought consideration of the use of RBM in ﬁsheries. The most common are ITQs. While attractive because of their ability to better link private and social net beneﬁts in decision making than is possible with traditional regulation, property rights instruments face complicated allocation issues. ITQ policies often are molded by distributional concerns and the political inﬂuence of small-vessel owners, ﬁsh processors, and other interest groups. Disputes over the types and allotment of ITQs to be granted in U.S. ﬁsheries resulted in a four-year moratorium on their expansion in 1996 by the

580 TABLE

Policy Instruments and Perspectives

43.1 Summary of allocation mechanisms and strength of property right for ﬁve natural resources

Resource

Nature of the Property Right

Implications for Allocation of Property Rights in Rights Based Management Fisheries

Oil and gas unit shares

Full, legal property right

Mineral rights

Full, legal property right

Grazing land

Use right only

Farm land

Full, legal property right

Information disputes block agreement on unit property allocations. Side payments as preferential regulations had path dependencies, making regulation less effective and slowing the adoption of rights based institutions (unitization). Property rights are allocated based on local rules, with no command-and-control regulation and no restrictions on trade, and successfully address potential open access. Distributional concerns undermine local allocation. Long-term failure to secure property rights results in land ownership and management by the state. Distributional concerns block allocation of property rights to land of sufﬁcient size for successful farms. Consolidation was slow due to high transaction costs, and farm failure and outmigration resulted.

Sustainable Fisheries Act. Generally, U.S. ITQs are more limited and are a weaker property right than those found in many other major ﬁshing countries (Arnason 2002, 12, 52–57; Leal 2005). Some U.S. ITQs are reserved for community development and not granted to individuals. There also are formal limits on the size of individual quota holdings and their transferability. In the Alaska halibut ﬁshery, for example, only transfers from larger to smaller vessel classes are permitted, and no individual is allowed to own more than 0.5 percent of the total quota. There are other controls on share consolidation to limit holdings and to maintain a targeted number of vessels in the halibut ﬂeet (Doyle et al. 2005). In this chapter, I have examined allocation issues with other natural resources to identify insights for the adoption of ITQs and related RBM regimes. Table 43.1 summarizes the key ﬁndings. Two issues have been explored: the importance of limited and asymmetric information in limiting agreement on rights allocations, and path dependencies resulting from side payments to address distributional objectives. Several conclusions can be drawn from this overview. One is that disputes about the size of the open-access problem (extent of stock depletion, magnitude of oil and gas drawdown, impact of small-farm agriculture in a semiarid region) constrained agreement on the timing and size of property rights distributions. Negotiation disputes and delay meant that common-pool losses continued for longer periods than otherwise might have

been expected. The property rights ﬁnally adopted often were not ideally suited to address open-access wastes. Second, property rights allocations endured, even in the face of accumulating evidence that some were ex post inappropriate. The private transaction costs of adjustment to new arrangements and the political transaction costs of changing property assignment rules were very high. Hence, there was opposition to change and pressure to maintain the status quo, resulting in path dependencies in property distribution patterns and use. Third, substantial resource rent dissipation was tolerated because of the distributional implications of changing property rights allocations. Each of these factors, prominent in the other resources examined here, is likely to play out to some degree in adoption of RBM in ﬁsheries. It is worthwhile to consider how they have affected the ability of governance institutions to mitigate the losses of open access. These insights are likely to be helpful in the design and allocation of ﬁshery rights to generate wealth, provide marine-based amenities, and improve the welfare of ﬁshers and the ﬁsh stocks upon which they depend. Notes 1. As described by Coase (1960), property rights provide the basis for exchange 2. This chapter draws upon Libecap (2007a, 2007b, 2008). 3. The problems of open access in oil production are discussed in Libecap and Smith (2002).

Allocation Issues in Rights-Based Management of Fisheries 4. For an estimate of the rental losses involved, see Libecap and Wiggins (1984, 90–91). 5. For discussion of unitization, see Libecap (1998) and Libecap and Smith (1999).

References Adelman, M.A. (1994). Efﬁciency of resource use in crude petroleum. Southern Economic Journal 31: 101–116. Arnason, R. (2002). CEMARE report 58: A review of international experiences with ITQs. Annex to A. Hatcher, S. Pascoe, R. Banks, and R. Arnason (eds). Future Options for UK Fish Quota Management. Portsmouth: Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Coase, R. (1960). The problem of social cost. Journal of Law and Economics 3: 1–44. Dahlman, C.J. (1979). The problem of externality. Journal of Law and Economics 22: 141–162. Doyle, M.R., R. Singh, and Q. Weninger (2005). Fisheries Management with Stock Growth Uncertainty and Costly Capital Adjustment: Extended Appendix. Working Paper, Department of Economics, Iowa State University, Ames. Gordon, H.S. (1954). The economic theory of a common-property resource: The ﬁshery. Journal of Political Economy 62: 124–124. Grafton, R.Q., D. Squires, and K.J. Fox (2000). Private property and economic efﬁciency: A study of a common-pool resource. Journal of Law and Economics 43: 679–713. Hansen, Z.K., and G.D. Libecap (2004). The allocation of property rights to land: U.S. land policy and farm failure in the northern Great Plains. Explorations in Economic History 41: 103–129. Hannesson, R. (2004). The Privatization of the Oceans. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: 1243–1248. Leal, D.R. (2005). Evolving Property Rights in Marine Fisheries. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleﬁeld. Libecap, G.D. (1989). Contracting for Property Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press. Libecap, G.D. (1998). Unitization. In: P. Newman (ed). The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law. Vol. 3, pp. 641–644. London: Macmillan. Libecap, G.D. (2007a). Assigning property rights in the common pool: Implications of the

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prevalence of ﬁrst possession rules for ITQs in ﬁsheries. Marine Resource Economics 22(4): 407–424. Libecap, G.D. (2007b). The assignment of property rights on the western frontier: Lessons for contemporary environmental and natural resource policy. Journal of Economic History 67(2): 257–291. Libecap, G.D. (2008). Open-access losses and delay in the assignment of property rights. Arizona Law Review 50: 379–408. Libecap, G.D., and Z.K. Hansen (2002). “Rain follows the plow” and dryfarming doctrine: The climate information problem and homestead failure in the Upper Great Plains. Journal of Economic History 62(1): 86–120. Libecap, G.D., and J.L. Smith (1999). The selfenforcing provisions of oil and gas unit operating agreements: Theory and evidence. Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 1: 526–48. Libecap, G.D., and J.L. Smith (2002). The economic evolution of petroleum property rights in the United States. Journal of Legal Studies 31(2, pt. 2): S589–S608. Libecap, G.D., and S.N. Wiggins (1984). Contractual responses to the common pool: Prorationing of crude oil production. American Economic Review 74: 87–98. Libecap, G.D., and S.N. Wiggins (1985). The inﬂuence of private contractual failure on regulation: The case of oil ﬁeld unitization. Journal of Political Economy 93: 690–714. Newell, R.G., J.N. Sanchirico, and S. Kerr (2005). Fishing quota markets. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 49(3): 437–462. Scott, A. (1955). The ﬁshery: The objectives of sole ownership. Journal of Political Economy 63: 116–124. Shotton, R. (2000). Current property rights systems in ﬁsheries management. Pp. 45–50 in R. Shotton (ed). Use of Property Rights in Fisheries Management, Proceedings of the FishRights99 Conference, Fremantle Western Australia. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 404/1. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Wiggins, S.N., and G.D. Libecap (1985). Oil ﬁeld unitization: Contractual failure in the presence of imperfect information. American Economic Review 75: 368–385. Wilen, J.E. (2006). Why ﬁsheries management fails: Treating symptoms rather than the cause. Bulletin of Marine Science 78(3): 529–546.

44 Harvest Control Rules and Fisheries Management ANDRÉ E. PUNT

The aim of ﬁsheries management is to achieve an appropriate trade-off among the often-conﬂicting objectives (or goals) that arise from legislation, policy interpretations of legislation, international agreements, and court decisions. The traditional objectives for ﬁsheries management relate to achieving sustainable and stable harvests of target stocks for food and income, and the preservation of the ﬁshing communities that depend on those target stocks. However, more recently, the objectives for ﬁsheries management have been extended to include concepts such as transparency, accountability to stakeholder groups (including nonuse groups), and conservation of threatened species as well as protection of biodiversity. In relation to target species, the goals of ﬁsheries management are often represented in the form of target and limit biological reference points. Figure 44.1 shows a phase plot summarizing the frequent and unfortunate evolution of a targeted species, highlighting the target and limit reference points for ﬁshing mortality and spawning biomass. The species is initially unﬁshed (no ﬁshing mortality and a stock size substantially larger than Btarget; solid dot in ﬁgure 44.1), but ﬁshing intensity increases, resulting in reduction of the spawning biomass to below Blim. Fishing mortality is reduced which eventually leads to a recovery in spawning biomass. A stock is said to be “overﬁshed” if the spawning stock size is

below Blim, while “overﬁshing” is said to be occurring when ﬁshing mortality exceeds Flim, according to the technical guidelines produced to implement National Standard 1 of the U.S. Magnusson-Stevens Act (Restrepo et al. 1998). The methods for achieving objectives (tactics) have evolved over time, in some sense mirroring how the objectives themselves have changed. Historically, the most common tactics have been technical measures such as restrictions on the sizes of ﬁsh that can be landed, on the times and places

Fishing mortality

44.1. INTRODUCTION

FLIM

FTARGET

BLIM

BTARGET

Spawning biomass

44.1 Phase plot illustrating the evolution of a hypothetical ﬁsh population. BLIM and BTARGET are, respectively, the limit and target levels of spawning biomass, and FLIM and FTARGET are, respectively, the limit and target ﬁshing mortality rates FIGURE

582

583

Harvest Control Rules and Fisheries Management when ﬁshing can occur, and on the gear (including the types of vessels) that can be employed. However, other forms of ﬁsheries tactics are also used, including catch limits (for the entire ﬁshery, by vessel, or by individual quota owner) and no-take marine protected areas. Although it is possible to achieve management goals through the use of appropriate tactics, there is nevertheless a need for a technical basis to determine the speciﬁcs of how the tactics are to be implemented (e.g., the length of closed seasons, the number of ﬁshing days, and the size of the catch limit). Increasingly, the size of the harvest (or the amount of ﬁshing days) is determined using some form of harvest control rule. A harvest control rule provides the scientiﬁc basis for the tactics employed in a ﬁshery and depends on explicit or perceived management objectives and the data available on which to base scientiﬁc management advice. Figure 44.2 provides an example of a harvest control rule (used by the International Whaling Commission [IWC] 1999) from 1974 to 1986 to set catch limits for commercial whaling: the “new management procedure” [NMP]). This harvest control rule classiﬁed stocks into three categories: (1) protection stocks, which are depleted to less than 0.9 maximum sustainable yield level (MSYL)1 (the protection level), (2) sustained management stocks, which exceed 0.9 MSYL but are less than 1.2 MSYL, and (3) initial management stocks, which exceed 1.2 MSYL. The catch limit is 0 under this harvest

control rule if the stock is assessed to be less than 0.9 MSYL, is 0.9 MSY if the stock is assessed to exceed MSYL, and changes linearly with population size between 0.9 MSYL and MSYL. This chapter ﬁrst reviews the primary methods of stock assessment that are used when applying harvest control rules (e.g., in the context of ﬁgure 44.2, how population size and productivity are estimated) focusing on single-species techniques. It then summarizes the most common types of harvest control rules, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each type. Section 44.4 outlines how alternative management strategies (combinations of stock assessment methods, data collection schemes, and harvest control rules) can be evaluated. The ﬁnal two sections discuss how harvest control rules can deal with broader ecosystem considerations and provide some concluding remarks.

44.2. OVERVIEW OF STOCK ASSESSMENT METHODS Several texts (e.g., Hilborn and Walters 1992; Quinn and Deriso 1999; Walters and Martell 2004) describe the plethora of methods used for ﬁsheries stock assessment. This section therefore only brieﬂy (and nonmathematically) summarizes the different classes of methods. All stock assessment methods involve (to some extent) ﬁtting a model to a data set and using

Sustained Management Stock

MSY Surplus production

0.9MSY

Initial Management Stock

Protection Stock 0

0.2k

0.4k

MSYL

0.8k

Population size FIGURE 44.2 The harvest control rule (solid line) underlying the International Whaling Commission’s new management procedure

k

584

Policy Instruments and Perspectives

the results of the model-ﬁtting exercise to make inferences about the status of the population being assessed. Stock assessment methods differ in terms of (1) their data requirements, (2) their complexity, and (3) what they are designed to estimate (ﬁgure 44.3). The two simplest methods (biomass dynamics models and yield-per-recruit analysis) require the least data. Biomass dynamics models consider the change over time in an aggregated measure of population abundance (usually the biomass of ﬁsh available to the ﬁshery) and require information only on removals and an index of abundance. This approach has had a long history in ﬁsheries stock assessment and is fairly straightforward to apply, but generally ignores the impact of stochasticity in the population dynamics (e.g., recruitment ﬂuctuations) and is of questionable utility when there are multiple ﬂeets with different selectivity patterns. In contrast, yield-per-recruit analysis is a technique that does not attempt to determine the dynamic properties of the stock, but rather uses the relationships among the demographic processes of growth, maturity, and mortality to determine many of the reference points on which harvest control rules are based (see section 44.3 for additional details). The inputs to most harvest control rules are outputs from age- (or size-) structured stock assessments. These range from virtual population analysis (VPA), which uses catch-at-age data, an assumption about natural mortality, and indices of abundance

to reconstruct the population numbers-at-age (e.g., Shepherd 1999), to integrated analysis (IA), which separates the development of the population dynamics model from the model of how the observations relate to the modeled quantities. A variety of software packages (e.g., CASAL [Bull et al. 2005], GADGET [Begley 2003; Stefansson 2003], Coleraine [Hilborn et al. 2000], MULTIFAN-CL [Hampton and Fournier 2001], and Stock Synthesis 2 [Methot 2005, 2007]) have been developed to implement IA stock assessments. These assessments make use of a wide variety of data types, including those used by VPA, as well as data on the length structure of the catches and information on ﬁshing mortality from mark-recapture data. The most sophisticated IA assessments also account for multiple stocks, spatial structure, and movement. A variety of approaches have been used for parameter estimation in stock assessments. However, the most advanced stock assessment techniques rely on maximum likelihood (or penalized maximum likelihood) estimation. Uncertainty, if quantiﬁed at all, is assessed by varying the assumptions of the assessment (e.g., choices for data sets and prespeciﬁed parameters, and weighting of different data sets) and by assessing parameter uncertainty using bootstrapping or Bayesian techniques. Unfortunately, most harvest control rules are based on the “best” estimates of the model outputs and therefore rarely utilize the information on the uncertainty of the estimates from stock

Natural mortality, growth, selectivity, maturity

Biomass dynamics models

Indices of abundance Yield-per-recruit analysis

Total catch

Virtual Population Analysis

Catch-at-age

Integrated Analysis

Catch-at-length

Mark-recapture

FIGURE 44.3 Schematic of assessment methods (ovals) and the data types that they can use (rectangles)

Harvest Control Rules and Fisheries Management assessments (but see section 44.3 for some exceptions to this).

44.3. TRADITIONAL HARVEST CONTROL RULES Harvest control rules have traditionally been categorized into “constant catch,” “constant ﬁshing mortality,” and “constant escapement” policies (e.g., Getz and Haight 1989; Restrepo and Powers 1999; ﬁgure 44.4a–c). These harvest control rules have advantages and disadvantages. Setting a constant catch has the obvious advantage that it is not necessary to conduct regular stock assessments, and having a time-invariant catch limit should theoretically provide industry with a level of stability that can be applied in planning for the future. However, apart from the difﬁculty of establishing the level of constant catch, a constant catch strategy will eventually lead to extinction in a stochastic environment, so constant catch strategies are not the approach of choice. Some management systems operate as if they are based on constant catch strategies, however, because catch limits are not changed frequently, by design, because of lack of

(a)

sufﬁcient information, or simply because of lack of interest in making changes to management regulations. A constant escapement harvest control rule (ﬁgure 44.4c) selects the catch (or effort) so that the population size remains as close to a target level as possible by setting the catch to the difference between the current and target population sizes. Constant escapement harvest control rules can be shown to maximize long-term yield under the assumption of perfect information (Deroba and Bence 2008). However, they also lead to high variability in catch limits and, in particular, to occasional zero harvests. While these harvest control rules may be viable for ﬁsheries that exploit a large number of independent populations and thus buffer the impact of catch variability (e.g., in the case of the salmon stocks off the west coasts of the United States and Canada) and when catch limit variability is not a major concern to industry, they are not generally used as the basis for management of nonsalmonid ﬁsheries. Constant ﬁshing mortality harvest control rules (ﬁgure 44.4b) set the catch equal to a ﬁxed proportion of the estimate of the current population size and provide a balance between constant catch and constant escapement policies by being responsive to stock abundance (lower catch

Catch limit

Catch limit

(b)

Stock size

Stock size (d)

Catch limit

Fishing mortality

(c)

Stock size

Stock size

44.4 Examples of harvest control rules: (a) constant catch, (b) constant ﬁshing mortality, (c) constant escapement, and (d) threshold FIGURE

585

586

Policy Instruments and Perspectives

limits at lower stock levels), but without the level of variability in catches that occur under constant escapement. Many ﬁsheries jurisdictions have adopted some form of “threshold” harvest control rule (e.g., Dichmont et al. 2006; North Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council [NPFMC] 2005, 2007; Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council [PFMC] 2006; Smith et al. 2008; ﬁgure 44.4d). In common with constant escapement and constant ﬁshing mortality strategies, threshold harvest control rules also reduce the exploitation rate at low stock size (sometimes to close to zero at very low stock size). However, there are other reasons for adopting threshold strategies. For example, the IWC adopted the NMP (ﬁgure 44.2) to maximize yield subject to the constraint that the catch does not exceed 90 percent of MSY (Butterworth and Best 1994). Threshold harvest control rules come in various ﬂavors. For example, the harvest control rule in ﬁgure 44.4d includes a breakpoint at a target level (the threshold biomass or ﬁshing mortality in a threshold harvest control rule could be limits or targets). However, threshold management strategies with multiple breakpoints (e.g., Enberg 2005) and in which the catch, rather than the exploitation rate, becomes constant when stock size is greater than the target level (Butterworth 1987) have been proposed. Avoiding catch in excess of that at the target level may be desirable if larger catches could lead to increased investment in the ﬁshery and hence pressure for higher (and unsustainable) catch limits. Several studies have explored the behavior of threshold harvest control rules to achieve ﬁsheries management goals generically (e.g., Punt et al. 2008; Quinn et al. 1990) and for particular species (e.g., Enberg 2005; Ishimura et al. 2004; Katsukawa 2004). It is necessary to specify the values for the parameters of a harvest control rule (e.g., for threshold harvest control rules, the threshold levels and the exploitation rate when the stock is assessed to be above the target level) in addition to assessing stock status. Figure 44.5 summarizes some of the most common biological reference points used when selecting these parameters values. BMSY (the biomass at which MSY is achieved) and the associated ﬁshing mortality rate, FMSY, are the most common target reference points (although FMSY is also a limit reference point in some ﬁsheries jurisdictions). BMSY is a biological rather than an economic concept. Consequently, the target reference point for ﬁsheries management for federally managed ﬁsheries in

Australia is BMEY (the biomass at which maximum economic yield is achieved) (Smith et al. 2008). BMEY is almost always larger than BMSY, implying more conservative harvest rates than would be consistent with a target of BMSY. In the past, Fmax (the harvest rate at which yield per recruit is maximized) has been treated as a target reference point in some ﬁsheries jurisdictions. However, Fmax is always higher than FMSY and can be larger than Fcrash, the ﬁshing mortality corresponding to extinction (Mace 1994; Punt 2000). Reliable estimation of BMSY and FMSY requires information about the form and parameterization of the stock-recruitment relationship. However, many ﬁsheries data sets are uninformative about the shape of the stock-recruitment relationship which has led to adoption of proxies for both BMSY and FMSY. For example, the proxy for BMSY adopted for the groundﬁsh off the U.S. West Coast is 40 percent of the average unﬁshed spawning biomass, B40 (PFMC 2006). Proxies for FMSY can be expressed in terms of the spawning potential ratio (SPR). The SPR for a given level of ﬁshing mortality is the ratio of the spawning biomass per recruit at that level of ﬁshing mortality to the spawning biomass per recruit in an unﬁshed state (ﬁgure 44.5b). Clark (1991, 2002) used a minimax approach to identify SPR levels that should provide high levels of yield irrespective of the true shape of the stockrecruitment relationship. The approach of Clark (1991, 2002) has been extended from teleosts to crabs (Siddeek and Zheng 2007) and the proxies for FMSY for Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crab stocks (NPFMC 2007) were based on Clark’s method. Although Clark (2002) recommended an FMSY proxy of F40, this level of exploitation has been shown to be too high for some of the rockﬁsh species off the U.S. West Coast, and this has led to the adoption of a more conservative FMSY proxy for these species (F50; Ralston 2002). It is not necessary to base harvest control rules on the results of stock assessments, and “empirical” harvest control rules have been proposed (and in some cases adopted and implemented). For example, Hilborn et al. (2002) outline an approach for modifying catch limits directly based on an index of abundance (e.g., a survey). Similar approaches have been adopted for the management of rock lobster (Jasus edwardsii) stocks off New Zealand (Starr et al. 1997) and of sardine (Sardinops sagax) and anchovy (Engraulis capensis) stocks off South Africa (De Oliveira et al. 1998; De Oliveira and

587

Harvest Control Rules and Fisheries Management (b) Spawning Potential Ratio (%)

(a)

0.15

Yield

0.10

0.05 0.00 0

BMSY B40

100 80 60 40 20 0 0

B0

F40%

F20%

Fishing mortality

Spawning biomass (%)

(d)

(c)

0.25 Yield-per-recruit

0.15

Yield

0.10

0.05

0.00

0.20 0.15 0.10 0.05 0.00

0

FMSY

Fcrash

Fishing mortality

0

F0.1

FMAX

Fishing mortality

FIGURE 44.5 Equilibrium relationships between spawning biomass and yield (a), ﬁshing mortality and spawning potential ratio (b), ﬁshing mortality and yield (c), and ﬁshing mortality and yield per recruit (d), illustrating some commonly used biological reference points

Butterworth 2004). Empirical harvest control rules have the potential to react more quickly to marked changes in abundance, and are also attractive to some stakeholders because they do not rely on stock assessments and are hence more transparent. However, it is much more difﬁcult to select the parameters of empirical harvest control rules. Consequently, adoption of empirical harvest control rules should only occur following analyses to determine appropriate values for their parameters (see section 44.4). There is no “best” harvest control rule, and the choice among alternatives depends on the management objectives for the stock concerned and the data available on which to base management advice. Consequently, several management jurisdictions have a tier system of harvest control rules (e.g., table 44.1). Stocks are assigned to tiers

based on data availability, with the intent that management actions are more conservative in the lower tier levels. The harvest control rules for the Bering Sea crabs in table 44.1 provide overﬁshing levels for federally managed crabs stocks in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands; total allowable catches (TACs) for these stocks must not exceed the overﬁshing level computed using the harvest control rule. The harvest control rules for Australia’s southeast scaleﬁsh and shark ﬁshery in table 44.1 are used to calculate recommended biological catches for stocks. It is noteworthy that table 44.1 includes both model-based and empirical harvest control rules; stocks for which the most information is available are assigned to the “higher” tiers which use model-based harvest control rules, while the empirical harvest control rules are used for data-poor situations.

588

Policy Instruments and Perspectives TABLE 44.1 The tier systems used by the North Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council for Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crab stocks (NPFMC 2007) and by the Australian Fisheries Management Authority for groundﬁsh species in its southeast scaleﬁsh and shark ﬁshery

Form of Harvest Control Rule

Reference Points

Quantitative assessment and estimates of BMSY, FMSY (and measures of uncertainty for B, FMSY) Quantitative assessment and estimates of BMSY, FMSY

Threshold

3

Quantitative assessment and estimates of B35, F35

Threshold

4

Estimate of biomass, but no information on growth or fecundity

Threshold

5

None

Average catch

0.25 BMSY (BLIM) BMSY (BTARGET) FMSY (FTARGET) 0.25 BMSY (BLIM) BMSY (BTARGET) FMSY (FTARGET) 0.25 B35 (BLIM) B35 (BTARGET) F35 (FTARGET) ¯ (B ) 0.25B LIM ¯ (B B ) TARGET a gM N/A

Tier Level

Selection Criteria

Bering Sea crabs 1

2

Threshold

Australia’s southeast scaleﬁsh and shark ﬁshery 1

Robust quantitative assessment

Threshold

2

Less robust quantitative assessment

Threshold

3

Age- or length-frequency data

4

CPUE data

Empirical, based on a catch curve Empirical, based on trends in CPUE

0.2 B0 (BLIM) 0.48 B0 (BTARGET) F48 (FTARGET) 0.2 B0 (BLIM) 0.6 B0 (BTARGET) F60 (FTARGET) M (FTARGET) N/A

CPUE, catch per unit effort. a¯ B is the average biomass over a prespeciﬁed period, and g is chosen to approximate FMSY/M based on information for data-rich stocks.

Source: Smith et al. (2008).

44.4. TESTING HARVEST DECISION RULES Although the adoption of harvest control rules (or a tier system of harvest control rules) provides a structured approach for determining scientific management advice, this does not guarantee that advice will actually be adhered to. For example, although the Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Scientific Advisory Committee based TAC recommendations on a target fishing mortality rate of F 0.1 (the fishing mortality at which the slope of the yield-per-recruit function is 10 percent of that at the origin; figure

44.5d) fishing mortality off eastern Canada seldom dropped as low as F 0.1 in actuality due to the socioeconomic impact this would have caused (Rivard and Maguire 1993). Ultimately, excessive fishing pressure was one of the reasons for the collapse of several cod (Gadus morhua) stocks off eastern Canada. Similarly, the depletion of several U.S. West Coast groundfish species can be attributed in part to the use of F35% during the 1990s as a target fishing mortality (PFMC 2006) when in actuality FMSY is much lower than F35% for these species although this was not known when F 35% was selected as the proxy for FMSY. It is therefore vital that harvest

Harvest Control Rules and Fisheries Management control rules be evaluated before they are implemented so that decision makers are aware of the likelihood of their success. Unfortunately, it is not possible to evaluate a harvest control rule on its own. Rather, only a management strategy (i.e., a harvest control rule in combination with details on how the data on which it is based will be collected and the method used to determine its inputs) can be evaluated because the performance of a harvest rule will depend on the quality of the data and the method of analyzing the data as well as the form of the harvest control rule. The approach used to evaluate management strategies is referred to as management strategy evaluation (MSE), and involves the use of Monte Carlo methods to simulate the application (and consequences) of a management strategy. The steps followed when applying the MSE approach are as follows (ﬁgure 44.6): 1. Identiﬁcation of the management objectives and representation of these using a set of quantitative performance measures 2. Development and parameterization of a set of alternative structural models (called operating models) of the system under consideration, each representing an alternative, plausible, representation of reality 3. Identiﬁcation of alternative management strategies (including their assessment and harvest control rule components) that have the potential to satisfy the management objectives

4. Simulation of the future use of each management strategy to manage the system (as represented by each operating model speciﬁcation) under feedback control. Each simulation trial usually involves about 100 replicates for a particular operating model speciﬁcation. The following three steps occur for each year of the projection period: • Generation of the types of data available for assessment purposes • Application of the management strategy to determine management actions • Determination of the implications of these management actions by setting the removals from the “true” population for the next year based on them 5. Summary of the results of the simulations by means of the performance measures A key step in an MSE is the selection of the uncertainties that will be captured in the operating model (for reviews of the types of uncertainties considered in MSE analyses, see Butterworth and Punt 1999; Punt 2006). Conventionally, MSE has pertained to the direct effects of ﬁsheries for target species (yield, stock status, and catch variability) (Butterworth et al. 1997; Dichmont et al. 2006; Punt 2006), although, recently, MSE has also been proposed as the basis to evaluate whole-of-ecosystem management strategies (e.g., Fulton et al. 2007; Marasco et al. 2007; Sainsbury et al. 2000).

Specify Qualitative Management Goals Specify Quantitative Management Goals

Develop and Parameterize the Operating Model Generate Annual Data

Develop Management Strategies

Data

Stock Assessment Model

Apply Management Strategy Update Population Dynamics

Management Action

Harvest Control Rule

Calculate Performance Measures FIGURE

589

44.6 The management strategy evaluation approach

590

Policy Instruments and Perspectives

The most extensive evaluation of alternative management strategies (and hence harvest control rules) using the MSE approach occurred during the development of the IWC’s revised management procedure (RMP) for commercial whaling of baleen whales. Five groups of scientists developed alternative management strategies, and these were subjected to simulation testing. Three of the management strategies were based on model-based harvest control rules, one management strategy was based on an empirical harvest control rule, and the ﬁfth management strategy had an empirical harvest control rule, but adjusted its target using the results of an assessment model. The management strategies were evaluated in terms of catch, catch variability, the ﬁnal stock size after 100 years of management and whether harvesting occurred when the stock was below a “protection level” selected by the IWC (54 percent of the preﬁshery population size; i.e., the “protected level” that was part of the earlier harvest control rule). The management strategy that was eventually selected by the IWC (1999) was based on a threshold harvest control rule with inputs estimated using a Bayesian biomass dynamics model. A wide range of uncertainties was considered during the development of the RMP (Punt and Donovan 2007). The major sources of uncertainty related to the underlying (but unknown) level of productivity (a sevenfold range was considered during the development of the RMP) and uncertainty about stock structure. The latter required the development of case-speciﬁc rules for dealing with uncertainty in spatial structure, such as spreading catches spatially.

44.5. EXTENSIONS BEYOND SINGLE SPECIES The harvest control rules outlined above all pertain to single-species management. However, the vast bulk of the ﬁsheries worldwide are multispecies, and some account needs to be taken of this, noting that it is impossible to maintain all stocks in a multispecies ﬁshery at a target level of, say, BMSY at the same time. Two main approaches to handling multispecies considerations have emerged, in addition to ignoring the problem altogether. “Weak-stock” management, as practiced in the management of the groundﬁsh resources off the U.S. West Coast, involves applying harvest control rules to each species (or as many species as is feasible) and reducing

the harvest of stocks that are not depleted so that the catches of stocks that are depleted (or which are unproductive; i.e., weak stocks) do not exceed their catch limits under their harvest control rules. Weak stock management can lead to substantial losses in overall yield but avoids leaving any stocks in a depleted state (Hilborn et al. 2004), and reﬂects an emphasis on achieving conservation objectives. An alternative to weak-stock management is to develop multispecies harvest control rules. For example, De Oliveira and Butterworth (2004) developed a management strategy for anchovy and sardine off South Africa in which there is a bycatch quota for sardine that depends on the biomass of anchovy (strong recruitment of anchovy leads to a higher bycatch of juvenile sardine as juvenile sardine and juvenile anchovy are caught together) and in which the parameters of the joint management strategy were selected to achieve a desired trade-off between risk and reward for anchovy and sardine combined. An alternative to a multispecies harvest control rule is to use the MSE approach to identify the trade-offs achieved by single-species management strategies in the face of multispecies effects. For example, Schweder et al. (1998) and Fulton et al. (2007) examined the performance of singlespecies management strategies when the species being managed are linked through predation. Several studies (e.g., Dichmont et al. 2006; Maunder et al. 2000) have considered the impact of technical (i.e., bycatch) interactions when evaluating single-species management strategies. For example, Maunder et al. (2000) and Breen et al. (2003) examined the implications of a harvest control rule to protect Hooker sea lions (Phocarctios hookeri) on the ﬁshery for squid which impacts this population, in terms of the trade-off between the rate of recovery of the Hooker sea lion population and the probability of closing the squid ﬁshery. In principle, harvest control rules could be based on environmental variables and some such harvest control rules have been developed and implemented. For example, the proxy for FMSY included in the harvest control rule for Paciﬁc sardine (Sardinops sagax caerulea) off the U.S. West Coast and Mexico decreases from 0.15 to 0.05 as the threeyear running average temperature (measured at Scripps Pier) drops from 17.2°C to 16.85°C (PFMC 1998). An alternative way of accounting for the environment is to deﬁne reference points relative to the current environment rather than in some

Harvest Control Rules and Fisheries Management hypothetical long-term average state. For example, when applying harvest control rules for walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma) in the Gulf of Alaska, the biomass reference points are computed based on post-1977 recruitment to account for the well-known regime shift that occurred around that time (Dorn et al. 2005).

44.6. CONCLUDING REMARKS Harvest control rules are a fundamental part of modern ﬁsheries management, particularly when they form part of simulated-tested management strategies. They provide a well-structured framework for providing scientiﬁc ﬁsheries management advice, and the use of harvest control rules (with appropriately selected reference points) is considered to be a key component of the precautionary approach to ﬁsheries management (FAO 1996), but it is certainly not true that all or even most harvest control rules are precautionary in nature; in fact, most attempt to facilitate utilization over most of the range of stock size, and only impose severe restrictions on utilization at very low stock size, in an attempt to ensure long-term ﬁshery sustainability. Moreover, only a few jurisdictions (e.g., the United States, South Africa, the IWC, and to a lesser extent Australia) have implemented harvest control rules (and management strategies) formally. In contrast, scientists in many countries, as well as those associated with several international ﬁsheries management bodies (e.g., International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization, International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas), have evaluated the properties of harvest control rules, but the relevant decision makers have not implemented them as the basis for management actions. Adoption of harvest control rules (and management strategies for that matter) is not a panacea to ﬁsheries management problems. First and foremost, the availability (and even adoption of) a harvest control rule (or a management strategy) does not imply that the data needed to apply it are available. For example, when the IWC adopted the NMP (ﬁgure 44.2) in 1974, it was revolutionary because it (1) included a protection level at which catch limits were set to zero, (2) imposed a maximum on the catch limit that was less than the estimate of MSY, and (3) aimed to leave stocks above (rather than at) MSYL. However, this harvest control rule is

591

considered to be a failure because of the lack of any formal (and agreed) basis for estimating the parameters needed to apply it (Donovan 1992). Furthermore, the NMP had no means for accounting for uncertainty. One consequence of these problems was that the scientiﬁc committee of the IWC was frequently unable to reach agreement on catch limits when using the NMP, and this was one reason for the development of the IWC’s RMP. The use of tier systems that include both empirical and modelbased harvest control rules potentially overcomes the problem of lack of data, but at the expense of increased complexity and less transparency. The choice of the parameters in a harvest control rule determines its behavior. In the past, values for these parameters were based on broad policy considerations. For example, the NMP control rule involved setting catch limits to 0.9 MSY when the stock was above MSYL and to 0 when the stock was 10 percent below MSYL. While this form of control rule was argued to maximize total longterm catch, estimation error could lead to a stock changing from being an “initial management stock” (>1.2 MSYL) to a “protection stock” (<0.9 MSYL) without any real change in stock status. To avoid this problem, the IWC’s RMP changes catch limits more smoothly than the NMP, and in a manner selected by testing alternative formulations using the MSE approach. The ability of harvest control rules to achieve ﬁshery management goals depends on the decision makers following their outcomes. While simulation studies (e.g., Punt et al. 2008) have shown that occasional random deviations from the outcomes of harvest control rules (i.e., essentially treating those outcomes as “targets”) will not compromise the achievement of management goals, it is self-evident that unintended depletion will occur if actual removals consistently exceed those anticipated from the harvest control rule. In fact, it has been argued (e.g., Mace 1997) that it is institutional failure to follow scientiﬁc recommendations, rather than incomplete or erroneous management advice, that has led to many of the well-publicized ﬁsheries collapses. The extent to which this occurs in practice has generally not been sufﬁciently well appreciated; for example, the use of MSY-related reference points has frequently been used as a scapegoat for the failure of ﬁsheries management. Yet there are very few ﬁsheries that have ever been managed at, near or below MSY levels (Mace 2004).

592

Policy Instruments and Perspectives

It is often argued that adoption of harvest control rules leads to a too-rigid system for providing advice and that “expert knowledge” is “subverted.” However, adoption of harvest control rules (if appropriately developed) should capture expert knowledge, and the management system can include rules that deﬁne when the outcomes from a harvest control rule should not be used (see, e.g., De Oliveira and Butterworth 2004). Finally, although harvest control rules (and biological reference points) are not without problems, if properly evaluated and supported by appropriate data, they remain the most defensible way to create management plans that are likely to achieve management goals. The move towards simulation-tested management strategies that include harvest control rules will continue, most likely accounting more for ecosystem considerations than in the past.

Acknowledgments I thank Pamela Mace (Ministry of Fisheries, New Zealand) for her very useful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Note 1. MSYL is the population size (in numbers) at which maximum sustainable yield can be achieved on average under prevailing, environmental, and ecological conditions.

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Harvest Control Rules and Fisheries Management Elaborated by the Technical Consultation on the Precautionary Approach to Capture Fisheries (Including Species Introductions). FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries 2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Fulton E.A., A.D.M. Smith, and D.C. Smith (2007). Alternative Management Strategies for Southeastern Australian Commonwealth Fisheries: Stage 2: Quantitative Management Strategy Evaluation. Report to the Australian Fisheries Management Authority and the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation. Hobart, Tasmania: Commonwealth Scientiﬁc and Industrial Research Organization Marine and Atmospheric Research. Getz, W.M., and R.G. Haight (1989). Population Harvesting: Demographic Models of Fish, Forest, and Animal Resources. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Hampton, J., and D.A. Fournier (2001). A spatially disaggregated, length-based, age-structured population model of yellowﬁn tuna (Thunnus albacares) in the western and central Paciﬁc Ocean. Mar. Freshw. Res. 52: 937–963. Hilborn, R., and C.J. Walters (1992). Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment: Choice, Dynamics and Uncertainty. New York: Chapman and Hall. Hilborn, R., M. Maunder, A. Parma, B. Ernst, J. Payne, and P.J. Starr (2000). Documentation for a General Age-Structured Bayesian Stock Assessment Model: Code Named Coleraine. Fisheries Research Institute FRI/UW 00/01., Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington. Hilborn, R., A. Parma, and M. Maunder (2002). Exploitation rate reference points for West Coast rockﬁsh: Are they robust and are there better alternatives? N. Am. J. Fish. Manage. 22: 365–375. Hilborn, R., A.E. Punt, and J. Orensanz (2004). Beyond band-aids in ﬁsheries management: Fixing world ﬁsheries. Bull. Mar. Sci. 74: 493–507. Ishimura, G., A.E. Punt, and D.D. Huppert (2004). Management of ﬂuctuating ﬁsh stocks— the case of Paciﬁc whiting. Fish. Res. 73: 201–216. IWC (International Whaling Commission) (1999). Report of the Scientiﬁc Committee. Annex N. The revised management procedure (RMP) for baleen whales. J. Cetacean Res. Manage. 1(suppl.): 251–258. Katsukawa, T. (2004). Numerical investigation of the optimal control rule for decision-making in ﬁsheries management. Fish. Sci. 70: 123–131. Mace, P.M. (1994). Relationships between common biological reference points used as thresholds and targets of ﬁsheries management strategies. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 51: 110–122.

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Mace, P.M. (1997). Developing and sustaining world ﬁsheries resources: The state of the science and management. Pp. 1–20 in D.A. Hancock, D.C. Smith, A. Grant, and J.P. Beumer, 2. World Fisheries Congress. Collingwood, Australia: Commonwealth Scientiﬁc and Industrial Research Organization. Mace, P.M. (2004). In defence of ﬁsheries scientists, single-species models and other scapegoats: Confronting the real problems. Mar. Ecol. Progr. Ser. 274: 285–291. Marasco, R.J., D. Goodman, C.B. Grimes, P.W. Lawson, A.E. Punt, and T.J. Quinn II (2007). Ecosystem based ﬁsheries management: Some practical suggestions. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 64: 928–939. Maunder, M.N., P.J. Starr, and R. Hilborn (2000). A Bayesian analysis to estimate loss in squid catch due to the implementation of a sea lion population management plan. Mar. Mamm. Sci. 16: 413–426. Methot, R. (2005). Technical Description of the Stock Synthesis II Assessment Program. Version 1.17. Silver Spring, Md.: National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Methot, R. (2007). User Manual for the Integrated Analysis Program Stock Synthesis 2 (SS2). Model version 2.00c. Silver Spring, Md.: National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NPFMC (2005). Fishery Management Plan for Groundﬁsh of the Gulf of Alaska. Anchorage, Alaska: North Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council. NPFMC (2007). Initial Review Draft Environmental Assessment for proposed Amendment 24 to the Fishery Management Plan for Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands King and Tanner Crabs to Revise Overﬁshing Deﬁnitions. Anchorage, Alaska: North Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council. PFMC (1998). Amendment 8 (to the Northern Anchovy Fishery Management Plan) Incorporating a Name Change to: The Coastal Pelagic Species Fishery Management Plan. Portland, Ore.: Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council. PFMC (2006). Paciﬁc Coast Groundﬁsh Fishery Management Plan for the California, Oregon and Washington groundﬁsh ﬁshery as amended through Amendment 19. Portland, Ore.: Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council. Punt, A.E. (2000). Extinction of marine renewable resources: A demographic analysis. Popul. Ecol. 42: 19–27. Punt A.E. (2006). The FAO Precautionary Approach after almost 10 years: Have we progressed towards implementing simulation-tested feedback-control management systems for ﬁsheries management? Nat. Res. Model. 19: 441–464.

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Punt, A.E., and G. Donovan (2007). Developing management procedures that are robust to uncertainty: Lessons from the International Whaling Commission. ICES J. Mar. Sci. 64: 603–612. Punt, A.E., M.W. Dorn, and M.A. Haltuch (2008). Evaluation of threshold management strategies for groundﬁsh off the U.S. West Coast. Fish. Res. 94: 251–266. Quinn, T.J., II, and R.B. Deriso (1999). Quantitative Fish Dynamics. New York: Oxford University Press. Quinn, T.J. II., R. Fagen, and J. Zheng (1990). Threshold management polices for exploited populations. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 47: 2016–2029. Ralston, S. (2002). West coast groundﬁsh harvest policy. N. Am. J. Fish. Manage. 22: 249–250. Restrepo, V.R., and J.E. Powers (1999). Precautionary control rules in US ﬁsheries management: Speciﬁcation and performance. ICES J. Mar. Sci. 56: 846–852. Restrepo, V.R. (Convenor), G.G. Thompson, P.M. Mace, W.L. Gabriel, L.L. Low, a.d. MacCall, R.D. Methot, J.E. Powers, B.L. Taylor, P.R. Wade, P.R., and J.F. Witzig (1998). Technical Guidance on the Use of Precautionary Approaches to Implementing National Standard 1 of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Technical Memorandum, NMFS-F/SPO31. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce. Rivard, D., and J.J. Maguire (1993). Reference points for ﬁsheries management: The eastern

Canadian experience. Can. Spec. Publ. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 120: 31–57. Sainsbury, K.J., A.E. Punt, and A.D.M. Smith (2000). Design of operational management strategies for achieving ﬁshery ecosystem objectives. ICES J. Mar. Sci. 57: 731–741. Schweder, T., G.S. Hagen, and E. Hatlebaak (1998). On the effect on cod and herring ﬁsheries of retuning the revised management procedure for minke whaling in the greater Barents Sea. Fish. Res. 37: 77–95. Shepherd, J.G. (1999). Extended survivors analysis: An improved method for the analysis of catch-at-age data and abundance indices. ICES J. Mar. Sci. 56: 584–591. Siddeek, M.S.M., and J. Zheng (2007). Evaluating the parameters of a MSY control rule for the Bristol Bay, Alaska, stock of red king crabs. ICES J. Mar. Sci. 64: 995–1005. Smith, A.D.M., D.C. Smith, G.N. Tuck, N. Klaer, A.E. Punt, I. Knuckey, J. Prince, A. Morison, R. Kloser, M. Haddon, S. Wayte, J. Day, G. Fay, F. Pribac, M. Fuller, B. Taylor, and L.R. Little (2008). Experience in implementing harvest strategies in Australia’s south-eastern ﬁsheries. Fish. Res. 94: 373–379. Starr, P.J., P.A. Breen, R.H. Hilborn, and T.H. Kendrick (1997). Evaluation of a management procedure rule for a New Zealand rock lobster substock. N.Z. J. Mar. Freshw. Res. 48: 1093–1101. Stefansson, G. (2003). Issues in multispecies models. Nat. Res. Model. 16: 415–437. Walters, C.J., and S.J.D. Martell (2004). Fisheries Ecology and Management. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

45 Complexities in Fisheries Management: Misperceptions and Communication ERLING MOXNES

45.1. INTRODUCTION Open access (or the “tragedy of the commons”) is a well-known explanation of ﬁsh stock depletion and of overcapacity. This chapter focuses on the complexity of proper management of the commons, speciﬁcally, policies to control total allowable catch (TAC) and total harvesting capacity: what are the major challenges, why is it easy for policy makers to misperceive, and how can communication be improved to ensure more rapid learning? Section 45.2 deals with the problem of overcapacity and resource depletion in the process of adapting ﬁshing industries to resource limits. Section 45.3 considers “steady-state” strategies for controlling TAC and total capacity in ﬁsheries with environmental variation. Section 45.4 deals with implications of assessment error for steady-state policies. Finally, section 45.5 discusses boundaries of models and methods and calls for balanced interdisciplinary analysis, and section 45.6 concludes. A quick look at the history of modern ﬁshery management suggests that policy innovations have come as reactions to existing problems rather than as a result of forward-looking analysis. Each new policy has generated a new problem. Half a century ago, governmental policies focused on developing ﬁshing technology. As a result of productivity improvements, ﬁsh stocks were run down. New policies were implemented to limit access by closing ﬁsheries or by setting quotas, which fostered illegal

ﬁshing followed by a new law of the sea facilitating surveillance and punishment. Then overcapacity became a problem, and licensing was thought to be the answer. Unofﬁcial markets developed for licensed ﬁshing vessels and provoked distributional issues. This has led to the instigation of ofﬁcial markets for individual tradable quotas (ITQs). No doubt, policy innovations have been needed, and the latest advance, the ITQ system, does show promising results compared to previous systems (Costello et al. 2008). The gradual development of policies is paralleled by a slow progress in understanding. To exemplify, the commons problem was well described by Gordon (1954) but did not get much attention before Hardin’s (1968) “tragedy of the commons.” While Scott (1955) pointed to the beneﬁts of private property rights, the ITQ system for ﬁsheries was not proposed until Christy (1973) sketched the idea in a discussion paper. Then it was yet another decade before the knowledge had spread to policy makers and the ﬁrst ITQ system was implemented. Our hypothesis for slow learning is misperception. According to laboratory experiments carried out over the last few decades, people systematically misperceive and mismanage dynamic systems (Brehmer 1992; Funke 1991; Rouwette et al. 2004; Sterman 1989). At the core of all dynamic systems, one ﬁnds their basic building block: a stock with its inﬂows and outﬂows, as shown in ﬁgure 45.1: the stock (rectangle) is increased by an inﬂow (pipe

595

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives Stock

Inflow

Outflow

FIGURE 45.1 Stock with in- and outﬂows. (Diagram introduced by Forrester 1961)

with a valve), and it is decreased by a corresponding outﬂow. The same system can also be expressed by a standard differential equation: dStock/dt = Inﬂow – Outﬂow

(1)

In spite of its apparent simplicity, the basic building block turns out to be challenging. Let us ﬁrst consider prediction of behavior. The stock accumulates net inﬂows. Thus, a change in, for example, the inﬂow will have an effect on the stock that is distributed over time. While it is not difﬁcult to calculate the stock development over time, intuitive predictions can be both imprecise and biased. The task is further complicated if the ﬂows vary over time due to environmental variation and even more so if they vary due to feedback from the stock itself. It is much easier to just wait and observe how the stock develops. Predicting behavior is not the only challenge. Perceiving the structure of dynamic systems is another. In a laboratory experiment on reindeer management, Moxnes (1998b) found that subjects tended to reason according to a static mental model where changes in the most salient ﬂow (grazing) were thought to lead to more or less proportional changes in the opposite direction for the stock (lichen). This tendency was conﬁrmed in a welldesigned study by Sweeney and Sterman (2000). They used the term “pattern-matching heuristics” to describe people’s tendency to correlate stock and (salient) ﬂow behaviors. Repeated experiments have conﬁrmed these ﬁndings (Kainz and Ossimitz 2002; Moxnes and Saysel 2009; Sterman and Sweeney 2007). Hence, people may operate with dynamically incorrect notions of causality. This tendency is not corrected by equilibrium analysis, which, for its purpose, correctly operates with “static” relationships between ﬂows and stocks. Moreover, everyday language is not precise in this regard. The statement “reduced harvesting will lead to a higher ﬁsh stock” sounds correct, but it can be both correct and wrong. As long as

harvesting (outﬂow) is greater than net ﬁsh growth (inﬂow), the stock will decrease in spite of reductions in harvesting. To be precise, one should say “reduced harvesting will lead to a higher ﬁsh stock than it would be otherwise.” That is a phrase one seldom or never hears. So what do people usually do to control stocks if they do not form proper mental models and if they are reluctant or unable to produce predictions? Forrester (1961) advanced the theory that decisions are guided by feedback policies. We hardly do anything without using feedback. For instance, when ﬁlling a glass of water, the ﬁlling rate depends on the gap between the desired and the current amount of water. When the gap closes, we turn off the faucet. These are very efﬁcient and automated strategies that “make us smart” (Gigerenzer et al. 1999). Consequently, such feedback policies are likely to be held in high regard by decision makers. Moreover, in stochastic models, optimal policies are feedback policies (Bertsekas 1987). So, if simple feedback strategies work that well, how could ﬁsheries be mismanaged? The answer lies in the apparent tendency to think that feedback strategies that work in simple systems will also work in complex systems. Complex systems typically consist of multiple stocks and ﬂows, nonlinear relationships, and random disturbances. Experiments conﬁrm that as the degree of complexity increases, performance deteriorates (Diehl and Sterman 1995; Moxnes 2004; Moxnes and Jensen in press). Complexity can also explain why learning from experience is slow and limited (Brehmer 1980, 1990; Moxnes 2004; Paich and Sterman 1993). Hence, complexity implies that there is a need for analysis and expert advice. But that is not enough since frequently, good expert advice is not listened to or acted upon (Moxnes 2009).1 Effective communication is also needed for new insights to have an effect on decisions. If a decision maker does not understand an advice, it would be irresponsible and risky to follow that particular advice—unless the advisor is highly reliable. Therefore, decision makers tend to choose policies that are compatible with own intuition and gut feelings. These gut feelings in turn depend on their mental models.2 Changing mental models is not easy. Laboratory experiments on dynamic problems have found little effect on decisions of highly appropriate, written and graphical information (Moxnes 1998b; Moxnes and Saysel 2009; Moxnes and Jensen in press). To overcome overconﬁdence, decision makers

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Complexities in Fisheries Management could be presented with contradicting evidence to make them question their current mental models. Limon (2001) discusses how this method can be used to motivate change and uses the term “cognitive conﬂict.” Once people question their existing understanding, analogies may help construct new mental models (Venville and Treagust 1996). A combined strategy of cognitive conﬂict and analogy was used successfully by Moxnes and Saysel (2009) to improve performance in a dynamic system. The ideal to strive for is short and effective interventions that can reach many with little cost. There are also more time-consuming ways to communicate complex policy insights to decision makers, such as seminars and personal interactions, group model building (Andersen et al. 1997; Vennix 1996), reference groups (Stenberg 1980), strategic forums (Richmond 1987), and interactive learning environments (Spector and Davidsen 1998). Timeconsuming methods are particularly needed to foster radical policy innovations. Once a policy has been used with success, positive experiences will help policy diffusion to other regions.

45.2. ADAPTING TO RESOURCE LIMITS A large number of ﬁsh stocks around the world have been reduced below levels that produce maximum sustainable yield (MSY), or maximum economic yield (MEY). In the process of adapting to harvesting limits such as MSY, harvesting capacities have often been built to more than twice the optimal capacity. What causes capacity to overshoot and ﬁsh stocks to undershoot their respective optimal levels? My hypothesis is that decision makers misperceive stocks and ﬂows. While simple strategies usually work well to control one stock, they fail when one stock (capacity) is used to control another stock (ﬁsh). In ﬁgure 45.2, the stock and ﬂow diagram

shows that capacity increases by investments and decreases by scrapping after a certain lifetime. The ﬁsh stock increases by growth and decreases by harvesting, which in turn depends on capacity. A simple decision rule in this case says that capacity should increase as long as harvests increase (more appropriately total proﬁts).3 When harvests no longer increase because of declining ﬁsh stocks and declining catch per unit effort (CPUE), investments should drop toward the scrapping rate to stabilize capacity. This strategy makes sense if one assumes that there is a static relationship between harvesting and ﬁsh stock: as harvesting stops increasing, immediately, the ﬁsh stock stops declining. However, as explained in the introduction, this is contrary to the logics of stocks and ﬂows. When harvesting stops increasing, capacity and harvesting are much higher than ﬁsh growth. Consequently, the ﬁsh stock continues to decrease. To halt the decline, capacity utilization is reduced, and then overcapacity is revealed. Since ﬁshing vessels have long lifetimes, the problem does not go away quickly. My hypothesis about harvest- (or proﬁt-) driven investments is able to explain overshooting capacity and undershooting ﬁsh stocks as ﬁsheries approach limits set by nature (easily demonstrated by simulating the model behind ﬁgure 45.4; see below). To rule out alternative motivations and explanations of capacity overshoots, Moxnes (1998a) ran a laboratory experiment where the single goal was to maximize the net present value. Private property rights were given to each participant to rule out the commons problem. Participants were ﬁshing boat owners, ﬁshery researchers, ﬁshery managers, and others. The simple proﬁt-driven feedback policy for investments was not rejected. A typical comment during the experiment was, “Things are looking good, I will invest in more vessels.” Capacities exceeded the optimal level by percentages similar to those seen in real ﬁsheries. Similar experiments where a second stock has been introduced as a

Capacity

Investment

Fish stock

Scrapping

Growth

Harvesting

cpue FIGURE

45.2 Stock and ﬂow diagram for a ﬁshery

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treatment gives explicit evidence of the importance of the second stock for impaired performance (Moxnes 2004; Moxnes and Jensen in press). Using real data, the strongest support for the hypothesis comes from episodes of mismanagement where private property rights are in place or where governments control TACs and licenses. Interestingly, the introduction of 200-mile zones that greatly increased national control over many ﬁsheries did not automatically solve the problem of overcapacity; in many cases, the problem worsened. This was partly due to governmental subsidies of new ﬁshing capacity long after total capacities had surpassed optimal levels (Munro and Sumaila 2002). Thus, governments were actually contributing to the problem rather than solving it. How can misperceptions be corrected such that proper decisions about TAC and capacity licenses are made, or such that an ITQ system is implemented? A ﬁsher who did very well in Moxnes’s experiment expressed his understanding as follows: “If I invest in one more vessel it will exert a pressure on the ﬁsh stock for its entire lifetime.” That person would probably understand and take an interest in the model in ﬁgure 45.2 since he already had a dynamic mental model. Others may need strong motivations to explore new models. Cognitive conﬂict could perhaps be produced by showing data for historical periods with constant ﬁshing effort and dwindling ﬁsh stocks. This will challenge static mental models of the relationship between harvesting and ﬁsh stock. However, a potential challenge with this method is that there may be alternative explanations for stock depletion. Information about stock assessments did have a negative effect on investments in Moxnes’s experiment. However, overcapacity was not prevented by that information. This is not surprising since most

of the overinvestment took place before the ﬁsh stock was seriously depleted. Uncertain estimates of ﬁsh growth (MSY), on the other hand, had positive effects on performance and led to less overcapacity. Similarly, Moxnes (1998b) found that growth information led to less overutilization of lichen pastures. That information was apparently useful because it shifted attention to growth, quantiﬁed it, and enabled comparisons with harvesting rates. In that way, overcapacity could be revealed at an early stage. Usually, growth rates are less salient than harvesting rates, partly because growth rates cannot be directly measured. However, they can be estimated and should be announced frequently. In addition to stocks, decision makers could also misperceive nonlinearities in the rates of ﬂow, and this leads to a second, complementary hypothesis of misperception. Figure 45.3 shows an estimated nonlinear growth curve for lichen together with records of historical reindeer grazing. For 22 consecutive years, grazing exceeded growth, leading to reduced stocks of lichen. Long after biologists had started warning about overgrazing (around the MSY level), managers started a gradual reduction of herd size and grazing. During the six years with grazing reductions, lichen growth declined as well. Probably without being aware of it, managers were chasing a moving target. When the decline in lichen was halted, the stock level had reached a dangerously low level. Lasting damage to the pastures was caused by erosion. Even worse, in the island of St. Paul, lichen was exhausted (Scheffer 1951). In both cases, institutions were in place to tackle the commons problem. These observations have been reproduced in laboratory experiments (Moxnes 1998b, 2000, 2004) with outcomes similar to that shown in ﬁgure 45.3. Could a misperception of the nonlinear growth

15000

10000

5000

0 0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

Lichen density [g/m2] FIGURE 45.3

Estimated growth function for lichen together with historical grazing (+) from 1944 to 1967 for the Snøhetta district. (Moxnes et al. 2002)

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Complexities in Fisheries Management curve be a problem in ﬁsheries as well? It seems likely. However, it is worth noting that in ﬁsheries capacity utilization can be reduced quickly. Reduced grazing by reindeer requires capacity reduction (slaughtering), decisions with lasting effects. The possibility of misperceiving nonlinear growth rates underscores the potential beneﬁts of providing information about growth, either the growth curve itself or predictions of how the growth rate will develop.

45.3. STEADY-STATE MANAGEMENT WITH VARIABILITY This section deals with steady-state management that is complicated by stochastic variation in the environment for the ﬁsh. The focus is on overcapacity that is sustained after a ﬁrst round of adaptations to resource limitations. Again, the hypothesis involves misperceptions linked to the stock nature of ﬁsh. We start by discussing optimal policies in a highly simpliﬁed model. Then we investigate misperceptions and consider implications for TAC and capacity control. Consider a ﬁshery model that is very much simpliﬁed to make only a few key points. We want to maximize the following objective function ¥

J = E ê å t =0 (pht - cvht - ccC) / (1 + r)t ú , ë û

(2)

where J represents the expected net present value (ENPV) for the ﬁshery. The criterion sums up discounted net proﬁts over time (discount rate r), where revenues are given by price p (ﬁxed in world markets) times harvest ht, variable costs are given by ﬁxed unit variable costs cv times ht, and capacity costs are given by unit leasing costs of capacity cc times capacity C. Unlike most similar models, the model ignores the effect of ﬁsh stock on catch (CPUE). However, at low ﬁsh stocks, the stock size matters in that each year the harvest is limited by ﬁsh available. Restrictions are represented by a dynamic model for the ﬁsh stock, similar to the one illustrated in ﬁgure 45.2: st+1 = (st + a(st – ht) – b(st – ht)2 – ht)wt > 0

(3)

where parameters a and b determine the growth curve for the ﬁsh stock st as a function of escapement st − ht. Environmental variation is captured

by wt, which is a lognormally distributed random variable (independent, identically distributed [iid]). The optimal solution to this stochastic and dynamic optimization problem can be written as

ìht = h(st) £ C ü í * îC = C þ

(4)

where C* represents an optimal constant-forever capacity. Random variation wt implies that the optimal harvesting strategy is a feedback policy. Stating the problem in this way, it could represent a private ﬁrm or a nation that controls both harvest and capacity. We parameterize the model such that it is representative of the Barents Sea cod ﬁshery.4 Figure 45.4 shows the surplus growth curve, relating postharvest stock size (escapement) to next period’s growth. The MSY is 0.80 million tons/year, and the maximum is reached for a postharvest stock size of 2.05 million tons. The initial ﬁsh stock is set equal to 2.853 million tons, which equals the equilibrium preharvest stock size when harvesting equals MSY. Harvesting strategies and capacities are reported in ﬁgure 45.4 and in table 45.1. As a reference, ﬁrst consider the case with no environmental variation (deterministic case). The optimal solution is to harvest MSY each year, ht = 0.80 million tons/ year. Capacity equals harvest such that utilization is always 100 percent. Next we introduce random variation. To ﬁnd the optimal harvesting strategy and ﬁshing capacity in this case, we use the optimization program SOPS (Moxnes 2003, 2005). Figure 45.4 shows the harvesting strategy.5 At high ﬁsh stocks, when capacity is binding, harvest and capacity are only slightly higher than in the case with no variation, 0.2 percent. At the outset, with environmental variation, more capacity seems to be needed since the ﬁsh stock will frequently exceed its normal, no-variation level. What explains this minuscule increase? The most important factor is the leasing costs that imply that capacity should be kept low while capacity utilization is kept high. This is obtained not only by reducing capacity, but also by smoothing harvests over time. Here the ﬁsh stock plays an important role as an inventory that can be used to smooth harvests. The optimal ﬁshing strategy does this in two different ways. First, excessive stocks that are not harvested due to capacity limitations are “stored” and become available in future years. According to the surplus

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives 1.0

Harvest

0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 0

1

2

3

Stock Variation and assessment error Variation

No variation Surplus growth

FIGURE 45.4 Harvesting policies and surplus growth as functions of stock size. Note that harvest relates to preharvest stocks and surplus growth to postharvest stocks

TABLE

45.1 Results of optimization

No variation Variation Variation and assessment error

ENPV (billion Norwegian kroner)

Optimal Capacity (million tons/year)

Capacity Limiting (% of time)

39.7 34.8 32.2

0.801 0.802 0.737

— 71 83

growth model, the cost will be somewhat lower growth in future years with large stocks. Second, in “normal” years with stocks in the range from 1.40 to 2.85 million tons, optimal harvesting is greater than what it would be with no or little random variation. Thus, the strategy attempts to keep the ﬁsh stock below the level that maximizes growth. The beneﬁt is reaped after years with growth higher than capacity. Then the stock will not reach as high a level and the growth rate will not drop as low as it would otherwise. When the stock serves as an inventory to smooth harvests, it varies more than it would do otherwise. The harvesting policy in ﬁgure 45.4 is very effective in smoothing harvests. Simulations show that in 71 percent of the years harvesting is equal to capacity. The average utilization is 90 percent. Years with capacity utilization below 100 percent and growth less than MSY imply that the ENPV becomes 12 percent lower than in the case without variation.

Average Capacity Utilization (%) 100 90 92

Laboratory experiments suggest that decision makers behave differently from the optimal strategy. Moxnes (1998b) found that a large fraction of participants with excess capacity erroneously reinvested after vessels were (automatically) scrapped. In another experiment, Moxnes (2007) found that an ITQ system led to capacity reductions compared to an initial situation with large overcapacity. However, a signiﬁcant overcapacity was sustained. Similar results were obtained for a system of auctioned seasonal quotas. Experiences from real ﬁsheries also suggest misperceptions and excessive investments. Pauly et al. (2002) report sustained overcapacity “not only under open access, but also under all forms of property regimes,” that governments provide subsidies even in “ﬁsheries with full-ﬂedged property rights,” and that governments have been forced to implement vessel decommissioning schemes. Anecdotes also provide support. As an example, in a year with unusually high TACs in Norway, full

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Complexities in Fisheries Management capacity utilization was used to argue that the current capacity was not excessive. What could motivate such an upward bias in capacity? Our simple model suggests that capacity should limit harvests in 71 percent of the years. If decision makers in charge of national capacity policies observe that capacity is binding year after year, it seems likely that they will feel strong internal and external pressures to increase capacity. Under optimal policies, total ﬁsher proﬁts are the highest they can be. However, rather than seeing this as a sign of good management, there is a chance that high proﬁts build a pressure to extend capacity. How can misperceptions regarding optimal capacity be corrected? Again, data producing cognitive conﬂict and analogies may be useful. One may, for instance, calculate the proﬁtability of marginal ﬁshing vessels under assumptions about how often they will be used. A stock and ﬂow model could be used to explain the buffering capacity of ﬁsh stocks. Pointing out beneﬁts in terms of stability and high proﬁts over time may also create a counter pressure to increasing capacity beyond the optimal level. Then we ask if the hypothesis about misperception of capacity also extends to steady-state harvesting. A frequent claim is that ﬁsh stocks are overharvested, typically implying that harvest rates are too high for all stock levels—the curves in ﬁgure 45.4 are shifted upward. Moxnes (1998a) found that overharvesting was related to overcapacity: the larger the overcapacity, the lower the ensuing stock levels. Overharvesting was not a problem for those with only moderate overcapacity. Schnier and Anderson (2006) used a private property experiment without capacity limits to focus on harvesting decisions. In a treatment without spatial dynamics, they found average overharvesting of, respectively, 6 and 26 percent for subjects with “steady-state” and “pulse ﬁshing” strategies. Hey et al. (2002), also using a private property and unlimited capacity experiment, found a slight tendency toward overharvesting when the surplus growth curve was known, and underharvesting with an unknown growth curve. Regarding the effect of capacity on harvesting, Pauly et al. (2002) writes: “There is widespread awareness that increases in ﬁshing-ﬂeet capacity represent one of the main threats to the long-term survival of marine capture-ﬁshery resources, and to the ﬁsheries themselves.” In the absence of overcapacity, there may be other reasons for excessive harvesting, such as ﬁshing community unemployment

and lack of raw materials for downstream industries. Such reasons will not disappear even if the above misperceptions are corrected. Since overcapacity is likely to stimulate overharvesting, this is yet another argument to control capacity carefully. Limiting capacity may also lead to more stable landings of ﬁsh, which in turn reduces problems of local unemployment and lack of raw materials. Using licensing schemes, governments have direct control with total capacity. Under an ITQ system, investment decisions are made freely by ﬁshers. To avoid overinvestments in this case, governments may consider using the yearly TAC decisions to inﬂuence the market. By announcing and practicing limited quotas in years with high ﬁsh stocks, the low economic potential for marginal vessels may become more obvious for investors. It will reduce ITQ owners’ need to lease capacity in years with high TAC. It will prevent or reduce the number of instances were ITQ owners are not able to harvest their entire yearly quotas. Thus, it will also reduce the need for auxiliary systems were ITQ owners are allowed to transfer excess quotas from one year to the next. While our simple model helps demonstrate the complexity of management under environmental variability, the importance of the ﬁndings also points to the need for more detailed models. (See section 45.5 for some general comments.)

45.4. STEADY-STATE MANAGEMENT WITH ASSESSMENT ERROR This section considers errors in assessments of ﬁsh stocks. We take as given that decision makers understand that assessment error reduces the quality of decisions. The hypothesis in this case is that those involved tend to focus their attention more on the errors than on how policies should be adjusted due to inescapable uncertainty in stock assessments. We start by adding assessment error to the model of the preceding section. Stock assessments can result from imprecise stock measurements (surveys), or they could be based on uncertain model forecasts using historical data (VPA), or they could combine both types of information (Bayesian methods). These assessments are never perfect. We express assessments as yt = stvt ,

(5)

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were the error term vt is lognormally distributed (independent, identically distributed [iid]) with parameters that are probably quite realistic for the Barents Sea cod ﬁshery.6 Assessment error complicates the problem considerably. Now, optimal policies should ideally consider also past stock assessments and past harvest rates (Bertsekas 1987). Again we use SOPS software to ﬁnd policies. Moxnes (2003) shows how near-to-optimal solutions can be obtained with simplifying assumptions regarding the policy function. Here we ﬁnd harvests as a function of yt (thus we ﬁlter in space rather than in time). For an approach where the model rather than the policy is simpliﬁed, see Clark and Kirkwood (1986). Figure 45.4 shows the near-to-optimal harvesting strategy for the case with natural variation combined with assessment error. Compared to the strategy for variation only, harvesting at high stock values (due to limiting capacity) is reduced by 8 percent. For stock levels less than 2.2 million tons, harvesting is increased. Table 45.1 shows that harvest is limited by capacity in 83 percent of the years and average capacity utilization is 92 percent. Thus, considerable stability in harvests is obtained as a side effect of optimization in a system with both random variation and assessment error. Compared to the case with random variation only, the ENPV is reduced by 8 percent. This number represents the costs of assessment error and also indicates the potential for improvement if assessment error could be removed altogether. Important to note here is that the loss is already much reduced by adjusting the harvesting strategy and the capacity to the amount of assessment error. Without these adjustments, the value of accuracy would appear much higher. Moxnes (2003) shows that adjusting of the harvesting strategy can be both cheaper and more valuable than increasing the accuracy of assessments. Analyzing the policy implications of assessment error has been a challenge for researchers (Clark and Kirkwood 1986; Moxnes 2003) and continues to be so for decision makers. Whether practical decision rules lead to systematic biases in capacity and TAC is not known. One may speculate that assessment error ampliﬁes the effects of the misperceptions dealt with in section 45.3. Assessment errors may in addition lead to unwarranted conﬂicts between researchers and policy makers. In debates about TAC, ﬁshers have a tendency to question the accuracy of stock

assessments rather than the implications of inaccuracy for TAC policies. Typically, assertions about uncertainty and underestimation are used to argue for higher TACs. Policy makers tend to listen. Researchers have responded by claiming that their assessments result from good methods and good analysis, implying that the estimates are accurate and to be trusted. Since stock estimates and stock predictions are frequently proven wrong, the defensive strategy backﬁres in two ways. First, obvious errors reduce the trustworthiness and authority of researchers. Second, claimed accuracy suggests that there is enough and perhaps more than enough effort going into stock assessments. A better strategy for researchers seems to be to acknowledge that assessments are and will be uncertain. Then they will not be proven wrong; rather, they will be in agreement with ﬁshers. To counter a possible reduction in authority caused by announced uncertainty, managers should make clear that uncertainty is accounted for in policies for quotas and capacity. Then, criticism could be seen as an opportunity to educate about the policy implications of assessment error. Furthermore, criticism could be used to argue for more resources to assessments, given that analysis shows that the marginal net beneﬁts of increased effort are positive.

45.5. NARROW BOUNDARIES OF MODELS AND METHODS Previous sections have used highly simpliﬁed models to investigate the complexity of ﬁshery management. It would be unreasonable to claim that these simple models produce perfect policy recommendations. However, the simple models may help decision makers to question their own mental models and to ask for more in-depth analysis. This section touches upon a few modeling issues where different research traditions may lead to misunderstandings and unwarranted disagreements between researchers. If so, potentially fruitful cooperation between researchers could be reduced as well as their authority. First, consider the problem of simpliﬁcation, a problem that cannot be escaped. Ideal holistic analysis is not an option for researchers or for policy makers. There are two routes toward simpliﬁcation, both of which have their advantages: one could simplify models to the extent that one can ﬁnd exact optimal policies, and one could seek

Complexities in Fisheries Management policy improvement for models that are too complex for exact solutions. In the latter case the policy is simpliﬁed. The ﬁrst route is particularly helpful to understand policy implications of isolated complexities. The results help correct mental models and motivate further research, as was the motivation in previous sections. However, if research does not go beyond highly simpliﬁed models, one leaves the most complex problems to be resolved by decision maker intuition. That this may not work well, is indicated by the studies we have referred to earlier showing that performance deteriorates when complexity increases. The second route allows for complexity and policy exploration, typically relying on widely used simulation techniques. To improve on this technique one may use “stochastic optimization in policy space” to identify parameters in policy functions that maximize an explicit criterion. SOPS is a user-friendly program to do this.7 Using SOPS, one can choose among grid policies providing the same accuracy as stochastic dynamic programming and simpliﬁed policy functions that overcome the “curse of dimensionality.” In general, the latter approach only approximate optimal solutions. An interesting observation is that stochasticity, measurement error, and model error typically work to smooth policy functions. This makes it easier rather than harder to approximate near-optimal policies when complexity increases. Second, consider model testing, where there are two main traditions. In econometrics, the main focus is on model behavior and prediction error. Unfortunately, no perfect method exists to test nonlinear dynamic models with measurement error. In the simulation tradition frequently used by biologists, focus is more on prior information about both model structure and parameters. In the spirit of Bayes theorem, both traditions are needed; the challenge is to make a practical and balanced use of both sources of data.8 Failure to see the importance of both sources of data can lead to unnecessary conﬂict and divert resources away from developing and using better Bayesian-type methods. Third is the question of model boundary. This question goes beyond model accuracy; it has to do with the appropriateness of models to produce reliable and accurate policy recommendations. Importantly, model boundaries do not follow the boundaries of academic disciplines. Fishery problems involve oceanography, biology, economics,

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political science, law, sociology, and so forth. Researcher biases toward their own ﬁelds of expertise typically lead to models that are skewed in different directions. This may be useful to foster debate. On the other hand, it may also create barriers of distrust and slow down efforts to develop better interdisciplinary models. If so, decision makers are left with the complicated task of combining insights from different academic disciplines. Similar to behavior sensitivity tests, one can perform tests to see how sensitive policies are to model formulations and parameter values. Parameters and formulations that are important for the policy should be kept within the model boundary, and it may be worthwhile to improve their accuracy. Policy sensitivity tests are demanding with respect to method. First, to avoid an element of subjectivity, the method should search for policies that maximize a given criterion. Second, the method should be ﬂexible and powerful enough to deal with major changes in the boundary. To illustrate, I refer to a study that tested the policy effects of frequently used biological and economic model formulations (Moxnes 2005). Assuming constant ﬁsh price and constant unit operating costs, SOPS was used to ﬁnd optimal and near-to-optimal harvesting policies for, respectively, an aggregate surplus growth model and a cohort model of the same cod ﬁshery. In both cases, harvest was found as a function of harvestable biomass.9 Figure 45.5 shows the resulting policies. The aggregate model produced the wellknown target escapement policy (Reed 1979), while the cohort model produced pulse ﬁshing (Spulber 1983). Clearly, the two biological models suggest very different policies, and the choice of model seems to matter a lot. However, can we trust the above conclusion; in particular, are the model boundaries wide enough to produce a fair test? To explore this question, Moxnes (2005) introduced ﬁsh prices that declined with increasing harvests and unit variable costs that increased with capacity utilization.10 Figure 45.6 shows the policies for the aggregate and the cohort models. Clearly, the new economic model structure matters a great deal for the policy, and it removes most of the ambiguity caused by the different biological models. In the latter case, it does not matter very much for the ENPV if, erroneously, the aggregate policy is used in the cohort model. Using the pulse ﬁshing strategy in the latter cohort model has a devastating effect on ENPV.

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The choice of methods and models reﬂect different purposes and different researcher backgrounds. It is a challenge to ﬁnd out how different approaches can complement and correct each other. If successful, this will help individual learning, communication between researchers, and communication between researchers and decision makers.

45.6. CONCLUDING REMARKS Central to this chapter has been a hypothesis about misperceptions of dynamics, in particular, of the stock nature of ﬁshing capacity and of ﬁsh species. Such misperceptions can explain overinvestments and consequent overharvesting as resource limitations are approached. Misperceptions could also explain a tendency to overinvest when there are natural variations in ﬁsh stocks and when there are random errors in stock assessments. Effective

communication may require cognitive conﬂict to motivate learning; understanding requires simple models and analogies. Assessment errors will always exist. More important than quarreling about current stock sizes is to discuss the implications of errors for TAC and investment policies. Similarly, it is important to have an open discussion about model complexity, accuracy, and boundaries. Complexity can be important for policies, and it may be costly to rely too heavily on intuition when policies are established.

Acknowledgments I am grateful for helpful advice or comments from professor I. David Wheat from the System Dynamics Group at the University of Bergen, Norway; from professor John D. Sterman at MIT Sloan School of Management, USA; and from professor Rögnvaldur Hannesson at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration.

Complexities in Fisheries Management Notes 1. Decision makers have their reasons to be skeptical of advice as they know that experts make imprecise forecasts, that they do not considering all factors, that they disagree among themselves, and so on. Regarding advice from optimization models Walters (1986) comments: “It would be silly to expect any real decision maker or manager to blindly plug numbers into such a function [policy linking state variables and decisions].” 2. By mental model I mean the understanding and heuristics that actually lead to decisions, corresponding to what Argyris and Schön (1974) call “theory-in-use.” Mental models are not easily accessible and are often different from the “espoused theory” perceived by the decision maker and communicated to others. 3. Harvesting, which is closely related to profits, is used here to simplify the exposition. Feedback from the rate of change in proﬁts is consistent with a hill-climbing strategy, which is intentionally rational for a company with private property rights and for governments. In an open-access situation, proﬁts above the normal is a more likely cue. 4. Parameters are similar to those used in Moxnes (2005); currency units have not been inﬂated. Parameter values are surplus growth a = 0.78 and b = 0.19/million tons, cv = 3.7 NOK/kg, p = 8.0 NOK/ kg, cc = 1.8 NOK/kg/year, r = 0.05/year; parameters for wt are sw = 0.15 and mw = 1.0. 5. If capacity were not limited, the effect of increased environmental variation would be to shift the harvesting policy in the opposite direction, to the right (Moxnes 2003; Reed 1979). This happens in this model, as well, when capacity is ﬁxed at a sufﬁciently high level. In that case, the more cautious policy helps avoid infrequent but long periods with low stocks and little growth. 6. We assume sv = 0.4 and mv = 1.0. 7. Models are formulated and tested in the simulation program Powersim Studio; an example of the program’s graphical interface is shown in ﬁgure 45.2. Then the model is automatically transferred to SOPS for optimization (see www.powersim.com or www.iﬁ.uib.no/sd/software.html). The optimization method is a special case of reinforcement learning using Monte Carlo simulations to estimate expected criterion values and search routines to ﬁnd policy function parameters that maximize the expected criterion value. See Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis (1996) for other methods to deal with complexity. 8. Before better and user-friendly methods are developed, there are numerous tests for both structure and behavior (Barlas and Carpenter 1990; Forrester and Senge 1980; Mass and Senge 1978; Sterman 2000; Zellner 1981). A simpliﬁed Bayesian strategy is to keep the most reliable prior parameter

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estimates as they are and adjust (and test) only the vague prior estimates to improve the model ﬁt to time-series data (using statistical methods, Theil inequality statistics, or eyeballing). 9. Capacity was assumed not to be binding in this case. In the cohort model, the gear selectivity was given and was not part of the policy. 10. In this case, optimal capacity was found as part of the optimization. Different from section 45.2, CPUE varied with the ﬁsh stock.

References Andersen, D.F., G.P. Richardson, and J.A.M. Vennix (1997). Group model building: Adding more science to the craft. System Dynamics Review 13(2): 187–201. Argyris, C., and D. Schön (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Barlas, Y., and S. Carpenter (1990). Philosophical roots of model validation: Two paradigms. System Dynamics Review 6(2): 148–166. Bertsekas, D.P. (1987). Dynamic Programming. Deterministic and Stochastic Models. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Bertsekas, D.P., and J.N. Tsitsiklis (1996). NeuroDynamic Programming. Belmont, Mass.: Athena Scientiﬁc. Brehmer, B. (1980). In one word: Not from experience. Acta Psychologica 45: 223–241. Brehmer, B. (1990). Strategies in real time, dynamic decision making. Pp. 262–279 in Hogarth, R.M. (ed), Insights in Decision Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brehmer, B. (1992). Dynamic decision making: Human control of complex systems. Acta Psychologica 81: 211–241. Christy, F.T. Jr. (1973). Fisherman Quotas: A Tentative Suggestion for Domestic Management. Occasional Paper 19. Kingston, R.I.: University of Rhode Island, Law of Sea Institute. Clark, C.W., and G.P. Kirkwood (1986). On uncertain renewable resource stocks: Optimal harvest policies and the value of stock surveys. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 13: 235–244. Costello, C., S.D. Gaines, and J. Lynham (2008). Can catch shares prevent ﬁsheries collapse? Science 321: 1678–1681. Diehl, E., and J.D. Sterman (1995). Effects of feedback complexity on dynamic decision making. Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes 62(2): 198–215. Forrester, J., and P. Senge (1980). Tests for building conﬁdence in system dynamics models. TIMS Studies in the Management Sciences 14: 209–228.

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Forrester, J.W. (1961). Industrial Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Funke, J. (1991). Solving complex problems: Exploration and control of complex systems. In Sternberg, R., and P. Frensch (eds), Complex Problem Solving: Principles and Mechanisms. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gigerenzer, G., P.M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group (1999). Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. New York: Oxford University Press. Gordon, H.S. (1954). The economic theory of a common property resource: The ﬁshery. Journal of Political Economy 62: 124–142. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. 162: 1243–1248. Hey, J.D., T. Neugebauer, and A. Sadrieh (2002). An Experimental Analysis of Optimal Renewable Resource Management: The Fishery. Discussion Paper 37. Tilburg, The Netherlands: Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research. Kainz, D., and G. Ossimitz (2002). Can Students Learn Stock-Flow-Thinking? An Empirical Investigation. Palermo: International System Dynamics Conference, System Dynamics Society. Limon, M. (2001). On the cognitive conﬂict as an instructional strategy for conceptual change: A critical appraisal. Learning and Instruction 11(4–5): 357–380. Mass, N.J., and P.M. Senge (1978). Alternative tests for the selection of model variables. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics SMC-8(6): 450–480. Moxnes, E. (1998a). Not only the tragedy of the commons, misperceptions of bioeconomics. Management Science 44(9): 1234–1248. Moxnes, E. (1998b). Overexploitation of renewable resources: The role of misperceptions. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 37(1): 107–127. Moxnes, E. (2000). Not only the tragedy of the commons: Misperceptions of feedback and policies for sustainable development. System Dynamics Review 16(4): 325–348. Moxnes, E. (2003). Uncertain measurements of renewable resources: Approximations, harvest policies, and value of accuracy. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 45(1): 85–108. Moxnes, E. (2004). Misperceptions of basic dynamics, the case of renewable resource management. System Dynamics Review 20(2): 139–162. Moxnes, E. (2005). Policy sensitivity analysis: Simple versus complex ﬁshery models. System Dynamics Review 21(2): 123–145. Moxnes, E. (2007). Individual Transferable Quotas versus Auctioned Seasonal Quotas, an Experi-

mental Investigation. Rome: Economic Science Association, World Meeting. Moxnes, E. (2009). Are Advice Adhered To? Populist versus Activist or Expert Advice. Albuquerque, N.M.: International System Dynamics Conference, System Dynamics Society. Moxnes, E., Ö. Danell, E. Gaare, and J. Kumpula (2002). Reindeer Husbandry: A Practical Decision-Tool for Adaptation of Herds to Rangelands. Report 49/02. Bergen, Norway: Institute for Research in Economics and Business Administration. Moxnes, E. and L. Jensen (in press). Drunker than intended; misperceptions and information treatments. Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Moxnes, E., and A.K. Saysel (2009). Misperceptions of basic climate change dynamics: Information policies. Climatic Change 93: 15–37. Munro, G.R., and U.R. Sumaila (2002). Subsidies and their potential impact on the management of the ecosystems of the North Atlantic. Fish and Fisheries 3(4): 233–250. Paich, M., and J. Sterman (1993). Boom, bust, and failures to learn in experimental markets. Management Science 39(12): 1439–1458. Pauly, D., V. Christensen, S. Guenette, T.J. Pitcher, U.R. Sumaila, C.J. Walters, R. Watson, and D. Zeller (2002). Towards sustainability in world ﬁsheries. Nature 418(6898): 689–695. Reed, W.J. (1979). Optimal escapement levels in stochastic and deterministic models. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 6: 350–363. Richmond, B. (1987). The Strategic Forum: From Vision to Strategy to Operating Policies and Back Again. Lyme, N.H.: High Performance Systems, Inc. Rouwette, E., A. Größler, and J.A.M. Vennix (2004). Exploring inﬂuencing factors on rationality: A literature review of dynamic decision-making studies in system dynamics. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 21(4): 351–370. Scheffer, V.B. (1951). The rise and fall of a reindeer herd. Scientiﬁc Monthly 75: 356–362. Schnier, K.E., and C.M. Anderson (2006). Decision making in patchy resource environments: Spatial misperception of bioeconomic models. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 61(2): 234–254. Scott, A.D. (1955). The ﬁshery: The objectives of sole ownership. Journal of Political Economy 63: 116–124. Spector, J.M., and P.I. Davidsen (1998). Constructing learning environments using system dynamics. Journal of Courseware Engineering 1: 5–12. Spulber, D.F. (1983). Pulse-ﬁshing and stochastic equilibrium in the multicohort ﬁshery.

Complexities in Fisheries Management Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 6: 309–322. Stenberg, L. (1980). A modelling procedure for public policy. In J. Randers (ed), Elements of the System Dynamics Method. Cambridge, Mass.: Productivity Press, pp. 292–312. Sterman, J.D. (1989). Misperceptions of feedback in dynamic decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 43(3): 301–335. Sterman, J.D. (2000). Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. Boston: Irwin/McGraw-Hill. Sterman, J.D., and L.B. Sweeney (2007). Understanding public complacency about climate change: Adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter. Climatic Change 80(3–4): 213–238.

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Sweeney, L.B., and J.D. Sterman (2000). Bathtub dynamics: Initial results of a systems thinking inventory. System Dynamics Review 16(4): 249–286. Vennix, J.A.M. (1996). Group Model-Building: Facilitating Team Learning using System Dynamics. Chichester: Wiley. Venville, G.J., and D.F. Treagust (1996). The role of analogies in promoting conceptual change in biology. Instructional Science 24: 295–320. Walters, C.J. (1986). Adaptive Management of Renewable Resources. New York: Macmillan. Zellner, A. (1981). Philosophy and objectives of econometrics. In Currie, D., R. Nobay, and D. Peel (eds), Macroeconomic Analysis: Essays in Macroeconomics and Econometrics. London: Croom Helm.

46 Seafood Ecolabeling TREVOR WARD BRUCE PHILLIPS

46.1. INTRODUCTION Ecolabeling to indicate “environmentally friendly” products began in 1977 with the establishment of the Blue Angel program by the government of Germany (Müller 2002). Since that time, worldwide concern about sustainability issues has led to the emergence of ecolabeling schemes for many products, including those from forests (Forest Stewardship Council) and the oceans (Marine Stewardship Council [MSC]). The emergence of ecolabeling for natural resources, and particularly marine products, has been driven strongly by the involvement of nongovernment organizations (Sutton and Wimpee 2008). The ecolabeling of seafood has arisen in the last decade to become an important marketing tool in countries where consumers are sensitized to issues of environmental sustainability in food products. However, despite at least three decades of ecolabeling experience, the more recent ecolabeling of seafood presents a number of important issues, including the technical quality of criteria used to award ecolabels, the response of consumers to the rapid proliferation of different ecolabels that apply to similar products, and the potential for distortion of international trade in seafood to the detriment of developing countries (Deere 1999; Rotherham 2005). In this chapter we describe seafood ecolabeling, with some examples of how it is being used in different ﬁsheries around the world. We discuss

the drivers behind the upsurge in ecolabeling for seafood, and how the related concept of certiﬁcation is used as a tool to improve ﬁshery management. As with all innovations in marketing, the decision to proceed to seek an ecolabel for a speciﬁc line of seafood products carries with it a number of potential business risks. In seafood, ecolabeling has brought with it a diversity of ecolabels and certiﬁcation programs that demonstrate various strengths and weaknesses (Ward and Phillips 2008). In this chapter we also identify the motivations and outline some of the potential issues surrounding seafood ecolabeling so that ﬁshers, ﬁsh processors, resellers, and ﬁshery managers may be able to better recognize and manage such risks if they wish to secure (or maintain) an ecolabel or an environmental certiﬁcation for their product.

46.2. WHAT IS SEAFOOD ECOLABELING? A seafood ecolabel or a certiﬁcation is a product mark or recommendation that presents a strong signal to purchasers at all levels in the supply chain that the product that carries the endorsement is preferable from the ecological perspective. An ecolabel is any form of logo, proprietary mark, or similar form of endorsement applied to a seafood product that infers to a purchaser that the product has been caught and processed in a way that creates fewer environmental

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Seafood Ecolabeling impacts than nonecolabeled products, and hence is a better choice for purchasing. The consumer appeal of the logo is paramount, because the selective purchase of the labeled product over the nonlabeled product is the driving force that gives ecolabeled products a competitive edge in the marketplace. The ecolabeled products may generate market advantages, such as increased proﬁts or increased market access, so there is an incentive created for seafood producers to secure an ecolabel for their products. Environmental certiﬁcation is an assessment process that conﬁrms (veriﬁes) that a product complies with a standard and a set of criteria. A certiﬁcation of compliance may be used as part of an ecolabel program, but not all certiﬁcation systems lead to the award of an ecolabel. Products that are certiﬁed may carry an ecolabel, or producers may simply choose to use the certiﬁcation as a mechanism for inﬂuencing wholesale purchasers, or gaining access to markets in countries where access is strictly controlled. Some certiﬁcation systems (e.g., GLOBALGAP, www.globalgap.org) are not extensively used for retail marketing and are mainly for industry or regulatory purposes. Some ecolabeling programs issue certiﬁcates of compliance based on their assessment process, but in other programs an assessment of compliance may lead only to a certiﬁcation and not to an ecolabel. Choosing between these types of product labeling is an important point of judgment for producers that may be interested in ecolabeling for their products because of their different implications for market beneﬁts and the costs to secure and maintain the certiﬁcation or label. Environmental certiﬁcation, while a different form of product endorsement from that of an ecolabel, is also based on consumer preferences for more environmentally friendly products. Where these issues are not openly disclosed to consumers in the marketplace, the certiﬁcation process can be considered to be more closely aligned with an industry or trade standard that applies to all members of that industry. Where the certiﬁcation is used in advertising or in industry promotions, this can be considered to be almost equivalent to an ecolabel. However, certiﬁcation systems may lack the compliance veriﬁcation and transparency qualities that are inherent in a well-designed ecolabel. So, while such certiﬁcation systems are very important in the gradual improvement of environmental performance across all aspects of an industry, they may not apply the same high standards of veriﬁcation

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as those of the ecolabels. Certiﬁcation systems are therefore a preferred pathway for ﬁshing industries where the members have a variable level of performance such that an ecolabel could not be awarded because of the lack of compliance by some parts of the industry. In addition to ecolabels and certiﬁcation, buying guides and ratings systems are becoming increasingly popular in the marketplace (e.g., Seafood Watch, www.mbayaq.org/cr/SeafoodWatch.asp). Part of their popularity is because they are less expensive than ecolabels, but they are also rapidly expanding because they can be very selective and focused on issues that are locally important for consumers. This is important for producers because, if there is an appropriate partnership developed between the industry and the owner of the guide or rating system, various aspects of incremental environmental improvement may be progressively implemented at a rate that is appropriate to the size and scale of the ﬁsheries concerned. Such progressive implementation can then be agreed to and shown in the buying guides. One of the more difﬁcult issues is that the different programs each have a different interpretation of ecological sustainability, often based on the different value system of their members or the standard owner. It is not surprising that an environmental organization (e.g., Seafood Watch) might choose a standard that is different and more environmentally demanding than a standard that might be chosen by a ﬁshery industry association (e.g., Clean Green, www.southernrocklobster.com/cleangreen/default. aspx). Therefore, in evaluating which type of product endorsement to secure, producers will need to consider not only if they can achieve the standard, but also whether the standard they are seeking to achieve has consumer appeal in their marketplace. The different standards used in the different certiﬁcation and ecolabel programs also means that a product that may be given an ecolabel under one program may not achieve an ecolabel under another program, because of the different type of standard. The basic issue to address when considering which form of product endorsement to seek is the question of the credibility of the product endorsement versus the market return in the context of the cost to secure and maintain the endorsement. The most credible programs are the high-quality ecolabels, such as the MSC (Marine Stewardship Council; however, there are many questions and issues about the effectiveness of the MSC program that remain unanswered; see below), but these come at a high cost and can

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take a long time to secure (Gilmore 2008). Industrywide certiﬁcation systems and some forms of buying guides do not necessarily require high levels of environmental performance, so they are easier to comply with and can be secured at a lower cost. However, they may provide less consumer assurance and more limited market advantage. These issues are the basis for much of the following discussion in this chapter and are discussed in greater detail in Ward and Phillips (2008).

46.3. TYPES OF ECOLABELING In the seafood sector, ecolabeling has been classiﬁed into three basic types: ﬁrst-, second-, and thirdparty systems (Deere 1999). A “ﬁrst-party” ecolabel is one based on a process of self-declaration. This occurs where a ﬁshing company or an individual reseller declares compliance with a speciﬁc standard

and set of criteria that they have developed for their own operations. Veriﬁcation procedures are internal to the company or group concerned, usually with little opportunity for stakeholder input or discussion. This type of ecolabeling can be considered to be an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) type II self-declaration environmental labeling system (ISO 1999b). Self-declarations are not likely to be considered technically robust or believable by consumers in the matters usually covered by ﬁsheries ecolabels. Consumers will not be strongly inﬂuenced by such self-declarations unless they are issued by highly trustworthy organizations that have a demonstrated track record of minimal motivational bias. A “second-party” ecolabel is issued by a group of companies, an industry association, or cooperative based on standards and certiﬁcation criteria largely derived from their internal sources. Veriﬁcation of product compliance with this standard

(b) (a)

(d) (c)

46.1 (a) Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) logo, the leading global capture ﬁshery ecolabeling program (www.msc.org). (b) Dolphin Safe logo, a leading ecolabeling program applied to many canned tuna products worldwide (www.earthisland.org/dolphinSafeTuna/consumer/index. html). (c) Marca Colectiva logo, applied by six ﬁshing cooperatives in southern Mexico in their local ﬁshery for the lobster Panulirus argus. (d) Friend of the Sea logo, an increasingly popular and inexpensive ecolabeling program (www.friendofthesea.org)

FIGURE

Seafood Ecolabeling is achieved through either internal procedures or, sometimes, through limited external veriﬁcation. These ecolabels may be classiﬁed as either ISO type I or type III (ISO 1999a, 2006). A “third-party” ecolabel is derived from a program that is independent from the ﬁshery or the ﬁshing industry, based on standards and criteria that have been widely scrutinized by a range of stakeholders. Products are expected to have a closely controlled “chain of custody” to avoid product substitution issues. Veriﬁcation of compliance of the products with the standards and criteria is conducted by an independent third-party auditing company, which provides for a transparent and accountable process of impartial veriﬁcation and certiﬁcation. These types of ecolabels are considered to be the most robust, and usually can be classiﬁed as an ISO type 1 ecolabel (ISO 1999a). The MSC program is currently the most popular seafood ecolabel (www.msc.org; ﬁgure 46.1a). However, the high cost of verifying that a ﬁshery is achieving the MSC standard, difﬁculties with the exact meaning of the MSC principles and criteria for a speciﬁc ﬁshery, and the issues associated with determining if a ﬁshery complies with the standard have opened the “ecolabel marketplace” to a number of other competing systems. Each of these other systems also seeks to provide a form of seafood product endorsement that infers “sustainability” or “oceanfriendliness” to the purchasing consumers in their speciﬁc marketplace (Ward 2008a; Ward and Phillips 2008). The many competing systems have various strengths and weaknesses, and here we summarize some of the issues so that producers who wish to secure (or maintain) an ecolabel or an environmental certiﬁcation for their product may be better informed about the underlying issues and potential risks.

46.4. DATA AND INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS Decisions about the condition of ﬁsh stocks, or environmental impacts of ﬁshing, can only be based on data and information. The better the quality of the data and information, the more reliable and realistic are the decision outcomes. Some ﬁsheries are well endowed with data and information, but even the best ﬁsheries typically lack high-quality knowledge about their environmental impacts, because of a history of neglect of such issues. Even in the bestmanaged ﬁsheries, where stocks may be very low

611

compared to historically unﬁshed levels (e.g., less than 20 percent), and it is obvious that there will have been large ecological impacts through the historic removal of such large proportions of the biomass, the historic ecological impacts are rarely understood. This means that the consumer has very little prospect of being correctly informed about the actual impacts of ﬁshing, other than from the current and short-term impacts of the present day activities. This narrow and generally highly limited view of the issue of sustainability is also inconsistent with modern views of sustainable natural resource management (Ward 2008a). As consumers become more aware of the breadth and extent of ﬁshing impacts, each market situation is likely to require a different type of ecolabel and different amounts of supporting data and information. The amount of available data and information that may be available compared to what might be required is therefore an important factor that needs to be carefully considered by producers when choosing a speciﬁc ecolabel or certiﬁcation.

46.5. ROLE IN FISHERIES MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING Many resellers, national governments, and producers are making commitments to supply only (or mainly) ecolabeled or certiﬁed seafood products within the next few years, thus creating a large demand for such products (e.g., Youngs, a U.K.-based seafood brand, www.youngsseafood. co.uk; and Wal-Mart, a U.S.-based shopping chain, walmartstores.com/Sustainability/7988.aspx). In response, many ﬁsheries are entering into the process of MSC assessment. However, in addition to the MSC there are a number of other ecolabel programs that are also becoming very active and increasingly well known (e.g., Friend of the Sea, www.friendofthesea.org; ﬁgure 46.1d). Why is there so much interest in ecolabeling and certiﬁcation in the marketplace? The principal answer to this question is that consumers are becoming increasingly aware of, and sensitized to, the declining abundance of many ﬁshed species, and the gradual degradation in ocean conditions. The opinion leaders in the environment and ﬁsheries sectors long ago determined that if wild-caught ﬁsh are to continue to be good business investments, then action is needed to protect gradually declining stocks across the world (Sutton and Wimpee 2008). But without a strong

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

pull from consumers in the marketplace, there has not been (until recently) a commercially signiﬁcant driver to promote better management of ﬁsheries. The recent popularity of certiﬁcation and ecolabeling has fueled the prospect of a commercial beneﬁt to be secured from seafood products that are clearly more environmentally friendly than competing products. There is now a rush from resellers to secure sources of ecolabeled seafood supplies so that they may themselves be able to continue to offer quality environmentally friendly products to discerning seafood consumers. Along with the other matters of importance to seafood consumers, such as taste, price, and food hygiene and security, this environmental inference contributes to a buying decision. While environmental friendliness is not the top reason that most consumers purchase a speciﬁc product, it is often an important point that can distinguish competing products (Wessells et al. 1999). Of course, consumers will always balance these factors as they make their purchasing decision, and while there is some evidence that an ecolabel can make a small price increment, any market advantage conferred by an ecolabel can be easily offset by a less environmentally friendly product offered at a slightly reduced price. This means that if the cost of securing an ecolabel contributes signiﬁcantly to the product price in the marketplace, ecolabeling programs may inadvertently be contributing to enhancing the market for less-friendly products that can be marketed cheaper than ecolabeled products.

46.6. COSTS AND BENEFITS FOR FISHERIES Given the great range in apparent costs of certiﬁcation and ecolabeling, the decision to engage in securing an ecolabel for a line of seafood products cannot be taken without a careful evaluation of the costs set against the beneﬁts. The costs of securing an ecolabel or an environmental certiﬁcation can include the following: • The preparatory stages of internal consultation and coordination within a company, an industry group, or a ﬁshery • The engagement of professional consultants to prepare a tactical decision base and a road map for the development and maintenance of the ecolabel

• The capture and synthesis of the various forms of data and information that the speciﬁc ecolabel program will require to be able to assess compliance with the standard • The appointment of a trusted manager to control the assessment/veriﬁcation process from the industry perspective and be responsible for liaison with the certiﬁer and within the company or industry group concerned, and liaison with stakeholders • The direct funding of any formal or informal preassessment process (e.g., to make an internal risk-free assessment of the likelihood of the products securing the ecolabel) • The cost of any upgrading of industry equipment, operations, or practices (including, e.g., monitoring data and information capture and synthesis) to ensure that the ecolabel will be secured • The direct cost of the assessment process for a certiﬁer to determine if the products do comply with the ecolabel standards and criteria • The direct costs of any appeals or objections, and consequent liaison with stakeholders • The costs of implementing and enforcing compliance with any conditions that may be raised by the certiﬁer in the assessment and veriﬁcation process • The direct cost of maintaining the currency of the ecolabel (e.g., through annual surveillances or other forms of routine inspection of compliance) • Direct costs for promotion of the value of the ecolabel and its implications for the ﬁshery providing ecolabeled seafood products • The internal review and synthesis of costs and beneﬁts of the ecolabel within the business system and pricing for each product Despite this long list of costs, many of these matters may already be covered in existing business systems. For example, in Australia, a number of these matters are addressed by individual ﬁsheries through their compliance with national regulations, some of which cover some of the same sorts of issues as ecolabeling (e.g., Australia’s Guidelines for the Ecologically Sustainable Management of Fisheries, www.environment.gov.au/coasts/ﬁsheries/publications/guidelines. html). In such cases, the real costs of securing an ecolabel will be the incremental costs of any additional requirements by a speciﬁc ecolabel program. The beneﬁts cited for ecolabeling of seafood products are very broad, although there appears to

Seafood Ecolabeling be little actual evidence that purported beneﬁts have been realized. Generally, the beneﬁts are considered to fall into two broad classes: market and nonmarket beneﬁts. The market beneﬁts are thought to include the following: • Maintaining access to markets where there are increasing expectations of environmental sustainability, and where competing products are making claims of environmental friendliness • Maintaining access to buyers and resellers who are becoming more aligned with markets demanding more sustainable products, and limiting access to competing products • Creating access to new market types (e.g., fresh food restaurants) • Securing price increments, although this is commercially sensitive information and difﬁcult to verify The nonmarket beneﬁts include securing favorable treatment from regulatory agencies, in both seafood and nonseafood sectors. The Baha spiny lobster ﬁshery for Panulirus interruptus in Baja California, Mexico, cites as a prime motivation the increased recognition provided from central government of the recognized global quality of the ﬁshery after its certiﬁcation by the MSC program (Phillips et al. 2008). The speciﬁc beneﬁts are difﬁcult to evaluate because ecolabels typically are only one tool used in most seafood businesses to create and maintain market advantage, and it is often difﬁcult to separate out and uniquely identify the speciﬁc contribution that the ecolabel may have made to any speciﬁc beneﬁt. Perhaps the most important statement about the relative costs and beneﬁts of ecolabeling in the MSC program is that no ﬁshery that has been certiﬁed by the MSC has failed to take up the option of proceeding to a second 5-year term of certiﬁcation, despite the costs and other hurdles. Clearly, the beneﬁts of all types have been perceived to outweigh all types of costs in the case of the early entrants to the MSC program. Only time will tell if this situation also applies to other ecolabeling and certiﬁcation programs.

46.7. STANDARDS AND VERIFICATION SYSTEMS To secure a return from the investment in ecolabeling, producers need to demonstrate to consumers

613

either at the retail point of sale or to buyers at each step in the supply chain that the ecolabeled product has strong environmental credentials. Where there are competing products, some of which may also be ecolabeled, consumers need to be assured that the product endorsement (the ecolabel) is made by an authority with appropriate standing and credibility to make such an endorsement, and that the ecolabel does represent a high-quality environmental standard. To provide assurances and support for a wise purchasing decision, consumers will be inﬂuenced by the standing of the authority promoting the ecolabel, the environmental standard that is claimed for the product, and the robustness of the process used to assess and verify that the product does indeed comply with the standard represented by the ecolabel. Producers, industries, or national governments making self-declarations will have little impact. Modern environmental standards are complex and require high levels of technical expertise to formulate, assess, and report. As a result, most current ecolabels and their related assessment processes rely on a hierarchical system of increasing complexity to arrange their standard into a set of measurable criteria. The standards and criteria differ among the various systems, as does the level of environmental strictness imposed. While all systems address the issues of ﬁsh stocks in some way, there are very substantial differences between them in the rigor applied to assess stock condition, and such important details as the reference points that are used to decide if a stock is overﬁshed or not. Some systems appear to rely uncritically on data and information that is synthesized and presented by the ﬁshing industry, without an independent assessment of the quality of such information. Other systems rely on perspectives derived from environmental organizations that focus on speciﬁc forms of ﬁshing that are considered by some to be unacceptable. The best standards and criteria are developed within an open and transparent system that involves a wide diversity of stakeholders to provide a fair representation within the standard for all the issues that may be of concern to environmental and consumer interests as well as the interests of the ﬁshing sector. None of the current ﬁsheries assessment systems deals with all the environmental and social issues of concern to consumers, and this is an area that requires considerable further development (Leadbitter and Ward 2007).

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

Overall, the standards and criteria that stand behind the various ecolabels, certiﬁcations, buying guides, and rating systems are highly variable. The most difﬁcult area is the ecological impacts of ﬁshing, which are only weakly considered in all of the assessment systems. Even the market leader (the MSC program) has major problems in attempting to deal effectively with issues of impacts of ﬁshing on ecologically associated species (Ward 2008b). This diversity in the environmental standards and criteria opens the opportunity for producers to select an ecolabel that will best serve their needs and their capacity to actually secure an ecolabel for their products. It is not clear that consumers are sufﬁciently discriminating to be able to determine that, for example, the MSC ecolabel represents a higher environmental standard than the Friend of the Sea ecolabel. A further complication is that the lack of an ecolabel does not necessarily infer that any speciﬁc product does not comply with even the most rigorous environmental standards and criteria. The lack of an ecolabel will simply leave the question open in the minds of consumers. All forms of ecolabel, certiﬁcation, buying guides, and rating programs have some sort of assessment process that sets out to determine if the products (or ﬁsheries) submitted for consideration do properly comply with a program’s standards and criteria. This process of assessment is the veriﬁcation that a product complies with the standard. There are some common standards under development that also embed the veriﬁcation system (e.g., Seafood Choices Alliance, www.seafoodchoices. org), but most programs currently have their own veriﬁcation system, and, just as with the standards and criteria, each veriﬁcation system emphasizes different aspects considered by the program to be important. The third-party systems of veriﬁcation are robust but are also expensive. However, in situations where there may be facts that are highly contestable, and where an ecolabel decision may carry substantial business costs or rewards, only thirdparty systems of veriﬁcation can provide consumers with reasonable assurances that the ecolabel has not been awarded (or withheld) purely on spurious grounds. Issues about the facts often arise where data and information are limited and can be interpreted in different ways. In such cases, motivational bias driven by business pressures, or environmental policies, can confound interpretations, and it is only through technical experience and expertise that

such matters can be appropriately resolved. Any veriﬁcation system that approaches self-declaration cannot be considered to be robust at any level, and should not be contemplated for seafood ecolabeling or certiﬁcation. To be accepted as lacking in motivational bias, certiﬁers and their expert assessors must be independent of the seafood business concerned, of the technical and research community that supports the speciﬁc type of seafood, and of any government agency with an interest in management or research in that seafood. This usually means that a fully independent assessment comprises experts from other countries, although in some circumstances, specialist local knowledge may also be important to provide the background, history, specialist species knowledge, or local language support. Alternatively, as in the Blue Angel program, an expert jury may be used in place of a third-party certiﬁer to make an objective assessment of the product to ensure that it complies with the standards and criteria. In this case, the experience, standing and credentials of the jury are the basis for providing the independence and quality of the veriﬁcation system. An independent jury of experts may also provide a more cost-effective approach to veriﬁcation, avoiding many of the issues associated with the use of third-party certiﬁers (Ward 2008b). Transparency and accountability are also key features of a good veriﬁcation system. Data and knowledge used as the basis for decisions should be made publicly available, as a means of ensuring that issues can be publicly debated and considered. In this way, assumptions, models, and conclusions can also be reviewed and challenged as necessary to provide for robust debate over any contestable areas of interpretation.

46.8. EFFECTIVENESS OF ECOLABELING PROGRAMS Ecolabeling and certiﬁcation systems generally focus on four important aspects of ﬁshing and its impacts: (1) the status of the stocks of target species; (2) the impacts on nontarget species, habitats ﬁshed, and associated ecosystems; (3) the impacts on sensitive or protected species; and (4) the way in which the ﬁshery system is managed for sustainability purposes. If an ecolabeling program is to be effective, it will therefore be in these four key areas where effectiveness should be evident, and each of

Seafood Ecolabeling these could form the basis of summary advice to consumers about the ﬁndings of the veriﬁcation process. The MSC program has been responsible for achieving a signiﬁcant reduction in the bycatch of albatross in the South Georgia toothﬁsh ﬁshery, one of the few veriﬁable environmental achievements of the MSC program (Agnew 2008, Ward 2008a). While the incentive to reduce ﬁshery bycatch of important species, such as seabirds, is clearly enhanced by the MSC program, demonstrating a causal link is much more difﬁcult, even in a situation where bycatch is falling. The reducing bycatch of Australian sea lions in the western rock lobster ﬁshery has been attributed to the effects of the MSC program (Agnew et al. 2006), but the primary driver for the reduction was the listing of the species as protected under Australian law, which happened prior to the MSC intervention. The MSC ecolabel has other critical issues with the veriﬁcation system for environmental impacts, and it has been concluded (Ward 2008b) that this is a major ﬂaw in the program that substantially degrades its overall effectiveness as a tool to encourage environmental improvements in ﬁsheries. When the major global program struggles to demonstrate any real effect on management in the ecolabeled ﬁsh stocks or increased protection of ocean ecosystems and protected species, it is hard to accept that even weaker ecolabeling or certiﬁcation programs are achieving more robust environmental outcomes. Consumers will gradually become aware of these weaknesses, and the producers and their ecolabeling programs themselves will need to be well positioned to argue their case to consumers that their ecolabeled products are indeed more environmentally friendly then those not so labeled. At this time, this seems a questionable assertion. Why then would any producer wish to engage with an ecolabel system? Put simply, while there is at present very little demonstrated evidence that consumers can rely on, the seafood ecolabeling market phenomenon is accelerating based on the promise of good outcomes, irrespective of demonstrated achievements. This pattern parallels that of other ecolabeling systems (nonseafood) that appear to be market successes even though they appear to achieve very little in terms of environmental improvements (Rotherham 2005). Even after several decades, such ecolabels appear to be prospering without the demonstrated environmental achievements to assure consumers.

615

46.9. ECOLABELING IN FISHERIES IN THE FUTURE Seafood producers considering ecolabeling and certiﬁcation for their product have a vast array of potential forms of product endorsements at their disposal. Choosing from among the various forms, such as the government systems (most of which are effectively mandatory within each national jurisdiction, e.g., the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, www.environment. gov.au/coasts/ﬁsheries/index.html, the Australian national process regulating the provision of export approvals for seafood), the voluntary systems dominated by the ﬁshing industry (e.g., the MSC), the voluntary nongovernment systems dominated by environmental interests (e.g., the North Sea Alliance, www.seafoodchoices.org; or the Ocean Wise restaurant program, www.vanaqua.org/oceanwise) can pose a very signiﬁcant challenge. Among other key problems, the lead time and costs of securing a product endorsement vary greatly across these different types of programs, as well as within each type. How should a ﬁshing group decide which form of product endorsement is right for their products? The most efﬁcient and effective decision process will follow these steps: • Establish product-speciﬁc market objectives, based on marketing trials and pilot projects to determine the potential for higher prices, value-added products, product differentiation or new markets • Review data and information availability in the context of potential ecolabeling programs and their requirements, and the cost of upgrading such information in the context of the likelihood of securing the ecolabel • Secure support from within the industry, regulatory system, and stakeholders for pursuing an ecolabel • Conduct a preliminary assessment of a selected group of products to test the assumptions about data availability of the likelihood of securing the ecolabel In the MSC program, there is an increasing tendency to make veriﬁcations of compliance based on risk assessments. This is derived from the use of risk assessment in ﬁsh stock assessment, where deﬁned parameters and end points can be used

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

with some certainty to establish the risks of speciﬁc management policies or interventions. However, this is difﬁcult to translate effectively into assessment of the environmental issues in most ﬁsheries because there be are no equivalent agreed parameterizations of the problems, and almost no objective endpoints that can be established without very extensive species-by-species data and information. This means that, in assessing the risks of environmental impacts of ﬁshing, conclusions about speciﬁc risks are highly subjective, and usually controlled by the composition of the experts involved in determining the risks (Rice 2009), providing for potentially major motivational and frame-setting bias problems. While this can be mitigated to some extent through the use of highly experienced risk assessors, most ﬁsheries (and particularly smallscale community ﬁsheries) will not normally be able to afford the cost of such assessors. Therefore, while risk assessments offer a good framework for considering stock issues and managing ﬁsheries, they are not likely to provide for any better outcomes when considering environmental impact issues within ecolabeling or certiﬁcation programs for the majority of ﬁsheries. The diversity of potential ecolabel systems will increase in the coming years, and the choice of a program will inevitably be made based on the level of expected beneﬁts compared to the costs. Local communities of ﬁshers are increasingly forming collectives to take advantage of heightened consumer sensitization to seafood sustainability issues, and developing local-scale cost-effective labeling programs. In southern Mexico, a collective of six ﬁshing cooperatives ﬁshing for Panulirus argus, supported by philanthropic funding from the Alcoa Foundation, is marketing lobsters in Mexico with a label that certiﬁes the source of the lobsters, attesting to the provenance and providing data to ensure sustainability (ﬁgure 46.1c). In Australia, the Southern Fishermen’s Association, comprising 34 family businesses that ﬁsh in the Lakes and Coorong of South Australia ﬁshery, have recently, with assistance from WWF-Australia, secured MSC certiﬁcation for four of its products. With the increase in diversity of available labels, it is clear that for an ecolabel or certiﬁcation to have the desired effect of maintaining (or creating) market access and possibly securing price or supply advantages, consumers, and the intermediaries in the supply chain will need to be convinced on three key matters:

1. Scientiﬁc credibility of the criteria used in determining if the product warrants an ecolabel, providing reasonable assurance that the ﬁshery for the product is not contributing to overﬁshing or environmental degradation 2. Level of trust that can be placed by the consumer in the process used to verify that the product actually does comply with the criteria (the independent third-party veriﬁcation system) 3. Transparency and accountability of the ecolabeling/certiﬁcation process, to ensure that the inﬂuence of vested interests and motivational bias are kept to a minimum Within a decade, it seems unlikely that commercial wild capture ﬁsheries will be able to operate successfully in most countries without a form of certiﬁcation or ecolabel that indicates to consumers that at least some attention is being paid to environmental (and speciﬁcally ecological) issues. A similar situation will likely apply to farmed products from aquaculture facilities, although at present ecolabeling of aquaculture products is in its global infancy. We expect that these product endorsements will be many and varied, and it seems unlikely that there will be a major global dominance by just a few ecolabels unless they comprise regionally appropriate standards as a subset of some broader forms of environmental commitment. These broader levels of environmental commitment will likely be those propagated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the expression of these at the national level by the various national ﬁsheries management jurisdictions, and take speciﬁc account of differing national circumstances between the developed and developing nations. This will bring environmental issues in seafood production into line with the other major consumer concerns, such as assurance of food hygiene and safety issues, as matters to be routinely incorporated into the good business practice of well-managed ﬁsheries.

References Agnew, D. (2008). Case study 1: Toothﬁsh—an MSC-certiﬁed ﬁshery. Pp. 247–258 in Ward, T., and B. Phillips (eds), Seafood Ecolabelling Principles and Practice. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Agnew, D., C. Grieve, P. Orr, G. Parkes, and N. Barker (2006). Environmental Beneﬁts

Seafood Ecolabeling Resulting from Certiﬁcation against MSC’s Principles and Criteria for Sustainable Fishing. London: Marine Stewardship Council. Deere, C. (1999). Eco-labelling and Sustainable Fisheries. Washington, D.C.: World Conservation Union and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gilmore, J. (2008). Case study 3: MSC Certiﬁcation of the Alaska pollock ﬁshery. Pp. 269–285 in Ward, T., and B. Phillips (eds), Seafood Ecolabelling Principles and Practice. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. ISO (1999a). Environmental Labels and Declarations—Type I Environmental Labelling— Principles and Procedures. ISO/DIS 14024. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization. ISO (1999b). Environmental Labels and Declarations—Self-declared Environmental Claims (Type II Environmental Labelling). ISO/DIS 14021. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization. ISO (2006). Environmental Labels and Declarations—Type III Environmental Declarations— Principles and Procedures. ISO 14025:2006. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization. Leadbitter, D., and T. Ward (2007). An evaluation of systems for the integrated assessment of capture ﬁsheries. Marine Policy 31: 458–469. Müller, E. (2002). Environmental Labelling, Innovation and the Toolbox of Environmental Policy, Lessons Learned from the German Blue Angel Program, p. 38. Berlin: Federation of German Consumer Organisations. www. blauer-engel.de/downloads/EDDA-MuellerPapier.pdf

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Phillips, B.F., L. Bourillon, and M. Ramade (2008). Case study 2: The Baja California, Mexico, lobster ﬁshery. Pp. 259–267 in Ward, T., and B. Phillips (eds), Seafood Ecolabelling Principles and Practice. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Rice, J.C. (2009). A generalization of the three-stage model for advice using the precautionary approach in ﬁsheries, to apply broadly to ecosystem properties and pressures. ICES Journal of Marine Science 66: 433–444. Rotherham, T. (2005). The Trade and Environmental Effects of Ecolabels: Assessment and Response. Geneva: U.N. Environment Program. www. unep.ch/etb/publications/Ecolabelpap141005f. pdf Sutton, M., and L. Wimpee (2008). Towards sustainable seafood: The evolution of a conservation movement. Pp. 403–415 in Ward, T., and B. Phillips (eds), Seafood Ecolabelling Principles and Practice. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Ward, T.J. (2008a) Measuring the success of seafood ecolabelling. Pp. 207–243 in Ward, T., and B. Phillips (eds), Seafood Ecolabelling Principles and Practice. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Ward, T.J. (2008b). Barriers to biodiversity conservation in marine ﬁshery certiﬁcation. Fish and Fisheries 9: 169–177. Ward, T.J., and B.F. Phillips (2008). Ecolabelling of seafood: The basic concepts. Pp. 1–37 in Ward, T., and B. Phillips (eds), Seafood Ecolabelling Principles and Practice. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Wessells, C.R., R. Johnston, and H. Donath (1999). Assessing consumer preferences for ecolabeled seafood: The inﬂuence of species, certiﬁer, and household attributes. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 81: 1084–1089.

47 Can Voluntary Programs Reduce Sea Turtle Bycatch? Insights from the Literature in Environmental Economics KATHLEEN SEGERSON

47.1. INTRODUCTION Coastal populations have long valued sea turtles for both cultural and economic reasons (Campbell 2002). In many cultures they are a symbol of longevity, fertility, and strength. In addition, local populations use turtle-derived products, including turtle meat, eggs, shells, and leather. Sea turtles can also generate ecotourism revenues for local communities and are valued more generally simply for their existence and their ecological importance (Tisdell and Wilson 2001). However, all of the six species of sea turtles that live in the Paciﬁc Ocean are now classiﬁed as endangered, critically endangered, or vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of threatened species (IUCN 2003). The U.S. government is committed to protection of endangered species, including Paciﬁc sea turtles, and devotes considerable resources (both public and private) toward this end. A signiﬁcant threat to Paciﬁc sea turtles comes from the longline ﬁshing industry. Longline vessels targeting swordﬁsh incidentally interact with populations of leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles, resulting in incidental takes or bycatch and subsequent turtle mortality (Gilman et al. 2006a). A number of at-sea measures can be used to reduce turtle bycatch and mortality (Gilman et al. 2006b; Watson et al. 2005). They include gear modiﬁcations (e.g., replacing J hooks with circle hooks), bycatch response (e.g., using line cutters to release

hooked or entangled turtles), changes in set depth, and changes in ﬁshing location (e.g., area closures or avoidance of certain ﬁshing areas at times when turtles are likely to be present). Since actions to reduce sea turtle bycatch can be costly and hence reduce proﬁts for ﬁshing vessels, ﬁshers cannot be expected to adopt these measures on their own. Some protection measures (e.g., gear modiﬁcations) can be and have been mandated through regulation (see, e.g., Gilman et al. 2006a), but others (e.g., changes in set depths or ﬁshing locations) are less easily controlled this way. In addition, the use of area closures to protect turtle populations can be very costly (Curtis and Hicks 2000; Pradan and Leung 2006). As an alternative, policies based on taxes and ﬁnes can be used to provide incentives for ﬁshers to undertake protective measures and are generally more efﬁcient than area closures (Segerson 2007). However, regulatory or management agencies often lack the authority to impose these types of policies. Thus, rather than using a “stick” approach to reducing bycatch, these agencies may look to a “carrot” approach under which ﬁshers are induced to undertake protective measures voluntarily. This raises the question of whether, or under what conditions, initiatives that rely on voluntary actions by ﬁshers to ensure sea turtle protection are likely to be effective. A relatively recent literature in the ﬁeld of environmental economics suggests that voluntary approaches (VAs) to environmental protection can

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Can Voluntary Programs Reduce Sea Turtle Bycatch be effective under certain conditions even when protective measures are costly (see Alberini and Segerson 2002; Khanna 2001; Lyon and Maxwell 2002). This literature has arisen in response to a growing interest over the last two decades in using VAs instead of regulation or taxation as a means of reducing pollution, both in the United States and elsewhere (see, e.g., Baranzini and Thalmann 2004; Blackman 2008; Carraro and Lévêque 1999; Croci 2005; Daley 2007; Dietz and Stern 2002; Morgenstern and Pizer 2007; Sullivan 2005). It suggests, for example, that incentives for voluntary protection can exist when environmentally conscious consumers are willing to pay more for products produced in environmentally friendly ways, or when governments threaten to impose more costly regulatory actions or restrictions if VAs are not successful in meeting protection targets. In addition, ﬁrms can be induced to undertake protective actions through direct ﬁnancial incentives. Incentives can be created either at the level of an individual ﬁrm or for a group of ﬁrms or entire industry. In the case of group incentives, issues of “free-riding” can arise and need to be addressed. The literature on VAs seeks to evaluate their use both theoretically and empirically. Most of this literature has focused on evaluating VAs designed to reduce various forms of pollution. However, VAs have also been used to promote conservation (see, e.g., Casey et al. 2006), and part (albeit a small part) of the scholarly literature on VAs has focused on their use in the context of conservation. Since the pollution and conservation contexts are similar in many respects, the pollution-related literature on VAs can provide insights into the use of VAs for conservation, including protection of marine species. Nonetheless, the marine context creates some additional challenges for the successful use of VAs. This chapter examines the likely effectiveness of using VAs to reduce incidental bycatch of sea turtles. It provides an overview of VAs, summarizes some of the lessons learned from the general literature (both theoretical and empirical) on the use of VAs to control pollution, and identiﬁes insights from the existing literature that can be applied to the case of sea turtle protection.1 It discusses important issues in the design of VAs, followed by a discussion of the factors that are likely to inﬂuence the success of using a VA. It concludes with some reﬂections on the potential for using VAs to reduce incidental bycatch of Paciﬁc sea turtles by longline ﬁshers.

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47.2. DESIGN ISSUES FOR VOLUNTARY APPROACHES The term “voluntary approach” typically refers to a policy or activity that takes one of the following forms: (1) unilateral initiatives by ﬁrms or industries, often called “self-regulation”; (2) negotiated bilateral or multilateral agreements (e.g., among ﬁrms, regulators, and nongovernmental organizations); and (3) public voluntary programs, under which a government entity establishes eligibility and participation requirements and then individual eligible ﬁrms choose to participate or not (Carraro and Lévêque 1999). While theses different forms vary in terms of how abatement requirements are set, they all share a common characteristic, namely, that participation is not compulsory and cannot be enforced by law. In other words, ﬁrms choose to participate, and presumably only do so when they feel that participation is in their best interest as they deﬁne it.2 In designing a VA, three dimensions or characteristics are important: (1) what motivates individuals or ﬁrms to participate, (2) the level at which the voluntary requirements associated with participation are deﬁned (e.g., behavior vs. performance), and (3) whether the VA is based on individual or group behavior/performance.

47.2.1. Participation Incentives Broadly speaking, the possible motives for participation can be categorized as follows: 1. Environmental Stewardship. Parties can be motivated to voluntarily take actions solely on the basis of personal conviction and concern about environmental protection or conservation. This is more likely to be a motivation for individuals than for ﬁrms or other business entities. For example, individuals concerned about sea turtles may be motivated to volunteer to assist with activities to protect them, such as nesting site protection or restoration.3 2. Market-Based Incentives. In some cases, ﬁrms might undertake voluntary actions in response to incentives in either their output or their input markets. For example, when consumers are willing to pay more for products that embody environmental or conservation concerns (e.g., dolphin-safe tuna—see

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Teisl et al. 2002), ﬁrms may seek to supply these products in an effort to increase market share and proﬁts. Similarly, ﬁrms can respond to pressure from consumers or input suppliers (e.g., through capital markets) to improve their environmental or conservation performance, in order to reduce the likelihood of negative events (e.g., boycotts, legal liability, or damage to public image) that can be triggered by poor performance.4 3. Incentives payments. When market incentives are not sufﬁciently strong to induce voluntary actions, governments or other organizations (e.g., environmental or conservation-oriented nongovernmental organizations) can induce voluntary pollution abatement or conservation through the use of incentive payments, that is, payments made to parties (individuals or ﬁrms) in exchange for some speciﬁed action or the provision of some service.5 In the conservation context, these payments are most commonly made to landowners. However, incentive payment schemes have also been used to encourage local populations to protect sea turtle nests and in one case to reduce turtle kills from bycatch (Ferraro 2007).6 The use of incentive payments requires that sufﬁcient ﬁnancial resources be available and, depending on how they are structured, can induce entry into activities that they seek to control (Baumol and Oates 1988). 4. Regulatory Threats. As an alternative to incentive payments, which can be viewed as positive incentives or “carrots,” governments can seek to motivate voluntary action through the use of “sticks,” that is, threats to impose a more costly regulatory or tax-based policy if voluntary actions prove insufﬁcient to achieve environmental or conservation objectives.7 Threats can also relate to closure of ﬁshing areas or entire ﬁsheries if conservation-related targets are not met. 5. Beneﬁts from Cooperation. In contexts where individuals or ﬁrms face a “prisoner’s dilemma,” they might collectively engage in voluntary actions in an effort to improve the outcome for the group as a whole and hence the individuals or ﬁrms within the group. This potential might simply stem from an oligopolistic market structure (see, e.g., Ahmed and Segerson 2008). Alternatively, voluntary cooperative arrangements can arise from a desire to better manage a resource that generates income but suffers from a “tragedy

of the commons” problem. For example, voluntary collaborative management can be used to address open access problems that can lead to overﬁshing (Pinto da Silva and Kitts 2006).

47.2.2. Behavior- versus Performance-Based VAs As noted above, all VAs impose certain requirements on participants. Broadly speaking, requirements can be deﬁned either in terms of required behaviors, actions, or practices (behavior-based VAs) or in terms of a performance standard (performance-based VAs). For example, a voluntary program designed to protect whales in the northeast region of the United States speciﬁes voluntary guidelines governing speed limits for whale watching vessels as they approach whales (Wiley et al. 2008). Similarly, a voluntary program in Wisconsin established a “voluntary waterfowl avoidance area” in Lake Onalaska and asked lake users to avoid the area voluntarily to reduce disturbance to waterfowl (Kenow et al. 2003). These VAs specify behaviors, and voluntary compliance is deﬁned simply in terms of adherence to these behavioral standards. In the context of sea turtles, a behavior-based VA might specify voluntary guidelines on ﬁshing practices (e.g., gear type, set depth, or location choices). Alternatively, a VA can set performance targets and compliance (and the associated rewards or punishments) can be deﬁned in terms of whether those targets were met. In an environmental context, performance could be deﬁned in terms of emissions or ambient environmental quality (e.g., air or water quality). In the context of species conservation, performance targets could be deﬁned at a variety of levels, including targets for habitat or nest protection, bycatch reduction, or, ultimately, species populations. As a general rule, performance standards are more efﬁcient than behavioral (or design) standards, and, ceteris paribus, standards set at “higher levels” (i.e., at a level more directly linked to the ultimate objective) are more efﬁcient than standards set at “lower levels.”8 For example, if the ultimate goal is a target level for a sea turtle population, then in principle a target set at this level would be more efﬁcient than a target based on factors that contribute to, but do not fully determine, turtle populations (e.g., the number of turtle nests protected or the type of gear used in longline or trawl ﬁshing). Setting a performance target based on the ultimate

Can Voluntary Programs Reduce Sea Turtle Bycatch goal allows the greatest ﬂexibility in determining the most cost-effective means of meeting the target or goal. However, often a trade-off exists in determining the level at which a standard is set or whether the standard is based on behavior or performance, for at least three reasons. The ﬁrst is monitoring or tracking: depending on the context, the cost of monitoring voluntary compliance with a high level target may be greater.9 For example, the cost of accurately monitoring actual sea turtle populations might be greater than the cost of monitoring the number of nesting sites or the type of ﬁshing gear used in a given ﬁshery. Thus, while in principle it might be preferable to set a target at the highest level, determining whether such a target is met might face signiﬁcant challenges. Second, when the impact of behavioral choices on a high-level target is difﬁcult to ascertain with certainty (because it depends on a number of other factors as well, including random variation), setting targets at levels that are too far removed from individual behavioral decisions might make voluntary compliance with the target difﬁcult to determine (especially when links involve long lag times) and hence dampen incentives.10 Third, when individuals or ﬁrms making behavioral decisions cannot fully control whether the high-level targets are met, basing a VA on those targets will subject the potential participants to risks that are outside their control. If they are risk averse, then subjecting potential participants to this risk can have negative welfare effects, through its effect on both risk sharing and the incentives for behavioral change.11

47.2.3. Individual versus Group VAs VAs can also be distinguished on the basis of whether the design or performance standards are applied to individuals (including individual ﬁrms) or to a speciﬁed group. As noted above, incentives for participation in VAs can be based on rewards or threats of punishment, and these can be based on voluntary compliance by an individual (implying a reward or punishment for that individual) or by the group (implying a reward or punishment for the group as a whole, with implications for the individuals or ﬁrms in the group). For example, recent studies by Segerson and Wu (2006) and Dawson and Segerson (2008) have examined voluntary

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group mechanisms to control environmental externalities. The basic policy approach entails setting an aggregate performance target for a group of polluters and then charging the group with responsibility for meeting the target (or incurring some penalty for failure to do so). In principle, this is similar to the allocation of some portion of a total allowable catch (TAC) to a group or cooperative, which is then responsible for collectively adhering to the limits imposed on the group (see Pinto da Silva and Kitts 2006). Likewise, it is similar to the imposition of industry-level limits related to bycatch control or protection of endangered species such as sea turtles or sea lions (see Jensen et al. 2004; Segerson 2007). An example of group punishment in the context of sea turtle bycatch was the 2006 closure of the longline swordﬁsh industry in Hawaii when aggregate turtle interactions exceeded the total allowable number set for the industry as a whole (Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council 2006).

47.3. SUCCESS OF VOLUNTARY APPROACHES Measuring whether a VA has been effective or successful in promoting environmental protection or conservation is often very difﬁcult. It requires comparison of an observed outcome with a counterfactual (hypothetical) outcome, such as the outcome that would have occurred under an alternative policy or no policy at all.12 Nonetheless, there is a growing theoretical and empirical literature seeking to evaluate VAs (see references above). This literature paints a mixed picture regarding the effectiveness and efﬁciency13 of VAs. In some cases or under some conditions they are found to be effective (and even efﬁcient) while in other cases they are not. There is, however, some consensus on conditions that seem to be necessary (although perhaps not sufﬁcient) for success. These include the following: • Sufﬁciently strong participation incentives • Clearly identiﬁed standards for behavior or performance • Sufﬁcient monitoring to determine voluntary compliance with those standards These features are necessary regardless of the type of VA. For example, they apply to VAs targeted at

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individuals (or individual ﬁrms) as well as those targeted at groups. In the case of group VAs, though, in addition to the above conditions, it is also necessary to address the potential for free-riding to determine whether this is likely to undermine the effectiveness or efﬁciency of the approach. Clearly, in the absence of strong participation incentives, VAs cannot succeed. As noted above, participation incentives can take a variety of forms, and the strength of each will generally vary with the context. For example, environmental stewardship might be an important motivator for individuals who volunteer their time or money for conservation efforts such as sea turtle conservation (Bradford and Israel 2004). In addition, environmental stewardship, coupled with clear voluntary standards and monitoring, was likely responsible for high rates of compliance with the “voluntary waterfowl avoidance area” observed among boats involved in hunting, pleasure boating, and canoeing in Lake Onalaska (Kenow et al. 2003). However, stewardship is unlikely to be sufﬁcient motivation for ﬁrms or other individuals or organizations whose income stream would be diminished by such efforts. For example, Rachlinski (1998) found that landowner stewardship was not sufﬁcient to protect endangered plants. Clearly, stewardship alone is not solving most of the world’s conservation problems. The potential for VAs to arise from marketbased incentives will depend, among other things, on the nature of the product and consumer demand. The successful use of consumer boycotts to reduce drastically the use of dolphin-deadly tuna ﬁshing techniques illustrates the potential for the power of market forces to induce conservation-oriented changes on a wide scale. However, the success of the tuna boycott stems from the combination of a number of factors (see Earth Island Institute, earthisland.org/immp/; Teisl et al. 2002): • A concerted effort by an organized group dedicated to the cause (in this case, the Earth Island Institute’s International Marine Mammal Project) • A clear delineation of standards for dolphinsafe tuna that could be readily met by ﬁshers • Consumer willingness to pay more for tuna harvested according to these standards • An effective monitoring system using onvessel observers to verify compliance with the standards

Whether these conditions could be replicated for, for example, “turtle-safe swordﬁsh” is an open question. The existing on-vessel observer system in the Hawaiian longline ﬁshery would allow for relatively easy monitoring in this ﬁshery, but widespread application across other ﬁsheries, particularly in developing countries, would likely require signiﬁcant investment in monitoring capacity. In addition, while it may be possible for tuna ﬁshers to avoid dolphin kills by not using encircling techniques, there is no simple control mechanism to ensure longline harvesting of swordﬁsh without incidental turtle bycatch. In other words, while efforts by ﬁshers (e.g., changing gear, set depths, and ﬁshing locations) can reduce the likelihood or incidence of bycatch, even “conscientious” ﬁshers may not be able to avoid bycatch altogether (thereby ensuring their product can be labeled “turtle-safe”).14 Even without events such as actual or threatened boycotts, ﬁrms might still be willing to participate in VAs if they view it as an opportunity to proactively establish a reputation or secure an input or output market so as to increase proﬁts. For example, in Costa Rica successful voluntary agreements relating to watershed protection have been negotiated between private hydropower companies and environmental nongovernmental organizations (Miranda et al. 2007). The companies were apparently motivated by a desire to secure access to the water quantity and quality necessary to sustain their proﬁts over time. Incentive payments have been successfully used to induce participation in a number of voluntary conservation programs. For example, conservation programs for farmers in the United States, such as the Conservation Reserve Program and the Wetlands Reserve Program, have relied on incentive schemes in the form of compensation payments to landowners aimed at changing land use decisions or practices.15 Payment schemes have also been successfully used to protect land-based endangered species (Langpap 2006), and the Costa Rican watershed protection voluntary agreements noted above involve incentive payments to landowners (Miranda et al. 2007). While most incentive payments are based on individual behavior or targets, rewards of this type can be applied to groups as a whole as well. For example, Collins and Maille (2008) describe a ﬁeld experiment in which a group of farmers are being collectively rewarded for voluntary improvements in water quality.

Can Voluntary Programs Reduce Sea Turtle Bycatch Ferraro (2007) documents the apparently successful use of incentive payments to protect nesting sea turtles, and in one case to reduce mortality from turtle bycatch. However, to ensure effectiveness, incentive payments need to be tied closely to clearly identiﬁed and monitored targets for behavior or performance; that is, they should directly support actions closely linked to goals (Ferraro and Simpson 2002). In the one example of incentive payments related to bycatch, the incentive payments are tied to release of turtles. Thus, as Ferraro (2007) notes, while they encourage releases that reduce mortality from bycatch, they do not provide incentives for reductions in bycatch per se (through, e.g., changes in ﬁshing techniques). The use of incentive payments directly tied to bycatch reduction would require some means of on-vessel monitoring, coupled with rewards to ﬁshers for levels below some target (see further discussion below). Numerous examples where regulatory threats appear to have encouraged VAs exist, as well (e.g., Davies and Mazurek 1996; Khanna and Damon 1999; Lyon and Maxwell 2002; Videras and Alberini 2000). In addition to inducing participation in voluntary programs, in some cases regulatory pressures appear to also encourage changes in overall business practices (Anton et al. 2004). Studies demonstrating these results have been primarily in the context of environmental protection by industries, rather than in the context of conservation. The extent to which incentives for cooperation can lead to successful VAs is still uncertain, despite the potential gains from the use of cooperative management approaches, especially for harvest control.16 For example, Kitts et al. (2007) question whether the beneﬁts and incentives for cooperation received by members of the Montauk Tileﬁsh Association will be sufﬁcient to sustain collaborative resource management in the long run. Likewise, Matulich et al. (2001) note that VAs such as the cooperatives authorized under the American Fisheries Act of 1998 can have unintended consequences that impede efﬁciency, and that constraints imposed, for example, by the need to protect endangered species (e.g., sea lions), can affect the equilibrium that emerges. In a ﬁeld experiment in Japan involving ﬁshers, ﬁsh wholesalers, and staff at a local ﬁshing coop, Carpenter and Seki (2006) found that the extent of cooperation varied with the amount of competition within the groups. Both Carpenter and Seki (2006) and Kitts et al. (2007)

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note the importance of social factors in determining the extent of cooperation. As noted above, VAs that set targets at the group level are similar to policies that set a TAC at an industry or group level or to policies that set a limit on industrywide turtle interactions (as in the Hawaiian longline swordﬁsh industry). While such policies can promote cooperation, they can also create incentives for free-riding. In order for such approaches to be successful, they must somehow address free-rider incentives. Recent theoretical literature shows that free-rider incentives in group VAs do not necessarily undermine the effectiveness of the VA. For example, Segerson and Wu (2006) and Dawson and Segerson (2008) show that group VAs can be effective in meeting exogenously set targets, despite the presence of free-riding within the group.17 However, the presence of free-riding does reduce the efﬁciency of the VA, since abatement efforts are not allocated efﬁciently across all contributing polluters. In addition, concerns about free-riding can hinder efforts to fund conservation programs related, for example, to nesting site protection through voluntary contributions by individual ﬁshers (see chapter 17). Weersink et al. (1998) and Shortle and Horan (2001) suggest that group policies are more likely to work well when (1) the group is small, (2) members of the group are relatively homogeneous, (3) group outcomes can be well monitored, and (4) the time lag between individual decisions and the resulting impact on the target is relatively short. A growing literature in experimental economics has also examined the effectiveness and efﬁciency of group policies, motivated in most cases by the potential for application of these types of policies in the context of agricultural nonpoint source pollution (e.g., Poe et al. 2004; Spraggon 2002, 2004; Suter et al. 2008a, 2008b; Vossler et al. 2006). The results from these experiments suggest that, despite the presence of free-riding (and the associated inefﬁciency), group policies can be effective in meeting aggregate targets under certain conditions.18 Factors inﬂuencing the outcome include (1) whether the setting is noncooperative or cooperative; (2) when noncooperative, whether the speciﬁc policy has a unique or multiple Nash equilibria; and (3) under collusion, whether the policy involves subsidy payments or not. For example, experiments show that in a noncooperative setting policies with multiple equilibria (e.g., forcing contracts) are not very effective,

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presumably because of coordination problems (Spraggon 2002). “Continuous” policies with marginal rewards and/or penalties appear to be more effective. Furthermore, in a cooperative setting with communication and collusion, group policies that involve rewards (subsidies) generally lead to overabatement (Vossler et al. 2006). This suggests that group VAs based on incentive payments could result in “excessive” conservation if ﬁrms within the group collude, unless the parameters of the policy are adjusted to offset this incentive.19 Policies that involve only “sticks” and no “carrots” do not suffer from this problem. Suter et al. (2008b) looked speciﬁcally at the performance of a VA that involved the threat of imposition of an ambient tax if an exogenous target was not met voluntarily. Their experiments show that the VA was very effective (i.e., the target was met nearly 100 percent of the time) when individuals within the groups were allowed to communicate. However, when communication was barred, the VA was effective only when the punishment threat was very severe. Closure of a ﬁshery is a form of punishment that would be viewed by most ﬁshers as severe, especially if it occurred early in the season. Faced with this type of threat, evidence suggests that ﬁshers can face strong incentives to cooperate in efforts to meet a collective bycatch limit. Gilman et al. (2006c) describe three case studies where aggregate bycatch caps led to the use of ﬂeet communication systems designed to identify bycatch “hotspots” and track aggregate bycatch. By providing this information to vessels within the ﬂeet, vessel owners could take actions to reduce bycatch and thereby reduce the possibility of exceeding the cap and facing closures. Although evaluation of the effectiveness of these voluntary ﬂeet communication systems is difﬁcult because of the existence of confounding factors, Gilman et al. (2006c) suggest that four factors contributed to the likelihood of success: • Strong economic incentives to reduce bycatch (caused, e.g., by a severe threat such as closure) • Incidental bycatch that is a fairly rare event (e.g., sea turtle interactions) • Sufﬁcient monitoring through, for example, on-vessel observers • Existence of a ﬁshery association or other industry group when the ﬂeet is large

These conditions closely parallel the conditions for successful VAs identiﬁed above. The above discussion suggests that, when the conditions given above are met, VAs can be successful in meeting environmental or conservation targets. However, it is equally important to recognize that, when these conditions do not hold, a VA is not likely to be effective. For example, King and Lenox (2000) examine environmental performance of participants in the chemical industry’s Responsible Care program. This was an industrywide VA designed to improve the public image and reputation of the chemical industry. King and Lenox argue that the disappointing performance results for program participants stem from the program’s lack of both credible monitoring to determine compliance with its guiding principles and practices and explicit sanctions for failure to comply. These features of the program create an incentive for individual ﬁrms to free-ride on any reputational beneﬁts that the industry as a whole might gain through the creation of the program. A second example in the context of conservation is the voluntary conservation program for whale watching in the northeast region of the United States. This program establishes voluntary guidelines for vessel speeds within speciﬁed distances of whales. A recent study of compliance with the guidelines found widespread violations, suggesting the VA was not achieving its goal of reducing harassment of endangered whales (Wiley et al. 2008). The program appears to have lacked any real incentive for vessel operators to abide by the voluntary guidelines, as well as any meaningful means of monitoring compliance.20 Absent these, it is not surprising that the program has been relatively ineffective. Rivera et al. (2006) drew similar conclusions about the Sustainable Slopes Program for ski areas in the western United States. This is a voluntary program aimed at improving environmental protection, wildlife and habitat management, and resource (energy and water) conservation. While program participants have superior performance in resource conservation, their ﬁndings suggest that the program has not been effective in promoting environmental protection or wildlife and habitat management. They attribute this to the lack of explicit performance standards, independent monitoring for compliance with program principles, and sanctions for noncompliance. Without these, ﬁrms can beneﬁt from any public image or reputational gains

Can Voluntary Programs Reduce Sea Turtle Bycatch associated with participation in the program without incurring the costs of meaningful compliance. Finally, although Gilman et al. (2006c) describe three case studies where ﬂeets appear to have successfully cooperated voluntarily in efforts to meet aggregate bycatch caps, Gauvin et al. (1995) report that free-riding by one company in the North Paciﬁc yellowﬁn sole ﬁshery undermined the success of a voluntary bycatch reduction program in that ﬁshery. This was apparently due to the high cost (in terms of reductions in harvests of the target species) resulting from avoidance measures. When avoidance costs are high, participation incentives are reduced, and free-riding is likely to be more problematic. The discussion above suggests a number of factors that the theoretical and empirical literature identiﬁes as important for the success of a VA for either environmental protection or conservation. Although some of the empirical evidence for these conclusions is derived from VAs that have been tried in conservation contexts, most of the theoretical literature is focused on environmental protection.21 Nonetheless, it suggests some general conclusions, which are summarized in the following section.

47.4. CONCLUSION Regulators have recently looked increasingly to VAs as a means to achieve environmental protection and conservation goals. This has spurred both a theoretical and an empirical literature on the effectiveness and efﬁciency of VAs. While most of this literature has been in the context of environmental protection, it has implications for the use of VAs in the context of conservation as well. The VA literature suggests three key conditions inﬂuencing the likely success of a VA: (1) sufﬁciently strong participation incentives, (2) clearly identiﬁed standards for behavior or performance, and (3) sufﬁcient monitoring to determine voluntary compliance with those standards. In addition, for group VAs, the potential for free-riding exists. While the existence of free-riding does not necessarily imply that a VA will be unsuccessful, it will generally reduce the efﬁciency of the policy. What conclusions can be drawn from this about the potential for using VAs to reduce sea turtle bycatch in the Paciﬁc longline swordﬁsh industry? There appear to be two potentially promising avenues for using VAs in this context. The ﬁrst builds

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on the existing regulatory aggregate bycatch limits on leatherback and loggerhead turtles and the closure of the ﬁshery when either limit is exceeded. This constitutes a serious threat to vessels and provides a strong motivation for bycatch reduction. In addition, the 100 percent observer coverage allows aggregate bycatch to be monitored accurately, and the consequences of exceeding the aggregate limits are clear. Thus, the three conditions for a successful VA noted above hold. Given this, voluntary bycatch reduction efforts supported by a ﬂeet communication system similar to those described in Gilman et al. (2006c) appear promising. However, success of such an approach requires a means of preventing (or at least controlling) free-riding. If information about bycatch by individual vessels is shared, peer pressure might be an effective means for controlling free-riding incentives. A second approach, suggested in Segerson (2008), would be based on the bycatch performance of individual vessels rather than the ﬁshery as a whole. Vessel-level bycatch targets could be established, and incentive payments could be used to encourage compliance with these targets. Again, all three of the conditions for a successful VA would hold under this approach as well. In addition, free-riding would be eliminated. The incentive payments could take the form of a ﬁxed payment if the bycatch level is at or below the target. However, this would require some means of ﬁnancing these incentive payments. Alternatively, a combined approach could be used, under which ﬁrms receive incentive payments when bycatch is at or below their target and pay ﬁnes for bycatch levels above the target. Fines in periods of high bycatch could be used to ﬁnance incentive payments when bycatch is low. Because of the small numbers problem, targets could be deﬁned over multiple periods. Either of these approaches could provide incentives for ﬁrms within the ﬁshery to voluntarily undertake actions aimed at reducing turtle bycatch. Although signiﬁcant reductions in bycatch have already been realized through regulation (most notably, required changes in gear and bait), further improvements are likely to come through avoidance activities that are less easily regulated (e.g., changes in ﬁshing location). This suggests that policy approaches that create incentives for ﬁrms to undertake such efforts voluntarily in an effort to achieve bycatch reduction goals are likely to be an important means of protecting Paciﬁc sea turtle populations in the future.

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Notes 1. An expanded version of this chapter (Segerson 2008) describes a simple modeling framework that can be used to examine the incentives created by alternative VAs and to identify policy designs that are likely to be most effective. This framework builds on the models of VAs developed previously to study problems of air and water pollution (e.g., Dawson and Segerson 2008; Segerson and Jones 2004; Segerson and Miceli 1998; Segerson and Wu 2006) and adapts these models to the longline ﬁshing industry. 2. Of course, ﬁrms can differ in their goals for voluntary or collective actions. See, for example, Pinto da Silva and Kitts (2006). 3. Many opportunities for this type of activity exist. See Bradford and Israel (2004) for an interesting survey of volunteer motivation for a sea turtle conservation program in Florida. 4. For example, a call for a consumer boycott of tuna caused some of the major processing ﬁrms to stop purchasing, processing, and selling tuna that was not caught using “dolphin-safe” ﬁshing techniques. This, in turn, led to voluntary adoption of these techniques by a number of ﬁshers (see www.eurocbc.org/page322.html). There have also been calls for boycotts related to sea turtle protection. See, for example, Peter and Peter (1990). 5. Recently, the use of incentive payments of this type has been viewed as the creation of a “market for ecosystem services” (see, e.g., Pagiola et al. 2002; Ferraro and Kiss 2002). Prior to this, such incentive payments were typically simply viewed as subsidies (e.g., Baumol and Oates 1988). 6. For an exchange on evaluating the use of incentive payments in this context, see Ferraro (2005, 2006) and Pritchard (2006). 7. In some cases, a regulation is already in place and participants in a voluntary program are provided an exemption to, or ﬂexibility in meeting, the regulation. An example is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Project XL, which allowed businesses and communities to develop innovative projects for achieving environmental goals in exchange for regulatory ﬂexibility or relief (www. epa.gov/ProjectXL/ﬁle2.htm). 8. This is a general result that would apply whether the policy is based on a VA or regulation. For discussions in the context of regulation, see, for example, Besanko (1987) and Burtraw (1996). 9. It is also possible that this cost could be lower. For example, in the nonpoint pollution context where multiple farmers contribute to water pollution in a given lake, it might be cheaper to monitor ambient water quality in the lake than to monitor daily activities of all of the farmers in the watershed that contribute to that quality. See Segerson and

Wu (2006) for a discussion of VAs in the context of nonpoint agricultural pollution. 10. Pritchard (2006) provides a convincing case for this concern in the context of incentive programs for sea turtle protection. 11. For a related discussion in the context of environmental protection, see Segerson (1987). 12. See Ferraro (2005, 2006) and Pritchard (2006) for commentaries on these difﬁculties in the context of sea turtle protection. 13. See Segerson and Miceli (1998) and Alberini and Segerson (2002) for discussions relating to evaluating VAs based on effectiveness versus efﬁciency. 14. This might be easier for other ﬁsheries. For example, shrimp ﬁshers may be able to designate their products as “turtle-safe” by properly using turtle excluder devices to ensure that any incidental bycatch is safely released. 15. For a recent overview of funding for agricultural conservation programs, see Zinn (2007). For a general description of federal conservation incentive programs, see www.biodiversitypartners. org/incentives/programfed.shtml. 16. Cooperative industrywide voluntary agreements have also been used to reduce or eliminate production of polluting products. These include the highly acclaimed European voluntary agreements on appliances. However, recently the industry group that initiated these agreements has chosen not to renew them and called instead for the government to use mandatory efﬁciency standards to ensure further improvements in energy efﬁciency. While cooperation in the decision not to produce inefﬁcient products may have been in the collective interest of the ﬁrms within the industry, it appears that lack of adequate monitoring and freeriding undermined the industry’s support for this approach. See Ahmed and Segerson (2008) for a discussion of these VAs. 17. Segerson and Wu (2006) show this in the context of agricultural pollution (using the concept of a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium), while Dawson and Segerson (2008) demonstrate a similar result in the context of industrial pollution (using the concept of a self-enforcing equilibrium). 18. This occurs because some individuals overabate, which offsets the underabatement by other individuals (free-riders). This result is consistent with theoretical predictions. See, for example, Segerson and Wu (2006) and Dawson and Segerson (2008). 19. While this result has been shown both theoretically and in the lab, it remains to be seen whether it will hold in the ﬁeld. For an interesting ﬁeld experiment that could shed some light on how farmers behave in such a setting, see Collins and Maille (2008). 20. Wiley et al. (2008) collected compliance data by placing unidentiﬁed observers (acting as

Can Voluntary Programs Reduce Sea Turtle Bycatch paying customers) onboard vessels. This was not part of a systematic monitoring effort known to operators. In contrast, Scarpaci et al. (2003) report data collected from on-vessel observers monitoring compliance with “swim-with-dolphins” regulations in Australia. They also found evidence of high levels of noncompliance. In this case, however, regulations governing approach methods and duration of interaction existed, but there was apparently no enforcement of these regulations. 21. The limited theoretical literature that exists in the conservation context primarily deals with land-based conservation and landowner incentives for habitat conservation. See, for example, Polasky and Doremus (1998), Parkhurst and Shogren (2003), and Langpap and Wu (2004). References Ahmed, R., and K. Segerson (2008). Collective Voluntary Agreements: Toward Greener Markets. Working paper, Department of Economics, University of Connecticut. Alberini, A., and K. Segerson (2002). Assessing voluntary programs to improve environmental quality. Environmental and Resource Economics 22: 157–184. Anton, W.R.Q., G. Deltas, and M. Khanna (2004). Incentives for environmental self-regulation and implications for environmental performance. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 48(1): 632–654. Baranzini, A., and P. Thalmann (eds) (2004). Voluntary Approaches in Climate Policy. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar. Baumol, W.J., and W.E. Oates (1988). The Theory of Environmental Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Besanko, D. (1987). Performance versus design standards in the regulation of pollution. Journal of Public Economics 34(1): 19–44. Blackman, A. (2008). Can voluntary environmental regulation work in developing countries? Lessons from case studies. The Policy Studies Journal 36(1): 119–141. Bradford, B.M., and G.D. Israel (2004). Evaluating Volunteer Motivation for Sea Turtle Conservation in Florida. IFAS Extension, AEC 372. Gainesville: University of Florida. Burtraw, D. (1996). The SO2 emissions trading program: Cost savings without allowance trading. Contemporary Economic Policy 14(2): 79–94. Campbell, L.M. (2002). Contemporary culture, use, and conservation of sea turtles. In Lutz, P.L., J.A. Musick, and J. Wyneken (eds), The Biology of Sea Turtles. Vol. 2. Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press.

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Carpenter, J.P., and E. Seki (2006). Competitive work environments and social preferences: Field experimental evidence from a Japanese ﬁshing community. Contributions to Economic Analysis and Policy 5(2), article 2 (Berkeley Electronic Press). Carraro, C., and F. Lévêque (eds) (1999). Voluntary Approaches in Environmental Policy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Casey, F., S. Vickerman, C. Hummon, and B. Taylor (2006). Incentives for Biodiversity Conservation: An Ecological and Economic Assessment. Washington, D.C.: Defenders of Wildlife. Collins, A.R., and P. Maille (2008). Farmers as Producers of Clean Water: Getting Incentive Payments Right and Encouraging Farmer Participation. Paper presented at the American Agricultural Economics Association Meeting, Orlando, Fla. Croci, E. (ed) (2005). The Handbook of Environmental Voluntary Agreements: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation Issues. Dordrecht: Springer. Curtis, R., and R.L. Hicks (2000). The cost of sea turtle preservation: The case of Hawaii’s pelagic longliners. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 82(5): 1191–1197. Daley, D.M. (2007). Voluntary approaches to environmental problems: Exploring the rise of nontraditional public policy. The Policy Studies Journal 35(2): 165–180. Davies, T., and J. Mazurek (1996). Industry Incentives for Environmental Improvement: Evaluation of U.S. Federal Initiatives. Washington, D.C.: Global Environmental Management Initiative, Resources for the Future. Dawson, N.L., and K. Segerson (2008). Voluntary agreements with industries: Participation incentives with industry-wide targets. Land Economics 84(1): 97–114. Dietz, T., and P.C. Stern (eds) (2002). New Tools for Environmental Protection: Education, Information and Voluntary Measures. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Ferraro, P.J. (2005). Guest editorial: An economist’s reﬂections on the 25th annual symposium for sea turtle biology and conservation: Empirical program evaluation and direct payments for sea turtle conservation. Marine Turtle Newsletter 109: 2–6. Ferraro, P.J. (2006). Response to comment by Peter C.H. Pritchard. Marine Turtle Newsletter 111: 4–5. Ferraro, P.J. (2007). A Global Survey of Sea Turtle Payment Incentive Programs. La Jolla, Calif.: National Marine Fisheries Service. Ferraro, Paul J., and A. Kiss (2002). Direct Payments for Biodiversity Conservation. Science 298: 1718–1719.

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Ferraro, P.J., and R.D. Simpson (2002). The costeffectiveness of conservation performance payments. Land Economics 78(3): 339–353. Gauvin, J.R., K. Haﬂinger, and M. Nerini (1995). Sea State program: From solving bycatch: Considerations for today and tomorrow. University of Alaska Sea Grant Program. www.groundﬁshforum.org/Project/SeaState/SeaStBdy.html Gilman, E., D. Kobayashi, T. Swenarton, P. Dalzell, I. Kinan, and N. Brothers (2006a). Efﬁcacy and Commercial Viability of Regulations Designed to Reduce Sea Turtle Interactions in the Hawaii-Based Longline Swordﬁsh Fishery. Honolulu: Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council. Gilman, E., E. Zollett, S. Beverly, H. Nakano, K. Davis, D. Shiode, P. Dalzell, and I. Kinan (2006b). Reducing sea turtle by-catch in pelagic longline ﬁsheries. Fish and Fisheries 7: 2–23. Gilman, E.L., P. Dalzell, and S. Martin (2006c). Fleet communication to abate ﬁsheries bycatch. Marine Policy 30: 360–366. IUCN (2003). 2003 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Gland, Switzerland: International Union for Conservation of Nature, Species Survival Commission, Red List Programme. Jensen, L.S., J. Koebbe, and K.R. Criddle (2004). Pooled and Individual Bycatch Quotas: Exploring Tradeoffs between Observer Coverage Levels, Bycatch Frequency, Pool Size, and the Precision of Bycatch Estimates. Working Paper, Department of Economics. Logan: Utah State University. Kenow, K.P., C.E. Korschgen, J.M. Nissen, A. Elfessi, and R. Steinbach (2003). A voluntary program to curtail boat disturbance to waterfowl during migration. Waterbirds 26: 77–87. Khanna, M. (2001). Non-mandatory approaches to environmental protection. Journal of Economic Surveys 15: 291–324. Khanna, M., and L.A. Damon (1999). EPA’s voluntary 33/50 Program: Impact on toxic releases and economic performance of ﬁrms. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 37(1): 1–25. King, A.A., and M.J. Lenox (2000). Industry selfregulation without sanctions: The chemical industry’s responsible care program. Academy of Management Journal 43(4): 698–716. Kitts, A., P. Pinto da Silva, and B. Rountree (2007). The evolution of collaborative management in the northeast USA tileﬁsh ﬁshery. Marine Policy 31: 192–200. Langpap, C. (2006). Conservation of endangered species: Can incentives work for private landowners? Ecological Economics 57(4): 558–572. Langpap, C., and J. Wu (2004). Voluntary conservation of endangered species: When does no

regulatory assurance mean no conservation? Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 47: 435–457. Lyon, T., and J. Maxwell (2002). Voluntary approaches to environmental regulation: A survey. In Frazini, M., and A. Nicita (eds), Economic Institutions and Environmental Policy. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate. Matulich, S., M. Sever, and F. Inaba (2001). Fishing cooperatives as an alternative to ITQs: Implications of the American Fisheries Act. Marine Resource Economics 16(1): 1–16. Miranda, M., C. Dieperink, and P. Glasbergen (2007). Voluntary agreements in watershed protection: Experiences from Costa Rica. Environment, Development, and Sustainability 9: 1–19. Morgenstern, R., and W.A. Pizer (eds) (2007). Reality Check: The Nature and Performance of Voluntary Environmental Programs in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future. Pagiola, S., J. Bishop, and N. Landell-Mills (eds) (2002). Selling Forest Environmental Services: Market-Based Mechanisms for Conservation and Development. London: Earthscan. Parkhurst, G.M., and J.F. Shogren (2003). Evaluating incentive mechanisms for conserving habitat. Natural Resources Journal 43(4): 1093–1149. Peter, B., and G. Peter (1990). German conservation organization calls for Bali boycott. Marine Turtle Newsletter 51: 28. Pinto da Silva, P., and A. Kitts (2006). Collaborative ﬁsheries management in the Northeast US: Emerging initiatives and future directions. Marine Policy 30: 832–841. Poe, G.L., W.D. Schulze, K. Segerson, J.F. Suter, and C.A. Vossler (2004). Exploring the performance of ambient-based policy instruments when non-point source polluters can cooperate. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 86(5): 1203–1210. Polasky, S., and H. Doremus (1998). When the truth hurts: Endangered species policy on private land with imperfect information. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 35(1): 22–47. Pradan, N.C., and P. Leung (2006). Incorporating sea turtle interactions in a multi-objective programming model for Hawaii’s longline ﬁshery. Ecological Economics 60(1): 216–227. Pritchard, P.C.H. (2006). Comment on the guest editorial by Paul J. Ferraro. Marine Turtle Newsletter, 111: 3–4. Rachlinski, J.J. (1998). Protecting endangered species without regulating private landowners: The case of endangered plants. Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, 8: 1–36.

Can Voluntary Programs Reduce Sea Turtle Bycatch Rivera, J., P. de Leon, and C. Koerber (2006). Is greener whiter yet? The sustainable slopes program after ﬁve years. Policy Studies Journal 34(2): 195–221. Scarpaci, C., D. Nugegoda, and P.J. Corkeron (2003). Compliance with regulations by ‘swimwith-dolphins’ operations in Port Phillip Bay, Victoria, Australia. Environmental Management 31: 342–347. Segerson, K. (1987). Risk-sharing and liability in the control of stochastic externalities. Marine Resource Economics 4(3): 175–192. Segerson, K. (2007). Reducing Stochastic Sea Turtle Bycatch: An Efﬁciency Analysis of Alternative Policies. Report to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service, La Jolla, Calif. Segerson, K. (2008). Voluntary Programs to Protect Paciﬁc Sea Turtles: An Economic Evaluation. Report to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service, La Jolla, Calif. Segerson, K., and K.R. Jones (2004). Do voluntary approaches to climate change lead to efﬁcient environmental protection? In Baranzini, A., and P. Thalmann (eds), Voluntary Agreements in Climate Change. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar. Segerson, K., and T.J. Miceli (1998). Voluntary agreements: Good or bad news for environmental protection? Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 36(2): 109–130. Segerson, K., and J. Wu (2006). Nonpoint source pollution control: Inducing ﬁrst best outcomes through the use of threats. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 51: 165–184. Shortle, J.S., and R.D. Horan (2001). The economics of nonpoint pollution control. Journal of Economic Surveys 15: 255–289. Spraggon, J. (2002). Exogenous targeting instruments as a solution to group moral hazards. Journal of Public Economics 84: 427–456. Spraggon, J. (2004). Testing ambient pollution instruments with heterogeneous agents. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 48: 837–856. Sullivan, R. (2005). Rethinking Voluntary Approaches in Environmental Policy. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar. Suter, J.F., C.A. Vossler, G.L. Poe, and K. Segerson (2008a). Experiments on damage-based

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ambient taxes for nonpoint source pollution. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 90(1): 86–102. Suter, J.F., K. Segerson, C.A. Vossler, and G.L. Poe (2008b). Voluntary-Threat Approaches to Reduce Ambient Water Pollution. Working paper, Cornell University. Teisl, M.F., B. Roe, and R.L. Hicks (2002). Can eco-labels tune a market? Evidence from dolphin-safe labeling. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 43(3): 339–359. Tisdell, C., and C. Wilson (2001). Wildlife-based tourism and increased support for nature conservation ﬁnancially and otherwise: Evidence from sea turtle ecotourism at Mon Repos. Tourism Economics 7(3): 233–249. Videras, J., and A. Alberini (2000). The appeal of voluntary environmental programs: Which ﬁrms participate and why? Contemporary Economic Policy 18(4): 449–461. Vossler, C.A., G.L. Poe, W.D. Schulze, and K. Segerson (2006). Communication and incentive mechanisms based on group performance: An experimental study of nonpoint pollution control. Economic Inquiry 44(4): 599–613. Watson, J.W., S.P. Epperly, A.K. Shah, and D.G. Foster (2005). Fishing methods to reduce sea turtle mortality associated with pelagic longlines. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 62(5): 965–981. Weersink, A., J. Livernois, J.F. Shogren, and J.S. Shortle (1998). Economic instruments and environmental policy in agriculture. Canadian Public Policy 24: 309–327. Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council (2006). Council Votes to Initiate Emergency Closure of Hawaii Longline Swordﬁsh Fishery. Press Release, March 14. Honolulu: Western Paciﬁc Regional Fishery Management Council. Wiley, D.N., J.C. Moller, R.M. Pace III, and C. Carlson (2008). Effectiveness of voluntary conservation agreements: Case study of endangered whales and commercial whale watching. Conservation Biology 22(2): 450–457. Zinn, J.A. (2007). Mandatory Funding for Agriculture Conservation Programs. Congressional Research Service, CRS Report to Congress, Order Code RS22243.

48 Fisheries Management Science ROBERT L. STEPHENSON DANIEL E. LANE

48.1. THE CONCEPT AND EVOLUTION The concept of ﬁsheries management science (FMS) was introduced by Stephenson and Lane (1995). The concept linked ﬁsheries science, ﬁsheries management, and management science (ﬁgure 48.1) in an integrated, multidisciplinary framework in which the well-known decision methodologies of management science would be used to provide “the rigorous application of the scientiﬁc method of problem solving in the development of strategic alternatives and their evaluation on the basis of objectives that integrate biological, economic, social, operational and other relevant factors in decision making” (Stephenson and Lane 1995: 2054). As presented in 1995, FMS was grounded in systems analysis and management science techniques for improved decision making in resource management (Bjørndal et al. 2004; Hillier and Hillier 2008; Pidd 2004). The systems analysis approach adopts management by objectives (Drucker 1999), structured decision analysis (Hammond et al. 1999), and participatory governance regimes (Charles 2000; Kay et al. 1999). It was noted that effective FMS required restructuring of existing, primarily governmental-based, institutional arrangements so that ﬁsheries scientists, ﬁsheries managers, the harvesting and processing sectors and their associated coastal communities could be empowered to make a balanced contribution to provide an integrated,

structured, participative team approach to resolving the complex problems of the marine ecosystem. The need for FMS arose out of perceived global failures of the ﬁsheries management experiment of the 1990s and the growing recognition of the need for a framework and methodologies for deﬁning multiple objectives and constraints, modeling alternative management scenarios, and assessing and managing risk. It was proposed that FMS would accept diverse information sources toward improved, participatory decision making, and consensus building

Fisheries Management

Fisheries Science

Management Science

48.1 The three-part helix connected at the core and linking the three disciplines of ﬁsheries science, ﬁsheries management, and management science symbolizes the integrated multidisciplinary ﬁeld of ﬁsheries management science. (Reprinted with permission from Stephenson and Lane 1995: 2053)

FIGURE

630

Fisheries Management Science with responsibility, and offer a new paradigm within which effective ﬁsheries management could emerge. Management science, also known as operations research, developed signiﬁcantly as an outgrowth of structured, multidisciplinary, and urgent problem solving during World War II. Subsequently, management science evolved from military to civilian and primarily business applications and into the ﬁeld of study for the scientiﬁc method of problem solving. As such, it provided a formal, vibrant body of research and literature in methodologies, applications, and best practices on methods for decision theory, bargaining and negotiation, operations management, evaluation of management and systems performance, and analysis of systems under uncertainty. While these methods had been successfully and inﬂuentially applied to many industrial decision making and strategic planning settings for decades (see, e.g., Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, www.informs.org), the scientiﬁc method of problem solving that offered considerable opportunity for improved ﬁsheries decision making had not been fully employed in the management of ﬁsheries and other marine activities.

48.2. UPTAKE AND INFLUENCE The original FMS paper with the plea for conceptual change in ﬁsheries management (Stephenson and Lane 1995) has been cited with respect to a number of key areas, including (1) holistic and integrated approaches to ﬁsheries management, (2) structured decision making in complex ecosystems, (3) methods for participatory management, and (4) explicit consideration of uncertainty through risk management decision methods. Examples from the literature of progress in these areas include: 1. Integrated Approaches. A number of publications citing FMS diagnose problems and predict a general change in direction of management of human activities in the marine system (e.g., Arlinghaus et al. 2002; Brodziak and Link 2002; Caddy 1999; Cochrane 1999; Garaway et al. 2006; Garcia 2005; Lassen 1998; Mahon 1997; Miller 1999; Richards and Maguire 1998). Since the FMS concept was introduced in 1995, there has been rapid conceptual change in ﬁsheries to more holistic approaches including recognition of the multiple activities of marine area use, and

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identiﬁcation of a broader, multiple, and sometimes conﬂicting set of objectives. Such work is evident in sustainability frameworks such as those of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Garcia 1998) and Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO 2008), and in the criteria of the Marine Stewardship Council certiﬁcation (Marine Stewardship Council 2004). 2. Structured Decision Making. The FMS concept has also been cited in papers that have integrated a broader set of criteria in structured decision making (e.g., Cochrane et al. 1998; Mackinson and Nottestad 1998; Pech et al. 2001; Robb and Peterman 1998; Smith et al. 2007). This work recognizes the tradeoffs evident in complex ﬁsheries management decisions, including the conservation objective versus exploitation and value-based ﬁsheries harvesting, stock sustainability versus social support for the coastal ﬁshing industry, and restrictions to ﬁsheries access versus signiﬁcant natural predator behavior. 3. Participatory Management. The evolution of participatory management and governance regimes, as espoused in the FMS paper, have been increasingly recognized in recent literature (Australian Fisheries Management Authority 2008; Chakalall et al. 1998; Dyer and McGoodwin 1994; Edwards et al. 2008; Haapasaari et al. 2007; Jentoft 2005; Kooiman et al. 2005; Mikalsen et al. 2007; Paquet 2005, 2004; Suarez De Vivero et al. 1997; Yandle 2008). This work acknowledges the complexity of the ﬁsheries management problem and, in asserting the importance of stewardship from the public and resource users, presents a devolved role of governments in access and allocation in favor of greater roles and responsibility of the industrial and public sectors in decision making. 4. Risk Management. The incorporation of risk analysis and uncertainty, as fundamental roles in FMS ﬁsheries management are highlighted in the work of Rice and Richards (1996), Francis and Shotton (1997), Hilborn et al. (2001), Rahikainen et al. (2003). Moreover, the importance of risk analysis in government strategy has increased (e.g., DFO 2005a, 2005b). The adoption of value trade-offs under stochastic (uncertain dynamical) systems and the need to manage in the face of these uncertainties give rise to management science decision frameworks for value-based decision making and utility analysis (Keeney 1992).

632

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Subsequent papers by the authors (Lane 2008, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 1999a, 1999b; Lane and Stephenson 2000, 1999, 1998a, 1998b, 1997a, 1997b, 1996, 1995; Stephenson et al. 1999) provide further details of the framework and applied examples. A number of papers have also been published in which aspects of the concept have been applied to the Atlantic herring ﬁshery in the ScotiaFundy region of Atlantic Canada, including strategic ﬁsheries management systems analysis (Xue and Lane 2008; Lane and Stephenson 1996), a framework for the evaluation and management of risk (Chen 2004; Lane and Stephenson 1998a), and a model of in-season Bayesian stock assessment (Lei and Lane 2008; Zhao et al. 2008).

recreational boating) in the marine environment, points to an enhanced validity and importance of the concept of FMS. Managed activities are being asked to conform to an increasingly diverse spectrum of objectives according to the requirements of various acts and regulations within government. Also, the wishes of an increasingly interested public exerts pressure in the marketplace and the emerging ideas of product certiﬁcation, “ecosystem assessments” and cumulative performance (Brodziak and Link 2002; Kay et al. 1999; Rahikainen et al. 2003; Marine Stewardship Council 2004; see ﬁgure 48.2). Fishing industry sector and activity management plans are expanding in complexity to include more diverse objectives (and associated indicators and performance measures) aligned with valued conservation, social (including cultural) and economic attributes (e.g., ﬁsheries sustainability checklist; DFO 2008), and management efﬁciencies. Market certiﬁcation is also applying increasing pressure on ﬁsheries and other marine activities to conform to a set of standards (as in the case of

48.3. FUTURE APPLICABILITY The evolving landscape of ﬁsheries management, together with the management of other human activities (e.g., aquaculture, recreational ﬁshing,

Coordinated Marine Spatial plan

Others

Recreation

Transportation

Energy

Aquaculture

Fisheries

Consistent Objectives

derived from regulation and desired attributes/services

With nested managed activity plans

Cumulative Effects Audit (Ecosystem assessment)

1. Conservation Resource Sustainability Productivity Biodiversity Habitat 2. Economic Viability 3. Social/Cultural Stability 4. Administrative Efficiency

FIGURE 48.2 The evolving landscape of management requires evaluations that integrate biological, economic, and social/cultural objectives, the cumulative performance of diverse activities, and a participatory governance regime. Activities are being managed with an increasingly diverse set of objectives (with performance indicators and reference points), and there is need for evaluation of cumulative effects leading to an ecosystem assessment. Fisheries management science provides a conceptual and methodological basis for scenario comparison and decision making in such a context

Fisheries Management Science Marine Stewardship Council 2004) related to stock status, impact of ﬁshery on the ecosystem, and effectiveness of the ﬁsheries management system. While there is no existing framework for evaluation of cumulative ecosystem performance, consideration of cumulative performance for an area is also an emerging requirement of both integrated management (IM) and the ecosystem approach to management (EAM) in future management needs (Sutherland et al. 2007). Effective future management prescribes the evaluation and audit of the performance of activities against a set of objectives for ecosystem conservation and resource sustainability, social stability, economic viability, and administrative efﬁciency and governance (ﬁgure 48.2). This requires multiobjective evaluations of management scenarios including “cost-beneﬁt analyses” and feedback on performance of the plans for all activities. It is also required for the evaluation of the cumulative ecosystem performance in an area through an integrated ecosystem assessment. FMS has the required tools for the structured, holistic decision making. Furthermore, it is proposed that, in the future, the practical and IM of all activities may be achieved by a system in which management plans are nested within an area or regional planning framework that uses the concept of FMS to assist in integrated risk management (DFO 2005a). FMS provides an appropriate context for articulation of valued attributes for a marine area including those attributes related to social and economic aspects that, to date, have not been fully articulated. These values are required to evaluate future policy and scenario development and alternatives comparisons that will form the basis for management evaluations, discussions, and decisions. As such, FMS methods and tools provide the basis for practical implementation of IM and the EAM. This context could also be used to resolve conﬂicts among competing uses, make recommendations (following cost/beneﬁt-type analyses) concerning novel activities, and facilitate ﬁsheries governance across governmental jurisdictions (i.e., federal, provincial/ state, municipal and territorial governments).

48.4. DISCUSSION There has been an evolution of practice in global ﬁsheries management toward more structured, integrated, and participatory frameworks. This

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evolution is consistent with the spirit and perspectives of FMS. Moreover, the future direction of ﬁsheries and oceans resource management continues to point toward enhanced problem solving and the need for FMS methods and techniques. This closing section examines how ﬁsheries management systems themselves can adapt toward more effective FMS. As noted above, there has been and will continue to be movement toward FMS as a general context for dealing with the complexity of ﬁsheries and oceans management. At the same time, problem solving in ﬁsheries systems can only move forward effectively by developing a supportive management system. Such a “supportive” system is a function of (1) the supporting role of government, (2) IM institutional arrangements, (3) deﬁned marine use spaces, and (4) incentives for positive compliance and stewardship. These points are discussed further below. 1. The Supporting Role of Government. Centralized governments have struggled with the appropriateness of their role as public guardian of the ﬁsheries and oceans. Many countries have in fact witnessed that this historical artifact has been unmanageable as is evidenced by stock collapses and ﬁsheries sector layoffs and closures. In retrospect, it is unreasonable to overburden government with the complexities and stochasticity of marine resources and for the ultimate responsibility for both stewardship, and the socioeconomic aspects that include access and allocation. Rather, government’s role is deﬁned most effectively as that of providing support for industry and community decision making (e.g., in support of government science), as an arbitrator to help resolve jurisdictional issues, and in a monitoring and auditing capacity and that these services be provided at cost. FMS can assist governments and decision makers as an effective means of providing strong decision support. However, FMS also conﬁrms that commitment to decision making requires that the authority and responsibility for decisions include those who execute and beneﬁt from the decisions. Thus, as the language of “inclusive” and “participatory governance,” “transparency,” and “shared stewardship” imply, this can only be assured if ﬁshermen (and not the central government) are empowered by the authority to act and are, in turn, held responsible for their actions.

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2. Integrated Institutional Arrangements. Consistent with the historical mandate and responsibilities of public guardian, many government institutions with the mandate for ﬁsheries have evolved sophisticated organizational structures. Typically, these structures are arranged in disciplinary substructures committed to (1) ﬁsheries management, and monitoring and enforcement, (2) ﬁsheries science, and (3) ﬁsheries policy. However, consistent with the expressed need in FMS for integrated approaches for treating complex ﬁsheries problems, the disciplinary organization—working more or less independently in silos—is simply not as effective as it could be if it were more problem focused and integrated. To be most effective, FMS would beneﬁt from institutions that unify the science, management, and policy functions. These institutions would be constructed to provide cohesive support to a broader participatory management structure that includes all stakeholders as responsible decision makers. As such, the decision support institution would be committed to provide decision support, encourage negotiation and cooperation, and to resolve disputes. 3. Deﬁned Marine Use Spaces. Unquestionably, ﬁsheries and marine activities take place in highly complex, stochastic marine ecosystems that in many ways defy management. FMS informs us that such a situation requires a distributed authority to manage this complexity effectively as a consequence of “Ashby’s law of requisite variety” (Paquet 2004). The idea is that control or regulation is most fundamentally formulated as a reduction of variety, that is, with decentralized systems. One way to achieve this “reduction in variety” is to break down ﬁsheries management units to local geographical marine spaces associated as far as possible with the resource patterns and with local coastal exploitation methods. Effective FMS then suggests that spatially deﬁned separable marine zones with associated property rights for coastal marine access is a key element in well-deﬁned EAM. 4. Incentives for positive compliance and stewardship. FMS informs us that compliance and stewardship is a function of the decision makers’ abilities to reap beneﬁts from a decision for which they are responsible. Economic and value-laden incentives have been widely attributed to property rights (Costello et al.

2008; Grafton et al. 2006) in relation to common pool ﬁsheries resources (Ostrom 1990). Property rights, in turn, instill ownership and responsibility (i.e., stewardship). These economic incentives effectively invalidate ﬁsheries as local instruments of social inclusion by governments who exercise their authority to redistribute wealth “equitably.” Wealth redistribution policies undermine economic and market-based incentives arguably for a greater social good. However, the two approaches (economic incentives vs. social support; see Sen and Nielsen 1997) are fundamentally not compatible, and governments have arguably not been successful in carrying out redistribution policies due to difﬁculty in clarifying these objectives as well as for exerting additional pressure on the limited resources.

48.5. CONCLUSION Fisheries management globally is progressing along lines that address the urgent need to engage, unify, and integrate toward solving the complex problems of managing diverse activities in marine ecosystems. To this end, since 1995, the concept of FMS has contributed to the integration of previously disparate ﬁelds of ﬁsheries science, ﬁsheries management, and management science in support of participatory management using an expanded set of conservation, social and economic objectives. With its problem-solving focus and rich and varied tools, FMS has much to offer. FMS contributes to the management of ﬁsheries by encouraging participatory platforms for decision making, multidimensional analyses for policy evaluation, and quantitative as well as qualitative frameworks for the analysis of available data. To take full advantage of FMS, ﬁsheries management institutions and responsible governments need to be integrated and focused on problem solving through uniﬁed disciplinary capacities around the ﬁsheries. This focus would provide considerable capacity in support of decisions by ﬁshing industries, coastal communities, environmental groups, and the public working together toward mutual sustainability objectives. The result of managing our ﬁsheries more effectively and sustainably is attractive. With the help of FMS, the means of achieving effective and sustainable management are realizable. The challenge to do so is before us.

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Hillier, F.S., and M.S. Hillier (2008). Introduction to Management Science: A Modeling and Case Studies Approach with Spreadsheets, 3rd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Jentoft, S. (2005). Fisheries governance, social justice and participatory decision-making. In Gray, T. (ed), Participation in Fisheries Governance. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kay. J., Regier, H., Boyle, M., and Francis, G. 1999. An ecosystem approach for sustainability: Addressing the challenge of complexity. Futures 31(7): 721–742. Keeney, R. (1992). Value-Focused Thinking. Boston: Harvard University Press. Kooiman, J., S. Jentoft, R. Pullin, and M. Bavinck (2005). Fish for Life: Interactive Governance for Fisheries. MARE Publication Series. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lane, D.E. (2008). Fishing in the NAFO regulatory area: Integrated modeling of resources, social impacts and ﬂeet viability. Journal of Northwest Atlantic Fishery Science 39(8): 119–145. Lane, D.E. (2007a). Planning in ﬁsheries-related systems: Multicriteria models for decision support. In Weintraub, A., C. Romero, T. Bjorndal, and R. Epstein (eds), Handbook of Operations Research in Natural Resources. International Series in Operations Research and Management Science. New York: Springer, 237–272. Lane, D.E. (2007b). Assessing the Economic Impacts of Bottom Trawling on the Grand Banks. Final Report. Ottawa: Policy Branch of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Lane, D.E. (2007c). Spatial-temporal stock assessment analysis with application to the ScotiaFundy herring ﬁshery. In Bjorndal, T., D. Gordon, R. Arnason, and U. Sumaila (eds), Advances in Fisheries Economics. Festschrift in Honour of Professor Gordon Munro. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, pp. 283–303. Lane, D.E. (1999a). Applications of rights-based ﬁsheries: Experiences and consequences. In Hatcher, A., and K. Robinson (eds). The Deﬁnition and Allocation of Use Rights in European Fisheries. Proceedings of the second workshop held in Brest, France, 5–7 May 1999. EU Concerted Action on Economics and the Common Fisheries Policy. Portsmouth: University of Portsmouth, pp. 19–61. Lane, D.E. (1999b). Property rights and governance in Canadian ﬁsheries. Optimum, the Journal of Public Sector Management 29(1): 1–8. Lane, D.E., and R.L. Stephenson (2000). Institutional arrangements for ﬁsheries: Alternate structures and impediments to change. Marine Policy 24: 385–393. Lane, D.E., and R.L. Stephenson (1999). Fisheries-management science: A framework for the implementation of ﬁsheries-management

systems. ICES Journal of Marine Science 56: 1059–1066. Lane, D.E., and R.L. Stephenson (1998a). Toward a framework for risk analysis in ﬁsheries decision making. ICES Journal of Marine Science 55(1): 1–13. Lane, D.E., and R.L. Stephenson (1998b). Fisheries co-management: Organization, process, and decision support. Journal of Northwest Atlantic Fishery Science 23: 251–265. Lane, D.E., and R.L. Stephenson (1997a). Decision analysis. In Boreman, J., B.S. Nakashima, J.A. Wilson, and R.L. Kendall (eds), Northwest Atlantic Groundﬁsh: Perspectives on a Fishery Collapse. Bethesda, Md.: American Fisheries Society, pp. 203–210. Lane, D.E., and R.L. Stephenson (1997b). Fisheries management science: Integrating the roles of science, economics, sociology, and politics in effective ﬁsheries management. In Hancock, D.A., D.C. Smith, A. Grant, and J.P. Beumer (eds), Developing and Sustaining World Fisheries Resources: The State of Science and Management. 2nd World Fisheries Congress, Brisbane, Australia. Collingwood, Victoria: CSIRO Publishing, pp. 117–182. Lane, D.E., and R.L. Stephenson (1996). SATURN: A framework for integrated analysis in ﬁsheries management. INFOR 34(4): 156–180. Lane, D.E., and R.L. Stephenson (1995). Fisheries management science: The framework to link biological, economic, and social objectives in ﬁsheries management. Aquatic Living Resources 8: 215–221. Lassen, H. (1998). The future ﬁsheries: Constraints and possibilities for sustainability—ecological impacts from ﬁsheries, the political environment and how this may affect the future of capture ﬁsheries. Journal of Northwest Atlantic Fishery Science 23: 27–39. Lei, L., and D.E. Lane (2008). Spatial-temporal stock assessment: In-season repeated measures and VPA. American Fisheries Society Symposium 49: 1389–1405. Mackinson, S., and L. Nottestad (1998). Combining local and scientiﬁc knowledge. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 8: 481–490. Mahon, R. (1997). Does ﬁsheries science serve the needs of managers of small stocks in developing countries? Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 54: 2207–2213. Marine Stewardship Council (2004). MSC Principles and Criteria for Sustainable Fishing. November. MSC Executive. www.msc.org/ documents/msc-standards/MSC_environmental_standard_for_sustainable_ﬁshing.pdf Mikalsen, K.H., H.-K. Hernes, and S. Jentoft (2007). Leaning on user-groups: The role of civil society in ﬁsheries governance. Marine Policy 31(2): 201–209.

Fisheries Management Science Miller, R.J. (1999). Courage and the management of developing ﬁsheries. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 56: 897–905. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paquet, G. (2005). The governance of sustainability: A social learning approach. In The Ottawa Colloquium on the Governance of Sustainable Development. Ottawa: Centre on Governance, University of Ottawa Press. Paquet, G. (2004). The New Geo-Governance: A Baroque Approach. Centre on Governance. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Pech, N., A. Samba, L. Drapeau, R. Sabatier, and F. Laloe (2001). Fitting a model of ﬂexible multiﬂeet-multispecies ﬁsheries to Senegalese artisanal ﬁshery data. Aquatic Living Resources 14: 81–98. Pidd, M. (ed) (2004). Systems Modelling: Theory and Practice. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Rahikainen, M., S. Kuikka, and R. Parmanne (2003). Modelling the effect of ecosystem change on spawning per recruit of Baltic herring. ICES Journal of Marine Science 60: 94–109. Rice, J.C., and L.J. Richards (1996). A framework for reducing implementation uncertainty in ﬁsheries management. North American Journal of Fisheries Management 16: 488–494. Richards, L.J., and J.J. Maguire (1998). Recent international agreements and the precautionary approach: New directions for ﬁsheries management science. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 55: 1545–1552. Robb, C.A., and R.M. Peterman (1998). Application of Bayesian decision analysis to management of a sockeye salmon (Oncorynchus nerka) ﬁshery. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 55: 86–98. Sen, S., and J.R. Nielsen (1997). Fisheries co-management: A comparative analysis. In Hancock, D.A., D.C. Smith, A. Grant, and J.P. Beumer (eds), Developing and Sustaining World Fisheries Resources: The State of Science and

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49 Challenges in Marine Capture Fisheries COLIN W. CLARK

T

his chapter attempts to survey, as brieﬂy as possible, the many problems and difﬁculties facing the conservation and management of marine ﬁshery resources. Some of these problems are widely recognized (e.g., the so-called tragedy of the commons), but others have often been overlooked, by academic theorists and practical managers alike. The chapter also outlines feasible management strategies that have the potential to overcome the perceived difﬁculties. Managing any ﬁshery requires the use of a mathematical (or computer) model of population biology, but every model is a simpliﬁcation of nature, relying on certain speciﬁc assumptions. Not only can these assumptions be in error, but worse, managers (and modelers) may not fully realize what the assumptions are, or what their consequences may be. One important example discussed in this chapter is the “CPUE” assumption: that catch-per-uniteffort is a useful, if approximate, index of stock abundance. This assumption is now known to be unreliable for pelagic schooling species (Mackinson et al. 1997), but the likelihood that it is also not valid for demersal species is not widely recognized (Clark 2006; Harley et al. 2001). Deciding how to estimate stock abundance, when CPUE is not a reliable index, is a major challenge for managers. Alternative methods, including historical reconstruction (virtual population analysis), sample surveys, and tagging experiments also have problems. But how does one manage a ﬁshery if

one has limited knowledge of the current status of the stock? A questionable assumption of a different kind is the idea that ﬁshery management is a purely scientiﬁc problem. Figuring out (using some biological model plus available data) the level of sustainable yield, and then controlling catches accordingly, has been considered to be the “scientiﬁc” approach to management. But this approach entirely ignores economics and human behavior (Clark 2006). It is by now recognized, for example, that the current widespread phenomenon of excess ﬁshing capacity is largely an unintended consequence of the biologically based approach to management. Biological models are necessary, but far from sufﬁcient for successful management. The problems of overﬁshing and overcapacity constitute the present-day crisis in ﬁsheries management. Both problems arise from the fact that ﬁsh populations are harvested competitively. While free competition is usually desirable in an economic system, it only works under secure property rights. How to emulate property rights in ﬁsheries (without actual privatization) is discussed further below.

49.1. THE UNDERLYING CHALLENGES The main facts about marine ﬁsh populations are as follows:

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Challenges in Marine Capture Fisheries • Fish swim freely and cannot be “branded” like cattle. • Fish reproduce, usually with highly unpredictable dynamics. • Fish populations are components of marine ecosystems, the functioning of which is often poorly understood. • Fish in the sea are hard to count. These facts imply that ﬁshery management is an uncertain endeavor. While this uncertainty is widely recognized, what methods should be used to deal with uncertainty is not yet widely agreed upon. For example, how should uncertainty in stock assessment be evaluated and presented to decision makers? I discuss this question later. In addition to problems arising from basic uncertainty, ﬁsheries management also faces severe problems of controllability: • Monitoring and enforcement of catch quotas • Prevention of illegal ﬁshing • Monitoring and control of bycatch and discards • Control of habitat degradation, speciﬁcally from bottom trawling A third class of challenges results from externally generated changes to the marine environment (and to associated freshwater environments, for the case of diadromous species): • Increases in surface ocean temperatures • Ocean acidiﬁcation resulting from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide • Oceanic pollution from terrestrial runoff and from ocean dumping These externally caused changes have the potential of severely reducing ﬁsheries productivity on local and global scales. It is known that acidiﬁcation is now affecting zooplankton communities worldwide. Every method of ﬁsheries management requires enforcement of the regulations. Managing ﬁsheries that occur beyond anyone’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is therefore virtually impossible at present. Hilborn (2007) states it succinctly: “The existing governance regimes for high seas ﬁsheries have failed totally. Despite the existence of numerous regional management organizations as mandated by the UN ﬁshing agreements, none of them

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regulates the high seas ﬁsheries to any effect. The existing legal framework for high seas ﬁsheries is utterly inadequate to protect them.” This chapter deals only with ﬁsheries operating within national jurisdictions; this includes transboundary ﬁsheries for which harvest-sharing agreements exist.

49.2. COMMON-POOL FISHERIES Most marine capture ﬁsheries are still exploited as common-pool resources. Management techniques and strategies that have been used in such ﬁsheries include 1. A complete lack of management (pure openaccess) 2. Vessel and gear restrictions 3. Closed seasons and areas 4. Total annual catch (TAC) quotas 5. Limited entry 6. Rights-based ﬁshing This list is historically ordered, in the sense that the historical development of ﬁsheries management has tended to move from the top of the list toward the bottom. The term “rights-based ﬁshing” refers to management systems in which speciﬁc rights (catch shares or effort quotas) are allocated to speciﬁc individuals, ﬁrms, or community groups. The term “dedicated access” is sometimes used in a similar sense. Why do actual ﬁsheries so often progress through this list? It must be that the earlier methods are tried and found wanting in some way. Note that the sixth method, rights-based ﬁshing, is the ﬁrst listed method that attempts to establish partial property rights to the ﬁshery resource. Economic theory and practical experience (not to mention common sense!) strongly support the proposition that such rights are necessary for commercially successful exploitation of any resource. This point is further elaborated in the following discussions.

49.3. A BIOECONOMIC MODEL The following dynamic model is useful as a basis for the discussion of management principles (Clark 2006):

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives dx = G(x) – h, x(0) given dt h = qEx R = ph – cE = (pqx – c)E

(49.1) (49.2) (49.3)

Here x = x(t) denotes the size (biomass in metric tons) of the ﬁsh population at time t, and G(x) is the natural growth rate of the population. It is assumed that G(x) > 0

for

0 < x < K,

(49.4)

where K denotes the “environmental carrying capacity” for the given population. Also h = h(t) denotes the harvest rate at time t. Equation 49.1 thus describes the population dynamics of the ﬁsh resource under harvesting. This “general production model” has sometimes been used in ﬁshery management, although it is clearly simplistic. Note that if the production function G(x) is assumed to be known, for a certain population, then the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) is also known: hmsy = maxx G(x) = G(xmsy)

(49.5)

MSY was at one time considered to be the optimal management objective for ﬁsheries, but experience has shown that many other aspects also need to be considered, economics and uncertainty being two important examples.1 Equation 49.2 is the famous catch-effort equation, due to Schaefer (1954). Here E = E(t) denotes ﬁshing effort at time t and q is a constant, called the catchability coefﬁcient. For example, in a trawl ﬁshery, E(t) would typically be quantiﬁed as the number of trawlers active at time t, and q would then represent the proportion of the stock x caught by one trawler, in one unit of time. Although widely used in ﬁsheries management, the Schaefer equation (49.2) is now suspected to be highly inaccurate for most ﬁsh stocks. For example, note that equation 49.2 implies that h / E µ x; that is, catch per unit effort is a direct index of relative stock abundance. Unless examined critically, this assumption is likely to be extremely misleading. In many cases, the searching behavior of ﬁshers can maintain a high CPUE even as the stock level declines to a low level. The CPUE index gives

a biased and overly optimistic estimate of stock abundance in all such cases.2 Next, in equation 49.3, R represents the ﬂow of net income for the ﬁshery as a whole, as given by revenues ph minus effort costs cE. Thus, equations 49.1–49.3 provide a complete dynamic, if simpliﬁed, model of a commercial ﬁshery. It remains to decide how ﬁshing effort E(t), and hence catch rate h(t), is determined. Two extreme cases worth considering are unregulated open access and proﬁt maximization. We begin with unregulated open access. It makes sense to assume that ﬁshing will continue, provided that it is proﬁtable or, in other words, if R > 0. Unless the capacity of ﬁshing ﬂeets is small, this implies that the stock x(t) will be ﬁshed down until R = 0, that is, until pqx − c = 0 or x = xBE, where xbe = c pq.

(49.6)

The stock level xBE is referred to as the “bionomic equilibrium” of an unregulated, open-access ﬁshery (Gordon 1954). Note that this is a biological equilibrium because G(xBE) > 0 by assumption. Fishing pressure keeps the stock at xBE, while natural growth processes continue to provide a sustained harvest hBE = G(xBE). Countlessly many empirical examples support this prediction, at least in qualitative terms. If we deﬁne “overﬁshing” to mean that x has been reduced below xMSY, then overﬁshing will occur in every unregulated openaccess ﬁshery provided that the cost/price ratio c/ pq is sufﬁciently low. The next question is, given that bionomic equilibrium is sustainable (this is a model prediction, not necessarily true in nature), is it in some way desirable or undesirable? A clue is that RBE = (pqxBE − c)E is zero: sustained proﬁts (economic rents, in the accepted jargon) are zero at bionomic equilibrium. Since R > 0 for any x > xBE, it seems unlikely that bionomic equilibrium is in fact a desirable outcome. But what would be optimal, economically speaking? One suggestion (inadequate, unfortunately) is that maximum sustained economic yield (MSEY) would be optimal. Setting dx/dt = 0 in equation 49.1, we obtain the expression R = (p -

c )G(x) qx

(49.7)

for sustainable rent R, at stock level x. Setting dR/dx = 0, we ﬁnd that xMSEY satisﬁes

Challenges in Marine Capture Fisheries

G´(xMSEY) -

c´(xMSEY)G(xMSEY) =0 p - c(xMSEY)

(49.8)

where c(x) = c/qx. This implies, not surprisingly, that xmsey>xbe

(49.9)

xmsey>xmsy

(49.10)

and also that

MSEY is achieved at a stock level larger than bionomic equilibrium and also larger than xMSY. How well does the empirical evidence support this model prediction? Do ﬁshers wholeheartedly support management strategies that aim to maximize their sustained incomes? They do not. In most cases, the ﬁshers are adamantly opposed to such a strategy. Why would this be so? We will continue to assume, for the moment, that ﬁshers compete for the allowed annual catch. This turns out to be the crux of the problem—obvious, no doubt, but it is only in recent years that the full implications of competitive ﬁshing have become widely recognized. If the effects of competition can be overcome in some way, ﬁshers may actually favor conservation-minded ﬁshing strategies. This is explained further below. For competitive ﬁshing, there are two cases to look at: (1) the ﬁshery is currently at or near xMSY, and (2) it is currently at or near xBE. Consider case 2 ﬁrst. To shift from xBE to xMSEY, it is necessary to reduce the catch rate temporarily, allowing the stock to recover. (“Temporarily” may mean for several years, or several decades, in some cases.) The ﬁshers, who are breaking even ﬁnancially at xBE, will see their take-home incomes reduced roughly in proportion to the reduction in catches. Unless they can ﬁnd alternative employment, they will be worse off, temporarily, during the recovery phase. Case 1 is less obvious. Consider a ﬁshery currently at the stock level xMSEY and managed to remain there. The management is based on TAC quotas, with the managers closing the ﬁshery each year once the TAC has been caught. (How they know what has been caught at any time is another problem.) The existing ﬁshers, we assume, are making positive proﬁts. What will happen next is perhaps not obvious, but experience has shown over and over again that each ﬁsher will be motivated to

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maximize annual proﬁts by investing in technology that increases the ability to catch and store ﬁsh. This will result in bigger boats, more powerful engines, extra crew, stronger winches, larger nets, bigger freezers, more sophisticated navigation equipment, and so forth (Turris 1999). Also, additional vessels may be attracted to the ﬁshery. The ultimate result, called “regulated bionomic equilibrium,” beneﬁts no one. This, exactly, is the basic problem facing managed ﬁsheries throughout the world today: brief ﬁshing seasons, excessive ﬁshing power—the “derby” ﬁshery, as it is often called. In some cases the ﬁshery may collapse under the pressure, as managers are unable to cope with the larger ﬁshing ﬂeets. No wonder that ﬁshers oppose MSEY or similar management proposals. In the worst case, this strategy will reduce their short-term incomes for little or no long-term gains; in the best case, it will generate high incomes temporarily, until the expansion of ﬂeet capacity again reduces proﬁtability to low levels. But surely something is missing in this argument. Is there no management strategy that maintains sustainability while providing individual long-term proﬁtability? In the 1960s economists Christy and Scott (1965) suggested that a system of individual catch quotas could emulate the situation of private ownership of the resource and result in proﬁtable ﬁshing. How this would work is that the government sets the annual TAC, which is then shared among speciﬁed owners of individual quotas. Since quota holders cannot exceed their quotas (and nonquota holders are excluded), the economic incentive underlying the derby ﬁshery is eliminated. Such individual transferable quota (ITQ) systems have now been instituted in several countries, including Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Australia, and Namibia. Quotas may be allocated to individuals, vessels, or groups of individuals, depending on circumstances. Needless to say, rigorous enforcement of the quota restrictions is paramount. Also, the quotas need to be ﬂexible, to allow for annual ﬂuctuations in stock abundance. Each speciﬁed ﬁsher is granted a certain quota share, entitling the ﬁsher to a speciﬁed share of the annual TAC. Individual quotas are not a panacea, however (Ostrom et al. 2007). First, they are a highly sophisticated device, depending on expert scientiﬁc input to determine TACs and requiring strict monitoring and enforcement of quotas and other aspects of ﬁshing activity. Individual quotas can be controversial because of the perception that they amount to the

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

privatization of resource ownership. If the quotas are transferable, as they are under an ITQ system, concentration of quota ownership to a few wealthy entrepreneurs (who may not be actively involved in ﬁshing) may take place. Individual nontransferable quota systems have been tried in some cases, but they usually prove to be unworkable. ITQs have the advantage of ﬂexibility. In addition, under an ITQ system ﬁshers may be willing to accept reduced TACs temporarily when the stock is depleted, because the projected future increases in incomes will beneﬁt the quota owners. The market values of quota shares will reﬂect expected future income levels. Fishers can decide whether to retain their shares as an investment or to cash them in immediately by selling them to other ﬁshers. Under an ITQ system, ﬁshers will favor management strategies that preserve sustained long-term (discounted) proﬁts. Although the optimal longterm strategies differ from strict MSEY strategies, at least in theory (see appendix), they usually do imply resource conservation. Exceptions may arise for resources that can provide very large proﬁts from initial overharvesting; the great whale ﬁsheries of the 19th and 20th centuries were a notorious example (Clark and Lamberson 1982). One result that typically occurs immediately upon the establishment of an ITQ system is the almost magical disappearance of the derby ﬁshery (see ﬁgure 49.1). With an assured annual catch, and no opportunity to exceed it, ﬁshers no longer need to rush to get their share of the TAC before the

Season Length (days)

300

200

100

0 1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

49.1. Season length in the British Columbia Paciﬁc halibut ﬁshery, 1980–2005. Individual catch quotas were initiated in 1991. (A season limit of 245 days is set by the International Paciﬁc Halibut Commission.) (From Munro 2001)

FIGURE

ﬁshing season ends. Fishers can also take the time to carefully process the catch on board, thereby increasing its market value. An alternative to ITQs is community or group quotas, the idea being that the community will then further allocate catches to individual members, or otherwise prevent the occurrence of the commonproperty competitive scramble. I do not know if such systems have worked out in practice.

49.4. ECONOMICALLY MOTIVATED PRECAUTIONARY MANAGEMENT As noted above, ITQ owners can be expected to become supporters of management strategies that protect and enhance the value of their quota shares. In particular, precautionary strategies that reduce the risk of overﬁshing would be favored. This in turn provides an incentive to identify and then respond to the major risks and uncertainties in the ﬁshery, including the following: • • • •

Inaccurate stock assessment Inaccurate estimates of population parameters Risk of collapse and nonrecovery Unpredictable environmental effects on the ﬁsh population • Long-term genetic effects of ﬁshing • Unknown ecosystem dynamics • Risk of habitat degradation How have these uncertainties been dealt with in the past? Often they have been ignored, probably because taking them into account would have meant a reduction in TACs. Besides this, it is seldom obvious how to quantify or interpret these uncertainties, or to account for them in setting management strategies. Let us consider the question of imprecise stock estimates, which is common, if not almost universal, in marine ﬁsheries. Suppose, for example, that the scientists have estimated an optimal level of ﬁshing mortality F for the given population. The TAC is then given by TAC = F · x, where x is the current ﬁshable biomass. But what if the estimated value of x is highly uncertain? What TAC should be chosen? Possibilities include

643

Challenges in Marine Capture Fisheries Midpoint, or “best guess” for x Midpoint with a safety factor Minimum point Maximum point

The minimum point would use the lowest likely level x, whereas the maximum point would use the highest level. The scientists would provide estimated values for xmin, xmidpoint, and xmax (or perhaps a probability distribution for x) and leave the actual decision to the managers. This is more or less what has been done in the past, at least in those situations where uncertainty has been considered at all. Given such information, how is the manager to decide? It is sometimes explained that risk-averse managers will choose xmin, risk-neutral xmidpoint, and risk-prone xmax. Under competitive ﬁshing, the ﬁshers may prefer xmax on the grounds that the scientiﬁc evidence is too weak to support a lower TAC. But in an ITQ system, the ﬁshers may also be concerned with avoiding severe overﬁshing. How can the scientiﬁc advice be made more useful to whoever sets the TAC? Clearly, the decision maker would like to have the risks of overﬁshing quantiﬁed in some way for each choice of TAC. By constructing suitable models and performing computer simulations, it is possible to generate estimated probabilities of extinction (or severe depletion) over a speciﬁed time horizon, for alternative management strategies. Figure 49.2 indicates the kind of results that can be generated in this way. The graphs depict the probability of some speciﬁed undesirable outcome (e.g., collapse below some speciﬁed biomass level) as a function of the TAC as set over a given time span. A threshold risk level is also shown; this would be speciﬁed in advance by managers and then used to specify the annual TAC from the probability curve. Figure 49.2 shows two probability curves, depending on whether a marine protected area (MPA) is in effect. It might be objected that the probability curve is itself uncertain, but this is unavoidable—at least the displayed curve has the advantage of clearly depicting system uncertainty and its potential consequences for management. The usual procedure of simply presenting managers with a range of possible TACs in fact provides no useful information. Managers need to be made aware of the likely consequences of their decisions. A similar approach can be used in the case of model uncertainty, which arises when one tries to

1 No MPA Probability of Collapse

• • • •

0.8 0.6 0.4

With MPA

0.2

Threshold

0 0

20

40

60

80

100

TAC (Thousand tons) FIGURE 49.2 Hypothetical probabilities of a speciﬁed outcome (“collapse”) as a function of the TAC, under stock uncertainty. Case 1 (upper curve), no marine protected area; case 2 (lower curve), marine protected area in place. A hypothetical threshold probability is also indicated; TACs that result in a collapse probability above the threshold would be rejected

decide which of M different biological models best ﬁts the available data. Bayesian methods (Hilborn and Mangel 1997) can be used to attach a probability pm to the mth model, but again, this information by itself would be useless for managers. Instead, one can generate unconditional probability curves, M

Pr(collapse) =

å Pr(collapse|model m) · p

m

m =1

as a function of the TAC. This probability curve is just a convex combination of the separate, modeldependent curves, but the managers do not need to concern themselves with these details.

49.5. MARINE PROTECTED AREAS MPAs are a hot topic these days. Curiously, most of the discussion has been based on deterministic models, the assumption being that other management methods are ineffective and an MPA is the last hope. The idea that MPAs provide a hedge against uncertainty is usually ignored (but see Lauck et al. 1998). Where to locate an MPA and how large to make it are additional decisions that will be required of managers. Until now, ﬁshers have tended to oppose

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

MPAs on the grounds that they will reduce catches or make them more expensive. But, by reducing the risk of future catastrophes, MPAs can have substantial economic beneﬁts. As ﬁshers gradually become more business oriented (because of ITQs), support for precautionary management, including MPAs, can be expected to increase. To put the point differently, the failure to include an MPA as part of the management strategy of a given ﬁshery can amount to a neglect of the implications of irreducible uncertainty. (MPAs do have other advantages, such as protection of biodiversity.) Lack of an MPA may mean that the values of ITQ shares are placed at an unnecessary risk.

49.6. CONCLUSIONS Ever-growing demand for food ﬁsh and other marine products, combined with ever-increasing technical ability to harvest marine resources, has led to today’s crisis in marine ﬁsheries. The declaration of 200-mile EEZs for ﬁsheries jurisdiction in the late 1970s brought the majority of these resources under national control, but the new management systems have often failed to bring about sustainable, proﬁtable ﬁsheries. While these management systems have, in some cases, been successful in preventing overﬁshing, the ﬁnal result has often been a greatly overexpanded ﬁshing ﬂeet, built to cash in on a highly demanded resource product. Such overcapacity is a doublewhammy for ﬁsheries, resulting in minimal proﬁtability and lack of controllability. The collapse of Canada’s historic cod ﬁshery in 1991–1992 was but one example of a closely managed ﬁshery that got out of control because of excess harvesting capacity. To a large extent the reason for overﬁshing and/ or overcapacity lies in the lack of any form of recognized property rights in ﬁsheries (de Soto 2003). Each ﬁsher is then motivated to catch as many ﬁsh as possible, subject to the regulations, a behavioral trait that inevitably leads to overﬁshing or overcapacity, or both. Attempts to prevent such individually rational, but socially devastating, behavior have often proved futile. Likewise, attempts to reduce overcapacity by buying out the excess vessels have also often been futile, and expensive as well (Clark et al. 2005). I have argued in this chapter that a system of ITQs has, under appropriate circumstances, the potential to reverse this type of management failure.

ITQs are a form of limited rights-based management, in which each ﬁsher owns an entitlement to a speciﬁed, saleable share in the annual catch quota, subject to overall control by the state. Recent experience in a number of coastal states has demonstrated the effectiveness of carefully designed and operated ITQ systems to generate sustainable, profitable ﬁsheries. Other important aspects of successful resource management, including environmental (and biodiversity) protection, plus hedging against uncertainty and management error, will doubtlessly become integral parts of the new management systems, as these become more familiar and acceptable. Ownership and control of ﬁsheries within 200-mile EEZs will be maintained by coastal states as a source of national wealth. Deep-sea ﬁsheries, on the other hand, will probably continue to be overexploited, unless some way is found to negotiate enforceable international agreements encompassing these resources.

APPENDIX If R = R(t) is the ﬂow of net economic revenues (t ³ 0), then the present value of R, with discount rate d, is deﬁned by ¥ PV = ò e -δ t R(t)dt 0

(49.11)

The effort E(t) that maximizes PV, subject to the model equations 49.1–49.3, is ìEmax when x(t)> x* ï E(t) = íE * when x(t)= x* ï0 when x(t)= x* î

(49.12)

where Emax denotes ﬂeet effort capacity, and where x* is the optimal equilibrium biomass, as given by the equation G´(x*) -

c´(x*)G(x*) =δ p - c(x*)

(49.13)

(see Clark 2006, p. 59). Also, E* = G(x*)/qx* is the effort level required to maintain x(t) at x*. Thus, the optimal ﬁshing strategy is to harvest the initial stock as rapidly as possible, down to its long-term equilibrium level x*, and then to maintain this equilibrium. [If x(0) < x*, the optimal strategy is a ﬁshing moratorium until the stock returns

Challenges in Marine Capture Fisheries to x*.] Clark (2006) explains the assumptions needed to obtain this result and discusses alternative assumptions. Equation 49.13 reduces to equation 49.8 for xMSEY in the event that the discount rate d = 0. Thus, xMSEY is the optimal stock level under zero discounting. For positive discount rates d > 0, we have x* < xMSEY. (In fact, it can be shown that limδ→∞x*=xbe.) If ﬁshers discount the future (as everyone does), they will wish to maintain a stock level somewhat smaller than xMSEY, because of the “tilt” of income preference toward current income. Note that the tilt applies to ITQ ﬁshers, and also to a hypothetical private owner of the ﬁshery. It is not related to the common-pool case (which in fact corresponds to d = +∞). As pointed out above, in the case of stock rehabilitation [x(0) < x*], ﬁshers will favor an earlier resumption of harvesting than would occur under an MSEY strategy. In practice, the difference could amount to several years, depending on circumstances.

Notes 1. As with all equations in this chapter, it is important to realize that those listed above have been chosen with the purpose of presenting a simple basic model of ﬁshery bioeconomics, suitable for newcomers to this ﬁeld, and convenient for the topic under discussion. Combining biology and economics in this way is already mentally taxing, and many publications have gone far astray in terms of misunderstanding the dynamic interplay between these two aspects. To mention just one example, the role of future discounting in determining optimal harvest strategies remains badly misunderstood even in some contemporary publications. More complicated biological—and economic—models are readily found in the literature, but such advanced topics are deliberately eschewed here. 2. See Clark (2006, 42) for further discussion and alternative models for equation 49.2.

References Christy, F.T., Jr., and A.D. Scott (1965). The Common Wealth in Ocean Fisheries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Clark, C.W. (2006). The Worldwide Crisis in Fisheries. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Clark, C.W., and R.H. Lamberson (1982). An economic history and analysis of pelagic whaling. Marine Policy 6: 103–120. Clark, C.W., G.R. Munro, and U.R. Sumaila. (2005). Subsidies, buybacks and sustainable ﬁsheries. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 50: 47–58. de Soto, H. (2003). The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books. Gordon, H.S. (1954). The economic theory of a common property resource: The ﬁshery. Journal of Political Economy 62: 124–142. Harley, S., R. Myers, and A. Dunn (2001). Is catchper-unit effort proportional to abundance? Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 58: 1760–1772. Hilborn, R. (2007). Moving to sustainability by learning from successful ﬁsheries. Ambio 36: 296–303. Hilborn, R., and M. Mangel (1997). The Ecological Detective: Confronting Models with Data. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Lauck, T., C.W. Clark, M. Mangel, and G.R. Munro (1998). Implementing the precautionary principle in ﬁsheries through marine reserves. Ecological Applications 8 (suppl.): S72–S80. Mackinson, S., U.R. Sumaila, and T.J. Pitcher (1997). Bioeconomics and catchability: Fish and ﬁshers behaviour during stock collapse. Fisheries Research 31: 11–17. Munro, G.R. (2001). The effect of introducing individual harvest quotas upon ﬂeet capacity in the marine ﬁsheries of British Columbia. In R. Shotton (ed.), Case Studies on the Effects of Transferable Fishing Rights on Fleet Capacity and Concentration of Quota Ownership. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 412. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, pp. 208–220. Ostrom, E., M.A. Janssen, and J.M. Anderies (2007). Going beyond panaceas, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 104: 15176–15178. Schaefer, M.B. (1954). Some aspects of the dynamics of populations important to the management of commercial ﬁsheries. Bulletin of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission 1: 25–56. Turris, B.R. (1999). A comparison of British Columbia’s ITQ ﬁsheries for groundﬁsh trawl and sableﬁsh: Similar results from programmes with different objectives, designs and processes. In R. Shotton (ed.), Use of Property Rights in Fisheries Management, FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 404/1. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, pp. 254–261.

50 The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and Beyond: The Next 25 Years GORDON R. MUNRO

50.1. INTRODUCTION The third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea, 1973–1982, and the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to which it gave rise (United Nations 1982), led to a revolution in the management of the world’s maritime capture ﬁshery resource. The conference and UNCLOS led to vast amounts of ocean capture ﬁshery resources being transformed in status from that of international common pool resources to that of coastal state1 property. UNCLOS, which achieved the status of international treaty law in 1994, did not mark the end of the revolution. On the contrary, there were further major developments in the 1990s, which resulted in UNCLOS being supplemented by what is popularly referred to as the 1995 U.N. Fish Stock Agreement (UNFSA). The revolution continues at the time of writing and might not be fully completed during the 25 years to come. The focus of the revolution has been on the doctrine of the freedom of the seas, as it pertains to ﬁshing, which in turn gave a legal foundation to the common pool nature of ocean ﬁshery resources. The freedom of the seas, pertaining to ﬁsheries, has been sharply reduced since the early 1980s, but has not been fully eliminated. A remnant remains. In light of the emphasis that other chapters in this volume give to the destructive consequences of ﬁsheries being common pool in nature, some

explanation is required as to why the freedom to ﬁsh ever existed in the ﬁrst place, and why it has taken so long to eliminate it.

50.2. THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS AND THE ORIGINS OF UNCLOS While it is now taken to be self-evident that ocean capture ﬁshery resources have been subject to overexploitation, thanks to their common pool nature, and that some are at risk of being driven to commercial, if not biological, extinction, this fear and concern are, in fact, of relatively recent origin. The ﬁrst concerns about capture ﬁshery resource overexploitation did not emerge until early in the 20th century, and no serious measures to address overﬁshing were introduced, until the end of World War II (Munro 2007). Prior to that time, the consequences of ocean ﬁsheries being common pool in nature seemed to be of little concern. While particular local ﬁshery resources might have been subject to overexploitation, the great ocean ﬁshery resources were seen as inexhaustible. Attempting to regulate such ﬁsheries was hardly worth the effort, or so it was argued. This point of view found its clearest expression in the doctrine of the freedom of the seas (Mare Liberum), as propounded by the 17th-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. Under this doctrine,

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The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and Beyond the oceans were divided between the coastal state territorial sea and the remainder, the high seas. The territorial sea was, and is, a narrow strip of water, by tradition extending out from shore to no more than three nautical miles.2 The resources in the high seas were to be deemed res communis, the property of all, and thus open to exploitation by all. The doctrine of the freedom of the seas, as it pertained to ﬁsheries, rested upon two premises: (1) the high seas ﬁshery resources are inexhaustible, (2) coastal states are unable to control effectively resource exploitation activities beyond their territorial seas (Orrego Vicuña 1999). When Grotius developed the freedom of the seas doctrine in the early 17th century, the ﬁrst premise appeared to have been validated, by virtue of the fact that, given the then state of ﬁshing technology, heavy exploitation of high seas ﬁshery resources was prohibitively costly (not to mention dangerous). The belief that the great ocean ﬁshery resources were protected by economics continued until late in the 19th century. In 1883, at a London exhibition on ﬁsheries, one of Britain’s leading scientists of the day, Thomas Huxley, stated that “probably all the great sea ﬁsheries are inexhaustible” and that there was no point in trying to regulate them (cited in National Research Council 1999: 16). Even as Huxley spoke, however, the ﬁrst premise was beginning to fray. Fishing technology was changing rapidly, bringing with it a fall in harvesting costs. The shift from sail to steam is the prime example. As harvesting costs fell, the great sea-ﬁshery resources lost their natural economic protection, and the realization gradually began to take hold that offshore ﬁshery resources were not inexhaustible after all. Marine biologists noted that, after both world wars, ﬁshery resources in the North Sea increased in abundance. The marine biologists, putting two and two together, surmised that the growth in the ﬁshery resources was not unconnected to the sharp decline in ﬁshing activities due to wartime conditions. They concluded that (1) ﬁshing does have an impact upon offshore ﬁsh stocks, and (2) such ﬁsh stocks can recover, if ﬁshing is curtailed (National Research Council 1999). The growing realization that high seas ﬁshery resources were exhaustible, that the common pool nature of these resources did in fact matter, led gradually to curbs being placed upon the freedom to ﬁsh in the high seas, initially through international agreements. One example is provided by the International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries (ICNAF), established by Canada, the United States,

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and a few European countries in 1949. ICNAF attempted to encourage proactive management of high seas ﬁsheries from the southern boundary of Greenland down to the U.S. mid-Atlantic. The efﬁcacy of ﬁsheries management through international organizations became subject to question. Those who raised such questions (coastal states in particular) were to be given an alternative through the United Nations. Following the close of World War II, coastal states (beginning with the United States) began asserting claims of jurisdiction over marine resources off their shores, beyond the territorial sea. In response to what it saw as a disorderly attempt on the part of coastal states to extend their areas of marine jurisdiction, the United Nations convened an international Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1958. From a ﬁsheries standpoint, the conference resulted in coastal states being granted jurisdiction over shellﬁsh resources out to the edge of the continental shelf, but nothing more (Logan 1974). The 1958 conference was followed by the second U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1960, which accomplished little or nothing, and then by the third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea, 1973–1982, which accomplished a great deal. As already stated, from the perspective of ﬁsheries, it can be said that the U.N. conference of 1973–1982 led to a revolution in the management of world marine capture ﬁsheries. UNCLOS, arising from the 1973–1982 conference, provides the bedrock legal framework for the management of international capture ﬁshery resources.3 For the purpose of ﬁsheries, the key parts of UNCLOS are part V, which addresses exclusive economic zones (EEZ), and part VII, addressing the high seas (United Nations 1982). Under part V of UNCLOS, coastal states are granted the right to establish EEZs out to 200 nautical miles (370.4 kilometers) from shore. Within the EEZ, the coastal state has “sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing . . . the ﬁshery resources contained therein” (United Nations 1982, article 56). To all intents and purposes, the coastal state has property rights to the intra-EEZ ﬁshery resources (McRae and Munro 1989). If the coastal state has effective property rights to ﬁshery resources within the EEZ, then the next, and obvious, question to raise is the signiﬁcance of the new EEZ regime to world capture ﬁsheries. The answer is that the new regime is highly signiﬁcant. The EEZ regime has now become all but universal.

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In the mid-1970s, when the EEZ regime was clearly on the horizon, it was estimated that more than 90 percent of the world commercial marine capture ﬁshery harvests, by volume, were taken within 200 nautical miles from shore (Alexander and Hodgson 1975: 586). It is on this basis that one can argue that a massive amount of renewable resource wealth has been transferred from common-pool international resource status to that of coastal state property, with a concomitant radical reduction in high seas ﬁsheries. Indeed, it appeared to many that the freedom of the seas, as it pertained to ﬁsheries, was all but dead. A document published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in the early 1990s stated that “ten years ago [1982], the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was signed, marking the end of an era of freedom of the seas” (FAO 1992: 1). The end, in fact, had not yet come. A signiﬁcant remnant of the freedom of the seas, pertaining to ﬁsheries, yet remained. The establishment of the EEZ regime gave coastal states much increased power to manage ﬁshery resources, power that coastal states have exercised to date with various degrees of success. Several other chapters in this volume deal with the problems of intra-EEZ management of capture ﬁshery resource. What this chapter focuses on is a major ﬁshery resource management issue raised by the new EEZ regime: the management of “shared” ﬁshery resources. The FAO has declared that “the management of shared ﬁshery resources remains one of the great challenges towards achieving long-term sustainable ﬁsheries” (FAO 2002: iv). Here I argue that this key international resource management issue must be resolved, not just within the next 25 years, but well before, if further serious depletion of marine capture ﬁshery resources is not to occur.

50.3. SHARED FISH STOCKS: AN OVERVIEW An internationally shared ﬁsh stock can be deﬁned as one that is exploited by two or more states (or entities). The advent of the EEZ regime gave rise to the shared ﬁsh stock management issue by virtue of the mobility of the typical capture ﬁshery resource. Given this mobility, it was inevitable that a coastal state, upon establishing an EEZ, would ﬁnd that some of the ﬁshery resources thereby crossed the

boundaries of the EEZ. There had been shared ﬁsh stocks before the advent of the EEZ regime, of course, but the management of such resources had not gained prominence prior to the appearance of this regime (Munro 1979). The FAO sets forth the following categories of internationally shared ﬁsh stocks: 1. Transboundary stocks: stocks that cross the EEZ boundary into one or more neighboring EEZs 2. Highly migratory stocks: primarily tuna resources, which, because of their highly migratory nature, are to be found both within the EEZ and the adjacent high seas 3. Straddling stocks: all other stocks to be found both within the EEZ and the adjacent high seas 4. Discrete high seas stocks (Munro et al. 2004). There is, in fact, neither a biological nor an economic justiﬁcation for distinguishing between categories 2 and 3 (Munro et al. 2004). Merging them into one category—straddling stocks broadly deﬁned—thus leaves 1. Transboundary stocks 2. Straddling stocks (broadly deﬁned) 3. Discrete high seas stocks Note also, in passing, that categories 1 and 2 are far from being mutually exclusive. It would seem reasonable to suppose that, since the EEZs worldwide account for 90 percent of the world capture ﬁshery resources, only category 1 (transboundary stocks) would be of interest. This was indeed the view taken in 1982. The following decade was to prove that this sanguine view of the world was wholly unfounded. Straddling ﬁsh stocks (broadly deﬁned) were to constitute a major resource management problem and to force the United Nations to convene another international conference to address the problem.

50.4. THE MANAGEMENT OF TRANSBOUNDARY FISH STOCKS While our main interest here is in the management of straddling and discrete high seas stocks, we

The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and Beyond commence with a discussion of the economics of the management of transboundary ﬁsh stocks. The foundation of the economics of the management of straddling stocks and of discrete high seas stocks is provided by the economics of the management of the much simpler transboundary ﬁsh stocks. Under UNCLOS, coastal states sharing a transboundary resource are admonished to enter into negotiations with respect to cooperative management of the resources (United Nations 1982, Article 63(1) ). Importantly, however, they are not required to reach an agreement. If the relevant coastal states negotiate in good faith but are unable to reach an agreement, then each coastal state is to manage its share of the resource (i.e., that part occurring within its EEZ) in accordance with the relevant rights and duties laid down by UNCLOS (Van Houtte 2003). We can refer to this as the default option. With the default option in mind, economists ﬁnd that coastal states have before them two issues that they must attempt to analyze: 1. The consequences, if any, of the relevant coastal states adopting the default option and not cooperating in the management of the resource 2. The conditions that must prevail if a cooperative resource management regime is to be stable over the long run If the answer to option 1 is that the negative consequences of noncooperation are negligible, then, of course, option 2 can be safely ignored. Two prominent aspects of the problem at hand must be brought to the fore that help to differentiate the management of transboundary ﬁsh stocks from that of straddling and discrete high seas stocks. The ﬁrst is that state property rights to the ﬁshery resources are straightforward and clear. The relevant coastal states are to be seen as joint owners of the resources and can be seen as owning the resources on the equivalent of a condominium basis (McRae and Munro 1989). The second is that there is virtually no evidence of “free-riding” on the part of states not parties to a cooperative management arrangement. That is to say that if, for example, three coastal states share a ﬁsh stock, there is no evidence of two out of three of those states cooperating to manage the resource, while the third free-rides off the cooperative efforts of its neighbors (Munro et al. 2004). This, as we will see, stands in stark contrast to the

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management of the other two categories of shared ﬁsh stocks. The central feature of transboundary stock management is that, with few exceptions, there will, for straightforward reasons, be a strategic interaction between, or among, the coastal states sharing the resource. Consider two coastal states sharing a transboundary resource. The harvesting activities of coastal state 1 can be expected to have an impact upon the harvesting opportunities available to coastal state 2, and vice versa. Coastal state 2 (1) will have no choice but to take into account the likely harvest plans of coastal state 1 (2)—hence the strategic interaction. In attempting to analyze options 1 and 2, economists have no choice but to recognize such strategic interaction. The economics of the management of transboundary ﬁsh stocks is, as a consequence, a blend of the standard ﬁsheries economics applied to domestic ﬁsheries (i.e., ﬁsheries conﬁned to a single EEZ) and the theory of strategic interaction (or interactive decision theory), more commonly known as the theory of games. Economists studying other shared resources (e.g., water resources, the atmosphere) also ﬁnd themselves compelled to incorporate game theory into their analyses. Such is the growing importance of game theory in economics in general that the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded twice to specialists in game theory, with the second such award being made in 2005. The press release announcing the awarding of the prize for 2005 laureates Thomas Schelling and Robert Aumann read as follows: Why do some groups of individuals, organizations and countries succeed in promoting cooperation while others suffer from conﬂict? The work of Robert Aumann and Thomas Schelling has established game theory—or interactive decision theory—as the dominant approach to this age-old question. (see nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/2005/press.html) This “age-old question” is precisely the one we are attempting to address in a ﬁsheries context. There are two broad classes of games: noncooperative (competitive) and cooperative. We draw upon the theory of noncooperative games to analyze option 1, the default option of noncooperative management. The key conclusion arising from noncooperative game theory is that the “players” (coastal states sharing the ﬁshery resources) will be driven inexorably to adopt strategies that

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they know perfectly well will produce decidedly undesirable results. This outcome is referred to as a “prisoner’s dilemma” outcome after a famous noncooperative game developed to illustrate the point (Tucker 1950; see also Munro et al. 2004). The basic nature of the prisoner’s dilemma outcome, in a ﬁsheries context, can be illustrated as follows. Consider a transboundary ﬁshery resource shared by two coastal states. Coastal state 1’s harvesting activity will have an impact on that of coastal state 2, and vice versa. Suppose, further, that there is no signiﬁcant resource management cooperation between them—states 1 and 2 adopt the default option and manage their respective segments of the resource on their own. If state 1 undertakes to restrict harvests in order to “invest” in the resource, the beneﬁts from this action will also be shared with state 2. What assurance does state 1 have that state 2 will also undertake to conserve the resource? Since there is no cooperation, the answer is none. It is only too possible that state 2 would be content to “free-ride” off of state 1’s resource investment efforts. In these circumstances, it is likely that coastal state 1 will conclude that the return on its resource investment would be less than the cost, and that its best course of action (“strategy”) is to do nothing. Coastal state 2 could be expected to come to the same conclusion. Worse, state 1 has to allow for the possibility that state 2 might deliberately deplete the resource. If state 1 seriously believes this, then it could decide that its best strategy is to strike ﬁrst. Once again, state 2 could follow the same line of reasoning. The theory has strong predictive power. One example, of which I have considerable knowledge, is that of Paciﬁc salmon in the Northeast Paciﬁc, shared by Canada and the United States. Both coastal states are developed and have extensive ﬁsheries management experience. The two have attempted to manage the salmon resources cooperatively. At times, however, the cooperation has broken down. The reversion to competition has led to “ﬁsh wars,” the deliberate overexploitation of the resources (Miller et al. 2001). Thus, except in unusual circumstances, cooperation does matter. With respect to cooperative management, the analysis, appropriately enough, draws upon the theory of cooperative games. It is assumed that each “player” is motivated by self-interest alone and is prepared to consider cooperating only because it believes that it will be better off than by playing competitively. The chief problem in cooperatively

managed ﬁsheries is that of ensuring the stability of the cooperative management regime through time. The following considerations are of key relevance: 1. Prospects for effective intra-EEZ management: if the intra-EEZ management of the “players” is wholly ineffective, the potential gains from cooperation may be simply dissipated, and cooperation will be hardly worth the effort. 2. Satisfaction of the individual rationality constraint: each and every “player” must be assured at all times, now and in the future, of receiving economic beneﬁts from the cooperatively managed ﬁshery resources that are at least as great as it would receive under noncooperation—a principle that should be obvious but is often ignored in practice. 3. Effectiveness of compliance: if compliance cannot be assured—if cheating is allowed to go unchecked—then rational “players” can be expected to assume that, although their allocations of the beneﬁts from the ﬁshery are “fair,” their actual returns may be less than what they would receive under noncooperation—the individual rationality constraint once again. 4. Maximizing the scope for bargaining through the use of side payments (“negotiation facilitators”): side payments are essentially transfers, which can take any number of forms. A cooperative ﬁsheries game, without side payments, is one in which coastal state 1’s (2’s) economic returns from the ﬁshery are determined solely by the harvest of state 1’s (2’s) ﬂeet within state 1’s (2’s) EEZ. The objection to such a cooperative game is that the scope for bargaining may be unduly restricted. Economists would argue further that the focus should be not on the sharing of harvests from the ﬁshery, but rather on the sharing of the global net economic beneﬁts from the ﬁshery resource. The concept of side payments, while seemingly obvious, has been slow to be accepted in practice. There are signs, however, that the lesson is now being learned in the real world (Munro 2008).4 5. Resilience through time: cooperative resource management arrangements are likely to be subject to unpredictable shocks over time. If a cooperative resource management arrangement lacks resilience, the shocks can cause the arrangement to founder. The

The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and Beyond Canada–U.S. Paciﬁc salmon cooperative resource management arrangement provides us with yet another example. The cooperative arrangement, which was established under a formal treaty in 1985, was driven into a state of paralysis in the early 1990s because of an unforeseen climate regime shift that had a negative impact on Paciﬁc salmon stocks off the northwest continental United States and southern British Columbia, but a very positive impact upon these stocks off Alaska. The solution to the cooperative game, reached through extensive bargaining, was upset, with the cooperative resource management arrangement essentially seizing up. The cooperative arrangement was eventually “patched up,” after a six-year hiatus. The hiatus, however, marked by a striking example of the prisoner’s dilemma at work, as “ﬁsh wars” reemerged (Miller and Munro 2004).

50.5. THE RISE OF THE STRADDLING FISH STOCK MANAGEMENT PROBLEM Straddling ﬁsh stocks, those to be found in the EEZ and the adjacent high seas, are subject to exploitation by coastal states and by so called distant-water ﬁshing states (DWFSs). A DWFS can be deﬁned as a ﬁshing state some of whose ﬁshing ﬂeets operate well outside of the state’s EEZ. Japan and Spain provide prominent examples. Parts V and VII of UNCLOS that address EEZs and the high seas provide the basic legal framework for the management of these resources. The relevant states are admonished to cooperate (as best they can) in the management of the resources. Having said this, the freedom of the seas prevails in the high seas, subject to the proviso that DWFSs exploiting straddling stocks are to take the interests of the relevant coastal states into consideration (United Nations 1982). Maintaining the principle of the freedom of the seas, while recognizing the interests of the coastal states, with regards to the straddling stocks, presented UNCLOS’s drafters with a difﬁcult balancing act. The ﬁsheries articles of part VII (high seas) resulting from this balancing act have been described as a model of opaqueness (Munro 2000). This, in

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turn, made it very difﬁcult to establish effective cooperative resource management arrangements. At ﬁrst, this did not seem to matter very much, given the seemingly limited ﬁshery resources in the remaining high seas. The 10 percent ﬁgure referred to above is, however, misleading. Heavy exploitation of the high seas segment of a straddling stock obviously affects the intra-EEZ management of the stock. Far from being trivial, the FAO estimates that straddling stocks, actual and potential, are estimated to provide the basis for one-ﬁfth of the world’s ocean capture ﬁshery harvests (Munro et al. 2004). In any event, the prisoner’s dilemma played itself out as more and more cases of straddling stock overexploitation emerged during the remainder of the 1980s and into the early 1990s. An example is provided by Alaska pollock, the species that historically has yielded the largest harvest in the North Paciﬁc. Large concentrations are to be found in the Bering Sea. A signiﬁcant part of the resource straddles the American zone and a high seas enclave, between the American and Russian zones, referred to as the “Doughnut Hole.” The management of the straddling stock was noncooperative. The pollock resources in the Doughnut Hole were not just overexploited; they were, in the words of the FAO, plundered (FAO 1994). As Munro et al. (2004) remark, “the overexploitation of straddling/highly migratory ﬁsh stocks worldwide . . . bears powerful testimony to the predictive powers of the economic analysis of the noncooperative management of such resources” (45). The growing concern over the state of world straddling ﬁsh stocks led the United Nations to convene an international conference to address the issue. The conference, commonly referred to as the U.N. Fish Stocks Conference, 1993–1995, brought forth an agreement, popularly referred to as the U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA).5 UNFSA, which achieved the status of international treaty law in late 2001, is not meant to replace any part of UNCLOS, but rather is designed to buttress it (Bjørndal and Munro 2003). Under the terms of UNFSA, straddling stocks (broadly deﬁned) are to be managed on a region by region basis through regional ﬁsheries management organizations (RFMOs). The RFMOs are to have as members both coastal states and DWFSs. Examples are provided by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), the Northeast Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC), and the Western Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Convention (WCPFC).

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The RFMO regime is still at an early state of development, with many key resource management problems unresolved. It is these problems, along with those pertaining to the management of discrete high seas stocks, that must be resolved well before the next 25 years. With this in mind, let us review the economics of the management of straddling ﬁsh stocks.

50.6. THE MANAGEMENT OF STRADDLING FISH STOCKS As noted above, the economics of the management of straddling stocks rests ﬁrmly upon the foundation of the economics of the management of transboundary stocks, with economists asking themselves what modiﬁcations, if any, to the economics of transboundary stocks are required by the straddling stock management problem. With respect to noncooperative management of straddling stocks, the answer is no modiﬁcations whatsoever are required. Noncooperative management brings with it the promise of prisoner’s dilemma types of outcomes and resource overexploitation. Indeed, it was the increasing evidence of just such outcomes that compelled the United Nations to convene the 1993–1995 U.N. Fish Stocks Conference. At the time of this writing, there is no serious alternative to the RFMO regime for the cooperative management of straddling stocks. If RFMOs prove, by and large, to be unstable, then the economics of straddling stock management assures that continuing overexploitation, and in some cases destruction, of straddling stocks is all but guaranteed. We turn, then, to what we might call the economics of RFMO (cooperative) management of straddling stocks. The economics of the cooperative management of transboundary stocks provides us with a foundation for analyzing the cooperative management of straddling stocks, but no more than a foundation. Substantial modiﬁcations are required. There are two fundamental differences between the cooperative management of transboundary ﬁsh stocks and that of straddling stocks, one a difference of degree and the other a difference in kind. The ﬁrst difference involves numbers of “players.” The typical cooperative transboundary stock management arrangement involves a small number of players, with such arrangements having no

more than two players being not uncommon. With RFMOs having both coastal states and DWFSs as members, an RFMO-based ﬁsheries cooperative game with fewer than 10 players is to be regarded as being modest in size. As a general rule, the difﬁculty of achieving a stable cooperative arrangement, of any form, increases almost exponentially with the number of players. The second difference, a difference in kind, pertains to collective property rights to the ﬁshery resources encompassed by the cooperative resource management arrangement. In the case of transboundary stocks, as already noted, the property rights to the resources are clear, with the coastal states sharing property rights to the resources on what amounts to a condominium basis (McRae and Munro 1989). The property rights to straddling stocks, on the other hand, are much less clear, with the lack of clarity arising from what I would term a freedom of the seas “hangover” (Munro 2007). Having said all of this, the conditions for stability pertaining to the stability of cooperative transboundary stock management arrangements must all be met by straddling stock management arrangements. These may be thought of as the initial conditions to be met. Of particular importance is the requirement that the scope for bargaining be made as broad as possible, through the use of side payments, or the equivalent thereof (e.g., “negotiation facilitators”). The problem that has to be addressed in the near future is that of developing mechanisms that will put side payments into effect in an efﬁcient and politically acceptable manner. An example of the thinking that is proceeding along these lines is provided by Chand et al. (2003), who address the question of the management of what is almost certainly the world’s largest RFMO, in terms of area and value of harvests: Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission (WCPFC). The WCPFC oversees the management of the world’s largest and most valuable tuna ﬁshery. Chand et al. call for the establishment of a tuna commission that, through an elaborate and detailed scheme, would facilitate the trading and leasing of harvest quotas for the different tuna species with the WCPFC jurisdiction between and among WCPFC members. The scheme, which clearly has applicability to other RFMOs, both tuna- and non-tunabased, deserves close study (Chand et al. 2003). The most crucial difference between the cooperative management of transboundary stocks and

The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and Beyond that of straddling stocks revolves around property rights. The ambiguity surrounding straddling stock property rights arises in the following manner. The UNFSA, which is now a part of international treaty law, maintains that only those states that are members of an RFMO, or that agree to abide by the provisions of the RFMO, shall have access to the ﬁshery resources under the jurisdiction of the RFMO (United Nations 1995, Article 8(4) ). A fundamental principle of international law is that a treaty binds only those states that are party to the treaty, unless the treaty has achieved the status of customary international law6 (Buergenthal and Murphy 2002: 21ff; Munro et al. 2004: 42). There is not yet complete agreement among legal experts on whether UNFSA has, in fact, achieved the status of customary international law. The consequence is that there is uncertainty about the nature of the property rights to segments of RFMO-governed straddling stocks to be found within the high seas adjacent to EEZs. The property rights ambiguity, in turn, gives rise to the distinction between illegal and unregulated ﬁshing. According to the FAO, illegal ﬁshing involves ﬁshing by one state (or entity) in the EEZ of another state without the latter’s permission, or willful noncompliance with the management provisions of an RFMO by a member of the RFMO (FAO 2001: 3.1). Thus, if a nonmember free-rides by ﬁshing without permission in the EEZ of a coastal state member of the RFMO, the nonmember is engaging in unequivocal poaching, and the affected state can take vigorous action. On the other hand, if vessels ﬂying the ﬂag of a nonmember of an RFMO and nonparty to UNFSA ﬁsh in the high seas portion of the area governed by the RFMO, in a manner inconsistent with the management provisions of the RFMO, such vessels are deemed to be engaging in unregulated ﬁshing (FAO 2001: 3.3.1). Unregulated ﬁshing is a much more vague concept than is illegal ﬁshing, reﬂecting the aforementioned ambiguity of property rights, and the freedom of the seas “hangover” (Munro 2007). While unregulated ﬁshing is deemed to be morally reprehensible, it has, in the past, been unclear what RFMO members can do to curb such activities. Unregulated ﬁshing constitutes free-riding, pure and simple. If free-riding is allowed to go unchecked, the effect will be exactly the same as unchecked noncompliance. The individual rationality condition will not be met by one or more “players,” and the cooperative resource management arrangement

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will unravel. The recent Chatham House Report on the governance of RFMOs, issued by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, states that “a core conclusion [of the report] is that the success of international cooperation depends largely on the ability to deter free-riding” (Lodge et al. 2007: x). The ambiguous property rights issue is complicated by another pair of problems commonly referred to as the “real-interest” and “new-member” problems. The real-interest problem arises in the context of the question of which states should be invited to become “charter” members of an RFMO. Article 8(3) of UNFSA maintains that “States having a real interest in the ﬁsheries concerned may become members of such organizations,” that is, RFMOs. Does this imply that the “charter” members of an RFMO should include, for example, DWFSs, which had hitherto never been involved in the relevant ﬁsheries but now would like to become so involved and express a “real interest” to this effect? Munro et al. (2004: 50n.38) found that experts in international law have far from uniform views on the question.7 The new-member problem arises by virtue of the fact that a state (almost invariably a DWFS), not originally a member of the RFMO, may develop a real interest in the ﬁshery and apply for membership in the RFMO.8 Articles 8, 10, and 11 of UNFSA make it clear that “charter” members of an RFMO cannot bar outright prospective new members that are prepared to adhere to the RFMO management regime (Munro et al. 2004; United Nations 1995). The question is under what terms prospective new members are to be permitted to enter (e.g., what allocations are to be made to new members). The question is important because the new-member problem, along with the real-interest problem, carries with it a more subtle variant of the free-rider threat, quite separate from unregulated ﬁshing. It arises in the following manner. An international group of legal experts, T. McDorman, K. Sigurjonsson, and P. Örbech, maintain that, under UNFSA, new members must be allocated just and reasonable shares of the total allowable catch (TAC) available under the RFMO management plan (Örebech et al. 1998). A number of years ago, Kaitala and Munro (1997) demonstrated the following. If just and reasonable implies that new members/participants, upon joining an RFMO, should be allocated, at no further cost as it were, shares of the TAC, or the equivalent, on a pro-rata basis, then when planning is undertaken

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for the establishment of an RFMO, prospective “charter” members could well calculate that their expected payoffs from cooperation would fall below their respective noncooperation payoffs. Hence, the RFMO would be stillborn, in essence, because of potential new member free-riding. The Kaitala-Munro argument can be explained in terms of the following example. Suppose that a hitherto overexploited straddling type of stock comes under the management of an RFMO consisting of coastal state V and three DWFSs W, X, and Y, all of which had a history of involvement in the ﬁshery. The four “charter” members undertake the cost and sacriﬁce of rebuilding the resource over, let us say, a seven-year period. In the eighth year, the four are in a position to enjoy a return on their resource investment through harvesting. At the beginning of the eighth year, a prospective new member, DWFS Z, appears. It demands access to the RFMO, agrees to abide by the resource management rules, but demands, “free of charge,” a pro-rata share of the harvest and, by implication, a pro-rata share of the net economic returns from the ﬁshery. If DWFS Z’s demands were acceded to, Z would effectively be a free-rider. Having incurred none of the costs and sacriﬁces of investment in the resource, it will enjoy, at no cost, a pro-rata share of the return on the investment. A straightforward application of game theory demonstrates that the impact of this new form of free-riding is no different from the impact of the free-riding associated with unregulated ﬁshing (Kaitala and Munro 1997; Munro et al. 2004). The real-interest issue raises a similar free-rider threat. Munro et al. (2004) argue that, if “real interest,” as expressed in Article 8 of UNFSA, is interpreted to mean that states not currently engaged in exploiting resources to come under the management of an RFMO must be invited to become “charter” members of the RFMO, then the same sort of free-rider problem, threatened by the newmember issue, can readily arise. Let us return to our new member problem example discussed in the preceding paragraphs. Suppose, as before, that states V, W, X, and Y come together to establish an RFMO to oversee the management of a straddling or highly migratory stock that had, in the past, been overexploited. Suppose, also as before, that the four had been actively involved in the ﬁshery prior to any thought being given to establishing an RFMO. The four plan to rebuild the resource over a seven-year period. Let us suppose

that DWFS Z is a state that had never participated in the exploitation of the resource but that has developed a real interest in the resource now that it may come under effective management. Rather than wait to come in later as a new member, Z demands full and undiluted “charter” membership. The four feel compelled to accede to Z’s demand. Z incurs no real sacriﬁce in the rebuilding of the resource, because it had not hitherto been engaged in harvesting the resource. Z will simply bide its time over the seven-year period and then, when the eighth year arrives, will come to enjoy an allocated share of the return on the resource investment, as the free-rider that it most certainly is. Once again, the possibility of such free-riding could undermine the viability of the RFMO. Willock and Lack (2006), in a study of RFMO practices, maintain that there have been two broad approaches to addressing the new member problem. The ﬁrst, for which NAFO and NEAFC provide examples, involves informing prospective new members that the RFMO ﬁsheries are fully subscribed and that they can expect allocations from new ﬁsheries only. Willock and Lack (2006: 27) aptly describe this approach as “effectively closing the door on new members.” The second approach, as exempliﬁed by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) and the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Blueﬁn Tuna, is to grant prospective new members allocations at the expense of “charter” members. Some RFMOs attempt to mask the pain to “charter” members by adding the allocations to new members to the existing TACs. Rational “charter” members will, however, soon strip the mask away. A “charter” member of ICCAT, South Africa, referred to this practice, then being carried out by ICCAT, as “nothing less than ICCAT-sanctioned overﬁshing in complete violation of our convention” (Willock and Lack 2006: 26). The two approaches combined pose a dilemma. If allocations offered to prospective new members, or hitherto nonparticipants in the ﬁshery(ies) now claiming a “real interest,” are too generous, then the RFMO may be undermined for reasons discussed. If, however, states/entities found in these two groups deem the offered allocations to be insufﬁcient, they may refuse to join the RFMO and turn to unregulated ﬁshing in the adjacent high seas, regardless of UNFSA. How, then, is the dilemma to be resolved?

The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and Beyond A group of European ﬁsheries economists who are, I would argue, at the cutting edge of the application of game theory to the management of shared ﬁsh stocks have addressed this very problem (see in particular Pintassilgo and Lindroos 2008). Their conclusion is that if restrictions on unregulated ﬁshing are weak—property rights to the high seas segments of straddling stocks remain ambiguous— there will be instances in which no resolution of the dilemma is possible, regardless of how ingenious the allocation schemes might be. The analysis developed by these economists was tested empirically by being applied to the case of east Atlantic blueﬁn tuna ﬁsheries, under the management of (ICCAT). Pintassilgo (2003) concluded that if restrictions on unregulated ﬁshing are weak, it will not be possible to achieve a stable cooperative arrangement for the management of the resource, UNFSA notwithstanding. Pintassilgo also concludes, however, that if unregulated ﬁshing can be eliminated, the prospects for effective cooperative resource management will be much brighter. Another pair of European economists add that, if effective cooperative management measures are not applied to these tuna resource, the sustainability of the ﬁshery will be under severe threat (Bjørndal and Brasão 2006). There remains a third approach that is coming up for increasing discussion. This is to allow—to enable—prospective new members to buy, or lease, quota from existing RFMO members, similar to prospective new entrants to a domestic ITQ ﬁshery buying quota from existing ITQ holders. The alternative was discussed at the 2002 Norway–FAO Bergen Expert Consultation on the Management of Shared Fish Stocks. The report of the consultation states: “if . . . it were possible for prospective new members to purchase quotas from existing members of RFMOs, this would serve to ease the problem of quota allocation to new members” (FAO 2002). It was recognized at the expert consultation that if this approach were to be adopted, then, by implication, the “charter” members of the RFMO would be granted de facto collective property rights to the ﬁshery resources encompassed by the RFMO; that is, the property rights ambiguity hitherto discussed would be eliminated (Munro et al. 2004: 37). The approach to the elimination of property rights ambiguity is of academic interest only, of course, if it is found to be in violation of international law. International ﬁsheries law specialist Andrew Serdy (2007) argues that the proposal is fully compatible with international law. He goes further—a

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contributor to the unregulated ﬁshing problem, if not the main contributor, is, as argued above, the fundamental principle that a treaty is nonbinding on third parties until such time as the treaty is deemed to be a part of customary international law. Serdy argues that allowing for the transferability (i.e., sale or lease) of national quota between existing RFMO members and prospective new members will tend to hasten the parallel crystallisation of the customary rule of cooperation in international ﬁsheries law into a requirement that nonmembers abide by the RFMO’s rules in order to ﬁsh, as long as these are non-discriminatory. This test should not be hard to satisfy, since a could-be new entrant can at any time, by becoming a member of the /RFMO . . . make itself eligible to buy quota from and existing member—and refusal of an offer is non discriminatory. (p. 286) If all of these measures are implemented, little progress will have been made unless there are accompanying strong surveillance and enforcement measures against what has hitherto been deemed unregulated ﬁshing. Fortunately, enforcement measures are already being put into place, the current state of international law notwithstanding. Blacklisting of vessels engaged in unregulated ﬁshing is now becoming commonplace.9 RFMOs have strengthened the blacklisting measures through cooperation. Thus, for example, the two North Atlantic RFMOs, NAFO and NEAFC, have a blacklisting agreement. A vessel that is blacklisted by NAFO is automatically blacklisted by NEAFC, and vice versa (Lodge et al. 2007).10 What is required is that such inter-RFMO cooperation should become worldwide.

50.7. DISCRETE HIGH SEAS STOCKS There remains the issue of discrete high seas stocks, those stocks to be found exclusively in the high seas. The issue can be dealt with summarily. Munro et al. (2004: 57) describe these stocks as the “orphan” ﬁsh stocks of the ocean. Many of the stocks have been protected to date, by virtue of the fact that it is too costly to exploit them on a commercial basis. The history of world ﬁsheries assures us that, with the ongoing advance of ﬁsheries technology, this protection is but temporary.

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Munro et al. (2004) pointed out that the only legal protection, which the resources then had, came from UNCLOS part VII addressing the high seas (United Nations 1982). States exploiting such stocks are admonished to cooperate for the purpose of conserving the resource. Needless to say, no mechanism for cooperation is suggested. Part VII of UNCLOS, in and of itself, they continued, proved to be quite inadequate for the conservation of straddling stocks. It was questionable, they argued, whether one could have any justiﬁcation whatsoever for assuming that these articles would prove to be any more adequate for the conservation of discrete high seas stocks. Property rights to these resources would be not just ambiguous but essentially nonexistent. One could therefore look forward with conﬁdence to an intractable free-riding problem. Without an effective mechanism for cooperation, one could further anticipate that the discrete high seas stocks ﬁsheries would play themselves out as competitive ﬁsheries games, with the usual destructive consequences. Munro et al. (2004: 57) went on to say that “it may be that a solution could be found in extending the existing mandate of RFMOs to cover these resources, but this is, of course, pure speculation at this stage.” Since 2004, there have been moves in this direction. Perhaps the most important such move is the undertaking to establish the South Paciﬁc Regional Fisheries Management Organization (SPRFMO; see www.southpaciﬁcrfmo.org). The proposed SPRFMO spans the Paciﬁc and is designed to complement the two tuna-based Paciﬁc RFMOs, the WCPFC and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. The SPRFMO is explicitly being designed to encompass discrete high seas stocks, as well as nontuna straddling stocks (SPRFMO 2008).

50.8. CONCLUSIONS The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea revolutionized the management of ocean capture ﬁshery resources. UNCLOS, by leading to the implementation of the EEZ regime, sharply reduced the impact of the freedom of the seas doctrine, as applied to ﬁsheries, which had enshrined in legal terms the common pool nature of the bulk of the world’s ocean capture ﬁshery resources. UNCLOS did not complete the task, however. The freedom of the seas continued to inﬂuence the

management of shared ﬁsh stocks in the form of straddling (broadly deﬁned) and discrete high seas stocks. Extensive overexploitation of straddling stocks resulted in a further diminution of the freedom of the seas, with the coming into force of the 1995 U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement (United Nations 1995), designed to buttress and support UNCLOS. There yet remains, however, what this chapter has termed the freedom of the seas “hangover.” The effective management of shared ﬁsh stocks continues as the great unresolved ﬁsheries management issue, under what has come to be called the New International Law of the Sea. The issue must be resolved well before the end of the next quarter of a century. The economics of shared ﬁsh stock management, which is a blend of intra-EEZ ﬁsheries management, discussed in other chapters in this volume, and the theory of games (theory of strategic interaction), makes it clear that what is required is the establishment of collective RFMO property rights to both straddling and discrete high seas stocks. Freedom of the seas, pertaining to ﬁsheries, must be eliminated de facto, if not de jure. If the pernicious effects of the freedom to ﬁsh are not eliminated and the emerging RFMO regime founders, we can look forward with conﬁdence to the ongoing depletion, and in some cases destruction, of straddling and discrete high seas ﬁsh stocks. This conclusion is now coming to be accepted by noneconomists as well as economists. The 2007 Chatham House Report on RFMOs states that “society has learned painfully over the past several decades [that] the freedom to ﬁsh on the high seas is now incompatible with the goals of conservation, sustainable use and optimum utilization of the world’s capture ﬁshery resources” (Lodge et al. 2007: 18).

Acknowledgments I express my gratitude for the generous support of the Sea Around Us Project, of the Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, which is, in turn, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust of Philadelphia, USA. I also express my gratitude for the helpful comments of an anonymous reviewer.

Notes 1. The term “coastal state” refers to a state with signiﬁcant marine coast line (e.g., Australia), as opposed to a landlocked state (e.g., Paraguay)

The 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and Beyond or a geographically disadvantaged state (e.g., Singapore). 2. Extended now to 12 nautical miles (United Nations 1982). 3. UNCLOS does, of course, cover much more than ﬁsheries. 4. One difﬁculty that afﬂicts game theory is its terminology. The term “side payments” is an example. To some, the term smacks of bribery and corruption, which has led to the search for euphemisms. One such euphemism for side payments is “negotiation facilitators” (FAO 2002). 5. The full title of the agreement is Agreement for the Implementation of the Provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 Relating to the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks (United Nations 1995). 6. Customary international law arises out of state practice, a conviction, by major powers as a minimum, that states are obliged to abide by the rules laid down by the law. If a state is to disregard such customary international law, it must explicitly object to the law, which is, of course, often costly politically (Buergenthal and Murphy 2002: 22–23). For example, UNCLOS part V (EEZ) is now deemed to be customary international law. The United States is not a party to UNCLOS. It does, nonetheless, adhere strictly to the provisions of part V. 7. Compare, for example, the views of Dutch legal expert Erik Molenaar (2000) with those of Chilean expert Francisco Orrego Vicuña (1999). 8. There are a few cases of RFMOs, particularly those which are tuna based, in which relevant coastal states were not “charter” members. This has to be regarded as an aberration. The Chatham House Report argues that such coastal states should be brought into the RFMOs with all possible speed (Lodge et al. 2007). Discussion, at a later point in this chapter, about the possibility of new members buying their way into an RFMO does not apply to these coastal state new members. 9. Blacklisting can lead to denial of port facilities, bans on trade in ﬁsh ofﬂoaded from the vessel, and other sanctions. 10. For a complete discussion of punitive actions being taken against those engaging in unregulated ﬁshing, see Lodge et al. (2007, chapter 5).

References Alexander, L.M., and R.D. Hodgson (1975). The impact of the 200-mile economic zone on the law of the sea. San Diego Law Review 12: 569–599. Bjørndal, T., and A. Brasão (2006). The east Atlantic blueﬁn tuna ﬁsheries: Stock collapse or

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recovery? Marine Resource Economics 21: 193–210. Bjørndal, T., and G. Munro (2003). The management of high seas ﬁshery resources and the implementation of the UN Fish Stocks Agreement of 1995. Pp. 1–35 in Folmer, H., and T. Tietenberg (eds), The International Yearbook of Environmental Resource Economics 2003/2004. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Buergenthal, T., and S. Murphy (2002). Public International Law: In a Nutshell. St. Paul, Minn.: West Group. Chand, S., R.Q. Grafton, and E. Petersen (2003). Multilateral governance of ﬁsheries: Management and cooperation in the western and central Paciﬁc tuna ﬁsheries. Marine Resource Economics 18: 329–344. FAO (1992). Marine Fisheries and the Law of the Sea: A Decade of Change. FAO Fisheries Circular 853. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. FAO (1994). World Review of Highly Migratory Species and Straddling Stocks. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 337. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2001). International Plan of Action to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. FAO (2002). Report of the Norway-FAO Expert Consultation on the Management of Shared Fish Stocks Bergen, Norway, 7–10 October 2002. FAO Fisheries Report 695. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Kaitala, V., and G. Munro (1997). The conservation and management of high seas ﬁshery resources under the new law of the sea. Natural Resource Modeling 10: 87–108. Lodge, M., D. Anderson, S. Løbach, G. Munro, K. Sainsbury, and A. Willock (2007). Recommended Practices for Regional Fisheries Management Organizations: Report of an Independent Panel to Develop a Model for Improved Governance by Regional Fisheries Organizations. London: Chatham House. Logan, R.M. (1974). Canada, the United States and the Third Law of the Sea Conference. Montreal: C.D. Howe Institute and the National Planning Association. McRae, D., and G. Munro (1989). Coastal state “rights” within the 200-mile exclusive economic zone. Pp. 197–112 in Neher, P., R. Arnason, and N. Mollet (eds), Rights Based Fishing. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Miller, K., and G. Munro (2004). Climate and cooperation: A new perspective on the management of shared ﬁsh stocks. Marine Resource Economics 19: 367–393.

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Miller, K., G. Munro, T. McDorman, R. McKelvey, and P. Tydemers (2001). The 1999 Paciﬁc Salmon Agreement: A Sustainable Solution? Occasional Papers: Canadian-American Public Policy, No. 47. Orono: Canadian-American Center, University of Maine. Molenaar, E. (2000). The concept of “real interest” and other aspects of cooperation through regional ﬁsheries management mechanisms. The International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 15: 475–531. Munro, G.R. (1979). The optimal management of transboundary renewable resources. Canadian Journal of Economics 3: 271–296. Munro, G.R. (2000). The UN Fish Stocks Agreement of 1995: History and problems of implementation. Marine Resource Economics 15: 265–280. Munro, G.R. (2007). Internationally shared ﬁsh stocks, the high seas and property rights in ﬁsheries. Marine Resource Economics 22: 425–443. Munro, G.R. (2008). Game theory and the development of resource management policy: The case of international ﬁsheries. Pp. 12–41 in Dinar, A., J. Albiac, and J. Sánchez-Soriano (eds), Game Theory and Policymaking in Natural Resources and the Environment. London: Routledge. Munro, G.R., A. Van Houtte, and R. Willmann (2004). The Conservation and Management of Shared Fish Stocks: Legal and Economic Aspects. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 465. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. National Research Council (1999). Sustaining Marine Fisheries. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Örebech, P., K. Sigurjonsson, and T.L. McDorman (1998). The 1995 United Nations straddling and highly migratory ﬁsh stocks agreement: Management, enforcement and dispute settlement. International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 15: 361–378.

Orrego Vicuña, F. (1999). The Changing International Law of High Seas Fisheries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pintassilgo, P. (2003). A coalition approach to the management of high seas ﬁsheries in the presence of externalities. Natural Resource Modeling 16: 175–197. Pintassilgo, P., and M. Lindroos (2008). Application of partition function games to the management of straddling ﬁsh stocks. Pp. 65–84 in Dinar, A., J. Albiac, and J. Sánchez-Soriano (eds), Game Theory and Policymaking in Natural Resources and the Environment. London: Routledge. Serdy, A. (2007). Trading of ﬁshery commission quota in international law. Ocean Yearbook 21: 265–288. Tucker, A.W. (1950). A Two-Person Dilemma. Unpublished paper, Stanford University. United Nations (1982). United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. U.N. Document A/Conf.62/122. Geneva: United Nations. United Nations (1995). Agreement for the Implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 Relating to the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks. United Nations Conference on Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, Document A/Conf./164/37. Geneva: United Nations. Van Houtte, A. (2003). Legal aspects in the management of shared ﬁsh stocks: A review. Pp. 30–42 in Papers Presented at the NorwayFAO Expert Consultation on the Management of Shared Fish Stocks, Bergen, Norway, 7–10 October 2002. FAO Fisheries Report 695 (suppl.). Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Willock, A., and M. Lack (2006). Follow the Leader: Learning from the Experience and Best Practices of Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. Sydney, World Wildlife Federation International and TRAFFIC International.

51 Bioeconomic Modeling of Marine Reserves with Environmental Uncertainty TOM KOMPAS R. QUENTIN GRAFTON PHAM VAN HA NHU CHE LONG CHU

51.1. INTRODUCTION A marine reserve may be deﬁned as a spatial area where some or all species receive long-term protection from harvesting. Reserves may exist in certain locations because of natural or physical features (e.g., natural spawning grounds and inaccessible ﬁshing areas), but they are also imposed as part of the overall management of marine resources. In recent years, marine reserves have received increased attention by both policy makers and researchers. This has been driven in part by concerns over the need to preserve both representative marine habitat and biodiversity, but also because of fears that traditional ﬁsheries management has failed to adequately manage much less conserve marine resources (Ludwig et al. 1993; Pauly et al. 2002). There is often a perceived tension between the conservation and biological beneﬁts of marine reserves and the economic proﬁtability of the ﬁshing industry when faced with the imposition of a reserve. On the biological side, support for reserves includes empirical evidence that they can raise the spawning biomass and mean size of exploited populations, increase the abundance of species and, relative to reference sites, raise population density, biomass, ﬁsh size, and diversity. By contrast, ﬁshers often oppose the establishment and expansion of marine reserves and claim that reserves provide few (if any) economic payoffs, since closing part of the

ﬁshing area necessarily restricts harvests and forces more effort into smaller (perhaps already overexploited) ﬁshing grounds. This chapter provides an exposition of recent contributions to the bioeconomics of marine reserves. The focus is on bioeconomic models that incorporate two forms of environmental uncertainty, namely, a jump-diffusion process that allows for both typical random temporal variation and occasional and relatively large negative shocks that may affect both the ﬁshery and reserve. The results of this modeling demonstrate that marine reserves create a “resilience effect” that allows for the population to recover faster, as well as increase harvest immediately following a negative shock (Grafton et al. 2005b). The trade-off of a larger reserve is a reduced harvest in the absence of a negative shock such that a reserve will never encompass the entire population if the goal is to maximize the economic returns from harvesting, and ﬁshing is proﬁtable. Under a wide range of parameter values with environmental uncertainty, a marine reserve (because of the resilience effect) can increase the economic payoff to ﬁshers even when the harvested population is not initially overexploited, harvesting is economically optimal, and the population is persistent. In other words, even if a ﬁshery is optimally managed with knowledge as to the size and probability of environmental variability to maximize the net returns from ﬁshing, a marine reserve still generates a higher economic payoff than no reserve

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(Grafton et al. 2006). In this sense, and in the presence of negative environmental shocks, marine reserves can provide a “win–win” situation, ensuring not only habitat and species protection but also increased proﬁtability to a commercial ﬂeet. Thus, under environmental uncertainty, marine reserves are a fundamental, but not exclusive tool, of ﬁsheries management. Section 51.2 of this chapter brieﬂy reviews some of the recent literature on marine reserves. Section 52.3 provides an illustration of the positive effect of marine reserves on ﬁsher proﬁtability in the face of negative environmental shocks in an otherwise standard bioeconomic model. Section 52.4 discusses some recent advances on this modeling, and section 52.5 provides a few closing remarks.

51.2. PREVIOUS LITERATURE A large literature (see Grafton et al. [2005a, 2006], on which this section is based) exists on marine reserves, mostly written from a biological perspective. A key insight is that how many, and under what conditions, ﬁsh migrate or “spill over” from reserves to harvested areas is critical to maximizing the direct beneﬁts of no-take areas (Polachek 1990). These spillovers occur whenever individual ﬁsh are afforded a measure of protection in a reserve, but also provide a source of recruitment for exploited areas outside of the reserve (Pulliam 1988). Roberts et al. (2001) and McClanahan and Mangi (2000), among others, provide empirical evidence that reserves can generate positive spillovers that may improve harvests in adjacent exploited areas. Pezzey et al. (2000) and Sanchirico and Wilen (2001) show, in theoretical models with density-dependent growth, that a reserve can increase the abundance of the population and, in some cases, may even raise the aggregate harvest in the exploited population. However, this “double payoff” arises only when the chosen area for the reserve is at a low population level such that the marginal beneﬁts of a closure outweigh the loss of harvest in a previously exploited area. One of the earliest economic contributions to the reserve literature is by Holland and Brazee (1996). They used a deterministic model to show that the relative beneﬁts of reserves depend on their effects on harvesting in exploited areas and also the discount rate. Given high levels of ﬁshing effort, a reserve provides insurance against a collapse in the

population, but reserves give little or no beneﬁt if there are effective management controls on effort. Holland (2000) observes in a spatially explicit model that optimal controls on effort and catches make reserves superﬂuous but stresses that there can be a positive economic payoff to a reserve if ﬁshing effort is excessive. Sanchirico (2004) also ﬁnds in a spatial model that a ﬁrst-best strategy is to optimally set ﬁshing effort in every possible ﬁshing location, but that establishing reserves in some patches can generate a higher resource rent in an open access ﬁshery. He emphasizes, as do Sanchirico and Wilen (1999), that the costs and returns of harvesting in different locations, as well as the spillovers, play an important role in determining where to establish reserves. In terms of stochastic approaches, Lauck et al. (1998) show that if management uncertainty exists regarding population size, marine reserves should increase with the size of the negative shocks to ensure population persistence. Mangel (1998, 2000a) generates a similar result whereby reserve size should increase with the size of an uncertain harvest rate so as to ensure sustainability of the population. Grafton et al. (2005b) ﬁnd that reserves increase resilience in the presence of negative shocks. Conrad (1999) shows that reserves may generate economic beneﬁts by reducing the variance of the population if net growth in the reserve and the ﬁshery are uncorrelated, or if they are perfectly correlated. In addition, Sladek Nowlis and Roberts (1998), Mangel (2000b), and Hannesson (2002) demonstrate that with environmental variability a reserve can lower the harvesting variance. Grafton et al. (in press), based on actual ﬁshery parameter values and known shocks, show that the presence of an optimal reserve may have even prevented the collapse of the northern cod ﬁshery in Canada.

51.3. THE ECONOMICS OF MARINE RESERVES WITH ENVIRONMENTAL UNCERTAINTY The brief survey of the literature shows that in a deterministic setting that it is hard to justify marine reserves from an economic point of view unless there is overharvesting. Our main goal in this section, based closely on the work of Grafton et al. (2005b, 2006), is to show how marine reserves can generate a potential win–win situation even with optimal harvesting. To demonstrate this important result,

661

Modeling Marine Reserves with Environmental Uncertainty assume that the population, without harvesting and uncertainty, is governed by density-dependent growth deﬁned by x  f (x) = rx  1 −  ,  K

(51.1)

where x is the population or biomass, f(x) is its growth, r is the intrinsic growth rate, and K is the carrying capacity. Following Grafton et al. (2005b), the model assumes the economic beneﬁt from the population is simply the resource rents or economic proﬁts it generates from harvesting. Intertemporal rents or economic proﬁts from harvesting the population are deﬁned by  x  ∏(h, xNR ) = p(h)h − c  h, NR   KNR 

(51.2)

where h is harvest, xNR is the size of the harvested population, KNR is the carrying capacity of the harvested population, p(h) is the inverse demand function, and c(h, xNR/KNR) is the aggregate cost function where costs rise with the harvest but do not increase with the population density of the harvested population. In the case of a permanent reserve that protects proportion s Î (0, 1] of the population, the carrying capacity of the harvested population is deﬁned by (1 − s)K, so that for s > 0 the growth function of the reserve population, f(xR, s), and the harvested population, f(xNR, s), are x   f (xR , s) = rxR  1 − R  ,  sK   xNR  f (xNR , s) = rxNR  1 − ,  (1 − s)K 

(51.3)

(51.4)

where xR and xNR are the reserve and harvested populations, respectively. To analyze the effects of reserves on economic proﬁts, it is appropriate to incorporate two stochastic shocks that may affect both the reserve and harvested populations. One source of variability is environmental stochasticity that can be either a positive or a negative and represents a temporal variation in both (reserve and harvested) populations, as deﬁned by a Wiener diffusion process (Brownian motion) that follows a normal distribution (Wt). The other stochastic process is a negative shock that occurs randomly over time and is deﬁned as a jump process (q) that follows a Poisson distribution, governed by the parameter l.

Brownian motion in the reserve and harvested population is deﬁned by g(xR) and g(xNR) that represent the proportional effect on the two populations from the same realization, dW. Sensitivity to negative shocks in the reserve and harvested population is deﬁned by y(xR) and l(xNR) that represent the proportional effects on the populations from the same realization, dq. The functions y and l differ to allow for the possibility that the sensitivity to the negative shocks may vary in the reserve and harvested populations. To solve for the optimal harvest trajectory and reserve size, we must ﬁrst determine the optimal harvest for a given reserve size, and then select the reserve size that maximizes the overall value function deﬁned over s Î (0, 1]. Thus, the solution to the overall optimization problem is deﬁned over all possible values of s and involves the selection of both a harvesting trajectory and a reserve size that maximize the discounted net returns from ﬁshing. The initial harvest optimization problem, incorporating the two stochastic processes and for an arbitrary s, is deﬁned by equations 51.5–51.8: ∞

V (xR , xNR ) = max h ∫ e − pt ∏(h, xNR , s) (51.5) 0 subject to  x xNR   dxR =  f (xR , s) − φ(1 − s)K  R −  dt  sK (1 − s)K    + g(xR )dW + ψ (xR )dq, (51.6)   x xNR  dxNR =  f (xNR , s) + φ(1 − s)K  R −  − h dt  (1 ) − sK s K   (51.7) + g(xNR )dW + γ (xNR )dq, x0 = x(0),

(51.8)

where V(xR, xNR) is the value function, x0 is the sum of the initial population inside and outside of the reserve, r is the discount rate, and f is the transfer coefﬁcient. The transfer function, f(1 − s)K(xR / sK − xNR / (1 − s)K), is consistent with evidence that dispersion is strongly density dependent (MacCall 1990) and ensures that the transfer of ﬁsh is governed by both reserve size and the relative population density of the reserve and harvested populations. The solution procedure involves evaluating all possible values of s to solve for the optimal harvest levels for any given reserve size. The optimal reserve size (s*) is that which gives the highest economic value for all possible reserve sizes and

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

51.1 Parameter values for the bioeconomic model of marine reserves

Notation r l s j r a x0 K a b y(xR) g(xNR)

Value 0.05 0.1 0.01 3.5 0.3 1 0.5 1 1 –0.3 –0.1 xR –0.1 xNR

Variable Name Discount rate Arrival rate of the negative shock Standard deviation of the Brownian motion Transfer rate Intrinsic growth rate Parameter of the growth function Initial biomass Carrying capacity Inverse demand parameter Inverse demand parameter Magnitude of negative shock in the reserve area Magnitude of negative shock in nonreserve (ﬁshing) area

maximizes the overall value function V*(xR, xNR) that is an envelope of value functions for all possible values of s. To illustrate the economic effects of reserves, we use the following inverse demand and cost functions: ln p = a + b ln h,

(51.9)

xNR  ch(1 − s)  c  h, = ,  (1 − s)K  xNR

(51.10)

with a full parameter set given in table 51.1, showing all speciﬁc values and relevant variable names for equations 51.1–51.10. For the given parameter set, assuming optimal harvesting with a 10 percent negative shock, the optimal reserve size is 50 percent—the win–win in terms of conservation and profitability. Figure 51.1 shows a realization of the time profile for harvest assuming a Brownian diffusion process and six discrete negative shocks for reserve sizes of 0, 30, and 60 percent. Two things are immediately clear. First, as expected, a negative shock results in a fall in harvest. But second, given a transfer function from the reserve to the fishery, harvest both falls less and recovers to near its former state more quickly the larger the reserve size. This resilience effect is most pronounced in figure 51.1 for the case of a 60 percent reserve. With no reserve, the fall in harvest in the face of a negative shock is the largest and the time to return to a near harvest level prior to the realization of the negative shock is the longest of the three cases.

Figure 51.2 shows the time proﬁle for the difference in harvest between a 20 and 50 percent reserve size, assuming a single negative shock (at time line “nine”). At the optimal value of a 50 percent reserve, the harvest difference is negative (i.e., harvest is much lower with a 50 percent compared to a 20 percent reserve) whenever there is an absence of a negative shock. However, with a negative shock, given the positive spillover from the reserve to the ﬁshing area, harvest is much larger for the 50 percent compared to the 20 percent reserve case. This also remains true for a substantial period of time after a negative shock.

0.05

Harvest

TABLE

0.04

0.03 0% reserve 30% reserve 60% reserve

0.02

0

10

20

30

40

50

Time FIGURE 51.1 Harvest values over time for a 0, 30, and 60 percent reserve size given six large negative shocks and a given diffusion process

Modeling Marine Reserves with Environmental Uncertainty

smaller sized ﬁshery in the absence of a negative shock. The point at which the beneﬁt and the cost from a marginal change in reserve size are equal is the optimum reserve size (or 50 percent of the marine area with the speciﬁc parameter set).

0.004

Harvest

0.003

51.4. MODELING AND FISHERIES MANAGEMENT

0.002

0.001

0

663

5

10

15

20

25

30

Time

51.2 The difference in harvest over time between a 50 percent and a 20 percent reserve size given a single large negative shock and a given diffusion process

FIGURE

In both ﬁgures 51.1 and 51.2, this resilience effect is (1) not conﬁned to the parameter values used in the simulation (alternative results and sensitivity exercises for different parameter sets are given in Grafton et al. 2005b, 2006); (2) not the same as population persistence as it occurs even when the population is not subject to extinction; and (3) will always occur if the shock sensitivity in the reserve is equal to or less than in the harvested population. In simple terms, a greater population density in the reserve allows for a transfer of ﬁsh to the harvested area. This, in turn, reduces the recovery time of the harvested population and also permits ﬁshers to harvest at a higher rate immediately after a negative shock than they would otherwise (as in ﬁgure 51.1). Although the spillover or transfer can increase with reserve size, the cost of a larger reserve is a reduced harvest in the absence of a negative shock (as in ﬁgure 51.2). As a result, a reserve will never encompass the entire population if the goal is to maximize the economic returns from harvesting and ﬁshing is proﬁtable. This is because, eventually, the marginal beneﬁt or spillover from a slightly larger reserve with a negative shock will equal the marginal cost from harvesting forgone from a

The simulation outlined above, and in Grafton et al. (2006), established the desirability of a marine reserve of “ﬁxed size.” However, changes in the underlying parameter values (e.g., changes in the costs of ﬁshing and the price of ﬁsh) would normally lead to changes in optimal reserve size. This model context assumes that the cost of setting up and changing the size of a marine reserve is negligible. In practice, however, these costs can be signiﬁcant, so much so that it is conceivable that establishing a reserve may not in fact enhance profitability. Consequently, comprehensive modeling of marine reserves with nontrivial establishment and running costs must allow for a “dynamic option” to set up, alter, and potentially remove existing reserves. In such a set up the decision maker can thus switch between two regulatory modes: no reserve (single-state variable, with the reserve set temporarily equal to zero) and a marine resource with a reserve (two-state variables). This variabledimension model is analyzed in Chu et al. (2008a), and numerical results of this modeling exercise provide some useful insights for ﬁsheries managers. This work shows that higher set up and running costs lead to smaller optimally sized reserves. More important, the results show that in many cases a temporary closure of the marine reserve after a negative shock may improve economic payoffs from harvesting. This temporary access to a reserve allows ﬁrms to ﬁsh in a relatively high density area (formally the reserve). In the “ﬁxed reserve” model, once a large negative shock occurs, the only option is to rely on the stock-recruitment relationship and the transfer process from the reserve to the ﬁshery. The opening up of reserves to limited forms of exploitation, especially if they do not compromise the biodiversity and habitat protection goals of reserves provide a way to get greater acceptance by the industry for their implementation and increase the returns from harvesting. A recent extension of the ﬁxed reserve model is to allow for marine reserve switching or

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“rolling reserves” (Chu et al. 2008b), permitting the establishment of a marine reserve to spatially move within the marine resource, depending on parametric shocks and relative population densities. Unlike the temporary reserve model, which has variable dimensions, the model of switchable reserves always has two dimensions. The two state variables are (1) the protected stock and (2) the exploitable stock. In this exercise, when the reserve is “switched” or moved, its location will change but the size of the protected and exploitable areas remains unchanged. As the protected area is moved from a high- to a low-density area, the size of the protected stock will decline. By contrast, the exploitable stock increases immediately following the opening of a reserve with a higher stock density. This result allows for higher proﬁts than in the ﬁxed reserve case. In this context, a switch often occurs in the face of a large negative shock, or immediately after a negative shock, allowing for harvest smoothing without the need to wait for ﬁsh transfers from the ﬁxed reserve area. Another recent innovation (Chu et al. 2008c) allows for variable transfer rates (depending on ﬁsh densities) and ﬂexible reserve sizes. This is modeled as a “dynamic regime switching” model and provides the most general results. It is computationally more demanding but allows for rolling reserves and changes in reserve size, with transfer rates, simultaneously. Unlike spatially implicit models, comprehensive modeling of both the spatial dimension and environmental stochasticity provides decision makers with a framework to help determine the location and duration of no-take areas. The application of such models offers the real possibility of maximizing the bioeconomic payoffs of marine reserves.

To bridge this divide, the chapter provides a selected review and exposition of some of the key beneﬁts of marine reserves, combined with a more detailed description of stochastic bioeconomic models of marine reserves with a negative shocks and environmental stochasticity. These stochastic bioeconomic models show that a marine reserve can generate economic payoffs, even if harvesting is optimal, the population is persistent, and no uncertainty exists over the size of the current population. A marine reserve can increase resource rents and reduce the recovery time for a harvested population in the presence of negative shocks. A reserve has economic value because it allows for spillovers of ﬁsh from the reserve to the harvested population following a negative shock that can raise resource rents. In this sense, reserves act as a “hedge” against negative shocks, provided the sensitivity to the shock is not greater in the reserve than the harvested population. The trade-off with a reserve, however, is lower harvests and resource rents in the absence of such shocks. While deterministic bioeconomic models provide important insights about reserves, they also understate the value of reserves to ﬁshers in a ﬂuctuating or uncertain environment. A proper understanding of the economics of marine reserves, and its importance to ﬁsheries management, requires well-articulated stochastic bioeconomic models. Ideally, such models should contain important spatial information, in ways that matter not only to the biology of ﬁshing (e.g., the distribution of ﬁsh stocks), but also to its economics (e.g., fuel and travel costs given different spatial placement of marine reserves).

References

51.5. CONCLUDING REMARKS Despite the increased attention and a commitment by many governments to establish a network of marine protected areas, many policy makers are still struggling to decide where to establish reserves, of what size, and how to reconcile short and longterm trade-offs and differences among stakeholders, particularly between ﬁsher and conservation groups. One of the barriers to moving toward the better use of marine reserves, at least in a policy context, is the relatively small number of studies that combine both the biological and economic drivers of marine reserves.

Chu, L., T. Kompas, and Q. Grafton (2008a). A Parametric Linear Programming Approach to Stochastic Optimal Control Problem with Discontinuous Jumps: Switchable Reserves. IDEC working paper, Crawford School of Economics and Government. Canberra: Australian National University. Chu, L., T. Kompas, and Q. Grafton (2008b). Rolling Reserves and Optimal Marine Reserve Design. IDEC working paper, Crawford School of Economics and Government. Canberra: Australian National University. Chu, L., T. Kompas, and Q. Grafton (2008c). Parametric Linear Programming Approach to Stochastic Optimal Control Problem with Variable Dimensions: Marine Reserve Design

Modeling Marine Reserves with Environmental Uncertainty with Variable Reserve Size and Transfer Rates. IDEC working paper, Crawford School of Economics and Government. Canberra: Australian National University. Conrad, J.M. (1999). The bioeconomics of marine sanctuaries. Journal of Bioeconomics 1: 205–217. Grafton, R.Q., T. Kompas, and V. Schneider (2005a). The bioeconomics of marine reserves: A selected review with policy implications. Journal of Bioeconomics 7: 161–178. Grafton, R.Q., T. Kompas, and D. Lindenmayer (2005b). Marine reserves with ecological uncertainty. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 67: 957–971. Grafton, R. Q., T. Kompas, and H. Pham (2006). The economic payoffs from marine reserves: Resource rents in a stochastic environment. Economic Record 82: 469–480. Grafton, R. Q., T. Kompas, and H. Pham (2009). Cod today and none tomorrow: The economic value of a marine reserve. Land Economics 85(3): 459–469. Hannesson, R. (2002). The economics of marine reserves. Natural Resource Modeling 15: 273–290. Holland, D.S. (2000). A bioeconomic model of marine sanctuaries on Georges Bank. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 57: 1307–1319. Holland, D.S., and R.J. Brazee (1996). Marine reserves for ﬁsheries management. Marine Resource Economics 11: 157–171. Lauck, T., C.W. Clark, M. Mangel, and G.R. Munro (1998). Implementing the precautionary principle in ﬁsheries management through marine reserves. Ecological Applications 8: S72–S78. Ludwig, D., R. Hilborn, and C. Walters (1993). Uncertainty, resource exploitation and conservation: Lessons from history. Science 260(7): 36. MacCall, A. (1990). Dynamic Geography of Marine Fish Populations. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Mangel, M. (1998). No-take areas for sustainability of harvested species and a conservation

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invariant for marine reserves. Ecology Letters 1: 87–90. Mangel, M. (2000a). On the fraction of habitat allocated to marine reserves. Ecology Letters 3: 15–22. Mangel, M. (2000b). Irreducible uncertainties, sustainable ﬁsheries and marine reserves. Evolutionary Ecology Research 2: 547–557. McClanahan, T.R., and S. Mangi (2000). Spillover of exploitable ﬁshes from a marine park and its effect on the adjacent ﬁshery. Ecological Applications 10: 1792–1805. Pauly, D., V. Christensen, S. Guénette, T. Pitcher, U. Sumaila, C. Walters, R. Watson, and D. Zeller (2002). Towards sustainability in world ﬁsheries. Nature 418: 689–695. Pezzey, J.C.V., C.M. Roberts, and B.T. Urdal (2000). A simple bioeconomic model of a marine reserve. Ecological Economics 33: 77–91. Polachek, T. (1990). Year around closed areas as a management tool. Natural Resource Modeling 4: 327–354. Pulliam, H.R. (1988). Source, sinks, and population regulation. American Naturalist 132: 652–661. Roberts, C.M., J.A.M. Bohnsack, F. Gell, J.P. Hawkins, and R. Goodridge (2001). Effects of marine reserves on adjacent ﬁsheries. Science 294: 1920–1923. Sanchirico, J.N. (2004). Designing a cost effective marine reserve network: A bioeconomic metapopulation analysis. Marine Resource Economics 19: 41–65. Sanchirico, J.N., and J.E. Wilen (1999). Bioeconomics of spatial exploitation in a patchy environment. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 37: 129–150. Sanchirico, J.N., and J.E. Wilen (2001). A bioeconomic model of marine reserve creation. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 42: 257–276. Sladek Nowlis, J.S., and C.M. Roberts (1998). Fisheries beneﬁts and optimal design of marine reserves. Fishery Bulletin 97: 604–616.

52 Privatization of the Oceans RÖGNVALDUR HANNESSON

52.1. INTRODUCTION This chapter deals with the emergence of private property rights to ﬁsh that has taken place in many countries since the establishment of the 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The organization of this chapter is partly chronological: Why did private property rights to ﬁsh develop so late? What forces led to their development? What form do they take? We then move on to the economic interests providing the necessary political support for property rights to ﬁsh, what they accomplish, and who gains and who loses from establishing such rights. Do they serve any socially useful purpose? Do they promote conservation?

52.2. THE COMMON PROPERTY PROBLEM That common resources tend to be overexploited is well established, both theoretically and empirically. The most widely cited reference probably is Hardin (1968), but in the context of ﬁsheries the conclusion can be traced back, in the English language literature, at least to Gordon’s classic 1954 paper, but a much earlier reference is Warming (1911; see also Andersen 1983). Brieﬂy told, the reason this happens is that each additional user of a common resource will in all probability diminish the beneﬁts other users derive from the resource,

but the additional user has no incentive to take into account beneﬁts other than his own. Hence, the result could easily be that the total beneﬁts are less than maximal while each individual user derives large enough beneﬁts to justify his or her own use of the resource. The solution of this problem obviously requires some control of access to the resource. Such a mechanism will not, however, arise unless some with the necessary authority ﬁnd it worthwhile to put it in place. Access control is costly; the users must be authorized, and it is necessary to monitor the use and to punish those who exceed their authorizations or are not authorized at all. Furthermore, it is necessary to determine how much use can be permitted. This requires investigating the capacity of the resource—in the context of ﬁsheries, how much surplus growth the ﬁsh stock is able to produce in each period and how it is related to the size of the stock and its exploitation. Such investigations are costly in terms of time, manpower, and other necessary inputs. This line of reasoning is well known from the economic literature. A classic reference is Demsetz (1967). Property rights to common resources arise when the beneﬁts of defending claims to a resource exceed the costs of doing so. In many cases, these claims relate to the use of the resource rather than control of the entire resource as such, and such claims are often informal and supported by extralegal actions. Demsetz cites claims to sites

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Privatization of the Oceans where beavers could be trapped. Collectors of the cherished matsutake mushroom in British Columbia try to keep secret the spots where these mushrooms grow. Sometimes the development may be in the opposite direction. Access rights to bird cliffs in the Faeroe Islands belong to individual farms, but the importance of egg and bird collecting has now declined so that only devout collectors do this any more. Nevertheless, out of courtesy they usually ask permission for their activities. So, access controls to previously common resources arise out of self-interest and involve capturing beneﬁts that otherwise would accrue to someone else. This holds not only for individual rights, but also for community rights where the rights of access are reserved for some particular group. In the latter case, the control involves the exclusion of those who do not belong to the community, however deﬁned. There is no fundamental difference between saying “this is mine and not yours” and “this is ours and not yours.” But the story does not end with noting that exclusive use rights, whether private or communal, involve the capture of beneﬁts others could have got. Restricting access is productive, because it generates beneﬁts that otherwise would be lost through excessive use. This is the social justiﬁcation for exclusive rights to resources. Exclusive use rights can in principle increase the beneﬁts enjoyed by everyone, but whether in fact that happens is another issue, depending on how they are established, how widely they are shared, and their economic repercussions, which may be quite complicated.

52.3. WHY EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS TO FISH CAME LATE The above references to the problems of common ﬁsh resources (Gordon 1954; Warming 1911) are ﬁfty to a hundred years old. Yet this is recent, from a historical perspective on property rights. The English commons were enclosed and privatized over a long period hundreds of years ago (Gonner [1912] 1966). How private rights to land came to develop is for the most part lost in the mists of history. We know that when European settlers came to unoccupied territories or lands where the original inhabitants could not resist them, they brought with them the concept of private property rights to land as an unquestioned mode of organization and developed procedures to divide up the new land. When

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the Norsemen settled Iceland, men could claim as much land as they could demarcate by lighting ﬁres in the course of one day, and women could claim as much land as they could lead a heifer around in one day. In the United States, property rights were allocated on open lands by federal legislation, and where Europeans settled in the lands of the British Empire, they got property or long-term lease rights from the Crown. Why did such rights not develop in the ﬁsheries? There are two reasons for this. First, ﬁsh are fugitive resources to which it is difﬁcult to claim ownership. Fish cannot be branded or otherwise marked so that the owners could recognize their ﬁsh. Because of this and because ﬁsh stocks migrate far and wide, property rights to ﬁsh stocks would have to imply exclusive rights to ﬁsh within wide areas, which would vary greatly in size from one stock to another, due to differences in the migration habits of different stocks. Second, the impact of the ﬁshing industry on growth and fecundity of ﬁsh stocks was until recently so limited as to make a negligible difference. In the late 1800s, Thomas Huxley, one of the most prominent biologists at that time, argued that the ﬁsh resources of the oceans were virtually inexhaustible (Smith 1994). In fact, the growth and fecundity of ﬁsh stocks ﬂuctuates so much due to environmental reasons that it can sometimes be challenging enough even today to identify the effects of ﬁshing. Given that there was enough ﬁsh for everyone, there was little incentive for a single ﬁsherman or even a nation state to claim exclusive rights to ﬁsh. Nevertheless, the King of England tried in the 17th century to claim exclusive rights to herring off the coast of England and attempted, unsuccessfully, to have the Dutch pay rent for ﬁshing in the area (Fulton 1911). It is doubtful, however, whether the King of England and his advisers perceived a threat to the herring stocks from the Dutch ﬁshermen; it is more likely that he wanted a cut of the proﬁtable Dutch ﬁshery, and all the more so since English attempts at emulating the Dutch met with little success. It is also known that ﬁshermen in the Paciﬁc Islands claimed exclusive ﬁshing spots (Ruddle and Johannes 1984). Since reef ﬁsh populations are much smaller and more stationary than populations spread out over a vast area like the North Sea, it is possible that protection of the local ﬁsh stock was a motivating factor, but this arrangement could also have come about because ﬁsh were more

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600000

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52.1 Catches of cod at Iceland by Icelanders and others, 1905–2007. (Hafrannsóknastofnun 2008: 95, table 3.1.1)

FIGURE

accessible in certain areas than others, without any conservation motive being involved. This happy state of abundance did not last forever. In the 1800s, ﬁshing technology made great strides with the development of vessels powered by steam engines and bottom trawls scooping up all ﬁsh in their way. That ﬁshing affected ﬁsh stocks was noticed in the trawl ﬁsheries in the North Sea, and Thomas Huxley retracted his previous pronouncements on the inexhaustibility of the oceans (Smith 1994). Gradually this happened in other areas as well. Both world wars of the 20th century had a protective effect on the most exploited ﬁsh stocks in the Northeast Atlantic. A case in point is illustrated in ﬁgure 52.1, which shows the catches of cod at Iceland. During the wars, ﬁshing vessels from Britain and the continent of Europe disappeared from the area, which led to a steep decline in catches, as more than half of all catches of Icelandic cod were at those times taken by foreign ﬁshermen, mainly from England. After both wars, the foreign ﬂeets returned, and the ﬁsh catches increased disproportionately, due to the ﬁsh stock recovery during the war years. A similar effect was noticed for ﬁsh stocks in the North Sea.

52.4. THE FIRST STEP: THE 200-MILE EXCLUSIVE ECONOMIC ZONE After World War II, ﬁshing technology continued to improve. Fish stocks were, however, still common resources, so the effectiveness of a better technology ultimately resulted in, or was feared

to result in, decline of ﬁsh stocks and worsening prospects for future catches. This gave rise to ever louder demands from coastal states to exclusive rights to the ﬁsh stocks off their shores. A major boost to these claims was provided by the Truman Proclamation of 1945, claiming that all resources on and underneath the seabed on the continental shelf of the United States were the property of the federal government. Many countries for which ﬁsh resources were important took this a step further and claimed exclusive rights to the ﬁsh stocks above the continental shelf, and the three states on the west coast of South America, which have a narrow continental shelf and ﬁshed stocks close to the surface, claimed 200 nautical miles without any reference to the continental shelf whatsoever. The 200-mile norm ﬁnally won international recognition at the third UN Law of the Sea Conference in the early 1970s, and shortly after that many countries established a 200-mile EEZ, well before the conference was over. Most of them acted after the United States set precedence in 1976 by establishing a 200-mile exclusive ﬁshery zone, later converted to an EEZ in accordance with the Law of the Sea Convention. The 200-mile EEZ established national jurisdiction over resources in the area, including ﬁsh. This went a long way toward enclosing all ﬁsh stocks within national jurisdiction; at the time the zone was established, 5–10 percent of world ﬁsh catches were estimated to be taken outside 200 miles. Within its zone, a state can set limits to ﬁsh catches, decide who has the right to ﬁsh, and in general regulate the ﬁshery in any way that serves its interests. This is a necessary prerequisite for establishing any kind of private property or use rights to ﬁsh. Such rights require that unauthorized persons or ﬁrms can be persecuted and punished for taking ﬁsh they are not allowed to take. The enforcement must ultimately be sanctioned by the jurisdictional power of some state. Prior to the establishment of the EEZ, jurisdiction outside the territorial sea (usually three and sometimes twelve nautical miles) was in the hands of the state where the vessel is registered (the ﬂag state), which is still the case in the area outside 200 miles. Effective control of ﬁshing would under those circumstances have required cooperation among all states whose vessels were ﬁshing the stock under regulation. The more states that are involved, the less likely it is that such cooperation is forthcoming, and prior to the 200-mile EEZ there were few examples of this. One was the Paciﬁc

Privatization of the Oceans Halibut Commission, which regulates the lucrative Paciﬁc halibut ﬁshery. Only the United States and Canada were involved in this ﬁshery. The establishment of the 200-mile EEZ can be seen as establishment of state property rights to resources. Within the zone, the coastal state has an exclusive right to extract resources, but can authorize ﬁrms from other states to do this, and many have in fact done so, both for ﬁsh and other resources. The coastal state charges a fee for this, whether it is a license to ﬁsh or to extract oil, unless it is a part of a mutual access agreement or some other agreement of mutual beneﬁt. The establishment of these property rights is in accordance with the economic theory of property rights, which claims that such rights develop in response to rising beneﬁts from such claims compared with the costs of defending them (Demsetz 1967). The improving technology of ﬁshing meant both increased proﬁtability and an increased threat that ﬁsh stocks might be destroyed, or their yields substantially harmed, through overexploitation. Countries that owed a substantial part of their income and living standards to ﬁshing off their shores pressed for exclusive rights for ﬁshing in this area, on the basis of the principles implied by the Truman Proclamation. Technological change also facilitated enforcement of extensive territorial claims at sea. Airplanes made it possible to monitor vast swaths of the ocean, and stronger engines and navigational instruments (radar, positioning equipment) made the coast guard more effective.

52.5. PRIVATE RIGHTS TO FISH Once the necessary jurisdictional framework had been put in place, private property rights to ﬁsh began to emerge in a number of countries. In all cases these rights are use rights and not rights to stocks of ﬁsh. Usually these are rights to catch a certain quantity of ﬁsh, determined as a share of the total catch quota set for a ﬁsh stock in each time period (typically a year). Rights to operate ﬁshing vessels of a certain kind with a certain type of gear and for certain ﬁsh stocks have also emerged, but they are usually complementary to rather than substitutes for rights speciﬁed as ﬁsh quotas. This is, for example, the case in Norway, where rights in the form of ﬁshing licenses (concessions) emerged in the early 1970s, well before the establishment of the 200-mile limit, as a result of a moratorium on the dwindling herring stocks. The allocation of ﬁsh

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quotas, which emerged later, was based on the vessel licensing system (Hannesson 2007). In the Faeroe Islands, a system based on ﬁshing days replaced a ﬁsh quota system after the latter had been tried out for a brief period in the 1990s. Why do we have these use rights to ﬁsh and not fully ﬂedged ownership rights to ﬁsh stocks? There is little doubt that ownership of ﬁsh stocks would be more effective for achieving economic efﬁciency. The owner of a ﬁsh stock would have as good a guarantee as nature permits for reaping the full beneﬁts of saving some ﬁsh today in order to improve catches tomorrow. But because ﬁsh stocks typically migrate over a large area, these rights would have to be quite extensive in order to be effective. In cases where ﬁsh stocks migrate across national boundaries, private ownership would entail a far-ranging cooperation of the states involved. National governments are likely, therefore, to balk at vesting such extensive rights in private individuals or companies. Furthermore, economic efﬁciency is not the only goal of ﬁsheries management. Preserving ﬁsh stocks as such for reasons of biodiversity, or as feed for other types of ﬁsh or marine mammals, is an increasingly important consideration in many countries. Private individuals or ﬁrms owning ﬁsh stocks would have no incentives to take these aspects into account unless being compensated for the forgone catches involved in doing so. This identiﬁes a role for the state in ﬁsheries management as a provider of public goods, just as in other arenas (parks, infrastructure). Even if use rights to ﬁsh are less effective than property rights to ﬁsh stocks, they can still go a long way toward achieving economic efﬁciency. The right to catch a given amount of ﬁsh over some time period provides a strong incentive for maximizing the net value of the ﬁsh one is authorized to take. There are two ways of accomplishing this. First, the value of the ﬁsh can be raised by a better treatment of the catch. A good example of this is what happened in the Alaska halibut ﬁshery after individual ﬁsh quotas were put in place. Prior to this the ﬁshing season was very short, sometimes just a few days. Most of the catch had to be frozen and in effect turned into an inferior product instead of being sold in the fresh ﬁsh market. After the quota system was put in place, the ﬁshing season lengthened to eight months, and virtually all the ﬁsh was sold fresh at a considerably higher price (Herrmann and Criddle 2006). A similar

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development took place in the trawl ﬁshery for Alaska pollock. The so-called ﬁsheries cooperatives that were established in this industry in effect amounted to a ﬁsh quota system that removed the incentive to catch the ﬁsh as quickly as possible and before someone else would take it. The vessels could ﬁsh at a more leisurely rate, and the amount of product extracted from the raw ﬁsh increased (Wilen 2005). The more relaxed way in which ﬁshing can be conducted under a system of ﬁsh quotas points to another source of increased efﬁciency, that is, lower costs of ﬁshing. Safety is also likely to be improved, as the vessels can limit their activities to reasonably good weather conditions if they have a right to a certain quota of ﬁsh and do not face the risk that the ﬁshery will be closed down because the total ﬁsh quota has been taken. This is not trivial; ﬁshing is in fact one of the most hazardous occupations in the world. The cost savings are particularly likely to be substantial if the ﬁsh quotas can be sold or rented out. In years when there is less ﬁsh available than the ﬂeet has capacity to take, it would clearly save costs if some ﬁshermen rented out their quotas to others who can ﬁsh them more effectively and so would be prepared to pay more for them than the original owners could obtain by catching the ﬁsh on their own. These are gains for a given ﬁshing ﬂeet. What about the ﬂeet size? Individual ﬁsh quotas that can be bought and sold and are valid for the long term are likely to lead to near-optimal investment in ﬁshing ﬂeets. A ﬁrm owning a certain ﬁsh quota that it will keep at least as long as a ﬁshing vessel can be expected to last has an incentive to invest in a vessel that can ﬁsh its quota efﬁciently. If there are increasing returns to scale in the ﬁshery and the ﬁrm’s quota is too small for a vessel of an optimal size, it could buy additional quota from other ﬁrms that wish to leave the ﬁshery, or it might ﬁnd it in its interest to sell its quota to some other ﬁrm that wishes to acquire quota for a vessel of an appropriate size. It has been shown that when ﬁshermen get a share of the catch instead of a ﬁxed wage this system will fall somewhat short of full optimality, but still be a great improvement over open access (Hannesson 2000). Finally, it may be noted that when ﬁsh quotas ﬂuctuate for environmental reasons, it is virtually certain that there will be some years with excessive ﬁshing capacity and other years with an insufﬁcient one (Hannesson 1987).

52.6. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF USE RIGHTS Drawing on the economic theory of property rights and the reasons why the 200-mile limit was put on the agenda, it would be tempting to conclude that these rights developed on the initiative of individuals or ﬁrms seeking a gain from excluding others from the ﬁshery. There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole story. In many cases the initiative to establish ﬁsh quotas came from government ofﬁcials and politicians concerned about economic efﬁciency. This was the case both in New Zealand and Iceland. However, in all cases support from industry has been necessary to bring proposals for use rights to fruition. In the rockﬁsh ﬁsheries off British Columbia an individual transferable quota system was developed in close cooperation with the industry (Rice 2004). An interesting lesson of that experience is that the more open the process and the wider the group of stakeholders, the more difﬁcult it is to establish a system of use rights, with more restrictions being needed to satisfy the speciﬁc interests of certain groups of stakeholders. Where the necessary support for a use rights system has not been forthcoming from industry such proposals have failed. This happened in Chile, where certain groups in the industry opposed the individual transferable quota system proposed in the late 1980s (Peña-Torres 1997). Industry opposition to individual transferable quotas in the Faeroe Islands prompted a transition to a system of individual transferable ﬁshing days. Despite the economic gains that can be realized through use rights such as individual transferable quotas, it is important to note that they do not solve the fundamental problem of the commons, which concerns limiting the present use for preserving the future potential of the common resource. This trade-off between present and future use can be resolved by maximizing the present value of beneﬁts over an inﬁnite time horizon. To accomplish this, property rights over the resource stock valid for an inﬁnite time horizon would be conducive, but this is not what we have, for reasons that have already been mentioned. Under a use rights system such as individual transferable quotas the setting of the total ﬁsh quota, the length of the ﬁshing season, or whatever variable is used to limit the catch, is in the hands of the authority managing the ﬁshery and not in the hands of the industry. What use rights accomplish is economic efﬁciency, given the

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Privatization of the Oceans annual ﬁsh quota or the rule by which annual ﬁsh quotas are set, but neither of these is necessarily set appropriately. It is wrong, therefore, to blame individual transferable quotas for not succeeding in rebuilding ﬁsh stocks. This depends on how the total catch is limited, but not on how it is divided among the industry players or whether use rights, be they quotas or whatever, are transferable or not. That said, use rights such as individual transferable quotas are likely to promote the rebuilding of ﬁsh stocks. These rights, if transferable, are valuable, and the more so the better the ﬁsh stock is managed. Quota holders are likely, therefore, to try to inﬂuence ﬁsheries managers to manage the stock for which they hold quotas in a way that maximizes the present value of the ﬁshery, as this will also maximize the market value of the ﬁsh quotas they hold. Besides, individual ﬁsh quotas will help implementation by making it clear how much each vessel or ﬁrm can ﬁsh. In ﬁsheries where the total quota is set, or ﬁshing effort limited, in a way that comes close to maximizing the net present value of the ﬁshery, ﬁsh quotas or ﬁshing effort units can be quite valuable. Indeed, this is the driving force behind the industry’s interest in a system of use rights; giving ﬁsh quotas or ﬁshing licenses to vessel owners in an industry plagued by overcapacity and allowing them to buy and sell these rights will generate an economic surplus that will materialize in the form of market value of such rights. Owners of less efﬁcient vessels will be able to sell their rights to the owners of more efﬁcient vessels willing to pay a price for the ﬁsh quotas that

the others are willing to accept. In this way, redundant ﬁshing vessels will be phased out of the ﬁshery, and those that remain can be used much more efﬁciently. To the extent the ﬁsh stock is managed in a better way, the value of the ﬁsh quotas will be further enhanced. This scenario has played out in a number of ﬁsheries. In Norway there has been some trade in ﬁsh quotas, resulting in a considerable decline in the number of ﬁshing vessels in the ﬁsheries affected and an increase in the value of ﬁsh quotas (Hannesson 2007). The rationalizing effect of individual transferable quotas is well illustrated by the development of investment in the Icelandic ﬁshing industry. Figure 52.2 shows a volume index of investment in the ﬁshing industry. Three periods can be distinguished. After 1970 investment increased about fourfold, compared to the period 1945–1970. This increase was in the beginning associated with the extensions of the Icelandic jurisdiction at sea, ﬁrst to 50 miles in 1972 and then to 200 miles in 1975. This brought the expulsion of foreign ﬁshing ﬂeets, and the Icelanders rapidly expanded into the void. It soon became clear that far too many vessels had been built, which led to a decline of the cod stock, the most important resource for the Icelandic ﬁsheries. At ﬁrst, avoiding overﬁshing was attempted through limiting the number of ﬁshing days, but this turned out not to be very effective. In 1983 individual transferable quotas were tried for the ﬁrst time, an arrangement that was then prolonged with certain modiﬁcations for one or a few years at a time. As is clear from ﬁgure 52.2 this did not reduce the

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FIGURE 52.2 Volume index of investment in ﬁxed capital in the Icelandic ﬁsheries, 1945–2007. Straight lines show averages over three periods. (Hagstofa Íslands, Statistics Iceland, www.hagstofa.is)

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investment, but rather the opposite. In 1986–1989 there was a surge in investment. At this time, the individual quotas were not valid for the long term, and more important perhaps, vessel owners could affect their future quota allocations by going for an effort option and establish a more favorable catch record. This provided a strong incentive to acquire more powerful vessels. This is the most likely reason for the investment peak in this period. In 1990, the individual quotas were established for an indeﬁnite period, and there have been no major changes in the system after that. It is hardly a coincidence that the level of investment fell by almost 40 percent after 1990 compared with the period 1971–1990.

52.7. THE BENEFITS OF PRIVATE USE RIGHTS The value of ﬁsh quotas or other forms of use rights in ﬁsheries reﬂects the resource rent in the ﬁshery. Fish stocks are renewable resources, but their regenerative capacity is limited. To make the best possible use of these resources involves maximizing the net present value of revenues less costs, taking into account how the amount of ﬁsh left after ﬁshing in any particular year affects the growth of the ﬁsh stock. Typically, the solution of this problem implies an excess of revenues over costs, or resource rent by another name. This is the maximum amount a sole owner of a ﬁsh stock could charge for the use of the ﬁsh stock, much as the owner of good agricultural land can rent out the land for a fee while farming on marginal land breaks even. In long-term equilibrium, the price of ﬁsh quotas will reﬂect the resource rent; a ﬁsh quota will be valuable if the revenues from the ﬁsh catches it permits exceed the costs for taking them. The value of a ﬁsh quota that is valid forever is equal to the present value of the difference between revenues and costs (the rent) in all future years. In a competitive market for quotas, the market price might come close to reﬂecting this value, but quota buyers will of course try to get away with paying less for their quotas, so the quota price depends on the interplay between supply and demand for quotas. The resource rent and the value of quotas are the factors behind the interest of the industry for quotas and its support for implementing a management system based on quotas. However, these values are not a permanent gain for the industry; they are a gain for those who initially get the quotas for free, or for

less than their true value, but for those who enter the industry later the quota value is a cost they have to pay for entering the industry in the hope of getting it back when in turn they decide to leave. In most ﬁsheries where individual quota rights have been established, they have been handed out for free. The resulting gains, which often have been substantial, have been a source of much controversy. First, there has been strife between groups within industry. Quotas have typically been allocated to vessel owners on the basis of previous catches, and crew members without any investment in vessels have often resented the windfall gains of vessel owners. Controversies over eligibility have arisen between those who have recently entered the industry and those with a long catch record, and sometimes the allocation of quotas has been modiﬁed to take into account investment in vessels in addition to previous catch records. There have been controversies over the allocation rules between different groups of vessel owners, with each group trying to inﬂuence the rule makers in its favor. A similar process of rent seeking has often resulted when establishment of individual quotas has been anticipated or announced, with vessel owners scrambling to establish a favorable catch record, resulting in excessive participation in the ﬁshery or unnecessary investment and a further depletion of the ﬁsh stock if no mechanism has been in place to limit the catch. A further controversy is over whether the ﬁshery rent should accrue to the industry and become capitalized as quota values or whether some of it should be taxed away. It has been argued that society at large is the rightful owner of the ﬁsh stocks in its economic zone and therefore entitled to the beneﬁts these resources can provide. In countries or regions where the ﬁshing industry is a substantial part of the economy, such taxes could be important sources of revenue, much as taxation of the extraction of oil and minerals is an important source of public revenue in countries rich in such resources. The Falkland Islands receive a substantial income from renting out licenses to foreign ﬂeets ﬁshing for squid. Other countries where this could make a difference are Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, and regions of certain countries such as Norway and Canada. Iceland has a resource rent tax in place, but it is quite moderate compared to the market values of quotas. Controversies over windfall gains from ﬁsh quotas have often intensiﬁed as the value of the quotas has increased over time, due to the rationalization of the ﬁshery. However, the windfall gains accruing to the industry due to the value of ﬁsh quotas are gains

Privatization of the Oceans due to a rationalization process and not gains taken at anybody’s expense. Without the quota system in place, these gains would not have existed. Furthermore, there is a certain conﬂict between taxing away ﬁshing rents and the support from industry for the quota system and for a better management of the ﬁshery. If ﬁsh quotas are valueless, they will largely be a matter of indifference for the industry, and so will management measures that would improve future catches and raise the value of the quotas.

52.8. CONCLUSION Private property rights to ﬁsh are rights of extraction, not rights of ownership of resource stocks. In this they differ from property rights to forests or livestock. One could say that property rights to oil and minerals also are extraction rights, but for minerals these also are in effect rights to stocks, because mineral deposits do not migrate out of their locations. Oil and gas, on the other hand, are a bit similar to ﬁsh in that they migrate underground, which gives rise to some of the common resource problems encountered in the ﬁsheries. The extensive migrations of ﬁsh are one reason why we are not likely to see property rights to ﬁsh stocks emerge any time soon. Another reason is public goods aspects of ﬁsh stocks, which appear to be assuming increasing importance. But even if property rights to ﬁsh are likely to remain use rights, they can be very useful for promoting economic efﬁciency. There is little point in using more capital and manpower than necessary to catch the available amount of ﬁsh; nature limits the amount of ﬁsh that can be taken in any time period without harming future catch possibilities, and in managed ﬁsheries this is often formalized by setting a limit to the amount of ﬁsh that can be taken. This would appear to be particularly important for poor countries where a large part of the population of working age is engaged in ﬁsheries. Poor countries need above all to use their resources more productively; poverty reduction is synonymous with economic growth. No new value is created by having more people and vessels than necessary chasing the ﬁsh that can be taken. Yet one often hears the argument that allowing as many people as possible to ﬁsh will allow them to make a living and alleviate their poverty. Historically this is what has happened in many countries, and in those

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that now have become industrialized and rich. But it is surely a sign of failed distribution mechanism if poverty is reduced by allowing so many people to ﬁsh that the total ﬁsh catch declines; it is as if a better distribution requires having less to distribute. Allowance should also be made for the possibility that accommodating more people in the ﬁsheries than necessary is likely to be a drag on economic development; closing the ﬁshing industry to those who are not needed there pushes them to look for something else more productive to do. Where use rights have been introduced in the ﬁshery, they have increased economic efﬁciency, through higher product values, less costs (including less of redundant investment in ﬁshing vessels), or both (for formal investigation, see Grafton et al. 2000; Fox et al. 2003). While not directly improving ﬁsh stock management, use rights are likely to have done so indirectly through changing the incentives of the industry from pressing for higher short-term quotas to avoid bankruptcies because of overcapacity to pressing for better ﬁsh stock management that maximizes the value of these rights. Successful ﬁsheries management by transferable use rights invariably results in a rising value of those rights. This brings a windfall gain to those who initially got the rights, the greater the less they paid for their rights (and they have usually been handed out for free). Such distributional effects have often been controversial. There are proverbial tales of twin brothers who started out with empty hands but where one followed a track that gave him a ﬁsh quota for free while the other lost his job in the ensuing rationalization of the industry. There are methods to deal with distributional effects of this kind, although they are hardly perfect and perhaps never will be. In practice, it is not possible to make a watertight separation between allocation and distribution; economic development is often accompanied by changes in income distribution that moves some forward and sets others back. In the ﬁsheries case, it may very well be that putting in place a wealth-enhancing management system based on private use rights requires that the rights holders get a large enough share of the wealth generated by the use right system. Generally speaking, we can say that one must weigh the gains in efﬁciency against the distributional effects. The worst possible trade-off that can be imagined is one where any distributional inequity, however small, will always outweigh any efﬁciency gain, however large.

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References Andersen, P. (1983). On rent of ﬁshing grounds: Translation of Jens Warming’s 1911 article, with an introduction. History of Political Economy 15: 391–396. Demsetz, H. (1967). Toward a theory of property rights. American Economic Review 57: 347–359. Fox, K.J., R.Q. Grafton, J. Kirkley, and D. Squires (2003). Property rights in a ﬁshery: Regulatory change and ﬁrm performance. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 46: 156–177. Fulton, T.W. (1911). The Sovereignty of the Sea. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons. Gonner, E.C.K. [1912] (1966). Common Land and Inclosure. 2nd ed. New York: Augustus M. Keelley Publishers. Gordon, H.S. (1954). The economic theory of a common property resource: The ﬁshery. Journal of Political Economy 62: 124–142. Grafton, R.Q., D. Squires, and K.J. Fox (2000). Private property and economic efﬁciency: A study of a common-pool resource. Journal of Law and Economics 43: 679–713. Hafrannsóknastofnun (Institute of Marine Research) (2008). Nytjastofnar sjávar (State of marine stocks in Icelandic waters) 2007/08, Reykjavík: Hafrannsóknastofnun. Hannesson, R. (1987). Optimal catch capacity and ﬁshing effort in deterministic and stochastic ﬁshery models. Fisheries Research 5:1–21.

Hannesson, R. (2000). A note on ITQs and optimal investment. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 40: 181–188. Hannesson, R. (2007). Buyback programs for ﬁshing vessels in Norway. In Curtis, R., and D. Squires (eds.), Fisheries Buybacks, pp. 177– 190. Oxford: Blackwell. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: 1243–1247. Herrmann, M., and K. Criddle (2006). An econometric model for the Paciﬁc halibut ﬁshery. Marine Resource Economics 21: 129–158. Peña-Torres, J. (1997). The political economy of ﬁshing regulation: The case of Chile. Marine Resource Economics 12: 253–280. Rice, J. (2004). The British Columbia rockﬁsh trawl ﬁshery. In Report and Documentation of the International Workshop on the Implementation of International Fisheries Instruments and Factors of Unsustainability and Overexploitation in Fisheries. FAO Fisheries Report 700, pp. 161–187. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Ruddle, K., and R.E. Johannes (1984). The Traditional Management of Coastal Systems in Asia and the Paciﬁc. Paris: UNESCO. Smith, T. (1994). Scaling Fisheries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warming, J. (1911). Om Grundrente av Fiskegrunde. Nationaløkonomisk Tidskrift. 49: 499–505. Wilen, J. (2005). Property rights and the texture of rents in ﬁsheries. In Leal, D. (ed.), Evolving Property Rights in Marine Fisheries, pp. 49–67. Oxford: Rowman and Littleﬁeld.

53 Fisheries Co-management: Improving Fisheries Governance through Stakeholder Participation SVEIN JENTOFT BONNIE J. MCCAY DOUGLAS CLYDE WILSON

53.1. CO-MANAGEMENT IN FISHERIES Recurrent crises have tarnished the top-down, bureaucratic, science-based approach to ﬁsheries management (McGoodwin 1990). Not only have governments frequently failed to prevent ﬁsh populations from overexploitation, but in many instances they have even exacerbated the problems through mismanagement (Finlayson and McCay 1998; Hannesson 1996; Marchak et al. 1987). Increasingly, this has led to recognition that ﬁsheries management needs to be reinvented, that new approaches must be tried out (Pitcher et al. 1998). Concepts such as “adaptive management” (Walters 1986), “ecosystem management” (Schramm and Hubert 1996), and “responsible ﬁsheries” (FAO 1995) all represent searches for alternatives to prevailing management practices. Co-management is closely linked with these alternatives. “Ecosystem-based management” as developed for ﬁsheries and for marine conservation more broadly includes two key underlying principles: (1) increased collaboration among government agencies and, when multiple jurisdictions are involved, between governments (Christensen 1996) and (2) participation of stakeholders representing the relevant interests (Pomeroy and Douvere 2003). Responsible ﬁsheries brings even more clearly into the foreground the role of key stakeholders, the ﬁshers, in taking initiatives for stewardship, and

adaptive management, borne of the need to act in situations of uncertainty, needs the cooperation of resource users and other stakeholders in reducing uncertainties and evaluating and carrying out changes in management. The co-management component is the idea that in many cases of environmental decision making, stakeholders, or interested and affected parties (National Research Council 1996) should be involved in the management process, that they participate in problem identiﬁcation, knowledge production, and regulatory decision making, and perhaps even implementation and enforcement. There are three lines of argument in support of this participatory view, which is a general one in environmental decision making (Dietz and Stern 2008): the normative argument of the consent of the governed; the substantive one of creating another source of knowledge, insight, and wisdom; and the instrumental one of reducing conﬂict and increasing trust and legitimacy (National Research Council 1996). The ﬁrst goes without saying, except that people may be willing to grant decision-making power to their elected representatives and authorities of the state, and thus some decision making involves only the policy-making and scientiﬁc or technical elite. To the second argument, although environmental decision making requires technical expertise, public engagement is a source of what Freudenberg (1988) calls “prudence,” especially in deciding when it does and when it does not make

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sense to rely mainly on experts to guide public policy. The argument for participatory knowledge creation and decision making is particularly strong where knowledge is scarce and unreliable and yet the stakes are high, the condition that is said to call for “post-normal science” (Ravetz 2004) and hence greater participation of the wider community in knowledge production and decision making. This would seem the case for efforts at ecosystem-based ﬁsheries management, which involves going beyond single-species population dynamics to incorporate predator–prey, competitive, and other ecological relationships as well as environmental factors such as pollution and climate change. Increasingly, ﬁsheries problems are seen as major and urgently in need of action, but data on all these factors and their linkages over space and time are rarely adequate and certain enough to stand on their own, raising the value of the knowledge of ﬁshers and others whose experiences help them gain knowledge and understanding (Dyer and McGoodwin 1994). Third, the participation of key stakeholders such as resource users enhances the legitimacy of the regulatory regime, reducing conﬂict and improving compliance. As Hall (1972) argues, “Compliance and involvement are interrelated phenomena . . . [and] participation . . . contributes to compliance through the process of involvement.” Compliance is also enhanced because users are likely to become more knowledgeable of, committed to, and supportive of regulations if they have had a say in the process. Therefore, so the argument goes, a more bottom-up approach is called for, some aspects of the management system must be decentralized, and users should be granted decision-making rights through delegation of management authority. They may also be granted more responsibility. As a report on a review of ﬁsheries stock assessment in the U.S. Northeast suggested, “[g]iving stakeholders more say in formulating and implementing policy might mitigate some of the existing tensions between NMFS [National Marine Fisheries Service] and harvesters, as well as transfer some of the responsibility for the consequences of policy to those involved directly with exploit the ﬁshery” (National Research Council 1998). Co-management is a term increasingly used in ﬁsheries for the participatory approach. With respect to the “ladder of participation” (Arnstein 1969), with government power at one end and citizen power at the other, co-management is somewhere in the middle rungs, where advice is sought

by government with the intent of truly taking it into account, and/or there is a formal public– private partnership, where resources are pooled, responsibilities shared, and actions coordinated. Increasingly other stakeholder groups, such as environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), are joining such arrangements, as in the regional advisory councils of the European Union (Gray and Hatchard 2003), in which case an emerging term is “cooperative management” rather than “co-management.” In this chapter we include such arrangements in our deﬁnition of co-management, recognizing that resource users no longer have a privileged claim over other stakeholders in many situations. Such partnerships can assume different organizational forms; there is no speciﬁc formula, only some organizational principles to build on. Co-management in ﬁsheries is now gaining popularity in many parts of the world, partly because it is also seen as a tool in ﬁghting poverty in ﬁsheries communities (Wilson et al. 2005) as well as the only feasible form of management where governments lack resources. Co-management is thought to do away with what is seen as the distant, impersonal, insensitive bureaucratic approach now characterizing the role of government in ﬁsheries management. Instead, responsibility for management functions is decentralized and delegated to user organizations at national, regional, and/or local levels. This implies autonomy of users within an overall institutional framework. It also calls for a system of interactive governance and cooperative democracy (Kooiman 1993), whether through direct participation or through representation at levels that transcend local community boundaries. Informal and formal institutional arrangements that ﬁt some or all of these criteria have existed in ﬁsheries in different parts of the world for decades and in some instances for centuries (Harkes 2006; Jentoft and McCay 1995; McGoodwin 1990; Pinkerton and Weinstein 1995). Co-management is not a question so much of reinvention as of rediscovery and renewed commitment to the “meso-level” of governance, involving civil society and voluntary associations (Dubbink and van Vliet 1996). Skeptics tend to regard co-management practices as remnants of the past, ideal but nevertheless special cases not generally applicable in modern settings. Moreover, critics may argue that successful co-management requires a particular cultural foundation, with cooperative and communal values, that has become rare in the context of an industrialized,

Improving Fisheries Governance through Stakeholder Participation high-tech, and increasingly globalized ﬁshery. Thus, it seems to be naive to assume that co-management will transform what has become an extremely competitive and often antagonistic relationship into a cooperative and more responsible one. The problem of “free-riding” is assumed to remain because it is as much in the interest of the individual user to defect after as it is before a deal has been struck. Therefore, user organizations will not be able to encourage or discipline members to cooperate. Even at a collective level, co-management will suffer from the opportunism captured by the “fox in the henhouse” metaphor (McCay 1995). In other words, user organizations with a formal position within the management system will be tempted to misuse the trust they have been granted as guardians of the resource. Negative perceptions of co-management follow this line of thought: if comanagement is weak in theory, it must be poor in practice. Yet another line of critical thinking about co-management comes from broader critiques of neoliberalism in policy and practice, where governments devolve responsibilities onto local units or citizens groups in ways that increase their burdens without helping achieve social or ecological goals (Harvey 2005; Mansﬁeld 2004). These critical expectations cannot be ignored. We argue, however, that some of the skepticism about co-management is excessively pessimistic. In our judgment, this pessimism stems from an overly narrow social theory about the role and nature of institutions. In what follows, we discuss alternative perspectives on institutions that support a more positive view of the prospects of co-management. In addition, building upon our earlier work on issues of institutional design that contribute to the success or failure of co-management regimes (Harkes 2006; Jentoft 2004; Kooiman 1993), we address questions about community and co-management.

53.2. INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON CO-MANAGEMENT Expectations of the possibility of institutional change, such as introducing co-management within ﬁsheries, reﬂect one’s views of institutions. Rational choice perspectives found in economic and public choice schools of thought see institutions basically as constraints, as “the rules of the game” (North 1990) that restrict human behavior in the collective interest. This perspective dominates ﬁsheries

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management policy. Institutional change means changing the rules. The privatization model for ﬁsheries (individual transferable quotas) proposed by resource economists is based on a similar notion of institutions to the extent that it calls for changes in the rules, especially property rights, to allow market mechanisms to work more effectively. Co-management, however, is not so much about the rules per se as it is about the communicative and collaborative process through which these rules are formed: who participates, how debates are structured, how knowledge is employed, how conﬂicts of interest are addressed, and how agreements are reached. Schlager and Ostrom (1992) make a related and useful distinction between operational rules and collective-choice rules in natural resource management. The former are mainly what we refer to as rules. The latter specify who may participate, and how, in changing operational rules, and at a highly level might include constitutional principles. Note that from their legalistic perspective, even comanagement arrangements are rule driven. However, by stressing only the restraining elements of institutions, one misses the extent to which institutions such as co-management also enable and empower, provide licenses, establish mandates, and create opportunities (Giddens 1984b; Jentoft and McCay 1995; Scott 1995). For this we need a broader deﬁnition of institutions, such as the one suggested by Scott (1995: 33): “Institutions consist of cognitive, normative, and regulative structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behavior.” From another perspective, institutions are observed in behavior patterns that persist over time (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Institutions are shared understandings that are continually recreated through a process of people behaving in ways that depend on how they understand the institution and being seen by others who interpret the behavior in light of the institution. Then the others repeat the process, with each cycle reproducing and at the same time marginally changing the institution as interpretations change. To this point in environmental and marine ﬁsheries policy, the focus has mainly been on what Scott (1995) calls the regulative “pillar” of institutions, the “rules of the game” discussed above, giving little weight to the normative and cognitive dimensions. The regulative pillar focuses on the content of the behavioral patterns, which when they persist can all be described as rules; that is, in situation X, Y is done. This pillar focuses our attention on which rules exist and how they are established and

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enforced. This pillar is obviously critical, but its importance should, according to Scott, not obscure the equal importance of the normative and cognitive dimensions. The normative pillar reﬂects the prescriptive, evaluative, and obligatory dimensions of institutions that are required to pattern behaviors. Here the emphasis is on behavioral standards and values, on prescriptions about how things should be done, and on what means are legitimate in the pursuit of valued goals. If an institution is to actually reproduce behavior patterns, it must be understood by participants as “normal behavior,” which implies both that the behavior is seen as legitimate and that its violation is expected to be punished. This normative pillar directs our attention to the moral basis of institutions and how they are justiﬁed according to ethical principles and perceptions, as well as questions about who makes “collective-action” decisions and how they do so. Related to the normative “pillar” of institutions is the argument that co-management is expected to improve legitimacy and compliance because users tend to support management schemes that they have worked out themselves (Hall 1972). Beyond the normative and regulative pillars, institutions also deﬁne and very often actually create the cognitive understandings that people use to interpret behavior. For example, the very idea of “brother” is both integral to and deﬁned by the institution of the family. The cognitive aspect is of particular relevance to co-management which challenges the way institutional roles are traditionally deﬁned in management. One area the cognitive dimension makes more prominent is the respective roles in building the knowledge base played by ﬁshers with their local, experience-gained user knowledge, and scientists mobilizing research-based knowledge. Involving users in regulatory decision making broadens the basis of information that informs regulatory systems, and is a step toward more ecologically and socially sound management. As Pinkerton (1994) argues, “when folk knowledge and local perspectives are incorporated into a larger management system as co-management, they may make the difference between the system’s having local legitimacy or not, having local relevance or not, and in general operating more rather than less effectively.” We ﬁnd Scott’s (1995) understanding of institutions to be much closer to the essentials of co-management than other deﬁnitions that emphasize only their rule

character. Scott’s view of institutions as embodiments of culture, social structures, and routines within various levels of jurisdiction is in line with the embeddedness perspective in social theory (Granovetter and Swedberg 1992). It is very likely that success or failure of ﬁsheries co-management hinges upon the links that bind one level of jurisdiction to the other, for example, between an agency of the nation state, a user organization, and a local community. Management reforms face the problem that institutions come to be perceived as “objective reality” rather than a social creation (Berger and Luckmann 1967). When an institution has come to be regarded as legitimate, it sets new standards and norms for evaluating behavior. It becomes a tool that people use to predict the behavior of others and so guide their own. When this happens, the behavior that is both prescribed and proscribed comes to be viewed as “human nature” and becomes a background assumption to intersubjective interpretations of social reality. For this reason, one cannot simply assume that institutions exist only as long as actors ﬁnd them to be in their interest. Rather, they become a fact of life. Institutions are often characterized by inertia. Instead of changing institutions to meet the challenge, aspirations are reduced to ﬁt what is being accomplished. This is a central problem for ﬁsheries management where resource ﬂuctuations and crises are endemic. Thus, a necessary condition for co-management is that institutions must ﬁrst be understood as the socially constructed and changeable reality they are. Co-management is not a ﬁxed unitary entity; rather, it is a set of principles for institutional design that can assume various organizational forms depending on particular circumstances. It is possible to be supportive of co-management as such but skeptical about some of its practical designs. One may even be in favor of some of its principles but not necessarily the whole package. Instead of discarding co-management as utopian, not ﬁt for modern ﬁsheries, one should try to learn from experience to see what has worked and not and why. One should also be open to the possibility that co-management may fail (or succeed) for reasons that have nothing to do with the model itself but the institutional and social framework surrounding it. We have dealt with some of these design variables elsewhere (Harkes 2006; Jentoft 2004; Kooiman 1993). In what follows we discuss one important design issue in greater length than

Improving Fisheries Governance through Stakeholder Participation we have done before: how co-management is related to communities.

53.3. CO-MANAGEMENT, COMMUNITY, AND INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN The lessons of co-management suggest that, from a community perspective, several institutional variables are important. The ﬁrst is how “community” is deﬁned. The second is the locus and scale of the community. Third is how the various groups within the affected community are represented. The fourth to be discussed here is property rights. These issues are not technical and as such cannot be regarded from a purely instrumental point of view. They are highly political; they affect social relationships, interests in conﬂict, and the distribution of power among those that are involved in, and affected by, the management decisions. The sociological construct of community, emphasized already in our discussion of the embeddedness perspective, is helpful in thinking through these institutional issues.

53.3.1. Deﬁnitions of Community “Fishermen do not ﬁsh only from individual boats; it is fair to say that they also ﬁsh from communities”(Matthews 1993). This truism has important implications for the design of ﬁshery comanagement. It implies a territorial notion of community. Most approaches to co-management in the global South are based in geographical communities where a village or group of villages will work with the government to manage small-scale ﬁsheries resources. These efforts are often linked “acrossscale” (Hall 1972) with NGOs or donors who have more focused interests that address speciﬁc aspects of many communities. Increasingly in the North, territorial or “local” community can be contrasted with a functional notion of community (Jentoft and Mikalsen 1994), which in turn is based on shared activities over larger geographical scales. Conceptually, these activities can be related to notions of “virtual” and “epistemic” community. Co-management rights and responsibilities may be assigned to representatives of ﬁshing industry organizations or otherwise-deﬁned groups of harvesters (and potentially processors). These groups may be deﬁned in functional terms, such as shared reliance on particular gear types (i.e., mobile gear

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vs. ﬁxed gear), in terms of certain species, such as herring (Stephenson et al. 1993), or in terms of ﬁshing grounds used, for example, the Lofoten Islands (Jentoft and Kristoffersen 1989). Where individual transferable quotas (ITQs) or enterprise allocations are in place, the quota holders may constitute the relevant groups for co-management purposes as in Atlantic Canada’s inshore dragger ﬁshery and the U.S. surf clam and ocean quahog ﬁshery (McCay et al. 1995). In this context, the phrase “virtual community” (Munro et al. 1998) expresses the idea that such communities need have no particular geographic or social focus beyond shared participation in a ﬁshery. However, one should not forget the more traditional notion of community as webs of social interaction tied to place, history, and identity, indicated by the term “local community.” Co-management is gaining increased recognition, but most often based on functional and “virtual” constructs of community. These constructs carry the risk of marginalizing large segments of populations dependent on viable ﬁsheries if their use in management means that the fates of “local communities” are ignored. Accordingly, two important questions remain: whether and how co-management authority can be vested in or assigned to local communities. The well-known coastal ﬁsheries management regimes of Japan, centered in local cooperatives, have elements of this kind of co-management insofar as the cooperatives are deeply embedded in and represent many of the interests of the larger community (Lim et al. 1995; Pinkerton and Weinstein 1995; Ruddle 1989), which of course are not always conﬂict-free (Barrett and Okudaira 1995; Takahashi et al. 2006). Moreover, some groups that are deﬁned functionally, such as the “ﬁxed gear” sector in Nova Scotia, Canada, may also have bases in particular regions and local communities. Indeed, for that reason, in Nova Scotia many of those involved in ﬁxed gear (e.g., gill-net and longline) ﬁshing use the language of “community-based co-management.” Nova Scotians using that language argue that making the community the home of co-management offers “an exciting and innovative way to address issues such as reducing conﬂict between various competing gear sectors, ensuring equitable allocation of ﬁshing opportunism . . . and helping to promote community economic development” (Anonymous 1996). “Functional groups” differ from “territorial groups” in many ways, some of which are relevant to their potentials for co-management. For one

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thing, the relationships among people in functional groups (i.e., gear-based groups) are more contractual and single-stranded than relationships within a local community. Sharing a technology or even, at times, a ﬁshing ground is not the same as sharing the history and future of a local community. Community members typically have bonds of kinship and friendship. The homogeneity, equality, and stability characteristic of local communities are conducive to cooperation (Ostrom 1990, Singleton and Taylor 1992). Fishers shift between gears faster than they shift residency. Accordingly, commitment and continuity are likely to be greater for local community-based co-management regimes than for systems relying on functional communities. As Singleton and Taylor (1992) argue, this may also lower the transaction costs of resource management, that is, the costs of negotiation, implementation, enforcement, and monitoring of regulatory schemes. However, social bonds and identities also shift, and kinship and friendship can also be “virtual” in this sense. Each ﬁshery involves a unique interplay between environmental realities and social relations, both contractual and identity based. One should not hold too fast to any a priori deﬁnition of community. Community is an emergent property of social relationships that people create by taking advantage of cultural understandings and existing identities, geographical or otherwise. Some policy communities are good examples that may characterize future co-management regimes in ﬁsheries. Haas (1992) has traced the development of a number of such coherent policy communities led by scientists who have come to an agreement about both the nature of environmental threats and appropriate responses, but co-management does not rely solely on scientiﬁc consensus. Centered on speciﬁc management issues or managing bodies, co-management groups can be made up of industry members, lobbyists, bureaucrats, journalists, scientists, and others who come to know each other well, to learn whether and how much to trust each other, and to share common conceptions of problem and solution even as they may differ on specifics. The “IQ Group” created by Canada’s Ministry of Fisheries in 1990 to design and implement a new management regime appears to have taken on some of these features, enabling communication among scientists, bureaucrats, and ﬁshers and the development of innovations and experiments in conservation that might not otherwise have taken place (Apostle et al. 2003).

53.3.2. The Locus and Scale of Community The ecology and geography of ﬁsh stocks and deployment of ﬁshing effort pose major questions for the design of co-management. Local community-based co-management may not be appropriate for very mobile, far-ranging species of ﬁsh or of ﬁshing ﬂeets, in contrast with, for example, sedentary shellﬁsh stocks or relatively localized migratory lobster stocks. The decentralization involved will face boundary and aggregation problems, and such localized management can create externalities for other areas, not to mention conﬂicts when management powers are used to exclude other users. Clearly, structures for coordination and conﬂict resolution are required, whether they be vertical or horizontal, and it is easy to imagine pressures mounting in some cases to replace localized co-management with more regional or even centralized co-management regimes as the costs of coordination mount. However, there are also costs of centralization, for instance, pertaining to communication, enforcement and control. These costs tend to grow with organizational scale. Therefore, one should adopt the principle of subsidiarity: management should be done at the lowest feasible level (Kooiman 1993). Typically, the management of total allowable catches is better suited for nonlocal community management than is the management of space and gear. Co-management, in the broader sense of collaborative planning and implementation between users, government ofﬁcials, and scientists, may take place at all geographic scales and levels of decision making (Harkes 2006). User organizations frequently exist at the national level and have an administrative capacity comparable to that of government management agencies. Thus, cooperation on regulatory tasks may take place without decentralization. However, the distance from the organization leadership to the ﬁshers may be as great as with the government bureaucracy. A risk is that comanagement may entrench the power of an administrative elite and be as impersonal, insensitive, and indifferent to local concerns as management by government. Consequently, the legitimacy problem may be unchanged, if not enhanced, because of the disappointment that users feel when expectations are still not fulﬁlled. For communities, conﬂict and scale are intertwined (Wilson 2003). Motivations of participants

Improving Fisheries Governance through Stakeholder Participation in co-management arrangements are often driven by conﬂicts over the allocation of ﬁshing resources. The community’s need for the government is often rooted in needing help dealing with conﬂicts that are being played out over greater than local levels. Scale is also central to why the government wants to work with the communities. Scale is also a critical part of the attraction that co-management holds for governments. Bureaucratic management agencies have to be able to gather and make use of the kind of rich information that allows adaptive management; this includes local ecological knowledge about the resource, the local economic and social conditions, and information needed for monitoring, surveillance, and control. All of this information is bound up in complex local meanings that often require extended communications and even face-to-face conversations. Co-management is an institutional form that can make such information available and facilitate interactive learning essential for adaptation (Armitage et al. 2007). For governments, however, conﬂict and scale are also intertwined (Wilson 2003) because conﬂicts give governments their entrée into the community. Approached correctly, co-management gives governments the opportunity to use their authority to contain and channel ﬁsheries conﬂicts in creative ways and try to maintain an equitable balance among the user groups who must negotiate outcomes because of clashing objectives if management is to be effective. This creative channeling of conﬂict, however, requires the state to use its authority for this purpose rather than attempting to manage the ﬁshery directly in a top-down style (Hall 1972; Wilson 2003).

53.4. REPRESENTATION OF USER GROUPS AND STAKEHOLDERS Creating co-management does not take place within a social and institutional vacuum. New institutions, such as co-management, emerge through a “bargaining” process in which groups with varying power and diverse and conﬂicting interests seek to control how the institution will be deﬁned, legitimated, and enforced. Existing institutions, or “lords of the past,” will affect the formation of new ones, even if they are out of touch with the new conditions that exist (Wilkinson 1992). Co-management is likely to be contested because it affects the distribution of both economic and administrative

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resources among user groups and stakeholders. An inescapable tension exists between the desire of parties to maximize their own advantages and/ or seek a cooperative solution to mutual problems. These two goals can contradict one another when cooperative solutions require more open communications that make protecting individual interests more difﬁcult (Walton and McKersie 1965). This tension is most evident in the basic problem of who will get a “seat at the table” of comanagement. The communities involved in ﬁsheries co-management, as we discussed above, are deﬁned by both territorial and functional considerations. Some communities are also formed around issues and ideologies, such as environmental groups, thus representing a cause rather than an interest of a particular constituency. The community dynamic we seek to enlist in the co-management effort is an emergent property of the engagement in management of such communities. A central question is how the members of these communities are represented, whether they are elected or appointed to represent one or the other type of community. Moreover, “ﬁshers” is itself a large category. It includes owners, skippers and crew that may have very different interests. Fish processors, ﬁsh workers, ﬁsh consumers, and ﬁsher families are all affected by management decisions and are stakeholders with a legitimate demand for a voice in the process. There is also a public interest in ﬁsheries management, particularly where the ﬁshing industry is important for the economy as a whole. How this interest should be heard is an increasingly important issue. Direct public participation through political appointees is an option but certainly not the only one. The problem, however, is that the more other groups become involved in the process, the more difﬁcult it is to maintain the qualities and beneﬁts of community described above, and the higher the risk of alienating some of the user groups who have power to veto or sabotage co-management decisions. For instance, ﬁshers control the effectiveness of the rules and regulations because there is always a limit to how effective enforcement can be at sea. Therefore, it hardly matters for the efﬁcacy of the co-management system if other user groups and stakeholders are satisﬁed with their representation and the decisions made but the ﬁshers are not. It is difﬁcult to strike a balance that all parties can live with. The U.S. regional management councils are good illustrations of this problem (Cloutier 1996).

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Thus, any co-management system is confronted with at least four design questions pertaining to representation (Jentoft et al. 2003). First, who can legitimately claim to be recognized as a user or stakeholder and, hence, demand to have a seat at the table? Some users may have more at stake than others. How should this then be accounted for? Second, in what capacity should users and stakeholders be represented? Should they be represented as member of an interest group, a local community, or simply as concerned citizens? The third question pertains to how much involvement. Co-management comes with alternative costs. Some issues may lend themselves more efﬁciently for representation than direct participation. Fourth, how should representation be done? The act of representation requires certain skills and capabilities that can be learned but should somehow also be regulated to avoid tension and conﬂict. The issue here is not so much who participates—directly or indirectly, but how they communicate. Co-management systems must be designed in order to facilitate deliberation among participants and allow participants to be convinced by the better argument.

53.5. CO-MANAGEMENT AND PROPERTY RIGHTS Property rights constitute an important set of institutions inﬂuencing the nature of a resource regime. Property rights institutions are often strongly embedded in ﬁshing communities. They can be very complex, with both formal and informal elements involving both social and ecological dimensions (Vandergeest 1997). Expanding commercialization of ﬁsheries, however, brings with it a secular tendency toward greater formality and a “disembedding” (Giddens 1984a; Kooiman 1993) of these regimes. This has been attributed to economic pressure to reduce the transaction costs that arise from having to deal with complex and contextually speciﬁc property rights (Lim et al. 1995). This increased formality means a loss of ecological ﬂexibility that co-management regimes can potentially mitigate. This effect of co-management is reported in the Dutch case reported by Dubbink and Van Vliet (1996) and in the Lofoten co-management system of Norway (Jentoft et al. 2003). Co-management means that those that have a hands-on experience of how management schemes work in practice also are in position to change them without having

to have the consent of a government agency or a national assembly. The form of all ﬁsheries management institutions, including co-management, will be strongly inﬂuenced by the prevailing regime of property rights. In the rudimentary “tragedy of the commons” model, open access is the root problem. The way to avoid the destruction of the resource is to institute some set of rights, which can attach to individuals, groups, communities, or the state, that does away with open access. Most resource economists are in favor of private property solutions. Yet these solutions may accelerate the formalization of the forms of property, further disembedding the resource from its social and cultural context, and further reducing the social capital and ecological ﬂexibility needed for effective management. The argument for co-management is part of an attempt to recognize and build upon a larger set of property options for managing natural resources, including various forms of community-based jurisdiction over natural resources, or at least rights to use and manage them. Co-management involves the authority to determine use patterns, to take action to enhance stocks, and to challenge other activities affecting the conditions of the resources (Rieser 1997). Co-management does not require any particular ownership system. Thus, there are examples of co-management working within many different property rights regimes. For example, in Norway co-management works within the principle that ﬁsh and waters are no one’s property, while in Japan property rights are exclusive to the ﬁshing community, and in parts of Canada and New Zealand, comanagement may be found in systems where rights to shares in quotas are privatized. Although co-management does not pertain to resource ownership, but rather to ownership of rights to make certain kinds of decisions about resources, differing property rights systems may have different implications for its functioning. Open access is more equitable and, as such, less divisive than other systems. This is an aid for cooperative decision making. However, open access often contributes to competition, overexploitation and the need for ﬁsheries management initiatives. Open access also makes it more difﬁcult to enforce cooperation and agreed upon rules because of the freerider problem. Obviously, such a property rights system has one less weapon to ﬁght with, perhaps its most effective one, as it loses the ability to sanction by exclusion.

Improving Fisheries Governance through Stakeholder Participation Co-management may also work when based on private property. Privatized property rights give clearer deﬁnition of who the users are than under open access, and private property owners may have a larger incentive to “invest” their efforts in the sustenance of the resource (Rose 1994). Moreover, having a clearly deﬁned set of holders of exclusive property rights makes it easier to assign responsibility for a self-governing or co-management regime (Scott 1993). However, the nature of the property right is a critical variable. Where it is fully privatized with a guaranteed right of access, as in the Dutch case (Dubbink and van Vliet 1996), the co-management system has fewer sanctions at its disposal if rules are violated among property owners. Such a co-management system would have little leverage and would need a third party to legitimize, monitor, and enforce the regulatory decisions. If, however, the rights are contingent and revokable, then sanctions for noncooperative behavior may be strengthened. One successful approach that has mobilized many of the beneﬁts of ITQs without incurring all of the costs is the Shelburne Community Management Board in Nova Scotia, which controls a portion of the ﬁxed-gear quota and uses an informal ITQ system to distribute the quota among its members. They are able to exclude ﬁshers who are violating rules. While they cannot revoke their quotas, they can deny them management services and force them to pool their quota outside of the community board in an essentially unmanaged and much less economically rational quote pool. This has proven an effective sanctioning tool (Rescan and Wilson 2009). It may be easier to create co-management institutions where there is some element of communal property, whether in the resource itself or in rights to use or manage the resource and its habitat. The rights to manage are strengthened if backed up by the rights of ownership. This works not only in the relation between the management authority and the individual user but also among users. Their shared dependency on the resource promotes discipline and “mutual vulnerability” (Singleton and Taylor 1992). Resources held by users in common can be withheld by other members through a group decision and can thus be employed as a sanction against users who break the rules. In Japan an individual has to become member of the ﬁshing cooperative and follow its statutory charters to be allowed to catch and sell ﬁsh, and membership can be withdrawn if rules are violated. This is

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also much of the reason for the unique success of ﬁsheries cooperatives in that country. A promising new example of community-based co-management is the “community development quota” program in Alaska (Ginter 1995). Recognizing the special needs of communities as distinct from those of individuals or business ﬁrms, community organizations are allocated a quota for them to distribute and manage in accordance with a community development plan that must be submitted to, reviewed, and ﬁnally approved by the State of Alaska. When rights of management and property go together, property is not only a right but also a responsibility for the collective as well as the individual. Without that responsibility, there is no guarantee that property rights may institute sustainable resource use. Also, when violations of rules can be handled effectively at the local level, the costs of enforcement and litigation are reduced. This does not exclude the opportunity to appeal to higher levels of governance if users feel that they have been unfairly treated at the lower level.

53.6. CONCLUSION Co-management does not change the fundamental fact that regulatory systems impose restrictions on users. Unavoidably, ﬁshers will sacriﬁce and suffer as their traditional liberty to act as they choose will be restrained. Fishing assumes a new meaning. The rewards of being independent, of being your own boss, are vital reasons why people feel attracted to this occupation in the ﬁrst place (Gatewood and McCay 1990; Pollnac and Poggie 1988). These beneﬁts explain why ﬁshers have been willing to endure the hard work, the long hours, and the physical danger. While income is important, the dignity and esteem that come from the ﬁshing occupation also matter a great deal. Regulatory decisions are controversial, conﬂicts arise, and management schemes fail. As Ostrom (1990: 14) argues, “getting the institutions right is a difﬁcult, time-consuming, conﬂict-evoking process.” Management systems, such as quota arrangements, alter the nature of ﬁshing, the hunt transforms into harvest, predictability is obtained, and ﬁshers’ skills come to mean less. The “skipper effect” (Pálsson and Durrenberger 1982), that is, the contribution of the skipper, loses its potency. Fishers do not easily accept the command and control that the intrusion of government brings.

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This lack of acceptance is exacerbated when what they are being told does not make sense in terms of their experience. This is the problem that comanagement is uniquely suited to address. Co-management is one of many alternative management strategies. The quest for reinventing ﬁsheries management grows out of an extensive and well-substantiated critique of the outcomes experienced to date. In this chapter and others, we have pointed out the conditions that we believe are critical in determining success or failure of comanagement. Co-management involves real dilemmas that require hard choices. These choices are more difﬁcult when they are made with careful cognizance of the institutional, social, and cultural context. We believe pragmatism and cautiousness should characterize new institution building. Many of the problems and opportunities created by comanagement must be discovered and addressed in the process. The management system must be allowed to adapt and be ﬂexible, bearing in mind that institutions can create the illusion of naturalness and inevitability. It should encourage the ability to learn and a readiness for change. For this same reason some of the criticisms of co-management are premature. Co-management is not a ﬁxed thing. It is an evolving process guided by a set of institutional principles. Some of the doubts and criticisms should be put to test through bold management initiatives and experiments. We have argued that co-management as an institution is not only about rules. It is also about creating opportunities. It is a process of social creation through which knowledge is gained, values articulated, culture reexpressed, and community created. Without this broad perspective on co-management, the problems of ﬁsheries may have a paralyzing effect on ﬁsheries managers: There is nothing one can do, world’s ﬁsheries are doomed, and there is no way we can escape our dismal destiny. Such an attitude to ﬁsheries management is neither necessary nor something we can afford.

Acknowledgments An earlier version of this chapter was published in 1998 (“Social Theory and Fisheries Co-management,” Marine Policy 22[4–5]: 423–436). For this book, it has gone through substantial revision, with sections both deleted and added. Since 1999, considerable research on

co-management institutions in ﬁsheries has been carried out, and we include references to some of the new literature. References Anonymous. (1996). Community based comanagement offers a better way to manage the ﬁshery. Coastal Communities News 1: 5–9. Apostle, R., B. McCay, and K. Mikalsen (2003). Enclosing the Commons: Individual Transferable Quotas in a Nova Scotia Fishery. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Armitage, D., F. Berkes, and N. Doubleday (eds) (2007). Adaptive Co-management: Collaboration, Learning and Multi-level Governance. Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press. Arnstein, S.R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35: 216–224. Barrett, G., and T. Okudaira (1995). The limits of ﬁshery cooperatives? Community development and rural depopulation in Hokkaido, Japan. Economic and Industrial Democracy 16: 201–232. Berger, P.L., and T. Luckmann (1967). The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Christensen, N.L., A.M. Bartuska, J.H. Brown, S.D. Carpenter, C. Antonio, R. Francis, J.F. Franklin, J.A. MacMahon, R.F. Noss, D.J. Parsons, C.H. Peterson, M.G. Turner, and R.G. Woodmansee (1996). The report of the Ecological Society of America Committee on the scientiﬁc basis for ecosystem management. Ecological Applications 6: 665–691. Cloutier, T.M. (1996). Conﬂicts of interest on regional ﬁsheries management councils: Corruption or cooperative management. Ocean and Coastal Law Journal 2: 101–152. Dietz, T., and P.C. Stern (eds) (2008). Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Dubbink, W., and M. van Vliet (1996). Market regulation versus co-management: Two perspectives on regulating ﬁsheries compared. Marine Policy 20: 499–516. Dyer, C., and J. McGoodwin (eds) (1994). Folk Management in the World’s Fisheries: Lessons for Modern Fisheries Management. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. FAO (1995). Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. COFI/95/2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

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Jentoft, S., K. Mikalsen, and H.K. Hernes (2003). Representation in ﬁsheries co-management. In Wilson, D.C., J.R. Nielsen, and P. Degnbol (eds). The Fisheries Co-management Experience: Accomplishments, Challenges and Prospects. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kooiman, J. (ed) (1993). Modern Governance: New Government-Society Interactions. London: Sage. Lim, C.P., Y. Matsuda, and Y. Shigemi (1995). Comanagement in marine ﬁsheries: The Japanese experience. Coastal Management 23: 195–221. Mansﬁeld, B. (2004). Neoliberalism in the oceans: “Rationalization,” property rights, and the commons question. Geoforum 35: 313–326. Marchak, P., N. Guppy, and J. McMullan (1987). Uncommon Property: The Fishing and FishProcessing Industries in British Columbia. Toronto: Methuen Publications. Matthews, D.R. (1993). Controlling Common Property: Regulating Canada’s East Coast Fishery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McCay, B.J. (1995). Foxes and others in the henhouse? Environmentalists and the ﬁshing industry in the U.S. regional council system. Pp. 380–390 in Meyer, R.M., C. Zhang, M.L. Windsor, B.J. McCay, L. Hushak, and R. Muth (eds). Fisheries Resource Utilization and Policy; Proceedings of the World Fisheries Congress, Theme 2. New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing. McCay, B.J., R. Apostle, C. Creed, A.C. Finlayson, and K. Mikalsen (1995). Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) in Canadian and US ﬁsheries. Ocean and Coastal Management 28: 85–116. McGoodwin, J.R. (1990). Crisis in the World’s Fisheries: People, Problems, and Policies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Munro, G., N. Bingham, and E. Pikitch (1998). Individual transferable quotas, communitybased ﬁsheries management system, and “virtual” communities. Fisheries 23(3): 12–15. National Research Council (1996). Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. National Research Council (1998). Review of Northeast Fishery Stock Assessments. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. North, D.C. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pálsson, G., and P.E. Durrenberger (1982). The dream of ﬁsh: The causes of Icelandic skippers’ ﬁshing success. Journal of Anthropological Research 38: 227–242.

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Pinkerton, E. (1994). Summary and conclusions. In Dyer, C., and J.R. McGoodwin (eds). Folk Management in the World’s Fisheries. Niwot: University of Colorado Press. Pinkerton, E., and M. Weinstein (1995). Fisheries That Work: Sustainability through Community-Based Management. Vancouver: David Suzuki Foundation. Pitcher, T.J., D. Pauly, and P.J.B. Hart (eds) (1998). Reinventing Fisheries Management. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Pollnac, R.B., and J.J.J. Poggie (1988). The structure of job satisfaction among New England ﬁshermen and its application to ﬁsheries management policy. American Anthropologist 90: 888–901. Pomeroy, R., and F. Douvere (2003). The engagement of stakeholders in the marine spatial planning process. Marine Policy 32: 816–822. Ravetz, J. (2004). The post-normal science of precaution. Futures 36(3): 347–357. Rescan, C.U., and D.C. Wilson (2009). Rightsbased management and participatory governance in southwest Nova Scotia. Chapter 3 in Hauge, K.H., and D.C. Wilson (eds.), Comparative Evaluations of Innovative Fisheries Management: Global Experiences and European Prospects. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Rieser, A. (1997). Property rights and ecosystem management in U.S. ﬁsheries: Contracting for the commons? Paper presented at the Ecology Law Symposium, 21–22 February, University of California, Berkeley. Rose, C.M. (1994). Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Ruddle, K. (1989). Solving the common-property dilemma: Village ﬁsheries rights in Japanese coastal waters. Pp. 168–198 in Berkes, F. (ed). Common Property Resources. London: Belhaven Press. Schlager, E., and E. Ostrom (1992). Property-rights regimes and natural resources: A conceptual analysis. Land Economics 68: 249–262.

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54 Stakeholder Involvement in Fisheries Management in Australia and New Zealand ALISTAIR MCILGORM DARYL R. SYKES

54.1. INTRODUCTION The level of stakeholder involvement in ﬁsheries management regimes differs among ﬁsheries and reﬂects multiple historical, governance, and management decisions; it is more than participation in a government-led co-management regime. In this chapter, we give stakeholder perspectives that reﬂect the difference in the rights management regimes in the Australia and New Zealand that have lessons for ﬁsheries management regimes internationally.

54.2. BACKGROUND Scott (1988) describes the “parade of ﬁshing regimes” where government intervenes in openaccess harvesting with regulation, such as limitedentry licensing, and then further restrictions are put on ﬁshing effort via input control regimes, until they have to consider a leap into output controls, such as individual transferable quotas (ITQs). Both New Zealand and Australia have moved along the rights management pathways with degrees of stakeholder involvement. The experiences from this front line could be informative for many nations where only some rights development has taken place. Australia in 1997–1998 had 105 managed ﬁsheries, all of which had limited-entry licenses (McIlgorm and Tsamenyi 2000). Of these, 61 percent were licenses with some gear regulations, 14 percent were

licenses with special tradable ﬁshing effort, and only 25 percent had progressed to ITQs replacing the license. In contrast, New Zealand moved most of its important commercial ﬁsheries to the quota management system (QMS) in 1986 and completed the process for the remainder of ﬁsh stocks from 1990 through 2006. These backgrounds make the accounts of stakeholder issues in ﬁsheries management in Australia and New Zealand signiﬁcantly different from each other. Stakeholder participation in Australian ﬁsheries with limited-entry licensing regimes took the form of government/industry port meetings. Various forms of co-management across a range of different ﬁsheries were gradually introduced in the early 1990s. In contrast, the New Zealand stakeholder study focuses on the expectations given to stakeholders from the implementation of the rights-based QMS in 1986 and the issues for commercial stakeholders since. The stakeholder issues observed in the diverse range of rights-based management approaches in both countries have relevance internationally. In each country, some issues keep reoccurring: What are the roles of government and industry in ﬁsheries management? What involvement in management can stakeholders expect? There is no simple answer because research and management planning and implementation are long and timeconsuming processes often overlaid with political interventions. There are inevitably difﬁculties

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incorporating stakeholders into management roles in a meaningful and enduring way. In the 1980s, both countries had the intention of forming ﬁshery management plans under legislation. The New Zealand QMS in 1986 conﬁrmed all quota owners as commercial stakeholders, and allocation within the sector was to be by the market. The years following saw signiﬁcant economic ﬂeet rationalization and the aggregation of quota ownership (Grafton 1996; Kerr et al. 2003). The notion of commercial rights holders being devolved greater management responsibility was explored and for a time encouraged by the New Zealand government. By the end of the 1990s the Ministry of Fisheries revised its operational policies in order to promote a framework in which noncommercial stakeholders, such as recreational ﬁshers and Maori customary rights holders, are provided opportunities and greater inﬂuence to direct ﬁsheries management interventions. In New Zealand, there are unresolved tensions between industry and government over the apparent failure of government to fully complete the ﬁshing rights self-governance framework after the quota system was installed. There are differing views over who should drive the research and management planning processes, and confusion as to how noncommercial interests, including both extractive and nonextractive, should be placed within this rightsbased management framework. In contrast, Australia could not pursue a quota system nationally, due to its diverse ﬁsheries and the duplicative federal and state system, which impedes uniﬁed national approaches on ﬁsheries management. By the early 1990s, Australia accepted that the involvement of stakeholders to advise government managers was critical and that ITQs were one of a suite of ﬁshery management instruments. By the late 1990s, rights development in Australia ﬁsheries was thought to have stalled (McIlgorm and Tsamenyi 2000). In the 1990s in Australia, each state and federal jurisdiction moved to establish management advisory committees (MACs) to advise the Minister of Fisheries. The committee membership expanded from commercial ﬁshers only, to include other community and nongovernment stakeholders (Wilson et al. 2003). Most MACs have been able to develop management plans with government facilitators in recent years, but the ﬁshing industry still has profitability and sustainability concerns. Rights-based industry self-management has been less of an issue in Australia in the past decade.

Most Australian ﬁsheries chose to be part of “co-management” arrangements and generally had unrealistically high expectations. Leadership skills and MAC course training were promoted in the 1990s through the Commonwealth government’s Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (McIlgorm 2002).

54.3. AUSTRALIA 54.3.1. The Context to Stakeholder Involvement Stakeholder involvement in Australian ﬁshery usually starts after government intervention in open access ﬁsheries to halt overexploitation. The relevant ﬁsheries management legislation deﬁnes a ﬁshery under the control of the minister in each state, assisted by an administering government ﬁsheries department, which often appoints a ﬁshery committee for consultation. Following the introduction of limitedentry licensing in Western Australia in the 1960s, a regime of port visits commenced and ﬁshery committees were established. More of these ﬁshery committee arrangements developed in the 1980s, and in the 1990s there was a simultaneous expansion in the stakeholder consultation systems across Australia due to the adoption of co-management. In Australia, limited entry deﬁnes the commercial stakeholders in the ﬁshery. This deﬁnition has subsequently widened to include recreational ﬁshers and community representatives.

54.3.2. Stakeholders, Governance, and Co-management The term “co-management” is used generically for a range of devolved management models in different states of Australia (McIlgorm 2002). In co-management theory, there are degrees of involvement, with a continuum going from government management, which is highly instructive, to consultation, cooperative, and advisory and informative, where the government has delegated authority to the stakeholders (Jentoft et al. 1998; Sen and Nielson 1996; Wilson et al. 2003). The continuum is seen in the titles of management committee (MC) and management advisory committee (MAC). The MAC process provides advice to the legislatively empowered minister, whereas a ﬁshery legislated MC has fuller power

Stakeholder Involvement in Fisheries Management and responsibility on members. Most committees are at the advisory end of the MC–MAC continuum and some low-value ﬁsheries have a consultative committee only. The nature of the stakeholder involvement is related to the ﬁshing rights regime in the ﬁshery and the intention of governance to administer or to develop self-management among ﬁshers.

54.3.3. What Limits the Extent of Devolution in Stakeholder Fishery Governance? Often governments are slow to intervene in openaccess ﬁsheries, but subsequently become overinvolved, like a colonial occupation. Is occupation to be long term? Is there a plan to withdraw and leave a functioning local autonomous governance structure? Has training been provided for a new leadership regime? Doubts are also raised about the future well-being of the country under a new ﬂedgling government. Transitions to independence often require either civil disturbance, agitation, or a ﬁght for freedom. In the analogy, ﬁshery governance has been able to occupy the open access ﬁshery, and address overﬁshing. Fishery stakeholders are analogous to the occupied population desiring more selfdetermination, but have no legitimate pathway forward. Under government ﬁshery regulations managers can become waterlogged by distribution and legal problems. Managing without stakeholder involvement has a limited future and needs ongoing regulation and enforcement to maintain ﬁshery sustainability. Often ﬁshery agencies do not have a clear picture of what a successfully managed ﬁshery may look like. Stakeholders may have no incentive to speak out directly to government due to the inherent power imbalance and fear, given there is no obvious way forward. In Australia, ﬁsheries departments are often caught up in allocation disputes and legal challenges. It is preferable that the energies of stakeholders are channeled to engage in building a more fully self-managed future under the watchful eye of government, which will have the auditing function in a new self-managed arrangement. The last decade of co-management has enabled industry and government to communicate, but there is little evidence of an increase in devolution of management responsibility to stakeholders.

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54.3.4. The Structure of the MAC System The structure of the MAC system comes from the minister asking the ﬁshery department to develop a consultative system.

54.3.4.1. Legal Responsibility If committee members are individually or collectively liable for decisions, then they are a management committee and are managers. All other nonliable forms of committee are advisory, and the department makes the decisions. The responsibilities of the MAC can be increased by involvement in the ﬁshery management plan, which is usually supported by legislation.

54.3.4.2. Committee Ofﬁcers and Resourcing A typical state ﬁshery MAC becomes discontent with government staff and wants an independent executive ofﬁcer to support the MAC meetings, and an independent chairperson to direct the MAC and to communicate directly with the minister. Under cost recovery policy, industry is charged for both positions. Subsequently, lone independent executive ofﬁcers have limited effectiveness, unless they are administratively resourced like the ﬁshery department. An independent chairperson for a MAC may have a mix of ﬁshery, corporate governance, and industry experience.

54.3.4.3. Fishing Rights Stakeholder involvement is also set within the context of ﬁshing rights development. Fishing licenses are encouraged by government. Government ﬁshery managers have not pushed to open up new rights regimes where the government’s control is reduced. There is a test for determining the extent of ﬁshing rights in a ﬁshery seen in Scott’s riddle (Scott 1988). He asks the question “When is a right not a right?” The answer is “when it’s a means of administration.” Put another way, if you give someone a right you loose control; if you still have control, it’s not a true right. After hundreds of ﬁsheries worldwide have been depleted under the administrative watch of government, are we to delay advancing rights and stakeholder consultation? What wealth are

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we forgoing by not trying alternative governance regimes? (Grafton et al. 2007).

54.3.4.4. Cost Recovery: Stakeholders Paying for Management The policy for cost recovery of ﬁshery management costs was adopted in Australia in the 1990s. Large and proﬁtable ﬁsheries can request services through the MAC system and can also be involved in selecting the service purchased (research, administration, additional enforcement). Sustainable ﬁshery criteria in most ﬁshery Acts means the government has to manage and protect small uneconomic ﬁsheries. In Australia, the government charges stakeholders for a set of management services as they enjoy the beneﬁts of being a limited-entry license holder. Stakeholders examine what they are being charged for and try and reduce the services consumed. Stakeholders realize they should clarify which services they should pay for. Generally, central management and enforcement are the preserve of supply by government only, whereas some administration and research may be provided by service providers outside of government. Stakeholders can pay for additional services if persuaded they will improve the value of their right. Cost recovery increases the costs of operation for stakeholders in a struggling ﬁshery where the choice was to pay the annual cost recovery fee for one year of ﬁshing, or give up the ﬁshing license. For example, in introducing cost recovery in Victoria, up to 50 percent of the license holders in several small marginal ﬁsheries did not renew their license, which led to a doubling of fees per remaining stakeholder. Cost recovery may lead to a downward revision of the administrative services provided by government, including staff losses.

54.3.4.5. Unity in Stakeholder Representation With the MAC, in place it does not necessarily follow that the ﬁshery is united. The government agency holds the mantle of management and speaks like the captain on the poop deck: “Yes . . . all is on course!” A duality comes in when one appraises the crew to be partially on deck, some between decks, and some down in the dark bilges doing illegal, unregistered, and unreported ﬁshing. For policy to be functional, even in a command-and-

control model, the stakeholders need to be on deck to talk with managers. Unity is inhibited as many stakeholders think they could do better than the latest 26-year-old “captain” supplied by the ﬁsheries department. The united ﬁshery is one where the stakeholders and ofﬁcers are on deck and a majority decision is made on a future path for the good of the ﬁshery. There is a large power imbalance between the department and the MAC members. Departments cannot, on the one hand, set and enforce the rules and wield the enforcement stick and then, on the other hand, ask stakeholder ﬁshers to come and talk about “moving to self-management.” A third party is required to broker change and enable the department to let go.

54.3.4.6. Consultation with Stakeholders Consultation and communication with stakeholders are an important area (Kaplan and McCay 2004). When MAC members are ushered into the new committee, they expect to be directly involved in running the ﬁshery. The term “advisory” means giving advice on ﬁshery issues. Stakeholders wonder if they are the representatives of their constituency or are there on an expertise basis. The ﬁshers presume the former and the ﬁshery department the latter. The record of consultation is captured in the minutes of the committee usually taken by a department employee or an independent executive ofﬁcer. The minutes can then go to the minister, with or without department approval, though the unedited views of the committee can make the ﬁshery department look poor in the eyes of the minister. A tussle will develop when the department retains the statutory right to management and the MAC members are relegated to an advisory capacity. Lack of real management involvement by stakeholders leads to MAC members withdrawing into a world of silence, where information given “is just used against us.” A political commentator in Western Australia suggested that advisory committees established by ministers are a standard political technique to ensure quasi consultation. “In Australia, when mum and dad want to talk home business on a hot sunny Sunday afternoon, dad puts the hose and lawn sprinkler under the trampoline and tells the kids to enjoy bouncing up and down in the spray. . . . What are advisory committees? The Minister keeping

Stakeholder Involvement in Fisheries Management stakeholders occupied, while he and management get on with the serious decisions.” While cynical, this has been the experience of many MACs in the state and federal ﬁsheries scene in Australia. Fishers refer to it as “putting the con into consultation.”

54.3.5. Conclusion: Australia The past 20 years have seen stakeholders as part of the ﬁshery management process in Australia. These committees help communication but may not necessarily save declining ﬁsheries without rights development. There is insufﬁcient planning to equip stakeholders for the steps required to move to fuller self-management. Capacity development of multiskilled managers with the best attributes of a government and a commercial manager is required. Until this stage of fuller devolution to stakeholders is reached, the attempts of government to “co-manage” while constricting rights development lead to failure. This struggle may be part of the process of devolution and, with each rejuvenation of co-management, reﬂects ﬁshers “marching round the wilderness” in the transition between domination and the self-rule (McIlgorm 2000). This process may take a generation and calls for stakeholders who wish to work together, rather than carrying a competitive mentality (Jentoft and McCay 1995). It will take time and repeated failures of the stakeholder involvement and co-management processes until government will give out rights with self-management incentives and structures. Stakeholders will have to be more organized and have a structure capable of managing any rights given. This evolution to fuller self-management by stakeholders is making slow progress due to many of the reasons identiﬁed above. Government needs to make trials of fuller devolution of management to stakeholders a priority, if we are to achieve improved sustainable ﬁshery outcomes.

54.4. NEW ZEALAND 54.4.1. Introduction This account could be titled “When expectations exceed outcomes,” as this is the perspective of many stakeholders under the umbrella of the New Zealand QMS. The QMS is one that for more than twenty years has been often studied and externally reviewed and is quoted as a “model” for

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ﬁsheries elsewhere (Grafton 1996; Kerr et al. 2003). New Zealand practitioners have long held that the QMS should be studied only as a lesson. To the outsider, the all too simplistic macroeconomic and socioeconomic overviews of property rights, output controls, and sustainable catch limits may well satisfy some academic curiosity. For those who have made the commitment to be in the business of ﬁshing, “the devil is truly in the detail” of any rights-based regime (McClurg 1997). The intention of the QMS system as seen by commercial ﬁshing interests was to usher in a set of better deﬁned ﬁshing rights that would enable market forces to allocate efﬁciently within sustainable limits recommended by biological experts (Grafton 1996). After 20 years, there is considerable concern that a rights-based regime has not enabled commercial rights holders into more complete management roles and authority. The failure of successive governments since 1986 to incentivize all stakeholders to individual and collective stewardship of ﬁsheries resources relegates the QMS to being allocative only to commercial participants. The lack of progress toward self-management then allows a ﬁsheries management administration system to consolidate a command and control authority, fraught with all the problems associated with open access, limited entry, and the oft-quoted tragedy of the commons (McClurg 1997). The experiences and achievements of one commercial stakeholder cluster in New Zealand are used to illustrate the challenges that confront both stakeholders and government agencies if the theoretical outcomes of rights-based ﬁsheries management regimes (Lock and Leslie 2007) are to be properly realized.

54.4.2. Responsibility: Taking and Giving The New Zealand QMS was implemented in October 1986 for key ﬁnﬁsh and selected shellﬁsh stocks. Rock lobster stocks did not enter the QMS until April 1990, after sufﬁcient time had passed (some intentional, the rest a consequence of unresolved high-level government policy issues) for lobster industry participants to critically review the initial QMS implementation period for ﬁnﬁsh and shellﬁsh. When the transition from limited entry to output controls and ITQs for lobster ﬁsheries was completed, those commercial stakeholders adapted quickly to the QMS disciplines—admittedly less

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challenging in any single-species management setting than, for example, in a diversiﬁed inshore trawl ﬁshery. The central themes of the commercial stakeholders’ management initiatives in New Zealand lobster ﬁsheries are organization, cooperation, and collaboration. The industry participants have generally operated in a demonstration of collective and cooperative management responsibility that was anticipated as a consequence of the transition to a rights-based management framework. The lobster industry was proactive with its ﬁsheries and business management aspirations throughout the open-access and limited-entry regimes prior to that transition. The allocation of apparently more secure access and utilization rights ITQs made the lobster industry more ambitious to secure greater self-management and/or comanagement. They were motivated by the belief that quota rights were more robust in terms of security and certainty.

54.4.3. Stakeholder Lessons Learned Experiences to date in New Zealand show that the implementation of a rights-based management regime must be carefully planned, properly promoted, have political patronage, and be supported by a participatory bureaucracy. Unlike New Zealand currently the rights-based framework should be completed and include all extractive use sectors. A proper alignment between the research on stock management and business decision-making timetables and processes is required. Those decision-making processes must also be timely and, importantly, adaptable and ﬂexible. The roles and responsibilities of government agencies and sector groups must be agreed in advance and adhered to, with sufﬁcient ﬂexibility accorded to those arrangements to allow for the limitations on collective responsibility within sectors. Among the lessons to be learned by the commercial stakeholders in New Zealand rock lobster ﬁsheries since 1990, the following are most relevant to stakeholders and agencies in other jurisdictions contemplating transition to rights-based management arrangements: • Sufﬁcient attention needs to be paid to the design of a rights-based regime, particularly the design of the underlying rights framework

and its capacity to realize management objectives through correct linkages to science and operational policy inputs. • Both the public and private sector must show ongoing commitment to the rights-based regime. In New Zealand, government has progressively denied the integrity of commercial property rights and avoided using market instruments to adjust for changing societal values and political preferences. • The right relationships within the commercial sector are essential—rights holders must recognize, accept, and initiate the potential of collective and collaborative endeavor. • The system requires political champions or, at very least, some political patronage. Without these key ingredients, the growth, innovation, and entrepreneurial activities anticipated by proponents of rights-based management and expected by commercial rights holders will be stiﬂed. So, too, will the cultural elements of ﬁshing communities that add color, romance, and aesthetics to society. Likewise, the efﬁcient and proﬁtable delivery of healthy and sustainably harvested food products and economic growth locally, regionally, and nationally is compromised. The failure of successive governments to utilize the fundamental characteristics of the QMS—which are property rights—other than for their own convenience is progressively turning the New Zealand system into merely an allocative process for commercial ﬁshing (McClurg 1997). Industry conﬁdence in the QMS has weakened as a result. ITQs have been used to facilitate an important treaty settlement for indigenous stakeholders. There are no similar facilitated arrangements for commercial rights holders with respect to changing societal values on marine protection and/or recreational and cultural values. These changes have to date been at the expense of mainly commercial ﬁshing, because the QMS is not seen by politicians or the community as a conservation mechanism, and no serious consideration is given to market-based adjustments and/or reallocations across sectors. Both the government and commercial rights holders did not adequately promote the intention and potential of the QMS from its inception in 1986 (Bess and Harte 2000). In fact, the rights framework has never been completed, absolving the recreational ﬁshing sector from any management responsibility or accountability for their

Stakeholder Involvement in Fisheries Management sectoral catch. A bias against commercial ﬁshing pervades the media and state agencies. Neither will recognize, and endorse the QMS as a stewardship tool and state agencies increasingly implement command-and-control approaches to most ﬁsheries issues. The recreational ﬁshing community and the businesses that supply and are therefore dependent on it have considerable political inﬂuence. Government policy and agency operational policies since 1999 have instituted a de facto priority and/or preference for recreational ﬁshing that conspires to undermine the conﬁdence that commercial rights holders might otherwise have in the QMS. Notions of effort and reward that are embodied in them adopting a custodial nature toward the resource in which they have implicit shares and substantial economic investment are being routinely violated. Consequently, the true potential of the QMS is being confounded. It need not be, but in New Zealand at least it seems that many decisions relevant to the QMS will remain politicized, and commercial rights holders will be increasingly marginalized in terms of their ability and authority to be managers/co-managers of ﬁsheries resources and/or to improve either or both productivity and proﬁtability while ensuring sustainability of ﬁsheries.

54.4.4. Limitations of Rights Holders: Problems within the Commercial Sector and with Other Sectors Experience in New Zealand lobster ﬁsheries has also demonstrated that there are natural limitations on the ability of commercial rights holders to achieve optimal outcomes in terms of stock status and economic performance. Even now, not all rock lobster commercial rights holders recognize the value of cooperative behavior, which is their right. A legacy of pre- and post-QMS government control and intervention has conditioned many commercial rights holders to believe (incorrectly) that no new initiatives are possible unless initiated by government and implemented by regulation. One expectation of the QMS was that the “race for ﬁsh” would be halted by the allocation of individual catch limits. The theory held that ﬁshermen would no longer be in a race to ﬁsh and would take the opportunity to maximize the value (to them) of a quota-limited ﬁshing opportunity.

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In rock lobster ﬁsheries, the theory has been rigorously tested as price incentives exist within the season as windows of opportunity open in the live lobster markets of Asia and promote a race for ﬁsh during certain periods, even though individual catch limits are rigorously monitored and enforced. Gear and spatial conﬂicts, and tensions between commercial ﬁshermen and between them and noncommercial ﬁsher folk, have not markedly diminished as a consequence, although they may be of shorter duration. The tensions between commercial ﬁshermen are not generally conducive to collective and cooperative endeavors and therefore conspire against their own commercial stakeholder organizations (CSOs) being able to achieve full potential in self-management or co-management roles. Useful voluntary initiatives such as vessel logbook programs, spatial-mapping and ﬁne-scale data collection, or voluntary area or temporal closures are generally not fully subscribed. Essential initiatives such as voluntary reductions to commercial catch limits in response to declining stock abundance are invariably hard won within the relevant CSO. Given that commercial operators are in a unique position to monitor ﬁsheries performance, are alert to seasonal declines and other status indicators, and understand the need for constraint—whether it is by way of effort and/or catch reduction—they have been slow to respond unanimously to obvious signals. The reliance on voluntary initiatives by commercial rights holders is demanding of them in many respects and the debates within the sector that precede the more signiﬁcant ﬁsherywide initiatives such as voluntary catch reductions can create even greater tensions between them. Because of the inﬂexibility of the regulatory framework, free-riders cannot be reigned in and thereby proﬁt from the sacriﬁces of the majority. Individually and collectively, the incumbent commercial rights holders are failing to halt the decline of the QMS. Their efforts have been less effective than if all commercial rights holders actively embraced the “duty of care” that is inherent in rights-based management philosophy. The recreational sector refuses to constrain their extractive use because of an erroneous belief in a birthright to sea ﬁsheries that ensures priority and preference for recreational ﬁshing. Successive governments have not fully incorporated

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noncommercial ﬁshing rights into the QMS. The recreational sector is not directly accountable for its impacts on ﬁsh stocks and directly beneﬁts from any increases in stock abundance that arise from voluntary initiatives by commercial rights holders, thereby distancing the potential cooperation between sectors.

54.4.5. Theory Translated: Seven Attributes of Success Despite the inadequacies of the New Zealand QMS as described here, there are several examples in rock lobster ﬁsheries of commercial rights holders being able to grasp the potential and be proactive in a collective and collaborative manner. For example, some rock lobster CSOs—CRAMACs—have initiated research and management programs that have been beneﬁcial both to the ﬁsheries in which they have an interest and to commercial rights holders in terms of increased security and certainty, at least for a period. Industry-funded stock monitoring programs supplement mandatory catch and effort reporting that informs stock assessments (Kendrick and Bentley 2003). In the Wellington/Hawkes Bay rock lobster ﬁshery, industry stakeholder organization commissioned a management procedure and has so far implemented two successive voluntary catch reductions—40 percent in 2007 and 60 percent in 2008—in support of an agreed ﬁve-year stock rebuilding strategy. The New Zealand Rock Lobster Industry Council (NZRLIC) has been the primary research provider to the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries since 1997 and delivers research services to the Ministry of Fisheries by way of contractual collaborations with a range of domestic and international science providers and consultants. Seven factors contribute to the success of these initiatives. The ﬁrst is the existence of commercial property rights and their underlying incentive for rights holders to act responsibly in order to consolidate the value of their asset—being a deﬁned share of the available yield from a ﬁsh stock. The second is the custodial attitude demonstrated by a core, and often small, group of individual rights holders who have understood their roles and responsibilities and who have been inﬂuential in changing behavior and attitudes within their sector. Third, the hallmark of several successful industry initiatives has been an absence of bureaucratic intervention by government and their agents.

Commercial rights holders are more alert to the need for adjustments to ﬁshing behavior and have a shorter response time. In New Zealand, the legislative and regulatory system is often slow, and government interventions are often attempted too late to be effective in halting observed stock declines. Fourth, a greatly improved relationship between commercial rights holders and stock assessment scientists has led to improvements in ﬁsheries data collection and greater trust in the development and operation of management procedures to guide decisions on commercial catch limits. It is important to have the right people with the right attitudes guiding the processes that inform decision making. Since 1996 the quality of rock lobster stock assessment science in New Zealand has been world class, consistently satisfying independent peer reviews, and the science team has continued to reﬁne and improve assessment models and management procedures incorporating decision rules. The scientists themselves have proved to be excellent communicators; the commercial rights holders have been a willing audience and generally reliable and consistent contributors to the various research data bases. Fifth, commercial rights holders after taking advice from scientists have been innovative in developing additional voluntary arrangements to rebuild stocks, or to hold them at high levels of abundance. Accepting the ministerial decisions relating to total allowable catches (TACs) and total allowable commercial catches (TACCs), commercial rights holders in some areas have instituted voluntary catch reductions, using civil contracts between quota owners to reduce the amount of annual catch entitlement available to the ﬂeet in any one season. These voluntary arrangements require high thresholds of industry support—in all cases, no less than 95 percent of the quota owned for a stock— but were successfully implemented in rock lobster ﬁsheries three times between 2004 and 2008 (twice in the Gisborne/East Coast ﬁshery and twice in the Wellington/Hawkes Bay ﬁshery). The irony of these voluntary initiatives is that the same management procedure approach has guided ministerial TAC/TACC decisions for the two southern rock lobster stocks (CRA 7 and CRA 8) since 1997–1998. It is signiﬁcant that commercial participants in other than those two lobster ﬁsheries do not have conﬁdence in commercial catch reductions being reinstated in future ministerial decisions and have chosen to preempt the need for government

Stakeholder Involvement in Fisheries Management intervention by taking voluntary collective action. The politics of preference for resource protection and for recreational ﬁshing that are evident in a series of relatively recent ministerial sustainability decisions for ﬁnﬁsh stocks and marine mammal protection are the principal reasons. Sixth, in New Zealand rock lobster ﬁsheries, the industry organizational structure provides a coordinating role through a national “peak body”— the New Zealand Rock Lobster Industry Council (NZRLIC)—which has recourse to science and policy expertise in the New Zealand Seafood Industry Council (SeaFIC), a national stakeholder-owned seafood industry organization. The SeaFIC science and policy personnel and independent legal advisers can match their counterparts in government agencies. SeaFIC makes those agencies far more accountable for their performance and “braces” the rights-based framework to enable commercial rights holders to achieve agreed outcomes consistent with the purposes and principles of the Fisheries Act. Finally, SeaFIC also enables funding of commercial rights holders’ initiatives. CRAMACs and other CSOs have recourse to a statutory funding base—the Seafood commodity levy—which is reviewed and updated annually. The regional work plans agreed by rights holders are presented as business plans for the endorsement of SeaFIC directors, and a component of a generic seafood levy payable to SeaFIC is then made available to the relevant CSO.

54.4.6. Conclusion: New Zealand Seven factors are seen to be important to the success of commercial stakeholder initiatives in the context of a rights-based management framework. The overall policy and operational policy setting within which these initiatives are undertaken are of equal importance. It is not enough to have commercial rights holders acting in accordance with the conceptual elements of a rights regime while politicians and bureaucrats act differently. Whether the disconnect being experienced in New Zealand ﬁsheries is one borne of willful disregard or lack of institutional commitment to an innovative natural resource management approach is hard to determine. What is obvious is that the resulting tension is depriving the industry and the wider community of a range of beneﬁts that might otherwise be realized if the principles of property

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rights and market mechanisms were properly upheld and applied. There are sufﬁcient manifestations of rightsbased theory to support the contention that better ﬁsheries management outcomes can be derived from the implementation of rights-based regimes. In New Zealand those outcomes are less than they might have been because of the failure to complete the rights framework and to institute market-based mechanisms to resolve competing interests and changing societal values. The apparent decline of the QMS to an allocative system for commercial ﬁshing is a deterioration that should have been averted. It has been lack of attention to detail on the part of both governments and commercial interests that has contributed to that decline. It cannot be easily reversed unless both parties revisit the intended purposes and principles of the New Zealand QMS and agree to cooperatively implement corrective action.

54.5. OVERALL DISCUSSION This chapter has investigated ﬁshery stakeholder involvement in Australian and New Zealand and found the key issue is one of rights development and the capacity of government to facilitate stakeholder involvement in ﬁsheries management. In the Australian case, many ﬁsheries are not of sufﬁcient size or value to consider fuller development of rights-based ﬁshing. These smaller ﬁsheries use co-management to dialogue with government. Larger ﬁsheries are ﬁnding that co-management is not moving quickly enough, not bringing the selfmanagement expected by commercial stakeholders operating in tradable effort and ITQ regimes. Lack of unity among state and federal governments and a tapestry of different management arrangements have hindered a fuller national approach to ﬁshing rights as taken by New Zealand. The cost of this has been a halt in the development of rights-based ﬁshery management approaches and inefﬁciency in Australian ﬁshery management. However, the Australian industry has not had a strong enough vision for developing ﬁshing rights and has been prepared to be drawn into too many situations where co-management discussions are displacing fuller rights allocation. The uniﬁed approach to a single national rightsbased ﬁshing system in New Zealand gave stakeholders expectations of progressively devolved

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management responsibility. In reality the commercial ﬁshery sector was issued relatively explicit rights, and recreational and Maori ﬁshers were not incorporated into the QMS in quite the same manner; rather, a general allowance was made for their extractive use. Market instruments have not been employed to resolve competing interests where they do exist because there has been no political action to deploy them. Changing political priorities and preferences and a lack of shared vision for an environmentally and biologically sustainable multisector ﬁshery management framework have led to frustration in the ﬁshing industry—not over what they have, but rather how much more effective and efﬁcient the New Zealand QMS could be if the system was operating in a manner properly consistent with the theoretical construct of rightsbased natural resource management and not teetering in favor of political and bureaucratic command and control.

54.6. OVERALL CONCLUSIONS In both Australia and New Zealand, the contribution of government to the development of ﬁshing rights and stakeholder involvement is considerable. However, this is not just a one-off intervention but is a continuous process involving reﬁnements to the nature, extent, and quality of ﬁshing rights and the consolidation of stakeholder and government roles and responsibilities and relationships within and between ﬁshing stakeholders. A gap evident in both countries is the need for all sectors to invest in the training and development of ﬁshery managers with a more complete government and industry skill set to ensure optimal biological, economic, and social outcomes from the sustainable utilization of ﬁsheries resources within ﬁshing rights-based frameworks (McIlgorm 2002). The search for sustainable governance arrangements is a complex process that involves considerable time, energy, and resources from many people in industry, government, and the community. In presenting some of the positive steps and shortcomings in both of our nations’ recent ﬁsheries management history as seen by stakeholders, we desire to make the future much better than the past. There must be improvement if we are willing to learn from recent history and develop more creative stakeholder-based solutions to apply to the overﬁshing problem.

References Bess, R., and M. Harte (2000). The role of property rights in the development of New Zealand’s seafood industry. Marine Policy 24(4): 331–339. Grafton, Q.R. (1996). Individual transferable quotas: Theory and practice. Journal Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 6(1): 5–20. Grafton, Q.R., T. Kompas, R. McLoughlin, and N. Rayns (2007). Benchmarking for ﬁsheries governance. Marine Policy 31: 470–479. Jentoft, S., and B. McCay (1995). User participation in ﬁsheries management: Lessons drawn from international experiences. Marine Policy 19(3): 227–246. Jentoft, S., B.J. McCay, and D.C. Wilson (1998). Social theory and ﬁsheries co-management. Marine Policy 22(4–5): 423–436. Kaplan, I.M., and B.J. McCay (2004). Cooperative research: Co-management and the social dimension of ﬁsheries science and management. Marine Policy 28: 257–258. Kendrick, T.H., and N. Bentley (2003). Movements of rock lobsters (Jasus edwardsii) tagged by commercial ﬁshers around the coast of New Zealand from 1993. P. 48 in New Zealand Fisheries Assessment Report 2003/55. Wellington, N.Z.: Ministry of Fisheries. Kerr, S., R. Newell, and J. Sanchirico (2003). Evaluating the New Zealand Individual Transferable Quota Market for Fisheries Management. Motu Working Paper 03-02. Wellington, N.Z.: Motu Economic and Public Policy Research. Lock, K., and S. Leslie (2007). New Zealand’s Quota Management System: A History of the First 20 Years. Motu Working Paper 07-02. Wellington, N.Z.: Motu Economic and Public Policy Research. McClurg, T. (1997). Bureaucratic management versus private property: ITQs in New Zealand after ten years. In Jones, L., and Walker, M. (eds), Fish or Cut Bait! The Case for Individual Transferable Quotas in the Salmon Fishery of British Columbia. Vancouver: Fraser Institute. McIlgorm, A. (2000). Towards an eco-theology of ﬁsheries management? Paper presented at the 14th biennial International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade IIFET conference, Corvallis, Oregon, July. McIlgorm, A. (2002). Fisheries management training for sustainable governance. Paper presented at the 15th biennial International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade IIFET conference, Wellington, New Zealand, August. McIlgorm, A., and M. Tsamenyi (2000). Rights based ﬁsheries development in Australia: Has it stalled? Pp. 148–154 in R. Shotton (ed), Use of Property Rights in Fisheries Management.

Stakeholder Involvement in Fisheries Management Proceedings of the FishRights99 Conference, Fremantle, Western Australia, 11–19 November 1999. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 404/2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Scott, A. (1988). Development of property in the ﬁshery. Marine Resource Economics 5(4): 289–331.

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Sen, S., and J.R. Nielsen (1996). Fisheries co-management: A comparative analysis. Marine Policy 20: 405–418. Wilson, D.C., J.R. Nielsen, and P. Degnbol (eds) (2003). The Fisheries Co-management Experience Accomplishments, Challenges and Prospects. Fish and Fisheries Series 26. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

55 Managing World Tuna Fisheries with Emphasis on Rights-Based Management ROBIN ALLEN JAMES JOSEPH DALE SQUIRES

55.1. INTRODUCTION World catch of the principal market species of tuna comprises about 5 percent of the world catch of all marine ﬁsh, and is even higher in value terms. Steadily increasing demand led to increasing ﬁshing effort. Most tuna stocks are fully exploited, and some are overexploited. About 40 percent of the world’s tuna are captured on the high seas beyond exclusive economic zones (EEZ). International law affords every nation’s citizens the right to pursue ﬁsheries on the high seas, and accompanying law dictates certain norms for ﬁshing on the high seas, but these laws provide a stimulus in many respects for investing in high seas tuna ﬁsheries that may already be fully utilized. Similarly, coastal states, which can control access to their resources, may provide more licenses to tuna vessels than needed to take the available harvest. Allowing the resources to be treated as common-property, open-access, or controlled open-access ﬁsheries has led to excess ﬁshing capacity, which has led to overexploitation. Unlimited entry into tuna ﬁsheries must now change. Failing this, the inevitable outcome will be overexploitation of the world’s tuna stocks. Rightsbased management, wherein catches are allocated to participants and ﬂeets are limited in numbers, can bring this change and provide incentives to ﬁshers to maintain ﬂeets at optimal levels. To accomplish this requires a change in mind set and political will of many nations whose citizens participate in

world tuna ﬁsheries, both on the high seas and in coastal zones. Such measures have been successfully used in a number of national ﬁsheries within EEZs, and for tunas some initial steps have been taken within some of the regional management organizations (RFMOs). This chapter reviews the world tuna ﬁsheries, the status of the stocks, current management and its shortcomings, and rights-based management addressing these shortcomings. The ﬁshery in the eastern Paciﬁc Ocean (EPO) is used to discuss how rights-based management systems can work for tuna.

55.2. TUNA CATCHES AND STOCK STATUS Before 1950, world catches of tuna were less than 350,000 tons annually, but then grew until around 1998, when catch reached nearly 4 million tons (Miyake 2005). Between 2003 and 2007, catches averaged about 4.4 million tons. Purse seine vessels take about 60 percent of the catch, with about 12 percent by pole-and-line vessels, 15 percent by longliners, and the remainder by other gear types. With the exception of skipjack in some oceans, almost all of the principal market species of tunas are either fully exploited or overexploited (Majkowski 2007). The increased ﬁshing mortality will not result in sustained increases in catch, with growing

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Managing World Tuna Fisheries concern over recruitment failure. Blueﬁn tunas are the most heavily exploited, with southern blueﬁn catches declining from a high of 80,000 in the early 1960s to about 15,000 tons. Atlantic blueﬁn faces a similar situation. The western Atlantic stock is heavily overexploited, and the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean stock is below average maximum sustainable yield (AMSY). North Paciﬁc blueﬁn are probably fully exploited, but catches vary considerably due to natural ﬂuctuations in abundance. Current harvests of the three species of blueﬁn recently averaged about 68,000 tons: 16,000 for southern, 32,000 for Atlantic, and 20,000 for North Paciﬁc blueﬁns. There are six stocks of albacore: two in the Paciﬁc, two in the Atlantic, and one each in the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. One is overﬁshed, three are fully exploited, one is not fully exploited, and the status of one is unknown. Recent catches average about 225,000 tons, 143,000 from the Paciﬁc, 57,000 from the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and the rest from the Indian Ocean. Before 1980, longline gear captured most bigeye, taking mostly large ﬁsh near the size producing maximum yield per recruit. With widespread use of ﬁsh-aggregating devices (FADs) by purse seine vessels after the 1980s, large quantities of small bigeye have been caught, reducing the availability of large bigeye for longline vessels. FAD catches also reduced the overall yield per recruit and threatens growth overﬁshing of most of bigeye stocks in the three oceans, with Paciﬁc Ocean bigeye overﬁshed and full exploitation in the other oceans. World catches during 2003–2007 average about 448,000 tons: 247,000 from the Paciﬁc, 79,000 tons from the Atlantic, and 122,000 from the Indian Ocean. All yellowﬁn stocks are fully exploited, and increased ﬁshing effort will not result in sustained increases in catch. World catches from 2003 to 2007 averaged about 1.2 million tons: about 694,000 tons from the Paciﬁc, 427,000 tons from the Indian Ocean, and 109,000 tons from the Atlantic. Skipjack comprise about 55 percent of the world catch of the principal market species of tuna. Catches during 2003–2007 averaged about 2.4 million tons per year: about 1.8 million from the Paciﬁc, about 498,000 from the Indian Ocean, and about 147,000 from the Atlantic. Skipjack in the eastern Atlantic Ocean may be fully exploited, but the stocks in other areas are probably not yet fully exploited, particularly in the western and central Paciﬁc Ocean.

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In summary, with the exception of skipjack tuna, particularly in the Paciﬁc, most stocks of tunas are fully exploited, and two stocks of blueﬁn are clearly overexploited. Increased ﬁshing effort for most of these stocks will not result in sustained increases in catch, but would probably lead to reduced catches over the long term. Controls on ﬁshing mortality are needed.

55.3. CURRENT INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT Effective management of tunas and billﬁshes is complicated by their travel through waters under jurisdiction of many different nations, which distinguishes tuna management and requires cooperation among nations. In the negotiations to draft a law of the sea convention, nations recognized tuna’s migratory nature. Because tunas traveled from one coastal zone to another, and onto the high seas, no nation could unilaterally manage tuna effectively. Article 64 of the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Sea mandates that states cooperate directly or through appropriate international organizations to ensure the conservation of highly migratory species. Five international conventions establishing Article 64-type tuna bodies exist in the world. Two of these bodies, the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), for the eastern Paciﬁc Ocean (EPO) east of 150° west longitude, and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), for the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent seas, were created before Article 64 existed and provided case studies in formulating Article 64 and subsequent instruments. The remaining three bodies were created more recently: the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Blueﬁn Tuna (CCSBT), which is responsible for this species throughout its entire range; the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), for the Indian Ocean; and the Commission for the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Central and Western Paciﬁc Ocean, referred to as the WesternCentral Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), for the Paciﬁc Ocean generally west of the IATTC area. All ﬁve tuna RFMOs (TRFMOs) maintain the stocks of tuna and tunalike ﬁshes for which they are responsible at or above abundance levels that can support AMSY. These bodies are empowered to coordinate and/or conduct research, with the

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results used as a basis for measures to maintain populations at desired abundance levels. The mechanisms for reaching agreement on management measures differ among the TRFMOs. The IATTC and CCSBT require unanimity among all members for all decisions. This provides veto power for any member and can cause long and arduous delays in decision making, which can lead to the development of excess capacity and overﬁshing. At the other extreme, ICCAT and IOTC do not require unanimity and provide “opt out” clauses wherein a party objecting to a recommendation of the commission is not bound by that recommendation. This can sink a conservation program. WCPFC decisions are generally made by consensus (the absence of any formal objection made at the time the decision was taken), where consensus is lacking, decisions on questions of substance shall be taken by a qualiﬁed majority of the members present and voting. No state will agree to be bound by any decisions they consider detrimental to national interests. There lies the rub: how to get those recalcitrant nations to comply with the majority on conservation and management measures. Decision making is critical. The use of consensus for decisions impairs reaching agreement; the process of implementing effective conservation measures would work better if decisions were based on a qualiﬁed majority and opt out clauses were eliminated. Diplomatic persuasion is one such option, but such measures are not always effective. Unilateral trade measures are another option, but most governments abhor them, and they can create serious international problems. Joint measures taken by parties to an RFMO have the highest probability of success in terms of securing compliance of recalcitrant parties. Such joint actions can include a variety of measures such as diplomatic persuasion, attempting to “shame” the nation into complying by publicizing the situation, or attacking their markets through trade sanctions. This latter approach seems to offer the most promise for bringing nations around (Barrett 2003; DeSombre in press). Such measures are increasing in TRFMOs and have been used by ICCAT and IOTC. Because of these difﬁculties in reaching agreement, ﬁshing mortality in many cases exceeds the level needed to maintain tuna populations above AMSY. These high rates of ﬁshing mortality are mostly the result of too many vessels. Even when management measures are in effect, excessive vessel

numbers for the available catch creates difﬁculty in reaching agreement. For example, with a total allowable catch (TAC) but no control on capacity, each increment in capacity reduces the individual shares to each participant. As individual catches decline, pressure grows on governments to not agree to further controls, or to even abandon current controls. As proﬁts decline, governments tend to subsidize their vessels to keep them operating, and the situation deteriorates. More purse seine ﬁshing capacity exists in every ocean than is needed to take current harvest levels (Reid et al. 2005). Excess capacity also exists in world longline ﬁsheries (Miyake 2005). The longline overcapacity problem has been so severe that the industry initiated a program through their organization, the Organization for the Promotion of Responsible Tuna Fishing (OPRT), reducing longline vessels by 20 percent. The degree to which TRFMOS have been successful in achieving their objectives has varied. The IATTC ﬁrst initiated conservation catch quotas in 1966 and subsequently used a variety of management techniques. Most recently, periods of no ﬁshing and TACs have been used to reduce ﬁshing mortality. Individual quotas, with an overall cap, have been used to manage dolphin mortality associated with tuna ﬁshing. A regional vessel register (RVR) limiting the number of vessels authorized to ﬁsh in the area has been in effect for several years, but capacity continues to grow and is at the highest point in the ﬁshery’s history. This enormous capacity created difﬁculty for nations to agree to continue conservation measures during 2008. Four commission plenary meetings failed to resolve this problem. The next plenary meeting is scheduled for 8–12 June 2009, but a single opposing nation can block acceptance of the scientiﬁc recommendations. The WCPFC has implemented several management measures, but these do not substantively address bigeye and yellowﬁn overﬁshing. The WCPFC scientiﬁc staff recommended a 25 percent reduction in ﬁshing effort for bigeye and a 10 percent reduction for yellowﬁn, but a consensus failed, the ﬁshery remains unregulated, and overﬁshing continues. ICCAT implemented management measures on both bigeye and yellowﬁn tuna ﬁsheries, including minimum size limits, limitations on ﬁshing capacity, and country allocations for bigeye. Catch quotas and capacity limitations on albacore have also been implemented. Blueﬁn tuna in the Atlantic and

Managing World Tuna Fisheries Mediterranean has been the object of a number of management measures by ICCAT. Currently there is a major confrontation going on among members whose ﬂeets ﬁsh blueﬁn in the Mediterranean. The Standing Committee on Research and Statistics has recommended drastic reductions in catch, but there is so much ﬁshing capacity and tuna farming capacity in the area that the nations cannot accept the recommendations of the scientists. Agreement has been reached on catch limits, but these exceed the recommendations of the scientists and overﬁshing continues. IOTC recommended that ﬁshing capacity for yellowﬁn and bigeye should not increase over 2003 levels, and bigeye catches should not exceed recent levels. Such measures are not too effective in controlling ﬁshing mortality, but member states have been reluctant to implement more stringent measures for controlling capacity. The CCSBT allocates catches among its members. Within these allocations, some members have applied individual quotas. TRFMOs are not providing the protection to tuna stocks needed to maintain them at levels that can support AMSY. Although most stocks are not currently overﬁshed, most suffer overﬁshing, due most critically to excess ﬁshing capacity, which itself is largely due to incomplete property rights. As long as capacity is allowed to increase, the stocks will be in jeopardy of overﬁshing, even with other controls such as TACs and closed seasons. Capacity must be controlled, and the most effective way to do this is rights-based ﬁsheries management. Management is achieved by restricting ﬁshing in some way. In “command-and-control” techniques, an authority sets catch limits, or restricts ﬁshing effort, or limits the characteristics (normally size or breeding status) of individual ﬁsh that may be taken legally. These measures apply to all ﬁshers and to those who wish to enter the ﬁshery. As an alternative to command and control, rights-based ﬁshery management techniques allocate rights in the ﬁshery to entities (individual ﬁshers, companies, or communities) in such a way that the sum of the ﬁshing rights ensures that no more than the optimum catch may be taken in accordance with those rights. The stronger the participants’ rights, the more the incentives of those rights holders are aligned toward the long-term conservation of the ﬁshery. Entrenched positions of ﬁshing states and the problem of overcapacity of the world’s ﬁshing ﬂeets have slowed progress in satisfying that

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growing international interest in ﬁsheries. Fisheries management is more difﬁcult when it requires cooperation among states, and rights-based approaches have been slower to develop in the international arena than within national jurisdictions.

55.4. RIGHTS-BASED MANAGEMENT Rights-based ﬁshery management within national jurisdictions allows participants to rationalize their capital investment and, equally important, enjoy valuable property rights that strengthen their interests in the conservation of the stocks. Scott (2000) discusses important characteristics of property rights highlighting exclusivity, duration, security, and transferability. The individual transferable quotas or individual ﬁshery quotas in New Zealand, Australia, Iceland, Canada, and the United States provide examples of rights-based management systems with well-developed characteristics of the rights. Individual quotas with exclusivity, security, and a long duration foster a collective interest of rights holders in conservation. An investment in reduction of quotas provides real beneﬁts for the quota holders who made the investment. Transferability allows the quotas to be used by those to whom the quotas are most valuable, leading to economic efﬁciency. Territorial use rights systems for individuals or communities can also have well-developed property rights characteristics (Christy 1982). Examples include prefectural management systems in Japan, the Challenger scallop ﬁshery in New Zealand, and small communities that exclusively control local ﬁsheries. When ﬁsheries in the areas of each territorial use holder do not affect those of others, the territorial use holders beneﬁt from conservation investments. Transferability increases the right’s value and allows efﬁcient operators to purchase rights from less efﬁcient operators. Limited entry, which provides a weak user right, is a simple rights-based system that, provided the rights are guaranteed for a long time, gives those with the right an interest in conservation, but on its own does not promote economic rationalization. The examples above are all from a national context, within which a ﬁshery can be managed by a single government authority. Stocks of tunas generally occupy areas that encompass more than one zone of national

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jurisdiction, and also the high seas, and are exploited by vessels of many nations. Thus, international agreement is necessary to conserve tuna stocks. Extensive tuna movements mean that territorial use rights cannot control tuna catches and make limited entry and quota management systems the most likely rights-based systems. This chapter considers only those as candidates for rights-based management of tunas. While most tuna ﬁsheries are not yet overexploited, the problem of excess ﬁshing capacity seems to be common to all. In addition to the issues facing all ﬁsheries management systems (e.g., compliance, enforcement and illegal, unregulated, and unreported ﬁshing), the use of rights-based systems in internationally managed ﬁsheries raises additional difﬁcult questions. These include ownership of rights to ﬁsh, how would the rights be allocated, who would be responsible for recording the rights, and who would be responsible for ensuring that an individuals’ ﬁshing does not exceed the allocated rights and how that would be achieved. Typically, more extensive systems for monitoring and compliance are needed for rights-based management systems than for command-and-control systems. Serdy (2007) examined legal issues surrounding transferability of quotas among members of RFMOs and found that rudimentary systems for quota trading among states are allowed in some RFMOs, and that any such systems depend on decisions of the RFMO concerned, rather than on the development of new international law. While RFMOs commonly make allocations of quota or ﬂeet capacity among their members, there is little precedent for allocations being made either directly or indirectly to individuals. However, there are two such examples in the eastern Paciﬁc Ocean (EPO): the allocation of annual dolphin mortality limits (DMLs) and the limited-entry system used by the IATTC, which maintains a closed RVR to record the rights of individual purse seine vessels to ﬁsh for tunas in the EPO. The allocation of quotas directly to individuals, for example, by an RFMO, has not been analyzed legally, but, of course, national quotas may be allocated to individuals. Some examples are the Australian quota for southern blueﬁn tuna, Chinese Taipei’s bigeye tuna quotas, and Paciﬁc halibut quotas allocated to ﬁshers of Canada and the United States. The closest example of allocation of quotas to individuals by an international agreement is

provided by the Agreement on the International Dolphin Conservation Program (AIDCP) DMLs for individual vessels since 1992. The DML is a relatively weak right because it does not provide full exclusivity (there are national mortality limits that, if reached, would curtail individual rights), their duration is for only one year (or a shorter period), and their security is subject to the ability of the various governments to renounce their DMLs or to reallocate them among vessels of their ﬂeets. With respect to transferability, the agreement provides that a vessel that changes ﬂags retains its DML and its record of dolphin mortality during the year to date, and that its obligations under the AIDCP be enforced by its new ﬂag. The AIDCP also provides some limited transferability of the limits among vessels,1 in that limits from vessels that renounce or forfeit their assigned limits are redistributed among other vessels. In practice, however, the parties to the AIDCP have also allowed ad hoc transfers (IATTC 2006) among vessels. The limited-entry system of the IATTC is also a relatively weak rights-based system because, while the system provides exclusivity (the place of a vessel on the RVR2 is not affected by other vessels moving off and on the RVR), and the duration of the right is permanent, the security and transferability are subject to government decisions, as all changes to the RVR are made at the request of the governments under whose jurisdictions the vessels operate. The two examples discussed above also provide answers to the questions noted earlier in this section. For both DMLs and places on the RVR, the ability to exercise the rights belongs to the vessels. In other words, a vessel with a DML is entitled to ﬁsh for yellowﬁn tuna associated with dolphins, and a vessel that is included on the RVR is entitled to ﬁsh for tunas in the EPO. DMLs are allocated to all qualiﬁed vessels that seek them. The original places on the RVR were allocated in June 2002 to vessels that were ﬁshing (or had recently been ﬁshing) at that time, with some additional space provided for ﬁve coastal states that were in the process of developing their tuna industries. The staff of the IATTC is responsible for recording which vessels have DMLs and also for maintaining the tally of dolphins killed against each DML. The staff also maintains the RVR. Finally, subsidiary bodies of the AIDCP and the IATTC, the International Review Panel and the Working Group on Compliance, respectively, maintain the oversight of compliance with the allocated right.

Managing World Tuna Fisheries

55.5. MECHANICS OF MANAGEMENT, MONITORING, CONTROL, AND SURVEILLANCE FOR RIGHTS-BASED MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS All ﬁsheries management systems require systems for monitoring, control, and surveillance to ensure compliance with the system. This section discusses mechanisms that are required, particularly for limited-entry and quota-based systems. In both cases, the required mechanisms are much more complicated if the rights include transferability than if they do not include transferability.

55.5.1. Limited Entry Limited entry can be directed at vessels or at participants. Because the effectiveness of vessels can be increased by investing in equipment or increasing their size, additional controls on investment that increases ﬁshing capacity are usually necessary to make limited entry effective. However, these additional controls can limit only certain attributes of vessels, and over time normal investments will increase the ﬁshing power of the vessels. Limited entry requires relatively simple mechanisms that include a list of all those entitled to ﬁsh, and, if there are controls on investments that increase ﬁshing capacity, mechanisms to ensure they are complied with. For example, the IATTC limited-entry system has an RVR (IATTC 2002) of purse seine vessels that have the right to ﬁsh in the EPO. In addition to not allowing new vessels to be introduced except as replacements for vessels leaving the ﬁshery, there is a rule that prohibits increases in well volumes of vessels unless equal well volumes are removed by other vessels leaving the ﬁshery or decreasing their well volumes.3 This provision envisages the transferability allowed by the resolution establishing the limited-entry system (IATTC 2002). Because the ﬁsheries authorities responsible for compliance with the rules of the RFMOs do not always have adequate communication with the maritime authorities responsible for registration and ﬂagging of vessels, states do not always have the mechanisms in place to monitor compliance with vessel changes that may include increased capacity. Thus, systems maintained by the commission itself, including information collected by at-sea

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observers and inspections by staff members, have been used to monitor compliance with that aspect of the resolution. A formal register must be maintained to preserve the integrity of the system. The register must be easily accessible to participating governments and, preferably, to others with interest in the ﬁshery. If transferability were not allowed among participating governments, it would be possible for each state to maintain its own register. However, if, as is the case for the IATTC, transferability of vessels across participating governments is allowed, it is essential that a central register be maintained and that there be a centralized system to ensure that any controls on investments that increase capacity are complied with. (Even if each state maintained its own register, these would have to be accessible to participating governments, as otherwise nationals of the various states might suspect that other states were not complying with the agreement for limiting ﬁshing capacity.) In the IATTC’s limited-entry system, transferability is allowed in several ways. First, a vessel that is included in the RVR may change ﬂag from one participating state to that of another without affecting the status of the vessel on the RVR. Vessels may also be replaced on the RVR by other vessels, providing the well volume of the new vessel is no greater than that of the vessel or vessels being replaced. The well volume of a vessel may be increased only if an equivalent amount of well volume is removed from the RVR. In 2004, the commission agreed that when a vessel is removed from the RVR and its well volume is not replaced completely, the state concerned would retain the residual well volume (IATTC 2004). Thus, in addition to maintaining the list of vessels on the RVR, the staff of the IATTC maintains a record of the residual well volume for each participating state. Between 30 June 2002 and 31 December 2007, 317 such transactions were recorded. The question of ﬂag changes of vessels on the RVR has been one of the key difﬁculties in the administration of the RVR. The IATTC considers the ﬂag of a vessel as being the sole determinant of the government with authority over the vessel. It has been troubled by the complex situations of bare boat charters in which the registration in one country is temporarily suspended and the vessel is allowed to ﬂy another ﬂag during the duration of the charter. Also, the resolution does not explicitly require approval from any government to

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retain a vessel on the RVR when its ﬂag is changed. A government does, however, have the ability to remove a vessel from the RVR before it changes its ﬂag. Some IATTC member governments would prefer that the rights to places on the RVR belong to the governments, rather than to the vessels, and have sought to achieve this with an explanatory note in the minutes of the 73rd meeting4 (IATTC 2005) of the IATTC or via an instruction to the director that he remove any of their vessels from the RVR if they change their ﬂag.

55.5.2. Quota-Based Systems Monitoring compliance with quotas requires systems that are more complex than those discussed above for limited entry. In this case, it is necessary to have registers of quotas (possibly for multiple species and areas) and records of catches against those quotas. At the minimum, a register of quotas would require a system similar to a register of vessels permitted to ﬁsh in a limited-entry system, but it may be considerably larger if there are quotas maintained for more than one ﬁsh stock, area, or time period. While owners of vessels will maintain their own records of catches against quotas, it will also be necessary for those records to be veriﬁed by authorities, requiring a near real-time data recording system that now could rely on reports by atsea observers or estimates reported electronically from sea, and veriﬁcation at the time of unloading. In practice, balancing of catches (Sanchirico et al. 2006; Squires et al. 1998) against quotas in the ﬁsheries managed with the aid of such systems has led to some creative and rather complex balancing systems, including banking quotas from one year to another, the imposition of deemed values for catches in excess of quotas, and, for multispecies ﬁsheries, substitution of a quota of one species for a quota for another. The problems associated with quota balancing are far more serious in multispecies ﬁsheries than in single-species ﬁsheries, because it is common for such ﬁsheries to include stocks whose productivities are different from their representation in normal catch. The use of these balancing systems greatly complicates the basic system for recording quotas and catches against them. If there is no transferability across participating ﬂags, each could maintain its own quota register and record catches against the quotas of its own vessels. If transferability is allowed, of course, a

central register of quota holding and reporting of catch against quota would be required. Transferability includes several possibilities. It might involve sale or leasing for determined periods of quota. It could also be used to address over- and undercatching referred to above. The combination of provisions for over- and undercatching and of transferability requires a complex and carefully deﬁned system for recording quotas and for counting catches against them. The basic system for registering DMLs under the AIDCP is relatively simple. There is only one limit for each vessel, the total number of mortalities of dolphins in the EPO allocated to that vessel in a given calendar year. If a vessel kills more than its limit of dolphins in any year, the excess, plus an additional 50 percent of its limit, is deducted from its DML for the following year. However, in addition to this basic system, there are complex rules that relate the vessel’s performance in achieving a low mortality rate and in compliance that affect the vessel’s DML in the next year. In addition, the DML system operates under, and may be constrained by, a wider quota system that provides global limits for each stock of dolphins involved in the ﬁshery, for the total number of dolphins that may be killed and for the number that may be killed by vessels of any participating state.

55.5.3. Registers For most limited-entry and all quota systems, it is essential that there be a register of rights that is maintained by an agency that is trusted by all states and participants in the ﬁshery. This might be operated by the RFMO concerned, as is the case for the IATTC limited-entry system, or by an independent agency, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Even in the relatively simple IATTC system the operation of the register is a sensitive issue that has led to controversies, which, in several cases, are still unresolved (IATTC 2007a). Some vessels are recorded on the register under two ﬂags or two names, indicating a difference of views of governments about the probity of particular ﬂag transfers. This highlights the importance of ensuring that rules concerning transfers are unambiguous so that the administrator of the system is not subject to differing interpretations of participating governments. It is also desirable that those operating the register be as far removed as practical from the inﬂuence

Managing World Tuna Fisheries of governments or individuals whose interests are recorded in the register.

55.6. THE TUNA FISHERIES IN THE EASTERN PACIFIC OCEAN AS A CAPACITY MANAGEMENT EXAMPLE The IATTC is the RFMO responsible for the management of the ﬁsheries for tunas in the EPO. The IATTC has 16 members: Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Guatemala, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, the Republic of Korea, Spain, the United States, Vanuatu, and Venezuela. In addition, an additional 10 states, regional economic cooperation organizations, and ﬁshing entities are involved in the ﬁshery: ﬁve cooperate formally with the IATTC and the others informally. The agreement area for the IATTC is

FIGURE

705

the EPO, generally taken to be from the coastline of the Americas to 150° W longitude (ﬁgure 55.1), and is so deﬁned in the new “Antigua Convention” (which has not yet entered into force). The retained catches of the principal market species of tuna in the EPO from 1986 through 2006 are shown in ﬁgure 55.2. The catches in the EPO constitute between 10 and 20 percent of the world’s total catch of tunas. The catches of yellowﬁn tuna, by ﬁshing method, and bigeye tuna, by gear, in the EPO, are shown in ﬁgures 55.3 and 55.4, respectively. Most purse seine ﬁshing on schools associated with ﬂoating objects is carried out using ﬁsh-aggregating devices (FADs) deployed by ﬁshers. FADs have been used in the EPO since 1993, and are particularly effective at attracting skipjack and small bigeye tunas. Sets on schools of tuna associated with dolphins seldom take anything but medium to large yellowﬁn tuna. Purse seine vessels are specialized with equipment to make them

55.1 IATTC agreement area. (From www.iattc.org/EPOmapENG.htm)

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

suitable to ﬁsh for either tuna schools associated with dolphins or schools associated with FADs, but not both. However, any vessel will take advantage of an unassociated school that it comes across. Longline vessels generally direct their effort at bigeye tuna and take smaller amounts of yellowﬁn tuna (and other species of tunas and billﬁshes). This method catches the largest tunas and has the least impact on the populations. The catches by pole-andline ﬁshing, which used to be the predominant form

of ﬁshing prior to about 1960, has now practically disappeared from the EPO. The greatest catches of yellowﬁn are taken in schools associated with dolphins, followed by sets on unassociated schools and sets on schools associated with ﬂoating objects (ﬁgure 55.3). Only small amounts of bigeye are taken in purse seine sets other than those of ﬁsh associated with FADs, so the catches of bigeye by purse seines are combined in ﬁgure 55.4. Previous to 1994, an overwhelming

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FIGURE

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55.2 Catches of the principal market species of tuna in the EPO,

1986–2006 500 000 450 000 400 000

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FIGURE

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55.3 Catches of yellowﬁn tuna by ﬁshing method, 1975–2006

2005

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Managing World Tuna Fisheries 160 000 Longline Purse seine

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55.4 Catches of bigeye tuna by gear, 1975–2006

majority of the catch was taken by longline. Bigeye tunas associated with FADs tend to be quite small, and it would take these ﬁsh several years to become available to the longline ﬁshery. The purse seine ﬁshery is growing at the expense of diminishing longline catches. At the same time, because bigeye caught with purse seines are smaller than those caught with longlines, purse seine ﬁshing is causing a reduction in the total yield from the ﬁshery in the EPO.

55.6.1. Capacity Issues in the EPO The major management issue in the ﬁshery today is that there is too much ﬁshing effort for the productive capacities of yellowﬁn and bigeye tuna. The situation is complicated by small bigeye and, to a lesser extent, yellowﬁn taken while purse seine

ﬁshing for skipjack tuna, a valuable species for which there are currently no conservation concerns. The aggregate well volume of tuna ﬂeet in the EPO has been increasing since 1991. Figure 55.5 shows the changes in the well volumes of the purse seine and pole-and-line ﬂeets and the numbers of hooks deployed by the longline ﬂeet. Controlling the size of ﬁshing ﬂeets is not on its own an ideal method to manage the ﬁshery. Every effort at controlling the numbers and sizes of ﬁshing vessels can be met by investment to increase the ability of vessels to catch ﬁsh by focusing on some uncontrolled aspect. Nevertheless, keeping the ﬂeet size near that which can take the optimum catch will make other management measures easier to implement and more effective. Between 1988 and 1998, the ﬂeet was not large enough to require restrictive management measures.

(b)

(a)

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FIGURE 55.5 Aggregate well volume of purse seine and pole-and-line vessels in the EPO (a), and numbers of hooks deployed by longline vessels in the EPO (b)

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Policy Instruments and Perspectives

However, since 1998 the IATTC has agreed on closures for the purse seine ﬁshery and quotas for bigeye tuna to maintain the yellowﬁn and bigeye stocks at levels that would produce the AMSYs of those species. Currently, the IATTC faces great difﬁculty in agreeing on appropriate measures, as demonstrated by the need for it to hold two special meetings addressing conservation measures following the 75th meeting of the IATTC in June 2007. The size of the ﬁshing ﬂeet in relation to the productive capacity of the resources has been assessed in a number of ways. In 2005, in its capacity management plan, the IATTC adopted a target level for the capacity of the purse seine ﬂeet of 158,000 m3 of well volume.5 This was based on the ﬂeet size that would normally be able to ﬁsh through the year without requiring management intervention to maintain the yellowﬁn tuna stock at the level that would produce the MSY. At that time (June 2005), the actual capacity of the purse seine ﬂeet was 209,000 m3. Thus, the actual capacity was 32 percent greater than this measure of optimum capacity. Since then, the purse seine ﬂeet has continued to grow, and at the end of 2007 its capacity was more than 230,000 m3, 46 percent greater than that target capacity. Another indication of overcapacity is the recommended closure of the purse seine ﬁshery, which is used because the actual closure chosen by the IATTC takes account of factors other than the capacity of the ﬂeet to take the MSY. Overcapacity6 could be measured by the percentages of the year during which the yellowﬁn ﬁshery would be open, according to the recommendation. Between 2003 and 2007 the recommended closure for yellowﬁn varied from 2 months to 74 days, equivalent to overcapacity of between 20 and 25 percent. The FAO has deﬁned capacity of a ﬁshing ﬂeet as its capacity to catch ﬁsh. Whereas the two previous examples were based on the previous average utilization of the available ﬂeet, the FAO deﬁnition takes account of potential of the ﬂeet to catch ﬁsh. Reid et al. (2005) assessed the capacity of the purse seine ﬂeet in the EPO (and other areas), using the technique of data envelopment analysis, which accounts for increases in capacity if all vessels were used as effectively as the most efﬁcient vessel. That analysis provided an estimate of average excess capacity divided by capacity output during 1998– 2002 for yellowﬁn and bigeye tuna of 39 percent. Of course, it is necessary to take into account longline ﬁshing, at least, in addition to purse seining

when considering ﬂeet capacity. An approach to this is outlined in the next section.

55.6.2. Buybacks to Reduce Capacity of the EPO Tuna Fleet to an Optimum Level Effective buybacks are discussed in chapter 37. In the EPO, the Resolution on the Capacity of the Tuna Fleet Operating in the Eastern Paciﬁc Ocean (Resolution C-02-03), adopted in June 2002, potentially ensures that bought-out purse seine capacity cannot be replaced, but compliance is incomplete (IATTC 2007b, 2007c).7 Dissatisﬁed members (IATTC 2007d, 2007a) seek to increase their ﬂeet capacities. A vessel buyback would be expected to be successful only if there is a consensus among IATTC members that the RVR allocation is fair to all and compliance is full. Fleet well volume is not necessarily proportional to FAO’s deﬁnition of ﬁshing capacity. Even with limited well volume, owners can invest to increase the overall capacity of the ﬂeet to catch ﬁsh. This issue may be of less concern than compliance and the general acceptance of the limits on entry referred to above, given that a buyback program to reduce capacity is intended to facilitate management using other measures, rather than to be the only management tool for the commission. However, the effort creep that is likely to occur following a buyback must eventually be addressed, most effectively by specifying the rights of the remaining ﬁshers more completely (Fox et al. 2003). For longline ﬁshing, the second most important method of ﬁshing in the EPO, there is no IATTC control system similar to that used for purse seine vessels. A successful buyback requires limited entry. The Organization for the Promotion of Responsible Tuna Fishing (OPRT), founded in Japan in 2000 and joined by organizations in China, Chinese Taipei, Ecuador, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, and the Seychelles, bought back about 43 Japanese and Taiwanese ﬂag of convenience (FOC) longliners (Joseph 2005).8 Combinations of longline and purse seine ﬁshing effort compared to 2004–2006 levels that will produce the bigeye AMSY are shown by the dashed curve in ﬁgure 55.6; the solid curve shows the MSY for the whole ﬁshery with average recruitment for a given purse seine effort when longline effort is adjusted appropriately to produce the MSY. The actual 2004–2006 effort in relative terms was at

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Managing World Tuna Fisheries the point marked by the cross. If ﬂeet capacity is approximated by ﬁshing effort, ﬁgure 55.6 can be used to show reductions in the purse seine and longline ﬂeets. For example, a reduction to 83 percent of existing levels of both purse seine and longline capacity would bring the ﬁshing effort to about the level corresponding to the AMSY. Because the two ﬁshing methods are mostly associated with different ﬂags, discussions about the appropriate reduction required in each method to reach MSY levels inevitably involves competition between groups of countries, which are difﬁcult to resolve. Instead of negotiating reductions for each ﬁshing method, a buyback could be structured to allow that decision to be made as a consequence of owners selling their interest in the ﬁshery, such as asking all owners to bid at the price at which they would be prepared to quit the ﬁshery, and to accept the set of bids that moved the effort toward the dashed curve in ﬁgure 55.6 at the minimum cost. This process could be elaborated in various ways. For example, a system to ensure that all those bought out would receive the same amount of money per unit of capacity could be adopted, or the commission could set constraints on how far the relative composition of purse seining and longlining might be allowed to move from the current ﬂeet composition.

55.7. DESIGNING AND FINANCING A BUYBACK Vessel buybacks can be designed in a number of ways to achieve particular ends, with the key issues discussed in chapter 37 (Squires et al. 2006; Groves and Squires 2007). In a ﬁshery such as the EPO tuna ﬁshery, there are many owners, some with large ﬂeets and some owning individual vessels, and decisions about which vessels to retire are more difﬁcult. An owner with only one vessel can permanently affect capacity only by withdrawing his vessel and then receiving no beneﬁt in the form of increased catches per unit of effort from the reduction he contributed, creating a free-rider problem in which the remaining owners gain. However, in aggregate, if ﬂeet capacity can be reduced to the lowest level that can take the available catch, total costs would fall and total proﬁtability increase. Given that, all owners could contribute to a buyback fund in proportion to their own capacity, and the fund could be used to buy out those willing to leave. Again, total proﬁtability will increase. The buyback results in a transfer of funds among the pool of owners. If all participants act in an economically rational way, those who sell their right to ﬁsh should do so at a price that at least reﬂects their 200 000 180 000

5

160 000 140 000

4

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100 000 80 000

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MSY (t)

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0 1.4

55.6 Combinations of longline and purse seine ﬁshing effort (compared to 2004–2006 levels) that will produce AMSY of bigeye tuna (dashed curve). The cross shows ﬁshing effort in 2004–2006. The solid curve shows the relationship between the MSY for the whole ﬁshery and purse seine effort when longline effort is adjusted appropriately to produce the AMSY. (From IATTC-75-07b Conservation Recommendations, www.iattc. org/IATTCandAIDCPMeetingsJune07ENG.htm)

FIGURE

710

Policy Instruments and Perspectives

expectations of future proﬁts if they had remained in the ﬁshery, and those who remain should be prepared to pay up to their expectations of the increase in their future postbuyback proﬁts. Owners may collectively face difﬁculty agreeing on their contribution to a buyback, and such a scheme could likely proceed only with initial funding by an external agency with the expectation of being repaid over time by the remaining owners, for example, via the use of a landings tax. Assuming the RVR measure for purse seine vessels in the EPO permits a vessel to transfer to another ﬂag without replacement by the current ﬂag state, ﬁshery participants could implement a buyback program that reduces ﬂeet size. Such a buyback would not work unless governments agreed with transferable capacity quota, and with nonreplacement when a vessel transferred to another ﬂag or was bought out of the ﬁshery. Costs of an EPO purse seine buyback under this speciﬁcation entails two components: values of the vessel and a place on the RVR, giving the right to bring a vessel into the ﬁshery, inclusion on the register, and participation in the ﬁshery. The value of a vessel, or the right of inclusion on the register, varies with the success of ﬁshing and the price of ﬁsh. The well capacity of the purse seine ﬂeet operating in the EPO is about 229,000 m3, and the optimum ﬂeet size is about 158,000 m3. This suggests there is about 70,000 m3 excess capacity in the ﬂeet, which represents about 59 vessels of about 1,200 m3 each (the average size of a vessel in the ﬂeet). With recent prices for a 1,200 m3 vessel ranging between $5,000,000 and $8,500,000, the cost to buy back the 59 vessels would range from $290,000,000 to $470,000,000. To put this into perspective, the annual landed value of the catch of tunas by the purse seine ﬂeet ﬁshing in the EPO averaged over 2005–2008 was about $600,000,000. In addition to the existing purse seine ﬂeet, many participating countries have rights to add additional capacity to the ﬂeet, either as a result of vessels that have been withdrawn after June 2002 when limited-entry was established, or through an initial allocation to coastal states whose ﬁsheries were developing. The aggregate of this unutilized capacity is 54,000 m3. Prices for register places ranged from $150,000 to $300,000. Some of this unutilized capacity is associated with a right of an individual to replace a vessel, but the bulk of it is a national right that is not currently allocated to an individual. If all of it had to be purchased at

between $150,000 and $300,000 per vessel, this unused capacity would be worth between $6.2 and $13.5 million. However, more than half of it could simply be written off by governments that do not currently intend to further develop their ﬂeets or are willing to forgo further expansion of their ﬂeets in the EPO. A complete buyback would have to remove the combination of the 70,000 m3 in the existing ﬂeet and the unﬁlled 54,000 m3. The cost of buying back the 59 vessels and some part of the options for countries allocated quota but that have no vessels is substantial. The preferable way to ﬁnance such a program might be through the industry, but because there is currently so much excess capacity, the catch per vessel may not provide large enough proﬁts for the vessel owners to ﬁnance the buybacks. If loans and grants sufﬁcient to cover the buyback of the 59 vessels were made available, the buyback could be immediate. Per-vessel catches and proﬁtability would increase, allowing industry repayment. Alternatively, if loans and grants sufﬁcient to buy back a portion of the 59 vessels were made available, per-vessel earnings would be expected to increase somewhat, thereby placing the vessel owners in a position to fund the buyback of the remaining capacity. International ﬁnancial assistance or national government assistance, or both, would be needed to initiate a buyback, but once the program was operating responsibility for maintaining it should fall to the industry.

55.8. CONCLUSIONS The world’s stocks of the principle market species of tuna are heavily exploited; some are overexploited, and overﬁshing is taking place on others. The TRFMOs have implemented a number of measures to prevent overexploitation, but in many cases they have been only marginally effective, and in other cases ineffective. This is due to the difﬁculties of achieving consensus among member states to implement restrictive measures, and these difﬁculties stem from the fact that there is too much ﬁshing capacity. It has been shown that such excess capacity exists in all oceans, and as long as the concept of open-access and common-property management prevails, this problem of overcapacity will not be corrected. It seems clear that nations and TRFMOs must move toward rights-based ﬁshery management, wherein vessels and catches are allocated to

Managing World Tuna Fisheries individual operators, thereby providing an incentive to maintain ﬂeets at optimal sizes. Fisheries management is most effective when the interests of all the participants are aligned to produce the same results. It is particularly important for the ﬁshers to have an economic incentive to ensure the conservation of the resources they exploit. This can be achieved by providing them secure and exclusive rights to the ﬁshery that extend into the future. This arrangement has been achieved within some national systems for ﬁsheries management, but will be much more difﬁcult to achieve for internationally managed ﬁsheries, where the management participants are ﬁshers, states, and an RFMO, and even nations not currently participating. The overcapacity in tuna ﬁsheries, and those of the EPO in particular, should be addressed by the establishment of a rights-based management frame work with well-deﬁned ﬁshing rights that could be preceded by a buyback of existing ﬁshing rights. An advantage of an initial buyback is that it could sidestep the very difﬁcult negotiation of shares in a ﬁshery among competing states. Notes 1. Annex IV(III) 2 of the Agreement for the AIDCP. 2. The IATTC’s RVR is the deﬁnitive list of purse seine vessels authorized by the commission to ﬁsh in the EPO (IATTC 2000). 3. Purse seine vessels store their catches in brine contained in spaces known as wells. 4. Minutes of the 73rd meeting of the IATTC (2005: 8): “A change of ﬂag by a vessel from one CPC [party, cooperating non-party, or ﬁshing entity] to another, and the vessel’s status on the RVR, shall not be considered effective until the Director has received ofﬁcial notiﬁcation of the change from both governments involved.” The commission endorsed this statement, and noted the importance of each government establishing adequate internal procedures to ensure the necessary coordination between the various domestic agencies involved in the process of ﬂag transfers. 5. The IATTC has used well volume as its measure of purse seine ﬂeet capacity. 6. Overcapacity here refers the difference between the actual capacity and a measure of optimum capacity. 7. The 2007 IATTC Compliance Report (IATTC 2007c) noted that four purse seine vessels ﬁshed in the EPO while not being included in the RVR, and that three vessels used wells that were not authorized under the resolution.

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8. Longline vessels less than 24 m in overall length are subject to less regulation than are larger vessels, and in recent years highly efﬁcient longline vessels slightly less than 24 m in overall length have been constructed for the purpose of ﬁshing without restriction.

References Barrett, S. (2003). Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Christy, F.T., Jr. (1982). Territorial Use Rights in Marine Fisheries: Deﬁnitions and Conditions. Technical Paper 227. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. DeSombre, E. (in press). Flags of convenience and property rights on the high seas. In Allen, R., Joseph, J., and Squires, D. (eds), Conservation and Management of Transnational Tuna Fisheries. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. Fox, K.J., R.Q. Grafton, T. Kompas, and T.N. Che (2003). Productivity and capacity reduction: The case of a ﬁshery. International and Development Economics Working Paper IDEC 03-2. Canberra: Australian National University. www.crawford.anu.edu.au/degrees/idec/working_papers/IDEC03-2.pdf Groves, T., and D. Squires (2007). Lessons from ﬁsheries buybacks. In Curtiss, R., and Squires, D. (eds), Fisheries Buybacks. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell. www.iattc.org/Meetings2004ENG.htm IATTC (2000). Vessel Database—Active PurseSeine. www.iattc.org/VesselRegister/VesselList. aspx?List=AcPS&Lang=ENG IATTC (2002). Resolution on the Capacity of the Tuna Fleet Operating in the EPO. IATTC Resolution Document C-02-03 www.iattc.org/ ResolutionsActiveENG.htm IATTC (2004). Minutes of the 7th meeting of the IATTC Permanent Working Group on Fleet Capacity. 20–21 February. La Jolla, Calif.: Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. IATTC (2005). Minutes of the 73rd Meeting (Revised). 20–27 June, Lanzarote, Spain. www.iattc.org/PDFFiles2/IATTC-73MinutesJun05-REV.pdf IATTC (2006). Minutes of the 15th Meeting of the Parties to the AIDCP: Agenda Item 11, 21 June, Busan, Korea. www.iattc.org/ PDFFiles2/MOP-15-MinutesREV.pdf IATTC (2007a). Ninth Meeting of the Permanent Working Group on Fleet Capacity. Document IATTC-75 PROP F1 VEN Capacity. 25–29 June, Cancun, Mexico. www.iattc.org/IATTCandAIDCPMeetingsOct07ENG.htm IATTC (2007b). Permanent Working Group on Compliance 8th Meeting. Document

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COM-8-04. 21 June, Cancun, Mexico. www. iattc.org/PDFFiles2/COM-8-04-Compliancereport-2006.pdf IATTC (2007c). IATTC Permanent Working Group on Compliance 8th Meeting. Document COM-8-04. 21 June, Cancun, Mexico. www. iattc.org/PDFFiles2/COM-8-04-Compliancereport-2006.pdf IATTC (2007d). Ninth Meeting of the Permanent Working Group on Fleet Capacity. Document IATTC-75-PROP F2 PER Capacity. 25–29 June, Cancun, Mexico. www.iattc.org/IATTCandAIDCPMeetingsOct07ENG.htm Joseph, J. (2005). Past developments and future options for managing tuna ﬁshing capacity, with special emphasis on purse-seine ﬂeets. FAO Fisheries Proceedings 2: 281–323. Majkowski, J. (2007). Global Fishery Resources of Tuna and Tuna-like Species. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 483. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, p. 54. Miyake, P.M. (2005). A brief history of the tuna ﬁsheries of the world. In: Bayliff, W.H., Leiva Moreno, J.I., Majkowski, J. (eds), Second Meeting of the Technical Advisory Committee of the FAO Project “Management of Tuna Fishing Capacity: Conservation and Socio-

economics.” 15–18 March, Madrid, Spain. FAO Fisheries Proceedings No. 2. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, p. 336. Reid, C., J.E. Kirkley, D. Squires, and J. Ye (2005). An analysis of the ﬁshing capacity of the global tuna purse-seine ﬂeet. FAO Fisheries Proceedings 2: 117–156. Sanchirico, J.N., D. Holland, K. Quigley, and M. Fina (2006). Catch-quota balancing in multispecies individual ﬁshing quota. Marine Policy 30(6): 767–785. Scott, A. (2000). Introducing Property in Fisheries Management. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 404/1. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1–13. Serdy, A. (2007). Trading of Fishery Commission quota under international law. Ocean Yearbook 21: 265–288. Squires, D., H. Campbell, S. Cunningham, C. Dewees, Q.R. Grafton, S.F. Herrick, J. Kirkley, S. Pascoe, S. Kjell, B. Shallard, B. Turris, and N. Vestergaard (1998). Individual transferable quotas in multispecies ﬁsheries. Marine Policy 22(2): 135–159. Squires, D., J. Joseph, and T. Groves (2006). Buybacks in transnational ﬁsheries. Paciﬁc Economic Bulletin 21(3): 63–74.

56 Research Priorities for Marine Fisheries Conservation and Management JOHN ANNALA STEVE EAYRS

• Determination of the impacts of ﬁshing on ecosystem structure and function • Development of ecosystem approaches to managing ﬁsheries

56.1. INTRODUCTION This chapter covers natural science research priorities that address ﬁsheries conservation and management needs for wild ﬁsh stocks currently and in the future. It does not address research topics that do not directly pertain to ﬁsheries conservation and management, or approaches or topics that are covered in other chapters (e.g., marine reserves, aquaculture, policy instruments, and social science research needs). The ultimate goal of ﬁsheries research is to collect, analyze, and synthesize the data required to evaluate alternative management policies and strategies for ﬁsh populations. This information is essential for understanding the underlying dynamics of the stock or population of ﬁsh, and subsequently for modeling the population dynamics and formulating advice for the conservation and management of the stock. A core set of basic information and approaches are required to move forward in ﬁsheries conservation and management:

56.2. FISH BIOLOGY 56.2.1. Introduction Why is the knowledge of basic ﬁsh biology important to the conservation and management of ﬁsheries? We need to know the dynamics of populations of ﬁsh to estimate what can be removed from the ﬁshed population on a sustainable basis. The sustainable yield for a stock of a species is determined by the biological characteristics of stock structure, age, growth rate, mortality or survival rate, reproductive output, recruitment, and immigration/ emigration. Other factors also determine the level of sustainable yield, which are covered in later sections. Put simply:

• Knowledge of the biology of the species • Estimates of abundance and trends in abundance • Development of data synthesis and assessment methods • Determination of ecosystem structure and function • Information on ﬁsh behavior and conservation engineering

Future biomass = current biomass + somatic growth + recruitment − natural deaths − ﬁsh catch

56.2.2. Stock Structure Determining stock structure or the unit stock lies at the heart of the information required for successful ﬁsheries conservation and management (Hilborn 713

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and Walters 1992). However, it is important to realize that in reality a unit stock is not static and ﬁxed but is dynamic. Species of marine ﬁsh often have far-ranging distributions and highly dispersive life history stages that make determination of stock structure challenging. Hilborn and Walters (1992) deﬁne a unit stock as “an arbitrary collection of populations of ﬁsh that are large enough to be essentially self-reproducing (abundance changes are not dominated by immigration and emigration), with members of the collection showing similar patterns of growth, migration, and dispersal.” Identiﬁcation of ﬁsh stocks is necessary for a number of reasons, including allocation of catch among competing ﬁsheries, management of highly migratory stocks, recognition of nursery and spawning areas, and development of optimal harvest and monitoring strategies (Cadrin 2005). Most quantitative stock assessment models assume that the biological (growth, mortality, recruitment, etc.) and ﬁsheries (catch, landings, etc.) input data originate from a single unit stock. A limited number of more complex assessments have been developed that incorporate movements between two or more stocks. If the unit stock assumption is violated in a mixed stock ﬁshery, then the less productive stocks run the risk of being overexploited while the more productive stocks may be underharvested. A recent excellent review of the application of stock identiﬁcation methods to ﬁsheries has been edited by Cadrin et al. (2005). The authors present the key issues in determining stock structure, including the various data requirements and data analysis approaches, for example, • Determination of life history and biological traits • Use of environmental marks (e.g., parasites) • Various genetic analysis techniques • Use of applied marks such as tags • Use of various stock identiﬁcation data analysis approaches

56.2.3. Age and Growth, Including Longevity and Mortality Estimation of age, growth, and natural mortality is important for understanding the dynamics of ﬁsh populations. The goal of most studies on age, growth, and mortality of ﬁsh has been to determine the yield from the stock at different levels of ﬁshing effort and age and/or size at recruitment to the

ﬁshery using the various kinds of ﬁsheries models described in later sections. Variation in growth rates is also important for understanding the dynamics of the stock. Information on age, growth, and size structure is used to determine increases in population biomass through growth of individuals as well as decreases in biomass through the effects of natural and ﬁshing mortality, to monitor changes in the population age structure through time caused by natural variation and ﬁshing, and to estimate population abundance and other parameters used in modeling studies to estimate sustainable yields. Natural mortality is a key parameter in the determination of ﬁsh population dynamics. It is also notoriously difﬁcult to determine because it is usually estimated indirectly and is typically confounded with ﬁshing mortality and recruitment. Data collected on length, weight, and age are typically used to estimate age, growth, and natural mortality. These data can be obtained from samples collected from research surveys, and commercial and recreational ﬁsheries. Various techniques are typically used to determine the age and growth of ﬁsh and include analysis of length frequency distributions, tagging experiments, and counting rings on hard parts (e.g., otoliths, scales, opercular bones, vertebrae, and ﬁn rays).

56.2.4. Reproductive Output and Recruitment, Including Fecundity, Egg Production, and Age/Size at Maturity Recruitment is usually deﬁned as the age and/ or size at which ﬁsh enter the commercial ﬁshery. Fisheries biologists and scientists have long recognized the need to improve estimates of recruitment, what determines recruitment, the importance of age structure of the parental spawning stock on recruitment, and the relationship between spawning stock size or biomass and recruitment. The relationship between spawning stock biomass and recruitment is an important driver of the results of ﬁshery assessment models, and the subsequent formulation of policy advice, but is unknown for most ﬁsh populations, and must be assumed. It is often assumed that recruitment will not decrease until stock size is reduced to very low levels and that above these low levels recruitment will vary around some average ﬁgure that is independent of stock size. This has led to the relationship between stock and recruitment often being ignored or to

Research Priorities for Marine Fisheries Conservation and Management the assumption that recruitment is independent of spawning stock size. However, there are now a number of examples in the ﬁsheries literature of recruitment to a stock decreasing as stock size is reduced by heavy ﬁshing. Fecundity, or the number of eggs produced per female, is typically linked to body size, with large and older females producing a larger number of eggs. Increasingly, information is emerging for a number of ﬁsh species that the eggs produced by larger and older females are “ﬁtter”; that is, they have a greater chance of survival than do eggs produced by younger and smaller individuals. Average age and size at maturity are linked to exploitation rate, with higher exploitation rates typically reducing the mean size and age of ﬁsh in the population as well as reducing the average age at maturity. The combination of (1) a reduction of the mean size and age of ﬁsh in a population, (2) lower fecundity at smaller size, and (3) a reduction in the mean size and age at maturity at high exploitation rates often results in a reduction in the number of larger, older, and more fecund ﬁsh and total egg production in the population. The relationship between spawning stock size and subsequent recruitment is determined by the combined inﬂuences of environmental and other physical and biological factors and the effects of exploitation on the various life history stages that lead up to a year class attaining the age at recruitment to the ﬁshery—egg, larval, and juvenile stages. For example, eggs and larvae may be advected away from areas conducive to their growth and development, there may be a mismatch between the appearance of larvae and the availability of their favored prey, or there may be an unexpectedly large abundance of predators appearing in nursery areas. In the future, climate change is likely to have a strong impact on many stocks, and further biological research is required to understand the relationship between environment and recruitment and to determine if we have entered a different recruitment regime.

56.2.5. Movements and Migrations Information on movements is important for determining stock structure (see above). Incorporation of data on movements and migrations formally into stock assessment models is not frequently done as data on the detailed movement dynamics is most

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commonly lacking. Instead, incorporating a range of assumed movement rates into assessment models has been used successfully for some stocks to evaluate the sensitivity of model results to a range of plausible rates. The main method for estimating movement or migration rates is by using capture-recapture or tag recovery studies. Tags are often taken by commercial and recreational ﬁshers, and recovery and return rates are seldom equal in all reporting locations, because of differences in the distribution of ﬁshing effort between areas and differences in the willingness to return tags. Therefore, simple analysis techniques are not appropriate and much more sophisticated techniques have been developed.

56.3. ESTIMATION OF ABUNDANCE Abundance is estimated either as absolute abundance or as relative abundance and is usually reported as the biomass or weight of ﬁsh. Absolute abundance is a census of the actual number of ﬁsh in a given area at any one time. Relative abundance is an estimate of the number of ﬁsh in a given area at a given time relative to an estimate of the number of ﬁsh in that area at another time. Relative abundance indices are sometimes scaled up to estimates of the absolute number, either directly by making various assumptions (see below) or indirectly through the output from assessment models. Estimates of abundance have typically been made using one of two approaches: (1) ﬁsheryindependent methods or (2) ﬁshery-dependent methods. Fishery-independent methods employ various research survey techniques that usually incorporate random sampling approaches to yield unbiased estimates of abundance. Some ﬁsheryindependent methods are used to estimate absolute abundance, but are more typically used to estimate relative abundance. Fishery-dependent methods usually consist of analysis of commercial catch per unit effort (CPUE) data. Fishery-dependent methods are used to estimate relative abundance. Whichever approach is used to estimate and monitor the abundance of a ﬁsh stock, the most important principle is that a consistent method is applied over time. This allows the researcher to build up a time series of abundance estimates that will provide data to assist in separating out the impacts of ﬁshing from environmental impacts on population size.

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56.3.1. Fishery-Independent Estimates 56.3.1.1. Surveys Using Fishing Gear, Including Trawls, Traps, and Lines Abundance estimates for ﬁsh stocks are often obtained from research surveys using commercial ﬁshing gear such as trawls, traps, and lines and are usually relative indices. The relative indices are sometimes directly scaled up to absolute estimates by making various assumptions about catchability, availability, and vulnerability. Catchability is usually deﬁned as “the fraction of a ﬁsh stock which is caught by a deﬁned unit of ﬁshing effort” (Ricker 1975) and is made up of its components, vulnerability and availability. Vulnerability is the proportion of ﬁsh that encounter the sampling gear that are retained by the gear. Availability has two aspects: (1) the proportion of ﬁsh in the total population that are found in the survey area, and (2) the proportion of ﬁsh in the water column that are available to the sampling gear (Hurst 1988).

56.3.1.2. Acoustic Surveys Acoustic surveys utilize either scientiﬁc or commercial ﬁshing echosounders to count the number of ﬁsh in the water column in a given area at a given time. Survey designs used include transect (ﬁxed or random), grid, or star-shaped surveys. The results from acoustic surveys can be used as either relative or absolute estimates. By making assumptions about species composition, ﬁsh size, target strength, and so forth, the acoustic returns can be scaled up to estimates of absolute numbers and biomass.

56.3.1.3. Aerial Surveys Aerial surveys using spotter aircraft are sometimes made for pelagic species that spend some part of their time at or just below the surface. Aerial surveys are usually made using either random or ﬁxed transects or grids. They are subject to the usual issues of changes in catchability (the ability of the spotter to detect the ﬁsh if they are there), availability (are the ﬁsh in the area at the time of the survey?), and vulnerability (are the ﬁsh able to be detected if they are in the area at the time of the survey due to wind, sea state, cloud cover, etc.?). These estimates are usually taken as relative estimates.

56.3.1.4. Egg Production Surveys Estimates of egg production have been used to estimate the absolute size of a population primarily for pelagic species (e.g., anchovies and sardines). Eggs are sampled from the plankton in a given area and at a time known to contain a large fraction of the spawning population of ﬁsh. By using estimates or assumptions about various parameters such as developmental times, egg mortality rates, horizontal and vertical distribution of eggs in the survey area, and adult fecundity, maturity, and sex ratios, the absolute abundance estimates of the spawning population can be obtained.

56.3.1.5. Mark-Recapture Techniques Absolute abundance estimates have also been obtained from mark-recapture studies that have employed primarily two different tagging methods—conventional external tags such as dart tags or disk tags that rely primarily on detection and reporting by ﬁshermen, or internal tags such as coded wire or passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags that rely on detection by trained sampling staff. Both methods rely on unbiased estimates of the distribution of tagged ﬁsh in the population relative to the true distribution of the population, the distribution of ﬁshing effort in relation to the distribution of tagged and untagged ﬁsh in the population, and tag detection and reporting rates.

56.3.1.6. Genetics A newly developing technique is the use of closekin genetics to estimate the absolute spawning stock size of a population of ﬁsh. The technique is based on the genetic identiﬁcation of parent-offspring matches in samples from both spawning and juvenile grounds and is based on mark-recapture principles. Genetic signatures are used as a “mark” in the juveniles that can then be “recaptured” in a sample of the spawning adults.

56.3.2. Fishery-Dependent Estimates Often the only information available to monitor changes in the abundance of ﬁsh stocks are changes in commercial CPUE. However, CPUE changes not only in response to changes in the abundance of

Research Priorities for Marine Fisheries Conservation and Management ﬁsh but also in response to changes in other factors such as time of the year, area ﬁshed, target species ﬁshed, vessel and gear characteristics, and changes in management regulations. Numerous models have been developed to analyze these various factors and “standardize” the CPUE trends in an effort to monitor relative trends in the “true” underlying population size.

56.4. DATA SYNTHESIS AND ASSESSMENT METHODS The point of collecting and analyzing data on abundance and the biology of ﬁsh species is to inform the management of the species through the results of data synthesis and assessment. Hilborn and Walters (1992) deﬁne stock assessment thus: “Stock assessment involves the use of various statistical and mathematical calculations to make quantitative predictions about the reactions of ﬁsh populations to alternative management choices.” Data synthesis and assessment methods can be grouped into three broad categories: single-species models, multispecies models, and management strategy evaluation.

56.4.1. Single-Species Models Models in this category, in generally increasing complexity, include the following: • • • •

Per-recruit models Biomass dynamic models Age and/or length-structured models Spatially explicit models

Generally, the simpler models outperform the correct (biologically more complex and realistic) models with a larger number of parameters in situations where limited information is available on changes in biological and ﬁshery parameters over time, which is the case in many if not most ﬁsheries.

56.4.2. Multispecies Models A relatively small number of multispecies models have been developed that incorporate species interactions and trophic linkages. These models tend to be very complex and data intensive. As of yet they have been of limited utility for the assessment of stock status and the provision of pragmatic ﬁsheries

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management advice. It has proven very difﬁcult to obtain reliable estimates of many of the model input parameters and to determine the signiﬁcance of many of the species interactions. These models are currently most useful as exploration tools to design future research programs to plug gaps in our knowledge of marine ecosystems.

56.4.3. Management Strategy Evaluation Management strategy evaluation (MSE) approaches (a.k.a. management procedures, harvest control rules, decision rules) have been under development since at least the mid-1990s and implemented and used in a handful of jurisdictions and are gaining increased acceptance as a way to move forward in providing advice for ﬁsheries management. MSE uses simulation modeling to assess the consequences of a range of management strategies or options and to report the results so that the trade-offs between key management objectives are explicit using a preagreed analytical approach. The following are typically regarded as the key components of the MSE framework: • The operating model that represents hypotheses about the “true” underlying dynamics of the system against which performance of the management procedure will be evaluated. • The observation error model that is used to generate data on the ﬁshery and stock(s) and that provides an interface between the “true” world of the operating model and the “perceived” world of the management procedure. • The management procedure that is used to assess the status of the stock and evaluate management options based on the observed status of the stock. The management procedure typically includes simulations of the observation or monitoring process, the data analysis and assessment, the use of the results of the data analysis and assessment for management purposes, and the implementation of management decisions. • Performance statistics that are used to evaluate performance of management procedures against the management objectives. MSE approaches have been most commonly used in the management of single-species target ﬁsheries, but can be applied to achieve ﬁshery ecosystem objectives as well. Perhaps the most important

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aspects of the MSE approaches are (1) their ability to explicitly incorporate uncertainty into the models, and (2) their ability to project forward and forecast future states of nature.

56.5. ECOSYSTEM STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION Information on ecosystem structure and function is important as we move toward an ecosystem approach to management (EAM) of ﬁsheries resources. Gavaris et al. (2005) argue that a tacit consensus is emerging that recognizes three principal objectives for ecosystem-based management: maintaining productivity, preserving biodiversity, and protecting habitat. They further elaborated these objectives as follows: • Ensure that the activity does not cause unacceptable reduction in productivity of each component (primary, community, and population) so that it can play its historical role in the functioning of the ecosystem • Ensure that the activity does not cause unacceptable reduction in biodiversity by maintaining enough components (biotopes/seascapes, species, and populations) to preserve the structure and natural resilience of the ecosystem • Ensure that the activity does not cause unacceptable modiﬁcation to habitat that is difﬁcult or impossible to reverse in order to safeguard the “container” (both physical and chemical properties) of the ecosystem Habitat and biodiversity are the key components of ecosystem structure and underpin the productivity of the ecosystem, which is the key component of ecosystem function. An important piece of information in the move toward EAM is the deﬁnition and location of the various types of seabed and pelagic habitats that are important to the different life history stages of marine organisms. Seabed habitats provide areas on the bottom where marine organisms live. Habitats that are structurally complex usually support more highly diverse and productive biological communities than simpler habitats. Speciﬁc types of habitat provide important spawning and nursery grounds for various marine species and can strongly inﬂuence the carrying capacity of the ecosystem.

Seabed habitats can also provide important feeding grounds for species that live higher in the water column and provide an important link in the energy ﬂow between the bottom and the water column (sometimes referred to as benthic-pelagic coupling). Protection of important bottom habitats has become an important component in the move to EAM. However, the importance of pelagic habitats such as oceanographic fronts, eddies, and gyres for most species is largely unknown. Why is knowledge of biodiversity important in the move toward EAM? It can be argued that the protection of biodiversity is important in its own right to guard against the extinction of species and the disruption of communities. Additionally, the authors of a recent review (Worm et al. 2006) have argued that restoration of biodiversity increased productivity and decreased variability in the marine systems that they studied. Understanding the productivity of an ecosystem and its components that include food web interactions, trophic ecology, energy ﬂows, predator–prey relationships, and so forth, is essential for gaining insights into how an ecosystem functions. Energy ﬂow through an ecosystem is mediated by the interactions between predators and their prey. It is important to gain an understanding of the total system production capacity so that total removals can be constrained to remain within that capacity in an EAM. Information is also required on the demands of the various trophic levels so that removals of prey species are limited to remain within the demands of their predators. Knowledge of diets and how diets change through time is critical to supplying these two information needs. Improved knowledge is also required on the impacts of climate change and climate variability on marine ecosystems through the interaction between climate and oceanographic conditions and its impacts on the growth, reproduction, and survival of marine species. Information on these factors is essential if we are to begin to separate out the impacts of climate and other environmental changes from the effects of ﬁshing in an EAM context. An important tool in the collection of the information to support the move to EAM will be the further development and spread of integrated ocean observing systems. These integrated systems will link together observations, data communications and management, and data analysis and modeling. Measurements will be collected

Research Priorities for Marine Fisheries Conservation and Management on various biological, chemical, geological, and physical variables on an ongoing basis. These systems will use ﬁxed and mobile sensors and sampling devices deployed on a combination of ﬁxed buoys, platforms, underwater sensors, research and commercial vessels, drifters, ﬂoats, autonomous underwater vehicles, aircraft, and satellites. As we move down the path toward implementing EAM, we will need to further our development and use of multidisciplinary, integrated models both to explore the relationships between various biological, physical, and socioeconomic factors and to forecast the effects of various changes to environmental conditions and management practices. A number of scientiﬁc tools and analytical approaches have been developed and used over the most recent 5–10 years to support the move to EAM, particularly in Australia (Smith et al. 2007). These have included the extension of the MSE approach previously described to evaluate broader EAM strategies using the Atlantis modeling framework, development of new approaches to ecological risk assessment to evaluate the ecological impacts of ﬁshing, and the development of a harvest strategy framework and policy to form the basis for a broader EAM strategy. The predictive ability of ecosystem models has been limited thus far, mostly by the lack of the necessary data, and their greatest value to date has been to help shift the focus to ecosystem thinking.

56.6. FISHING TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT In recent decades, ﬁshing technologists worldwide have been heavily focused on modifying ﬁshing gear to reduce the deleterious impacts of ﬁshing activity, including the capture of nontarget animals (bycatch), modiﬁcation of seabed habitats, and ghost ﬁshing. Dominating this focus has been the issue of bycatch and the need for improvements in ﬁshing gear selectivity and operating practice. In some instances these improvements have been highly successful and bycatch has been almost totally eliminated, including the escape of dolphins in tuna purse seine operations in the tropical eastern Paciﬁc ocean, the exclusion of turtles using turtle excluder devices (TEDs) in tropical shrimp-trawl ﬁsheries, and the reduction of cod bycatch using the so-called eliminator trawl in New England’s groundﬁsh ﬁshery. In contrast to these

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successes, a host of examples exist where success has been elusive, including the exclusion of small ﬁsh using bycatch reduction devices (BRDs) in tropical shrimp-trawl ﬁsheries and the prevention of shark capture in pelagic longline ﬁsheries. A review of the successful improvements in ﬁshing gear selectivity and operating practice indicate that most exploit size or morphological differences between target and nontarget animals or are based on an understanding of behavioral differences between these animals. The rigid grid of a TED, for example, has a bar spacing that is designed to prevent the retention of turtles by shrimp trawls while allowing the capture of shrimp and other small animals (see Eayrs 2007 for details). The grid is also inclined to guide turtles toward a large escape opening in the net through which they can swim and escape. The escape of dolphins from a tuna purse seine is successful because dolphins swim near the sea surface while the tuna swim deeper in the water column. Using this knowledge ﬁshermen use the backdown method to skillfully drag the ﬂoat line of the purse seine underwater so dolphins can swim over the ﬂoat line and escape (see Ben-Yami 1994 for details). The deeper swimming tuna meanwhile remain safely enclosed within the purse seine. Despite these successes, ﬁshing technologists are yet to engineer similar success in ﬁsheries where the target and nontarget animals are similar in size or morphology, or where there is insufﬁcient knowledge of their behavior, including response to ﬁshing gear stimuli. In these ﬁsheries, it is likely that exploiting differences in behavior is the key to the successful development and application of selective ﬁshing gears, but until this knowledge is acquired, bycatch in these ﬁsheries will remain an issue.

56.6.1. Fish Behavior Generalized models of ﬁsh behavior have been in existence for decades, including Wardle’s (1989) model describing ﬁsh response to a demersal ﬁsh trawl, and that by Løkkeborg et al. (1989) describing ﬁsh response to a demersal longline. Many of these models have originated in Europe and are focused on local species such as cod, haddock, saithe, mackerel, tusk, and ling. With few exceptions, the behavior of ﬁsh in other regions of the world is substantially less well described and understood. Many ﬁsheries in tropical regions are located in developing countries where socioeconomic

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circumstances and limited human capacity hampers efforts to study ﬁsh behavior and develop selective ﬁshing gears. Moreover, in some of these ﬁsheries the catch may comprise several hundred species, many of which are similar in size and morphology, and separating target ﬁsh from nontarget ﬁsh using existing BRDs has achieved only limited success. Several steps need to be taken to improve knowledge of ﬁsh behavior and ﬁshing gear selectivity. Fishermen are an excellent but widely underutilized source of ﬁsh behavior information. On a daily basis they make decisions regarding where, when, and how to ﬁsh; these decisions are based on knowledge and experience collected over many years or even generations. Knowledge of ﬁsh movement and migration, both spatially and temporally, and the inﬂuence of periodicity on this behavior are of paramount importance to successful ﬁshermen. Collecting this information and using it as a foundation to better understand how and why ﬁsh behave as they do is an essential beginning to improving the selectivity of ﬁshing gear. The use of underwater camera equipment is a relatively common method used to observe ﬁsh behavior and response to ﬁshing gear, particularly in temperate-water ﬁsheries where water clarity is relatively good. In tropical ﬁsheries, however, camera use is limited because high water turbidity limits their effective visual range, and useful observations are often not possible. At night or in deep water ﬁsheries, artiﬁcial lighting may be required for effective camera observations, although the effect of lighting on ﬁsh behavior and their response to ﬁshing gear is largely unknown, and the value of these observations remains a source of concern and criticism. Acoustic techniques to observe ﬁsh behavior in these conditions are currently being developed and may soon overcome the limitations of camera systems. The Didson sonar system has been tested in some trawl ﬁsheries and found to have an effective range of 10 m or more. This system is a major step forward, however, while it is possible to identify animals that are substantially different morphologically, the ability to identify similarly shaped species remains elusive. Greater efforts are also required to understand the inﬂuence of extrinsic and intrinsic factors on ﬁsh behavior and their response to ﬁshing gear. Extrinsic factors that dominate ﬁsh behavior are ambient light intensity, water temperature, and ﬁsh density (Winger et al. in press). Assessing how these inﬂuence ﬁsh behavior in the at-sea environment is difﬁcult, and most studies have been restricted to

controlled experimentation with ﬁsh in tanks where translating the results to the marine environment is not always successful. While ﬁsh size is perhaps the best understood intrinsic factor inﬂuencing ﬁsh behavior, others include learning, experience, motivation, and physiological condition. How ﬁsh learn to escape from ﬁshing gear and use this experience to avoid future interactions are not well understood. Several studies cite the altered behavior and response of heavily ﬁshed schools in a trawl ﬁshery, or of ﬁsh that had previously encountered a baited ﬁsh hook. How long ﬁsh retain this behavior and how it is affected by motivation and physiological condition are poorly understood, primarily because the interplay between these and extrinsic factors is difﬁcult to tease apart.

56.6.2. Seabed Impact Signiﬁcant concerns exist over the impact of bottom tending ﬁshing gear, including demersal trawls and dredges, to sensitive benthic habitats and communities. Despite documentation of these concerns for more than 200 years, solutions to this problem have been few and far between. Hampering the development of effective solutions includes difﬁculties accurately quantifying the impact of ﬁshing gear and the recovery rate of benthic habitats following this impact. In some instances a response to ﬁshing gear impact has been the introduction of marine parks with zones limiting certain types of ﬁshing activity or outright bans on ﬁshing activity. Options to reduce the impact of demersal trawling include the use of lightweight ground gear materials, modiﬁed ground gear, and specialized trawl rigging designed to lift the footrope of the trawl clear from the seabed. Modern, hydrodynamically efﬁcient otter boards can also reduce seabed impact because they traverse the seabed at a low angle of attack and leave a narrower footprint on the seabed. While ground gear modiﬁcation is a positive step forward, few options have been regulated or adopted by ﬁshermen in part due to concerns over their impact on the catch, and much work remains to develop modiﬁcations that can be applied across a wider range of ﬁsheries.

56.6.3. Fuel Reliance With dwindling oil reserves and ever increasing fuel costs eroding proﬁtability in the world’s ﬁsheries, there is a need to focus on new technologies to improve

Research Priorities for Marine Fisheries Conservation and Management fuel efﬁciency and reduce fuel consumption. Newly constructed vessels are now commonly designed with the latest fuel-saving technologies and adaptations, including sleek and streamlined hull designs, bulbous bows, Kort nozzles, and variable pitch propellers. In some instances, multihulled craft have replaced monohulls for use as longliners or trawlers because they can offer less hull resistance and fuel consumption and a stable platform for ﬁshing operations. Efforts to increase fuel efﬁciency include the development of engine systems that utilize fuel more efﬁciently without compromising power output. Alternative fuels, such as biodiesel may be another way to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and already there are newly constructed trawlers with engine systems designed for dedicated use of biodiesel. Of all commercial ﬁshing methods, trawling has arguably undergone the greatest changes to reduce fuel costs, with changes not only to vessel design and propulsion systems, but also to the ﬁshing gear. The use of multislot otter boards with cambered, high-aspect ratio foils to improve hydrodynamic performance and reduce drag are increasingly ubiquitous in most large-scale trawl ﬁsheries. High-performance polyethylene twines, such as Spectra and Dyneema, are increasingly replacing traditional netting because their strength and durability allows the use of smaller diameter twine, with less fuel being required to tow the net through the water. These twines also allow the use of larger mesh nets, without compromising net strength, providing a further opportunity for fuel savings (and improved gear selectivity). Currently there is renewed interest in harnessing the wind to help offset the need for mechanical propulsion and reduce fuel consumption, and this interest is unlikely to wane in the immediate future. Globally, small-scale, artisanal craft dominate this scene with many traditionally designed and ﬁtted out for sail propulsion. Efforts are now increasingly being made to adapt this technology to larger vessels, including industrial ﬁshing ﬂeets. There is even interest in applying large parasails or kites to trawlers to reduce fuel costs when steaming and towing the trawl net.

56.6.4. Greenhouse Gas Emissions With increasing concern over the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, there is a need to account for the contribution

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to these emissions by commercial ﬁshing activity. To date this has received relatively scant attention, although in the future this could change as countries respond to calls to limit or cap the emission of these gases.

56.7. IMPACTS OF FISHING ON ECOSYSTEM STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION Fishing activity can introduce a range of direct and indirect impacts on ecosystem structure and function. Direct effects include scraping and plowing of ﬁshing gear on the seabed, the disturbance and suspension of seabed sediments, modiﬁcation of seabed habitats, and the mortality of target and nontarget species. Delayed direct effects include delayed mortality after escapement or discarding from a ﬁshing gear, and long-term gear-induced damage to the seabed. Indirect effects include changes in the structure of the food web and the relative abundance of a range of key species in the ecosystem. There is little to no information available to suggest that ﬁshing alters or limits nutrients or their availability and therefore affects primary production. The impacts of ﬁshing on ecosystem function therefore occur mostly via impacts on trophic energy ﬂow. Effects include the removal of prey species from one trophic level to levels below that required to support the demands of their predators and the next higher trophic level. Generally speaking, despite widespread efforts the successful containment or mitigation of the impacts of ﬁshing has been hampered by large information gaps, including identiﬁcation and agreement on suitable remedial action, baselines, and targets. This is underpinned by current difﬁculties observing or quantifying the various impacts of ﬁshing activity on the ecosystem. Overcoming these limitations will therefore require a sustained effort coupled with the development of new tools and techniques that enable improved quantiﬁcation and assessment of the impacts of ﬁshing.

56.8. ECOSYSTEM APPROACHES TO FISHERIES Globally, there are increasing moves toward an EAM that recognizes the physical, biological, economic,

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and social interactions within an ecosystem and attempts to achieve a range of societal goals and outcomes. Much has been written describing the steps to achieve EAM (for reviews, see Leslie and McLeod 2007; Marasco et al. 2007; Murawski

2007) and the importance and role of humans in the ecosystem. In contrast, relatively little has been written describing how ﬁshermen can meet and support the demands of EAM while maintaining access to ﬁshery resources and proﬁtability.

EMS Outcomes & Benefits

Environment

Economy

Sea Safety

Industry

Sustainable utilization of fish stocks

Improved fishing practices & operating efficiency

Improved training and safer operating practices

Enhanced industry viability

Reduced interaction with protected and/or endangered species

Efficiency gains in fishery management

Reduced accident risk & downtime

Greater public awareness & support

Reduced mortality of non-target species

Improved product quality & value

Greater industry cohesion & selfrespect

Reduced discarding practices

Reduced fishing costs & waste

Increased collaboration with other stakeholders

Reduced impact to sensitive habitats

Improved marketing opportunities

Enhanced strength against adversity

Reduced carbon emissions & reliance upon fossil fuels

Greater financial control & safety

Crew stability, reliability & performance

Improved reporting practices & mgt. involvement

FIGURE

56.1 Beneﬁts and outcomes from an environmental management system

Research Priorities for Marine Fisheries Conservation and Management

56.8.1. Environmental Management Systems and Third-Party Certiﬁcation Schemes One way for ﬁshermen to demonstrably contribute toward an EAM of ﬁshery resources is to use an environmental management system (EMS). An EMS is a process of continual improvement that results in increased beneﬁts to the environment and the ﬁshing industry (ﬁgure 56.1). Simply put, an EMS commences when a group of ﬁshermen coordinate their activity to achieve a common goal or outcome, including changes in ﬁshing practice and behavior to satisfy (or exceed) government regulation, environmental guidelines, or societal demands. More commonly utilized in manufacturing or processing industries, these systems are also being used by ﬁshermen to improve proﬁtability in an increasingly regulated environment, while facing dwindling resource access, increasing ﬁshing costs, and threats to traditional markets. In addition, ﬁshermen may use an EMS to achieve and record gains in operating efﬁciency, seafood safety and quality, and occupational health and safety. Third-party certiﬁcation schemes such as that provided by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) are a way for ﬁshermen to demonstrate that ﬁshing activity meets guidelines for responsible ﬁshing and sustainable seafood production. These schemes are also being utilized by ﬁshermen seeking market advantage, and they can easily be a component of an EMS. An EMS is therefore a tool that not only empowers ﬁshermen to enhance their working and operating environment, and tackle issues affecting their livelihoods, but also demonstrates the application of best practices and positive environmental stewardship.

References Ben-Yami, M. (1994). Purse Seining Manual. Oxford: Fishing News Books. Cadrin, S.X. (2005). Morphometric landmarks. Pp. 153–172 in S.X. Cadrin, K.D. Friedland, and J.R. Waldman (eds), Stock Identiﬁcation Methods: Applications in Fisheries Science. Boston: Elsevier Academic Press. Cadrin, S.X., K.D. Friedland, and J.R. Waldman (2005). Stock Identiﬁcation Methods: Applications in Fisheries Science. Boston: Elsevier. Eayrs, S. (2007). A Guide to Bycatch Reduction in Tropical Shrimp-Trawl Fisheries. Rev. ed.

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Rome: Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations. Gavaris, S., J.M. Porter, R.L. Stephenson, G. Robert, and D.S. Pezzack (2005). Review of Management Plan Conservation Strategies for Canadian Fisheries on Georges Bank: A Test of a Practical Ecosystem-Based Framework. ICES CM 2005/BB:05. Copenhagen: International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Hilborn, R., and C.J. Walters (1992). Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment: Choice, Dynamics and Uncertainty. New York: Chapman and Hall. Hurst, R.J. (1988). The Estimation of Catchability in the Interpretation of Bottom Trawl Survey Data. Fisheries Research Centre Internal Report 109. Wellington, N.Z.: Fisheries Research Centre. Leslie, H.M., and K.L. McLeod (2007). Confronting the challenges of implementing marine ecosystem-based management. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 5(10): 540–548. Løkkeborg, S., Å. Bjordal, and A. Fernö (1989). Responses of cod (Gadus morhua) and haddock (Melanogrammus aegleﬁnus) to baited hooks in the natural environment. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 46: 1478–1483. Marasco, R.J, D. Goodman, C.B. Grimes, P.W. Lawson, A.E. Punt, and T.J. Quinn II (2007). Ecosystem-based ﬁsheries management: Some practical suggestions. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 64: 928–939. Murawski, S.A. (2007). Ten myths concerning ecosystem approaches to marine resource management. Marine Policy 31(6): 681–690. Ricker, W.E. (1975). Computation and interpretation of biological statistics of ﬁsh populations. Bulletin 191. Ottawa: Fisheries Research Board of Canada. Smith, A.D.M., E.J. Fulton, A.J. Hobday, D.C. Smith, and P. Shoulder (2007). Scientiﬁc tools to support the practical implementation of ecosystem-based ﬁsheries management. ICES Journal of Marine Science 64: 633–639. Wardle, C. (1989). Understanding ﬁsh behaviour can lead to more selective ﬁshing gears. Pp. 12–18 in World Symposium on Fishing Gear and Fishing Vessel Design (November 1988). St John’s, Newfoundland: Marine Institute. Winger, P., S. Eayrs, and C. Glass (in press). Fish behaviour near bottom trawls. In P. He (ed), Behavior of Marine Fishes: Capture Processes and Conservation Challenges. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell Sciences. Worm, B., E.B. Barbier, N. Beaumont, J.E. Duffy, C. Folke, B.S. Halpern, J.B.C. Jackson, H.K. Lotze, F. Micheli, S.R. Palumbi, E. Sala, K.A. Selkoe, J.J. Stachowicz, and R. Watson (2006). Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. Science. 314: 787–790.

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Contributors

Sveinn Agnarsson is senior researcher at the Institute of Economic Studies at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. His research is mostly concerned with resource utilization and regional development. He has published scholarly articles on Icelandic ﬁsheries management and served as secretary for the parliament-appointed Resource Committee in Iceland. Robin Allen is executive secretary of the Interim Secretariat for the International Consultations on the establishment of the proposed South Paciﬁc Regional Fisheries Management Organization. During 1999–2007, Robin Allen served as Director of Investigations of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, the regional ﬁshery management organization responsible for the conservation of stocks of tuna and tunalike species in the eastern Paciﬁc Ocean. He was responsible for the research of the scientiﬁc staff and for the stock assessment and management advice provided to the commission. Managing the eastern Paciﬁc ﬁsheries in the face of increasing ﬁshing capacity is the major ﬁsheries management issue faced by the commission. James L. Anderson is chair and professor in the Department of Environmental and Natural Resources Economics at the University of Rhode Island and is involved with numerous research projects related to ﬁsheries and aquaculture

management, seafood markets, and international trade. His recent work has focused on analysis of international salmon, tuna, and shrimp markets and seafood futures and evaluating how aquaculture development and rightsbased ﬁsheries management are changing the global seafood sector. He is author of The International Seafood Trade (2003) and coauthor of The Great Salmon Run: Competition between Wild and Farmed Salmon (2007) with Gunnar Knapp and Cathy Roheim. He is the editor of Marine Resource Economics, the leading international journal in the ﬁeld. He has served on three National Research Council committees related to aquaculture. He earned his Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California at Davis. John Annala, Ph.D., is the chief scientiﬁc ofﬁcer and the Doherty Chair for Scientiﬁc Leadership at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. He has more than 30 years of work experience in marine ﬁsheries research and management in New Zealand and the United States and served as chief scientist for the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries from 1995 to 2004. He lead or participated in New Zealand delegations to a number of international scientiﬁc meetings and meetings to negotiate international ﬁsheries conventions convened by FAO, CITES, and APEC. Since 1997 he has chaired the scientiﬁc meetings

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Contributors

of the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Blueﬁn Tuna. He also has worked in Australia, South America, and Africa. Frank Asche is a professor in the Department of Industrial Economics at the University of Stavanger in Norway. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Bergen and his Ph.D. from the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia and the University of Rhode Island. He is a member of the science advisory board for the Worldﬁsh Center and associate editor for Marine Resource Economics. His research interests focus on aquaculture and seafood markets, but he has also been doing work in ﬁsheries management and energy economics. Recent research topics include international trade with seafood and the organization of the seafood supply chain as well as the impact of productivity development on aquaculture and seafood markets. He has published numerous articles in international journals, edited Primary Industries Facing Global Markets (2007), and coauthored The Economics of Aquaculture (2010) with Trond Bjørndal. He has also written a number of popular scientiﬁc articles, undertaken a number of research projects in Norway as well as for such international organizations as FAO and OECD, and served on the expert panel on a new law of the management of marine resources in Norway. Rachel Baird is a senior lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She specializes in international ﬁsheries law and has a particular interest in the conduct of IUU ﬁsheries. Her published Ph.D. thesis addresses IUU ﬁshing in the Southern Ocean and brings together in one text the law, policy, politics, and realities of commercial ﬁshing. Jay Barlow is a program leader at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California, and is an adjunct professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research on human impacts on marine mammals includes studies along the U.S. West Coast and in Hawaii, Mexico, Colombia, and China. He has authored or coauthored more than 70 professional papers and 50 technical reports. He is currently a

member of IUCN’s Cetacean Specialist Group and Mexico’s vaquita recovery team. In 1996 he received the Department of Commerce Gold Medal for developing a new management paradigm for marine mammal bycatch in the United States. Trond Bjørndal is director of CEMARE at the University of Portsmouth; visiting professor at Imperial College London; distinguished research fellow at the Center for Fisheries Economics, SNF, Bergen, and chairman of the board of the WorldFish Center, with headquarters in Penang. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of British Columbia. He has been professor or visiting professor at the Norwegian School of Economics, Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, Humboldt University of Berlin, and University College London. He has served as research director of the Center for Fisheries Economics SNF, Bergen, and is former president of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade. He has published extensively on ﬁsheries and aquaculture economics, including several textbooks. Over the years, he has undertaken consulting for international organizations such as the FAO and OECD and was part of the independent expert evaluation team that undertook a major evaluation of the FAO, with prime responsibility for ﬁsheries and aquaculture. Keith Brander is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute of Aquatic Resources and coordinator of the ICES/GLOBEC program. His principal ﬁelds of research are ﬁsh population dynamics and the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems. He has worked as a ﬁsheries science adviser within government departments and also for the European Commission and for six years was president of the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers in international journals and numerous book chapters, reports, and articles for newspapers and magazines. Ian Cartwright is an independent consultant advising on ﬁsheries policy and management issues for governments and industry organizations throughout the Paciﬁc region. He is currently on the board of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority and has been the chair for

Contributors numerous independent reviews and ﬁsheries management committees throughout Australia. Prior to this, he worked in ﬁsheries in the Paciﬁc for more than twenty years, both at the national and regional level, including serving as a deputy director of the Forum Fisheries Agency from 1996 to 2000. Anthony Charles is a professor of management science and environmental studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada, a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation, and author of Sustainable Fishery Systems (2001). He works regularly with ﬁshery and aboriginal organizations on Canada’s Atlantic coast and with such international bodies as the OECD and FAO. His research focuses on socioeconomics, management, and policy for ﬁsheries, marine conservation, and coastal management—including aspects of ecosystem-based management, community-based management, marine protected areas, and indicator frameworks for coastal socioecological systems. Tuong Nhu Che, Ph.D., is senior economist at the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and a visiting fellow at the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University. She has published more than ﬁfteen major professional papers and forty technical reports in economics, agricultural economics, and ﬁsheries economics, and is the coauthor of three book chapters on economic theory and measurement and a book chapter on the use of statistics in agricultural economics. Long Chu is a Ph.D. candidate at the Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian National University, and a research economist at the State Bank of Vietnam. He specializes in economic dynamics and is currently working on various models of marine reserves in a dynamic programming context. Colin W. Clark, F.R.S., F.R.S.C., is professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of The Worldwide Crisis in Fisheries: Economic Models and Human Behavior (2007), and Mathematical Bioeconomics: The Optimal Management of Renewable Resources (1976, 1990). He served for eight years on the

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Fisheries and Oceans Advisory Council, advising the federal minister of ﬁsheries about research priorities. Robin Connor is currently a senior policy analyst with the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries. Recent major project involvements have included the allocation of treaty settlement ﬁsheries assets, policy for arbitration of conﬂict between aquaculture development and wild ﬁsheries, the quota balancing regime, and reform of shared ﬁsheries management. His interdisciplinary Ph.D. from the Australian National University in natural resource policy focused on the use of individual transferable quotas in the management of ﬁsheries. Anthony Cox is currently head of the Environment and Economy Division in the Environment Directorate of the OECD. Formerly a senior economist in the OECD Fisheries Policies Division and at the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, he has worked and published on a wide range of ﬁsheries policy issues, including the costs of ﬁsheries management; ﬁsheries trade; ﬁsheries subsidies; illegal, unreported, and unregulated ﬁshing; governance; and the political economy of ﬁsheries policy reform. In recent years, he has given many talks to national and international forums on ﬁsheries subsidies in the context of the WTO negotiations on ﬁsheries subsidies. Rita Curtis is director of the Economics and Social Analysis Program, Ofﬁce of Science and Technology, U.S. NMFS in Silver Springs, Maryland. She received a Ph.D. in agriculture and resource economics from the University of Maryland. Diane P. Dupont is a professor in the Department of Economics at Brock University and holds a Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence. Her research embraces both natural resource economics (particularly issues relating to governance and ﬁsheries management on the west coast of Canada) and environmental economics (valuation of water quality). She was a member of the Scientiﬁc Advisory Committee to the Worldﬁsh Center and previously served on the board of directors of the North American Association of Fisheries Economists. She is an associate editor for the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

728

Contributors

Peter H. Dutton has been a zoologist with the NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center since 1995. His research interests include the evolution, phylogeography, ecology, and conservation biology of marine turtles and uses genetics and satellite telemetry as tools to study their life history, migration, and habitat use. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Stirling University in Scotland, his master’s degree in ecology from San Diego State University, and his Ph.D. in zoology from Texas A&M University in 1995. He has published more than 60 scientiﬁc articles and book chapters related to the biology and conservation of marine organisms. Steve Eayrs is a research scientist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Previously he was a commercial ﬁsherman working in Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, before working at the Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Environment at the Australian Maritime College for sixteen years. His research includes the development of more efﬁcient and selective ﬁshing gears, monitoring ﬁshing gear performance, and understanding ﬁsh behavior. He has worked for the FAO in the Middle East and Africa, and the South East Asian Fisheries Development Center, and he wrote a book on bycatch reduction devices in tropical shrimp ﬁsheries that has now been translated into ﬁve languages. Peter Etnoyer is a doctoral fellow at Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. He has published a dozen professional papers in ecological and oceanographic literature and serves as coeditor for the Deep-Sea News blog at Discovery Channel. He received the 2008 NOAA David Johnson Award for outstanding and innovative use of satellite data for his work tracking blue whales and sea turtles in relation to oceanographic phenomena. He is currently engaged in the taxonomy and distribution of deep-sea gorgonacea using remotely operated vehicles for his Ph.D. dissertation research. Rolf Färe is professor of economics at Oregon State University. He is the author or coauthor of twelve books and more than two hundred journal articles. He received his education at Lund University and University of California, Berkeley, where he collaborated with R.W. Shephard, known for

Shephard’s Lemma. He has done extensive work on production theory, duality, index number formulations, and data envelopment analysis. Izzat H. Feidi, ﬁsheries consultant, worked with the FAO from 1969 to 2000. He received his B.S. and M.A. in economics from the University of Oklahoma. His last FAO post was chief of the Fish Utilization and Marketing Service (1997–2000) in Rome. He has served as project manager for the Red Sea Project (1983–1985) and for INFOSAMAK Center (1986–1990), as senior regional ﬁsheries ofﬁcer for FAO/Near East Region (1991– 1996), and as secretary to the Gulfs Committee (1992–1999). He currently serves as a consultant to the Arab Academy for Science and Technology in Cairo. He has authored more than eighty published and unpublished studies, research papers, reports, and articles on various topics dealing with ﬁsheries development issues of concern to the Arab world and the world at large. Jan Helge Fosså, Ph.D., is a marine ecologist working as a senior scientist at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway. He has built up and led the deep-water coral research at the institute since its inception in 1997. His research experience ranges from studies of carrying capacity of fjords to the ecology of kelp beds, plankton, and hyperbenthos. He has been a member of the steering board for the National Research Program on Biodiversity of the Research Council of Norway, and he is presently the main adviser on coral ecosystems to the Norwegian authorities. He is principal investigator in the ongoing FP6–FP7 HERMES, PROTECT, and CoralFISH projects as well as member of the steering committee of HERMES. Hans Frost is associate professor in ﬁsheries economics at the Institute of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen. He has been working with ﬁsheries economics since 1976 and has extensive experience in ﬁsheries management, bioeconomic modeling, and ﬂeet management. He has continuously been engaged in research projects within the European Union’s research programs as well as the work of the Scientiﬁc, Technical, and Economic Committee for Fisheries. He has served as consultant to the E.U. Directorate General for Fish and has been working with the development of economic impact assessment models constructed

Contributors

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to assess economic repercussions of the ﬁsh stock management of the European Union.

on ﬁsheries, and initiated the Fisheries Global Information System.

Elizabeth A. Fulton, Ph.D., is a senior research scientist with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. She has published fourteen papers in the scientiﬁc peer-reviewed literature as well as a number of inﬂuential reports. She has developed the Atlantis model, which has been applied to more than ﬁfteen marine ecosystems around the world, including in Australia, the United States, Canada, and Mexico. She has active international professional engagements with PICES, EUROCEANS initiatives, the FAO, the U.S. NMFS, NCEAS, and the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research. She was the 2007 recipient of the Australian Life Scientist of the Year Award for her work in marine ecosystem modeling.

Eric Gilman, Ph.D., is the Head of Participation for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, an international organization constructing a biodiversity informatics research infrastructure to enable open access to global biodiversity data. His research during his 17-year career has focused on ﬁsheries science and policy. He was previously employed by the IUCN Global Marine Programme, Blue Ocean Institute, National Audubon Society, U.S. FWS, Ofﬁce of the Governor of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Pohnpei Port Authority of the Federated States of Micronesia, and has been a visiting scientist at the FAO. Eric has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, technical reports, popular articles, and educational materials on ﬁsheries bycatch and management, biodiversity informatics, coastal ecosystem responses to climate change, wetlands ecology and management, site-planning, and community-based management. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Tasmania, master’s degree from Oregon State University, and bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University.

Pramod Ganapathiraju is doing Ph.D. work on IUU ﬁshing at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia. He obtained his M.Sc. in Marine Biology and Oceanography from the Centre of Advanced Study in Marine Biology at the Annamalai University in India, where he studied recruitment patterns and critical inshore-offshore linkages of grouper juveniles in the Vellar-Coleroon estuarine system. He completed his master’s degree in marine management at Dalhousie University (2004–2005) with research on “Trawl Fishery along the India’s Northeast Coast: An Analysis of Catches, Seasonal Changes, and Ecological Impacts.” Serge M. Garcia, Sc.D. (Doctorat in Sciences), has been successively chief of the Marine Fishery Resources Service of the FAO from 1984 to 1990 and director of its Fisheries Management Division from 1990 until his retirement in 2007. He specialized in population dynamics and management of tropical ﬁsheries and published 154 papers, reports, and communications, including 60 journal articles, 21 invited chapters in books, 14 authored or coauthored books, and 34 FAO reports. He contributed actively to the elaboration of the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries and spearheaded the FAO efforts in the development of sustainability indicators in ﬁsheries and the formulation of the precautionary and ecosystem approaches to ﬁsheries. He conceived and directed the development of the U.N. Atlas of the Oceans and the FAO glossary

Heidi Gjertsen is an economist. She is currently researching cases of economic incentives in marine management areas for Conservation International, and worked for four years at the U.S. NMFS Southwest Fisheries Science Center, where she conducted research on the economics of sea turtle conservation in the Paciﬁc. She has taught conservation economics courses at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of San Diego, California. She received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2003 in the Department of Applied Economics and Management. Her dissertation included empirical work on the design and performance of marine-protected areas in the Philippines. R. Quentin Grafton is professor of economics at the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University. He currently serves as editor of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics and is a former associate editor of Marine Resource Economics. He is the author of 70 scholarly articles, 20 chapters in books, 3 edited books, and 7 coauthored books, including Economics for Fisheries Management (2006).

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Contributors

Theodore Groves is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He contributed widely to the economic theory of organization and planning and public economics before turning his attention to environmental and resource economics. Recent research has focused on the conservation of Paciﬁc sea turtles, the conservation and management of transnational ﬁsheries for highly migratory species, and voluntary agreements among ﬁshers to manage the commons problem and protected species and other ecosystem issues. His research on cooperative agreements focuses on applying the economic theory of teams, to which he is a main contributor. His research on oceanic public goods includes mechanism design issues, of which he was one of the key contributors to its economic theory. Rögnvaldur Hannesson is professor of ﬁsheries economics at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen. He was born in Iceland and grew up in a ﬁshing village and has had hands-on experience of the ﬁshing industry. He has published four books on ﬁsheries and two on petroleum economics and mineral wealth, more than 60 papers in refereed journals, and several book chapters. He has been visiting professor and scholar at universities in the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Iceland. His most recent book is The Privatization of the Oceans (2006). Ray Hilborn is Richard C. and Lois M. Worthington Professor of Fisheries Management in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, specializing in natural resource management and conservation. He currently serves as an adviser to several international ﬁsheries commissions and agencies and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in conservation, ﬁsheries stock assessment, and risk analysis. He authored Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment (1992) with Carl Walters and The Ecological Detective: Confronting Models with Data (1997) with Marc Mangel. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the 2006 recipient of the World Volvo Environment Prize for developing mathematical models for assessing and managing ﬁsh stocks, for formulating improved management

procedures and approaches, and for pioneering adaptive management strategies. Daniel S. Holland, Ph.D., is a research scientist with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and an adjunct professor at the University of Maine. He currently serves as an associate editor of Marine Resource Economics. He has worked as an economist in government, industry, and academia in the United States and New Zealand. He is the author of more than thirty scholarly articles in economics and ﬁshery journals. Alhaji M. Jallow is a ﬁsheries economist and currently serves as a ﬁsheries adviser to African countries in the FAO Regional Ofﬁce for Africa. He has more than 25 years of experience in artisanal ﬁsheries management and development in the Africa region. He is also the current secretary of a 24-member ﬁshery committee for the eastern central Atlantic. Chuck Janisse is the founder and director of the Federation of Independent Seafood Harvesters. He has participated in highly migratory ﬁshery management in local, regional, national, and international forums since 1990. The development and implementation of alternative ﬁshing technology and methods aimed at reduction of incidental marine mammal and sea turtle interaction have been his main focus during this time. Svein Jentoft, Ph.D., is a sociologist and professor at Center for Marine Resource Management, Norwegian College of Fishery Science, University of Tromsø. He specializes in social and institutional aspects of ﬁsheries and coastal governance and development and how this affects indigenous communities. He has thirty years of research and teaching experience within this and other social science areas in Norway and internationally. James Joseph has been employed by the California Department of Fish and Game, the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), and was a visiting scientist with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in New Zealand. He served as director of the IATTC from 1969 to 1999, and as an afﬁliate professor at the University of Washington and at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has served as either chairman or member on numerous advisory

Contributors committees, task forces, and consultative groups in the United States and throughout the world dealing with marine science and conservation. He retired as director of IATTC in 1999 but continues to serve as an adviser and consultant to a number of private and public institutions. His education includes a B.S. and M.S. from Humboldt State University, a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and Docteur Honoris Causa, Université de Bretagne, Brest, France. Kieran Kelleher is the ﬁsheries team leader in the World Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department and manager of the World Bank’s Global Partnership on Fisheries, which supported the Sunken Billions study. The partnership includes developing countries, leading bilateral donors to the ﬁsheries sector, and technical institutions such as FAO. He has spent most of his career in developing countries and worked as a ﬁsherman, ﬁsh farmer, ﬁsheries scientist, and economic adviser on ﬁsheries to governments. He has authored global studies on discards (ﬁsh caught and dumped at sea), on ﬁsheries enforcement, and on aquaculture. James Kirkley is professor of marine science at the College of William and Mary, School of Marine Science. He was formerly chief of economic investigations for the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, NOAA Fisheries. His research and publications have mostly been in the area of applied production economics in ﬁsheries. He has also published in the areas of welfare economics, stated preference analysis, input/output analysis, and ﬁsheries management. Tom Kompas is director of the International and Development Economics Program and professor of economics at the Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian National University. He has published more than 60 major professional papers and technical reports and is currently editor of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics. In 2004 he received the Crawford Award for Research Excellence from ABARE for this work on ﬁsheries bioeconomic models and their applications to Commonwealth ﬁsheries. Lone Grønbæk Kronbak is associate professor at the Department of Environmental and

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Business Economics at the University of Southern Denmark. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Southern Denmark in 2004 and completed the Postgraduate Certiﬁcate Program in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Davis in 2001. She has extensive experience in applying game theory to bioeconomic models and has written several professional articles and book chapters on the topic. Daniel E. Lane, Ph.D., is professor at the Telfer School of Administration at the University of Ottawa and focuses his research interests on decision-making processes, simulation modeling, and control of dynamic systems, especially in the area of commercial ﬁshing and aquaculture. He is recipient of numerous research grants and since 2005 has served as chair of the Oceans Management Research Network, a joint initiative program of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A full professor at the University of Ottawa since 1995, he has published widely in peer-reviewed papers and international conference proceedings on ﬁsheries management methods and evaluations. He is an active supervisor and reviewer of graduate students’ research. Gary D. Libecap is a Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Corporate Environmental Management at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and professor in the Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara. He also is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and previously taught economics and law at the University of Arizona. He has authored or coauthored ﬁve books; edits the series Advances in the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Economic Growth published by Elsevier Scientiﬁc; has written more than 50 journal articles on property rights, natural resources, environmental, and other issues; and serves on various National Science Foundation panels. His research is on property rights institutions—how they emerge, when they emerge, their structure, and how they affect resource use.

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Contributors

Marko Lindroos, Ph.D., is university lecturer at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Helsinki. He has published more than 40 articles in ﬁsheries economics, bioeconomic modeling, and game theory. He is head of the Fisheries Research Group at the University of Helsinki. Carl Gustaf Lundin is head of the IUCN Global Marine Program. His primary responsibility is to develop the program in four areas: marine protected areas; building partnerships for conservation of ecosystems and endangered marine species; sustainable ﬁsheries management; and climate change effects on marine resources. He is responsible for all aspects of managing the program as well as fundraising and development of public information materials. Before joining IUCN, he worked with the World Bank for more than 12 years, where his primary focus was coastal and marine management issues in several regions of the world, including the Argentina Coastal Contamination and Marine Pollution project, China Coastal Development Project, Eritrea Port Project, Indonesia Coral Reef Rehabilitation and Management Project, Mexico’s Natural Protected Areas Project 1 + 2, Mesoamerican Biological Corridor Project, Aquaculture Development Project, Seychelles Biodiversity and Marine Pollution Project, and the Uruguay Maritime Management Project. He has worked on a wide range of reports and publications in this ﬁeld as well. He received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Uppsala University in his native Sweden, and a licentiate in philosophy, natural resources management, from Stockholm University. Mitsutaku Makino, M.A., M.Phil. Ph.D., is a researcher of the Fisheries Research Agency of Japan, specializing in the ﬁsheries and ecosystem management. He has published more than forty research articles, chapters in books, and technical reports and has been involved in many international scholarly programs at such agencies as FAO, PICES, APFIC, and World Fisheries Congress. He teaches in several universities in Japan and currently serves as an editor of the Japanese Journal of Fisheries Economics. Gustavo San Martín is a marine biologist who graduated from the University of Concepcion, Chile.

He obtained his Ph.D. at the Mediterranean University, Marseilles, France, where he developed research on sea urchins and threatened species. Back in Chile he entered the Undersecretariat for Fisheries to direct the implementation of Management Areas (TURF system) and the general management of small-scale ﬁsheries (shellﬁsh and benthic macroalgae). At present his main interest is to develop integration policies among TURF systems and MPA networks. He also teaches coastal management at Andrés Bello University in Santiago. Thorolfur Matthiasson is professor of economics at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. He has published scholarly articles on ﬁshery management and ﬁsher remuneration and has also been an active participant in the debate on how to implement the individual transferable quota system in the Icelandic context. Bonnie J. McCay is Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she chairs the Department of Human Ecology. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1976. Her research and teaching have focused on challenges and policies for managing marine resources, particularly ﬁsheries. She has done ﬁeld research in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, Canada, in New Jersey, and in Baja California, Mexico, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the New Jersey Sea Grant College Program, and the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station. Books she has authored or coauthored include The Question of the Commons (1987), Oyster Wars and the Public Trust (1998), and Enclosing the Commons (2002). She serves on the Scientiﬁc and Statistical Committee of the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council, heads the Resource Policy Committee of the American Fisheries Society, and was appointed to the Fisheries Expert Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Patrick McConney is senior lecturer in marine resource management planning at the Center for Resource Management and Environmental Studies, University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus in Barbados. He is a former ﬁsheries manager, and his current research and

Contributors publications focus on adaptive co-management, socioeconomics, and governance related to small-scale ﬁsheries and marine protected areas. Alistair McIlgorm is director of the National Marine Science Center, a joint venture of the University of New England and Southern Cross University, in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia. His career in the Australian ﬁsheries economics and management started with the Australian Maritime College, leading Fisheries Research and Development Corporation stakeholder capacity development projects for eight years in the 1990s. As managing director of Dominion Consulting Pty. Ltd., he completed more than ﬁfty projects with marine resource agencies at state and Commonwealth levels and with such international agencies as the APEC. He has completed a dozen journal and peer-reviewed articles and many project reports. Richard McLoughlin’s career has focused on ﬁsheries and natural resource management. Following thirteen years with the CSIRO as a ﬁsheries scientist and then three years as principal ﬁsheries and aquaculture manager with the Tasmanian Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries, he joined the Victorian Department of Natural Resources and Environment as Director of Fisheries in 1997 and then Executive Director Fisheries Victoria in the Victorian Department of Primary Industries. From 2004 to 2007 he served as managing director of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, implementing a major ﬁshing industry reform program focused on improved sustainability and proﬁtability for the Commonwealth ﬂeet. Following a short period working on rural water policy with the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, in late 2007 he was appointed assistant secretary in the Commonwealth Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, working on reform of Australia’s rural irrigation infrastructure in the context of climate change. He holds a B.S. (Hons) and M.S. from the University of New South Wales and is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Sarah Mesnick is an ecologist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California, and is a cofounder of the Center for Marine

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Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her research on human impacts on marine mammals includes investigations of the indirect impacts of the tuna purse seine ﬁshery on dolphins in the eastern tropical Paciﬁc. She has worked in the Gulf of California for 20 years, studying the evolution, biodiversity, and conservation of ﬁshes and marine mammals. She has authored or coauthored twenty scholarly articles, book chapters, and technical reports. She is interested in the role of incentives and informational networks in vaquita conservation. Kaija Metuzals, Ph.D., is adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa in the Telfer School of Management and member of C-FOAM, the Canadian Fisheries, Oceans, and Aquaculture management group. She has worked for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, on stock assessments of herring, hake, ﬂatﬁsh, and tuna. She is interested in ﬁsheries governance, discards, bycatch, and impacts of IUU ﬁshing. Elie Moussalli is the principal of QED Associates, a ﬁshery consulting ﬁrm located in Ottawa. Since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1984, he has undertaken successive technical assistance projects in the Middle East (speciﬁcally in the Gulf and the Red Sea), Southeast Asia, and West Africa for such donors as the USAID, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank. He has also worked for United Nations organizations such as FAO and UNDP. Currently, he is at FAO’s Regional Near East Ofﬁce in Cairo responsible for ensuring the implementation of several ﬁsheries projects. Erling Moxnes is professor of system dynamics at the University of Bergen, Norway, and has worked as a senior research economist at the Center for Fishery Economics at the Institute for Economics and Business Administration in Bergen. He has published about 20 scholarly articles and book chapters, about 150 research reports and conference papers, and about 20 popular articles and newspaper chronicles. In 2000 he received the Jay Wright Forrester Award for the best contribution to the ﬁeld of system dynamics over the preceding ﬁve years. This award is given by the System Dynamics Society, for which Moxnes is president in 2009.

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Contributors

Carlos Muñoz-Piña received a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked as an economist for the government of Mexico, the World Bank, and the London Environmental Economics Center, with internships at the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation in Montreal and the Resources Renewal Institute in San Francisco. He has published papers on the economics of rural migration, environmental taxes, common property resources, poverty and the environment, economic valuation of ecosystems, water economics, and policy and the payment of environmental services. He is currently the director of Environmental Economics and Public Policy Research at the Instituto Nacional de Ecología, the research agency of the Mexican Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment. Gordon R. Munro is professor emeritus in the Department of Economics and the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia, and visiting professor at the University of Portsmouth, England. He has been involved in research and has published widely on the economics of ﬁsheries management issues for more than thirty years, giving particular emphasis to those arising under the new international Law of the Seas. In 2007, the volume Advances in Fisheries Economics was published in his honor. He has done extensive consultation for international organizations, such as the FAO, APEC, OECD, and UNDP. He recently coauthored the report Recommended Best Practices for Regional Fisheries Management Organizations, published by Chatham House, London. D. Nandakumar, Ph.D., is afﬁliated with the Community-Based Research Lab in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria, Canada, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in geography in 2007. His research focus is on sustainable livelihoods and poverty, and he is actively involved in community-based research both in India and Canada. Prior to his Ph.D, he was a senior lecturer in geography at University College in Kerala, India. He is a member of the board of Protsahan, a nongovernmental organization based in India, involved in action research for and with the coastal poor. He has undertaken a national level project to map the

extent of coastal regulation zone violations for the National Fishworkers Forum in India. He has several publications to his credit. Nalini Nayak has been working in coastal communities in India for the last three decades. Through the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers, of which she is a founding member, she has worked with coastal communities in several parts of the world in an effort to strengthen local organizations in their struggle for livelihood and sustainable ﬁsheries. She coordinated an international program on women in ﬁsheries in six countries that was launched by the ICSF. She is based in Trivandrum, in Kerala, South India, where PROTSAHAN, the research organization she works with, is based. She has several publications to her credit. Harry W. Nelson is assistant professor in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia. His area of research is in resource economics and policy analysis, specializing in forestry. He has studied how current institutional arrangements not only inﬂuence how we manage our forests but also affect the economic conditions under which ﬁrms operate in Canada. He has also examined policy change in ﬁsheries, including not only how it has been implemented but also the effects of such changes. In addition to his academic research, he has provided advice to First Nations, provincial governments, the federal government, and Canadian forest product companies on a range of issues involving different aspects of Canadian forest policy and other topics. Wallace J. Nichols is a research associate at California Academy of Sciences and founder of Ocean Revolution. He currently serves as a regional vice chair for the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialists Group and is a past president of the International Sea Turtle Society. He has authored more than ﬁfty publications on sea turtle ecology, migration, and ocean conservation, advises a dozen ocean conservation organizations, and mentors a group of creative and innovative graduate students. He wrote the bilingual children’s book Chelonia: Return of the Sea Turtle (2000) and is an active ocean communicator. J. M. (Lobo) Orensanz, a native of Argentina, is an afﬁliate professor with the School of Aquatic and

Contributors Fishery Sciences, the University of Washington, and a research scientist of Argentina’s National Council for Scientiﬁc and Technical Research, based at the National Patagonic Center. He is also a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. The main focus of his current research is the management of small-scale benthic ﬁsheries, including geoduck, Chilean loco snail and sea urchin, Argentine scallops, and Bering Sea snow crab. Currently he is working toward the development of a general framework for the assessment and management of benthic ﬁsheries. Ana M. Parma is an expert in ﬁsheries modeling, assessment, and management. She earned a Ph.D. in ﬁsheries in 1989 from the University of Washington and has worked for ten years as an assessment scientist at the International Paciﬁc Halibut Commission. In 2000 she returned to her native Argentina to become a research scientist with the Argentina’s National Council for Scientiﬁc and Technical Research, at the Centro Nacional Patagonico. The main focus of her current work is on small-scale, sedentary reef, and shellﬁsh ﬁsheries, and she is involved in the evaluation of spatially explicit management approaches in several ﬁsheries in South America. Hannah Parris is an applied policy economist and geographer who specializes in bridging the gap between economic theory and the needs of policy makers in natural resource management. She is currently completing a Ph.D. at the Australian National University on evaluating regional institutions for ﬁsheries management of ﬁsheries in the Paciﬁc and the potential for allocation the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission. Prior to this she worked as a policy analyst on environmental and natural resource management issues for the Australian government. L. Scott Parsons, Ph.D., is a former scientist and senior executive in the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans and is currently an adjunct professor at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. He has represented Canada at numerous international organizations, including NASCO, ICCAT, IOC, and ICES, and has served as president of ICES. He is author of Management of Marine Fisheries in Canada (1993) and coeditor of Perspectives on Canadian Marine Fisheries Management (1993). His

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research interests include oceans and ﬁsheries governance systems, ecosystem-based management, and the performance of regional ﬁsheries management organizations. Sean Pascoe, Ph.D., joined CSIRO as an economist in the Marine and Atmospheric Division in 2006. Prior to this, he was professor of natural resource economics and director of the Center for the Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources (CEMARE) at the University of Portsmouth. He has published around sixty refereed articles in both economics and ﬁsheries journals. The primary focus of his research has been applied economic analysis to support ﬁsheries management and policy. This has included studies of productivity analysis, demand modeling, and bioeconomic modeling. His studies have involved both qualitative and quantitative analysis and the development and application of economic theory to ﬁsheries. Bruce Phillips is an adjunct professor in the Department of Environmental Biology and Aquatic Science Research Unit, Curtin University of Technology, Perth. He has published more than 175 research papers mainly on spiny lobster biology, ecology, and management. He was the joint editor of three books on rock (spiny) lobster biology, ﬁsheries, management, and aquaculture and contributed many of the chapters in these volumes. He has recently edited and contributed to Eco-labelling in Fisheries: What Is It All About (2003). Lobsters: Biology, Management, Aquaculture and Fisheries (2006). He is currently conducting research into the recruitment of the phyllosoma larvae and puerulus stage of Panulirus cygnus in relation to the Leeuwin Current off Western Australia, and examining prospects for aquaculture of Panulirus cygnus and other spiny lobster species in Australia. Tony Pitcher is founding director of the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia, after holding academic posts in Germany, Ireland, and England. He has published more than 430 items, including 15 books, and trained more than 30 Ph.D. students. He edits Fish and Fisheries, the leading journal in the ﬁeld. André E. Punt, Ph.D., is a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University

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Contributors

of Washington, Seattle. Prior to this he was a senior research scientist with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Hobart, Australia. He has been involved in research on marine population dynamics, stock assessment methods, and harvesting theory since 1986 and has published more than 120 papers in the peer-reviewed literature, along with more than 300 technical reports. He is currently associate editor for the Journal of Applied Ecology and Population Ecology and has been a member of scientiﬁc committee of the International Whaling Commission since 1990. Nick Rayns has worked in ﬁsheries research and management for the past twenty years. He gained his Ph.D, in aquaculture from Otago University in New Zealand. Following a brief period of employment with New Zealand Fisheries, he moved to Australia and has managed demersal and pelagic ﬁsheries from cool temperate to tropical waters, including commercial, recreational, aquaculture, and traditional ﬁsheries. He has been Director of Fisheries in the Northern Territory and New South Wales. He also spent three years as a nonexecutive director of the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation and is a fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is currently the Executive Manager for Fisheries at the Australian Fisheries Management Authority. Jake Rice is currently National Senior Adviser, Ecosystem Sciences for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), Ottawa. From 1996 to 2007 he was Director, Peer Review and Science Advice for DFO. Previous positions with DFO included Division Chief, Marine Fish at Paciﬁc Biological Station (1990–1996), and Division Chief, Groundﬁsh (1998–1990), and Section Head, Marine Ecology (1992–1998), at the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Center. He also held faculty positions at Memorial University of Newfoundland (biology) and Arizona State University (environmental studies) and was guest professor of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences from July 1996 through March 1997. Lorraine (Lori) Ridgeway is Director General of International Policy and Integration in the Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO). She is responsible, in collaboration with others in DFO and other departments, for policy-related

international trade and business development, international ﬁsheries policy, international oceans and ecosystems policy, and international integration, under the umbrella of the Canadian International Governance Strategy for ﬁsheries and oceans. She was chair of the OECD Fisheries Committee (2000–2005) and chair of many ad hoc OECD processes and workshops, cochair (2006–2008) of the U.N. Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea, and chair of the APEC Fisheries Working Group. She has been a speaker at many international forums, especially with respect to the challenges in the ﬁsheries and oceans governance and policy agenda internationally. Prior to joining DFO in 1999, she held diverse positions in policy and economics in the government of Canada. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, Ph.D., heads the Coordination for Marine Mammal Research and Conservation, National Institute of Ecology, in Mexico. He established and chairs the International Committee for the Recovery of Vaquita. He has authored or coauthored more than 40 scholarly articles, book chapters, and technical reports on marine mammals, and has been invited to participate in many international committees, workshops, and working groups related to the management and conservation of marine mammals, among them IUCN’s Cetacean Specialist Group, the Red List Authority, and the Committee of Scientiﬁc Advisers from the Society for Marine Mammalogy. Benedict P. Satia is an afﬁliate professor (institutions and governance) at the School of Marine Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle. Prior to November 2004 he was chief of the International Institutions and Liaison Service in the Fisheries and Aquaculture Department of the FAO and secretary to the FAO Committee on Fisheries and the Advisory Committee on Fisheries Research. For several years he was the director of a regional ﬁsheries project covering twenty coastal countries in West Africa from Mauritania to Angola. He has authored more than forty professional and technical papers in ﬁsheries and aquaculture. Carl-Christian Schmidt is the head of the Fisheries Policies Division in the Directorate for Trade and Agriculture of the OECD. Following

Contributors the years 1979–1982 when he worked for the Danish Ministry of Fisheries, he was appointed administrator at the OECD in 1982 and principal administrator in 1988. In 1997 and 1998, he was on leave of absence while setting up the Marine Stewardship Council in London. In 2001, he was promoted to the Head of the Fisheries Policy Division. Kathleen Segerson, Ph.D., is Philip E. Austin Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on the incentive effects of alternative environmental policy instruments. She was recently honored as a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE). In addition, she is currently president of AERE. She has held several editorial positions, including coeditor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, associate editor for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and coeditor of Ashgate Studies in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics. She is currently a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board and the Board of Agriculture and Natural Resources of the National Academy of Sciences. Her publications include more than ninety scholarly journal articles and book chapters and three edited volumes. Jeffrey A. Seminoff is an ecologist and leader of the Marine Turtle Ecology and Assessment Program for the NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California. He is adjunct faculty at IndianaPurdue University and University of Florida, is an active member of the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group, and is deeply involved with U.S. FWS/NMFS efforts to update marine turtle status assessments for the U.S. Endangered Species Act. His current research uses innovative approaches such as stable isotope analyses, biotelemetry, animal-borne imagery, and aerial surveys to elucidate the life history of seabirds, marine turtles, and sharks. In addition to research, he is involved with numerous marine conservation initiatives in the eastern Paciﬁc. Bruce Shallard is director of Bruce Shallard and Associates, a New Zealand–based consultancy.

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Bruce spent ﬁfteen years with the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries, where he held senior management positions throughout a period of major change in New Zealand. He was one of the key people involved in introducing the concept of a quota management system to the New Zealand ﬁshing industry in 1986, based on individual transferable quotas, and played a major role in quota management. Since 1995 he has offered international consulting services in the marine sector worldwide, with particular emphasis on the Middle East. Hein Rune Skjoldal is a marine ecologist working as a senior scientist at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway. He has served as chairman of ICES Advisory Committee on Ecosystems (2001–2003) and as chair of an advisory group for establishment of marine protected areas in Norway (2001–2005). He currently serves as the Regional Vice-Chair for Western Europe on the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management. He is editor of the book The Norwegian Sea Ecosystem (2004) and is currently coeditor of the book The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries (forthcoming). Anthony D.M. Smith, Ph.D., is a senior principal research scientist with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and leader of the ecosystembased ﬁsheries management stream within the Wealth from Oceans Flagship. He has published more than ﬁfty peer-reviewed scientiﬁc publications, as well as numerous scientiﬁc reports, and has undertaken ﬁsheries consultations in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Namibia, Ecuador, and Chile, as well as for the FAO and for the Marine Stewardship Council. He is a former associate editor of Natural Resource Modeling and was the recipient of an Australian Centenary of Federation Medal for contributions to national and international ﬁshery science. Massimo Spagnolo is professor at the Università di Salerno and director of IREPA, Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture Economic Research in Salerno, Italy. He has been involved in ﬁsheries management and economics for the last 25 years and teaches Fisheries Economics and Management at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Salerno, Italy. He has been serving

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Contributors

as director of the Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture Research Economics since its foundation in 1982. In that position he is responsible for the E.U. rule on data collection and for the production of Italian ﬁshery statistics. He has been responsible for the negotiation of many E.U. rules concerning the Common Fishery Policy and has represented the Italian government in various ﬁsheries committees, including within the activities of the European Union, OCDE, and FAO. Since 1994 he has been responsible for technical assistance to the General Directorate for Fisheries and Aquaculture of the Italian Ministry of Agriculture. In this position he has also contributed to the introduction of territorial property rights in the national clam ﬁsheries and participated in a number of programs in other countries. He has published two books on ﬁsheries economics and management and more than forty articles and book chapters. Dale Squires is a senior scientist with the NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, and adjunct professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, and on the Scientiﬁc Committee of the International Sustainable Seafood Foundation. He conducts research on the economics of sea turtle conservation, technical change, and international tuna ﬁsheries and teaches classes at the University of California, San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Derek Staples is a New Zealander but has worked for much of his career in Australia and the Southeast Asian region. He has a Ph.D. in ﬁsheries ecology from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and a postdoctoral diploma in aquaculture from the Tokyo University of Fisheries. His interests include all aspects of the sustainable development of ﬁsheries and aquaculture, particularly small-scale operators in developing countries. He is presently employed as the Senior Fishery Ofﬁce with the FAO, stationed in Bangkok. Prior to taking up this post, he was a senior science adviser to ministers and policy decision makers in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry in Australia. Stein Ivar Steinshamn is research director at the Center for Fisheries Economics at the Institute for Research in Economics and Business Administration in Bergen, Norway. He has published

about thirty peer-reviewed articles in international journals and almost eighty scientiﬁc reports and several book chapters on ﬁsheries economics, resource management, and environmental economics. He is currently senior editor of Natural Resource Modeling. He has also been the manager of more than twenty research projects with international participation and has organized several international conferences in ﬁsheries economics. Robert L. Stephenson, Ph.D., has been a research scientist with the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans since 1984. He has worked extensively on the ecology, assessment, and management of Atlantic herring. His current research interests include ﬁsheries resource evaluation, ﬁsheries management science, strategies for conservation of biodiversity, application of integrated management and the ecosystem approach, and aspects of the history of marine science and policy. He has been an active contributor to ﬁsheries science internationally, including roles as chair of ICES Resource Management and Pelagic Fish committees and membership of the ICES Advisory Committee on Fisheries Management. U. Rashid Sumaila is associate professor and director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Center in Vancouver. His research is in the area of natural resources and environmental economics, with particular emphasis on ﬁsheries. He has won numerous awards, including the Craigdarroch Award for Societal Contribution, the Zayed International Price for the Environment, and the Peter Wall Center Senior Early Career Scholar Award. He has given invited talks at the United Nations, the White House, the U.S. Congress, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the World Trade Organization. His work has generated signiﬁcant international interest and has been cited by, among others, the Economist, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, and Voice of America. Daryl R. Sykes was a full-time professional ﬁsherman for twenty years, until 1992. As an independent ﬁsheries consultant since then, he has completed contracts for industry groups and government agencies in New Zealand and

Contributors overseas. Since 1996 he has been the executive ofﬁcer and research program manager for the New Zealand Rock Lobster Industry Council, which provides a range of policy, advocacy, technical, promotional, and administrative services to the industry, and is a stock assessment research provider to industry and to the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries. Maree Tait is Outreach Director for the Crawford School at the Australian National University and editor of the Paciﬁc Economic Bulletin and manages the associated large Paciﬁc Outreach program in Australia and throughout the Paciﬁc region. She is also a board member and manager of the journal Asian-Paciﬁc Economic Literature, manager of the Australian node of the World Bank’s Global Development Learning Network (GDLN), and a member of the Governing Committee of GDLN Asia Paciﬁc and the Global Steering Committee of GDLN. She was formerly managing editor of Asia Paciﬁc Press. Diana Tingley, Ph.D., has 13 years of experience working as a ﬁsheries economist and policy specialist as a researcher and consultant and under secondment to government. Following 8 years as a Senior Research Fellow at CEMARE (University of Portsmouth), she has recently returned to consultancy and now works for GoBe Consultants Ltd. In 2003–2004, she was seconded to the U.K. prime minister’s “Strategy Unit” to participate in a major review of the U.K. ﬁshing industry that helped shape contemporary U.K. ﬁsheries management and policy directions. She has both presented and published her research internationally. Her current areas of interest include commercial ﬁsheries management and policy analysis, risk, marine recreational ﬁsheries, and consensus building and stakeholder facilitation within the marine environment. Ralph E. Townsend, Ph.D., has been chief economist for the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries since 2007. He was associate professor and chair of economics in the Doermer School of Business and Management Sciences, Indiana UniversityPurdue University Fort Wayne in 2006–2007 and was on the faculty of economics at the University of Maine for 25 years prior to 2006. He has been a researcher for more than 25 years on the economics of ﬁsheries management, with

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more than 50 publications in the area. His most recent research interests focus on institutional reforms to promote self-governance of ﬁsheries, and he has just completed the editing of a book of case studies of ﬁsheries self-governance for the FAO. He has been involved in numerous ﬁsheries advisory roles in the United States and abroad and was the recipient of two Fulbright fellowships to study ﬁsheries management, in Iceland and the Philippines. He served as president of the North American Association of Fisheries Economists in 2005–2007. Sigbjørn Tveterås is professor at the Centrum Business School, Pontiﬁcia Universidad Católica del Peru. His research areas have concentrated on aquaculture and seafood markets. He has written a several articles and book chapters and conducted several research projects related to these topics. He has been a visiting scholar at Cornell University and FAO and has contributed work on seafood price indices to the FAO, as well as writing and coauthoring several popular scientiﬁc pieces. He earned his Ph.D. from the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. Pham Van Ha, Ph.D., is deputy director of the Institute of Financial Science at the Academy of Finance, Ministry of Finance in Hanoi. He is the author of more than twenty professional papers and technical reports in ﬁnance, macroeconomic modeling, and ﬁsheries economics. Niels Vestergaard is professor in applied microeconomics at the Department of Environmental and Business Economics, University of Southern Denmark, and head of the Center for Fisheries and Aquaculture Management and Economics, which over the last six years arranged more than twenty Ph.D. courses and workshops. He has published more than 25 peer-reviewed papers, more than 30 technical reports, and numerous working papers. He has led several research projects in ﬁsheries and has advised governments on ﬁsheries policies. John Walden is an economist in the Social Sciences Branch of NOAA Fisheries, Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The Social Sciences Branch provides economic and social impact analysis and guidance to regional ﬁshery management bodies.

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Contributors

He conducts research on measuring productivity, technical efﬁciency, and capacity of the commercial ﬁshing ﬂeet and applying math programming models to solve ﬁshery management problems. Trevor Ward, Ph.D., is on the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences in the Institute for Regional Development at the University of Western Australia in Perth. He has published more than 140 scientiﬁc journal papers, book chapters, and research reports in marine ecology and environmental management, and in 1996 was jointly awarded the CSIRO Chairman’s Medal for excellence in marine science. He was formerly leader of CSIRO’s national marine environmental science program and currently holds adjunct teaching and research appointments at three Australian universities. He specializes in performance assessment systems for marine ecosystems and biodiversity and is highly experienced in assessing ﬁsheries for compliance with the ecolabeling requirements of the Marine Stewardship Council for sustainable ﬁsheries. His current research and consulting focus on decision support systems for biodiversity conservation and natural resource management. Meryl J. Williams, Ph.D., is currently a member of the Australian Aid Advisory Council, the Scientiﬁc Steering Committee of the Census of Marine Life, the High Seas Marine Protected Areas Working Group, and the Scientiﬁc Committee of DIVERSITAS. Among many noteworthy positions, she has previously served as executive ofﬁcer of the Future Harvest Alliance Ofﬁce, director general of WorldFish Center, and director of the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Rolf Willmann is a senior ﬁshery planning ofﬁcer in FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Department dealing with policy and management issues in marine capture ﬁsheries, especially in relation to the implementation of the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. He has led the

development of the FAO Ecolabeling Guidelines for Marine Capture Fisheries and undertaken many assessments of the economics of capture ﬁsheries in developing countries with a particular focus on small-scale ﬁsheries and poverty issues. Douglas Clyde Wilson is the research director of the Innovative Fisheries Management, a research centre at Aalborg University in Denmark. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Michigan State University in 1996. He works as an environmental and natural resource sociologist with extensive experience in ﬁsheries management in Africa, North America, and Europe. His research program focuses on communicative systems theory and the analysis of institutional-scale management policy and the sociology of science/ knowledge. He has a long-standing interest in the sociology of science and knowledge and has published several papers on the subject. He is qualiﬁed as a university level instructor in African studies, development sociology, economic sociology, qualitative and quantitative methods including survey research, rural sociology, and the sociology of science. He served as editor-inchief of the Common Property Resource Digest and is a member of the executive council of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. He is the current chair of the ICES Working Group on Fisheries Systems. Andrew Wright is currently the executive director of the Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission and a regular commentator on Paciﬁc ﬁsheries issues. He has more than 25 years of experience in ﬁsheries and environmental management in the Paciﬁc region in a wide range of senior management roles. He served as deputy director for the Forum Fisheries Agency from 1992 to 1995 and then as manager of the International Waters Project for the Paciﬁc Regional Environmental Program.

Index

abalone illegal ﬁshing, 168, 175 illicit markets, 174 Aboriginal peoples, 467n Maori, 350, 353–354, 358n participation in Canadian ﬁsheries, 407–408, 461–462, 467 abundance, 140–141 catch per unit effort and, 640 effect of marine reserves, 660 estimates, 715–716 index of, 584, 586 seasonal, 11 access. See also open access allocations in Canada, 399–400 control in Chile, 332–333 cost and requirements of controlling, 666–667 securing, 451 accountability, 488 in ecolabeling programs, 616 of management organizations, 497 for policies, 499 acidiﬁcation, 4, 223, 228, 639 effect on reefs, 223, 228 acoustic mapping, 219–220, 716. See also sonar Act of Accession of Denmark, Ireland, Norway, and the United Kingdom, 370 adaptive capacity, role in management, 539 adaptive management, 294 Adriatic Sea, partition of, 423 adverse selection, 232, 508–509, 515, 565, 567, 570n aerial surveys, 716 Africa effect of climate change on ﬁsheries, 132 export, 173

ﬁsh consumption, 24 ﬁsheries employment, 29 ﬁsheries of West, 258–262 ﬁshing communities, 79 illegal ﬁshing, 266 regional ﬁsheries management organizations, 269n traditional ﬁsheries, 533 women in ﬁsheries, 75, 77 age, ﬁsh estimation of, 714 at maturity, 715 structure of ﬁsh populations, 3, 128, 129 agency problems, 521 agendas, involvement of ﬁshers in determining, 541 aggregate cost function, 661 Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, 100 Agreement on the International Dolphin Conservation Program, 159 agricultural exports, percent as ﬁsh, 259 agricultural runoff, 51 agricultural subsidies, 110n aid. See funding airfreight, 117 Alaska community development quotas, 683 coral habitats, 216 efﬁciency gains, 37 Alaska pollock Bering Sea ﬁshery, 388 market changes, 117, 118 overexploitation, 651 trawl ﬁshery, 670 albacore tuna, exploitation of, 699 Aleutian Islands, coral habitats, 216

741

742 algae harvesting, 51 allocation, 319, 464–466, 669, 702 in Canadian ﬁsheries, 459, 462, 463 eligibility for, 672 information problems, 573–577 international cooperation and, 485 in management organizations, 653–654 in oil and gas production, 575 path dependencies, 577–579 AMERBs. See Chile, territorial use rights American Fisheries Act, 388 anchoveta ﬁshery, production, 123 anchovies, 260 Ancud Bay, 330, 335 Anderson, David, 404 animal protein intake, portion as ﬁsh, 3 annual catch entitlements, 302–303 in New Zealand, 350 antibiotics, use in salmon aquaculture, 69 antidumping, 251 aquaculture, 23 climate change and, 127 effect on reefs, 222 environmental issues, 67–70 feed for, 3, 21, 66–68, 251 growth of, 28, 114 history and rationale, 60–61 in India, 276, 285 in Japan, 290 market targets, 118–119 negative feedback, 69 production, 61–63, 65–66 salmon, 69, 117, 459, 464 in Saudi Arabia, 433–434 seafood consumption and, 119 in Southeast Asia, 251 within territorial use rights ﬁsheries, 330 use of techniques in ﬁsheries, 523 worldwide supply of ﬁsh, 3 Arabian Peninsula, 427 Arabian Seas, 426 Arafura Sea, illegal ﬁshing, 169 aragonite, 223 arbitration, third-party, 528 artiﬁcial light, 52 artisanal ﬁsheries, 6, 166. See also ﬁshing communities; small-scale ﬁsheries catch of turtles, 195, 198 in Chile, 324, 327–328 ﬁshing methods, 465 proportion of total catch by, 168 in Red Sea area, 430, 435 vessels of, 284 in West Africa, 260 Asia aquaculture volume, 63 effect of climate change on ﬁsheries, 132 ﬁsh demand, 24 ﬁsheries employment, 29 numbers of vessels, 30

Index traditional ﬁsheries, 533 wages of ﬁshers, 30 women in ﬁsheries, 75, 77, 80 Asia-Paciﬁc Economic Cooperation, 99, 245, 489 Asia-Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission, 245 assessment error, 601–602, 604 Association of South East Asian Nations, 245 Atlantic Coastal Fisheries Cooperative Management Act (U.S.), 384 Atlantic Fisheries Adjustment Program, 406 Atlantic Fisheries Policy Review, 404 Atlantic Groundﬁsh Advisory Committee, 403 Atlantis model, 184–185, 187–190 at-sea shipment, smuggling, 159 auctions, 319, 442n in buybacks, 511–512 Australia buybacks, 510 exclusive economic zone, 338 ﬁsheries management, 339–340, 687 involvement of stakeholders, 688 management advisory committee system, 689–691 overﬁshing and, 340–345 harvest control for scaleﬁsh and sharks, 587 history of ﬁsheries, 338–339 illegal ﬁshing, 168, 174 priority species for regulation, 178 protected areas, 14 regulation and ecolabeling, 612 shrimp import disputes, 251 use of ecosystem modeling, 186–187, 187–190 women in ﬁsheries, 76 Australian Fisheries Management Authority, 339–340 Bacon, Francis, 88 Bahrain, ﬁsheries management, 436 Bali Plan of Action, 245, 502n Baltic Sea, vulnerability to climate change, 132 bans, 262, 290 import, 121 unilateral, 233 barbless hooks, 152 Barents Sea bottom trawling in, 220 ﬁsh stocks, 361 illegal ﬁshing, 174–175, 175–176 Loophole, 363 bathymetry, 48 Bayesian methods, 584, 643 Bay of Fundy, herring ﬁshery, 400 beach seines, 278 behavior, ﬁsh, 719–720 predicting, 596 behavior, human, 189–190, 348 buybacks and, 514 norms for, 678 strategic, 556–561 voluntary actions, 620–621 Beijing Declaration, 74 Bellagio Blueprint, 233

Index beneﬁts, distribution of, 15–16 Benguela Current large marine ecosystem, 258 Benin ﬁsheries employment, 260 migrant ﬁshers, 268 Bering Sea crab ﬁsheries, 587 pollock ﬁshery, 388 Bering Sea Pollock Conservation Cooperative, 37 bids, in buybacks, 511–513, 515–516, 517n bigeye tuna, 444 conservation, 450 exploitation, 699 overﬁshing, 448 bilateral agreements, 528, 619 biodiversity, 87, 718 buyback programs and, 507 bycatch and, 141, 150 discoveries, 43 ecosystem-based management and, 485 effect of ﬁsheries on, 140–142, 147, 187 global mapping projects, 53 maintaining, 139 policy, 143, 492 in the Red Sea, 428 of Sudanese ﬁsheries, 438 bioeconomic models, 639–640, 664 parameters, 662 strategic behavior and, 557 biological connectivity, 334 biomass, 661, 715. See also spawning biomass deﬁnition of overﬁshing and, 385 harvestable, 603 maximum sustainable yield as function of, 586 modeling, 184, 584, 640 optimal equilibrium, 644 stock, 140, 568 bionomic equilibrium, 105, 640–641 biophysical models, 184 bioprospecting, 223 Biosphere Reserve, 209 Bismarck Sea, 455n blacklisting, 171–173, 654, 657n blueﬁn tuna, 416 exploitation, 699 management, 420, 424, 655 blue whiting, 361 stock health, 365 boat trafﬁc, 53 Bombay duck, 278 bonga, 260 bootstrapping, 584 BORMICON model, 183 boycotts, 622 Brazil, World Trade Organization policy, 109 break-even analysis, 421 British Columbia aquaculture, 464 quota system, 402, 670 salmon ﬁshery, 459–464, 467

743

salmon species, 458 user conﬂicts, 407–408 Brownian motion, 661 brush parks, 262 building construction, 52 buyback programs, 106, 190, 211, 212, 467–468n asymmetric information in, 508 in Australia, 343 beneﬁts and uses of, 516–517 in Canada, 399 consequences of, 507–508 description and examples, 550–551 designing, 509–510, 709–710 ﬁnancing, 514, 515, 709–710 ﬁshery transitions and, 514 of ﬁshing vessels, 13. See also decommissioning ﬁxed prices, 511 importance of capacity estimates, 547 in Italy, 423 in New Zealand, 349 rationales for, 507 transnational, 516 in tuna ﬁsheries, 708–709 in U.S., 387 buying guides, 609 bycatch, 5, 51, 182, 268 avoiding crab, 291 biodiversity and, 141 caps, 624, 625 economic and social issues, 150 fees for, 155 in Indian ﬁsheries, 282 reducing, 152–153, 155, 157, 389 cost-effectiveness of, 202 incentives for, 199, 624 initiatives, 157, 159–161 voluntary programs, 160, 625 research investment to address, 161 sea turtle, 196, 198–199, 618, 623 tolerable limit, 323n in tuna ﬁsheries, 152, 154 unsustainable, 142 bycatch reduction devices, 719 caletas, 327 California, drift gillnet regulations, 201, 233, 235 Cambodia, wages of ﬁshers, 30 Canada, 323n. See also British Columbia; Nova Scotia Aboriginal participation ﬁsheries, 407–408 Atlantic groundﬁsh stocks, 394–396 conservation policy, 402–403 ﬁsheries characteristics and trends, 393–394 ﬁsheries management, 398–399, 405–406, 411, 524 contractual, 528 ecosystem-based, 407–408 northern cod ﬁshery, 10 oil rights, 574 Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Scientiﬁc Advisory Committee, recommendations on target mortality rate, 588

744 Canadian Fisheries Adjustment and Restructuring Program, 461 Canadian Fisheries Assistance and Restructuring Program, 406 Canary Current large marine ecosystem, 258 Canary Islands, 173 canneries, investment in, 450 canning, 116 capacity. See ﬁshing capacity; overcapacity capacity building, 498–499, 501, 539 capacity utilization, 553n capelin, 361 stock models, 366 capital, 284 costs, 26 effect of subsidies on, 361 excessive and rent, 367 inﬂow in Red Sea region, 431 versus labor, 532–533 removal of redundant, 514 caps bycatch, 624, 625 on quota holdings, 318 cargo culture, 197 Caribbean tuna longline ﬁsheries, 533 women in ﬁsheries, 76 carrying capacity, 640, 661 caste hierarchy, of Indian ﬁshing communities, 276 catch. See also total allowable catch in Australian ﬁsheries, 338, 345 composition, 371, 394, 523 constant, 585 in coral habitats, 216 country rankings, 171, 382 data, 35, 172, 319, 420, 704 estimates, 133, 463 fees, 303–304 global stagnation, 21 in Icelandic ﬁsheries, 299, 306 in Japanese World Heritage Site, 296 limits, 173, 591 methods to ensure optimum, 701 outside economic exclusive zones, 668 redistribution, 367 in Red Sea region, 429 reporting, 168, 173, 568–569 of straddling stocks, 651 target, 162 in West African ﬁsheries, 261 catchability, 716 catchability coefﬁcient, 640 catch-effort equation, 640 catch per unit effort, 170, 638, 715, 716–717 as index of stock abundance, 640 cause-effect relationships, nonlinear, 89 Center for Marketing Information and Advisory Services for Fishery Products in the Arab Region, 433

Index Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission, 245 cephalopods, overexploitation, 261 certiﬁcation. See environmental certiﬁcation; product certiﬁcation cetaceans. See also common names of cetaceans bycatch and gear, 154, 156 conservation and exploitation, 8–10 gillnet entanglement, 208 protection, 53 chakara, 11 Challenger Scallop Enhancement Company, 351 Chatham House, 171, 502n chemical industry, voluntary regulation in, 624 chemicals, prohibition against use, 262 Chesapeake Bay, 190 children, employed in ﬁshing, 77 Chile administrative regions, 325 industry reaction to transferable quotas, 670 institutional stakeholders, 327–328 salmon exports, 117 territorial use rights, 324, 328–330, 365–327 Chilka Lake, 275 China aquaculture, 62, 63, 70n disruption of markets, 523 extinction of river dolphin, 210 ﬁsh demand, 24 ﬁsheries production, 23 ﬂeets, 31 food expenditures, 121 maﬁa in South Africa, 175 misreporting of catch, 173–174 seafood processing, 120 women in ﬁsheries, 75 World Trade Organization policy, 109 chinook salmon, 397, 404 chloroﬂuorcarbons, 201 chlorophyll fronts, 48 chutes, underwater setting, 153 CITES. See Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species civil sanctions, 377 clams, stocks and management, 422–423 Clean Development Mechanism, 199, 231 climate, effect on production and food chain, 127–128 climate change, 4, 22, 123–125, 190, 718 direct and indirect effects, 127 increased sensitivity to, 128 research on, 126 vulnerability to, 132 closures of ﬁsheries, 236–237, 249, 262, 290, 618 Canadian, 403 Icelandic, 300 as incentives, 624 seasonal in U.S., 387 tuna, 708 U.K., 376 Coalition of Legal Toothﬁsh Operators, 176

Index coastal communities. See also ﬁshing communities of the Red Sea region, 429–430 coastal development, 51–52, 195 in India, 276 in Red Sea area, 428 coastal ﬁsheries, 49, 146, 287 in Chile, 327 choice of economic instruments, 318 in India, 283 in Italy, 417 local knowledge, 541 management of U.S., 384 regulation of U.K., 374 sea turtles and, 196, 198, 233 in Southeast Asia, 252 threatened, 44 coastal states, 656n shared resource management, 649 cod effect of climate on, 130–131 ﬁsheries in Iceland, 299–301 illegal ﬁshing, 174–175 quotas, 362–363 status of stocks, 173, 299, 365, 393, 394, 410 stock models, 366 in U.K. ﬁsheries, 371 Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, 12–13, 74, 87, 143, 167, 249, 268, 495, 501 Codex Alimentarius, 245 cognitive conﬂict, 597, 598 coherence, 501 in policy, 494 in priority setting, 492 coho salmon, 397, 404 ﬁshing restrictions, 464 colonialism, 197 Colorado River, 208 co-management, 536, 675–677 acceptance by ﬁshers, 683–684 assignment of responsibilities, 679 in Australia, 339, 344, 688–689 beneﬁts of, 689 in buyback programs, 515 compared to corporate governance, 522 conﬂict and competition in, 681 property rights and, 682–683 scale of community, 680–681 of small-scale ﬁsheries, 542 in U.S., 382 command-and-control approach, 535, 550 commercial ﬁshing, bias against, 693 commercialization, effect on co-management, 682 Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, 166, 183 illegal ﬁshing initiatives, 172 Commission for the Conservation of Southern Blueﬁn Tuna, 245, 699–701 seabird conservation policies, 159 Common Fisheries Policy (E.U.), 108, 370, 374, 415

common property, 7–8, 249, 303, 310, 313, 400, 405, 411, 647, 666–667 effect of subsidies on, 105 theory, 247 Commonwealth Scientiﬁc and Industrial Research Organization (Australia), 340 communication, 537 expertise, 488 importance in buyback programs, 509 of policy, 597 in small-scale ﬁsheries management, 541 with stakeholders, 690–691 community. See also coastal communities; ﬁshing communities characteristics of, 679 deﬁnitions, 679–680 locus and scale, 680–681 rights, 667, 682 community-based management, 247, 542 in India, 283 in Southeast Asia, 247–248 community-based quotas, 314–315, 317, 321, 642 community organizations, 285 compensatory mitigation, 155 competition, 6, 105 among ﬁshers, 641 in aquaculture, 70 loss of competitiveness, 318 models of, 183 complex adaptive systems, 535 complexity managing, 634 role in learning, 596 understanding implications of, 603 compliance, 160 capacity, 449 certiﬁcates of, 609 cooperative management and, 650 incentives, 634 networking and, 291 problems in Paciﬁc tuna ﬁsheries, 448 in Red Sea ﬁsheries, 436 relation to biodiversity, 499 stakeholder participation and, 676 to voluntary regulation, 620, 624 conﬂict management, 541 resolution, 11, 334 scale and, 680–681 consensus building, 355, 574 conservation, 12, 632 advice in Canada, 402–403 blocking, 498 buyback programs and, 507 cooperative, 237–238 cost-effectiveness, 201–202, 232 direct payments, 197, 238 economic advantages for opposing, 450

745

746

Index

conservation (continued) funding, 15, 198, 235–236 holistic view, 14 incentives for, 200, 334 in Indian ﬁsheries, 283 information needed for successful, 713 investments, 231, 232 in Japan, 293–297 of nontarget species, 160 north-south divide, 500 practices and scientiﬁc data, 448 in Red Sea ﬁsheries, 434, 440 rights approaches and, 319, 642 single-species, 448 standards, 498 in U.K., 377 use of voluntary approaches, 624 conservation-based strategy, 189 Conservation Law Foundation, 387 Conservation Program for Endangered Species, 209 Conservation Reserve Program (U.S.), 622 consortia, for clam ﬁsheries, 423 constant catch, 585 consultants, 333 consultation, with stakeholders, 690–691 consumer demand for ecolabeled products, 609, 611 environmental protection and, 619 for sustainability, 160–161 voluntary regulation and, 622 consumer guides, 161, 609 consumers preferences, 118 role in curbing illegal ﬁshing, 176 continental shelves, cold-water reefs on, 228 contracts, 565 relative payment, 566–567 share, 566–567 contractual management, 527–528 control. See also command-and-control approaches in aquaculture, 62, 70 fallacy of, 92 problems of, 639 convening power, 488 Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, 143 Convention on Biological Diversity, 87, 143, 144, 231, 489, 494, 498–499 lack of involvement of ﬁshers, 146 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), 146, 489 lack of coherence, 494 Convention on the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Paciﬁc Ocean, 443–444 Convention on the Law of the Sea, 5, 87, 142, 289, 444, 646 guidelines on cooperative management, 649

guidelines on management of straddling stocks, 651 illegal ﬁshing regulations, 167 protection of high seas stocks, 656 ratiﬁcation in Southeast Asia, 245 Convention on the Regulation of Whaling, 9 cooperation, 319, 464 among regional ﬁsheries, 253–254 beneﬁts, as incentives, 620, 623 buybacks and, 514 communities and, 680 conservation of high-seas stocks and, 656 in game theory models, 558–559 illegal ﬁshing and, 176 versus noncooperation, 652 in regional ﬁsheries management organizations, 497 in self-governance, 525 cooperative games, 649–650 cooperative management, 650 versus co-management, 676 unequal power, 451 cooperatives, 388 Indian, 11 in Japan, 679, 683 unintended consequences of, 623 in Yemen, 436 coordination, 495 among government agencies, 348 coral reefs, 43–44, 49, 215–216 cold-water, 216–218, 227 effect of trawling, 220–221 evaluating damage to, 219 mapping, 218–220 principles of protection, 223–224 in the Red Sea, 428 in Southeast Asia, 252 zones, 216, 218 coral remains, identifying, 220 Coral Triangle Initiative, 494 corporate governance, 520–521 economic analysis of, 525–526 embedding in regulation, 526–528 of mixed ﬁsheries, 522 corruption, 159, 174, 176, 448 Consortium for Ocean Leadership, 53 Costa Rica, voluntary agreements, 622 cost recovery in New Zealand, 350 stakeholder payment for management and, 690 Council for Exploration of the Seas management of Russian and Norwegian ﬁsheries, 174 crab ﬁsheries. See also snow crab Canadian catch, 396 harvest control rules, 587 credit, 34, 279, 284, 386, 435 crew remuneration, 30 Crosbie, John, 402 curvina golﬁna, 208

Index Darwin Mounds, 221 data acquisition, 714 availability, 591 collection in U.K., 375 consideration of sources, 603 integration, 378 quality, 435, 439, 440 data envelopment analysis, 547, 548 days-at-sea restrictions, 374, 387 dead zones, 51 debt ﬁsheries, 514 of ﬁshers, 284 decentralization, 537, 634, 680 decision making defensive, 355 equality in, 521, 522, 527 level of, 537 participatory, 675–676 structured, 631 decommissioning, 268, 363, 376, 378, 418, 709. See also buyback programs in Southeast Asia, 249–250 delayed responses, 89 demersal species African regulations, 262 assumption of catch per unit effort, 638 catch, 21 stock health, 365 stocks in North Sea, 363 targeted by small-scale ﬁsheries, 533 in West African ﬁsheries, 260–261 demonstration effects, 318–319 density-dependent growth, 661 deposit feeders, 218 developing countries, 533 conservation costs, 232 differential treatment, 109 ﬁsh demand, 26 ﬁsheries investment, 534 unregulated ﬁsheries, 165 development assistance, for Indian ﬁsheries, 11 Development of Fisheries in Areas of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, 433 Dijibouti, 426 direct payments, 197, 238, 620, 622–623 disasters effect on markets, 523 relief and buyback programs, 507 risk of, 295–296 discards, 150, 373 bans on, 189 changing patterns, 21 conﬂicts over, 363 moral hazards and, 568 discount rate, 645, 661 displacement, of ﬁshing communities, 276 distant waters ﬁshing nations, 651

747

investment by, 444 in regional management organizations, 654 distrust, 355, 499, 500 among agencies, 147n between ﬁshers and environmental interests, 146 diving, commercial, 324 divisibility, 313, 314 Doha Round, 100 inclusion of ﬁsheries subsidies, 109 dolphins bycatch of, 150 devices to reduce bycatch, 719 mortality, 154, 704 allocations in, 702 limits, 15, 159 protection of, 157 Doughnut Hole, 651 downstream externalities, 527 Dr. Fridtjof Nansen research vessel, 437, 440 driftnets bans, 416–417, 421–422 buyback of, 510 Duke University, Project GLOBAL, 53 dumping, 122n, 251 Dupuy, Peter, 232, 237 dynamic regime switching, 664 dynamic systems, understanding structure, 596 East Asian Seas congresses, participation, 252 Eastern Paciﬁc Barrier, 45 ecolabeling, 121, 161, 173, 406, 496, 502n costs and beneﬁts to ﬁsheries, 612–613 description, 608–609 effectiveness of, 614–615 information and data requirements, 611 standards for, 613–614 types, 610–611 veriﬁcation programs, 614 ecolabels, logos, 610 econometrics, 603 economic analysis of self-governance, 525–526, 528–529 economic assistance, 387 to Canadian ﬁsheries, 406–407 economic development, increased trade and, 115 economic efﬁciency, 316 buyback programs and, 507 as goal of policy, 383 government failures and, 524 trade-off with social equity, 332 use rights and, 669, 673 economic growth, pollution and, 69 economic instruments, 313 characteristics of, 313–316 in ecosystem-based management, 319–320 in international ﬁsheries, 319 pragmatic use, 318 economic optimizing behavior, 549

748 economics application of principal-agent paradigm, 563 effect on illegal ﬁshing, 169–170 effects of bycatch on, 150 effects of climate change on, 132 effects of subsidies on, 99 importance of considering, 638 overﬁshing and, 265 research, 375 of straddling stock management, 652 Ecopath with Ecosim model, 183, 184 application, 186–187 ecosystem-based management, 8, 53, 87–89, 143, 182, 265, 383, 404, 633, 675, 721–723 biodiversity and, 145–146, 485 in Canada, 407–408 development of, 94 economic instruments in, 319–320 incorporation in legal instruments, 446 as integrating force, 500 in Japan, 293–294 main objectives, 718 in small-scale ﬁsheries, 540 in Southeast Asia, 247, 248 in U.S., 389–390 ecosystem modeling, 183–185 ﬁsheries management and, 185–191 versus population modeling, 190 Ecosystem Productivity Ocean Climate model, 183 ecosystems, 8 acceptable levels of impact, 190 addressing effects on, 162, 390 alterations, 44 assessing components, 145 description, 49–50 drivers of decline, 5 effects of ﬁsheries, 140, 721 relationships between terrestrial and marine, 294 structure and function, 718–719 threats to, 50–53 education conservation and, 197 of management personnel, 80–81 efﬁciency. See also economic efﬁciency of ﬁsheries, 366–368 as focus of policy, 360, 365 individual transferable quotas and, 306–307 of policy, 499 use of economic instruments and, 310 egg production surveys, 716 Egypt, 426, 427 ﬁsheries research and management, 438 tilapia production, 64 eliminator trawl, 719 El Nino-Southern Oscillation, 123 employment alternative, 249 bycatch solutions and, 156 in Italian ﬁsheries, 417

Index migrants and, 268 in Norwegian ﬁsheries, 362 in Red Sea ﬁsheries, 428–429 reduction, 268 subsidies and, 107 trends, 28–30 in U.K. ﬁsheries, 371 Endangered Species Act (U.S.), 199, 236, 239n, 389 endowments, 198 enforcement, 331, 639 assumption of perfect, 106 in Chile, 324, 335 in co-management, 677 illegal ﬁshing and, 159, 167 management and, 496–497 of Mexican regulations, 212 in Red Sea ﬁsheries, 434, 436, 439 relation to biodiversity, 499 in scallop ﬁsheries, 351 in U.K., 377 in West Africa, 262, 263 engine power, 376 England, attempts to exclusively control herring ﬁshery, 667 enhanced quota management strategy, 188 enterprise allocations, 400–401 environmental carrying capacity, 640 environmental certiﬁcation, 609, 723 costs of, 612 environmental conditions, stock collapses and, 394 Environmental Defense fund, 390 funding of buybacks, 514 environmental issues, 87 of aquaculture, 67–70 management success and, 485 in salmon ﬁsheries, 464, 467 of U.K. ﬁsheries, 373 environmental legislation, 146 environmental management systems, 723 environmental nongovernmental organizations, 450, 502n, 514 inﬂuence in New Zealand, 352 opposition to property rights, 322n participation in management, 390 purchase of quotas, 323n reduction of illegal ﬁshing by, 176 as stakeholders, 357 sustainability assessments, 160–161 in U.K., 379–380 in U.S., 382 environmental protection, 622 attitudes toward, 619 voluntary approaches, 618–619 environmental variability, 523, 599 assessment, 265 effect on economics of reserves, 661–663 forms of, 659 environmental variables, harvest control rules based on, 590–591

Index equimarginal principle, 201 equity, as focus of policy, 360, 365 Eritrea, 426 enforcement in, 436 ﬁsheries projects, 434 war and ﬁsheries, 430 escapement, 458 constant, 585 estuaries, 49 Euphrates River, 428 Europe. See also European Union ﬁsh demand, 24 seafood market, 117 shared resources, 373–374 women in ﬁsheries, 75 European Commission, Scientiﬁc, Technical and Economic Advisory Committee on Fisheries, 375 European Fisheries Convention, 370 European Habitat Directive, 373 European Union analysis of ﬁshery policy, 567 antibiotic, regulations, 251 Common Fisheries Policy, 108, 370, 374, 415 imports, 115, 173 monitoring assistance to Africa, 263 total allowable catch negotiations, 362–363 eutrophication, 69 evergreen contracting, 528 exclusive economic zones, 5, 557, 644, 666 Canada, 10 development of, 668–669 distant waters ﬁshing nations agreements, 567–568 effect on overcapacity, 598 versus high seas, 422 illegal ﬁshing in, 169 implementation, 121n India, 11, 281 lack in the Mediterranean, 415, 419 management, 650 signiﬁcance to world ﬁsheries, 647–648 trade and, 114 tuna catch, 444 U.S., 386 West Africa, 263 exclusivity, 313, 314, 400, 551, 701 existence value, 202n, 527 expertise, use of, 592 exploitation controlling, 254 in models, 185 rate, 586 sensitivity to climate change and, 128 statistics, 21 sustainable, 142 exports Indian, 280–281 quantity, 115 West African, 260

749

external drivers, ﬁsheries sensitivity to, 89 externality theory, 528–529 extinction, 45, 126 estimating probabilities, 643 of sea turtles, 234 of vaquita, 209 of Yangtze River dolphin, 210 extraction rights, 673 Faeroe Islands, total allowable catch negotiations, 363 family ﬁshers, 211. See also ﬁshing communities farm consolidation, 579 farmers, incentive payments to, 622 farm land, rights to, 578–579 fecundity, 715 Federation of Independent Seafood Harvesters (FISH), 232, 235, 237–238 feedbacks, 596, 605n control loops, 89 fees, 303–304, 669 to pay for conservation, 200–201 to reduce bycatch, 199 First Nations peoples, 458 ﬁsheries, 400 treaties with, 463 ﬁsh. See also ﬁsh stocks age, 714, 715 as aquaculture feed, 3, 21, 66–68, 251 biology, 713–715 competition among, 140 effect of climate on, 125–128 estimation of natural mortality, 714 populations age structure and stability, 3 densities, 140 replacement, 140 size and behavior, 720 ﬁsh-aggregating devices, 154, 157, 699, 706, 707 ﬁsh consumption. See also seafood consumption global trends, 24 in West Africa, 259 ﬁsheries. See also ﬁsheries management; see also under names of countries and common names of ﬁsh assessment of impacts, 501 biodiversity and, 140, 147 categories and characteristics, 6–8, 534 climate change and, 128, 130 closures. See closures of ﬁsheries commercialization, 233, 682 concept of private property, 667–668 conﬂicts within, 267–268 data, 72, 250, 254 deterioration, 20–23, 36 development projects, 103 economics, 20, 35–37, 210–212 effect of ecolabeling on, 612–613 effect of wars on, 430 efﬁciency of, 366–368

750 ﬁsheries (continued) global and private norms, 495–496 important aspects for policy, 423 partitioning, 335 perception of inexhaustibility, 646–647 production trends, 23–24 reform, 37 renting out, 672 strategic behavior in, 556–557 systemic nature of, 89 systems view, 185 unregulated, 349 women in, 74–77 world locations, 5 worldwide economic performance, 25–30 ﬁsheries access agreements, 260, 268 ﬁsheries management, 582–583. See also ﬁsheries management science; names of countries; speciﬁc types of management adaptive, 185 adherence to, 588 administration, 378 application of principal agent theory to, 566–569 of aquaculture, 70 capacity, 244 coherence, 485, 487, 494 concept of natural resource, 445–446 conﬂict with ownership, 563 consumers as drivers of, 612 conventional, 96, 535 cooperation in, 245, 253, 384 coordination, 334 costs, 34–35, 289, 345, 410, 453, 524 decentralized, 289, 676 effectiveness, 633, 647 effect of exclusive economic zones, 650 evolution of, 633 exemptions, 448 ﬁnancing, 438, 441, 498–499 gender issues, 73–74, 80–81 general problems, 638–639 geography of organizations, 423 goals of, 124, 263, 450, 509, 582, 589, 591 ideological differences in, 95 importance of economics and behavior, 638 integration, 332, 334, 485–487 modeling and, 638, 663–664 multiple species, 590–591 nature of ﬁsh stocks and, 650–655, 680 overstafﬁng, 434 participatory, 496, 631, 687–689 performance measures, 188 physical environment and, 128–133, 250–251 planning, 264, 352, 356–357, 542, 543 priorities, 13–14, 418, 420, 492–495 private, 524 reform challenges, 144 rules, 677 separation from policy, 350

Index spatial measures, 142 steady-state, 599, 601–602 strategy evaluation, 188 support for, 103, 333, 450 systems, 544 target reference points, 586 top-down, 265, 500, 675 traditional, 145, 262–263, 278, 335, 435, 534–535 training and recruiting staff, 452 uncertainty in, 539, 660 use of economic instruments, 313–316 Fisheries Management Act (Australia), 341 ﬁsheries management science, 89, 631, 634 application of, 632–633 bases for, 631–632 concept, 630 ﬁsheries partnership agreements, 260 Fisheries Products International, 406 Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, 341 Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, 396, 403 Fishermen’s Welfare Corporation (India), 279 ﬁshers. See also artisanal ﬁshers assistance programs, 103 attitudes during transitions, 508 behavior, 189, 190 buybacks and, 514 and capacity estimates, 549 modeling, 185, 557–561 commitment to rules, 348 competition among, 641 coordination among, 293 deﬁnition of, 681 distrust of environmental interests, 146 effect of declining ﬁsheries, 3 former employment of farming, 251 functional groups of, 679–680 investing in conservation, 236–238 investing in technology, 641 management participation of, 218–219, 265, 296, 297, 328, 331, 424 migrant, 268, 284 numbers of, 28, 335n, 362, 442n opposition to marine reserves, 659 as part of ecosystem, 296 perceptions of territorial use rights, 330 relationships among, 291, 425, 680 training in modern methods, 435 types of employment, 6 ﬁshers’ organizations, 402, 417. See also cooperatives; names of organizations in Chile, 328–329 in Italy, 424 Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic, 262, 269n Fishery Committee of the West Central Gulf of Guinea, 269n Fishery Conservation and Management Act (U.S.), 382, 383 Fishery Policy Council (Japan), 288

Index ﬁsh farmers. See also aquaculture former employment of, 251 ﬁsh farming. See aquaculture ﬁshing costs, 26 decreasing, 105 and illegal ﬁshing, 170 versus value, 20 economic alternatives to, 209 length of trips, 235 personal beneﬁts of, 683 revenues, 6 social versus economic perspective, 379 technologies. See technology traditional methods, 465 ﬁshing agreements access, 444 international, 567–568 ﬁshing capacity. See also names of countries; overcapacity assessment of, 546–549, 552 in Australia, 339 buyback programs and, 515, 516 deﬁnitions, 546–547 development in U.S., 386 economic concept, 546 environmental variability and, 605n excess, 549–550, 600 global development, 31–33 limiting, 328, 376 misperceptions about, 601 quotas and, 670 reducing, 106, 378, 406–407, 418, 452 relationship to harvest, 597 resource rent and, 367 in tuna ﬁsheries, 700–701, 705, 707–708 utilization, 601 worldwide expansion, 3 ﬁshing communities, 537–538, 679–680. See also artisanal ﬁshers in Canada, 410 characteristics, 79 costs of conservation to, 199, 232 effect of limited-access privilege programs on, 389 environmental interests and, 139 Indian, 276–278 local knowledge, 678 norms and management, 262 policy considerations, 285, 384 property rights and, 16 protection of rights and, 254 women in, 75 ﬁshing effect on ecosystems, 614, 616, 721 historically limited, 667 realization of, 647 reducing biodiversity threats, 141–142 ﬁshing effort, 30–33, 232 biodiversity and, 187

751

controlling, 6, 128–131 effectiveness of limitations on, 671 effect of subsidies on, 105 versus ﬁshing capacity, 546, 550 increase in West Africa, 263 in India, 284 lack of information, 434 policies in Mediterranean, 418 reducing, 249, 304, 305, 377 relationship to beneﬁts of reserves, 660 transferring excess, 249 ﬁshing ﬂeets. See vessels ﬁshing industry funding of buybacks, 514 involvement in governance, 162 partnerships with nongovernmental organizations, 238 response to management in Australia, 343, 344 size and environmental degradation, 69 ﬁshing masters, 176 ﬁshing mortality, 140, 582 climate change and, 125 constant, 585 direct from gear, 141 measures to reduce bycatch, 152–153, 155, 157 in models, 183 rate, 385, 586 recommendations for target, 588 of tuna, 700 ﬁshing partnership associations, 268 ﬁsh landings. See catch ﬁsh meal, 26, 67–68 ﬁsh oil, 26 ﬁsh prices, 603 and bycatch in India, 282 determinants, 118 global, 25–26 illegal ﬁshing and, 170 ﬁsh species. See also target species aquacultured, 61, 62, 119 composition in Kerala ﬁsheries, 11 composition of Red Sea ﬁsheries, 430 considering effects on multiple, 157 discoveries, 44 important in Norwegian ﬁsheries, 361 migratory, 167, 245, 416, 419–420, 444, 648 role in food web, 140 sensitivity to climate, 125, 126 shelf, 190 threatened, 182 values, 21, 26, 62 ﬁsh stocks. See also stock assessments; stock biomass; stock collapse age structure, 3, 128, 129, 714, 715 categories, 583, 648 causes of changes in, 129 conceptualizations of, 522 conservation, 251, 387 depletion, 20, 265, 361, 668

752 ﬁsh stocks (continued) effect of subsidies on, 105 excessive, 599–600 exploited by small-scale ﬁsheries, 533 inﬂow and outﬂow correlations and, 596 health and management, 365, 640, 680 discrete high seas stock, 655–656 Indian, 279–280 misperceptions, 597 protected versus exploited, 664 rebuilding, 390, 420 status and management, 121, 342, 352 straddling, 650–655 structure, 713–714 traditional management, 145 transboundary, 649, 652–653 West African, 260–261 ﬁxed reserve model, 663 ﬂags, changes in vessels, 703–704 ﬂags of convenience, 167, 168 ﬂexibility, 313, 314, 318, 334–335, 626n in decision making processes, 692 loss of ecological, 682 ﬂick-off practices, 152 ﬂows misperceptions, 597 nonlinear, 598 relationships with stocks, 596 Food and Agricultural Organization, 492–493. See also Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries Advisory Committee on Fisheries Research, 263 deﬁnition of capacity, 546–547, 708 ﬁsheries governance guidelines, 269n International Plan of Action on IUU Fishing, 167 Red Sea projects, 440 resources assessment survey, 437 food chain, effect of climate, 127–128 food prices, 33 food security, 260, 265, 537 food webs, 296 changes in, 140 effects of ﬁshing on, 721 Forbes, Edward, 43 foreign ﬁshing. See also distant water ﬁshing nations foreign ﬁshing, U.S. phaseout of, 386 Forum Fisheries Agency, 444 France, misreporting of catch, 173 Fraser River, 466 freedom of the seas doctrine, 646–647 free-rider problem, 4, 232, 237, 449, 558, 568, 623, 677 in bycatch reduction programs, 625 cooperation and, 649 illegal ﬁshing as, 653 real interest and, 654 free trade agreements, in Southeast Asia, 251

Index freezing technology, 113, 114, 116, 461 effect on supply chains, 120 Friend of the Sea ecolabel, 614 fuel consumption, 28, 129 costs, 26–28, 33, 252 pollution from, 46 subsidies, 34 taxes, exemptions, 103–104 fuel efﬁciency, 129 improving, 720–721 functional complexity, of ﬁsheries governance, 91–92 funding, 498 for conservation, 198, 235–236 constraints, 439, 452 co-management and, 248 of Red Sea ﬁsheries projects, 432–433 research in developing countries, 439–440 transparency of sources for capacity building, 498 GADGET model, 183 Galapagos Islands, 9 game theory, 649–650 model of ﬁsher behavior, 557–560 gas exploration and production, allocation of rights in, 573–577 gear buyback, 509 co-management and type of, 679 conﬂict, 189 conversion, 422 costs, 26, 27, 232 effect on catch composition, 523 ﬁsh population impact, 142 habitat impacts, 141, 720 investment in, 284 modernization, 11 modiﬁcation, 618, 719 postrelease survival and, 152 regulations, 182, 262 restrictions, 301, 459 reuse of bought back, 510 selectivity, 719–720 sophistication investment, 534 traditional, 533 types, 278 used in Japanese ﬁsheries, 294 gender, ﬁsheries management and, 72–74, 81 gene ﬂow, 45 gene pool, aquaculture and, 69 General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean, 416 genetic adaptation, 130 genetics inbreeding, 208 use to estimate spawning stock size, 716 Georges Bank ﬁshery sector, 388–389 Ghana, migrant ﬁshers, 268 ghost ﬁshing, 166

Index gillnets, 297 ban, 210 bycatch of vaquita, 205 effect on reefs, 221–222, 228 entanglement of cetaceans, 208 operation of, 235 Global Environmental Facility, 252, 498 Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts, and Islands, 144, 492 globalization, 54 challenges for management, 485–486 effect on ﬁsheries sustainability, 259. See also trade, international Global Oceans Forum, 489, 494–495 global warming, 53 goals, prioritizing, 12 gorgonians, effect of gillnets on, 222 governance. See also ﬁsheries management deﬁnition, 90 poverty and, 268 principles, 92–93 responsibilities, 90 structure, 91 Governance of High Seas Fisheries and the United Nations Fish Agreement, 171 government contracting, 351–352 failures, economic efﬁciency and, 524 overinvolvement, 689 support from, 633 grants, 34 grassroots activism, 353 Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, 14 Greece, women in ﬁsh processing, 73 greenhouse gases, 124, 721 green turtles, conservation, 235 gross domestic product, ﬁsheries and, 36 gross tonnage, 376 Grotius, Hugo, 646 groundﬁsh ﬁsheries buybacks in, 508 Canadian Atlantic, 394–396 government assistance, 406 stock collapse, 393 stocks in Canada, 409 ground-truthing methods, 220 group policies, 624 group quotas, 363 growth, ﬁsh estimation of, 714 growth rates, 598 effect of ﬁsheries on, 140 Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem Project, 264 Gujarat, India, 276 Gulf of Aden, 426–427 Gulf of California, 207–208 gillnet ﬁsheries valuation, 210 Gulf of Oman, 427 oceanography, 428

Gulf of St. Lawrence, 403 Gulfs Project Follow-up, 433 Gunnerus, J. C., 216 habitat degradation and destruction, 20, 36, 47, 51–52, 141, 190, 389, 460, 718 in India, 276 sea turtle, 195, 197 habitat diversity, 5 haddock, 361 Canada-U.S. agreements, 384 stock health, 365 in U.K. ﬁsheries, 371 hake, 348 halibut ﬁshery, 387 transfer of quotas, 580 harpoon cannons, 9 harvest. See also catch caps, 305 controlling, 132 costs, 32 documenting, 448 efﬁciency, 459, 523 optimal, 365, 523, 602, 661 rate, 142, 335, 660 relationship to capacity, 597 smoothing, 600 unintentional. See bycatch worldwide, 3 harvest control rules, 583 empirical, 586–587 inputs, 584 multispecies, 590 testing, 588–590 tier system, 588 threshold, 586 traditional, 585–587 harvest cooperatives, 388, 390 hatching success of sea turtles, 196–197, 234 Hawaii, longline regulations, 201, 233 Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, 120 H.B. Nickersons and National Sea Products, 406 heavy metals, 51 herbivores, aquaculture of, 62 herring, 361 ﬁsheries in Iceland, 299–300 ﬁsheries in U.K., 371, 373 stock collapse, 361 stock depletion, 299 stock health, 365 stock models, 366 hidden action problem. See moral hazards hidden information problem. See adverse selection high seas territorial seas and, 647 discrete stocks, 655–656 lack of ﬁsheries regulation, 639 High Seas Task Force, 171, 172, 494

753

754

Index

hoki ﬁshery, in New Zealand, 348 homesteading, 578–579 Hong Kong, illicit markets, 175 Hong Kong Declaration, 109 hook bycatch and, 158, 160 quota licenses, 302 shape, 151 household assets, 80 Huxley, Thomas, 647, 667, 668 hydraulic dredges, 422 IATTC. See Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission ICCAT. See International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna Iceland coral habitat, 216 exclusive economic zone, 6 ﬁsheries management, 302–306 ﬁshing communities, 80 individual transferable quotas, 306–307, 311 investment in ﬁsheries, 671–672 litigation concerning quotas, 307–308 stock health, 299 total allowable catch negotiations, 362, 363 ideological differences, in ﬁsheries management, 95 illegal, unreported and unregulated ﬁshing. See IUU ﬁshing immunosuppression, 51 imports, volume, 115 inbreeding, vaquita mortality and, 208 incentives, 13, 202, 310, 410, 435, 485, 564 to avoid overinvesting in effort, 145 buybacks and, 514 and capacity building, 498 to cheat, 425 compatibility, 567, 569 for conservation, 197, 199, 334 created by regulatory measures, 160 economic, 232 effectiveness of, 347 effect of subsidies on, 106 to elicit participation, 333 importance of understanding, 7 market-based, 161, 176, 177, 619–620 match to capacity, 314 in principal-agent approach, 565 role in promoting public beneﬁts, 15 in territorial use rights ﬁsheries, 335 in voluntary regulation, 619–620, 622 incidental catch. See bycatch income in clam ﬁsheries, 423 distribution, 318, 333, 673 of ﬁshers, 534 ﬂow of net, 640 lost, 199 maximization, 641 schemes to increase, 360, 387

support, 108 trends, 28–30 India ﬁsheries employment, 29 ﬁsheries management, 281–283 Kerala ﬁsheries, 10–12 physical geography, 274–275 World Trade Organization policy, 109 Indian Marine Fisheries Census, 73 Indian Ocean Fishery Commission, 431 Indian Ocean Program, 431 Indian Ocean Tuna Commission, 245, 699–701 seabird avoidance policies, 159 indirect use value, 202n individual ﬁshing quotas, 390 in Canada, 400–402 in U.S. ﬁsheries, 385, 388–389 individual nontransferable quotas, 314–315 individual rationality constraint, 650 individual transferable quotas, 299, 310, 314–316, 321, 349, 425, 520, 522–573, 579–580, 641–642, 701 in Australian ﬁsheries, 340 beneﬁts of, 353, 644 in Canada, 468n in co-management, 683 development of, 595 efﬁciency gains from, 306–307 in the European Union, 378 ﬁsh stocks and, 671 in Iceland, 302–307 incentives to set private catch limits, 525 participation in, 308 rationalizing effect of, 671–672 rent losses and, 522–524 subsidies and, 105–106 unanimous consent under, 526 individual vessel quotas, 400 Indonesia ecosystem-based management, 248 ﬁsheries, 244 ﬁsheries management, 247 illegal ﬁshing, 169 Indo-Norwegian Project for Fisheries Development, 11 industrial areas coastal management in, 252 pollution from, 276 information. See also scientiﬁc data asymmetric, 508–509, 515, 563, 569 allocations and, 575 effort level and, 567 sources of, 564–565 building, 678 in buybacks, 512 credibility, 496 for decision making, 496, 676 economics of, 564 effect on investments, 598 gathering and use, 296

Index inadequate and buy-in, 317 integration of, 333 lacking for Red Sea ﬁsheries, 434 role in increasing value, 523–524 sharing, 495 source of, 501 time dependent, 611 use in small-scale ﬁsheries management, 541 infrastructure, market access and, 115 initial management stocks, 583, 591 input controls, 542 input, mobility, 485 inspections, 168 Institute of Marine Research, 218 institutions as constraints, 677 deﬁnition, 677 dimensions of, 677–678 integration and, 487–488 role of, 485 insurance, 34 integrated management, 188, 485–487, 631, 633, 634 in small-scale ﬁsheries, 540 integration forces for increasing, 499–500 within regional ﬁsheries management organizations, 498 role of institutions, 487–488 in small-scale ﬁsheries policy, 537 state of, 492–499 Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), 159, 172, 699–701, 705 capacity reduction schemes, 708 international agreements, 647 International Collective in Support of Fishworkers, 74 International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT), 172, 262, 269n, 416, 420, 498, 699–701 granting of membership, 654 International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries, 399, 647 international cooperation, 4, 15, 361, 443, 444, 465, 485–486 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, 9, 489 assessment of ﬁsh stocks, 375 Multispecies Working Group, 183 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 307 International Fund for Agricultural Development, 440 International Labor Organization, 77 International Laws of the Sea, 657n International MCS Network Database, 171 international organizations. See also names of organizations functions of, 493 linked to ﬁsheries, 489–492

755

International Paciﬁc Halibut Commission, 172, 384 International Paciﬁc Salmon Fisheries Commission, 465 International Plan of Action on IUU Fishing, Model Scheme on Port State Measures to Combat IUU Fishing, 167 International Plan of Action on the Management of Fishing Capacity, 249 International Southern Ocean Longline Fisheries Information Clearing House, 176 International Standards Organization, certiﬁcations, 120 International Standard Statistical Classiﬁcation of Aquatic Animals and Plants, 62 International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 144, 171, 489, 495 International Whaling Commission, 583, 591 small cetacean subcommittee, 208 use of management strategy evaluation, 590 International Whaling Convention, 9 invasive species, 127 principal-agent model, 569, 570 invertebrates. See also common names of animals associated with coral reefs, 217–218 catch of benthic in Chile, 324, 327 investment, 391, 450. See also overinvestment to address bycatch, 161 in Australian ﬁsheries, 341 conservation, 199, 231, 232 control and limited entry, 703 by distant waters ﬁshing nations, 444 effect of subsidies on, 106 in Icelandic ﬁsheries, 300 in Indian ﬁsheries, 283–284 in Red Sea region, 431 relationship to overcapacity, 597–598 in small-scale ﬁsheries, 534 technology, 641 InVitro, agent-based model, 184 Ionian Sea, coral habitats, 216 Iran, ﬁsheries research, 436 Iran-Iraq war, effect on ﬁsheries, 430 Iraq ﬁsheries, 431 ﬁsheries research, 436 iron deposition, 127 irrigation channels, 442n Ise Bay, 289–290 Islamic Development Bank, 440 Israel, 426 Italy coastal ﬁsheries, 417 composition of ﬁshing ﬂeet, 416 distant-water ﬂeet, 418–419 driftnet buyback, 510 shellﬁsh management, 422–423 women in ﬁsh processing, 73 IUU ﬁshing, 150, 165, 333, 421, 442 and allocation problems, 655 ambiguous rights and, 653

756 IUU ﬁshing (continued) in Australia, 174 background, 166 bycatch and, 159 costs of, 35, 169 in east-central Atlantic, 169 effect on domestic ﬁsheries, 485 effect on sustainability, 334 estimating, 168–169 E.U. measures, 173 factors contributing to, 166–167, 265–267 gillnet, 210 institutionalized, 497 laws against, 167–168 magnitude, 169 proﬁts, 174 in Red Sea region, 438–439 reducing, 171, 175–176 in Southeast Asia, 249–250 U.S. measures, 173 in West Africa, 262 Iwi tribal grouping, Maori people, 358n Jakarta Mandate, 494 Japan community quota-pooling system, 312 cooperatives, 679, 683 ecosystem-based management, 293 effect of exclusive economic zones, 114 ﬁsheries management, 287–293 gender and ﬁshing, 79 imports, 115 loggerhead turtles in, 198 snow crab ﬁsheries, 291–293 Japan International Cooperation Agency, 440 Jeddah Convention, 434 Jordan, 426 jump-diffusion processes, 659 Kaitala-Munro argument, 654 Karun River, 428 kelp, 294 Kerala, India ﬁsheries, 10–12 women in ﬁsheries, 279 keystone predators, 142 Kirby, Michael, 402 Kirby Task Force on the Atlantic Fisheries, 402 Kiribati, 448 knowledge sharing, 488 Kobe Action Plan, 497 Korea, community quota system, 311 krill harvesting, 183 Kuwait ﬁsheries, 431 ﬁsheries research and management, 436–437 war and ﬁsheries, 430 Kuznets curve, 69 Kyoto Protocol, 199, 231

Index labor costs, 26, 167 demand for, 268 effect of subsidies on, 361 emphasis in small-scale ﬁsheries, 532 excessive and rent, 367 in principal-agent model, 566 sexual division, 278–279 underpaid, 77 lagoon systems, in West Africa, 258 land purchases, as conservation payments, 200 language barriers, 452 preciseness of, 596 leaded gasoline, phase-out, 201 learning role in management, 539 role of complexity, 596 leases as conservation payments, 200 negative effects, 16 in U.K., 376 leatherback sea turtles conservation, 201, 234, 235–236, 238 migration, 197 mortality, 195–196 nesting sites, 196–197, 232 legal agreements, 446 legal expertise, 488 levies, use in New Zealand, 351 Ley General de Pesca y Acuacultura (Chile), 324 licensing, 669. See also registration for access to exclusive economic zones, 444 buyback programs, 509–510, 553n in Canada, 405, 458–459, 462–463 in Chile, 328 in Iceland, 302, 304 in Japan, 288–289 limited entry, 399, 688, 701, 703–704 moratoria, 324, 391n retirement schemes, 406–407, 410 security of tenure, 400 for tuna ﬁsheries, 698 in U.K., 376–377 life history stages, vulnerability to climate change, 126 life history traits, effect of exploitation on, 140 limited-access privilege programs, 383, 385, 551–552, 553n limited entry. See under licensing limited nontransferable and transferable permits, 314–315 ling, 216, 348 litigation, 307–308, 355 livelihoods approach, 540 Lloyd’s database of vessels, 31 loan guarantees, 104 lobster ﬁsheries. See also rock lobster ﬁsheries Canadian, 396, 399, 410 West African, 260–261 Yemeni, 440

Index local resource management, 247 loco ﬁsheries, 324, 335n catch, 325, 326 recovery, 328 loggerhead turtles, 231 conservation, 235 population, 198 longline ﬁshing bycatch, 153–154 of seabirds, 156 of turtles, 618 catch types, 151 controls, 708 effect on reefs, 221–222, 228 ﬂeet communication, 160 gear description, 151 Hawaiian regulations, 201 of tuna, 706 loopholes, 452 access, 331 vessel size, 304–306 lumpy investments, 201 mackerel, 260, 361 stock health, 365 in U.K. ﬁsheries, 371, 373 Magnuson-Stevens Act (U.S.), 173, 391n, 551 majority voting rule, 521 Malaysia aquaculture, 251 ecosystem-based management, 248 ﬁsheries, 244 ﬁsheries management organizations, 245 reduction of ﬁshing capacity, 249 reporting of unregistered vessels, 250 trade disputes, 251 World Trade Organization policy, 109 management. See ﬁsheries management management advisory committees, 688–689 system structure, 689–691 management strategy evaluation, 7, 589–590, 717–718 mangroves destruction of, 47, 69 effect of coastal development, 276 Indian, 275 in Southeast Asia, 252 Maori, 358n ﬁshing claims, 350, 353, 354 maps, inclusion of coral reefs, 227 Marbank, 223 mariculture, 431. See also aquaculture Marine and Coastal Access Bill (U.K.), 377 Marine and Fisheries Agency (U.K.), 374 marine bioreserves, of India, 275 marine debris, 51 Marine Fisheries Resource Development Promotion Law (Japan), 289 Marine Mammal Protection Act, 235 marine mammals. See cetaceans

marine protected areas, 139, 155, 643–644 Indian, 283 in Japan, 290, 291 in Norway, 224–225 overreliance on, 500 small-scale ﬁsheries and, 543 in West Africa, 262 marine reserves, 659 economics of, 660–663 migration of ﬁsh out of, 660 size of and optimal harvest, 661–662 switchable, 664 Marine Resources Assessment Group, 168 Marine Stewardship Council, 609, 611, 614 effectiveness of, 615 Maritime Zones Act (India), 283 market-based incentives, 161 for environmental protection, 619–620 to reduce illegal ﬁshing, 176, 177 market-based management, 121, 199, 310, 390. See also economic instruments gradual implementation, 317–318 in U.S., 173 marketing, 67 role of ecolabeling, 611–612 women in, 278 market price support, 101 markets beneﬁts of ecolabeling, 613 competition in local, 279 competition with nonseafood, 119 demand for sustainable products, 495 drivers of, 121 as drivers of management, 612 dynamics, 523 global, 113–114, 116–117 illicit, 174, 175, 176 integrated, 117 interdependence of, 485 local, 78 segmentation of, 118 for small-scale ﬁsheries, 537 traditional, 113, 120 market signals, 508 mark-recapture techniques, 716 mass balance solution, 184 maturity, size and age at, 715 Mauritania, catch, 259 maximum economic yield, 341–342, 345 maximum likelihood estimation, 584 maximum sustainable yield, 151, 341, 583, 592n, 597, 640, 709 biomass and, 342 maximum sustained economic yield, 640–641 Mediterranean ﬁsheries, 415 factors limiting efﬁcient management, 419, 423–425 Mediterranean Sea, coral habitats, 216 Mekong River, 132

757

758

Index

Mekong River Commission, 81 Melanesia, culture, 197 meridional overturning circulation, 127 Mexico National Institute of Ecology, 210 National Institute of Fisheries, 212 sea turtle conservation, 235–238 vaquita conservation, 209, 212 Mifﬂin, Fred, 403 Mifﬂin Plan, 461 migrant labor, 75 migrant workers, 284 migration, ﬁsh, 45, 715 in models, 184 migratory species, 167, 245, 416, 419–420, 444, 648 management of, 486, 649 Millennium Development Goals, 265 mineral rights, in the U.S., 577–578 minimally realistic models, 183 Ministerial Conference on Fisheries Cooperation among African States Bordering the Atlantic Ocean, 269n Minister of Fisheries and Oceans (Canada), 398 minority rights, 79 misperceptions, 595, 604 mitigation measures, 231 mixed-use approaches, 14 models, 7, 290, 638 acceptance of data from, 344 of behavior, 566 boundaries of, 602–604 change in parameter values, 663 development and parameterization of structural, 589 ﬁtting, 583–584 harvesting, 366–367 of marine reserves, 661–662 single-species and multispecies, 717 of species invasions, 569 steady-state management with stochastic variability, 599 of stock health, 366 testing, 603 uncertainty in, 643 modernization buyback programs and, 507 in Icelandic ﬁsheries, 299, 305 in Indian ﬁsheries, 11, 277, 279, 283–284 need for training, 435 in Saudi Arabia, 437 monitoring, 6–7, 94, 168, 521 capacity, 452 costs and beneﬁts, 391 effect on illegal ﬁshing, 265, 267 by ﬁshers, 333 by ﬁshers’ organizations, 330 inadequate, 54, 442 involvement of industry, 403 in Italy, 424 in models, 185 progress in Paciﬁc tuna ﬁsheries, 448

in Red Sea ﬁsheries, 436 in rights-based management, 703–705 standardizing protocols, 333 systems for vessels, 159, 226–227 of voluntary compliance, 621 in West Africa, 263 monkﬁsh, in U.K. ﬁsheries, 371 monopoly power, 521 monsoons ﬁsh abundance and, 11 in Gulf of Oman, 428 role in Indian ﬁsheries, 275 Montauk Tileﬁsh Association, 623 Montreal Protocol, 199, 201, 231 moral hazards, 508, 515, 565, 570n discards and illegal ﬁshing and, 568–569 effect on risk taking and safety, 568 moratoria. See also under licensing on commercial whaling, 9 Morocco, use of driftnets, 422 motivation, for self-regulation, 619 movement dynamics, information on, 715 MSX (multinucleated spore unknown), 127 multiannual guidance programs, 371, 418, 548 multibeam echo sounder, 219–220 multilateral agreements, 536–537, 619 Multiple Use Integrated Marine Management Plan, 295 Mumrinskiy, 174 mussels aquacultured, 61, 330 mutual vulnerability, 683 Myanmar aquaculture, 251 ﬁsheries, 244 Namibia, monitoring program, 265 Nash equilibrium, 558 National Fishworkers Forum (India), 285 National Marine Fisheries Service (U.S.), 383 National Sea Products, 406 national wealth loss of, 37 world ﬁsheries and, 4 National Welfare Fund (India), 283 natural barriers, breakdown of, 50 natural disasters management and, 250–251 vulnerability to, 253 natural resources property rights, 580 variability, 411 Nature Conservancy, 390 funding of buybacks, 514 negative shocks, sensitivity to and effects of, 661–663 New Atlantis concept, 89 New England buyback programs, 509 groundﬁsh ﬁshery, 388–389 stock conservation, 387 new primary production, 127

Index New Zealand, 322n characteristics of ﬁsheries, 348–349 corporate governance in, 521 cost recovery programs, 350 exclusive economic zone, 6 ﬁsheries management, 347–348, 354–355, 528, 687 involvement of stakeholders, 688, 691–694 private, 524 quota system, 694–695 political system, 355 sustainability of ﬁsheries, 356 women in ﬁshing, 76 New Zealand Seafood Industry Council, 695 Nigeria, migrant ﬁshers, 268 noncooperative games, 649–650 nongovernmental organizations, 488, 495. See also environmental nongovernmental organizations nonlinearity, 89 nontarget species, conservation, 160 nonuse value, 9, 293, 527 North Atlantic Oscillation Index, 396 Northern Cod Adjustment and Recovery Plan, 406 northern cod ﬁshery history, 10 sensitivity to climate, 126 Northern Ireland, ﬁsheries management, 374 North Paciﬁc ﬁsheries, sustainability, 387 North Sea declining cod stocks, 173 ﬁsh stocks, 361 herring ﬁshery closures, 376 whiteﬁsh stocks, 373 Norway cold-water coral reefs, 215–216, 218, 223–225, 227 development assistance project, 11 ﬁsheries policy, 360 ﬁshing capacity and vessel sizes, 361–362 important ﬁsh species, 361 moral hazards, 508 overcapacity, 268 performance of ﬁsheries, 364–368 salmon ﬁsheries, 65, 117, 222 subsidy reform, 108 total allowable catches, 362–364 women in ﬁsheries management, 80 Norwegian Fishing Vessel Owners Association, 221 Norwegian Nature Conservation Act, 224 Norwegian Petroleum Activities Act, 223 Norwegian-Russian Fisheries Commission, 362 no-take zones, 291 Nova Scotia community-based management, 683 scallop ﬁsheries, 523, 524 nutrient ﬂows, in models, 184 observation error model, 717 observer programs, 6, 160, 161, 232, 448 onboard, 15, 162

ocean conveyor belt circulation, 55 oceanography, 49 ocean quahog, quota system, 552 ocean ranching, 62 ocean resources, application of principal-agent paradigm, 563 oceans acidiﬁcation. See acidiﬁcation changes in color, satellite measurement, 127 climate, 396 currents, 7 debate on health, 499–500 exploration, 43–44 relation to global economy, 54 restoring, 53–54 Oceans to Plate, 405 Ocean Trawlers company, 174 offer prices, 509 Ofﬁce International des Epizooties, 245 oil exploration and production, 411 allocation of rights in, 573–577 costs of prorationing regulations, 575 effect on reefs, 222–223 oil pollution, 430 spills, 46 oil sardine, 11 Oman ﬁsheries projects, 433 research and management, 437 traditional ﬁsheries management, 435 onboard processing, 9 open access, 110n, 244, 400, 556, 572, 595, 682 in Chile, 324, 335 disputes, 580 in India, 284 in Mexico, 209 models of, 640 in oil exploration and production, 573–574, 576 in Red Sea ﬁsheries, 434 small-vessel loophole, 304 subsidies and, 105 in West Africa, 262, 263 operating costs, 167, 211 in Indian ﬁsheries, 284 opportunity cost, 211 optimum yield, 384 orange roughy, 170, 348 stock health, 349 stock management in Australia, 340 oreos, 348 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 121, 322n, 489 approach to policy development, 312–313 promotion of economic instruments, 320 research activities, 493–494 organized crime involvement in illegal ﬁshing, 171, 174, 177

759

760

Index

outliers, in capacity estimates, 549 outsourcing, 351–352 overcapacity, 32, 265, 435, 485, 514, 595, 638, 710–711 addressing in Southeast Asia, 249 buyback programs and, 507 capacity estimates and, 549 employment and, 379 ﬁshing mortality and, 700 generation of conﬂict, 400 global, 498 high-seas, 319 illegal ﬁshing and, 166–167 improvements and quotas, 318 migration of, 498 in Norway, 268 in Paciﬁc ﬁsheries, 444, 448 reasons for, 644 role of subsidies, 33–35, 99, 361 in small-scale ﬁsheries, 542 sustained, 600 in U.S., 382, 386–387 in West Africa, 263 overcapitalization, 421 incentives for, 459 overﬁshing, 3, 47, 51, 165, 638, 640 in Australia, 339, 340–345 biodiversity and, 140–141 biological and economic, 365 biological health and, 20 of cod, 10, 300 economic, 268 economic factors, 265 effects of management on, 7, 390, 644 emergence of concerns about, 646 as function of mortality, 582 in Gulf of California, 208 institutionalized, 497 lack of property rights and, 551 mandate to prevent, 12 recovery from, 142 of Red Sea ﬁsheries, 430, 434 relationship to overcapacity, 601 role of subsidies, 6, 99 root causes, 263 of snow crab, 291 statistics, 21 of tuna, 151, 444 in U.S., 382, 384–385, 387 in West Africa, 261, 263 of whiteﬁsh, 373 overgrazing, 578, 598 overharvesting. See overﬁshing overhead costs, 167 overinvestment, 106, 421 incentives to avoid, 145 ownership, duration, 313 oysters decline and habitat degradation, 190 effect of climate on farmed, 127

Paciﬁc cod market changes, 117, 118 Paciﬁc Fisheries Inquiry, 402 Paciﬁc Fisheries Licensing Board, 402 Paciﬁc Halibut Commission, 668–669 Paciﬁc Integrated Commercial Fisheries Initiative, 464 Paciﬁc Island countries, 450 effort creep, 452 traditional ﬁsheries, 533 tuna ﬁsheries, 444 women in ﬁshing, 76 Paciﬁc Island Forum Fisheries Agency, 454n Paciﬁc oyster, effect of climate change, 127 Paciﬁc Policy Roundtable, 461 Paciﬁc salmon, cooperative management, 650, 651 Paciﬁc Salmon Revitalization Plan, 461 Paciﬁc Salmon Treaty, 465, 467n packaging, market expansion and, 117 panga ﬁshing, 207 illegal, 210 pangasius catﬁsh, disputes, 251 Papua New Guinea, 455n parameter estimation for harvest control rules, 586 in stock assessments, 584 parameters, choice of, 591 parasites effect of climate change on, 127 transfer from aquaculture, 68–69 Paretian analysis, 525 Parties to the Nauru Agreement, 446 partition function games, 561 partnerships associations, 268 in Canadian ﬁsheries management, 403–404 right to enter, 452 Patagonian toothﬁsh, 170 pattern-matching heuristics, 596 peak-to-peak approach, 548 Pearse, Peter, 402 Pelagic Fish Assessment Survey of the North Arabian Sea, 433 pelagic species African regulations, 261–262 assumption of catch per unit effort, 638 catch, 21 difﬁculty of studying, 47 stock health in U.K. ﬁsheries, 373 targeted by small-scale ﬁsheries, 533 in West African ﬁsheries, 260 penalties, 377 for illegal ﬁshing, 167, 170 for poaching, 330 performance-based voluntary actions, 620–621 permits, value of, 211 permit stacking, 551 Persian Gulf, 427 oceanography, 428 Peru ﬁshery, efﬁciency gains, 37

Index petroleum-based fuels, pollution from, 46 Philippines aquaculture, 251 ecosystem-based management, 248 ﬁsheries, 244 reporting of unregistered vessels, 250 women in ﬁshing, 75 physical environment. See also climate change challenges to management, 250–251, 639 Pinal, Rene, 237, 238n pirate ﬁshing. See IUU ﬁshing place-based management, 53 plaice, in U.K. ﬁsheries, 371 planetary motion, 124 plankton, biomass declines, 127–128 plastics, pollution, 51 platforms, effect on marine ecosystems, 50 poaching, 174, 175 seafood imports from, 176 in territorial use rights ﬁsheries, 330 polar regions, effect of climate change, 127 pole-and-line vessels, 151 policy, 16, 543, 634 analyzing sensitivity, 603 coherence, 494, 498, 499 communicating insights, 597 consideration of complexity, 603 consideration of ﬁshing communities, 384 development, 383, 453 divergent, 485 ecosystem-based management and, 96 engagement of experts, 492 failures and management success, 498 feedbacks, 596 focuses of, 382–383, 677–678 impetus for, 595 implementation, 495, 496–497 implications of assessment error, 602 importance of ﬁshery characteristics in, 423 information for determining, 145, 403, 422, 496 integration in small-scale ﬁsheries, 537 interface with science, 93–94 international and subsidies, 99–100 international obligations, 500 in management of small-scale ﬁsheries, 536–537 models to evaluate, 184 objectives, 187, 435 optimal, 569 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development approach, 312–313 research, 501 routine review of, 344 separation from management, 350 as subsidies, 34, 101 political conﬂict, effect on ﬁsheries, 430 political costs, 16 political support, 450 actions to build, 574 politics, 285

pollution, 20, 44, 50–51, 626n, 639 oil, 46, 430 from shipwrecking, 276 vaquita mortality and, 208 pool externality, 527 population, human growth, 52, 259 and habitat degradation in India, 276 population biology, 638 population biomass, 714 population dynamics, of sea turtles, 198 population models, 190 Porcupine Sea Bight, 221 port inspection programs, 159 ports construction, 103 development in India, 276 restricted access to U.S., 173 Portugal misreporting of catch, 173 women in ﬁsh processing, 73 postrelease survival rates, 152 poverty, 12, 74, 533, 537, 673 co-management as a tool against, 676 conﬂict and, 267 governance and, 268 illegal ﬁshing and, 170 overexploitation and, 263 in Southeast Asia, 247 strategies that consider, 265 as target of Indian ﬁsheries management, 282 Powell River Symposium, 349 prawn ﬁshery Australian, 340 buybacks in, 517n precautionary approach, 467n, 536–537, 591 economically motivated, 642–643 precipitation, changes with climate change, 124 predator-prey models, 183, 184 predator-prey relationships, 141, 147n predators biomass, 21–22 keystone, 142 removal of, 150 predictability, reduced, 89 price support, 34 Prigogine, Elia, 89 primary producers, 49 principal-agent problem, 563–564, 569–570 principal-agent theory, 564–565 application to ﬁsheries, 566–569 priorities, 13–14, 418, 420, 541 setting, 492–495 prisoner’s dilemma, 557, 650 privatization, 317 procedural principles, 92 processing cooperatives, 388 in Iceland, 300

761

762 processing (continued) industry, 78 small-scale ﬁsheries and, 538 women in, 73, 77–79 producer organizations, 375 product certiﬁcation, 609, 632–633 product endorsement programs choosing, 609–610, 615–616 product introductions, 118 production of Australian ﬁsheries, 338 costs, 66 development of ﬁshing capacity and, 31–33 ﬂuctuations, 123 fuel costs and, 27–28 global trends, 23–24 of Indian ﬁsheries, 279–280 modeling, 184, 640 sustainability of growth, 65–66 threats to, 126 trade and, 114–116 traditional versus modern, 280 of U.K. ﬁsheries, 372 value and ﬁsh prices, 25–26 production function, 640 productivity biological, 49, 718 ﬁsh, harvest rates and, 142 marine, in Shiretoko World Heritage Site, 294 ocean, 48 stock, 140 proﬁtability buyback programs and, 508 effect of subsidies, 105–106 as focus of policy, 360, 365 production and, 65–66 social acceptability, 15 proﬁts, effect of reserves on, 661 property rights, 14, 673 co-management and, 682–683 economic theory of, 669 exclusive economic zones and, 5–6 fairness, 16 issues in cod ﬁshery, 10 private, 666, 667–668, 683 protected areas establishing, 162 size and effectiveness, 54 protected species, 146 protectionism, 116 protection stocks, 583, 591 public beneﬁts, versus private, 4, 14–15 public goods, 4, 14, 202n, 310 buybacks and, 516 sea turtle biodiversity as, 232 purchase prices, in buybacks, 511 purse seines backdown maneuver, 158 bycatch and, 153–154 capacity, 451, 700

Index description, 151 ﬁsheries, 707, 708–709 well capacity, 710 Qatar, research and management, 437 quantitative stock assessment models, assumptions of, 714 quota hopping, 378, 379 quota management system in New Zealand, 347, 349, 351, 691–694, 694 quotas, 669, 670. See also speciﬁc types of quotas allocation, 349, 363–364, 420, 421. See also allocation caps on holding, 318 for cod, 362–363 in Europe, 374 ﬁxed, 379 holders, groups for co-management, 679 international, 319, 363 introduction in Iceland, 299, 301–302 litigation concerning, 307–308 maximization of net present values and, 671 monitoring compliance, 704 registry of, 351 tied to buybacks, 510 trading, 189, 378, 379 transferability, 378 value of, 672–673 in West Africa, 263 race for ﬁsh, 312, 376, 421, 459, 517, 572 eliminating, 641, 642 incentives, 523 in North Paciﬁc, 387 ranching, land rights, 578 range land, rights, 578 Rastrelliger research vessel, 437 ratings systems, 609 recreational ﬁshers participation in management, 390 power in New Zealand, 693 reaction to quotas, 353 recreational ﬁshing in Canada, 458 in Italy, 417 salmon restrictions, 467n in U.S., 382 recruitment, 714–715 redﬁsh, 216, 217 Red Sea, 426 commercial ﬁsh species, 430 ﬁsheries development projects, 440–441 ﬁsheries employment, 428–429 ﬁsheries management, 429, 435–440, 438 length of coastline for countries along, 427 organizational structures, 438–439 overexploitation, 434 physical oceanographical features, 428 red sea urchins ﬁsheries, management, 526 reﬂagging. See ﬂags of convenience

Index Regime for Benthic Exploitation, 328 Regional Commission for Fisheries, 431, 434, 438, 439, 441 Regional Fisheries Committee for the Gulf of Guinea, 267, 269n regional ﬁsheries management organizations, 446, 489. See also names of organizations accountability, 497 bycatch reduction initiatives, 157, 159–161 challenges of, 171–172 councils in U.S., 382 improving, 501 invitation and motivation of members, 653–655 list of, 497 management of straddling stocks, 651–652 participants, 496 in the Red Sea area, 438 for tuna ﬁsheries, 699–701 use of scientiﬁc data, 162 Regional Fishery Survey and Development Project (Gulfs Project), 432–433 Regional Organization for the Conservation of the Environment of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, 434 registration, 703. See also licensing importance in buyback programs, 509 maintenance of registers, 704 in Norway, 364 regulation as driver of business practices, 623 perceived need for, 177n trade effects and, 107 regulatory threat, 620, 624 relative abundance, 715 relative payment contracts, 566 relative stability principle, 380n release practices, 156 religion gender roles and, 79 role in traditional management, 262 rent, 36, 38, 110n, 303, 322n, 369n, 467n, 661 allocating, 527 conditions of optimal, 367 dissipation, 459, 522, 523, 573 effect of reserves on, 664 losses and transferable quotas, 522–524 maximizing, 365, 524, 574 negative, 105 resource, 672 sustainable, 640 in territorial use rights ﬁsheries, 333 rent seeking, 435, 672 incentives to eliminate, 522 principal-agent problem and, 564 repeated games, 560 reputation, role in voluntary participation, 622 research, 49 in developing countries, 439–440 and ﬁshers’ organizations in Japan, 291 importance of statistics to, 35

763

on pelagic animals, 47 in Red Sea countries, 436 in U.K., 374–375 research vessels, 439, 441 resilience, 94, 129, 130, 536, 543, 650, 663 effect of subsidies, 108 food web changes and, 140 of marine reserves, 659 resource conditions, inclusion in capacity estimates, 549 resource limits, adapting to, 597–599 resource management ﬁsheries, in Japan, 288 resource recovery, buybacks and, 551 retail chains, effect on supply chain development, 119–120 revelation principle, 565, 570n revenue distribution, 410 forgone as subsidy, 104 in models, 640, 644 of Norwegian ﬁsheries, 362 range of, 6 wages as share of, 566 reverse auctions, 512, 513 reversibility of effects of overﬁshing, 140 loss of, 89 Reykjavik Declaration on Sustainable Fisheries, 143 rice paddies, 275 rights, 7–8, 110n, 313, 424, 542–543. See also property rights; territorial use rights allocating, 319 ambiguous, 653, 654 beneﬁts of private use, 672–673 collective, 652 economic analysis and, 528–529 economic efﬁciency and, 673 equitable access, 262 importance of deﬁning, 354 as incentive for investment, 572 in Japan, 287, 288–289 litigation, 307 ownership, 376, 444, 669 perspective in Mexico, 209–210 protection and community well-being, 254 redeﬁnition, 528 security limits, 390 stakeholder involvement and, 689–690 of states to develop, 451–452 territorial, 287 transferable quotas and, 349 undermining of traditional, 38 varying approaches to implement, 318 women’s, 81 rights-based management, 15, 378, 410, 572, 639. See also individual transferable quotas development in U.S., 385 importance of industry support, 670 of sedentary resources, 422–423 in Southeast Asia, 249–250

764 rights-based management (continued) in tuna ﬁsheries, 701–702 in U.S., 383, 387–389 risk assessment in ecolabeling programs, 615–616 use in Australian ﬁsheries, 340 risk management, 523, 631 ritualism, 262 rivers constructions, 295 vulnerability to climate change, 132 Rockefeller Foundation, xi rock lobster ﬁsheries illegal ﬁshing, 178 in New Zealand, 692, 693, 694–695 quota holder associations, 351 roe herring ﬁshery, management, 526 Round Table on Sustainable Development, 171 Royal Institute of International Affairs, 171 rules, institution, 677 runoff, agricultural, 51 Russia illegal ﬁshing, 175–176 total allowable catch negotiations, 362 trawlers, 297n sacred ﬁshing grounds, 262 safety costs, 167 moral hazards and, 568 quota systems and, 670 saithe, 361, 365 salinity, cod populations and, 132 salmon aquaculture, 68–69, 117, 222 Paciﬁc, 394, 397–398, 458 processing, 67 production and price, 64 salmon ﬁsheries Canada-U.S. agreements, 384 economic state, 466 management in Canada, 459–464, 463–464 policy response to stock status, 404 stock assessments, 458 sanctions, 563 sandeel ﬁsheries, in Japan, 289–291 sardinellas, 260 sardines, 11, 260 satellite technologies, 46–48 Saudi Arabia, 426, 427 ﬁsheries, 431 ﬁsheries projects, 433–434 ﬁsheries research and management, 437–438 Savoie, Donald, 404 scale, co-management and, 680–681 scallop ﬁsheries, 354 in New Zealand, 351 techniques to maximize yield, 523 technology investment, 524 Schaefer equation. See catch-effort equation

Index scholarship programs, 197 science interface with policy, 93–94 scientiﬁc data, 634 acceptance of and adherence to, 291, 443, 448, 588, 591 collection, 375 lack of, 144, 263–264 policy and, 145, 403, 422, 496, 602 shared, 295 source of, 501 use of, 384 scientists, 488 in ﬁsheries management, 496 relationships with ﬁshers, 344, 694 training, 434, 441 Scotland ﬁsheries management, 374, 379 ﬁshing ﬂeet, 371 Sea Around Us Project, 169 seabed habitats, 373, 718 effect of gear on, 720 seabed mapping, 227 seabirds avoidance, 153, 159 bycatch and gear, 154, 156 sea courts, 11 sea cucumbers, stock depletion, 440 sea ﬁsheries committees (U.K.), 374 Seaﬁsh Industry Authority, 375 seafood competition as a food source, 115 consumption, 60 preferences, 118, 119 demand, 23–24, 47, 166–167 ecolabeling, 161 mislabeling, 159 percentage of supply as aquaculture, 60 safety, 120–121 standardization, 119 seafood industry, 36 consumer companies, 119–120 vessel ownership by, 364 Seafood Industry Council, 351, 355 seafood processing. See processing sea grass, 52 habitats in Southeast Asia, 252 sea level rise, 53 sea lice, 68–69, 464 sea lions, strategies to protect, 590 seasonal bans, in India, 12 sea surface temperature, 48, 124–125, 639 sea turtles. See also leatherback sea turtles bycatch, 198–199, 201–202, 623 avoidance, 153, 159, 160 and gear, 154, 156 conservation, 53, 251 investment by ﬁshers, 236–238 cultural signiﬁcance and status, 618 effect of artiﬁcial light, 52

Index egg harvesting, 195, 196 nest protection, 201–202, 231, 234 threats to, 233–234 sedimentation, gear and, 141 self-declaration labeling systems, 610 self-governance, 357, 522, 535, 619. See also voluntary approaches of clam ﬁsheries, 423 contracts, 527 economic analysis, 525–526, 528–529 reducing rent dissipation, 523 under unanimous consent, 526 self-policing, industry, 155, 160 Selligrunnen Reef, 219, 224 Senegal, migrant ﬁshers, 268 sentinel ﬁsheries, 403 sexual maturation, effect of exploitation on, 140 share contracts, 566–567 shared resources, 4, 54, 415 Barents Sea and North Sea, 361 characteristics of, 6 conservation of, 202 costs and beneﬁts, 38 incentives to maximize value, 527 management, 264–265, 440, 444, 451, 486, 639, 648–651, 656 in Mediterranean ﬁsheries, 419–420 negotiations with U.S., 384 overview, 648 small-scale ﬁsheries considerations, 538 strategic behavior and, 556, 561 sharing games, 560 sharks bycatch and gear, 154, 156 ﬁnning and mortality, 159 illicit markets, 174 overexploitation, 434 shellﬁsh. See also common names of shellﬁsh African regulations, 262 in Canadian ﬁsheries, 393–394, 396–397, 409–410 overrepresentation in self-governance case studies, 354 in U.K. ﬁsheries, 371 shipbreaking yards, in India, 276 shipbuilding, material costs, 27 ships, effect on marine ecosystems, 50 Shiretoko World Heritage Site, 294–297 shrimp aquaculture pollution, 69 decreased catch during wars, 430 ﬁsheries in Canada, 396, 397 ﬁsheries in Mexico, 210, 211 ﬁsheries in West Africa, 260–261 Indian exports, 281 production and price, 63–64 trawling in Gulf of California, 207 side payments, 200, 574, 577, 650, 652, 657n signaling, 569–570 simpliﬁcation, problems of, 602–603 single-species management, 8

765

sinks, 199, 231 size at maturity, 715 skipjack tuna, 444 exploitation of, 699 small island developing states, 448 small-scale ﬁsheries, 532–533, 543 aspects of scale considerations, 538 engagement of stakeholders in management, 539 history of management, 534–535 management approaches and issues, 536 management objectives, 540–541 smuggling, 173 in the Caribbean, 175 snappers, stock depletion, 349 snow crab, 396 catch, 291–292 ﬁsheries in Japan, 291–293 survey, 403 social beneﬁts, of subsidies, 107–108 social capital, 355 social costs, 16 social equity, trade-off with economic efﬁciency, 332 social issues in ﬁsheries management, 516, 535–536, 538 inclusion of, 632 social justice, 303 social sciences, interface with natural sciences, 93 social scientists, 488 social support, 634 socioeconomic issues, 265, 267–268. See also poverty sockeye salmon, 398 stock declines, 459 software, for stock assessments, 584 sole, in U.K. ﬁsheries, 371 sole owners, 525, 529, 556 solid waste pollution, 51 Solomon Islands conservation in, 197, 200, 238 Somalia, 434 sonar, 47, 720 South America. See also names of countries aquaculture volume, 63 effect of climate change on ﬁsheries, 132 ﬁsh demand, 24 women in ﬁsheries, 76, 77, 79 Southeast Asia. See also names of countries community-based management, 247–248 ecosystem status, 251–252 ﬁsheries, 243 ﬁsheries management, 245–248 food expenditures, 121 fuel costs and management, 252–253 rights-based systems, 249–250 trade agreements, 251 Southern Ocean, ecosystem models, 183 South Paciﬁc Regional Fisheries Management Organization, 656 Spain effect of exclusive economic zones on, 114 misreporting of catch, 173

766

Index

spatial integration, 488 Spatial Multispecies Operating Model, 183 spawning biomass, 130, 582, 586, 659 recruitment and, 714–715 spawning potential ratio, 586 special protection areas, 377 Species at Risk Act (Canada), 467n species interactions, 8 spillover, of ﬁsh from marine reserves, 660, 663 sponges, exploitation of, 223 sports ﬁsheries, 533 sports ﬁshing, 166 St. John’s Conference, 494 stability, management, 652 stage games, 560 stakeholders, 146 allocating rights among multiple, 94–95 buy-in, 317 in Chilean ﬁsheries, 327–328 conﬂict among, 16, 500 consultation with, 690–691 empowerment, 538 involvement, 403, 695 in management, 293, 675–676, 687–689 in policy, 355 and rights context, 689 relationships among, 347 representation in co-management, 681–682 resistance to market-based tools, 310 strategic effects, 559 unity in representation, 690 status quo strategy, 188 steady-state management with assessment error, 601–602 stochastic variation in, 599 steelhead salmon, 467n stochastic production frontier, 548 stock assessments, 333, 403, 523, 568–569, 638, 714, 717 in Australia, 339 errors, 10, 601–602, 642–643 information and investments, 598 in models, 185 overview of methods, 583–585 of Paciﬁc salmon, 458 parameter estimation, 584 problems of, 7 in product certiﬁcation programs, 613–614 in Red Sea ﬁsheries, 431, 437, 440 stock biomass, 140, 568 stock collapse, 129, 290, 296 in Chile, 324 cod, 393, 394 failure to follow scientiﬁc recommendations and, 591 herring, 361 predictions, 13–14 salmon, 464 storage and preservation technologies, 113–114 effect on trade, 116

Strait of Hormuz, 427, 428 strategic behavior basic concepts, 557–558 in ﬁsheries, 556–557 models, 560–561 stratiﬁcation, in capacity estimates, 549 structured decision making, 630, 631 structure quotas, 363 submersible technologies, 46 Sub Regional Fisheries Commission, 267, 269n Sub-regional Fisheries Training Center Project, 432 subsidiarity, principle of, 356 subsidies, 6, 20, 265, 319 in Australia, 341 categorizing, 101–102 for clam restocking, 423 deﬁning, 100–102 effects, 105–108, 106, 107, 361 estimates, 102–103 evaluation of, 38 fuel, 27, 252 illegal ﬁshing and, 168 included in Doha Round, 100 Indian, 282–283 of new capacity, 598 for northern cod ﬁsheries, 10 in Norway, 360 problems of quantifying, 100–105 purposes and history of, 99 reforming, 108–109, 109–110 role in overcapacity, 33–35 small-scale ﬁsheries and, 537 social dimension, 107–108 transparency, 103, 110 U.S., 386 at various governance levels, 105 subsistence ﬁshing, 258, 533 in Sudan, 438 substantial principles, 92 Sudan, 426, 427 development projects, 439 ﬁsheries, 438 Suez Canal, 426 Sula Reef complex, 215–216 Summit on Human Environment, 88 supermajority voting, 521 supermarket chains effect on aquaculture, 67 effect on trade, 114 seafood labeling, 160 supply chain, 66–67 changes in, 114 effect of international trade on, 251 opportunities for women, 82 retail chains and, 119–120 surfclam ﬁshery, quota system, 552 surimi, 118, 122n suripera nets, 212 surveillance, 6. See also monitoring

Index suspension feeders, 218 sustainability, 265, 293, 297, 690 assessments, 161, 162 of bycatch species, 160 of Canadian ﬁsheries, 406 of Chilean ﬁsheries, 327 demands for, 160 functions linked to, 490 harvest and, 142, 365 mortality and, 140 need for international guidelines, 161 of New Zealand ﬁsheries, 355 obstacles to, 16 of Paciﬁc tuna ﬁsheries, 448 as a priority, 13 in Southeast Asia, 253 subsidies and, 33, 109 varying interpretations, 609 sustainability science, 89 sustainable development, 88, 490 in Australia, 339, 341 Sustainable Development Strategy for the Seas of East Asia, 246 Sustainable Fisheries Act (U.S.), 580 Sustainable Fisheries Resolution, 499 sustainable livelihoods approach, 265 Sustainable Slopes Program, 624 sustainable yields, maintaining, 129 sustained management stocks, 583 swordﬁsh, 416 system noise, in capacity estimates, 549 systems analysis, 630 taboos, 262 tagging, 47 Taiwan, illicit markets, 175 target species, 8, 162 expansion, 21 management of, 293, 582 of small-scale ﬁsheries, 533 taxes, 15, 202n, 332, 529, 672 to address bycatch, 199, 618 in Chile, 329 exemptions from, 34, 103, 104 favorable policies, 386 to fund conservation, 200–201, 232, 238 for funding buybacks, 514, 515 tax rate, 568 technical expertise, 488, 496–497 technological coefﬁcient, 32 technology, 20, 46–48 advancement in West African ﬁsheries, 260 in aquaculture, 66 consequences of, 647 effect on environment, 719 effect on ﬁsh stocks, 668, 669, 699 effect on productivity, 27 ﬁsheries employment and, 30 investment, 524

in Japan, 290 obstacles to new, 293 storage and preservation, 113–114 transfer, 268, 485 telecommunication companies, funding conservation, 237 temperature. See also sea surface temperature maturation and, 130 tenure systems, traditional, 335 terrestrial drivers, of marine ecosystem decline, 5 territorial use rights, 249, 314–315, 320, 701 beneﬁt distribution, 329 in Chile, 324, 326–327, 335n conservation and, 334 costs, 332 sedentary species and, 417 Thailand aquaculture, 251 closures of ﬁsheries, 249 ﬁsheries, 244 ﬁsheries management organizations, 245 trade disputes, 251 wages of ﬁshers, 30 thermal stratiﬁcation, 127 Tigris River, 428 tilapia, production in Egypt, 64 tileﬁsh ﬁsheries (in U.S.), 526 total allowable catch, 189, 289, 297, 521 in Canada, 399 caps on aggregate, 389 determining, 362–363, 380n, 642–643 economic effects, 105 in Iceland, 302–303 negative effects, 421 in New Zealand, 349, 358n in Norway, 363–364 optimal, 522 self-determined, 525 stock biomass and, 361 for tuna ﬁsheries, 700 in U.K., 374, 375–376 in West Africa, 263 total allowable effort, 289 totoaba, 45, 207 bycatch of vaquita in ﬁshery for, 205 tourism in Gulf of California area, 207 in India, 276 in Japan, 295 whale watching, 9 traceability, 67, 120, 173, 424, 611 trade documentation, 159, 172 factors causing increased, 113–114 international, 4, 23–24 effect on West African ﬁsheries, 259 growth of, 114 measures to combat illegal ﬁshing, 168 production and, 114–116

767

768 trade (continued) safety as a barrier to, 121 small-scale ﬁsheries and, 537 trade agreements, in Southeast Asia, 251 traditional knowledge, 678 tragedy of the commons, 172, 335, 551, 572, 595, 666, 682 transactional sex, 78 transaction costs, 526, 529 transboundary resources. See shared resources transferability, 301, 302, 313, 314, 378, 400, 521, 551, 701, 702 enhancing, 379 in limited-entry systems, 703 problems with grandfathering and, 303 in quota systems, 704 transfer efﬁciency, 128 transfer rates, variable, 664 transition periods, in ﬁsheries, 550 transparency in ecolabeling programs, 614, 616 of funding sources, 498 transportation costs, 117 effect on trade, 114, 116–117 local markets and, 279 market access and, 115 Trawler Development Fund (India), 282 trawling, 44, 47 bycatch of vaquita, 205 destruction of reefs, 215, 220–221, 227 fuel costs of, 721 in Gulf of California, 207 habitat destruction, 51, 720 introduction in India, 283–284 in Japan, 291 optimal effort, 186 prohibitions in West Africa, 269n treaties, international law, 653 trophic cascades, 140 tropics, special management problems in, 198–199 Truman Proclamation, 668 tsunami of 2004, 253 tuna. See also common names of species boycott, 622, 626n bycatch of undersized, 154, 156 catch, 698–699, 705–706 catch methods, 151 export value, 151 overexploitation, 710 prices and illegal ﬁshing, 170 processing, 78, 80 stock status, 698–699 in West African ﬁsheries, 260 tuna ﬁsheries African regulations, 262 cooperative management, 444 international management, 699–701 regional management organizations, 497, 498

Index Turkey, use of driftnets, 422 turtle excluder devices, 719 turtle grass, 52 turtles. See leatherback sea turtles; sea turtles tusk, 216, 217 twines, high-performance, 721 unanimous consent, 526 uncertainty, 496 about catch, 568–569 addressing, 602, 639 behavioral, 189 in management, 539 in models, 184, 589, 643 quantifying in stock assessments, 584 sources of, 35 types, 642 underwater cameras, 720 underwater setting chutes, 153 unemployment insurance, 407, 410 unintentional harvest. See bycatch United Kingdom characteristics of ﬁsheries, 371–373 ﬁsheries management, 373–375, 378 ﬁshing disputes with Iceland, 300 importance of ﬁshing, 370 Overseas Development Agency, 439 seafood market, 120 total allowable catch, 375–376 United Nations, 492. See also Convention on the Law of the Sea Agreement for the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, 6 Conference on the Law of the Sea, 647 Environment Program, 496 Fishing Stocks Agreement, 142, 167, 245, 651, 653 implementation, 451–452 Fish Stocks Conference, 651 funding of Red Sea ﬁsheries projects, 433 Millennium Development Goals, 74 Omnibus Resolution on Oceans and the Law of the Sea, 494 Open-Ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea, 171 Resolution on Sustainable Fisheries, 144 ruling of Human Rights Committee, 307–308 Summit on Human Environment, 88 United States buybacks, 550–551 catch ranking, 382 Commission on Ocean Policy, 385 control of illegal ﬁshing, 173 economic performance of ﬁsheries, 390 exclusive economic zone, 386 ﬁsheries as government property, 668 ﬁsheries management, 383–385, 528 ﬁshing capacity assessments, 546

Index imports, 115 incentive payments, 622 limited-access privilege programs, 551–552 National Marine Fisheries Service, 235, 237 oil rights, 573–574, 576 rights to resources, 577–579 trade disputes, 251 women in ﬁsheries, 75, 80 unit formation, 575–576 universality, loss of, 89 upwelling, 11 along west coast of India, 275 in Gulf of Aden, 426–427 Red Sea, 428 in West African ﬁsheries, 258 urban areas, coastal management in, 252 urbanization, in the Red Sea region, 431 utopia, 88, 97n vaquita bycatch of, 208 conservation of, 208–209, 212 discovery and decline, 205–207 variable-dimension in model, 663 vegetable meal, 67–68 vessels. See also decommissioning blacklisting, 171, 172, 173 capacity, 32, 304–306, 376, 452, 454–455n, 549, 703, 708, 710 catch limits, 314–315 communication among, 155 conﬂict between owners and crew, 563 construction subsidies, 107–108 coordination, 444 depressed proﬁt margins and reinvestment, 32 development of ﬂeets, 30–31 disclosure of information by environmental groups, 176 dynamic of ﬂeets in models, 185 effect of buyback programs on, 507–508 efﬁciency of, 367 fuel efﬁciency, 721 multipurpose, 417 numbers of, 30 ownership issues, 364, 566 permits in Mexico, 210 permit stacking, 551 quotas, 363 reconversion allowances, 422 reﬂagging, 168, 703–704 registration, 167, 168 research, 375, 439, 441 restrictions, 7, 321 restructuring programs, 379 reuse of bought back, 510 ﬂeet size in U.K., 371 types, 260, 277, 534 unregulated ﬁshing, 653 Viarsa 1, 165

769

Vietnam aquaculture, 251 ﬁsheries, 244 ﬁsheries management, 247 reduction of ﬁshing capacity, 249 reporting of unregistered vessels, 250 trade disputes, 251 wages of ﬁshers, 30 voluntary approaches, 693, 694–695 design issues, 619–621 factors in success of, 621, 625 group-based, 621, 623 targets for, 621 volunteerism, 291 wages, 77. See also income as share of revenue, 566 of women in ﬁshing, 79 Wales ﬁsheries management, 374 ﬁshing ﬂeet, 371 walleye pollock, 296–297 wars, effect on ﬁsheries, 430 weak-stock management, 590 welfare effects, 569 well capacity, 710 well volume, 708 Western and Central Paciﬁc Fisheries Commission, 443, 454, 652, 699–701 developing constituency, 453 management outcomes, 446–450 membership, 454n seabird policies, 159 Western Paciﬁc Fishery Management Council, 235 wetlands, Indian, 274 Wetlands Mitigation Banking (U.S.), 200, 231 Wetlands Reserve Program (U.S.), 622 whales conservation, 8–10, 624 mortality, 154 whaling, methods and history, 8–9 whiteﬁsh changes in market, 117 consumer preferences, 118 ﬁsheries in U.K., 373 whiting, Canada-U.S. agreements, 384 Wiener diffusion process, 661 windborne nutrients, 127 wind power, 721 women in ﬁsheries management, 80–81 in ﬁshing, 74–77 in ﬁsh processing, 77–79 inclusion in development plans, 283 in Indian ﬁsheries, 278–279, 284–285 role in ﬁshing communities, 16 role in ﬁsh supply, 72 in West African ﬁsheries, 260 Work in Fishing Convention, 39n

770

Index

World Bank, 498 subsidies review, 38 world population, 3 World Summit on Sustainable Development, 20, 100, 143, 494 World Trade Organization, 490, 495 Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, 100 Doha Round, 100 ﬁsheries subsidies, 109–110 World Tuna Purse-Seine Organization, 160 World Wide Fund for Nature, 99 World Wildlife Fund, 171

Yangtze River dolphin, 207, 210 Yaquina Bay, ﬁsheries management, 526 yellowﬁn tuna, 444 conservation, 450 exploitation of, 699 yellowtail, Canada-U.S. agreements, 384 Yemen, 426, 427 ban on commercial ﬁshing, 429, 435 cooperatives, 436 ﬁsheries, 438 population, 442n yield-per-recruit analysis, 584