A hot topic for purse seine tuna fisheries in the Eastern and Western Central Pacific regions is the management of incidentally caught tuna species that are overfished or undergoing overfishing. In the Eastern Tropical Pacific managing the mortality of small bigeye and yellowfin tunas caught in the pursuit of skipjack...
When evaluating potential government interventions economists often consider whether a proposed policy is efficient. However, changes in policy can also result in changes in wealth. When politically influential individuals or groups see losses, efficient policies can become politically infeasible even if they increase wealth in aggregate. This paper examines political...
Traceability for globally traded seafood already exists due to concerns over health and safety, and some businesses have embraced innovative traceability technologies as a way to improve business efficiencies. But traceability is also being heavily pushed as a potential approach to promote sustainable seafood, specifically as a way to combat...
This presentation provides an overview of a session presentation held at the NAAFE Forum 2017 in March, 2017. The title of the session was: Rights-Based Management. The title of the presentation was: We Need to Restore Ourselves First: The Story of El Manglito.
The overall goal of the Walton Family Foundation’s (WFF) Chile Oceans Initiative is to create well-managed, sustainable fisheries that contribute to healthy ocean ecosystems and provide greater social and economic security to coastal communities and industries. Chile is the eighth largest fishing nation in the world, and although Chile boasts...
The rapid pace of climate change and increased human disturbance of ecosystems in the Arctic is bringing urgency to concern over non-native species introductions and their potential threats to the marine environment and its economic productivity, where before environmental conditions served as a barrier to their establishment. The same characteristics...
This presentation provides an overview of a Special Session presentation held at the NAAFE Forum 2017 in March, 2017. The title of the special session was: Saving the World's Most Endangered Marine Mammal. The session was organized by Oriana Poindexter.
This presentation provides an overview of a Special Session presentation held at the NAAFE Forum 2017 in March, 2017. The title of the special session was: Saving the World's Most Endangered Marine Mammal. The session was organized by Oriana Poindexter.
Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia have all developed nutrient trading programs to defray the cost of achieving mandated nitrogen load reductions in Chesapeake Bay, and there is increasing interest in the role oysters can play in generating credits. A number of bioeconomic models highlight the impact these credits have...
Over recent years, fisheries managers have been going through a paradigm shift to prioritize ecosystem-based management. With this comes an increasing need to better understand the impacts of fisheries management decisions on the social well-being and sustainability of fishing communities. This paper summarizes research aimed at using secondary data to...
Marine spatial planning (MSP) is a process that planners can use to make decisions about different, sometimes conflicting, ocean uses. The process is intended to be participatory and to facilitate the sharing of information about multiple uses of the marine environment. In the U.S. an important component of MSP is...
Billfish have greater value as living targets for non-consumptive, or minimally consumptive, recreational fisheries than they do as either directed catch or by-catch species in commercial fleets. The pilot projects seek a Coasian solution to this problem through private funding mechanisms. The angler sector has a high willingness to pay...
Overfishing and the destruction of small-scale fisheries in developing countries — particularly through the use of illegal fishing gear — is a pressing issue. Policymakers and local community leaders often suggest fines and enforcement mechanisms to reduce the use of illegal fishing; however, the response of fishery participants to “bans”...
In an environment of limited resources and expanded management expectations, fisheries regulators face hard decisions about how intensively to regulate different stocks. The Fishery Management Councils are required to regulate harvest of all stocks in a sustainable manner, but have discretion on how much regulatory effort to invest in individual...
For centuries, the Icelandic people has relied on its abundance of natural resources and fisheries in particular. In today’s volatile and homogenous economy of Iceland, fisheries is one of its main export industries, together with power-intensive manufacturing and tourism. Consequently, movements in fish prices have a significant effect on the economy...
Countries exploiting transboundary fisheries face strong incentives for over- exploitation. This basic economic insight has been validated empirically; transboundary fisheries tend to be in worse condition than fisheries in single nations. Thus, transboundary fisheries pose a significant, and globally ubiquitous, management challenge. Attempts to solve this challenge through cross-country cooperation...
While the importance of international trade in fish products has long been recognized, international trade in fishing services (TIFS), involving harvesting, processing, transportation and marketing has received but little attention. Yet, one half of the world’s EEZs involve foreign fishing arrangements, resulting in such trade. The World Bank report, Trade...
Almost one half of the EEZs of the world are subject to so-called foreign fishing arrangements (FFAs), in which foreign fishing states (distant water fishing states in particular) gain access to EEZs under access arrangements with the relevant coastal states. The FFAs may take the form of “fee fishing” arrangements,...
Informal fisheries (including unreported legal, illegal and discarded catch) have significant benefits for communities that official statistics often ignore, yet there is an associated loss in potential economic impacts compared to catch that is processed and marketed formally. This represents a significant global issue, as recent estimates suggest that about...
Seafood markets are the inflection point in the fish-to-food transformation, and act as windows into revealed consumer preferences for seafood selection. These preferences have far-reaching implications for fisheries management, food security, and marine conservation. This study reveals consumer preferences for seafood in San Diego County by quantifying the relationship between...
This paper tests the existence of asymmetric price transmission between first-wholesale and ex-vessel markets in the Alaska shoreside pollock fishery. The theory of derived demand implies that price changes should be transmitted through different levels of the supply chain. This suggests a cointegrating relationship between prices at the first-wholesale (the...
The Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs) have been successfully applied to commercial fisheries around the globe and have uncovered key insights into fishery management success. We developed an extension of the FPIs to consider performance of recreational fisheries. The Sport FPIs were developed through multiple iterations of consulting, piloting and revision...
Fisheries management currently claims for fisheries governance (FG), a more balanced scheme that proposes to share the power among government, civil society and economics. In Mexico and other developing countries, the lack of operational regulations has delayed its implementation. Several authors state that topological analysis is useful to identify key...
The paper analyzes a situation in which the fishing fleet is subject to restrictive regulation regarding the harvest of its primal target species due to biological overfishing that in turn reveals a high level of overcapacity. The goal is to model fishermen’s expectations and likely responses to the government initiated...
When making policy recommendations, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council balances community stability with efficiency in resource utilization. The Council is considering an action that, for part of the year, would effectively limit the harvest of Aleutian Islands Pacific cod to vessels that deliver to a shore plant in the...
Economists have long been interested in empirically modelling/forecasting the price of staple commodities using both structural and reduced form models. The purpose of this paper is to apply Pesaran’s Autoregressive Distributed Lag/ Error-Correction Bounds model for forecasting the ex-vessel price of lobster on the east coast of Canada using monthly...
In May 2016, the NOAA Science Advisory Board, Ecosystem Services and Management Working Group, submitted a report to the NOAA Administrator entitled, An Assessment of the Use and Potential Use of Ecosystem Service Valuation (ESV) within NOAA: A Report from the NOAA Science Advisory Board”. While the report covers all...
While rights-based management is generally purported enhance economic efficiency in fisheries and reduce over-capitalization, the social and economic outcomes due to this regulatory regime are less comprehensively understood. Relatively recently, industrialized and export-oriented Latin American fisheries began adopting individual transferable quota (ITQ) regimes to recover collapsed fish stocks. While these...
Proceedings of the 2017 Forum of the North American Association of Fisheries Economists, held March 22-24, 2017 in La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico.
Several factors currently threaten blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) in the Chesapeake Bay. In addition to poor water quality, degraded habitat, and shifting environmental conditions, derelict gear has recently been recognized as a significant source of mortality for this economically and culturally significant species. From 2008 through 2014, commercial watermen in...
From 2000 onwards, the United States saw an increasing trend for the shellfish aquaculture practices especially along the Northeast coast. Despite the supporting majority of public regarding the shellfish aquaculture operations, these operations are sometimes opposed by local communities claiming the devaluation of housing property due to the construction of...
By 2015 The European Common Fisheries Policy Reform includes a landing obligation (discard ban) in some fisheries and over the next few years all EU fisheries will be facing the landing obligation restriction. This is one of the most significant changes of the Common Fishery Policy (CFP) since 1983, the...
The for-hire sector plays a significant role in providing recreational fishing opportunities for Atlantic highly migratory species (HMS) such as tuna, billfish, swordfish, and sharks. Because of the high cost of equipment needed to pursue HMS, many saltwater anglers find chartering a for-hire vessel to be the only affordable alternative....
Achieving economic viability is an important goal when it comes to developing policies for sustainable fisheries management, especially for small-scale fisheries (SSF). SSF are vital for many coastal communities, however, often economically and politically marginalized. Here, we develop and estimate what we denote as ‘basic economic viability’ of SSF, using...
Acute hepatopancreatic necrosis disease (AHPND), initially referred to as early mortality syndrome (EMS), is an emergent bacterial disease that has resulted in substantial economic losses for the global shrimp farming industry. Its occurrence was first reported in China in 2009, rapidly spreading to Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and eventually Mexico in...
Ecologists warn that the rapid evolution occurring as a result of high-intensity commercial fishing could have potentially disastrous economic and ecological effects. The evolution of economically relevant life-history traits in fish, which can occur due to the harvesting pressure from commercial fisheries, can irreversibly diminish fisheries yields and ecological services....
In 2013 a stock of sea cucumber (Isostichopus badionotus) was discovered in northern shelf of Yucatan. A survey calculated a biomass of 17,600 tons. The species has an attractive price for local fishers, therefore, in order to avoid the “race for sea cucumbers” and the collapse of the stock, authorities...
Early studies of economies of scale show that ownership limitations imposed large costs on salmon farming firms prior to the deregulation of the industry in 1991. Since then a number of mergers and acquisitions have taken place and the industry has become far more concentrated. Despite this, a number of...
In 2011 an individual fishing quota (IFQ) system was implemented for the limited entry trawl component of the Pacific groundfish fishery in the US. The IFQ system allocates quota shares (QS) for 29 IFQ stocks and individual bycatch quota (IBQ) shares for Pacific halibut. Each year quota shareholders are issued...
Two species of the Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois miles and P. volitans) have rapidly expanded throughout the Gulf of Mexico, mid- and south Atlantic and the Caribbean following their introduction to Florida coastal waters during the mid-1980s through releases from marine aquaria. There is overwhelming scientific agreement on the threats that...
This paper investigates the impact of fishery subsidies on resource stocks in 23 OECD countries for the period 1996-2011. Country level subsidy data is matched with a resource stock index prepared by the Sea Around Us Project. Since the impact of subsidies is likely to vary by type, subsidies are...
The South Pacific Tuna Treaty has existed as a model of international fishery cooperation since 1988. However, in 2016, changing economic conditions led to an impasse between United States purse seine interests and the Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) over payment of vessel day fees. The impasse resulted in the United...
Designating small-scale fishing cooperatives as key actors in rights-based fisheries management represents a viable strategy for reconciling biological conservation with social objectives. Cooperatives are democratically-controlled enterprises designed to pursue the common interests of their members. In small-scale fishing communities, cooperatives provide a way for fishers to pool resources and engage...
Subsidies can directly support unsustainable fishing practices that harm both ecosystems and long-term social and economic benefits. Globally, fishery subsidies total around US$27 billion, yet their impacts on fishing dynamics are specific to given regions or particular fisheries and fishery subsidies within a nation have markedly different effects when applied...
The study presents a bioeconomic analysis of artificial shelter performance in a fishery targeting a spiny lobster meta-population, with spatially allocated, individual exclusive benthic property rights for shelter introduction and harvest of species. Insights into fishers’ short-run decisions and fishing strategies are also provided. Spatiotemporal bioeconomic performance of shelters located...
This paper analyzes the distributional consequences of re-distributing quota between different artisanal fisher groups (from large vessel to small vessel owner) when management is based on a collective rights system. We develop a basic model to analyze optimal decisions with a collective fishing rights system. With this model as a...
Annual socio-economic surveys, pared with third-party landing monitoring data, have allowed a multi-year analysis of the economic impacts and perceptions of implementing an individual vessel quota rights-based management system in the gulf corvina (Cynoscion othonopterus) fishery. This fishery is targeted by four communities, including an indigenous one, in the Upper...
Indigenous fishing rights are partially recognized via allocation of commercial quota rights to tribes. Concern exists, however, that the allocation of commercial quota rights to indigenous groups without restrictions on how the benefits from quota holdings can be allocated and exchanged will lead to class segregation within indigenous groups. Scholars...
The UN Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Small-scale Fisheries, along with the Voluntary Guidelines for Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests, recognize the role of secure tenure in ensuring the livelihoods, well-being, and basic human rights of small-scale fishing (SSF) communities. Rights-based management (RBM), which works to secure...
This presentation provides an overview of a Special Session presentation held at the NAAFE Forum 2017 in March, 2017. The title of the special session was: Saving the World's Most Endangered Marine Mammal. The session was organized by Oriana Poindexter.