The UN Law of the Sea of 1982 assigned rights and responsibilities to the
fishery resources within 200 nautical miles of the coast (i.e.,the Exclusive
Economic Zones: EEZs) to the adjacent maritime countries. A key
responsibility is the requirement that these countries manage their marine
living resources sustainably through time...
The Mexican Oyster fishery in the Gulf of Mexico annually produces only
50,000 MT, 95% of Mexico oyster production. Oyster production has
fallen drastically in most coastal lagoons, this decline has been attributed to
factors as overfishing, mismanagement of natural oyster beds,
environmental degradation and lagoons pollution. This work proposes...
If the study of the fisheries dynamics increasingly seeks to take into
account the evolution of fishing fleets, the main mechanisms which govern
their evolution at the local, national or international levels, are often not
studied at all, or only partially studied. This applies in particular to vessel
entry and...
Australia’s western rock lobster fishery is its most valuable and hence from a biological perspective most tightly managed major commercial fishery, yet it has been beset by problems of miniscule recruitment over the past 3 years. This coming year 2010-11 is little better. It was the joint first Marine Stewardship...
This paper examines the viability of the management of a transboundary resource, the Bay of Biscay anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus L.). A deterministic model is used to simulate the anchovy dynamics, with the fish stock consisting of two age groups, “young" and “old", while recruitment follows a Beverton Holt pattern. Two...
Understanding the complexities of ecosystems is difficult enough, but when the human dimension is added to the inherent uncertainty and risk in fisheries management, the actual versus expected results move from the counter-intuitive to the paradoxical. Without an adequate understanding of the interrelationships between ecosystem components, including the human dimension,...
The West Coast salmon fishery presents several complexities that have received little attention in the fisheries economics literature. Two of those complexities are reviewed and analyzed in this dissertation. The first, salmon fishermen participate in alternative fisheries within a season demonstrating a complex switching behavior between different species. Second, the...
Considerable attention has been applied to the development of models explaining how fish stocks change over space
and time, from relatively simple stock-recruitment relationships to ecosystem models with a complex food web
structure. However, in many case studies fishing effort is assumed to be exogenous and even in dynamic models...
A major simplification in bioeconomic models is that the model parameters
and functional forms are assumed known. In fisheries, the failure to capture
model uncertainty can easily cause overconfidence in model outputs and
resultant policy recommendations. Although fisheries modelers regularly
assume rather complete knowledge of the systems they study, in...
Fisheries economics theory suggests that weak fishery management
institutions, such as an open access regime, provide the motivation for
fishers to act as if they have infinite discount rates. This theory has serious
implications for the management of small-scale reef based fisheries in
developing countries, many of which are open...
Many of Australias most valuable fisheries are not appreciated as such and
so have miniscule management budgets. This situation is considered to be
common elsewhere too.
The paper argues this situation needs to be addressed from both scientific
and community perspectives, but is ultimately doomed to fail unless the
political...
The motivation of this paper is to detail the application of Markov chains in
simulating fleet dynamics in Australia's Northern Prawn Fishery (NPF).
The Markov chains are enhanced through the use of the multinomial logit
(MNL) and Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR) models to explain
transition probabilities. The terms MNL Markov...
The push for ecosystem based management has opened up not only for including more of the natural
systems when managing fish resources, but also a broader perspective on the human systems, and the
diverse activities in the sea. This is reflected for instance in the EU Maritime Policy where fisheries...
Technological switching and re-switching has been the subject of debates within economics. Under
assumptions of malleable capital in economies with multiple sectors, the wage-rent envelope can show
multiple re-switching. The interest of technological change and switching behavior for fisheries
economists and managers stems from the fact that the control of...
Lobster (Homarus americanus) ranks first in Canada’s fisheries, but Quebec lobster represents only 6% of eastern Canada landings. During the peak of the fishing season in Quebec as elsewhere, supply is at its maximum and price is the lowest. For this reason, there has been considerable interest in Quebec in...
We define the notion of sustainable yields for ecosystem, with particular
emphasis on long-run consistency between ecological and economic conflicting
objectives. We provide a way to compute sustainable yields by means of
a viability analysis of generic ecosystem models with harvesting. We apply
our approach to a Lotka–Volterra model of...
In Africa, the artisanal fishing plays a crucial role in the economy and
nutrition of populations. She participates in the equilibrium of the balance
of payments, and generates significant jobs. On the coast of Senegal in
particular, artisanal fisheries ranked first in economic activities. It carries
more than 1.8% of...
According to international law, straddling fish stocks should be managed
co-operatively through Regional Fisheries Management Organizations
(RFMOs). This paper analyzes the stability and success of these
organizations through a game in partition function form based on the
classical Gordon-Schaefer bio-economic model. Results show that the
larger the number of fishing...
An international symposium devoted to Research and small-scale fisheries (Durand, Lemoalle, Weber,
1991) in Montpellier (France) in 1989 came from increasing evidence that “the complexity of small scale
fisheries calls for applying knowledge from many fields in combined studies that can take advantage of a
whole range of information”. Has...
This paper investigates interactions between recreational and commercial fisheries. It introduces the idea of a protected area for recreational fisheries, as a way to reduce conflicts between the two sectors and to preserve the natural resource. It is demonstrated that without a protected area for recreational fisheries, open access may...
For proper utilization of Tal wetland ecosystem through natural resource
management and for updating production system through the integration of
fish-crop diversity and its proper implications to its farmers level through
modernizing adaptive technologies as well, IT system, a composite
zonewise TOT programmes (use of natural resources, farm demonstrations,
farmers...
In this paper, we analyze the efficiency of the existing management regime
of the Bay of Biscay anchovy fishery, which has been closed since 2005
due to stock collapse. We also study Pareto improving strategies to
improve management of the fishery once the moratorium is lifted, expected
for spring 2011....
Many commercial fisheries around the world experience spatial
coexistence of species and imperfectly selective harvesting gears. This
makes these fisheries multi-product industries, that often harvest multispecies
or have a bycatch of another (maybe also valuable) species, which
may or may not be target species for another fishery. Traditional game
theoretic...
The Maine lobster fishery is one of the most valuable fisheries in the US,
but the economic performance of the fishery has been poor and worsening
as costs of fuel and bait increase while ex-vessel prices decline. Landing
are heavily concentrated in the fall when quality is low, requiring the...
In the economic literature on fisheries management complete information
is normally assumed. In reality fishermen have more information than the
regulatory authority. In the present paper a principal-agent approach is
applied to analyse management with a tax on fishing days under
asymmetric information about the skill of fishermen (productivity) and...
To achieve sustainable fisheries, ecosystem-based fisheries management
yields increasing attention. However, so far mainly single-species models
are used to develop management advice, not accounting for species
interaction. In particular many traditional fisheries economic models have
been criticized by biologists, especially if results were gained by rather
simple biomass models. Therefore,...
A comparative multi-fleet rationale of socioeconomic indicators is described aiming a
potential incorporation into fishery management advice at an ecosystem scale. A set of
performance indicators, based on a survey of different industrial fishing fleets in São
Paulo (SE Brazil) which investigated investment, fixed, effort, labour and sailingrelated
costs and...
Mediterranean fisheries are characterized by a high diversity of fishing
strategies that can be differentiated according to a gradient from the coast
to the offshore area. Over the gradient, fleets interact through the resource.
The paper first provides a description of the fishing strategies and proposes
a typology for the...
Commercial fishing is a dangerous occupation, and accidents are bound to
happen given the operational environment within which fishing is
conducted. Fishery regulations have been shown or presumed to affect
vessel safety. NOAA Fisheries is promoting the adoption of catch share
based fishery management programs nation-wide as one way to...
On the rural Northwest coast of New Caledonia, the settlement of a world
class mining complex has initiated rapid socio-economic changes, linked
with a considerable demographic increase (+ 65% between 2007 and 2015)
and plentiful job opportunities. In 2007 and 2009, studies on fisheries and
commercialization of reef finfish and...
Management strategy evaluation (MSE) is a methodology which allows to compare the efficiency of different management strategies in order to ensure the sustainability, in particular those based on viable control theory. Classic strategies (like precautionary approach of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, ICES) were compared to...
The World Bank has fostered introduction of an individual quota
management system in the world's largest fishery based on both economic
and social studies. The implementation of the quota legislation has
uncovered a range of issues which were largely foreseen but fall outside the
remit of the fisheries authorities. The...
Economists have devoted considerable attention to rent-dissipation in limited-entry fisheries as a result of excessive use of capital inputs, or "capital stuffing." We may refer to this mechanism of rent dissipation as "cost-driven rent dissipation." An alternative potential mechanism of rent dissipation, which we refer to as "value-driven rent dissipation,"...
Capacity reduction programs in the form of buybacks or decommissioning programs have had relatively widespread application in fisheries in the US, Europe and Australia. A common criticism of such programs is that they remove the least efficient vessels first, resulting in an increase in average efficiency of the remaining fleet....
Yearly revisions of Total Allowable Catch under EU policies for the management of North Sea fisheries come at
high management costs and capital adjustment costs. It is unclear whether current EU fisheries policy strikes the
right balance between the need to regularly adjust fish quota to new information on one...
We examine the realities of selected African fisheries, and assess the extent
to which the existing governance assumptions and management
arrangements are appropriate. Fisheries management in sub-Saharan Africa
is largely derived from a target resource management paradigm, with
interventions largely focussed on limiting fishing effort for single stocks.
We argue...
In Senegal, macroeconomic and fishery sector policies stress sustainable
wealth creation for poverty alleviation. However, the current fisheries
management system is incapable of achieving this objective. The most
valuable fish stocks are over-exploited with excessive fishing effort and
capacity and no sustainable resource rents are being produced.
Policy reform has...
Fisheries management is an issue that draws out conflicting responses
about the role of the state, the market and civil society over the
management of natural resources. As an individual, anybody who is
exploiting the common resource will not think of any conservation because
the benefits in the short term...
How do fishermen choose where to fish? A logistic random utility model
(RUM) of fisher location choice by beam trawlers in the southwest of
England was used to help answer this question. The RUM was
parameterised using data from the EU vessel monitoring system, the UK
logbook Fishing Activity database...
This paper analyzes the effects of spatial closures on the multi-species
groundfish trawl fishery in northern and central California. The analysis
differentiates between changes in total effort and in the spatial distribution
of effort before and after implementation of the closures. We use logbook
data on the location and duration...
Anchovy fishery of Georgia (North Eastern Black Sea) has experienced a
considerable decline since the 80ths. The Ministry of Environment
Protection and Natural Resources (MEPNR) is in charge of fisheries
management since 1994 and is implementing since late 2006 a new
licensing system based on auction concept. According this management...
Economists studying the management of fisheries have universally assumed disturbances affecting harvest costs are unrelated to disturbances affecting biological growth. This paper gives examples of commercially valuable species that are impacted reproductively and behaviorally by a single environmental variable (e.g., temperature), leading to correlated disturbances in current marginal harvest costs...
Fisheries and aquaculture are part of a complex system with underlying
relationships between species and other activities. This calls for more
integrated assessment, leaving a management based on stock assessment
and single species. The ecosystem approach for fisheries management
(EAF) as well as the more recent ecosystem approach to aquaculture...
The West Coast Demersal fishery in Western Australia includes some
highly prized recreational fish: dhufish, pink snapper and baldchin groper.
Following a recent assessment that found these stocks are under threat from
overfishing, a range of new regulations designed to restrict effort have been
introduced with the objective to facilitate...
Bio-economic models are increasingly used to provide scientific advice in
fisheries management integrating both biological and socio-economic
considerations. In this context it becomes important to evaluate how
different recovery scenarios will influence the future situation for the
fishing fleets, particularly through the investment/disinvestment decisions
of fishing capacity.
In this paper,...
This paper develops a theoretical framework to assess resources management procedures from a sustainability
perspective, when resource dynamics is marked by uncertainty. Using stochastic viability, management procedures
are ranked according to their probability to achieve economic and ecological constraints over time. This framework
is applied to a fishery case-study, facing...
The recovery of fish stocks is in principle an investment decision weighing up short term losses against
future gains. In the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) of the EU long term management or recovery plans
are a main instrument. One of the basic aims is to move from a short term...
Fisheries exploitation at a large scale in the South Atlantic is recent.
Fisheries have experienced an extraordinary growth in the last 15 years. In
Argentina the growth of fisheries exploitation took place at unprecedented
rates, and this has been one of Argentina's most dynamic economic sectors
in recent times. It...
More than half of the worlds annual marine fish catch are landed by small
scale fisheries. However, most small-scale fisheries have not been routinely
or comprehensively managed. Understanding the social and economic
characteristics of small scale fisheries is the first step towards enhancing
their management and governance. To this end,...