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...
This talk will introduce this special session on coastal and marine spatial planning (MSP). An overview of how MSP is interpreted and implemented in the United States at different geographic scales will be discussed. An emphasis on data and research needs will be given as well as context for the...
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...
Eco-labels have been developed to face the difficulties faced by States in managing fisheries. They promote the voluntary adoption of sustainable practices, through market differentiation of sustainably produced items. In fisheries, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is the most commonly used eco-label. The label is presumed to increase the social and...
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...
Recently, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) recommended that pregnant and nursing women consume at least 8 to 12 ounces of seafood per week as part of a well-balanced diet. Thus, the seafood market has been flooded with health benefit/risk information targeted at women...
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...
In the last several years a number of U.S. policies and directives have laid the foundation for Ecosystem Service Valuation (ESV) to be incorporated into ecosystem-based management (EBM), the current management paradigm for U.S. oceans and coasts. In 2010 the Final Recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force instructed...
This work reports on how resource rent is distributed among owners of exclusive fishing grounds in the spiny lobster (Panulirus argus) fishery of Punta Allen, Mexico. This MSC certified small-scale fishery is co-managed through Territorial User Rights. Members of the local fishing cooperative, have exclusive access to individual fishing grounds....
A behavioral study on fishery participation and fishing location choice for the West Coast Salmon fishermen was undertaken to determine the effect of salmon fishery closures on the distribution of fishermen across alternative fisheries and fishing locations. A dataset describing fishing trips from West Coast salmon vessels from 2005 to...
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...
This paper is the result of a project that began with NAAFE 2015 special session on Fisheries Certification, which asked what forces are driving the market for sustainable seafood. Many previous studies looked at consumers' demand, but in this paper we looked at the entire supply chain (from producers to...
The trans-boundary migration of fish stocks creates spatial externalities, and hence, makes international cooperation beneficial. This study provides a model for the management of straddling and highly migratory fish stocks and examines the relationship between fish migrations and the benefits from cooperation. Previous studies on trans-boundary fish stock management have...
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...
The objective of this paper is to provide an analysis of the current state of fisheries subsidies worldwide, and how they are likely to affect the sustainability of fisheries. More specifically, I will review previous investigations of global subsidies issues, and give a brief overview of the impact of subsidies...
The goal of this research was to characterize the trade-offs between profitability and sustainability when managing a valuable commercial fishery. The Florida finfish fishery generates over $75 million in annual dockside value; the snapper-grouper complex constitutes over half of that total. Currently, federal stock assessment procedures focus on stock size...
This research combines a utility-theory consistent model of demand for recreational fishing trips with an age-structured stock dynamics model to provide policy relevant advice to managers of the groundfish fishery in the Northeast United States. We provide an overview of the model and describe the challenges encountered with using this...
The Biodiversity Impact Mitigation (BIM) hierarchy provides an overarching conservation framework for bycatch reduction, and more broadly for biodiversity conservation. This framework includes four steps, which are implemented sequentially to: (i) avoid and (ii) minimize impacts; (iii) rehabilitate/restore impacted biodiversity; and (iv), compensate such impacts, usually elsewhere. The first three steps...
The vaquita, a critically endangered marine mammal, is a bycatch to shrimp strawl and gillnet fisheries in the upper Gulf of California. Reducing vaquita bycatch, however, is complex. The fisheries are smaller-scale and major contributors of income and employment to coastal communities. Although tourism is increasingly important, fishing remains an...