Recreational fishing for popular species like red snapper and grouper in the Gulf of Mexico has followed a familiar pattern to that observed in many commercial fisheries: fishing under regulated open access has promoted a “race to the fish” with cascades of shorter seasons, shrinking bag limits, and significant fishery...
"Rationalization” or the change to catch share management in fisheries has been shown to lead to the slowing of fishing activity, input and effort consolidation, cost savings, as well as new market and product development. The effects of rationalization on fishermen’s behavior become more complex when one accounts for the...
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...
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...
Many of the tangible benefits of catch share programs (e.g., reducing overcapacity) are dependent on the trading of shares. Additional trading-related questions (such as whether landings will change port or be concentrated geographically) are also important to the overall evaluation of a fishery, but are often asked only during post-implementation...
Sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) are distributed from Japan to Baja California. Alaska is the world’s principal supplier of sablefish with the majority of commercial landings occurring in the Gulf of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. This demersal, long-lived fish is in one of Alaska’s highest value commercial fisheries. In terms of...
A serious impediment blocks advancement of individual transferable quota (ITQ) policy in the United States, particularly in North Pacific fisheries being considered for ITQ management. The traditional ITQ design, that allocates rights to only the harvesting sector, unintentionally expropriates wealth/property interests from the co-dependent-processing sector. This regulatory expropriation is a...
ITQ systems generate ITQ prices. For any given ITQ-managed species there are typically two prices. One is for the annual (or seasonal) quota, the other is for the longer lasting ITQ-share. In well-functioning ITQ markets, these prices reveal important information about the fishery. In the single species framework, prices of...
The current Senate Bill to reauthorize the Magnuson/Stevens Act, the key US fishery management law,
will allow some significant changes in the way that Individual Transferable Quota programs can be
developed. First, the bill will expand the range of individuals who will be permitted to obtain harvesting
privileges. In addition...
The West Coast Rock Lobster fishery is Australia's most valuable commercial fishery. Around 550 vessels
harvest 10,500 tonnes of lobster per annum. The industry has an enviable track record of biological
management which has been based on a variety of input controls. In recent years this has necessitated three
significant...