As a Member State of the European Community (EC), the United Kingdom's marine capture fisheries must be managed within the framework of the Community's common fisheries policy (see Box 1). Since 1983 this has included a system of annual total allowable catches (TACs) for most commercially important stocks within the...
An ITQ scheme has been shown to create a quota induced incentive for discarding of fish in excess of what is socially optimal. This finding is corroborated by empirical evidence in several ITQ managed fisheries. The incentive for discarding, over and above those expected in an unmanaged or input controlled...
Quota allocation mechanisms have distributional effects with important issues concerning the economic organization of the fishery and acceptability. Yet, these distributional effects are rarely studied. In France, where fishing rights are not transferable, the quotas are shared between producer cooperatives based on the historical landings of their members. Each cooperative...
Four commercial fisheries off Alaska’s coast are managed by transferable quota systems. Implementation
of each quota program was controversial, and two programs were mandated by federal legislation rather
than standard rulemaking procedure. Pacific halibut and sablefish are managed by individual harvest
quota programs, which were designed to maintain a predominantly...
Fisheries economists and fishery scientists have forcefully argued that access to fisheries has to be restricted so as to increase stock size, harvest and/or profitability compared to what would be the results of free access. Fisheries economists have pointed out that management by Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs for short) fare...
In this paper, a dynamic model of fishermen’s compliance is developed and used to analyse
several issues. There are two parties involved in the fishery; the regulator and the fishermen.
Regulator takes on a long term view and sets quota at the beginning of every period in order
to maximise...
Fishermen of Akita prefecture of Japan did the prohibition of sandfish fishery for three years independently. After cancel of a ban the coastal fishermen and the offshore fishermen carried out amount management of sandfish cooperated since 1995. This is first example of cooperative amount management, by coastal fishermen and offshore...
Resource management under Individual Transferable Quota System (ITQ’s) is similar to that of Total Allowable Catch system. It, however, is said that the former is more difficult than the latter. In this paper, by analysing the case of the New Zealand’s ITQ’s during Fiscal Year 1991 and 2001, the current...
During the first three years (2007-2009) of the Gulf of Mexico red snapper IFQ program most quota lease trades were local, involving fishers that lived in the same communities. In 2010, the red snapper quota lease market changed as more IFQ participants began trading quota with fishers from different regions...
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...
This paper models and investigates the foreshortening of transferred quota which is applied in the Norwegian fisheries management. This reduction in the transferred quota amount by 20% is then redistributed amongst all vessels in the relevant vessel group. It is shown that fishing units can be expected to be operated...
Fisheries economists have studied fisheries managed with ITQs and compared them to fisheries that are differently managed. Most of these studies have found ITQs to be economically superior. This paper studies the ITQ-fisheries in Iceland. It focuses on features that are difficult to explain using traditional fisheries economics. It is...
Multispecies fisheries pose a considerable management difficulty with respect to quota allocation between species. The applicability is to single vessel and its individual quotas, as well as to the fleet as a whole. Negative externalities may be created if Total Allowable Catches (TACs) are not set in optimal proportions. That...
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Environment (MERE)
Optimal Quota Allocation in
Multispecies Environment
Barbara Hutniczak
bhu@sam.sdu.dk
Multispecies fisheries pose a considerable management difficulty with respect to quota allocation between species. The applicability is to single vessel and its individual quotas, as well as to the fleet as a whole. Negative externalities may be created if Total Allowable Catches (TACs) are not set in optimal proportions. That...
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Management of Fisheries: What Role can Economics Play
Optimal Quota Allocation in Multispecies
Fisheries worldwide continue to suffer from the negative consequences of open access. In 1986, New Zealand responded by establishing an individual transferable quota (ITQ) system that by 1998 included 33 species and more than 150 markets for fishing quotas. We assess these markets in terms of trends in market activity,...
Management of individual species in a multi-species fishery poses a number of challenges for fishery management systems, including the problem of managing fish bycatch. Fish bycatch is sometimes identified as a particular problem associated with management systems based on individual transferable quotas (ITQs) but this has not always proven to...
This paper analyzes the behavior of fishing households under individual transferable quotas (ITQ) system based on Singh, Squire and Strauss household model. ITQ system is sought to be the optimal fishery management regime in terms of economic efficiency. However, preceding theoretical analyses only considered implementing ITQ to a well established...
In many fisheries, the harvesting pattern shows considerable intra-year variation. These fluctuations give
challenges for downstream firms in value chains where predictability and continuity in the flow of production are important. Seasonal harvesting may well be rational from an economic perspective, as migration patterns can give huge variations in catch...
According to the UN's Food and agicultural organisation (FAO, managing fishing capacity is a core elemnt to aceive sustainable fisheries. Here, FAO highlight the long term need to avoid unprofitable overcapacity; an adaptation which increase the pressure on fish resources, fisheres are marginalized economically, allocation conflicts among fishermen and high...
Norway has been characterized as a “hesitant reformer” regarding fisheries management. Instead of introducing a fully fledged ITQ-system after the crisis in the coastal fisheries in 1990, a new Individual Vessel Quota (IVQ) system was introduced. Later a structural policy was introduced, whereby fishing rights (and adjoining quotas) may be...
The Australian coral reef fin-fish fishery (CRFFF) on the Great Barrier Reef has been managed under ITQs since 2004. A large number of different reef species (>155) are covered by the management plan, but the primary species in terms of value and volume landed are coral trout and red throat...
The Icelandic ITQ system has been under development since the early 1980s. Rights were initially grandfathered. Rights have been priced and traded and put up as collateral against loans. Quota values have thus affected the balance sheet of Icelandic fishing firms in a fundamental way. The aim of this paper...
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price direct sale Cod price market
ITQ Lease Price ITQ Permanent Quota Price
Law
of
one
The Icelandic ITQ system has been under development since the early 1980s. Rights were initially grandfathered. Rights have been priced and traded and put up as collateral against loans. Quota values have thus affected the balance sheet of Icelandic fishing firms in a fundamental way. The aim of this paper...
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loans. Quota values
have thus affected the balance sheet of Icelandic fishing firms in a fundamental
Marine ecosystems are generally more extensive and complex than terrestrial ecosystems. Our understanding of the ecological relationships and biological processes within marine ecosystems is rudimentary but improving. In addition, our appreciation of the range of goods and services available from the marine environment and demand for competing economic uses of...
New Zealand’s quota management system, the QMS, has for years been considered as one of the most successful rights-based fisheries management system in the world. Although the hard evidence is at best patchy, New Zealand’s fishing industry is performing well ahead of most competitors, both in economic, biological and administrative...
This paper explores the issue of using marine reserves in combination with quotas as fisheries management tools. The underlying biological dynamics are described by a patchy environment model, in which a metapopulation is built up by linked sub-populations that are distributed across a set of spatially discrete habitats or patches....
This paper is intended to examine and discuss in what way output control, one of the fisheries management measures, is effective in reducing over-capacity, and can become an effective means towards sustainable management of living marine resources. It was made clear theoretically and empirically that output control is applicable as...
This paper begins by outlining the history of the Rules of Origin negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO), unfinished business from the Uruguay Round that is separate from the current Doha Round. The treatment of products of the sea is one of a large number of unresolved issues; progress...
Community fishery rights are use rights (the right to take part in fishing) and/or management rights (the right to be involved in managing the fishery) implemented at a local, community level. While by no means a new invention, community rights are receiving renewed attention as a mechanism to improve the...
Developing an allocation scheme for distributing rights amongst fishing nations remains one of the major obstacles to the development of stable cooperative arrangements to exploit international fish resources.
A great deal of effort has been devoted over the years to finding a durable solution to the allocation problem, both at...