Demand-side fishery management: integrating two forms of input control

A fishery management approach is presented which combines (1) a buyback of fishing vessels, and (2) a management tax or fee on seafood going to market. Tax rate by species is set proportional to the extent of overexploitation. Tax revenue is used for several purposes, including a buyback of licenses at free-market price. Advantages and disadvantages of this policy are discussed, with specific comparison to individual transferable quotas (ITQs). This regulatory policy offers advantages (1) for multispecies fisheries, (2) with ecosystem fishery management, (3) where self-funded financing for license buyback is needed, and in place of or together with ITQs (4) where allocation, discarding and highgrading, quota setting, or enforcement of ITQs is problematic.     

Lesser-known consequences of managing marine fisheries using individual transferable quotas

Managing marine fisheries using output controls in the form of individual transferable quotas (ITQs) can be an attractive alternative to more traditional input controls. There are now a number of examples of where ITQ-managed fisheries have been able to reduce the impact of the major management problems in global fisheries, namely, gross over-capitalisation and effort. However, ITQs are not the perfect management tool and one of the lesser known consequences of ITQ-managed fisheries where ITQs consist of a harvest right is the implicit relationship between ITQ property rights and rights of access to the fishing grounds. This implicit spatial right to the grounds can provide obstacles in the way of allocating water-space within fishing grounds for alternative uses such as marine-protected areas, large-scale aquaculture, and wind farms. These lesser-known consequences of ITQ-managed fisheries are discussed here.     

Figuring fish and measuring men: the individual transferable quota system in the Icelandic cod fishery

This article discusses inequality in the Icelandic cod fishery, focusing on changes in the actual distribution of fishing quotas and the ways in which Icelanders currently talk about equity and ownership. The individual transferable quota (ITQ) system, introduced in 1984, divided access to an important resource among those who happened to be boat owners at that time. Statistical findings with respect to the cod fishery - based on a database (the ‘Quotabase’) constructed using detailed information on all vessels that have been allotted ITQs from the onset of the system - show that ITQs have been increasingly concentrated in the hands of the biggest companies. Many of the small-scale boat owners that still hold ITQs are increasingly compelled to enter into contracts that involve fishing for larger ITQ holders. It is suggested that the distribution of ITQs, as well as their evaluation in social discourse, represents an important field of research. In Iceland, public discontent with the concentration of fishing rights and the ensuing social repercussions is increasingly articulated in terms of loaded metaphors, including ‘profiteering’, ‘tenancy’ and ‘lords of the sea’. It is argued that the ultimate efficiency of management programs may be jeopardized if managers ignore the history and culture of the fisheries involved and the likely social and ecological consequences of their programs.     

Alternatives to ITQs in equity–efficiency–effectiveness trade-offs: How the lay-up system spread effort in the BC halibut fishery

Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), also called “catch shares”, have been broadly adopted in the last two decades, at the same time that concerns about their equity and effectiveness in delivering the predicted outcomes have increased. This paper documents how an alternative fishermen-designed and operated system of spreading fishing effort to avoid the race for fish—called the lay-up system—worked effectively and equitably for four decades in the British Columbia halibut fishery before ITQs were introduced in this fishery. Why the lay-up system was allowed to collapse and its history ignored illustrates important roles played by conflicting ideologies, bureaucratic rationality, and the inability to imagine an alternative way of solving fisheries management problems. Trade-offs between the efficiency, equity, and effectiveness of halibut and other management systems are considered.     

Catch shares and the main Hawaiian Islands bottomfish fishery: Linking fishery conditions and fisher perceptions

To address overfishing concerns, a total allowable catch (TAC) management program was instituted in the main Hawaiian Islands (MHI) bottomfish fishery during 2007. Using results from a recent survey of bottomfish fishermen, this paper details behavioral and social aspects of bottomfish fishing in Hawaii and explores fisher perceptions towards current fishery conditions and future management alternatives. The paper further discusses the applicability of potential catch share management for this fishery. Bottomfish fishermen expressed uncertainty towards catch share programs and appear to be reluctant about any movement towards catch share management. This paper describes many preexisting conditions in the fishery that suggest a catch share program may not be practical at this time.     

Licence Banks as a tool to mitigate corporate control of fisheries: A British Columbia groundfish example

This paper provides an example of how one group of fishermen, operating in an ITQ fishery in British Columbia, Canada, used a licence bank to attempt to mitigate the negative consequences of ITQs. After ten years in operation, the licence bank is self-sustaining and has realized modest and limited success. The authors identify a number of lessons learned from the experience, as well as highlight the opportunities that licence banks offer as an alternative mechanism to redress the negative consequences of ITQs.     

Economic characteristics and management challenges of the Hawaii pelagic longline fisheries: Will a catch share program help?

To date, none of the fisheries in the U.S. Pacific Islands Region is managed under a catch share program. In light of the NOAA policy to encourage the use of catch shares as a fishery management tool, the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council (WPFMC) listed six commercial fisheries, including the Hawaii pelagic longline fishery, the largest in the region, as potential candidates for catch share programs. This study examines the baseline economic characteristics and the main challenges facing the Hawaii pelagic longline fishery and evaluates the impact of these on the desirability and feasibility of a catch share program for this particular fishery.     

Second-guessing uncertainty: Scenario planning for management of the Indian Ocean tuna purse seine fishery

An important task of natural resource management is deciding amongst alternative policy options, including how interventions will affect the dynamics of resource exploitation. Yet predicting the behaviour of natural resource users in complex, changeable systems presents a significant challenge for managers. Scenario planning, which involves thinking creatively about how a socio-ecological system might develop under a set of possible futures, was used to explore uncertainties in the future of the Indian Ocean tuna purse seine fishery. This exercise stimulated thinking on how key social, economic and environmental conditions that influence fleet behaviour may change in the future, and how these changes might affect the dynamics of fishing effort. Three storylines were explored: an increase in marine protection, growing consumer preference for sustainable seafood, and depletion of tuna stocks. Comparing across several possible future scenarios, a number of critical aspects of fleet behaviour were identified that should be important considerations for fishery managers, but which are currently poorly understood. These included a switch in fishing practices, reallocation of effort in space, investment in new vessels and exit from the fishery. Recommendations for future management interventions in the Indian Ocean were offered, along with suggestions for research needed to reduce management uncertainty.     

The elephant in the room: The hidden costs of leasing individual transferable fishing quotas

Despite the increasingly positive reviews of individual transferable quotas (ITQs), few studies have considered how quota leasing activities can reduce the economic benefits to society and to fishermen operating under the ITQ fisheries system. This analysis reveals negative economic impacts of ITQs previously overlooked by examining the extent of quota leasing and the relationship between the catch value, the cost of fishing, and the quota lease price in the BC halibut fishery, long considered a poster child for ITQs. Findings challenge assumptions of economic theory used to promote the benefits of ITQs.     

Regional fish stock management: A model for North-West Africa

Development of a bio-economic model for applications in managing an important north African fishery is reported in this article. The model is applied through identification of baseline conditions and analysis of two alternative fishery management plans; limiting the number of vessels and instituting a closed season. Several key assumptions relative to biological and fleet variables are necessarily made, since in some areas historical data are limited. However, results strongly suggest that rents to resource owners (African coastal countries) can be substantially increased by either method of limiting access to the fishery and by licensing vessels and fishermen.     

The economic sustainability of artisanal fisheries: the case of the trawl ban in the Gulf of Castellammare, NW Sicily

Small-scale fisheries and the communities they support are often given the protection of designated fishing zones from which non-artisanal vessels are excluded. This paper looks at one example of this approach, the trawl ban introduced in the Gulf of Castellammare (NW Sicily), focussing on the economic sustainability of the artisanal fishery currently operating within the protected area. The consequences of lifting the trawl ban and how far this would jeopardise the sustainability of the artisanal fishery are explored via an analysis of the financial viability of trammel net vessels under alternative assumptions concerning catch rates. The paper also investigates fishermen's attitudes towards the trawl ban and their predisposition either to remain in the fishery or to quit in the event of the ban being removed.     

Performance of an inshore fishery in the absence of regulatory enforcement

The principal inshore fishery in the southwest Irish Sea is currently for whelk Buccinum undatum, which expanded in the 1990s and yielded almost 10,000 t in 2003. The fleet exploiting it consisted largely of old boats many of which previously used a variety of gears but which cannot any longer compete with more modern towing craft. Whelk is the only target species for the majority. The fishery is in open access and is not regulated and the paper examines the consequences of this for the fishers, particularly the problems associated with maintaining a way of life traditionally associated with remuneration by share rather than wage. Lack of regulation, it is argued, encourages a short term, opportunistic harvesting regime, which is not conducive to maintain a biologically sustainable fishery.     

A natural experiment in fisheries management

The Atlantic sea scallop fishery in the USA and the offshore scallop fishery in the Canadian Maritimes offer a naturally occurring experiment in fisheries management. Canada has adopted a transferable output quota system and the USA has used a mix of size, effort and area controls. This paper compares the consequences over 15 years for the resource, the fishery, and the management regime.     

Spatial and temporal assessment of potential risk to cetaceans from static fishing gears

Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) requires the consideration of potential impacts of a commercial fishery on all components of the ecosystem. Assessment of the impact of commercial fishing on marine mammals generally focuses on species at known risk from bycatch. For cetaceans in particular, inclusion under the Threatened, Endangered and Protected (TEP) species component of Ecological Risk Assessment for the Effects of Fishing (ERAEF) can seem redundant if a species is already known to be at risk or is not thought to interact with the fishery with consequences for its conservation. A spatially and temporally explicit Productivity Susceptibility Analysis (PSA) procedure was developed for inclusion under ERAEF to allow cetacean species to be screened for risk. The technique is demonstrated by assessing the potential risk to harbour porpoise and minke whales from a number of static gear fisheries. The results demonstrate that although a fishery might pose high risk to a species, low or moderate risk areas can exist within the range of the fishery, enabling management measures to focus on areas of greatest risk. Designed to complement and support existing methods of bycatch assessment, this approach is a repeatable and standardised assessment, the outputs of which can be used to systematically document the level of risk posed to different species in a transparent way to aid the inclusion of cetaceans in ERAEF and EBFM both now and in the future.     

Transferable quotas,efficiency and crew ownership in Whalsay,Shetland

The resource economic theory tells us that individual transferable quotas (ITQs) improve efficiency in the fishing industry by removing the least efficient actors from a fishery and allowing ownership to concentrate in the hands of the most efficient operators. Assertions about the nature of this allocative efficiency are, however, often based on purely theoretical assumptions. This paper presents a case study of the efficient operators remaining in the UK pelagic fishing fleet. After over 30 years of rights-based management (RBM) and 12 years of ITQs, the UK pelagic fleet numbers only 31 large-scale boats. Seven of these operate from the island of Whalsay in Shetland, which, with a population of approximately 1000 people (0.000016% of the population of the UK), is entitled to land around 22% of the UK pelagic catch. A key characteristic of the economically efficient Whalsay fleet is a crew ownership structure. This is now under threat from the long-term dynamics of the UK's ITQ system, as the high price of quota prevents the renewal of the fishery through new entrants. In the majority of global fisheries, where vessel ownership structures do not follow an assumed economic norm, fully marketised transferable rights may not be the most efficient method of management.     

Social and economic consequences of 40 years of Dutch quota management

The Netherlands was one of the first nations to introduce ITQs in their fisheries to manage national yearly Total Allowable Catches (TACs). These ITQs have gradually developed from an individual quota system in 1976 to an ITQ system in the 1980s. In 1993 the system was reformed into a co-management system. In this paper it is argued that many of the usual negative socio-economic consequences of ITQs mentioned in the literature have been largely absent, due to the embeddedness of ITQs in co-management arrangements. However, cracks have appeared lately in this combined management system, allowing an identification of its vulnerabilities. These findings show that the social and economic structure of Dutch fisheries is changing from a rather cooperative to a more competitive and exclusive system, more like conventional ITQs.     

The social cost of fishery subsidy reforms

This paper analyzes the impact of reducing fisheries subsidies in a general equilibrium model for a fishery with heterogeneous vessels. It considers the impact of the stock effect, which determines the participation of vessels in a likely increased stock abundance. In equilibrium, the productivity of the fleet is endogenous as it depends on the stock of fish along the equilibrium path. The model concludes that any impact of a subsidy drop will depend on the stock effect. If that effect is large, fishing firms will benefit from the stock recovery and the elimination of the subsidy will increase future returns on investment. The model is particularised to industrial shrimp fisheries in Mexico. It is shown that the complete elimination of a subsidy increases biomass, capitalisation, marginal productivity, and consumption and reduces inequality when the effect of the induced increase in the stock is considered. However, if that effect is not considered, capital and consumption decrease, and inequality and hence, the social costs of a subsidy drop, increase.     

How have catch shares been allocated?

A unique database was created that describes the methods used to allocate shares in nearly every major catch share fishery in the world. Approximately 54% of the major catch share fisheries in the world allocated the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) solely on the basis of historical catch records, 3% used auctions, and 6% used equal sharing rules. The remaining 37% used a combination of methods, including vessel-based rules. These results confirm the widely-held belief that nearly all catch share programs have “grandfathered” private access to fishery resources: 91% of the fisheries in the database allocated some fraction of the TAC on the basis of historical catch. This publicly available database should be a useful reference tool for policymakers, academics, and others interested in catch shares management in Hawai'i and across the globe.     

Measuring fishery profitability: An index number approach

Tracking the financial well-being of vessels that depend on a marine fishery resource is an important function of regulators. This research demonstrates how simple indices can be constructed and utilized to track the economic well-being of vessels operating in the Northeast (USA) Multispecies (Groundfish) Fishery. The indices, which use both public and private data, can separately track trends in inputs, outputs, and prices. For the Northeast Multispecies Fishery, the indices reveal that the economic well-being of the groundfish fleet has improved under catch share management through gains in productivity.