Benefits of community fisheries management to individual households in the floodplains of the Amazon River in Brazil

Abstract

We study the incentives of households in the floodplain of the Amazon River (várzea) to comply with community fisheries management efforts. The local manifestation of fisheries management in the study region, fishing accords are community-level agreements that emerged starting in the 1980s in response to increased fishing pressure and fisheries stock depletion. We examine empirically the effects of fishing accords enforcement efforts on individual household time savings. The amount of time savings represents an incentive for, and a predictor of, continued participation in enforcing fishing accords. We quantify the time savings associated with the enforcement of accords by estimating a system of simultaneous factor demand equations that account for different periods in the flood regime of the Amazon River. We find that, in the short run, there is a cost to households from enforcing fishing accords. In the long term, however, the enforcement effort employed generates substantial time savings in fishing that frees scarce time to be allocated to other household activities, such as agriculture and cattle grazing.