Abstract
The Mazara del Vallo fleet is one of the main fleets of large trawlers in the Mediterranean. Traditionally, the two main fishing strategies adopted by the fleet can be summarized as follows: pesca a fresco (250 m), mainly targeting deep-water shrimp sold frozen. The second fishing strategy has become increasingly important over the last decade. This paper aims to investigate the extent to which the choice of targeting deep-water shrimp impacted the level of technical and scale efficiency for the fleet assessed through an input-oriented data envelopment analysis. The analysis was based on data collected under the Italian National Programme within the European Data Collection Framework, as well as through a focus group discussion with the trawler skippers. The results showed that the pesca a congelato trawlers had the highest average efficiency, with both technical and scale efficiency close to the maximum level. On the basis of information collected during the focus group discussion on the pesca a congelato strategy, technical efficiency was coupled with a lower discard rate and the widespread use of LED lights. The findings were discussed in light of the objective of discard reduction in European fisheries, one of the pillars of the reformed common fishery policy.
Highlights
Efficiency, together with sustainable utilization and equity in access to resources, is seen as one of the main aspects to be considered in the management of fisheries (Cochrane 2000)
According to Grafton et al (2006) scale efficiency (SE) expresses whether a firm is operating at its “optimal” size so that any modifications to its size will render the unit less efficient, and it is measured by dividing the aggregate efficiency by the technical efficiency (TE) of each decision making unit (DMU)
The analysis was based on data collected under the Italian National Programme, as well as through a focus group discussion with the trawler skippers, providing supplementary information to be integrated with the official data
Summary
Efficiency, together with sustainable utilization and equity in access to resources, is seen as one of the main aspects to be considered in the management of fisheries (Cochrane 2000). To measure firm-level efficiency, one technique that can be applied is data envelopment analysis (DEA), which was first introduced in the literature in 1957 (Farrell) for application in the public sector and in agriculture. In the Mediterranean, an application of output-oriented DEA was found in Maravelias and Tsitsika (2008), who assessed the efficiency in purse-seine fishing in the eastern Mediterranean Another example of estimating TE by applying DEA in small-scale fisheries in the Mediterranean was provided by Idda et al (2009). Both of these studies used variations of output-oriented approaches. The application of input-oriented DEA has been considered meaningful for fisheries managed under an input control system (e.g. Pinello et al 2016)
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