Monitoring and Management of the Northeast Atlantic Herring Stocks

Abstract

The collapse of all the major herring stocks in the Northeast Atlantic in the late 1960s and the early 1970s was undoubtedly the most striking phenomenon in the history of the European fisheries. The events leading to the collapse show similar features for all the herring stocks: a sharp increase in catches over a few years, followed by a rapid decline and a fishing ban. During the period of declining stock abundance, management actions came too late and were not sufficiently restrictive. It appears that managers found it easier to accept a total fishing ban than to agree on severely reduced catches. In many cases it is clear that the fishing ban has been thoroughly enforced, while in other cases illegal fishing has seriously delayed the recovery of the stocks. This has been monitored by various fishery independent methods, such as tagging experiments, trawl surveys, larval surveys, and acoustic surveys. Before advising the reopening of the fishery it has been the general policy of the ICES Advisory Committee for Fishery Management that the spawning stock would be about to reach a minimum target abundance and that there should be firm evidence that recruitment should be on a similar level as it was prior to the collapse. Some stocks are about to or have already fulfilled these criteria, while others are still at a low level and suffering from recruitment failure. When reopening fisheries, setting of total allowable catches (TACs) and national quotas has been universal. Enforcement practices vary greatly within the European countries. In some countries, enforcement of fishing regulations is very strict and carried out on real time bases, while in other countries there appears to be very little enforcement of the existing regulations. Large quantities of herring are sometimes landed and even sold as sprat, whiting, or mackerel. Overshooting TACs is therefore common, and inadequate reporting of catches makes assessment difficult and less reliable than need be. In those cases where fishery regulations are enforced, management is mainly concerned with restricting the activities of the participating vessels so that they do not overfish. In doing so, the best fishing areas have in some cases been closed to fishing, because otherwise the catches would be far too large for the small quantity allocated to each boat. In other cases the catches per boat per night have to be so restricted (because of the large number of participating vessels) that large but unknown quantities of herring are dumped at sea. With the modernized fleets and the large number of boats participating, management has assumed the image of concentrating on "anti-effectiveness." Although the biological management objectives have been well defined and agreed to, the overall management objectives have neither been defined nor agreed to. These must take into account not only the biological objectives but also socioeconomic aspects. A management objective could be to fish the TACs with minimum expense, thus gaining maximum benefit in terms of profits from harvesting the resource. The traditionally free entry and free participation would then be the main obstacle to such an objective. This is especially acute in the case of a schooling species, which can be fished cheaply in large quantities. It is therefore important to develop new methods to restrict effort and investment. This leads to the basic problem of redefining the ownership of the fish stocks. Before an owner is firmly established, management will be under very severe constraints in limiting the entry to the fisheries.