OYSTER FARMING AND EXTERNALITIES: THE EXPERIENCE OF THE BAY OF BOURGNEUF

Abstract

The history of the French shellfish industry is marked by a series of overfishing crises occurring in most of the open-access shellfish beds. When the concession system was introduced (1852), it was designed to cope with congestion and overfishing issues more than with the development of shellfish culture. After closing the production cycle in the late 19th century, the oyster industry kept suffering major crises such as massive disease outbreaks. Their occurrence can be analyzed in terms of overexploitation resulting from environmental externalities. We will show that this can create a backward-bending supply curve for oysters, using the Bay of Bourgneuf as a case study. In this bay, 400 firms, mostly family-sized, are being conceded 1,000 ha and sell 10,000 tons of Crassostrea gigas oysters a year. The paper presents a typology of farmers based on a survey that shows that farmer behavior can be aggregated into three main groups.