Structural Problems and the Need for Structural Planning in Fisheries Development

Abstract

Planning within a structural and geographical macro-perspective — defining desirable relations between regions, countries, and industrial sectors and units — should precede planning at the microlevel. Development aid by industrialized countries to the developing world should be conceived on the basis of an international division of labor and distribution of joint natural resources which appear optimal from a global standpoint. The global solution constitutes a point of departure for suboptimizing down the scale of geographical and sectoral levels.Managing common property fisheries to maximize net economic returns (i.e. by setting yield targets below the maximum sustained yield level) makes sense for the industrialized countries. As long as people in developing countries go hungry, however, and production of food resources below the maximum level cannot be made up by imports, a level of fishery resource exploitation below the maximum sustained yield does not seem to be justifiable on a global basis. Neither can maximum economic efficiency be accepted as the governing criterion for management, since this would undoubtedly work toward the creation of a virtual monopoly of exploitation by the countries with the most sophisticated technologies, in the absence of an international mechanism to guarantee that resulting economies would benefit others as well.Global redistribution of fish production and processing may be the most effective form of development aid, as the cost of "aid" given in this manner may be lower than that of financial and technical aid made available by industrialized countries. The "sacrifices" implied by this redistribution of natural wealth would not be great, as support for unprofitable or marginally profitable fisheries has often been no more than an impediment to general economic growth in the industrialized countries. Many developing countries, on the other hand, would enjoy considerable comparative cost advantages — because of their vicinity to rich, relatively unexploited fishing grounds — if only existing gaps in technology and know-how were being eliminated. Radical solutions along these lines do not appear feasible at the present time but attempts to move in the right direction through judicious application of aid measures, should not be neglected. In the absence of effective supranational decision-making bodies, it will be the responsibility of the international and bilateral agencies to ensure that resources made available to one country do not create "external diseconomies" for others. To achieve this goal, everybody will have to be educated on the benefits of planning fully integrated investments for large areas.Unless timely action is taken to harmonize development aid, investments, and fishing effort on a regional basis, the mistakes made and the sorry results produced in such areas as the North Atlantic will be repeated in areas of primary interest to developing countries and everybody will ultimately be a loser.