Sunken Billions – But how many?

Abstract

A report by the World Bank entitled Sunken Billions: the Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform, was circulated widely in October 2008, in two similar versions, the second of which (“Advance edition”) is co-sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN (FAO). The Bank and FAO should be applauded for making a serious attempt to give economic perspective to failed fisheries management, and their conclusions are surely qualitatively correct subject to the validity of the assumption that the ongoing biomass depletion process is reversible. The Report (Conference version) is criticized here with respect to the weakness of its “biological” underpinning and the dubious validity of some of the assumptions necessarily made. It is concluded that the methodology of estimating the scale of profit lost by bad management is flawed, although the estimated loss in recent years of about $50 billion could be a substantial under-estimate. The Bank/FAO study also depends on two contradictory theses: first, that 50% of all stocks are fully exploited, yielding about their collective maximum sustainable yield while the other 50% are either depleted and yielding less than their MSY or under-exploited and also yielding less than MSY; second, that the global, relatively constant catch is close to the global MSY. The data presented indicate that MSY is probably substantially greater than the present catch level, and thus that the maximum economic yield – as defined by the Bank/FAO – could also be higher than present catches. Suggestions are offered as to how the analysis could be improved, including by consideration of the problems that would arise in the transition period if it were ever decided to attempt significantly to reduce global fishing power and effort towards the level of about 50% of current power/effort that the Bank and FAO suggest would be an economic optimum.