Fisheries Management Regimes Research Articles

Can cod farming affect cod fishing? A system evaluation of sustainability

Abstract The cod resources in the Barents Sea constitute the most important fisheries in Norway. In order to reduce resource allocation conflicts among different gear and vessel groups and to ensure profit for all participants throughout the value chain, the sector is thoroughly organized. The institutions established to ensure long-term sustainability, have been developed within the framework of a joint Norwegian–Russian fisheries management regime. However, due to a very high fishing mortality, the cod stock is now under severe pressure. In addition, a major part of the cod fisheries is highly seasonal and unable to be a stable supplier to neither the land-based industry nor demanding international markets. In parallel, cod farming is expected to become a new emerging industry, with potential to copy the success of farmed Atlantic salmon. Many actors within the cod fisheries fear the future competition from the growing cod farming sector. With reference to important attributes that characterize the cod fisheries and cod farming, this paper discusses how a future farming industry may affect the traditional cod fisheries. Moreover, we discuss how the fisheries may be forced to organize in the future to encounter the expected competition from cod farming.

Ecological, environmental and socioeconomic aspects of the Lake Victoria's introduced Nile perch fishery in relation to the native fisheries and the species culture potential: lessons to learn

AbstractInland fishery ecosystems in Africa are characterized by patterns of overexploitation, environmental degradation and exotic species introductions. Ecological complexity and diversity of aquatic habitats dictate that fishes in general are not evenly distributed in a water body. However, fisheries management regimes tend to ignore this basic principle, assume generalized conditions in a water body, and focus more on ‘desired’ objectives such as maximizing catch. The result is to disregard fish habitat boundaries and anthropogenic influences from the catchment that influence fish production. Overexploitation and environmental degradation disrupt sustainable socioeconomic benefits from the fisheries, create uncertainty among investors, but leave some managers calling for more information with the expectation that the fisheries will recover with time. Open access to the fisheries and full control of fishing effort remain challenges for managers. Exotic species introductions and fish farming can increase production, but such interventions require firm commitment to sound ecological principles and strict enforcement of recommended conservation and co‐management measures in capture fisheries. The general tendency to downplay fishing effort issues, other ecosystem values and functions or rely on temperate fisheries models until a new cycle of overexploitation emerges, characterizes many management patterns in inland fisheries. Aquaculture is not an option to challenges in capture fisheries management. Aquaculture should be developed to increase fish production but even this practice may have negative environmental impacts depending on practice and scale. Decades of information on Lake Victoria fisheries trends and aquaculture development did not stop the collapse of native fisheries. The successfully introduced Nile perch (Lates niloticus) has shown signs of overexploitation and aquaculture has again been considered as the option. By reviewing significant trends associated with Nile perch and its feasibility in aquaculture this paper uses Lake Victoria to illustrate ‘special interest management’ targeting selected species of fish rather than the fisheries.

Improving fisheries management in New Zealand: Developing dialogue between fisheries science and management (FSM) and ecosystem science and management (ESM)

This paper attempts to overcome the dichotomy between the broadly different and largely separate fisheries science and management (FSM) and ecosystem science and management (ESM) knowledge systems that characterise the international literature and are found in fisheries management practice in different countries. The paper argues that the construction of a heuristic we term the fisheries problematic, around issues and contexts, reveals the breadth of international fisheries management concerns and the variety of contexts in which these concerns are being faced. Adopting a political economy informed nature-society approach the paper considers ecological and socio-economic processes in their institutional settings in an attempt to shift from the either/or arguments around fish or ecosystems found in the FSM or ESM literatures to investigation that is grounded in understandings of the historically and geographically specific trajectories of fisheries related interactions and understandings of how knowledge about the trajectories and their interactions is fashioned. Drawing on recent conceptual innovations in the field, the paper develops a matrix-centred approach to explore ecological, industry, community and policy domains in New Zealand’s Quota Management System (QMS) and Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) fisheries management regime. The extended framework prioritises scrutiny of the interaction amongst the four domains, as a strategy to help develop institutional frameworks that facilitate behaviours that are societally inclusive. The paper offers three conclusions. First, the landscape of New Zealand fisheries issues is very much a product of the contingent interaction of the QMS, a management regime designed around the principles of a FSM approach and laid down in a neo-liberal political environment and Maori aspirations encompassing the fisheries sector. Second, the conceptual mapping of FSM and ESM perspectives over New Zealand’s fisheries management experience highlights that a number of management issues have been down played by the commitment to FSM, a situation that has led to on-going tensions between commercial, recreational and customary stakeholders regarding fisheries management. Put another way, there is more to running a sustainable fishery (as defined in the Fisheries Act 1996) than QMS and other tools and dialogue about the development of these should be a priority. Third and more generally, improved dialogue on fisheries questions is likely to be most expeditiously advanced by studies that explicitly conceptualise and contextualise ecological and socio-economic processes and their institutional arrangements.

Spatial employment impacts of fisheries management: A study of the Barents Sea and the Norwegian Sea fisheries

A multiregional Input–Output (I–O) model was developed to investigate the spatial distribution of employment impacts of different fisheries management regimes and policies. The geographic areas used for this study were the fisheries dependent regions in south west Norway and the three northern most counties where the availability of fish resources is of significant importance for settlement. This study focused on the economically most important fish species in the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea: cod, herring and capelin. A major problem confronting fishery managers is quota trade-offs among ecologically interdependent fish stocks. This article demonstrates that fishery management decisions regarding the different stocks may have significance for the spatial distribution of economic activities. The spatial implications of managers’ decisions are crucial for fisheries dependent communities, but such effects are often difficult to foresee due to lack of spatial modelling. The modelling approach demonstrated in this paper would mitigate would such problems.

Moving towards a Rights-Based Fisheries Management Regime for the Tuna Fisheries in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean

AbstractThe 2000 Convention for the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPF Convention) establishes a Commission which will be responsible for setting catch limits and effort controls for the fishery. The Convention will require the Pacific Island States to impose some form of catch limits and this presents them with the opportunity to explore ways to enhance the fisheries regimes they manage. This paper explores the legal issues surrounding a possible rights-based regime, both as a collective approach by the Pacific Island States, and individually. The paper suggests possible legal approaches to the introduction of a rights-based fisheries management regime, drawing on ways in which they may structure their fisheries legislation, and on experiences from other regions. The paper concludes by examining the implications for the Pacific Island States of such an approach.

Fish Stories: Science, Advocacy, and Policy Change in New England Fishery Management

Once the poster child for government‐sponsored overfishing, New England by 2005 had become a fishery conservation success story. This article develops and deploys a problem‐definition framework to explain the dramatic shift from a permissive to a protective fishery management regime in New England. I argue that neither new and improved scientific information nor pressure from powerful commercial interests caused government officials to modify their approach to fishery management. Instead, environmentalists used lawsuits to threaten fishery managers’ autonomy and thereby forced them to replace fishers’ risk‐tolerant definition of the problem with environmentalists’ more precautionary one as the basis for management. Environmentalists had legal leverage because they were able to demonstrate convincingly a substantial discrepancy between what the agency's governing statute required and what managers actually did. Two factors were critical to environmentalists’ success: a compelling and credible scientific story about the relationship between fishing and the health of fish stocks, and an explicit conservation requirement in the language governing fishery management.

In Retrospect the Assumption of Sustainability for Atlantic Fisheries has Proved an Illusion

Fishery landings data series from 1970 to 2002 for the Northeast (FAO Area 27) and Northwest Atlantic (Area 21) with 73 and 42 species or species groups respectively, were mapped onto single charts as a diagnostic of the overall state of fisheries in these two regions, and could be appreciated simultaneously for the entire exploited suite of species as a series of contiguous bar charts. Charts were compared with that for a similar data set of 42 species or species groups from the Mediterranean and Black Seas (FAO Area 37). A “traffic light convention” partitioned the range of landings by species over the period into four equal intervals; coloured respectively red, yellow, green and blue between zero and the highest annual landing of the species. This allowed a model-free display of changes in the timing of species’ landings at the overall ecosystem level, as represented by the important commercial resources in the three areas. The year T 50 by which 50% of species landings had been harvested over the period, was considered a comparable measure of the response of individual species to exploitation. For a significant proportion of groundfish and pelagic fishes, the time to reach T 50 occurred early in the Atlantic time series. The hypothesis was tested that this measure of the depletion schedule is related to some aspect of species biology, as judged by data from the FISHBASE database. Except for commercial invertebrates where landings peaked late in the Northwest Atlantic time series, no significant regression was found between T 50 values per species and any biological characteristic of the species of finfish tested, suggesting that scheduling may reflect overcapacity and targeting by fisheries and/or regime changes. A decline in peak landings proceeded sequentially over time for the large proportion of all finfish species in the North Atlantic following a broadly similar trajectory. Possible exceptions were deeper water species where fisheries began later, suggesting that “fishing down the bathymetry” has occurred. A more synchronous “pulse” of high landings occurred in the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the mid-late 1980s, which was postulated as due to an increase in system productivity. Although regime changes and quota management cannot be excluded as partly responsible for the persistent low landings late in many time series, the main conclusion is that for all three areas, the effects of fishing overshadow those resulting from differing biological characteristics, habit, or species interactions. Although quota control may in part be responsible for low landings of some species late in the time series, the fishery management regimes that applied during 1970–2002 cannot be considered sustainable. This was confirmed by comparative analysis fitting a variety of models to the raw landing data. Of the mathematical models considered, the Hubbert curve, first used to predict the trajectory of extraction of non-renewable petroleum resources globally over time, best fitted the largest proportion of species time series. This seems to confirm that a hypothesis of harvest sustainability cannot be supported by the landing data.

Limitations of the Korean conventional fisheries management regime and expanding Korean TAC system toward output control systems

Abstract In this paper, we focus on the status and trends of the current Korean fisheries management regime. Specifically, this paper briefly introduces the Korean conventional fisheries management regime (KCFMR) and discusses its problems and limitations. In describing policy evolution, this paper finds reasons why the Korean government has chosen a TAC system, an output control approach, besides input control approaches in force for almost a century. This paper also describes the evolution of the Korean TAC system, which is carrying out a pivotal role in Korean fisheries development, and analyzes problems of the Korean TAC system. Finally, this paper gives a perspective on expanding the Korean TAC system toward Output Control Systems (OCSs) such as Individual Quotas (IQs), Individual Vessel Quotas (IVQs), Individual Transferable Traps (ITTs), Community Quotas (CQs), and Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs).

Rights-based Fisheries Management: An Environmentalist Perspective

Fisheries management regimes take many forms, but most fail to designate shares of the catch. This failure creates strong incentives for individuals to maximize their share without regard to long-term sustainability, because the benefits of conservation actions do not accrue to individuals. The competition to maximize catch usually entails excessive capital investments in fishing vessels and gear and intense fishing pressure, resulting in overfishing, high bycatch rates, and the use of large, efficient types of gear that can harm habitat. Managers respond by increasing regulations, but this often exacerbates perverse incentives. In addition, many fisheries could be producing more value than the current system permits, i.e. large quantities of fish are landed during short seasons, forcing fishermen to sell for low prices. Conservation and economic problems facing fisheries can be addressed in an integrated way, by designating access privileges (specifying shares of the catch) to individuals, harvest cooperatives, fishing sectors, communities, or other appropriate entities. Designated Access Privilege (DAP) systems demonstrably end the competition to maximize catch and often result in better conservation and financial performance. The cost of implementing these systems can be relatively high and has been a barrier to better management. However, this doesn’t have to be so. Fisheries could accept investments from a variety of sources and use a portion of the increased financial performance to repay recoverable grants and loans. The key to protecting fish stocks, habitats, and the communities that depend on them will be to implement DAPs that are appropriate for each fishery or community, making investments in sustainability, and creating financing mechanisms that are themselves sustainable, drawing on the increased value that DAP fisheries can produce.

Policy failure and stakeholder dissatisfaction in complex ecosystem management: The case of the Dutch Wadden Sea shellfishery

At the beginning of the 1990s, a combination of a sharp decline in shellfish populations and mass bird mortality in the Dutch Wadden Sea led to a conflict between conservationists and the shellfishery. The conflict gave rise to the establishment of a shellfish management policy in 1993. Although this policy certainly improved upon the old situation, without clear restrictions on fishing effort, the policy has been unable to manage the complex ecosystem satisfactorily. This paper addresses the question of why the conflict was not resolved. At the heart of the problem lie an improperly functioning co-management arrangement and general disagreement about which changes in the management policy should be adopted. In order to understand the fishing industry, the conservationist and the government positions in the co-management arrangement, we analyse what has been the impact of the current shellfish policy on the satisfaction of the objectives of the various stakeholders. We examine whether the implementation of alternative policy scenarios could lead to the establishment of a sustainable shellfishery. The case of the Dutch shellfishery is an important example of an unsustainable management policy. As such, this paper illuminates many of the problems faced by fisheries management regimes worldwide and suggests how some of them could be avoided.

Changing fisheries practices and their socioeconomic implications in South Coast Kenya

A study conducted in South Coast, Kenya to determine the factors that influence the harvesting of fish in the area, assess the changes that have occurred in local fishing practices and their socioeconomic impacts; establish stakeholder characteristics in relation to changing fishing practices; and identify the winners and losers in the changing fisheries management regimes. Information and data were collected from four sites, namely Vanga, Shimoni, Msambweni and Gazi. It was established that changing fishing practices in the area have led to over-exploitation of the fish stocks from the coral reefs. Regression analysis of the data indicated a significant inverse relationship between fish harvesting rate and price. This is inconsistent with the theory of production, which predicts output to increase with increase in price. In the study area, when the price of fish is low, fishermen tend to spend more hours per day fishing in order to compensate for the lost income due to price decrease. This results in over-fishing within the coral reef. Similarly, the output has a significant inverse relationship with distance to the fishing ground. There is a significant positive relationship between effort and output; when fishing effort increases by one unit, output increases by 0.43 units in weight. The other explanatory variables, particularly income, education and age, have a positive but insignificant relationship with output; the adjusted R 2 is 0.714, which means that these variables explain 71% of the variation in output. From the estimation of a transformed log–log model, the results obtained are consistent with the estimates of the original model.

Conservation through Collusion: Antitrust as an Obstacle to Marine Resource Conservation

This article explores the tension between antitrust principles and conservation of the marine commons. Part I provides an overview of fishery conservation efforts in theory and practice. As a common pool resource, marine fisheries will fall prey to the tragedy of the commons unless consumption is limited to sustainable levels, whether through property rights, community norms, or government regulation. Part II briefly explains the antitrust concerns raised by efforts to restrict output, fix prices, or allocate territories. Although each of these actions may, in specific circumstances, facilitate conservation efforts, they are each presumptively suspect under antitrust law. Part III explores the conflict between conservation and antitrust in fisheries, focusing on cases in which competitors or government officials sought to prosecute fishing unions and other cooperative fishery organizations for antitrust violations. These cases illustrate that collective efforts by fishers to control exploitation of the underlying resources are presumptively illegal under antitrust law. This part also explores potential exemptions for certain types of cooperative institutions as well as the impact of antitrust concerns on the implementation of property-based fishery management regimes. Part IV then considers how antitrust concerns may inhibit conservation or other environmental goals in the contexts of oil production and pollution control. While the focus of this article is fishery conservation, the analysis is potentially applicable to other contexts in which antitrust law inhibits non-governmental common pool management efforts. Part V explores how conservation objectives might be reconciled with antitrust concerns. Insofar as antitrust doctrine is motivated by efficiency concerns, antitrust law need not be hostile to private efforts to conserve common pool resources. The doctrine of ancillary restraints provides a sound analytical foundation for approving at least some cooperative fishery conservation efforts under the rule of reason. Insofar as existing antitrust precedent forecloses such a result, statutory measures may facilitate private cooperative fishery conservation efforts. In either case, antitrust law should be made more hospitable to non-governmental conservation efforts.

Strategies for Rebuilding Closer Links between Local Indigenous Communities and Their Customary Fisheries in Aotearoa/New Zealand

There is a growing recognition that knowledge of indigenous communities, based on accumulated observations and experience over time, is significant for sustainable environmental management in collaboration with modern scientific knowledge. A number of innovative policy initiatives are currently being implemented in New Zealand to enable indigenous Maori tribes and sub-tribes to rehabilitate and manage their local fisheries in accordance with customary values and practices. These policies are an important milestone from an historical perspective as they are meant to recognise and empower the role of Maori as Treaty partners. The fisheries management regime in New Zealand now provides for Maori representation at the local level within a co-management framework that enables local Maori communities to exercise their customary rights. These institutional arrangements have been crafted to facilitate Maori input, based on customary values and practices, to complement modern Western management practices for sustainable harvesting of marine resources. Nevertheless, the degree to which these initiatives constitute an adequate response to Maori Treaty aspirations is debatable. A major constraint in this respect is that the government is compelled to recognise the needs of other, economically and politically more dominant, non-Maori user-groups in allocating and managing access to fishery resources and the marine environment.

Minimum information management systems and ITQ fisheries management

In 1986 New Zealand reformed its fisheries management regime with the introduction of a rights-based system of management. At the beginning of each fishing season a government agency sets an allowable commercial catch. Individual firms hold an entitlement to harvest a share of the allowable commercial catch. To date, the government agency has relied almost exclusively on the results of stock assessment research when setting the allowable harvest. Excessive reliance on biological data in fisheries management has attracted criticism. An alternative, a minimum information management system, uses information contained in quota prices as a guide to set limits on commercial harvest. This paper examines price formation in one quota market. We find evidence in the data that supports the use of quota prices to guide the setting of limits to commercial harvest. Furthermore, time-series analysis provides a basis for studying the temporal response of changes in asset prices to perturbations in the allowable harvest. The results illustrate how information summarized in quota prices can complement the findings of stock assessment research in fisheries management.

Finessing King Neptune: Fisheries Management and the Limits of International Law

The shared uses of the world's oceans includes a broad spectrum of activities. Ships routinely navigate off the shores of virtually every coastal nation and their activities run the gamut from fishing to commerce, recreation, navigation, and military activities - all of which rely on the principle of mare liberum, or freedom of the high seas. Regulating the activities of these many vessels, flying the flags of different sovereign states, on the high seas - the paridigmatic international commons - poses a unique set of challenges for the international legal system. Of these many challenges, managing the mobile fish stocks that straddle zones of national jurisdiction and the international commons is perhaps the most complicated. Managing these resources raises practical questions about who has the authority to make and enforce rules as well as more theoretical questions about the contours of a State's sovereignty over vessels flying its flags. Taken to its logical end, mare liberum implies a right to fish straddling stock to extinction. Each State has an equal right to exploit the resources of the high seas, and no State has authority to regulate the activities of another State's nationals on the high seas. States vary in their commitment to fisheries protection, and no State wants to disadvantage its nationals in the international arena. Unless international law devises a legal framework capable of imposing consistent conservation measures on high seas straddling stocks, mare liberum will drive these stocks towards extinction, either actual or commercial. This paper uses the interaction between the competing international norms of mare liberum and environmental stewardship in the context of high seas fisheries management to explore fundamental questions of sovereignty and of international law. In particular, I ask whether the fisheries management regime proposed by the 1995 Straddling Stock Agreement can solve this regulatory puzzle in a manner consistent with generally accepted notions of national sovereignty in an international context. In answering that question, I propose a new vision of high seas fisheries management, one that reconciles the apparent contradiction between mare liberum and environmental stewardship.

Marine Biodiversity and Institutional Interplay

The interplay between the biodiversity regime and fisheries management and conservation regimes is not a critically important phenomenon at this point in time. For now, the institutions most relevant for the management of marine and coastal biodiversity are entrenched in conventional fisheries management structures. Biodiversity-oriented institutions appear to be less in touch with the practical aspects of resource management. The most significant interplay occurs at the global level, where several oceans-related regimes appear to be affected by the concerns raised by the CBD. The important question with regard to the longer term, is what impact the creation and operation of the CBD will have on various fisheries regimes in the future.

Voluntary management in an inshore fishery has conservation benefits

The management of fisheries in European Union (EU) waters has generally been regulated through government institutions and agreed quota allocations. This top-down management approach may have contributed to the continued decline of targeted fish stocks by forcing fishers to compete for limited resources without engendering a sense of resource stewardship. In attempting to reverse this decline, scientists and managers should examine management systems that do not solely depend on top-down approaches, and the Inshore Potting Agreement (IPA) is an example. The IPA is a voluntary fishery management system designed and operated by inshore fishers of south Devon, England. The IPA was conceived to reduce conflict between static-gear (pot and net) and towed-gear (trawl and dredge) fishers, and is regarded as a successful fisheries management regime by fishers and managers because it has effectively allowed fishers from both sectors to operate profitably on traditional fishing grounds. Another study determined that the IPA has incidentally protected benthic habitat complexity. Fishers from the static-gear and towed-gear sectors were interviewed to determine the evolution and function of the IPA, and to establish the factors that ensure the high level of regulatory compliance amongst fishers from both sectors. Towed-gear fishers gave significantly different responses to the same questions asked of static-gear fishers, and were generally less satisfied with the existence of the IPA. Multivariate analyses of the interview data suggested that fishers who thought the IPA was a good system also thought the system provided pot protection, but had experienced inter-sector conflict. Fishers who thought the IPA provided no personal benefit also thought that static-gear fishers should be more restricted, and that towed-gear corridors or more seasonal-use areas should be established within the existing IPA area. However, fishers from both sectors agreed that the IPA has maintained traditional practices of the local fishing industry, and that the system has conserved target finfish and scallop species. A number of factors were identified as critical to the success of the IPA. These included the voluntary nature of the agreement, the limited number of organizations representing fishers and very high level of membership of those organizations, and the simplicity of the system. Regulatory compliance is enhanced through the ability of fishers' organizations to respond rapidly to inter-sector conflict issues.

Multispecies Perspectives on the Bering Sea Groundfish Fisheries Management Regime

The need to understand the multispecies implications of various harvesting regimes is becoming more important as fishery managers move toward ecosystem-based management. We explore the possible effects that different exploitation rates may have on eastern Bering Sea groundfish using a multispecies simulation context that incorporates predator–prey relationships. At present, some groundfish species in the eastern Bering Sea are exploited up to the recommended levels of allowable biological catch, whereas others, for economic or bycatch limitation reasons, are only lightly exploited. We explore the possible long-term multispecies implications of different exploitation patterns on the biomass and yield of several groundfish species using predator−prey suitability estimates derived from multispecies virtual population analysis (MSVPA) in a multispecies simulation modeling context and compare those predictions with those from single-species forecasting models. Three different fishing scenarios that included eight species in the eastern Bering Sea were implemented in these models. In one scenario, the present exploitation rates were used for the model simulations; in the second scenario, all exploited species were more evenly exploited by fishing each species at its recommended allowable biological catch levels; and in the third scenario, there was no fishing for all the species. Results from the single-species and multispecies model simulations mostly showed the same direction of population trends. However, the magnitude of change was different for some species, which can be ascribed mainly to predation interactions. Greater differences were seen between the simulations that used the present exploitation rates and those in which no fishing occurred. The multispecies simulations that included predation interactions predicted much lower equilibrium population sizes for prey species populations under conditions of no fishing than did single-species simulations that did not take predator–prey relationships into account. These results show that multispecies models provide new insights into the implications of single-species harvesting strategies, particularly for prey species that are also the target of commercial fisheries.

New regional fisheries management regimes: establishing the South East Atlantic fisheries organisation

On the 20th of April 2001 the coastal States and fishing nations of the South East Atlantic Ocean adopted the “Convention on the Conservation and Management of Fishery Resources in the South East Atlantic Ocean”. This article analyses the process of negotiating the convention, from its initiation by Namibia in 1995 until its adoption in 2001. It argues that the fisheries played a secondary role in the process, while the negotiations revolved around the appropriate status and implementation of the UN Fish Stocks Agreement of 1995.

Inland commercial fisheries management in France

The French fisheries management regime is based on public and private ownership of fishing waters associated with a complex multilevel management system. A total of 730 operational commercial inland fisheries were examined by analysis of thematic interviews and questionnaires. Commercial fishermen are beginning to understand the nature of their own activity and its relationship to the concept of sustainable management. Nevertheless, fishermen have to face two major problems: first, they are poorly represented on decision making bodies where anglers are dominant, and secondly their activities are governed by two separate ministries. Opportunities for future development may lie in decision making at the catchment level.