Fisheries management


The management of fisheries is broadly defined as the set of tasks which guide vested parties and managers in the optimal use of aquatic renewable resources, primarily fish. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in the 2001 Guidebook to Fisheries Management there is currently "no clear and generally accepted definitions of fisheries management". Instead, the authors use a working definition, such that fisheries management is:
The integrated process of information gathering, analysis, planning, consultation, decision-making, allocation of resources and formulation and implementation, with necessary law enforcement to ensure environmental compliance, of regulations or rules which govern fisheries activities in order to ensure the continued productivity of the resources and the accomplishment of other fisheries objectives.

The goal of fisheries management is to produce sustainable biological, environmental and socioeconomic benefits from renewable aquatic resources. Wild fisheries are classified as renewable when the organisms of interest produce an annual biological surplus that with judicious management can be harvested without reducing future productivity. Fishery management employs activities that protect fishery resources so sustainable exploitation is possible, drawing on fisheries science and possibly including the precautionary principle.
Modern fisheries management is often referred to as a governmental system of appropriate environmental management rules based on defined objectives and a mix of management means to implement the rules, which are put in place by a system of monitoring control and surveillance. An ecosystem approach to fisheries management has started to become a more relevant and practical way to manage fisheries. Current scientific consensus is oriented towards ecosystem-based fisheries management as the most viable approach for achieving the goal of balancing human needs, ensuring the longevity of ecosystem services, and mitigating adverse ecological impacts. Today, EBFM is a more comprehensive approach to fisheries management which focuses on achieving ecological health and productivity, as opposed to traditional management techniques which focus on isolated species.

Objectives

Economic

In economics, fisheries are often clearly defined as a common property resource. Common property resources suffer from issues that occur uniquely with an open access good. Fisheries are primarily faced with the challenge of overexploitation. This problem was first discussed at length by H. Scott Gordon's 1954 article, The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery and Anthony D. Scott's 1955 article, The Fishery: The Objectives of Sole Ownership. Both were published in the Journal of Political Economy. Gordon's paper discusses the optimal rent extraction from fisheries, given the production function of fisheries is non-linear, and exhibits diminishing returns. Using an effort function, cost function and profit function for a user, he is able to derive optimal amounts of effort, and see how a change in the stock affects the users' optimal effort. He posits the user cannot maximize harvest, or else he jeopardizes future profits, such that in an equilibrium, with no intervention, total value less costs will be zero. This result is applicable for common pool resources, meaning that each user believes they can fish up to the amount that covers their costs. But, with the entry of each additional user, profits dissipate.
Scott's article asks a normative question, on whether society should manage renewable resources. Both articles were foundational in the environmental economics, and gave the basic economic motivation for how and why renewable resources, primarily fisheries, should be managed.
From this early work, we are able to describe the core economic objectives of fishery management. The economic objective of fisheries management is to maximize a user's present value of the sum of all future profits. Given that fisheries suffer from the same market failure as other common property resources, one of the main market interventions is to assign property rights. The most comprehensive economic survey of fishery management policies suggests that assigning property rights in fisheries prevents population collapse.
While these objectives have remained the same, the models for finding optimal conditions for profit-maximizing fisheries have advanced. Now, economic models are able to include more sophistication, such as heterogenous technologies and costs by users, uncertainty, as well as the biological dynamics of fish population growth over time.

Political

According to the FAO, fisheries management should be based explicitly on political objectives, ideally with transparent priorities. Political goals can also be a weak part of fisheries management, since the objectives can conflict with each other. Typical political objectives when exploiting a commercially important fish resource are to:
For the most recent several decades, the political goals in fisheries management of commercially important species have been rapidly evolving, primarily driven by a recognition of the response of fish and other target animals to a changing climate, new technologies for fishing, particularly on the high seas, development of competing policy priorities for aquatic environments leading to a more ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management, and new scientific insights about the processes affecting fish population size and recruitment. The political objectives operative in recreational fisheries management are often substantially different from those prevalent in commercial fisheries management. For example, catch-and-release regulations are common in some types of recreational fisheries. Thus, biological yield is of less important.

International

Fisheries objectives need to be expressed in concrete management rules. Where countries are members of the FAO, management rules should be based on the international, non-binding Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, first established at the 1995 FAO meeting. The precautionary approach it prescribes is typically implemented in concrete management rules as minimum spawning biomass, maximum fishing mortality rates, etc. In 2005, the UBC Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia comprehensively reviewed the performance of the world's major fishing nations against the Code.

History

Fisheries have been explicitly managed in some places for hundreds of years. More than 80 percent of the world's commercial exploitation of fish and shellfish are harvested from natural occurring populations in the oceans and freshwater areas. For example, the Māori people, New Zealand residents for about 700 years, had prohibitions against taking more than what could be eaten and about giving back the first fish caught as an offering to sea god Tangaroa. Starting in the 18th century attempts were made to regulate fishing in the North Norwegian fishery. This resulted in the enactment of a law in 1816 on the Lofoten fishery, which established in some measure what has come to be known as territorial use rights.

"The fishing banks were divided into areas belonging to the nearest fishing base on land and further subdivided into fields where the boats were allowed to fish. The allocation of the fishing fields was in the hands of local governing committees, usually headed by the owner of the onshore facilities which the fishermen had to rent for accommodation and for drying the fish."

In Europe, governmental resource protection-based fisheries management is a relatively new idea, first developed for North European fisheries after the first Overfishing Conference held in London in 1936. In 1957 British fisheries researchers Ray Beverton and Sidney Holt published a seminal work on North Sea commercial fisheries dynamics. In the 1960s the work became the theoretical platform for North European management schemes. In North America, both commercial and recreational fisheries have been actively managed for over 150 years. All U.S. states and Canadian provinces have fisheries agencies and their employees implement state, provincial, and federal laws using a broad suite of tools and procedures for both freshwater and marine fisheries.
After some years away from the field of fisheries management, Beverton criticized his earlier work in a paper given at the first World Fisheries Congress in Athens in 1992. "The Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations" expressed his concerns, including the way his and Sidney Holt's work had been misinterpreted and misused by fishery biologists and managers during the previous 30 years. Nevertheless, the institutional foundation for modern fishery management had been laid.
In 1996, the Marine Stewardship Council was founded to set standards for sustainable fishing. In 2010, the Aquaculture Stewardship Council was created to do the same for aquaculture.
A report by Prince Charles' International Sustainability Unit, the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund and 50in10 published in July 2014 estimated global fisheries were adding $270 billion a year to global GDP, but by full implementation of sustainable fishing, that figure could rise by an extra amount of as much as $50 billion.

Management mechanisms

Many countries have set up ministries or government departments, often named Ministry of Fisheries or similar, controlling aspects of fisheries within their exclusive economic zones. Currently, there are four core categories of management regulating either input, or output in a fishery or fishing area. These management mechanisms operate directly or indirectly:
InputsOutputs
IndirectVessel licensingCatching techniques or equipment
DirectLimited entryCatch quota and technical regulation

Technical measures may include:
  • prohibiting devices such as bows and arrows, and spears, or firearms
  • prohibiting nets
  • setting minimum mesh sizes
  • limiting the average potential catch of a vessel in the fleet (vessel and crew size, gear, electronic gear and other physical "inputs"
  • prohibiting bait
  • limiting snagging
  • limits on fish traps
  • limiting the number of poles or lines per fisherman
  • restricting the number of simultaneous fishing vessels
  • limiting a vessel's average operational intensity per unit time at sea
  • limiting average time at sea