and recreational angling (Sievanen et al. 2005). Clearly, this is a difficult task for policy-makers to implement. Nevertheless, there are options:
Scenario one: An across-the-board fishing capacity cut Assuming that the current global fishing fleet represents an average distribution of capacity throughout the world, we estimate that decommissioning of between 1.4 – 2.4 million vessels would be required. Similarly, between 15 million and 22 million workers would be removed from a green fishing industry. Based on vessel and crew data from the European Union (EC 2006), we calculate that the average cost of a vessel buyback is roughly equal to the average interest payments on a vessel for five years and the average cost of crew retraining is estimated as 1.5 years average annual crew wages. These values are estimated to be US$ 15,000 per vessel buyback and US$ 18,750 per crew retraining, respectively. Based on this information, we estimate that the total investment needed to reduce fishing capacity in this scenario to be between US$ 290 billion and US$ 430 billion worldwide. It should be noted that this total amount can be spread over time if necessary.
Scenario two: Accounting for catch capacity distribution differences The above scenario assumes that, on average, vessels have similar catch capacity and impact ecosystems in similar ways. In fact, the distribution of fishing effort exhibits a great deal of variation around the globe (Anticamara et al. in press). Large-scale, high capacity vessels also tend to use more capital in place of labour so that the number of workers per weight of landings is lower than small scale fleets. For policy-makers concerned about reducing fishing effort while minimizing the impact on workers, it is probably prudent to focus on buybacks of large-scale fishing vessels.
The catching power of large-scale vessels implies that 160,000 of the world’s 4 million fishing vessels catch the same amount of fish as the remaining 3.84 million vessels. Using data on fishing employment in small and large scale fleets (EC 2006), we calculate that, on average, large scale vessels employ about 3.6 times as many workers as small scale vessels. This implies that large scale fleets employ about 5 per cent of the world’s 35 million fishers or 4.6 million workers. Combining these figures with our assumptions outlined above implies that cutting 130,000 – 160,000 large-scale vessels along with 1.4 – 1.7 million jobs supported by these vessels will achieve roughly the same green economy results as cutting 15 to 22 million fishing jobs across the board. In this scenario, the total cost of adjustment to green fisheries is between US$ 115 and US$ 175 billion since the high cost of worker re- training is minimised. The reason why the cost of greening world fisheries under this scenario is lower
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than under scenarios one and three is that the cost of compensating, re-training and re-settling small scale fishers is much higher in those two cases.
Scenario three: Global fleet capacity distribution If large and small scale fishing vessels were evenly distributed around the globe, scenario two would be an effective strategy to minimise the effect on employment numbers by decommissioning only the large scale vessels and affecting a smaller number of workers. However, many large-scale vessels are concentrated in developed countries while small-scale vessels are mostly found in developing countries. Although the same green economy result could potentially be achieved by making cuts to just large-scale vessels, this would be ineffective in areas dominated by small-scale fishing that are currently overfished, such as in India and Senegal.
In this scenario, we explore the possibility of putting three- quarters of the responsibility for cutting fishing effort on large-scale vessels, with the remaining quarter filled by small-scale vessels. In such a case, reducing a combination of 120,000 large-scale vessels and 960,000 small-scale vessels would halve the world’s fishing capacity. However, unlike scenario one, the effect on workers in this scenario is greatly reduced, requiring provisions to deal with 1.3 million large-scale workers and 8.3 million small-scale fishers. Also, in this scenario, we allow for differences in the cost of decommissioning and re-training to vary between large and small-scale vessels. Using data from Lam et al. (2010), we calculate that large and small-scale crew workers earn average wages of US$ 20,000 and US$ 10,000 per year, respectively. Furthermore, we determine that large and small scale vessels pay an average of US$ 11,000 and US$ 2,500 per year in capital costs. This implies that, following the same assumptions as scenario one, the average cost of decommissioning for large and small- scale vessels is US$ 55,000 and US$ 12,500, respectively. Likewise, retraining efforts for large and small-scale crew members are estimated to be between US$ 30,000 and US$ 15,000 per worker.
By focusing effort reductions on large-scale vessels, the total cost of adjustment to green world fisheries in this scenario is much less costly than the first scenario, requiring a one-time total investment of between US$ 190 billion to US$ 280 billion with a mean of US$ 240 billion to decommission vessels and provide for workers as they transition to other forms of employment. It would also be necessary to increase management expenditure by 25 per cent to US$ 2 billion on an annual basis.
Given the current distribution of large and small-scale fishing vessels in the world, both scenarios one and two appear to be unrealistic. Therefore, we use the cost estimates in scenario three in the following cost- benefit analysis.