Towards a green economy

circumstances where it might not be adequate. Catch limits are notoriously difficult to monitor in small-scale fisheries, and even monitoring the boats and their use need not be much easier in that context. Yet, it is quantitative restriction of either kind that is needed in order to limit exploitation of fish stocks.

It has been pointed out repeatedly and supported by empirical evidence that limiting fish catches alone achieves very limited objectives in the fisheries (Costello et al. 2008; Hannesson 2004). It may, and it often has, succeeded in maintaining the fish stocks at healthy levels, while leaving the industry in shambles economically, with short fishing seasons, inferior products, low economic returns, and even threats to life and limb through undue risk-taking encouraged by narrow time opportunities to catch fish. One way to deal with this is to allocate the total fish quota among the vessels or fishing communities in the industry and make the quota allocations transferable, where feasible.

4.3 The economics of fishery management tools

The basic fishery management tools can be grouped into 1) output controls; 2) input controls; and 3) auxiliary measures. Both 1) and 2) control the rate of exploitation, which is the fundamental factor that needs to be controlled, as stated earlier.

Output controls mean limiting the total amount of fish that can be caught. We do not know what this means in terms of rate of exploitation unless we know what the size of the fish stock is. This can only be estimated with

a considerable and possibly high degree of imprecision. Nevertheless, catch quotas are often set on the basis of some target rate of exploitation, and to make any sense of them we must have a reasonably reliable idea about what the stock size is. This is admittedly an unlikely scenario in most fisheries of the world, which are small- scale and local in nature, and for which output controls may be of limited use. However, where feasible, the target output should be set on the basis of maximizing either food supply or fishing rent, depending on what is deemed most appropriate.

Where it is feasible to set a catch quota, and where there are strong monitoring and enforcement capabilities, it might be feasible to allocate the quota among the players in the industry, and make it transferable. This should help avoid wasteful competition for the largest possible share of a given catch and to achieve a reasonable correspondence between the fleet capacity and the available catch quotas. We stress reasonable, because there are several reasons why there is likely to be some mismatch between fleet capacity and catch quotas. One is variability of the fish stocks, another is the remuneration system used on the fishing boats. The optimal solution is ideal, but in practice we are unlikely to achieve anything better than getting closer to it.

Under some circumstances, effort controls could be better than quota controls. This can happen if quotas are difficult to monitor, or if the size of the fish stock cannot be estimated while we can be reasonably certain that it is always evenly distributed in a given area so that a unit of effort produces a given rate of exploitation. A problem here is technological progress by which a unit of effort (say, a boat-day) becomes more and more effective over

Box 6: Updating international law on shared fish stocks

A shared fish stock is one that either 1) is a highly migratory species (i.e., tuna); 2) occurs in the EEZ waters of more than one political entity; 3) occurs in the high seas where it may be targeted by a multitude of fleets; or 4) any combination of the previous three. Often, the management of shared fish stocks is needed to counter what game theorists term the prisoner’s dilemma, where parties sharing a stock would be better off cooperating on management initiatives but fail to do so because they are concerned other parties may free-ride on their investment in the resource.

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was implemented to deal with some problems associated with shared fish stocks,

giving special rights and responsibilities over near- shore marine resources to coastal nations. However, this agreement and the 1995 United Nations Fish Stock Agreement, which was meant to reinforce UNCLOS, have left the management of shared and transboundary fish stocks open to management problems that game theorists have predicted (Munro 2007). It is suggested that, in order to green fisheries that are shared or transboundary in nature, the body of international law concerning access rights in fisheries must be re-examined with a focus on the establishment of RFMOs with the teeth to oversee the use of these fish stocks; for such laws to be effective, international law should be reviewed as soon as possible – before serious harm to shared fish stocks occurs.

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