by
J.A. Gulland
Marine Resources Service
FAO Fisheries Department
Rome, Italy
FOREWORD
The purpose of the Consultation
The need for the Consultation arose from two observations - that the well-being of many fisheries requires some control of the amount of fishing (fishing mortality or fishing effort), and that many of the actions that have been taken to regulate fishing effort have not improved the well-being of the fisheries concerned.
There are a number of reasons for this failure, but for the purposes of the Consultation the most important arise from the lack of communication between different groups (scientists, economists, administrators, and of course those in the actual fishing business from the fisherman on a small boat to the owner of a fleet of factory trawlers). As a result most of the analyses carried out and most of the actions taken deal with only part of the problem. The complexities of managing fisheries are such that the result of tackling one part of the problem is to exacerbate the difficulties in other parts, thus reducing or even eliminating any benefits obtained. This lack of communication is also becoming more apparent between the theoretical and practical side of fishery management. Too much of current theoretical work is concerned either with the detailed analysis of one sector (e.g. the dynamics of fish stocks and the environment), or with the development of some description of how fisheries should be managed perfectly, which has little relevance to current practical problems. Commonly, too much time of those engaged in the practical side is taken up with actions dealing with immediate problems (e.g. regulations in allocating next year's catch quota). No time is left to consider whether anything is being done to resolve the medium- to long-term problems. As a result each year the same short-term problems tend to re-appear, getting worse each time.
It is not the intention at this Consultation to design (yet again?) the perfect system of fisheries management. Nor is it intended to provide immediate solutions to the problems of managing say the shrimp fisheries of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Its purpose may be deduced from the views of many thoughtful fishery managers throughout the world: “Surely there is a better way of doing things than what we are doing now”.
This is the point where it may be useful to consider the validity of the pair of observations at the start of this paper. The first is certainly true in theory, and there is a massive biological and economic literature to establish the point. It is also true in practice to the extent that without control of the amount of fishing, virtually all the large fisheries of the world have run into difficulties. The second observation is also also true as an observation of general practical experience. A pessimist might therefore conclude that fisheries are just too difficult to manage, and whatever the theoretical benefits of controlling fishing effort, they will never be achieved in practice. There is some weight in this view. There are probably a number of fisheries where the potential benefits from controlling effort are so small, and the practical difficulties so large, that it would not be worth while attempting to manage these fisheries. One of the first steps in considering management is to determine not only the potential benefits from effort control, but also to determine whether there is a reasonable hope of achieving a certain proportion of those benefits, and whether the costs of doing so will be less than the actual benefits achieved.
Experience suggests that this hope should exist in many fisheries. Changes in the Law of the Sea have removed, for a large number of fisheries, the need to achieve implementation of management actions through international agreement between an indeterminate number of countries. In the past, even where such agreement was reached, it had often been reached at the lowest common denominator, and involved small benefits and high transaction costs. Now many stocks are the concern of a single country. The government of that country has the legal power to impose any management scheme which seems appropriate to the national interest. Of course having the legal power does not necessarily mean that any regulation can easily be imposed and enforced. Also in several countries with a federal constitution there remain problems of jurisdiction between the central government and the state or provincial government. Despite these problems, some of the greatest obstacles in the way of effective management have been removed for the many stocks that now lie wholly within a single national jurisdiction.
The same is also true, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, for those fish which cross the boundaries between national EEZs. These stocks are shared between several countries; however, the number of countries is usually small - often only two - and there is no risk of extra countries entering the fishery, and thus upsetting the agreements reached between those already in the fishery. The biological and other characteristics of the stock, vis-a-vis the national EEZs (e.g. where the spawning grounds are, how much of the total catch is taken in each EEZ) provide some objective basis for reaching agreement as to how the stock should be managed, and the potential benefits divided between the interested countries. Managing shared stocks under the new Law of the Sea may be difficult, but it is definitely easier than managing the open-access international fisheries in the previous era.
Nevertheless, despite the increased powers of government, and despite the wide-spread recognition by individual governments that management, and the control of the amount of fishing, is needed in many of their fisheries, not much has been done. Many reasons can be put forward in respect of one or other fishery - poor statistics, inadequate knowledge of the biology of the fish, lack of information on the long-term economic impact of alternative management measures, inadequate legal powers, pressures by strong political forces against what would seem to be the best measures, insufficient administrative powers to enforce unpopular measures, etc. These are often excuses more than real causes. One underlying reason is, as mentioned earlier, poor communication between the different groups (scientists, administrators, fishermen, etc.) directly concerned with a national fishery, and also between the theoreticians and the actual practitioners of management.
As a result governments find it difficult to determine either qualitatively or quantitatively the management measure appropriate to the particular conditions of their fisheries. By qualitative is meant the type of measure - catch quota, fiscal measures, limits on the number or type of vessel and the gear used, etc. By quantitative is meant the precise level - the tonnage of the annual catch quota, the number of 200-gross ton trawlers that should be allowed to fish, etc. This Consultation is concentrating on the qualitative aspects. By exploring the various aspects, advantages and disadvantages, of each approach, the proceedings should provide governments with useful guidance on the approaches most appropriate to their individual conditions. Determination of the quantitative aspects of management requires examination of the actual conditions of the fishery, though it is hoped that even in this the Consultation will provide guidance on the nature of investigations that are needed. The specific attributes of individual approaches (catch quotas, etc.) are examined in later papers. This paper largely outlines the objective of management, and the criteria against which the success or failure of a management scheme can be judged.
Objectives
There are several possible objectives in managing fisheries, and some of them are inconsistent. It is not possible, given a limited resource, to maximize employment in a fishery, and at the same time maximize the average income of the individual fisherman. It is essential that any management should be based on a reasonably clear idea of what the objective (or objectives) are, and if there are several, of the relative priorities between them.
This does not mean that before starting to implement any management measure, the objectives have to be explicitly spelt out in detail. Indeed some of the bigger difficulties have come when a detailed objective has been set down, and later found to be inappropriate because of changed priorities, or technical difficulties in complying with the details. The International Whaling Commission's problems first with the Maximum Sustainable Yield, and then with the New Management Procedure could serve as a warning. In contrast some of the more successful examples of management have come when there are no explicit objectives, other than a desire on the part of the Director of Fisheries that, over a period of years, his life should be as peaceful as possible. It should be disturbed as little as possible by angry complaints from fishermen, politicians or others. This can be achieved only by a recognition of what matters are likely to raise most complaints (i.e. which are the main objectives of fishermen, politicians, or others) and that long-term peace requires on occasion some short-term trouble when a necessary but (at least in the short-term) unpopular measure is introduced.
Neither this paper nor the Consultation as a whole is intended to provide a prescription of what the objectives of management should be - even if this were theoretically possible, given the diversity of interest between countries, and even between regions within countries. Determination of objectives is a national matter. It should always be done, though it may well be more convenient for the expression of objectives to be implicit rather than explicit. If explicit it again may be better to leave the definitions somewhat general, provided the objectives are sufficiently well defined to enable the subsequent performance of management to be checked against these objectives.
The intention of this paper is, having stressed the importance of recognizing the objectives, to review the types of objectives that can be chosen, and the related measures against which the success of management can be measured. These objectives fall into three groups: the resources, economic performance, and equity. In addition the transaction costs, e.g., the burden on limited administration or scientific resources, form a fourth group of measures of the usefulness of a particular measure.
Resources and biological yield
A productive fish stock and high level of yield are necessary conditions for successful management. They are not sufficient ones. Nor does the need for a high yield mean that managers should try to maximize the biological yield from the stock, or that a fishery in which the yield is somewhat below the theoretical maximum is not being successfully managed.
Though the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) is not a good management objective, some of the extensive criticisms of MSY are misplaced. MSY has only rarely been used as the principal guide to actual management decisions. Its greatest practical value has been as part of a simple model of the biological facts on which management is based. By talking about MSY and the dangers of exceeding MSY, policy makers and others can appreciate that too much fishing can reduce the yield, and that in a heavily fished stock fishing less can mean catching more. In fact, for some of the cases where MSY seems to have been used as the objective, this has not been the case. Thus, especially round the North Sea, scientists have had to recommend catch quotas without explicit guidance from the decision makers on their target objective. In these cases the fishing mortality giving the maximum yield per recruit has provided an objectively definable target, which can be used by the biologists in reaching a specific figure for the recommended catch for next year. However, it will only give the MSY if the average recruitment does not vary. It may well be excess of the fishing mortality giving the MSY, which may be closer, for example, to F0.1.
So far as the impact on the resources are concerned, many of the most important differences between approaches to management lie in the unexpected effects. If fish stocks and the impact of different amounts of fishing followed the simple assumptions, then any management measure likely to be considered will have much the same effect. It should result in increased abundance (compared with an unmanaged fishery) and high catches. In practice fish stocks vary, and fishermen change their methods. Unless the management measures are adapted to take these changes into account, the effect on the stocks and future catches could be very different from that expected. A constant catch quota, set according to average stock abundance could lead to severe over-fishing in periods when abundance is low for natural reasons. A fixed number of vessels will lead to progressive over-fishing if no account is taken of improvements in the fleet (bigger vessels, more efficient gear, etc.).
A biological complication that is most talked about but rarely taken into explicit account in setting management measures concerns the interaction between fish species. Such interaction can be biological (e.g. one species feeding on another), or at the fishery level (e.g. one species being caught incidentally by vessels fishing primarily for other species). So that the work of the Consultation can focus on the sufficiently complex problems of controlling effort in a single species fishery, multi-species aspects will not be discussed except in passing. It must however be recognized that there will be differences between different approaches in the degree to which their impacts can be accurately concentrated on the particular species of concern, and on the ability of the fishing fleets to move from one species to another.
A good management measure is one that can accommodate departures from the single model with minimum adjustment. Thus a limit on the number of vessels may need little adjustment of abundance changes; catch quotas are not affected if the efficiency of the fishing fleet increases. A second consideration is the ease with which the information needed to make the appropriate adjustment can be collected and the adjustment made. This may be considered as part of the transaction costs discussed in a later sector.
Efficiency and economic performance
Nearly all the objectives of management are, in one form or another, economic. Economic indices of one kind or another are likely to be among the most useful tests of the success of a management regime. Nevertheless, perhaps because the emphasis has been placed on maintaining the biological production, the economic impact of many regulations has been to reduce the total value added by the fishery, either by increasing costs or reducing the final value of the product. In many cases the reduction in net value added, well below the level that might have been obtained with other approaches to management, must be taken as an indication of a serious failure by managers.
This is not to imply that maximization of net value added is the only objective, or that the fact that it is below some theoretical maximum obtainable under perfect conditions, should be taken as an indication of failure. It is the fact that the costs are higher, or gross value less, than could be obtained in the actual conditions of the real world, that is the basis for criticism.
Considerations of equity and the interests of special groups, e.g. in small coastal communities, will, as discussed in the next section, often require a fishing policy in which the efficiency in pure economic terms is reduced. At least in the short term the same is true for stocks that are extremely vulnerable to biological over-fishing. Unless enough spawning salmon are permitted to proceed upstream, the subsequent run will be very small. The allowable catch could be taken very cheaply by a few efficient gears, e.g. traps operating at the mouth of each river. It would be very difficult to know which few persons should operate these gears and enjoy the enormous potential profits. It is politically and socially much easier to keep the fishing mortality down to biologically acceptable limits by allowing only the less efficient gear - and then only under strict, and efficiency - limiting controls on when and where they can be used. The costs of harvesting the North Pacific salmon may be much higher than the theoretical minimum, but on the criterion used here - of what could have happened if there were no controls - the management programme has been justified.
Salmon are somewhat of an exception. For many stocks the increase in total yield from restricting the amount of fishing is not large. There may be advantages in reduced year-to-year fluctuations in catch, and increased stability of the fish stock and the fishery. The greatest benefits from management will, however, come from the opportunities to reduce the total costs. Whether these can be realized as soon as regulations are introduced depends mostly on the timing of the management, rather than the specific measures introduced. If management is not introduced until the amount of fishing and the size of the fleet is too large, then it will be difficult to get immediate economic benefits. There will be great obstacles to preventing many of those already fishing to continue. In any case once excessive numbers of vessels have been bought there may be little opportunity for saving the capital costs by using them in other fisheries. The best that can be done may be to reduce some of the excessive running costs, e.g. by reducing the length of the open season, or requiring vessels to stay in port for several days between trips.
On the other hand, if measures are introduced while the fishery is expanding towards the optimum size, it is much easier to realize the economic benefits even in the short term. In addition the actual implementation of the measures will be much easier, since they will mostly be concerned with preventing new entry to the fishery, rather than removal of those already in the fishery. Direct control of the amount of fishing or fiscal measures are likely to be more successful in deterring the hold-up of excess effort than controls of catch. Depending on how catch controls are applied, they may actually encourage the growth of excess capacity as individual fishermen or fishing enterprises try to maximize their share of the total catch.
The differences in the abilities of various management systems to maintain or increase economic efficiency become most obvious after the controls on the amount of fishing have been in operation for some time. Here there is a potential conflict between biological and economic considerations. The latter will usually require that the fishing mortality (i.e. the actual impact on the stock) remains about the same from year to year. Improvements on economic performance, however, will usually lead to increases in the fishing mortality exerted by an individual boat, or by a fleet of a given size. A distinction should be made here between changes in performance that are real economic improvements (e.g. from the development of an improved piece of gear), and changes that are basically intended to get round the regulations, or at least to take full advantage of them. A common example of the latter concerns the size of ship. Controls on fishing effort may take the form of allowing a certain number of ships to operate; the fishermen then respond by replacing their ships by bigger ships; controls on the length of vessel result in ships with greater beam and tonnage; controls on tonnage by larger engines, and so on. These changes will allow those fishermen who are first to make them to increase their share of the total catch. However, this increased share involves increased costs. The economic efficiency of the individual vessel will not increase much, while that of the fleet as a whole will decrease, at least until steps are taken to reduce the number of vessels appropriately. These latter changes should therefore be discouraged.
The first type of change - in real economic efficiency - should normally be encouraged. The exception would be the salmon type of situation where increased fishing mortality would lead to a substantial drop in catch, and where there are great practical difficulties to keeping the fishing mortality in bounds if the most efficient gears are allowed to operate. The management scheme should therefore normally allow such developments, but it must also do so without allowing the fishing mortality to rise above the desired level. Here it might be noted that, since fishermen are more cunning than administrators, there will (however the regulations are framed) usually also be changes in fishing power of the second type. These too need to be allowed for in the regulations. For catch quotas there is no problem, but for effort limits this will mean that, say, the number of vessels licenced to fish will have to be progressively reduced. The extent and frequency of the adjustments will vary from fishery to fishery. They are likely to be less frequent than the generally annual adjustments to catch quotas, but will require continuous and careful monitoring of the practices of the fleet. This should in any case be done as part of the work involved in monitoring the fishery, especially for the interpretation of catch and effort data.
Different management practices can also affect the economic performance by their impact on the value of the fish. The price of fish will be relatively high if the supply to the market is regular and predictable, and when the fish are landed at seasons when quality is good or demand high. The choice of management measures can affect all this. In principle catch quotas, if allocated to individual enterprises, will allow the supply of fish to be known well in advance, and marketed to the demand. In practice, catch quotas have often not been allocated. This has usually led to a flood of catches at the beginning of the open season, as fishermen try to maximize their individual catches. Controls on fishing effort, e.g. vessel licences, seem less likely in themselves to affect the value of the catch. More important may be the manner in which the regulations are applied. Sudden changes may make it difficult for the industry to adjust and take advantage of the changes. This is particularly likely to happen when there is a long chain from the fisherman through processor and distributor to the ultimate consumer. Thus there have been occasions when a herring fishery has been suddenly opened for a short period and most of the catches have gone for fish meal because the much higher valued market for fresh fish or smoking was not geared up to deal with the unexpected volume.
Equity and distribution of benefits
Fisheries often receive an attention greater than that appropriate to their contribution to the national Gross Domestic Product because of their importance to small local communities, in which there may be little alternative employment. The success of management should therefore often be judged more by the impact on these groups of small-scale fishermen and others, than by the impact on the fisheries as a whole. These distributive effects can be immediate and usually obvious, or long-term and possibly subtle.
The immediate effects include the clearly discriminatory measures, such as the prohibition of certain types of gear (the recent banning of trawling throughout nearly all of Indonesia is the outstanding example), limits on the areas where different sizes of vessel or types of gear can be used, etc. Control of fishing effort, e.g. licensing of vessel or allocated catch quotas, may also permit direct discrimination in terms of who gets licences, or particular shares in the overall catch quota.
The long-term effects can vary with even quite small differences in the form of management. If management is by direct control of effort, and the restriction of the number of vessels that are licensed to fish, there will have to be some scheme for changing the licence holders as fishermen retire, or as the total number licensed has to be altered to adjust to the target fishing mortality. Economic efficiency might call for licences to be freely bought and sold. Such a free market may result in ownership of licences becoming concentrated, perhaps in a few big companies. If this is felt to be undesirable, then the system of transferring licences will have to be suitably designed.
Transaction costs
Good fishery management does not just happen. It has to be based on adequate research, an effective administrative machinery to determine the desired measures, and the ability to enforce these measures. All this takes money, and the amount of money involved is not the same for all types of measures. Research and enforcement are generally the most costly items, and also those where the volume of work involved is most susceptible to different management policies.
A fair volume of research will be necessary whatever management policy is adopted. The difference in research requirements occur when year-to-year adjustments have to be made.
Thus if regulation is done by catch quotas, the biomass in the coming season must be well enough known to be sure that the catch quota set will generate a fishing mortality within acceptable limits. The amount of research needed will depend inter alia on the life span of the fish, and the extent of natural variation (especially year-class variation) in the stock. For a long-lived and not very variable stock, acceptable estimates may be obtainable from the data on catch rates and age composition in the commercial fishery during the past year. These will normally be obtained as part of any programme of monitoring the stock without needing special research. For short-lived and variable stocks, it may be necessary to obtain estimates of the newly recruiting year-class through special -and usually expensive - research surveys. In contrast adjustment of effort controls requires little special research although an extensive amount of economic and social analysis may be involved on the information awaited from effort control. There are unlikely to be violent year-to-year changes in the effectiveness of a unit of effort (i.e. the catchability of the stock). More usually there will be a general upward trend as part of technological improvement, and this should be detected and measured as part of the normal research studies of the relation between stock abundance, catch and nominal effort.
So far as costs of enforcement are concerned, the most important factor is the degree to which enforcement can be carried out in port, or requires close checking of the fishing vessels at sea. This depends not only on the legal form of the regulation but the practical ways in which it may be evaded. Thus the mesh size of trawl nets can be readily checked in port, but the true compliance with a mesh regulation needs careful inspection at sea to check on the use of covers, double cod-ends or other ways of reducing the effective mesh size.
If only a single stock was concerned, many forms of effort control could be enforceable from shore. Problems arise when a fisherman can claim to have taken his catch from an unregulated stock or to be using his vessel in an unregulated fishery. Checking on this will require close control on what is actually happening at sea. This is also needed for some of the other detailed regulations, such as closures of specified small areas in order to minimize conflict between fisheries directed at different species to be shared at sea. The details to which measures of this kind are taken will probably depend on the extent that these can be enforced by equally detailed control, and on whether the costs of such detailed control are justified by the benefits achieved.
There are other less quantifiable transaction costs involved in different types of management. To the extent that research staff are involved in recurrent calculations of, for example, the allowable catches for several stocks for the coming season, they are not able to look at other matters. It seems probable that some of the failures to develop a long-range strategy for management of many fisheries, e.g. in the North-East Atlantic, has been because the scientists who could help develop such a strategy have been too busy with determining annual TACs. Again, in many fisheries, the way that management measures have been put into effect has meant that the system has resulted in a set of conflicts - between different groups of fishermen, between scientist and administrator, and most seriously between administrators and the fishermen. Though a quantitative measure is difficult, the extent to which one or other particular approach to management can be implemented without excessive burdens on research staff, and without excessive arguments between different groups, should be an important criterion in the choice of approach.
