Fishery economists: What have they learnt and what are they telling us?

IIFET was founded in 1982 to promote interaction and exchange between people from all countries and professional disciplines about marine resource economics and trade issues. Among the many interests of its members are fisheries and, marine resource economics, fisheries management, seafood trade and markets throughout the world, aquaculture economics, and fisheries development. Industry members, government and academic researchers and managers from over 60 countries benefit from membership in IIFET's network.

Every two years, a different international site is chosen to host IIFET's four-day meeting, with world-wide participation of fisheries social scientists, managers, and industry members. Keynote speakers and submitted papers address a variety of both applied and theoretical topics. These conferences provide participants with unparalleled opportunities to interact with the world's foremost fisheries economists in both formal and informal settings. They also allow the participants to learn more about fishing and aquaculture activities in various international locations. The last, 2010 IIFET conference took place in Montpelier, France, and Ann Shriver of the Oregon State University who's the Executive Director of IIFET (Ann.L.Shriver@oregonstate.edu and http://oregonstate.edu/Dept/IIFET) provided me with a diskette containing all the records now published in hard copy and available on sale by the IIFET secretariat (iifet@oregonstate.edu).

About 350 participants from 43 countries attended this event. They submitted over 500 abstracts for posters or oral presentation. Eventually some 350 oral communications and 30 posters were presented. In my opinion, a majority of the papers are either very technical or location/country centered. I chose to review here a few, which are dealing with subjects of much general interest.

In his plenary lecture, Dr Serge Garcia, who used to head the FAO Fisheries Resources Division, gave a broad, detailed, and quite brilliant analysis of the processes that have been taking place within the world's fishery ecosystems and the related management and conservation issue. He stressed the contradictory and complex influences of nature preservation at one extreme and socio-economic considerations, on the other. He pointed out that both are separately unsustainable and that what's needed is a sort of an alliance centered on stakeholders' participation in a science-based governance of fishery ecosystems. Well, now what's left is to work out the details…

According to Dr Susan Hanna of the Oregon State University, fisheries economics suffer from inadequate data, on one hand and of insufficient exposure and extension, on the other. In the third plenary lecture, Professor Anthony Scott, himself a veteran fishery economist, reviews the 200 year old history of economics, stressing its special treatment of fisheries. It appears that he considers the marketable property rights, as expressed in the form of ITQs, the peak of fishery economics’ achievement. Pity, that when talking about the advantages of ITQs, he fails to mention the not so positive consequences of their introduction.

John Ward of the US/NMFS, and Rebecca Metzner and Cassandra DeYoung of FAO joined forces in the construction of a rather complex, multi-dimensional simulation model of a fishery ecosystem, which in their opinion should provide information on the needed research required for the ecosystem approach to fisheries management to be successful in achieving its multiple objectives. This, in my opinion, would be useful, as long as one employs it only for better understanding of internal relations in the system, as for example, in which way changes in one or more parameters may affect others, but not if used to quantify stocks and economic results, for there would be too many inexact, estimated and approximated data among the numerous parameters involved.

Ali Emami of the University of Oregon and R S Johnston of the Oregon State University, constructed a rather complex model illustrating the traditional practice of sharing (catch to non-fishing community members), which is still practiced in some places, especially on oceanic islands, as related to sustainable fisheries. Understanding of the practice of sharing and the ways it’s applied is of major importance, wherever governments apply fishery management and protected areas to traditional fisheries. Personally, I’m not sure whether such ‘mathematisation’ of indigenous solutions can help in real life. I think that this is a case which needs rather good ‘qualitative’ verbal treatment.

Sebastián Villasante and three others of the Swedish Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and the Universities of Santiago and La Coruna in Spain, assessed the effectivenessof the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy for 40 marine stocks and came to some interesting conclusions, namely, that the actually prescribed TACs significantly exceeded in almost every case the ICES scientists’ recommendations, and that during the 1990-2007 period the catches and biomass decreased by 85 and 75%, respectively, while the fishing mortality remained constant. Although, there were some positive improvements in some, the majority of stocks are still under strong fishing pressure, with biomass, catches and catch-per-unit effort declining throughout the CFP era, and, even after the reform of the CFP, the TAC system was generally unsuccessful and revolved around a political rather than a scientific rationale.

In a paper on the economics of the recovery of the Baltic cod stocks, R Döring and Jörg Berkenhagen of the German vTI-Institute of Sea Fisheries explained that that stock’s recovery was the result of a combination of a significant reduction in fishing effort in the eastern Baltic Sea and of favourable environmental conditions. Due, however, to external economic developments unconnected to fisheries (such as low fish prices), it’s unclear if the improvement in the stock(s) will also lead to an improvement in profits for the fishing vessels.

My impression is that many of the numerous papers were perhaps too theoretical, as if written by people who were looking at the fisheries they dealt with through the wrong end of their binoculars. But, perhaps as I am not a trained economist I couldn’t see the forest for the trees…