Global Fishing Issues

1. Global Fishing Issues Dale Squires July, 2004

2. Organization • 1. Introduction • 2. Trends in World Fisheries and Their Resources: 1974-1999 • 3. Fisheries Impact on Ecosystems and Biodiversity • 4. Aquaculture • 5. Root Causes of Problem • 6. Comprehensive Conservation and Management

3. 1. Introduction and Organization • Fundamental Global Fisheries Problems of: 1. Excess fishing capacity 2. Degraded and overexploited ecosystems 3. Overfished resource stocks • Inter-related problems • Different disciplines emphasize different aspects • But multi-disciplinary and multi-pronged approaches required • No single “magic bullet” solution

4. 1. Introduction and Organization • 1. Introduction and Organization • 2. Trends in World Fisheries and Their Resources: 1974-1999 • 3. Fisheries Impact on Ecosystems and Biodiversity • 4. Aquaculture • 5. Root Causes of Problem • 6. Comprehensive Conservation and Management

5. 2. Trends in World Fisheries and Their Resources: 1974-1999 • Sources: • FAO “Trends in World Fisheries and Their Resources: 1974-1999,” in The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, Part 3 • Pauly et al. “Towards Sustainability in World Fisheries,” Nature, Vol. 418, 8 August, 2002, pp. 689-695 • Daniel Pauly, * Villy Christensen, Johanne Dalsgaard, Rainer Froese, Francisco Torres Jr., “Fishing Down Marine Food Webs,” Science,Vol. 279, February 6, 1998, pp. 860-863 • Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) Meeting on Management of Tuna Fishing Capacity: Conservation and Socio-Economics, Madrid, March 14-18, 2004

6. Big increases in effective fishing effort since WWII • Increases in vessel numbers and sizes • Rapid technological advances • Industrial-scale fishing • Trawling, purse seining, long-lining • Small-scale or artisanal • Shallow tropical waters for food fish and shrimp • Compete with industrial-scale shrimp trawlers

7. Global landings slowly declining since late 1980s, by about 0.7 million tons per year (Pauly et al.)

8. Global trends vis-à-vis MSY since 1974 (FAO) • Percentage of stocks at MSY level slightly decreased • Percentage of stocks exploited below MSY decreased steadily • Percentage of stocks exploited beyond MSY has increased • From about 10% in early 1970s to nearly 30% in late 1990s • Many stocks without information

9. Global trends vis-à-vis MSY since 1974 (FAO)

10. Trends in percentage of stocks exploited beyond MSY levels in North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans

11. Trends in percentage of stocks exploited beyond MSY levels in North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans • Increasing proportion of stocks exploited beyond MSY until late 1980s or early 1990s • In North Atlantic, situation has improved and stabilized in 1990s • In North Pacific, situation has remained unstable

12. Trends in percentage of stocks exploited beyond MSY levels in tropical (Central and Southern) Atlantic and Pacific Oceans

13. Trends in percentage of stocks exploited beyond MSY levels in tropical (Central and Southern) Atlantic and Pacific Oceans • Growing percentage of stocks exploited beyond MSY in both tropical oceans • Deteriorating situation, with possible exception of tropical Atlantic, where stabilization might have started

14. Status of Stocks in 1999 (FAO)

15. Status of Stocks in 1999 (FAO) • In 1999, vis-à-vis MSY • 4% of stocks underexploited • 21% moderately exploited • 47% fully exploited • 18% overexploited • 9% depleted • 1% recovering • In sum, 72% of stocks at or above MSY level

16. Fishing Down Food Webs • The mean trophic level of the species groups reported in Food and Agricultural Organization global fisheries statistics declined from 1950 to 1994.  • Globally, trophic levels of fisheries landings appear to have declined in recent decades at a rate of about 0.1 per decade, • This reflects a gradual transition in landings from long-lived, high trophic level, piscivorous bottom fish toward short-lived, low trophic level invertebrates and planktivorous pelagic fish. • This effect, also found to be occurring in inland fisheries, is most pronounced in the Northern Hemisphere. • Fishing down food webs (that is, at lower trophic levels) leads at first to increasing catches, then to a phase transition associated with stagnating or declining catches. • These results indicate that present exploitation patterns are unsustainable.

17. Status of Tuna Stocks (FAO)

18. Trends in the catch of the principal market species of tunas by ocean

19. Trends in the world catch of tunas by species

20. Trends in the catch of tunas from the Pacific Ocean

21. Trends in the catch of tunas from the Atlantic Ocean

22. Trends in the world catch of bluefin tunas

23. Organization • 1. Introduction and Organization • 2. Trends in World Fisheries and Their Resources: 1974-1999 • 3. Fisheries Impact on Ecosystems and Biodiversity • 4. Aquaculture • 5. Root Causes of Problem • 6. Comprehensive Conservation and Management

24. 3. Fisheries Impact on Ecosystems and Biodiversity • Source: Pauly et al.

25. Organization • 1. Introduction and Organization • 2. Trends in World Fisheries and Their Resources: 1974-1999 • 3. Fisheries Impact on Ecosystems and Biodiversity • 4. Aquaculture • 5. Root Causes of Problem • 6. Comprehensive Conservation and Management

26. 4. Aquaculture

27. Organization • 1. Introduction and Organization • 2. Trends in World Fisheries and Their Resources: 1974-1999 • 3. Fisheries Impact on Ecosystems and Biodiversity • 4. Aquaculture • 5. Root Causes of Problem • 6. Comprehensive Conservation and Management

28. 5. Root Causes of Problem • Increasingly high derived demand for resources and increased productivity of exploitation • Ultimately, excessive population, advanced state of technology for resource exploitation, and demand for high standard of living • Until tackle these ultimate sources of high derived demand for resources, will have terrestrial and oceanic environmental problems • Are addressing symptoms in some sense

29. Ill-structured and incomplete property rights • Open access • Incomplete international institutions • External costs and market failure • Don’t pay full economic costs of resource exploitation • Including user cost of resource stocks • Including ecosystem services • Leads to excess capacity, ecosystem degradation, overfishing

30. Economic concepts of opportunity costs, trade-offs, and all costs and benefits • Trade-offs between between oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems for level of resource exploitation and ecosystem “health” • No free lunch • Opportunity cost to preserving oceans lies on greater reliance on terrestrial ecosystems

31. Monoculture, simplistic terrestrial food webs, genetically modified foods, pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers to raise yields • Great grain-growing areas of world, like Great Plains, have devastated ecosystems as bad anything facing oceans • Human diets comprised more of plants and less of animals • Eating lower on the terrestrial food chain to reduce derived demands for resources

32. Organization • 1. Introduction and Organization • 2. Trends in World Fisheries and Their Resources: 1974-1999 • 3. Fisheries Impact on Ecosystems and Biodiversity • 4. Aquaculture • 5. Root Causes of Problem • 6. Comprehensive Conservation and Management

33. 6. Comprehensive Conservation and Management • No single answer for multi-faceted problem of excess fishing capacity, ecosystem degradation, and overfishing

34. 1. Property rights when appropriate • Individual or effective common property • On catches, resource stocks, or areas • Catches: flows from resource stocks • Areas: TURFs in most developed form • Largely developed countries • More difficult with complex multispecies fisheries • Enforcement and monitoring key problems

35. 2. Strengthen international environmental agreements for high seas and straddling stocks • Source: Jim Joseph FAO (2004) • Problems derive from common stocks, which migrate over expansive areas of the world’s seas • Strengthen the authority for regional tuna and other international organizations • Give authority to deal with economic and social issues • Including the authority to assume and assign property rights in the fisheries • Establish permanent global body to coordinate regional commissions

36. Start management with limited entry • Moratorium on fleet growth • Must deal with new entrants (allowed under int’l law) • Strengthen management with annual vessel-level catch limits • Assigned to individual vessels rather than to flag states • Better if catch quotas are transferable property right • Their purchase addresses new entrant issue • Esp. coastal developing country nations • Vessel decommissioning scheme

37. 3. Limited access (entry) programs “everywhere” there isn’t effective property rights regime • Highly attenuated property right • Particularly exclusive use • Especially developing countries • Difficult to apply property rights approach • Complex multispecies fisheries in tropics where output controls and rights ineffective • Typically, combine with limits on one or more inputs (e.g. vessel length)

38. 4. Judicious use of vessel decomissioning and buy-back programs • In developed countries, more short- to medium-term measure to restore profitability • People behave very differently when fishery is profitable. • Rights-based systems are not possible (e.g. number of players is too high) • When fishery (at industry level) is not profitable due to excess capacity • Good supplement to marine protected areas • In developing countries, more difficult to implement

39. 5. Taxes on fisheries to raise cost of fishing and decrease input usage, fund management, vessel buy-backs, etc. • Opposite of subsidy • Substitute for property rights solution in some instances • Especially high seas, complex multispecies fisheries, international trade • 6. Eliminate external costs to make consumers and producers bear full costs of consuming seafood • Eliminate subsidies • Taxes on both producers and consumers • Incidence depends on elasticities (relative strengths)

40. 7. Comanagement • Comanagement reshapes, “…the state interventions so as to institutionalize collaboration between administration and resource users and end those unproductive situations where they are pitted against one another as antagonistic actors in the process of resource regulation.” (Baland and Platteau, p. 347)

41. 8. Judicious use of marine protected areas • Especially in critical habitats like spawning areas, rookeries, nursery and pupping grounds, coral reefs, beaches and nearshore for turtles, etc. • MPAs don’t address ill-structured property rights and excess capacity • By themselves, MPAS tend to actually aggravate excess capacity problem in remaining open areas • Have to couple with programs to reduce fishing capacity • Effectively, simply preserve certain areas • Controversy whether MPAs increase resource stock sizes outside and by how much and which species

42. 9. Improved gear • Reduce incidental mortalities and bycatch • (e.g. TEDs and circle vs. J hooks for sea turtles) • Reduce ecosystem degradation (e.g. trawl) • Mesh sizes and designs for escapement • 10. Eco-labeling, certified fisheries, trade restrictions • Useful in some instances • Not broadly applicable in foreseeable future • More case-by-case basis

43. 11. Small-Scale / Artisanal Fisheries • Eliminate harmful harvesting practices • Dynamite, cyanide • Reserve nearshore fishing grounds and keep out larger-scale • Less destructive gear (e.g. mesh sizes • Create employment opportunities outside of sector • Enhance value-added from post-harvesting activities • Stop increasing investment and technological change through aid programs, etc.

44. 12. Judicious reliance on aquaculture • Not panacea • Primarily only economically feasible for high-valued species

45. Recognize true opportunity costs, trade-offs, and costs and benefits • Full costs include • Ecosystem degradation for coastal shrimp aquaculture in mangrove swamps • Genetic mixing with wild species (salmon) • Diseases • Seed stock and feed still primarily from wild • Don’t substitute aquacultured for wild species • Even feeding salmon soybean meal simply shifts problem to monoculture agriculture in degraded terrestrial ecosystems