Transcript Part 2

Part IV. Renewable Resources
A. Fish – part 2: Policy
B. Forests
C. Water
D. Biodiversity
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Current Fishery Policy
•
This section will focus on 2 approaches to policy.
1.
Those policies that can actually address the issue of entry
are termed “limited-entry” techniques.
2.
All other regulations or policies that do not explicitly
address the problem of entry are termed “open-access”
(OA) techniques.
•
OA techniques modify fishing behavior of those
participants in the fishery without directly affecting
participation in the fishery, and typically raise the cost
associated with fishing.
Analogous to C & C
•
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OA regulations – how to catch
• OA regulations are designed to maintain the stocks at some
target level, usually stocks consistent with MSY.
• Because modern technology can give a fishing fleet
tremendous fishing power relative to the size of a fish
population, OA regulation generally forces inefficiency on
the fishers.
• In Maryland's share of the Chesapeake, it is illegal to
dredge for oysters under motorized power. This means
sails, smaller dredging equipment, and slower movement
across the oyster beds.
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OA regulations – who to catch
• Regulation which revolves around restrictions on
the minimum size of fish that are legal to harvest
are designed to leave a portion of the fish stock in
the water to provide a sufficient breeding stock to
ensure future populations.
• Fishers generally implement this restriction by
choosing a mesh size for their nets that allows
smaller, illegal fish, to escape.
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OA regulations – when to catch
• Because fishing activity may disrupt the spawning
process, often the fishing season is closed for a
certain period on an annual basis, generally during
spawning season.
• Also, some species become so extremely
congregated during spawning that fishing effort
could capture virtually the entire population.
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OA regulations – where to catch
• Regulations on where fish may be caught are
designed to protect fish stocks when they are
congregated and vulnerable to overharvesting.
• These types of regulations also protect vulnerable
fishing habitats from destruction by the fishing
process.
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OA regulations –
how many to catch
• Often, OA regulations take the form of limits on
how many fish may be captured in a given time
period.
• These limits may be in the form of weight caught,
number of fish, or volume of catch.
• The catch limit on giant bluefin tuna is 1 fish per
boat. A fish can often weigh as much as 1000
pounds and the market price has been $18 per
pound.
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Economic Analysis of
Open-Access Regulations
•
The effect of OA regulation falls has 2 effects:
1. increase in cost due to regulations
2. possible decrease in cost due to higher catch per effort
expended.
•
Net effect increased costs
•
Table 11.3 summarizes the impact of the OA
regulations on key variables in the fishery.
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Economic Analysis of
Open-Access Regulations
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Limited Entry Techniques
• Limited entry techniques raise the cost for fishers without
increasing social costs.
• If limited entry techniques are truly analogous to economic
incentives for pollution control, then they should be
available either as price policies (tax) or quantity policies
(MPP).
• Fisheries economics literature tends to focus on quantitybased systems.
• The name for these systems is individual transferable
quotas (ITQs).
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Catch based ITQs
• ITQs would work in a fashion similar to marketable
pollution permits.
• Limit placed on total catch, each fisher allocated portion of
total catch
• Limits effort because cost of effort increases, because
people must now buy ITQs to fish
• Cost increase serves to eliminate disparity between social
and private cost of fishing associated with the OA
externality
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Effort based ITQs
• Limited entry techniques structured to direct effort rather
than catch can also be developed.
• Here only a fixed number of boats would be allowed to
operate in the fishery, must have permit be to allowed in
• The method of permit allocation could be by auction or
historical presence in the fishery.
• Completely analogous to MPP’s
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Transferable ITQs
• If these ITQs are transferable, it will be possible to
have only the most efficient fisherman in the
fishery.
• Enforcement of effort-based limits, that is vessel
permits, would be much easier than that associated
with the catch limits.
• No measuring or weighing is necessary; a poster
sized certificate of operation would allow easy
identification of legal vessels.
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ITQ problems
• Catch-based ITQs are subject to several problems.
• People might cheat on their quota by selling to
foreign vessels or in an underground market.
• Another problem is associated with the differing
market values of different size fish.
• Once quota is reached, throw less valuable (but
now dead) fish overboard to make room for better
catch
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Private oyster beds
• Although most fishery regulation relies on OA
techniques, an important example of a limited
entry technique is the Virginia oyster fishery,
where oyster beds are treated as private property.
• Eliminates OA exploitation
• It gives oyster bed operators incentive to invest in
their property such as seeding with larval oysters
and creating more structures to which the oysters
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can attach.
EEZ
• An additional example of the limited entry
regulation is the economic exclusion zone,
established under the authority of the United
Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea.
• This regulation established a 200 mile limit along
the coast of a country where each country has the
right to limit access to their waters. This is a
partial limited access regulation.
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Why We Do Not See
More Limits to Entry
• First, many limits to access are informal.
• Fishing communities tend to be close knit and generally
resistant to outsiders.
• It is difficult to enter into these fisheries without facing
barriers and possible sabotage of equipment.
• Second, fisherman opposition to the idea of limited entry is
high.
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Why We Do Not See
More Limits to Entry
• A possible explanation for the opposition to limited entry
among current fishers is that these fishers may be utility
maximizers rather than profit maximizers.
• Pure profit maximizers would see the potential economic
rents associated with limited entry, and most would
probably support limits to entry in order to obtain these
potential rents.
• Fishers from communities that have fished for generations
fit this category.
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Why We Do Not See
More Limits to Entry
• Need to reduce catch today in order to expand fish
stock, catch and income in the future.
• The desire to support fishing families in the
present may result in opposition of limited entry
policies.
• The greater the uncertainty about the success of
limited entry policies to enhance future value in
the fishery, the greater the chance fishers will not
support the policies.
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Aquaculture
• Aquaculture, the cultivation of fish in artificial
environments or in contained natural environments, is
often suggested as a means of dealing with the OA
problem.
• Not all species can be cultivated.
• Shellfish are ideal because of their inherent immobility.
• Wildfish will only benefit indirectly from aquaculture if
the “farmed” species takes part of the market demand for
the wildfish and therefore reduces the fishing pressure on
the species.
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Aquaculture’s problems
• Aquaculture creates its own set of problems.
• Communities and industries that are based on wild
fisheries could suffer economic setbacks from the
decline in demand for wild fish (as consumers
choose aquaculture).
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Aquaculture’s problems
• Aquaculture can severely damage the environment.
• Shrimp aquaculture in Central and South America has
resulted in a loss of mangrove forests, excess nutrient
loading into estuaries and severely reduced dissolved
oxygen in areas bordering estuaries.
• There are also potential problems associated with
hybridized fish escaping and damaging the gene pool of
existing species.
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Other Issues in
Fishery Management
• Other problems associated with fishery
management include:
– incidental catch;
– destruction of habitat through fishing activities;
– destruction of wetlands and related habitat through nonfishing activities;
– pollution of fishery habitat;
– conflicts between user groups and
– international cooperation concerning the harvesting of
migratory species.
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Incidental catch
• Often the fisher will catch not only the species that they
seek but also other species, referred to as incidental catch.
• Many types of fishing gear do not discriminate among fish
species, and both the desired species and a spectrum of
untargeted species are caught by this gear.
• Among the most notorious of these are the gill nets, whose
lengths often measured in miles.
• These nets are vertically suspended in the water, like
underwater fences, ensnaring the gill covers of fish as they
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attempt to back out.
Long Lines
• Another indiscriminate fishing method is “long-lining.”
• A long-line consists of line that may be 10 km in length or
longer, with baited hooks every several meters.
• These lines are employed off the Atlantic coast in pursuit
of highly profitable swordfish.
• Because sharks are often caught, these long-lines have
been an important factor in the decline of the shark
populations.
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Policy
• Due to the difficulties of monitoring, restrictions on fishing
methods may be preferential to policies based on economic
incentives.
• An example of this type of policy is the requirement that
shrimpers install a Turtle Excluder Device (TED) in their
nets to allow endangered sea turtles to escape.
• In addition to the turtles which are “kicked” out of the
shrimp net, non-targeted fish are also allowed to escape.
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Policy
• Whether policy makers should implement the
restrictions on gill nets and long-line operations
needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis for
each potential restriction.
• The benefits of protecting untargeted species are
spread out over a large number of people, but the
costs are concentrated upon a very few.
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Destruction of Habitat
• Damage can occur when contact of fishing gear with the
floor of the estuary or ocean uproots aquatic plants, breaks
coral, dislodges shell fish, and so on.
• One particularly sensitive ecosystem is that associated with
a coral reef, where anchors and boat bottoms dragging
across the coral can kill it.
• Even more destructive is the practice of fishing using
explosions or the use of cyanide in the coral to stun and
collect fish for consumption and aquariums.
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Destruction of Habitat
• Other habitats such as upland and coastal wetlands,
temperate forests and free flowing rivers are critically
important to fisheries.
• The temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest are
critically important to maintaining the riverine habitat,
which is essential to anadromous fish, such as salmon and
steelhead.
• Any activity which impacts the quality of these ecosystems
can impact the quality of the riverine system and the
salmon and steelhead.
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Pollution of Fishery Habitat
• This pollution and loss of habitat has affected virtually
every freshwater species, and many saltwater species,
where saltwater species are affected by estuarine pollution.
• Anadromous species such as salmon, steelhead, shad, and
striped bass are particularly vulnerable to riverine
pollution.
• In developing countries, soil erosion from deforestation
and intensive cultivation of hillside lands has severely
impacted water quality not only in the rivers, but in
reservoirs, estuaries, lagoons, and coral reefs.
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Management of Recreational
Fishery Resources
• Limits on the number of fish that may be kept, restricted
seasons, and size limits.
• By stocking fish, where a very large number of fish are
hatched, grown to size, and released into the wild, the
problem of OA is addressed by increasing resource base.
• Often have closed seasons timed to coincide with
spawning periods in the fishery.
• Access improvements such as launching ramps, fishing
piers, parking areas, and artificial reefs can be designed to
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reduce congestion in the fishery, but may also lead to
increased use.
Management of Recreational
Fishery Resources
• Catch & release programs are based on the idea that a
recreational angler does not have to kill his or her catch to
produce utility from fishing.
• Size limits place restrictions on the minimum (and
sometimes maximum) size of fish that are legal to keep.
• Creel limits place restrictions on the maximum number of
fish per day that may be kept.
• Both restrictions are designed to protect the reproductive
viability of the fish stocks.
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Management of Recreational
Fishery Resources
• In order to find the benefits associated with a
particular recreational fishing activity, a valuation
study must be done. Usually CV or travel cost
studies.
• Freeman (1979) and many others note that the
major benefit of improving water quality can be
attributed to recreational uses of water resources,
including boating, swimming, and recreational
fishing.
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Summary
• Fishery resources are renewable but destructible.
• The destructibility problem is amplified by the open-access
nature of many of the world’s fishery resources.
• For commercial fishing, optimal management strategy
requires the limitation of effort to a level that maximizes
the sum of CS, PS, and fishery rent.
• Actual fishery management seldom achieves this goal and
is based on developing restrictions on how, when, where,
and how much fish can be caught.
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