Tag Archives: fisheries

Resuscitating Collapsed Fisheries: catch shares

Leave a reply

For American fish, this is a good time to be alive. On May 14th, 2012 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that a record six federal fisheries returned to health last year (pdf). After a decade of similar progress, 86% of America’s roughly 250 federally monitored commercial fish stocks were not subject to overfishing; 79% were considered healthy...

In the late 1980s cod fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank collapsed. This led to efforts to improve the fishery act, in 1996 and 2006, which forced the eight regional bodies that manage federal fisheries to introduce science-based quotas and ten-year recovery programmes for depleted fisheries. The recent recovery of species, including New England scallops, mid-Atlantic bluefish and summer flounder and Pacific lingcod, is the result. This signals another truth: given a break, the marine environment can often replenish itself spectacularly.

America’s fisheries are probably now managed almost as well as the world’s best, in Norway, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia. Yet there is plenty of room for improvement. State-run fisheries, which tend to be close to shore and dominated by small-scale and inefficient fishermen, are less well funded and well managed and much poorer for it. New England groundfish stocks, including cod, have also not recovered: they account for 13 of the remaining depleted populations. This appears to be partly the result of environmental change, climatic or cyclical.

And the politicians are still interfering. On May 9th the House passed legislation forbidding NOAA from developing an innovative means of apportioning fishing quotas, known as catch shares. These are long-term, aiming to give fishermen a stake in the future of their fisheries; market-based, since they can be traded; and, in practice, good for fish. Sadly, the two Republican congressmen behind the ban consider they have been designed “to destroy every aspect of American freedom under the guise of conservation”.

Fish stocks: Plenty more fish in the sea, Economist, May 26, 2012, at 32

Related posts:

The Coral Triangle, biodiversity, fisheries and climate change

Leave a reply

Stretching across six countries in Southeast Asia and Melanesia (Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Timor Leste), the Coral Triangle contains the richest marine ecosystems on earth. While encompassing just over 1.5% of the world’s oceans (and1% of the earth’s surface), it contains a staggering proportion of the world’s marine diversity: 76% of reef-building coral species, and 37% of coral reef fi sh species. The Coral Triangle is the epicentre for the biodiversity of not only corals and fi sh, but many other marine organisms as well....The signifi cance of the marine ecosystems lining over 132,800 km of coastline within the Coral Triangle goes far beyond their biological value or evolutionary signifi cance. Coastal ecosystems in this region are critically important for human livelihoods and communities, providing food and resources to over 100 million people. Many people in this region forage on coral reefs and other coastal ecosystems such as mangroves, to collect their daily food and income. Commercial fi sheries provide over $3 billion per year to the six nations. These ecosystems also contribute to the maintenance of water quality along coastlines, with mangroves and seagrass beds stabilising sediments and acting as fi ltration systems as water runs from land to sea. Coral reefs provide important coastal barriers in many regions, reducing the power of waves and preventing damage to human communities and infrastructure. These functions cannot be replaced if these ecosystems are removed.

Unfortunately, coastal ecosystems throughout the Coral Triangle are being severely threatened by the activities of humans. These threats arise from two distinct sources. The first set arise from local sources such as destructive fishing practices, deteriorating water quality, over-exploitation of key marine species, and the direct devastation of coastal ecosystems through unsustainable coastal development. The second set arise from rapid anthropogenic climate change, which is caused by the build up of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. These threats are escalating and ecosystems like coral reefs are already showing major changes to sea temperature and acidity. Further changes are putting the future of these important biological systems in serious doubt.

Excerpt from Executive Summary from THE CORAL TRIANGLE AND CLIMATE CHANGE, (2009)

More on the Threats and Recommendation for action (pdf)

See also Integrating Fisheries, Biodiversity, and Climate Change Objectives into Marine Protected Area Network Design in the Coral Triangle (pdf, 2012)

Related posts:

Another Way to Exploit African Countries; depleting their oceans by unsustainable fishing

Leave a reply

Two-thirds of African countries have access to the sea. Some are making good use of it through fishing and tourism. But the productivity of African waters is plummeting....The main reason is bad governance. African Union calls to fight overfishing with joint navy patrols and co-operation between fisheries have been ignored. Nigeria, among Africa’s richest countries, lacks a serviceable navy. Some governments even collude in overfishing. Angolan fisheries officers rarely report the illegal catches of boats owned by politicians.  At the same time African states are failing to invest in much-needed marine research. They say it is a “donor activity”, meaning they want foreigners to pay for it. The continent has only one large oceanography department, at the University of Cape Town, and that is underfunded.

Coastal wetlands have little protection and fishing grounds are especially vulnerable. In many countries lot of foreign boats operate in areas close to the shore supposedly reserved for locals in dugouts. Some vessels use banned methods like light-luring (attracting fish with floodlights) and pair-trawling (where nets strung between boats are dragged on the sea floor).  Industrial fishing has been encouraged by rising global demand. The European Union has a series of agreements for its boats to fish in African waters. China has moved in too. The Russian fishing fleet is resurgent. In many cases, says André Standing, a researcher into fisheries agreements in Africa, it is not clear how much money is being paid for licences, or to whom. Critics say Africa’s failure to protect its ocean is political, the definition of a continent too weak to exert full control over its resources. A recent deal between Mauritania and China makes it hard to reduce the catch even if it is unsustainable.

Meanwhile the human footprint along Africa’s vast coastline is growing. The UN says African seaside cities are spreading by more than 4% a year.... Making the sea safer and more productive may be the best way to keep landlubbers peaceful. Experts have plenty of suggestions. Community initiatives could help get rid of dynamite-fishing and its ruinous effects. Conservation no-catch schemes such as one run by Blue Ventures, a Madagascan outfit, [of a UK charity] have proven their value. But there is too little money to scale them up. The best way to find the cash would be to point out the security costs of unhappy fishing communities to rich governments. Somalia’s piracy problem began in part as an armed response to illegal fishing in Somali waters. Some banditry in Nigerian waters started as a protest against the threat to fishing from the oil industry.....

The tributaries of Africa’s oceans are mostly clean and its mangroves in good condition, especially compared with those of Asia. But abuse is growing. With the sharks almost gone, Chinese diners are demanding manta rays and mobulid rays as ingredients for their expensive banquet stews. Frank Pope, an Africa-based writer on oceans, says that the slow-breeding rays could be gone even sooner than the sharks they used to swim alongside on the glittering reefs.

Excerpts, Africa’s oceans: A sea of riches,Economist, Feb. 18, 2012, at 52

See also Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements

Related posts:

Groups Against the Individual: human rights

Leave a reply

When one category of citizens is singled out for privileged treatment, are the rights of others infringed? Phil Eidsvik, a Canadian salmon-fisher, thinks the answer is yes. He hopes his country’s newly re-elected prime minister, Stephen Harper, recalls a pledge he made five years ago: to oppose “racially divided fisheries programmes”, in other words, giving special fishing rights to indigenous groups.

But given the storm that Mr Harper’s comment provoked—he was accused of stoking white nativism—he is likely to proceed cautiously. And legal moves are now afoot to broaden the rights of indigenous fishermen. At present Canada upholds the rights of aboriginal groups to engage in traditional, subsistence fishing; hence regulators often open a fishery to a particular indigenous group for a limited time before a commercial catch begins.

One tribe, the Lax Kw’alaams, is fighting a legal battle for special rights in the field of commercial fishing, too, challenging the government’s contention that commercial harvesting only began with the arrival of whites, and so is not a traditional activity of Canada’s first inhabitants. All this horrifies Mr Eidsvik, who argues that the rights of other fishermen (including indigenous ones) are violated when a stretch of water is allocated to a particular tribe. “The individual is completely lost in the conflict over group rights,” he says, speaking for the British Columbia Fisheries Survival Coalition, an NGO.

Among the world’s liberal democracies, Canada stands out for the entitlements it grants to one group of citizens and for its open acknowledgment that there are hard trade-offs between individual rights and group rights. From South Africa to India, many countries have “affirmative action” policies, with the aim of correcting past wrongs by allocating a disproportionate share of jobs or educational places to groups that apparently need a leg up. But critics of the Canadian system say it goes further; it creates two levels of citizen by excluding indigenous people from conservation rules, and by exempting tribes from the accountability rules that other groups must follow. It is one thing to offer benefits to citizens who are felt to need them, another to water down the principle of equal citizenship.

Canada may be egregious, but, in one form or another, most democracies have to weigh the demands of groups against the rights of individuals—and getting the correct balance has become harder in the age of identity politics, when arguments about culture and even religion have replaced older ones over economics and class. Ostensibly at least, France has remained at the far end of the spectrum from Canada. French officials like to contrast their own policy of equal citizenship with the sloppy communautarisme—rights for specific groups—that some countries, including multicultural Britain, tolerate.

Whatever lies behind that French rhetoric, the question of group entitlement has been thrown into sharp relief in all rich democracies by the recent arrival of migrants whose “cultural practices” are at odds with any liberal understanding of rights. Extreme examples include the stigmatising of children accused of witchcraft; the practice of female genital mutilation; domestic violence; and forced marriages with partners in distant lands. Whenever those practices are tolerated, the victims are deprived of basic human rights—and the perpetrators enjoy a peculiar leniency.

As countries wrestle with those problems, realities often differ less than theories do. At least in the recent past, the French authorities turned a blind eye to polygamy among north African migrants. And if there are British inner cities where the Queen’s writ (in respect of equality of the sexes, say) hardly runs, something similar applies to the ghettos of Marseilles...

If the Arab uprisings prevail, will the resulting elected governments impose the will of the majority group—Sunni Muslim in Syria or Tunisia, Shia in Bahrain? Or will they be genuine liberal democracies, with guarantees that members of minorities will be treated no better and no worse than anybody else? That question is impossible to answer in advance, though there are many vulnerable groups, from the Christians of Syria to the Tuareg nomads of the Maghreb, who have reason to fear they might fare worse under free, universal suffrage than they did under secular despots.

Compared with the chaos that could accompany any regime change in the Arab world, decision-makers in stable places like Canada or France have an easy time of it; they are free to experiment and negotiate. And in any lively democracy, groups—defined by language, religion or simply voluntary association around an idea or a pastime—will bargain vigorously over things like language teaching or zoning rights for mosques. But a dangerous line has been crossed, and a bad signal sent to other places, if, in the name of group rights, the principle of equality before the law is openly breached.

Excerpt from Group rights v individual rights: Me, myself and them, Economist, May 14, 2011, at 75

Related posts:

Sustainable Fisheries: quotas and Peru

Leave a reply

For decades anchovetas have been ground into fishmeal, of which Peru is the world’s top producer. They have suffered from rampant overfishing, whose effects are sometimes amplified by the disruptive El Niño and La Niña weather patterns. The annual catch peaked at 12m tonnes before the stock collapsed in 1972, taking years to recover.

Now Peru is trying to make better use of one of its prime resources, in two ways. The government has introduced a quota aimed at ensuring that 5m tonnes of anchoveta are left each year as spawning stock. Since 2009 this has been refined so that the overall quota (set at 4.1m tonnes this year for the first of the two fishing seasons) is divided up among the country’s 1,600 registered trawlers. Each boat’s quota is transferable; the aim is to have a smaller, more efficient fleet.

In January the minister of production, Jorge Villasante, ended the season with less than 35% of the quota caught because there were too many juveniles, he says. Management of the fishery has improved, concedes Patricia Majluf, a zoologist at Lima’s Cayetano Heredia University, but she says there is still not enough information about stocks to know whether it is sustainable.

At the same time, some in the fishing industry have realised that selling anchoveta as food for people, rather than as fertiliser or animal feed, is more profitable. Human consumption of anchoveta in Peru has risen from 10,000 tonnes in 2006 to 190,000 tonnes in 2010. Most of this is canned, like sardines.

One fishing company, Inversiones Prisco, has begun to produce salted and cured anchovy fillets. They are smaller than the prized Mediterranean or Cantabrian anchovy. But supply is far more abundant. Prisco is already the world’s “fifth or sixth” biggest exporter of anchovies, according to Hugo Vernal, its manager. It is investing $30m to double production.

Fishing in Peru, The Next Anchovy, Economist, May 7, 2011, at 41

Related posts:

The Dinner Table and Overfishing in the Coral Triangle

Leave a reply

 

An insatiable appetite for reef fish like snapper in Hong Kong and other markets is fuelling over-fishing in the Coral Triangle, a key area for marine biodiversity, experts said...The trade is encouraging fishermen to use cyanide and explosives that destroy reefs and fish hatcheries essential for the industry's future, they said.  Officials and experts from across the Asia-Pacific region are meeting in Indonesia to discuss the future of the lucrative live fish industry.  The trade brings species like grouper, parrot fish and snapper from the warm seas of Southeast Asia to dinner tables in markets like Hong Kong and mainland China.  "Over-fishing and destructive fishing practices such as the use of cyanide and explosives are being driven by an increasing demand for seafood across the Asian-Pacific," said Geoffrey Muldoon, of environmental group WWF.  He said the problem was being "exacerbated by the lack of effective systems to sustainably manage this burgeoning industry"...Hong Kong is the major importer of live reef fish, buying a total of $159.6 million worth in 2008, according to Indonesian officials.  Indonesia is the second largest supplier after the Philippines, and exported 123,000 tonnes worth $85.5 million last year, WWF said in a statement. In terms of tonnage that was more than 57 percent up on 2009, it said.

The Coral Triangle stretches across six nations between the Indian and Pacific oceans -- Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, East Timor, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

Excerpt, Asia-Pacific live fish trade under threat: experts, Agence France Presse, Mar. 1, 2011

Related posts:

Endangered Fisheries: the Bluefin Tuna

Leave a reply

bluefin tuna/dailymail.co.uk

If ever there were a graphic illustration of the tragedy of the commons, it is the plummeting of the world’s stocks of bluefin tuna. Because they live in the high seas, these fish belong to everyone, and are thus no one’s responsibility. The result is that the bluefin has been doomed to decades of poor management.  Matters, though, appear to be reaching a crisis. In a study to be published soon in Conservation Letters, a group of scientists led by Brian MacKenzie, of the Technical University of Denmark, describe how they ran a computer model of the species’s population dynamics. Their conclusion is that even if fishing for bluefin were banned, the population in the north-east Atlantic and Mediterranean will probably collapse. The current management plan, to reduce quotas gradually over the next 15 years, will cause it to fall so far that bluefins in the area will qualify as critically endangered, the highest category of risk in the lexicon of conservation.

The organisation charged with changing that state of affairs is the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), based in Madrid. However a measure of its success is suggested by its nickname, the “International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas”. Indeed, things are so bad that a recent review by a group of outside experts appointed by ICCAT itself concluded that the management of the bluefin was “widely regarded as an international disgrace”.  Joseph Powers, a fisheries scientist at Louisiana State University who has been involved with ICCAT for a long time, says that, for the most part, the organisation’s scientists agree with Dr MacKenzie. The evidence, he says, is clear. The quotas handed out by ICCAT have been around 30,000 tonnes a year. The science suggests they should have been 15,000 tonnes. The management plan calls for them to be reduced to 25,500 tonnes by 2010. Yet, in practice, around 50,000-60,000 tonnes of fish are landed because even legal catches are not properly monitored, and there is a thriving illegal fishery too.

The reason is that like any international organisation, ICCAT is little more than the sum of its member states. The office in Madrid is a secretariat that compiles statistics and organises scientific advice. It is not responsible for management. The real work is done at meetings of ICCAT’s 46 members, where fisheries science collides with political horse-trading. At the next meeting, from 17th to 24th November, in Marrakech, the impending crisis will be the main item on the agenda. Fábio Hazin, chairman of ICCAT, says better management has been implemented but warns that scientific advice must be heeded

Andy Rosenberg, a fisheries scientist at the University of New Hampshire who is one of Dr MacKenzie’s fellow authors, explains that member nations of ICCAT such as Italy, Spain and France allow their fishermen to go on fishing despite the fact that they belong to an international body that is supposed to have agreed on conservation measures. And Dr Powers says if ICCAT’s members cannot both enforce the rules and accept that the quotas need to be small, then a complete moratorium “may be the best way forward”.

ICCAT, which was created in 1969, is one of the oldest of what are known as the regional fisheries-management organisations. Then, bluefin tuna were so abundant that they were found throughout the North Sea and the Baltic, as well as in the Mediterranean. If this is an organisation that is working well, it is hard to imagine what failure would look like.

Excerpt from: Conservation: Managed to Death, The Economist, Nov. 1, 2008, at 82.

Related posts: