Overcapacity to Fish
Even where regulation is tight, economic issues creep back into the picture. This includes the overcapacity to fish. There is a perception of increased revenue from regulated fisheries, drawing in more fishing fleets in some cases. Also, initial opening of fisheries can cause too great of an expansion of fleets in the beginning that cannot be sustained as fish biomass drops off. This causes many fishing fleets to barely make a profit because the TAC is being split between too many ships and competition can be fierce. This competition for many of the Alaskan fisheries, such as salmon fishing, is regionally famous. Overcapacity to fish can lead to strategies of government to subsidize the fishery or even buy out the excess capacity.
One of the newer ideas is to take TAC even further and implement what is called individual transferable quotas (ITQs) where the fishers are guaranteed long-term rights and individual allocation of catch. This allows for more flexibility for the fishermen between their ships year to year. Allowing more control in their hands is a helpful policy. Currently, ITQs have been implemented in U.S. Pacific fisheries, Australia, Iceland, and New Zealand most expensively. These policies might chose to limit the number of vessels to optimize yield and allows for fishers to make better decisions when where and when they are catching in order to best preserve the fishery. However, with these policies come necessary monitoring to know what the catch limits should be and strong enforcement resulting in overall high management costs.
Information above complied from the following sources:
Beddington, J. R., Agnew, D. J., & Clark, C. W. (January 01, 2007). Current problems in the management of marine fisheries. Science (New York, N.Y.), 316, 5832, 1713-6. Rosenberg, A. A., Swasey, J. H., & Bowman, M. (August 01, 2006).
Rebuilding US Fisheries: Progress and Problems. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 4, 6, 303-308.
Maybe break up the paragraph into bullets. Visually a paragraph of text isn't appealing to read, and sometimes hard to pull out the info you want people to get out of what you are stating.
ReplyDeleteJamie McAllister
Your site is very informative so far. It's obvious that you have put alot of thought into this. I like how you discuss why you approve/disapprove of the different management policies. A suggestion I would like to make is in regards to the structure of the text. It reads a bit like a term paper. Nontheless, you've done a great job so far.
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