Study: Fish less and make more money?

Jeff Barnard, Associated Press, Yahoo News 7 Dec 07;

At a time when a quarter of the world's fisheries are considered depleted, can commercial fishermen make more money by fishing less? A study published in the Friday edition of the journal Science says they can, with one condition.

They must be in a cooperative fishery, like those operating in New Zealand and Australia, where individual fishermen own a share of the total harvest — known as individual transferable quotas — rather than the competitive fisheries more common in the United States, where it is a race to catch the most fish.

The idea is that when there are more fish and no race to catch them, fishermen spend less on fuel and other costs chasing far and wide to fill their nets, and can concentrate on delivering a high-quality product to the dock, said lead author Quentin Grafton, research director at the Crawford School of Economics and Government at Australian National University.

Leaving more fish in the sea — a fishery management target called maximum economic yield — leads to higher profits than the traditional target known as maximum sustainable yield, the study said.

"We like to say it's a win-win," said co-author Ray Hilborn, professor of fishery sciences at the University of Washington. "You have fishermen making more money. You have ecosystems that are healthier. And you have more fish in the ocean."

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has classified 25 percent of the world's fish stocks as depleted, meaning populations are below a level that produces a maximum sustained yield.

The situation is similar in the U.S., where NOAA Fisheries has assessed 41 of 181 fisheries — 23 percent — as overfished, including the once thriving New England cod fishery and some West Coast groundfish. Both fisheries were managed with an overall harvest, which fishermen competed to get their share of, but saw drastic harvest reductions and economic pain when fish numbers plummeted.

Only a handful of U.S. fisheries are managed so that fishermen own a share of the overall harvest, said Hilborn. Among them are Pacific halibut, Alaskan crab, and East Coast clams.

Since the West Coast groundfish fleet was cut in half by an industry-funded buyback, depleted fisheries are rebuilding, and federal fisheries managers are considering the fleet's proposal to adopt individual transferable quotas for more stocks, but the process takes years, said Pete Leipzig, director of the Fishermen's Marketing Association.

The study looked at big eye tuna and yellow fin tuna fisheries off New Zealand, and northern tiger prawn and orange roughy fisheries off Australia, all of which give fishermen individual shares of the overall harvest.

The authors plotted revenue and profit against models for fish abundance. Maximum revenues generally came at lower fish populations, but maximum profits came at higher fish populations, and the more overfished the fishery, the greater the profit gains from rebuilding. Profits turned to losses long before the last fish was caught.

To overcome opposition from fishermen, loans could be taken out to pay them for not fishing as the stocks rebuild. The loans would be repaid by the fishermen when the fish were abundant, said Grafton.

"We've always known that was good for conservation, and now they are showing it's good for your bottom line," Kate Wing, a senior ocean policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a conservation group, said of the study's findings.

Jim Humphreys, U.S. fisheries director for the Marine Stewardship Council, which certifies sustainable fisheries around the world, said there are concerns that some individual transferable quotas are not applied fairly, but several fisheries certified as sustainable include them.

Colin Clark, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of British Columbia and author of the book, "The Worldwide Crisis in Fisheries," said he has seen similar results to the study's findings among Canadian fisheries managed with individual transferrable quotas.

"The good news is a lot of countries are moving toward these ITQ systems and they seem to be the way to go," he said. "The bad news is there are really problems in deep sea fisheries (such as tuna) that take place outside anybody's coastal waters. It's like the Wild West with no law whatever."

Build Up Fish Stocks Now For Big Money Later – Study
Deborah Zabarenko, PlanetArk 7 Dec 07;

WASHINGTON - Commercial fishers should cut back on their catch and allow fish stocks to grow above the levels most governments currently advise if they want to boost long-term profits, economists reported on Thursday.


Such a strategy would sustain fish populations and save fuel while opening the way to big profits in the future, the researchers reported in the journal Science.

And the more depleted a fishery has become, the better the results when stocks are built up to what the researchers call the biomass maximum economic yield. That might be 10 to 20 percent over what fisheries managers now aim for, which is the level at which fish populations can be sustained.

Co-author Quentin Grafton of the Australian National University condensed the results to five words: bigger stocks mean bigger bucks.

At the same time, the authors suggest that when profits from fishing are maximized, it's more likely that fish populations will be maintained, and fishers will use less fuel seeking out fish, since they won't be that scarce.

"In many fisheries of the world, profitability is close to zero and in some cases it's even negative," said Quentin Grafton of the Australian National University in a telephone interview. "So what we're suggesting here is we can ... turn around the current state of affairs to make them profitable and also increase the number of fish in the sea."

To illustrate how this could work, Grafton gave an extreme example:

Imagine there is only one tuna left in the entire Pacific Ocean, a body of water that covers about one-third of the Earth's surface. The cost of catching that tuna would be hundreds of millions of dollars, because finding it would be nearly impossible.

But if there were hundreds of millions of tuna in the Pacific, the cost of catching them would be much lower, because fishers wouldn't have to travel as far or look as hard. With this lower cost, profits would rise.

This system would counter a persistent cause of over-fishing: industry's opposition to lower catches.

Grafton and his co-authors tested their idea by looking at revenue and profit curves for four different fish: big eye tuna and yellow fin tuna in the western and central Pacific, and northern tiger prawn and orange roughy in Australia.

In all four cases, they found the "stock effect" -- that is, when fish are more plentiful, they're cheaper to harvest. This effect had not been taken into account in previous calculations of the best levels for fish stocks.

To build up the fish populations to the higher level, governments would have to persuade fishers to limit but not eliminate their catch, Grafton said. This could be done by subsidizing fishers during the lean period and taxing them after fish stocks are rebuilt.

To keep fish stocks profitably high, enforceable catch limits would be essential, he said.