OPEN ACCESS FISHERIES

Open Access Fisheries

Open Access Fisheries

Introduction

The consequences of overfishing can be quite severe. Overfished populations can take much longer to rebuild to a healthy condition than it took to degrade them, even if fishing pressure on them is relieved. This can be due to the small number of surviving spawning adults, but can also be because opportunistic species have taken over the habitat. Fishing capacity going unused reduces employment, creates a crisis of fixed capital investment, contributes to local and regional economic decline, and can—for fisheries crucial to regional food security—contribute to malnutrition. Overfishing in West Africa is believed to contribute to the intensification of the bushmeat trade, which threatens many kinds of wildlife in the region. The decline of a fishery stock may lead to intensified effort to harvest remaining individuals from it, exacerbating overfishing; or it may lead to diversification of effort onto other fisheries (with benign or harmful effects), or the abandonment of fishing for other livelihoods. The specific social, economic, and ecological contexts of a given fishery are important in understanding what a fishery will do when faced with overfishing.

Theories to explain overfishing often converge around the Tragedy of the Commons, which argues common property resources inevitably lead to overexploitation and conflict requiring coercive enforcement and enclosure. This general perspective translated into fisheries implies that with open access situations, where there are no restrictions to harvesting, more fishers will add their effort to the collective effort because their individual gain is larger than the collective loss of that share of the resource, until expenses equal benefits and no profits are gained by anyone. ( FAO, 1995 35)

The world now faces a global fishing crisis of unprecedented proportions. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 70% of the world's commercially important marine fish stocks are fully fished, overexploited, or depleted. In a third of the world's major marine fishing regions, the catch has declined by 20% or more from peak years.

As population pressure on aquatic resources escalates, there is a pressing need to identify and integrate science and policy solutions related to water pollution, coastal area degradation and the depletion of living aquatic resources. This paper presents an environmental perspective on some of the science and policy issues that must be addressed in order to more effectively manage population and consumption pressures on marine fisheries, which account for more than 80% of world fish production.

Overfishing And Depletion

Population Pressures

The generally employed rubric for managing fisheries to avoid commons tragedies is known as bioeconomics, which seeks to establish and regulate the amounts and types of harvest acceptable to sustain fish populations and the profitability of fisheries. Managers use statistical models drawing on data from research vessels or surveys of commercial landings to model the population dynamics of individual species or multiple species interactions. Surplus production models are utilized to understand how much fishing mortality can be sustained by a population and what biomass will generate the highest rate of increase to augment ...