Fishing about and about fishing
ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: LIP SERVICE OR REALITY?
For sometime now ecosystem management has become a fashionable phrase among fisheries scientists and managers. Soon everybody would be saying that there’s no point in managing fishery without managing the whole ecosystem, or that fishery management must be ecosystem based.
This major shift is a result of a growing understanding of how present policies and rules usually focus on regulating the catch of one target species. Their disregarding the forage, prey and predators of the managed species as well as climatic and hydrographic variations, habitat modifications, pollution and other factors, render them largely ineffective. Management’s forecasting tools are flawed, and while they sometimes may correspond to what has happened in the past, they’re practically useless with respect to future.
Such management imposes catch targets upon a fishery in the form of a total allowable catch (TAC ). This requires stock assessment using various population models based on a “root” formula: resulting biomass = old biomass less fishing mortality less natural mortality + recruitment.
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Back in 2003, Dr. Mikko Heino wrote in the ICES Newsletter: “Models that consider fish stocks in isolation from their ecosystem have clearly had their day, and fisheries science is moving on” (see this column of March 2004. My reading of this is that they were never any good, and we can all see the consequences of this management in most areas of the N.Atlantic and adjacent sees. Nowadays, ICES, NMFS (U.S. Natl. Marine Fisheries Service), GLOBEC (see this column of last month), and many other research institutions are assuming a more holistic attitude, and most agree that to keep marine ecosystem healthy, fish resources included, all its components must be considered. There is a growing agreement that the mainstream fishery management has been based on flawed assumptions. This makes all the “sustainable yield” notions, MSY, OSY, etc., which serve as bases for the TAC fixing, appear as a sort of make-believe values, calculated in a tunnel-vision manner on the basis of last-year and, seldom, some current data, for use in the future when they will be hardly relevant and often counter-productive.
So what the new approach is about? Let’s start with ecosystem based management and consider its main elements and their changes in space, time and character. The first element is the time factor. Any aquatic ecosystem is a dynamic, pulsating, and ever-changing macro-organism. Thus, trends and fluctuations that have been occurring in the ecosystem throughout history must be taken into account. The second element embraces all the changes and physical, biological and chemical forces imposed upon the ecosystem by the various human activities. Whatever happens with inshore and bottom habitats, as well as with the water (upstream and coastal pollution) affects the ecosystem’s biota (i.e., all living things). The third element is made up of the relationships between the various species occupying the ecosystem at all stages of their life. This runs from bacteria and phyto-plankton up to top predators, with special attention to the managed “target species”, physical factors affecting them, their food and predators. Last, but not least is fishing, which apart from massive removal of marine organisms from the system, also influences the genetics of the fished populations. The fishing itself is influenced by the market and the socio-economic context of fishing people and their communities, and fish consumers, as well as by the industry and technologies involved.
Only an intelligent analysis and synthesis of the interaction of all those elements can enable understanding of the problems and search for solutions. We have to accept that the dynamics of the system so complex that even the best existing models are of little use for forecasting the outcomes of possible management actions.
In this general context, ”context ecosystem-based fishery management” must address the particular elements. Those that require intervention must be defined and managed separately, while taking the other elements into account. Flexibility and tailoring management for each specific fishery and area should become the rule. There’s no rational way to impose a single “common” policy that doesn’t take all the above into account. We have to analyze fishery by fishery to see if, for example, if TACs are the right methodology to use or other options such as effort control should be considered.
Unfortunately, some authors and green zealots are trying to hijack the concept of “ecosystem management” in a way which stigmatises fishing as the only problem which needs tackling. While paying lip service to other factors, they focus on commercial fishing as the main villain to be constrained or eliminated in order to “protect” marine ecosystems. Their interest doesn’t lie in cleaning up habitats and keep fisheries prosperous, but elsewhere. Where? – This depends on who’s the “father” (or sponsor) of this fallacy.
Some fishermen get scared of all this media hype and noise. They shouldn’t. Ecosystem management approach places fishing in its proper context, so it can’t be blamed anymore for everything that happens in the sea. Consequently, managers and politicians wouldn’t be allowed to keep turning a blind eye to pollution, environmental variations, habitat destruction, etc.
The new approach, however, would carry fishery management from the current over-simplification into more complex concepts. This worries some scientists, such as
Dr. James Crutchfield, a veteran fishery economist. Writing on FISHFOLK Internet List: he said: “I don't mean to be negative. I am simply concerned that those who mouth the words "ecosystem management" know what they are getting into”.
So, it won’t be easy, but the point is that to leave the things as they’ve been since the mid 20th century is like depicting a midday landscape on a dark night, or like looking under a streetlamp for the key you dropped, because that’s where the light is, instead of looking for it where you dropped it - however dark the place may be. The new approach may require to get used to the fact that for a long time to come we won’t be able to put numerical values to numerous factors, a current custom that sometimes borders on numerology. We’d have to relearn to talk in qualitative terms.
Ecosystem-based management is coming of age. But, institutional inertia and obstinacy, human conservatism, fear of the unknown and need to admit own misconstruction of the realities of the coastal, marine and living resources, would impede its application.