Fishing about and about fishing

FISHERIES MANAGEMENT ECONOMICS: WHAT’S MISSING?

A guide to heartless, soulless, ice-cold economics

(e-version)

 

Prof. Lee G. Anderson’s “The Economics of Fisheries Management” is a 2004 reprint of the 1986 revised and enlarged version of the original 1977 first edition, which at that time was one of its kind. Although since then, the domain of fisheries economics expanded and, as his 22 pages long list of references demonstrates, the amount of literature greatly increased, this book can still serve as a basic text for students and practitioners. This, under the condition, however, that one accepts that “the simple Schaefer’s model, where

recruitment, individual growth, and natural mortality are lumped together in a simple population dynamics equation”, enables theoretical analysis of the economics of fisheries management in a tractable manner. Notwithstanding, the author notes that in the next edition he’d give more attention to rights-based fisheries, ITQs, marine reserves, and replace Schaefer’s model with age-structured ones, and quite rightly apologises for hardly discussing “the many facets of fisheries management”.

 

But, contemporaneous readers, while agreeing to his analysis of the faults of open access, may question the realness of some of the author’s basic postulations, such as the notion of general equilibrium in an economy, or of that in a fish population. Hence, they may question also the various consequent concepts, as for example, “maximum economic yield (MEY) over time”, or “stationary MEY” that would occur when “catch equals growth” and “population size will not change”, and in other situations that hardly ever happen. 

 

Misnomer. The title of this book is rather a misnomer. The book introduces a methodology for theoretical economic analysis of fisheries, which can help to assess economic results of different types of management. But there’s nothing in it about the economics of the management itself.  If the book’s contents would be consistent with its title, it should be addressing explicitly the matter of costs and benefits of the very management system itself. Such study would help governments to build up feasible fishery management institutions, fitting the economic value of the respective fisheries, on one hand, and steering clear of creating expensive bureaucracies that, along with their scientific and technical infrastructure, would be top-heavy and economically unfeasible for the fisheries to be managed.

 

Economics of fisheries management should also examine situations in which management is ineffective, or causes more harm than benefit.  It should identify economic losses due to

management blunders, such as allowing excessive fishing when it should’ve been already curbed, or the other way around, needlessly restraining fishing effort. Such bloomers happen when management adheres to concepts such as the above mentioned equilibrium in a fish population, “MEY over time”, “stationary MEY”, and the like, assuming that the size of the fish stocks is predominantly controlled by fishing mortality, while neglecting fluctuating physical and biological factors that greatly affect natural mortality and recruitment.

 

Economics of fisheries management should also attend, for example, to the costs to a

fishery and to society that occur where the management refrains from or is unable to tackle destruction and pollution of coastal habitats essential for the propagation of commercial fish, or their food organisms. It should consider the cost to a fishery managed by size regulation, which due to prolonged creaming off of the larger and faster growing individuals, even before they’re able to procreate, is leading to a genetic dwarfism.

 

Frozen economics.  Anderson defines fishery economics as:  “…the study of the optimal allocation of resources to a fishery in such a way that the value of production is maximised”. 

He writes that, in spite that the “…models presented here contain many simplifications…”  they’re “…surprisingly accurate in predicting behavior of the players on the economic stage and also in formulating policy recommendations”. Unfortunately, the author doesn’t provide a single proof to the above in spite of the fact that he could have picked up any one of the many well-documented fisheries in the world and could have applied his models to the historical data (“hind-casting”) to show how such models would perform. 

 

Fishery economics to be applicable requires much more than what “Management Economics” offers. The use of graphs, mathematics and models doesn’t make it a science. I cannot agree with the author when he writes: “If we had perfect (or at least very good) information on the biological and economic parameters involved, and if resources were easily transferable…” -  the conclusions derived -  “…could be used in straightforward manner in regulating fisheries”, because the framework he proposes is totally estranged from real-world fisheries. He’s right in saying that “…institutional and “people” (inverted commas belong to Anderson) problems prevent rapid movement of resources from one use to another”. But people’s problems and considerations are almost totally absent from his economics. So are any externalities, hidden or open, including social costs of secondary  economic effects of any change in legislation, regulation, and management policy. Making a given fishery more “efficient” by Anderson’s definition may be so costly to most fishing people, the society at large and the taxpayers’ purse that only a selected group would enjoy the financial gains.

 

This book is a guide to heartless, soulless, cold economics that shun actual situations, and turn nature, fish and people into a sort of abstract, mechanical, virtual entities that have little to do with ecosystems and society. The book’s examples steer clear of any existing fishery; they’re all conjured, strictly theoretical and devoid of any connection to a breathing and active fishing industry.  The good news about this book is that it may help to train students in methods of theoretical economic analysis, but the very bad news is that it may lead people into thinking that they may apply such a frozen economic theory to the complex realities of the fishing world. While this book may be useful for analysing past situations and 

processes and, perhaps, also some of the current ones, it is unthinkable that it could be properly applied as a guide to policymaking and fishery regulation.