Beyond the status quo: rethinking fishery management

Transcription

1 Chapter six Beyond the status quo: rethinking fishery management Anthony T. Charles ABSTRACT This chapter explores several controversial challenges for fishery management of the future. First, emphasis is placed on the need for appropriate involvement of the various stakeholders, including fishers, communities and the general public. In particular, the public, as holders of property rights to fish resources, deserve a greater involvement in fishery decision making. Second, the implications of a precautionary approach to uncertainty are explored, from the perspectives of fishery science (methodologies of stock assessment) and management (notably the transition from rigid to adaptive harvesting plans). The discussion points to a clear need to adjust the 'burden of proof in decision making so that by default, such decisions will favour conservation. Third, the nature of quota management is discussed, highlighting the inherent lack of resilience and the negative conservation impacts produced by an over-reliance on such controls. Finally, the chapter highlights the importance of shifting from a 'sectoral' view, in which the fishery is treated in isolation, to an integrated 'systems' view, with the fishery recognized as part of the larger coastal and regional economy. Reinventing Fisheries Management. Edited by Tony J. Pitcher. Paul J.B. Hart and Daniel Pauly. Published in 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers. London. ISBN

2 102 Rethinking fishery management 6.1 INTRODUCTION This chapter argues that the key challenge in fishery management lies not so much in developing new techniques or obtaining better data, but rather in rethinking the philosophy of managing for sustainability. Who should be involved in the process? What are the guiding principles? The chapter focuses on three particularly crucial yet controversial challenges: enlarging the role of 'stakeholders': applying a precautionary approach to fishery management and the 'burden of proof: rethinking quota management, in the light of limitations on fishery 'controllability'. These challenges, widespread throughout the world's fisheries, are considered here within the context of the early-1990s collapse of Canada's Atlantic groundfish fishery, analysed in greater detail in Charles (1995). 6.2 RETHINKING THE ROLE OF STAKEHOLDERS The fishers Historically, fishery management has been built around a simplistic view of fishers and managers. Within this perspective, fishers are no more than selfish profit-maximizers, driven to take as much fish as possible, while regulators have sole responsibility for conservation, to be achieved by controlling the fishers. This view of the world, shaped by Hardin's (1968) Tragedy of the Commons, led to authoritarian attempts to implement controls over the fishing industry. The response from fishers was a rejection of such management controls in practice. Hardin's flawed perspective (Berkes et al., 1989) became self-fulfilling: when fishers were excluded from management, they indeed had no other role than to catch as much fish as possible, and to thwart regulations whenever possible. Under such circumstances, no level of enforcement, however extensive, has been able to prevent illegal fishing and overharvesting. To overcome this 'us versus them' attitude, many fishery regulatory bodies shifted to a consultative model. in which government discusses management with the industry prior to implementation. However, consultations did not imply decision-making power, and as a result, in most cases fishers did not 'buy into' government-imposed regulations. The next step in the evolution of fishery management lies in the recognition that, for pragmatic reasons, effective management must be designed and implemented with the involvement of those being regulated, the

3 A. T. Charles 103 fishing industry. Increased stakeholder involvement can be found in the trend toward 'co-management', the creation of suitable institutions in which stakeholders and government work together to develop and enforce regulations jointly (Berkes, 1989; Pinkerton, 1989, Brown, Chapter 13, this volume). The move toward co-management by government and industry is gaining momentum, and clearly has many positive aspects. The public Yet those who catch fish are not the only stakeholders. Fish in coastal waters are typically state property, with the citizens of the nation having collective property rights over the fish. While owners of valuable property usually have some say in its management, this is rarely the case in fisheries. Instead, many fishery agencies focus exclusively on 'serving their clients' in the industry. This has meant in the past that an implicit objective of fishery bureaucrats has been to keep the industry happy, sometimes at the expense of conservation efforts. To reinvent fishery management, it is crucial to understand that resource owners are legitimate stakeholders. Management must better involve these resource owners, while at the same time recognizing the pragmatic need for a 'buy in' by other stakeholders, notably the resource users. Coastal communities Moreover, there is a third component of stakeholders: coastal communities and their residents. In many, perhaps most instances, such communities have been ignored in fishery decision making, despite their close ties to, and dependence on, the fishery. This unfortunate situation remains in effect in many jurisdictions, despite an expanding body of research that highlights the conservation and socia-economic benefits of local involvement in management. The vehicle of choice for this is 'community-based co-management', the process of joint decision making at the local level, by government, fishers and relevant institutions in coastal communities. This process tends to promote more efficient management, because the involvement of community institutions together with government and industry maximizes the built-in pressure, i.e. the moral suasion, for those in the fishery to comply with regulations in support of conservation. 6.3 RETHINKING THE BURDEN OF PROOF Given the inherent uncertainty pervasive in every fishery, decisions must always be made by balancing risks - typically a risk of resource collapse

4 104 Rethinking fishery management through excessive exploitation or environmental damage, versus a risk of foregone economic benefits if harvests are lower than necessary (Walters, Chapter 21, this volume). The question is: in considering this trade-off, where should the burden of proof lie? Stock and recruitment Is there a relationship between the number of adult spawners in a population and the resulting recruitment of young fish? Logic would suggest an affirmative answer, but given natural fluctuations in the environment and in the corresponding data available to scientists, there is often no scientific 'proof. In the Atlantic Canadian groundfishery experience, an absence of such proof meant that spawner-recruit links between fish generations were not incorporated into the assessment process (Hutchings and Myers, 1994), and the fundamental idea of maintaining a critical spawning stock biomass (to preserve the reproductive process) was not put into practice. On the other hand, application of the precautionary approach (Garcia, 1994) suggests that it may be preferable to rethink the burden of proof, assuming a positive connection between spawners and recruitment, unless the evidence is strongly opposed. What causes a collapse? Are fishery collapses caused by overfishing or environmental change? When Canada's northern cod, Gadus morhua, stock off Newfoundland collapsed in the early 1990s, the government issued an initial government press release that made no mention of human impacts on the resource, nor of problems with the fishery management process. Instead, it was stated that 'the devastating decline in the stock of northern cod' was due 'primarily to ecological factors' (Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 1992). Yet it seems that while ocean conditions might have acted as a trigger to initiate a stock collapse, the principal underlying cause of the collapse was high levels of resource exploitation. Although the dynamics of collapses are complex, the typical sequence of events is often as follows: 1. when ocean and environmental conditions are good or average (from the perspective of the fish), fundamentally unsustainable harvest levels may appear to be sustainable; 2. inevitably, and quite naturally, ocean conditions will change at some point, so that heavily-harvested fish populations become subjected to additional stress - environmental conditions that inhibit growth and reproduction; 3. faced with intense fishing pressure, and a trigger in the form of an adverse environment, the fishery collapses.

5 A. T. Charles 105 This scenario corresponds to considerable experience around the world, from Canada's Pacific coast herring, Clupea harengus pallasi, fishery collapse of the 1960s (Hourston, 1978) to the 1972 Peruvian anchovy, Engraulis ringens, collapse, triggered by ocean cooling known as El Nino but resulting fundamentally from massive exploitation (contributions in Pauly and Tsukayama, 1987; Hilborn and Walters, 1992). Recent research on the Atlantic Canadian groundfishery also supports this interpretation (Taggart et al ). Indeed, Hutchings and Myers (1994) and Walters and Maguire (1996) indicate that fishing pressure alone is sufficient to explain the collapse of northern cod. Thus, invoking bad ocean conditions as an explanation is simply unnecessary. In any case, a precautionary approach would suggest focusing more on reducing human impacts, rather than on blaming the ocean in the wake of fishery collapses. Conservation first In many fisheries, priority has been placed on avoiding disruption to the harvesting process rather than on meeting declared conservation goals. At times, this arose at the political level, such as the Canadian government's decision to set the 1990 quota for northern cod at tonnes, instead of tonnes as recommended by its scientists (Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 1990). More often, however, high quotas were produced within the management process, through well-meaning yet counter-productive efforts to reduce the socio-economic effects of downturns in stock abundance. For example, under the so-called '50% rule' (Department of Fisheries and Oceans, p. 5), when scientific evidence pointed to the need for large reductions in catches of an Atlantic Canadian groundfish stock, the government would reduce the total allowable catch slowly, by 50% of the difference each year, rather than taking immediate action to cut quotas to desired levels (unless scientists could prove a conservation crisis). However, this gradualism did not apply in the opposite direction; if scientific analysis suggested an increase in the allowable harvest, the full increase could be made immediately. Progress has been made in adopting a more conservationist management philosophy within Atlantic Canada's groundfishery. One example, created by the government following the 1992 collapse of the northern cod stock, is a new conservation institution, the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (FRCC). A partnership of industry and academic members (including this author), the FRCC provides public advice on conservation needs in Atlantic fisheries, to help the government 'achieve its conservation, economic and social objectives for the fishery' (FRCC, 1995, 1996a). Perhaps the most fundamental of the Council's efforts to date has

6 106 Rethinking fishery management been its role in bringing a solid 'conservation first' perspective to the fishery. This has been evident, for example, in its recommendations to close many Atlantic Canadian cod fisheries (despite the obvious dislocation this produced), to set total allowable catches well below FO.l levels in the case of depressed stocks, and to supplement catch quotas with effort controls, as a safeguard measure (FRCC, 1995, 1996a). 6.4 RETHINKING QUOTA MANAGEMENT Quota management is among the most fundamental of fishery management approaches. This often involves (a) estimating the biomass for each stock, (b) determining a total allowable catch (TAC) as a fraction of that biomass, (c) subdividing the TAC by sector (by gear and/or boat size), and (d) subdividing further into individual fisher quotas in some sectors. Quota management has the apparent benefit of setting a firm limit on what can be removed from the ocean. In practice, however, fisheries are not totally controllable - it has been impossible to properly determine quota levels (Walters and Pearse, 1996; Walters, Chapter 21, this volume) or to fully enforce these quotas, given the ease of cheating. The unknown number To properly set quotas requires knowledge of the fish biomass, something that can never be known with certainty. The two major sources of assessment information both have problems. The fact that research vessel surveys may cover only a fraction of the fishable area (for example, often missing inshore areas of Newfoundland, south-western Nova Scotia and elsewhere) can be a significant problem depending on stock structure and migratory patterns. The use of commercial fishery catch rates can produce highly misleading results, owing to the erroneous assumption that success in the fishery, as indicated by high catch rates, is a direct indicator of strong fish stocks. In reality, even as stocks decline, fishers often are able to find and catch the remaining fish; good catch rates create the illusion of a healthy stock. Compounding these concerns is the impact of misreporting and anticonservationist behaviour (discussed below) on the catch data crucial to the stock assessment process. Not only is the quality of the data compromised, but additional biases are also introduced, tending to produce faulty assessments of stock status, and overestimates of feasible catch levels.

7 A. T. Charles 107 Anticonservationist incentives Quota management creates inherent incentives to harvest more fish than is allowed in the established quotas. This overfishing can occur by: (1) exceeding the quota, whether this be a TAC, an allocated share of the TAC for a particular sector of the fleet, or an individual quota; (2) 'high grading' to maximize the value of what is reported as caught, typically by dumping lesser-valued fish overboard; and (3) dumping prohibited fish species (including those for which the quota has been reached) or fish sizes (notably small fish) so as to be able to continue fishing. These problems can be overcome, but only at a significant cost. Addressing the first problem requires reliable and independent catch monitoring, while addressing the second and the third, which take place at sea, can be eliminated only by placing full-time observers on every vessel. (While expensive, this has been implemented in fisheries where the catch per boat is sufficient to warrant the cost.) Incentives for high grading and dumping increase as quotas are subdivided to gear sectors and then to individuals. Under a simple global quota, high grading or dumping present direct costs to the fisher in the form of lost income, but provide relatively few advantages in return (except if hold capacity is a limiting factor), because the benefits would necessarily be shared by the entire fleet. On the other hand, under an individual quota system (or trip limits), the fisher's direct cost of high grading or dumping remains the same (the foregone fish), but the benefits of such actions are personalized; the fisher can increase the value of what is landed by high grading, or can engage in dumping so as to continue fishing other species. The relative benefits of anticonservationist actions are especially strong when the fisher must pay for the catch quota (e.g. if the market value of small fish in the catch is less than the cost of quota to account for them), but can be reduced somewhat if quotas are transferable. The illusion of certainty A less well-recognized aspect of quota management is the illusion of certainty it creates, as quantities of fish (pieces of what is in fact a pie of very uncertain size) are allocated to the various players. For example, in the groundfish fishery of Atlantic Canada, total allowable catches were adjusted from year to year, but were at least implicitly seen as fixed, firm and sacrosanct within the fishing season. Although allowance was made for in-season changes to annual catch quotas 'as a consequence of major changes in the scientific advice' (Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 1991), in reality, such changes were very rare. It was felt that

8 108 Rethinking fishery management any adjustment to the TAe should be left to next year's fishing plan. Not only were changes inconvenient to management and industry, but they were not thought to be particularly crucial from a conservation perspective. Such an attitude allowed the fishing industry to adopt annual business plans, comparable to those in non-resource sectors. This in-season rigidity in catch quotas not only contributed to overharvesting, it also led to dislocation when mid-season changes became necessary. For example, in 1993, the government (following FRee recommendations) closed some fisheries and reduced quotas on other stocks at mid season, in response to mounting evidence of groundfish collapses. Unfortunately, because such changes had not been well anticipated in management plans, considerable difficulties arose. This was particularly apparent in the individual transferable quota (ITQ) system, which had been promoted by the government largely through the claim that an ITQ gave the fisher property rights over shares of the TAe that could be caught at any time desired. This system was built around the illusion of certainty - the idea that the TAe, and thus the ITQ, was a 'sure thing', never to be changed in mid season in response to conservation needs. When such midseason quota reductions turned out to be required, the system was poorly equipped to produce an equitable sharing of the reduced quota. While quota management has its advantages, the concerns discussed here suggest that there is scope for a critical assessment of such controls as conservation tools. This is certainly controversial, however, because the view persists in the fishery, with respect to quota management, that 'the system works'. Furthermore, much of the allocation structure in fisheries has developed around the idea of dividing up the pie (Le. the TAe). One intermediate option lies in supplementing quota management with effort controls, to provide a double check that conservation measures are not thwarted (FRee, 1996b). For example, if the overall effort limit is reached before the quota is caught, this may indicate that the quota had been set excessively high. Accordingly, the fishery could be closed as a precautionary move. 6.5 CONCLUSIONS This chapter has focused on three controversial challenges to conventional fishery management. First, there is a need to remind ourselves that fish constitute a public resource, and that those with property rights to the resources (the public, and particularly those in coastal communities) are stakeholders who deserve to be involved in fishery decision making. Second, fishery scientists and managers must be guided by the precau-

9 A. T. Charles 109 tionary principle in the face of uncertainty. This implies shifting the burden of proof (Walters, Chapter 21, this volume). Rather than requiring proof that increasing harvests will deplete fish populations, that reducing the spawning stock will tend to produce fewer recruits, that dragging fishing gear along the ocean floor can damage the habitat, and so on, these conservation-orientated perspectives should be assumed to be valid unless proven otherwise. In other words, the default view of the world should be one that favours conservation. Third, emphasis must be placed on designing resilient management systems, capable of keeping fisheries on the desired conservation and socio-economic paths even if our understanding of the state of the world is incorrect. This requires more than a reliance on quota controls. In addition to these fishery-specific challenges, it is also important to highlight the need to see fisheries as an integral part of the larger coastal and regional economy. This recognition has several implications for fishery management itself. First, it is important to broaden beyond a focus on the fishery's output (such as the total allowable catch or 'sustainable yield') to a multidimensional view emphasizing ecological, socio-economic, community and institutional sustainability of the fishery system (Charles, 1994). Second, because the choices made in fishery management affect those outside the fishery system, and vice versa, an integrated approach to coastal (or watershed) planning is necessary to optimize the overall sustainable benefits to the local residents. Third, fishery management should draw upon a 'portfolio' of approaches, to provide multidimensional solutions for the multidimensional problems faced in fishery and coastal systems. We must be on guard against single-minded 'quick fixes' that attempt to deal with problems in the fishery, but that may well have a net negative effect on the coastal economy and beyond. In conclusion, this chapter has advocated a reassessment of several rather ingrained approaches to fishery management. The key question amounts to whether the system works, or whether fundamental change is needed. If the latter holds, and no change is implemented, history is likely to repeat itself; somewhere in the world, the next fishery collapse will begin to gather momentum. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Michael Sinclair for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. The chapter benefited as well from reviews by two

10 110 Rethinking fishery management anonymous referees and the editors. As usual, the views expressed here. and any remaining errors. are the sole responsibility of the author. Financial support is acknowledged from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, grant no. A6745. REFERENCES Berkes. F. (ed.) (1989) Common Property Resources: Ecology and Community-Based Sustainable Development, Bellhaven Press, London, 302 pp. Berkes, F., Feeny, D., McCay, B.J. and Acheson, J.M. (1989) The benefits of the commons. Nature 340, Charles, A.T. (1994) Towards sustainability: the fishery experience. Ecol. Econ. II, Charles, A.T. (1995) The Atlantic Canadian groundfishery: roots of a collapse. Dalhousie Law J. 18, Department of Fisheries and Oceans (1990) Highlights: 1990 Canadian Atlantic Groundfish Management Plan. Press release no. B-HQ E, 2 January DFO, Ottawa. Department of Fisheries and Oceans (1991) 1992 Atlantic Groundfish Management Plan. Minister of Supply and Services, Ottawa. Department of Fisheries and Oceans (1992) Crosbie Announces First Steps in Northern Cod (2J3KI,) Recovery Program. Press release no. NR-HQ-92-58E, July DFO, Ottawa. Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (1995) Conservation: Come Aboard Conservation Requirements for Atlantic Groundfish: Report to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. Minister of Supply and Services, Cat. no. FS 1-61/1996E, Ottawa, 109 pp. Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (1996a) Building the Bridge Conservation Requirements for Atlantic Groundfish: Report to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. Minister of Supply and Services, Cat. no. FS1 61/1997E, Ottawa, 224 pp. Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (1996b) Quota Controls and Effort Controls: Conservation Considerations. Discussion Paper FRCC.96.TD.3. Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, Ottawa, 9 pp. Garcia, S.M. (1994) The precautionary principle: its implications in capture fisheries management. Ocean Coastal Manage. 22, Hardin, G. (1968) The tragedy of the commons. Science 162, Hilborn, R. and Walters, C.J. (1992) Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment: Choice, Dynamics and Uncertainty. Chapman & Hall, New York, 570 pp. Hourston, A.S. (1978) The decline and recovery of Canada's Pacific herring stocks. Fish. Mar. Tech. Rep. no. 784, Minister of Supply and Services, Cat. no. Fs 97-6/ 784, Ottawa, 19 pp. Hutchings, J.A. and Myers, R.A. (1994) What can be learned from the collapse of a renewable resource? Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, of Newfoundland and Labrador. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 51, Pauly, D. and Tsukayama, L. (eds) (1987) The Peruvian Anchoveta and its Upwelling Ecosystem: Three Decades of Change (ICLARM Studies and Reviews No. 15), International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management, Manila.

11 A. T. Charles III Pinkerton. E.W. (ed.) (1989) Co-operative Management of Local Fisheries. Univ. British Columbia Press. Vancouver. Taggart. C.T.. Anderson. J.. Bishop. C. Colbourne. E.. Hutchings. I.. Lilly. G.. Morgan. J.. Murphy. E.. Myers. R.. Rose. G. and Shelton. P. (1994) Overview of cod stocks. biology. and environment in the Northwest Atlantic region of Newfoundland. with emphasis on northern cod. ICES Mar. Sci. Symp Walters. C.J. and Maguire. J.I. (1996) Lessons for stock assessment from the Northern cod collapse. Rev. Fish BioI. Fish. 6, Walters. C.J. and Pearse. P.H. (1996) Stock information requirements for quota management systems in commercial fisheries. Rev. Fish BioI. Fish. 6,