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Stock Stewardship Discussion
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Stock Stewardship/Biomass Allocations
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If you would like to post a comment on this subject, please send your contributions to me (Dick Allen) at rba@FisheryConsulting.com for posting. I will post both positive and negative comments on the subject, but I reserve the right to prevent my web site from becoming cluttered with material that is not relevant to the discussion, or is otherwise unacceptable to me. I will publish any acceptable submission without editing. In any case where I consider the material to be generally worthwhile, but for some reason unacceptable, I will offer the contributor the opportunity to alter the objectionable content. If you don't want your contact information published, please do not include it in the body of your message.
I may open the page for direct submissions if I gain more confidence that it will not be vandalized or misused.
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Subject Trevor Kenchington Response 1
Date
Tue Jan 25 2005 14:04
Author Trevor Kenchington
(tk@FisheryConservation.net)
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Dick,
Thank you for copying your message to me. Perhaps you could distribute this response to anyone else you sent yours to, aside from those on your "to" list?
In your message, you wrote:
> The scientific basis for stock stewardship shares was developed by Canadian fishery scientist Stratis Gavaris in a 1996 article in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries. It can be accessed at:
http://ginkgo.cisti.nrc.ca/ppv/RPViewDoc?handler_=HandleInitialGet&journal=
cjfas&volume=53&articleFile=f96-088.pdf&calyLang=eng
As I have told you before, Stratis came late to this idea. So far as I can tell, it was first proposed by John Caddy (then with FAO in Rome) in the early '80s, though I came up with it quite independently at about the same time and suggested a variant (specifically designed for the redfish fishery on the Scotian Shelf) in my 1984 thesis. Canada's DFO greeted that suggestion with the complete indifference that it no doubt
richly deserved. (So far as I can tell, Stratis' proposal has received about the same level of official recognition as mine did.)
Scientists squabbling over priority aside, it would probably be best to give the idea the name which John coined for it, "Biomass Allocation", since that captures its essence and clearly distinguishes it from IFQs and other families of management measures. [Ralph Townsend, who has also
discussed the same topic, termed these allocations "Bankable ITQs", while Stratis called them "Population Rights". I'd suggest that those are preferable to your "stewardship shares", though still not as informative as Caddy's term.]
When it comes to practical application, rather than the theoretical ramblings of the four of us, I would make a few points:
I suggested a form of biomass allocation for the redfish fishery because it is suited to the peculiar dynamics of that species and that fishery. There are a number of pertinent peculiarities but, most importantly, redfish are very long lived. Thus, a decision to fish conservatively this year can allow increased catches of the same year-class a few years into the future. For most other northwest Atlantic resources, rewards of present conservation that are taken more than a few years into the future cannot be taken from the present
year-classes (since mortality will have depleted them). The future gain from present pain will have to be taken (in part or in full) from the progeny of the conserved year-classes. Yet, for most of our fisheries, scientists are unable to clearly demonstrate a relationship between present spawning biomass and the recruitment which results from it. Thus, we would have no firm basis for saying how much any one sector's
present constraint contributed to an increase in the biomass of future generations. Arbitrary rules could, of course, be developed for rewarding more conservative sectors with larger shares of future year-classes but arbitrary rules are never ideal in fisheries management.
A degree of arbitrariness would in any case be needed in the allocation of biomass within present year-classes. That is: In a perfect system, we would monitor the natural mortality of fish left in the water by each sector, along with the growth of the survivors -- and hence we would determine the biomass "owned" by each sector at the start of each fishing year. Obviously, that isn't possible, let alone practical. A
biomass allocation system in which changes in the allocations were calculated annually by scientists would very quickly become mired in disputes over data, analyses and interpretations. To make biomass allocation work, there would have to be pre-agreed schedules for mortality and growth rates, which would be used for the allocation book-keeping even if they did not perfectly agree with biological reality. Such a system could be set up easily enough, except that the
schedules would have to be negotiated at the same time as the sizes of the initial allocations were hammered out. I am inclined to doubt whether the New England Council could deal with those, highly-contentious, negotiations in any reasonable time frame, while also carrying the massive load which it currently faces.
My third point derives from a project that I did for John Caddy in the mid-1990s (which I think I have told you about before). John had me develop a computer model suited to testing the biomass-allocation idea. It was an initially-simple spreadsheet model which grew so vast that contemporary computers took tens of minutes for each re-calculation. (My
1998 machine can re-calculate it in seconds. A modern computer would do it before the operator could finish hitting the "enter" key.) With that computation problem, we never did much with the model beyond building it. However, in the testing phase I did discover one unexpected but rather important effect of biomass-allocation systems, which would be
particularly crucial in U.S. fisheries management.
If NEFMC were to allow some sectors to have biomass allocations, they would not (at least initially) be allowed to overfish in the short term against a promise to be more conservative later. Such allocations would only be useful to those sectors which chose to take less than their share of the optimum yield now, in return for increased future benefits. yet the optimum yield is, by definition, the catch obtained by fishing at a rate that maximizes net benefits to the nation. Thus, biomass allocations can only benefit those who, in pursuit of their own interests, choose to underfish and hence reduce overall net benefits. That might not be so bad were it not that my model consistently showed that any holder of biomass allocations who harvested less than others
would gradually be allocated everyone else's shares. In other words, a biomass-allocation system in New England would result in those who tried to harvest enough to support the maximum net benefit to the nation losing their share of the fishery to anyone who chose to underfish. I doubt that that is an ideal policy objective.
It is, of course, very easy to visualize such a system within the rhetoric which supposes that all small-boat fishermen are inherently conservationists, who should be rewarded by just such a transfer of biomass-share, while all corporations owning large boats are resource-rapists dedicated to short-term profit, who should be squeezed out of the fishery. Setting such nonsense aside, however, it is clear that (all else being equal) corporate owners tend to win in any system
that offers transferable rights because they have better access to capital and hence are better able to survive present pain for future gain. Under a biomass-allocation system, it is entirely possible that some far-sighted corporation would invest in permits in a sector, use
them little if at all, and wait until the entire fishery came into its hands. Owner/operators of small boats are unlikely to be able to wait out the big players, even if we ignore the losses to everyone else that would result from the underfishing.
At least, those owner/operators who were dependent of the
biomass-allocated fishery would not be able to wait out their rivals. An FMP would, however, have to be carefully written to prevent the entire fishery from gradually accruing to the owners of unused latent permits (including the owners of small boats operating in other fisheries), with all active participants being excluded from the fishery.
I am sure that you are not aiming for either outcome but those are the likely results of an incautious application of the biomass-allocation idea.
I expect that each of these problems can be overcome and that biomass allocations can and should be added to the managers toolbox, for use in appropriate fisheries. (I still think that the idea would have worked well in the Scotian Shelf redfish fishery of the 1980s, when it was dominated by large companies using large trawlers.) However, we are a very long way from being ready to turn the Caddy/Kenchington/Townsend/Gavaris theoretical concept into something that could be applied to a broad spectrum of fisheries. We need a whole lot more abstract discussion (but not a discussion confined to theoreticians), though it might well be focused on some case studies. After that, we need a few real-world trials to see what new challenges emerge as biomass allocation is put into practice.
Which leads me to a question: Is it sensible to look to the New England Council for the development of case studies and/or an early real-world trial? I'd be the last person to dissuade the Council from applying a viable solution to current problems just because it is new and different
(particularly when it is a solution that I can fairly claim to have co-invented!). However, NEFMC is struggling to cope with existing and on-going demands, given constraints on staff, budget and simply the time demands on Council members. I would suggest that the development of wholly-new management approaches would be better left to others, until those approaches reach a much more finished state than the
biomass-allocation idea yet has.
Trevor Kenchington
P.S.: I would rather not comment on such matters but I must note that there is also, and quite separately, a major question over the political acceptability, in New England, of allocating biomass. We already hear objections to IFQs on the basis that nobody should own fish before they are caught. Yet IFQs only grant the right to harvest fish. Biomass
allocations are a way of privatizing ownership of the living resource on the ocean (even though all participants in the fishery would continue to share access, in contrast to freehold systems). I suspect that that would be deeply troubling to many people.
--
Trevor J. Kenchington PhD
Gadus Associates,
R.R.#1, Musquodoboit Harbour,
Nova Scotia B0J 2L0, CANADA
Science Serving the Fisheries
http://home.istar.ca/~gadus
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