November 2, 2006
Backgrounder: Dispelling fears of a worldwide fisheries crisis
NOTE: Last week newspapers trumpeted a report in Science magazine that predicted the collapse of all seafood fisheries by 2048.
“That’s alarmist and unfounded,” says Ray Hilborn, University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences.
Hilborn, who teaches conservation, quantitative fisheries stock assessment and risk analysis, just returned from Sweden where he received this year’s Volvo Environment Prize for his work in understanding the human impact on the world’s fisheries and global ocean environment. He shared the prize with two other fisheries experts. (See http://www.environment-prize.com/index.e)
Hilborn’s comments below are based on a public lecture he gave last May, but are not in the exact order in which they were presented at that time.
Comments by Ray Hilborn
Professor of aquatic and fishery sciences
University of Washington
Based in part on a public lecture, “Reinterpreting the Fisheries Crisis”
May 9, 2006
The nature of the fisheries crisis is a clash of objectives, not a collapse of world fisheries.
The analogy some are using is that the state of world fisheries is like the Titanic, it’s hit an ice berg, it’s ripped up the middle, it’s hopelessly lost, it’s time to bail out and get into the lifeboats. The litany is that most of the world’s fisheries are depleted or rapidly deteriorating and that, wherever they operate, commercial fishing fleets are exceeding the ocean’s ecological limits.
My argument is that the Titanic is a poor analogy. There’s been a fleet of ships under different captains: hundreds of fisheries around the world managed in various ways. Some have hit the iceberg and are sunk. There is no question that we’ve got a lot of real disaster stories out there, but on the other hand many have been more careful, they’ve guided themselves to safety and found ways to manage their fisheries sustainably.
But rather than jumping into lifeboats, let’s follow the examples of ships that have found their way. Learn from the experiences of successful fisheries.
In the U.S. about 30 percent of fish stocks are classified as overfished, and from these overfished stocks we are getting about half of the potential yield, so in the U.S. we are losing about 15 percent of potential production, so we are obtaining about 85 percent of potential. To me that is a pretty good record, one that could certainly be improved, but still good.
Successful fisheries
Iceland is a country of 250,000 people that almost completely depends on fish. It has one of the highest standards of living in the world, by almost any comparison it’s higher than the U.S., and it does on the basis of sustainably managed fisheries. So to say fisheries management has failed, well than why is Iceland doing so well? Their fisheries are generally growing, they’re not declining, they are making a lot of money, something American fisheries have had a lot of trouble doing on average. They know how to manage fisheries, let’s learn from what they’ve done.
The Marine Stewardship Council is an organization that certifies fisheries as being well managed. It was founded originally by the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever. It has a series of principles for evaluating fisheries, a reasonably stringent set of criteria that this fishery is well managed on an ecological, biological and administrative basis. There is a whole list of species and stocks that have been certified, from West Australian rock lobster to New Zealand hoki to Alaska salmon.
Another example is from Bristol Bay, Alaska, a real success story, the total catch, the total return to that system has been at record levels for salmon since the late 1970s. This is generally ascribed to a combination of good single management agency with clear biological objectives, a limited-entry program to keep from having way too many boats — although they have too many boats — and good ocean conditions from 1977-1995
Successes like these and others from around the world illustrate that:
- Simple institutional structure can maintain biological success. One of the characteristics of Iceland is it is a tiny country. It doesn’t have seven layers of bureaucracy deciding fisheries policy. Bristol Bay is managed by a single agency, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
- The other very important aspect is stopping the race for fish. In open access systems and even in limited access systems there is just too much incentive for someone to build a bigger boat to try to catch the fish before someone else does. We have to stop this race to fish.
- There are other incentives for stopping bycatch and ecosystem impacts
- There is an ongoing change in objectives underway toward less ecosystem impact and more economic profitability
We need to be clear about our objectives
There is no question that, in general, fish are a lot less abundant than they were in the past. But let’s consider fisheries objectives. There are in some sense four traditional objectives for fisheries management:
- Maximum Sustainable Yield: The one most common that you will find in every piece of legislation is maximum sustainable yield, that is sustainable, not maximum catch but maximum sustainable yield. The Magnuson-Stevens Act, the Law of the Sea, every country I’ve ever looked at has that written right in as the underlying theme of management.
- Jobs and communities: Never underestimate the importance of maintaining jobs in communities and their associated political power. If you want to understand why New England has so many fisheries in crisis, it’s because of enormous political power being applied to maintaining existing people in existing industries and maintaining existing fishing communities. It’s true the world over.
- Ecosystem preservation: In some sense this is a newer agenda. The conservation NGOs have really been pushing this and they’ve been doing it quite successfully saying, look, there’s more to the world than just catch. Marine ecosystems have value in themselves and we ought to preserve them for their own value.
- Economic profitability: In addition to jobs and communities, we might actually want fisheries to make money. It’s a pretty foreign concept in a lot of North America but there’s a growing desire to see fisheries actually consistently profitable rather than go through the booms and the busts.
If you put all four of these together my interpretation is we had a zone of what I call traditional management where yield and jobs were the two objectives and you ended up with a kind of compromise that ended up with stocks heavily fished and potentially overfished.
If I want to be optimistic, I would say we’re moving to a zone of new consensus. That is the conservation NGOs have been very effective at really changing the objectives of society. There is no question now that maintenance of ecosystems is a much higher priority than it used to be. Whether it’s the Marine Mammal Protection Act or a whole bunch of legislation and public attitudes, we are much more concerned about maintaining ecosystem integrity than we used to be. And there is no question that the fishing industries have been pushing for fisheries management actions that will maintain us at higher levels of profitability.
Both of those are moving us the same direction toward lower fishing effort, higher population sizes and less impact in marine ecosystems.
It’s an encouraging thought.
Knowing what to do and actually doing it are two different things
We really do know how to manage fisheries, we have lots of examples of what to do, it’s just that we need to apply those lessons a lot more.
A global perspective
Within the economic zones of many countries the lessons have been learned and real progress is being made in the U.S. and Canada and Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland.
I don’t want to be a Pollyanna, there are a lot of parts of the world where there is very little hope. Europe is just a basket case because of the institutional structure, the EEU and the need for consensus. They seemed to have moved nowhere beyond the protection of jobs and as a result they have many overexploited fish stocks. There are a lot of countries that have very little effective governance and I just can’t be that optimistic about what’s going to happen in those places. The only thing that seems to work in those places appears to be when they have a social mechanism for small-scale management and communities can in some way – legally or extra-legally, — claim and protect their own fishing rights.
The high seas, I’m a complete pessimist. There isn’t a high seas fishery in the world today that is being held above its unregulated level by management agencies, they are totally ineffective because they have no power, they almost all require consensus. Until we have a whole new form of international governance I can’t see how we will effectively manage the high-seas.
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For more information:
Hilborn, rayh@u.washington.edu
These comments are based on, but are not in the exact order which they were presented, in a lecture that was recorded by UWTV, which can be seen in its entirety at http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rID=2515
