Anticipating the Growth of an Ocean Aquaculture Industry

Abstract

& In assessing the future expansion of aquaculture in coastal-ocean environments, most studies focus only on the constraint posed by the local environmental assimilative capacity. In open-ocean environments, however, the assimilative capacity is difficult to gauge. We develop an alternative economic approach for projecting the growth of the open-ocean aquaculture industry. We evaluate equilibria in the market for seafood, where the product may be supplied either by a wild-harvest fishery or open-ocean aquaculture or both. In our framework, the net demand for farmed fish determines the size of the aquaculture industry and, in turn, the levels of pollution discharges. We illustrate our approach with a case study of a groundfish fishery and the proposed open-ocean aquaculture of Atlantic cod in New England. We find that, for a range of competitive production costs for aquaculture, the optimal industry structure would comprise both a wild-harvest fishery and aquaculture.

Marine reserve creation and interactions between fisheries and capture‐based aquaculture: A bio‐economic model analysis

“…Competition between ocean user groups is getting increased attention from scientists (Bishop & Samples, ; Hoagland et al., ; Jin et al., ; Laukkanen, ; Lee & Iwasa, ). Fishermen and marine farmers are competitive ocean users when aquaculture uses seeds (i.e., juveniles) extracted from the wild, causing an increase in fishing mortality of the wild stock, resulting in the reduction of commercial wild fisheries targeting adult individuals.…”

“…Secondly, we present MPAs as an integrated management tool to reduce potential conflicts between different users of the sea. This is an additional contribution to the scarce but important literature on resolving conflicts between ocean users via zoning, thereby separating conflicting interest groups (Bishop & Samples, ; Hoagland et al., ; Jin, Kite‐Powell, & Hoagland, ; Laukkanen, ; Lee & Iwasa, ). MPAs may however not be conducive for reducing conflict because some fishers may experience an increase in yields from the implementation of MPAs, while others get reductions in harvests (Holland, ; Ngoc & Flaaten, ; Sumaila, ; Sumaila & Armstrong, ).…”

Market policy and destructive network effects

“…In her review, Cantillon came to the conclusion that there is a tendency for using market models underpinned by neoclassical assumptions in business literature and research on the seafood exchange (eg. Asche et al 2002;Jin et al 2007;Myrland and Kinnucan 2005;Wellman 1992), and that these fundamental assumptions are present in the views of politicians attempting to understand this particular industry (Cantillon, 2010). The same can be said about the pelagic auctions, as they assumedly are established from a "market" perspective (This angle is further explored in a recent publication by the authors, Abrahamsen and Håkansson 2015a).…”