Credible Enforcement Policies Under Illegal Fishing: Does Individual Transferable Quotas Induce to Reduce the Gap Between Approved and Proposed Allowable Catches?

Rocha, José María Da; Villasante, Sebastián; González, Rafael Trelles

doi:10.1007/s13280-013-0459-6

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 41 publications

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“…fishing is a significant problem facing fisheries worldwide (Sumaila et al, 2006;Agnew et al, 2009), with a significant impact on sustainability of fish stocks and the economic and social benefits derived from fisheries (Charles et al, 1999;Sumaila et al, 2006). Thus, several measures have been proposed to tackle IUU fishing (OECD, 2004;Österblom et al, 2015) many of which are derived from the basic economic insight that people engage in IUU fishing because it pays economically to do so (Becker, 1995;Kuperan and Sutinen, 1998;OECD, 2004;Miller et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Carding System as an Approach to Increasing the Economic Risk of Engaging in IUU Fishing?

Sumaila

2019

Front. Mar. Sci.

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The European Union (EU) instituted a carding system via its European Commission Regulation (EC) No. 1005/2008 with the goal of incentivizing fish and fish products (fish) exporting countries to the Union to take action to reduce IUU fishing in their waters. This regulation stipulates that the EU will issue warnings, known as a "yellow card," to countries that perform poorly in the effort to end IUU fishing in their waters. Failure to curb IUU fishing will result in a ban in the export of fish to the EU via the issuance of a red card. Here, I ask the following questions: what is the economic risk of being red carded by the EU? Is the economic risk big enough to significantly reduce IUU fishing in a targeted country's waters? Would the risk be broad enough to result in a significant reduction in IUU fishing globally? What if the two other leading fish importing countries, i.e., the United States and Japan, also institute a similar carding system as the EU? To address these questions, I develop and compute an economic risk index for the carding system. This study suggests that the impact of an EU only IUU carding system could be significant for some targeted countries but its effect globally, with respect to reducing IUU fishing, would be minimal. However, I find that the economic risk to fish exporting countries would increase significantly if the United States and Japan also instituted similar carding systems, which would in turn help to reduce IUU fishing worldwide. This contribution shows that an IUU carding system could contribute significantly to the elimination of IUU fishing provided a critical mass of top fish importing countries participate in such a system.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Carding System as an Approach to Increasing the Economic Risk of Engaging in IUU Fishing?

Sumaila

2019

Front. Mar. Sci.

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Socio-economic impacts of the landing obligation of the European Union Common Fisheries Policy on Galician (NW Spain) small-scale fisheries

Villasante

Pita

Antelo

et al. 2019

Ocean & Coastal Management

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A tragedy of the commons case study: modeling the fishers king crab system in Southern Chile

Zambrano

Laguna

Kuperman

et al. 2023

PeerJ

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Illegal fishing in small-scale fisheries is a contentious issue and resists a straightforward interpretation. Particularly, there is little knowledge regarding cooperative interactions between legal and illegal fishers and the potential effects on fisheries arising from these interactions. Taking the Chilean king crab (Lithodes santolla; common name centolla) fishery as a case study, our goal is twofold: (i) to model the effect of illegal-legal fishers’ interactions on the fishery and (ii) analyze how management and social behavior affect fishery’s outcomes. We framed the analysis of this problem within game theory combined with network theory to represent the architecture of competitive interactions. The fishers’ system was set to include registered (legal) fishers and unregistered (illegal) fishers. In the presence of unregistered fishers, legal fishers may decide to cooperate (ignoring the presence of illegal fishers) or defect, which involves becoming a “super fisher” and whitewashing the captures of illegal fishers for a gain. The utility of both players, standard fisher and super fisher depend on the strategy chosen by each of them, as well as on the presence of illegal fishers. The nodes of the network represent the legal fishers (both standard and super fishers) and the links between nodes indicate that these fishers compete for the resource, assumed to be finite and evenly distributed across space. The decision to change (or not) the adopted strategy is modeled considering that fishers are subjected to variable levels of temptation to whitewash the illegal capture and to social pressure to stop doing so. To represent the vital dynamics of the king crab, we propose a model that includes the Allee effect and a term accounting for the crab extraction. We found that the super fisher strategy leads to the decrease of the king crab population under a critical threshold as postulated in the tragedy of the commons hypothesis when there are: (i) high net extraction rates of the network composed of non-competing standard fishers, (ii) high values of the extent of the fishing season, and (iii) high density of illegal fishers. The results suggest that even in the presence of super fishers and illegal fishers, the choice of properly distributed fishing/closure cycles or setting an extraction limit per vessel can prevent the king crab population from falling below a critical threshold. This finding, although controversial, reflects the reality of this fishery that, for decades, has operated under a dynamic in which whitewashing and super fishers have become well established within the system.

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Credible Enforcement Policies Under Illegal Fishing: Does Individual Transferable Quotas Induce to Reduce the Gap Between Approved and Proposed Allowable Catches?

Cited by 3 publications

References 41 publications

A Carding System as an Approach to Increasing the Economic Risk of Engaging in IUU Fishing?

A Carding System as an Approach to Increasing the Economic Risk of Engaging in IUU Fishing?

Socio-economic impacts of the landing obligation of the European Union Common Fisheries Policy on Galician (NW Spain) small-scale fisheries

A tragedy of the commons case study: modeling the fishers king crab system in Southern Chile

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