The crisis in global fisheries: can trade laws provide a cure?

Abstract

Fisheries, over-capacity and subsidies

A consensus is emerging regarding world fisheries.

Overall, the world's living marine resources are being overexploited; in many major areas a reprieve in the level of fishing would assure larger and more valuable fish supplies in the long term. Less would be more.

The system is uneconomical and unsustainable. We are paying an unnecessarily high price, in capture costs and environmental degradation, for a dwindling catch.

Conventional management measures (including time, space and gear constraints) have not proved themselves capable of stanching excessive fishing effort. Indeed, many of the traditional measures, by prohibiting the most economical means of fishing, amplify inefficiencies, raising unit costs without compensatory benefits in catch reduction.

Increasing blame is being placed on over-capacity. As long as investment in harvest capacity is excessive, in other words beyond the level required for efficient attainment of fisheries objectives, effective regulatory efforts are frustrated at the levels of both rule making and enforcement.