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Collective arrangements for managing ocean fisheries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Charles B. Heck
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Abstract

With the great spread and intensification of marine fisheries exploitation, the traditional fisheries regime of free and open access (part of traditional “freedom of the seas”) has been modified by many regional or stock-related management arrangements, and is now undergoing drastic change through a radical extension of coastal state jurisdictions. This article deals mostly with the development of various regional and stock-related arrangements. After sketching the overall purposes of management, the aiticle details some of the differences among competing states which have delayed or limited management arrangements, or otherwise complicated their development. Issues of allocation may be uppermost for competing interests, discussed here in the context of shifts from undivided to divided catch limits. The regulatory powers of intergovernmental fisheries commissions have generally been quite limited. While fisheries scientists have in some cases performed vital roles in encouraging regional arrangements, their information and advice has been of limited scope and influence in securing more restrictive regulatory regimes. FAO's Committee on Fisheries (COFI) might be called a global fisheries commission, though much of its most important work has related to amimating and supporting arrangements of a regional character. The radical shift outward of national jurisdictions is rearranging fisheries exploitation in most parts of the world. Given the nature of the resource, however, some forms of regional or stock arrangements will still be needed if the overall purposes of management are to be realized.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , Summer 1975 , pp. 711 - 743
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1975

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References

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22 Serioas problems have been created by the migration of some Alaskan salmon beyond the line initially drawn as the maximum westward extension of “abstention.” These stocks have, therefore, been somewhat exploited by Japanese interests. In the area in question, there is mingling with salmon spawning in Asia.

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24 Ibid., pp. 239, 260–61. Tomasevich also presents other important factors in the delay of salmon regulation.

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26 An international commission to watch over these arrangements and coordinate research was not created until 1957.

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33 Under the old procedure, there had developed “a serious accumulation of proposals, and amendments and reservations to proposals, which had not been fully accepted.” Lucas, Cyril E., “International Fishery Bodies of the North Atlantic,” Law of the Sea Institute, University of Rhode Island, Occasional Paper no. 5 (Kingston, R.I.: 04 1970), p. 19Google Scholar.

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43 Article 7 and Article 10.

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49 Johnston, p. 43n. In the decades just before, one finds, it appears, a flowering of the notion that depletion was no t a serious worry and that conservation regulations were therefore unnecessary in sea fisheries in the area. A whole set of British national regulations controlling exploitation of coastal stocks were repealed, for instance, at this time. Johnston tells us (p. 326) that “the redoubtable T. H. Huxley is given much credit for urging repeal of the British fishery restrictions in the 1860s. At the International Fisheries Exhibition of 1883, in delivering the inaugural address, he went further and expressed the opinion that the cod, herring, pilchard, and mackerel fisheries, and probably all the great sea fisheries, were inexhaustible, and that any attempt to regulate these fisheries seemed, from the nature of the case, to be useless.”

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55 The Southwest Atlantic council was developed after the old Latin American Fisheries Council idea finally died. The Eastern Central Atlantic council was put together after an abortive attempt to carry on one organization for the whole west coast of the continent, down through South Africa.

56 Jackson, Roy I., “Some Observations on the Future Growth of World Fisheries and the Nature of the Conservation Problem” in The Future of the Sea's Resources, Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the Law of the Sea Institute, June 1967, Alexander, Lewis M. (ed.), (Kingston, R.I.: University of Rhode Island, 1968), p. 12Google Scholar. At this time, Jackson was the Assistant Director-General for Fisheries of FAO.

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59 These are words from a resolution adopted by the FAO General Conference in 1963. FAO General Conference Resolution no. 8/63, “Fisheries Development.”

60 Some important non-member governments have participated as well, notably the Soviet Union. Some say the Soviet Union would join FAO were fisheries the only concern of the organization.

61 This discussion has been entwined with debate over the future constitutional structure of COFI and its relationship to FAO. Some have argued for the reconstitution of COFI under another article of the FAO Constitution, allowing the Committee more independence and perhaps authority. Funds could then be raised independently for the Committee's activities, breaking through some present constraints. A more radical suggestion would break fisheries activities away from FAO, perhaps placing them in some new United Nations specialized agency for the oceans.

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