Social and economic aspects of reef fisheries and their management

Summary

Because fisheries management involves the regulation of human activities, it should properly be considered a social science. Unfortunately, social aspects of management have been largely neglected compared with natural science investigations of the population biology of harvested organisms.

Tropical reef fisheries suffer from the ‘tragedy of the commons’ wherein individuals stand to gain by exceeding equitable levels of use of a common resource. This effect is exacerbated in areas subject to escalating popula tion pressures, an increasingly large proportion of the developing world, where alternative livelihoods are unavailable or are economically un attractive. In many areas, population expansion and poverty have led to Malthusian overfishing, where fishers initiate wholesale resource destruc tion in order to maintain their livelihoods in the face of declining stocks. The behaviour of fishers under these circumstances often follows the pre dictions of a simple bioeconomic fixed-price model. In this model, profit from catch follows a parabola with increasing fishing effort and is inter sected by a cost curve which rises linearly. The point at which the curves intersect is the bionomic equilibrium point, and occurs at the level of fishing effort at which no net profit is possible, a level at which the stock is seriously overfished. In areas with abundant unemployed labour, new entrants are attracted to a fishery until the bionomic equilibrium is reached. At a societal level, the greatest net profit from a fishery can be obtained when fishing is restricted to the level wherein the difference between the gross profit and cost curves is the greatest. This point is termed the maximum economic yield (MEY) and generally lies well to the left of the maximum gross profit point. The latter point corresponds to the maximum sustainable yield of the Schaefer model. Numerous studies of reef fisheries suggest that the MEY lies at approximately 40% of the fishing effort level of the bionomic equilibrium point. Many intensively exploited reef fisheries could thus benefit from a 60% reduction in effort, usually through a reduction in numbers of fishers.

Implementing effective management is difficult and must be based on a thorough understanding of the interacting ecological, sociocultural and economic systems. This generally requires one or more years of intensive study prior to the formulation of a strategy, and should include the affected community in a close and substantive way. I summarize some guidelines for the effective acquisition of economic and sociological data in coral reef settings. Management will rarely be effective without community participation but most management strategies will need to mix both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ elements. Devising effective management strategies in the future will require the collaborative efforts of social and natural sci entists, each aware of the basics of the others’ specialities, and each con tributing to assist human communities dependent on reefs to ensure the sustainability of their resources.