New Initiatives on Bluefin Tuna Management

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the U.S. government agency that regulates offshore fishing, has proposed a new set of regulations to reduce bycatch of Bluefin tuna by economic disincentive. The Washington Post reports that:

“Under the proposal, the NMFS would sharply cut back the number of bluefin tuna that individual fishing vessels are allowed to capture accidentally, setting a quota for each boat and requiring fishermen to include the bluefin they discard at sea under that cap. The NMFS also would change the long-standing formula by which it calculates the number of pounds of bluefin tuna that a long-liner may legally bring to shore for sale.”

This effort is very much in line with an article I’ve just published on incentivizing compliance on the high seas.   The article is available here, and it argues for an incentives based approach to management, using the 1911 Sea Fur Seals treaty as a model.  I argue that the scarcity problem of common resources on the high seas should be addressed by better governance and incentives, not by a property rights approach.

Another noteworthy developments on managing high seas tuna fisheries is this new program for a partnership between the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), a 183 member organization that has acted as a financial mechanism for a number of international climate conventions, in which the latter has committed a whopping $30 million, and is leveraging an additional $150 million in co-financing.   This project will run from 2013 through 2018, and aims to reduce illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing through monitoring and control, to lessen ecological impacts from illegal fishing, and to improve biodiversity.   Árni M. Mathiesen, FAO Assistant Director-General for Fisheries and Aquaculture stated: “Through collective action at all levels and broad cooperation that optimizes the use of scarce resources, this project – and the wider Common Oceans  initiative – will help move the world away from ‘the race to fish’ and towards implementation of an ecosystem approach. This is crucial to ensuring the future well-being and productivity of these vital marine ecosystems. Early successes will create incentives for donors and agencies to further invest in these types of catalytic projects.”

If you have an opinion on the NMFS regulations, the deadline for public comments ends on December 10.