The Spot Prawn Fishery The Spot Prawn Fishery - Basel Action ...

more, but less than 10,000 pounds in either year.
•$1,000 for each vessel landing 10,000 pounds or
more in either year.
The fee requirement expired 31 March 2001, but
the Observer Program will continue until all
monies collected have been spent (Reilly, CDFG.
Pers. comm., February 2001).
Due to the sensitivity of the issue, the data will
remain confidential until a larger sample size is
available. The data presently available “may not
be representative of the fishery as a whole and it
could be misleading to disseminate it” (Reilly,
CDFG. Pers. comm., February 2001).
RECOMMENDATIONS
Approach of the Recommendations
The disciplines of Ecological Economics and
Ecosystem Health are indispensable tools for
achieving the long-term sustainability of the
spot prawn fishery. (See the “Ecological Economics”
and “Ecosystem Health” boxes for details of
these academic fields.) APEX’s recommendations
for the spot prawn fishery are set in the context of
these disciplines. The discussion is divided into
or the true costs (environmental,
social, cultural) associated with natural
resource management systems
or projects. Ecological Economics, and
the analytical models it employs,
improves on traditional economic
and resource management systems
in numerous ways.
These include:
•clearly defining ecological sustainability
in an applied context
•appropriately valuing ecological
services, biodiversity, fisheries, and
other irreplaceable assets
•analyzing true uncertainty (traditional
economic theory converts all
uncertainty to risk, which in some
cases, such as global warming, is
not possible)
•implementing the precautionary
principle to avoid uncertain but
potentially catastrophic events
•examining the costs and benefits
of projects beyond traditional
cost/benefit analysis
•methodologies for examining the
economic and environmental
impact of capital flow
•measuring welfare benefits of
different management decision
options at the community as well
as national level
•a critique of trade theory and positive
suggestions for changes in
trade policy
•examining the details of free trade
and problems with both competitive
and comparative advantage
•constructing alternatives to the
GNP (in response to the critiques of
GNP, the World Bank has recently
introduced the concept of sustainable
income, an improvement that
still has many flaws)
•changing tastes and preferences
•examining institutions and social
traps that lead to economically and
socially inefficient results
•exploring alternative, incentivebased
regulatory systems that are
more economically efficient and
environmentally appropriate than
command and control
•specific tax and regulatory policies
to support ecological sustainability,
greater equity, economic efficiency,
and democratic regulatory institutions
The Spot Prawn Fishery: A Status Report
four problem areas: ecological sustainability and
appropriate scale for the fishery, fair distribution of
fishing privileges and benefits, democratic regulation
and management, and economic efficiency.
1. Ecological Sustainability and
Scale of the Fishery
In the world’s oceans we find the last of the great
wildernesses. Places where the hunter-gathers of
days gone by still exist. The “last buffalo hunt [is]
occurring on the rolling blue prairies of the oceans”
(Safina 1998, p. xvi). Marine ecosystems still provide
human society with a wild diversity of products and
services. Managing human intervention in these
systems and the resulting flow of goods and services
is therefore central to maintaining healthy, resilient,
stable, and complex marine ecosystems. It is important
to recognize, though, that regulating humans’
interactions with the marine realm is much more
complicated than, for example, managing modern
farming’s monocultures.
In order to ensure the long-term productive
potential of a fishery, the ecological sustainability
and ecosystem health of the entire system must be
maintained and prioritized over the short-term
economic potential of, say, a particular fishing season.
This is justified even using strictly economic
•examining community-based
resource management systems
•dealing with issues of intergenerational
equity, which generally are
ignored by traditional economics
•fitting economic criteria with
Ecosystem Health criteria for
resource management
•combining economic theory with
environmental impact statements,
consumer labeling, and other NGO
initiatives
Ecological Economics is a dynamic
field with a great deal of research
still under way. Nevertheless, the discipline’s
existing strengths and benefits
are numerous.There is little
doubt that Ecological Economic theory
and tools have the capacity to
move fisheries management
beyond rhetoric and create management
systems that are ecologically
sound, economically viable, and
socially equitable, thereby achieving
true fisheries sustainability.
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