From the article “How Behavioral Economics Could Save Both the Fishing Industry and the Oceans” written by Eric Pooley, he elaborates that previously, fishermen have overfished because there are limits to catch fish in certain time, but he introduces a new method to keep fishery market sustainable. It is called catch share management. He explains it works well by changing human behavior with putting incentives. It is mainly done by the fishery share, the maximum catch amount not time, determined scientifically. The share is based on the average amount of fish per year. The limit is not ‘tightened’ but ‘flexible’ for fishermen and consumers. The catch limit management helps fishery stock to increase at a given example in the Gulf of Mexico of red snapper fish. Also it helps to reduce the amount of discarded fish by 50%. Also other regions such as Northern California, Oregon and Washington State are along with the new method.
I enjoy reading the article. I think there is a question how we monitor each fisherment fish at the right stock. Also we learn in class that since the fish moves broadly, it is not easy to place under jurisdiction, so I hope many countries are cooperatively participated in fishing at a sustainable level.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/how_behavioral_economics_could.html
While catch share management seems to be a good method to prevent fishes from going out of stocks due to over harvesting, like you mentioned at the end of the blog, it’s hard to monitor such a “policy”. It would be very effort, time and money consuming for the monitorization to be carried out properly and efficiently, and many might think it’s not worth it.
Good information! This is what exactly we talked in class today:) Even there is ITQ to protect a fisher population from overfishing or pollution, it is hard to operate ITQ successfully because it is usually difficult to monitor fish population over large area. Thanks for sharing the infromation!!