صعود و نزول از شیلات روگی پرتقالی ایرلند: یک تجزیه و تحلیل اقتصادی

An Irish commercial fishery for orange roughy began in the Northeast Atlantic in 2001 with the assistance of government grants. The fishery began as an open access, non-quota fishery. The rapid boom and bust of many deep water fisheries was experienced. Landings peaked in 2002 and then dropped significantly the following year. Many vessels were forced out of the fishery due to high costs and rapidly declining stocks. By 2005 the fishery was largely closed. Applying a bioeconomic analysis, this paper shows why the fishery no longer exists and discusses both the external and opportunity costs of the fishery. A bioeconomic model is applied to the available data to assess the open access effort and harvest with and without government grant aid. The results suggest that in the absence of subsidies, deep water trawling would not have been viable. In addition to the financial costs such as high fuel consumption, there are also externalities associated with deep water trawling. Orange roughy is closely associated with deep water ecosystems such as seamounts and cold water corals. This paper examines the costs of damage to cold water corals. These costs include the loss of fish habitats and lost future use and preservation values.

Increasing pressure on traditional fisheries in readily accessible inshore waters on the continental shelf has forced fishermen to explore deeper waters [1] and [2]. These new fisheries are facilitated by the development of new fishing gear and sonar technologies. The move to deep water fisheries is encouraged further by governments offering grants and subsidies in an effort to alleviate the pressures on inshore stocks [3]. Perhaps the best known example of the large-scale commercial exploitation of an underutilized deep water fishery is the case of the orange roughy (Hoplostethus atlanticus). Fishing for orange roughy began in Australia and New Zealand in the 1970s [4] and [5] and subsequently in Namibia and Ireland in the 1990s [6] and [7]. However, the orange roughy fishery is frequently cited as an example of poor fisheries management where the stock has declined significantly and is not rebuilding [8] and [9]. Orange roughy fisheries are also considered to be heavily subsidised [10], and involve excessive monitoring and compliance costs to the state [11]. Concerns have also been voiced that the orange roughy fishery and its habitats are not resilient enough to withstand the destructive fishing practices on vulnerable deep sea ecosystems and the resulting environmental costs too large and uncertain to allow the fishery to continue [12]. On the other hand a number of other studies have argued that “the jury is still out” on the question of whether orange roughy fisheries are sustainable over the long term [5] and [13] and some suggest that the orange roughy fishery should continue and is both sustainable and economically viable [14], provides employment and supports coastal communities. Hilborn et al. [14] report that the New Zealand orange roughy fishery was in fact sustainable and close to being economically optimal. This inconsistent picture presents a number of difficulties for policy makers concerned about the management of the deep sea fishery. It is worth noting, however, that the paper by Hilborn et al. [14] focuses on the fish stock and ignores the effects of fishing on the ecosystem and thus provides a financial perspective rather than an economic one since externalities are not given consideration. Concerns by academics and the public at large about the destructive effects of deep sea fishing are not confined solely to the collapse of fish stocks as suggested by Hilborn et al. [14] but have also focused on the negative external effects of trawling on deep sea habitats. Recently, attention has been drawn to the fact that deep sea habitats such as cold water corals and seamounts play an important role in the provision of ecosystem goods and services. By damaging cold water coral, destructive fishing practices thus impose user costs1 not only on the fishermen themselves but also other stakeholders. Glenn et al. [16] report that the Irish public show strong preferences for a ban on trawling in order to conserve cold water corals in the Atlantic and Foley et al. [17] suggest that fishing practices that damage cold water coral may reduce the yield of another deep sea fish species, redfish. Armstrong and van den Hove [18] also suggest that deep sea trawling can damage cold water coral and impose external effects on coastal fishermen. An Irish fishery targeting orange roughy began in 2001 and ended shortly after, resulting in the boom and bust cycle of many orange roughy fisheries. Shephard et al. [19] discuss the stakeholder aspects of the fishery and Minto and Nolan [20] have looked at the biological background of the fishery, while Shephard and Rogan have considered the seasonal distribution of the fishery [7]. There have been no discussions on the economics of the Irish orange roughy fishery. In this paper Irish orange roughy data is applied to a bioeconomic model and the results of the fishery with grant aid and without are compared. Studies of orange roughy are limited, two studies that have applied bioeconomic models to orange roughy fisheries are Hilborn et al. [14] and Campbell et al. [21]. Hilborn et al. [14] use a simple model to evaluate alternative management histories for New Zealand orange roughy stocks. Campbell et al. [21] use a cohort model to analyse the orange roughy fishery off the east coast of Tasmania, while this paper applies a biomass model. The short duration of the Irish orange roughy venture, and the limitations in available Irish data make the application of a biomass model both acceptable and unavoidable. For the purpose of studying the economic consequences of this fishery, a biomass model is also sufficient. This paper provides an additional discussion compared to Campbell et al. [21], namely on the externalities of fishing on deep water habitats associated with the orange roughy fishery and whether the precautionary approach has a role to play in the fishery. The aims of this paper are: 1. To describe the orange roughy fishery in the NE Atlantic. 2. To establish the influence of grant aid on the orange roughy fishery in the NE Atlantic. 3. To demonstrate why the NE Atlantic orange roughy fishery no longer exists. 4. To discuss the costs to the NE Atlantic orange roughy fishery including the external costs. The remainder of this paper is as follows: the next section gives a background to the orange roughy fishery in Ireland and elsewhere. A brief description of the bioeconomic model and the orange roughy data set is then provided. The data for the orange roughy fishery is applied to the bioeconomic model and the open access harvest and effort with and without government grant aid are evaluated. This is followed by a discussion on the additional costs to deep water fisheries including user costs, preservation values and the precautionary approach.

This paper describes the rise and fall of the Irish orange roughy fishery. The fishery began in 2001 following deep water exploratory trials in 2000 but ended a short number of years later because of high fuel costs, low prices, low TAC shares, rapidly declining stocks and sustainability issues [54]. During the short period of the fishery harvests reached a peak in 2002 and then dropped by 75% the following year; fuel prices increased; price per tonne dropped; and when TACs were introduced by the EU, Ireland only received 300 tonnes. There is a growing literature on the global impacts of subsidies to fisheries in general and more specifically to deep water and high seas fisheries [3] and [10]. Through the Whitefish Renewal Scheme grant aid was offered to Irish fishermen for the updating or purchase of new vessels, an incentive was given to enter into the deep water fishery and diversify from shallower waters. The results of our bioeconomic analysis are interesting for two reasons: (1) the calculated open access effort and harvest are significantly lower than the estimated MSY levels, i.e. the costs are so high that even under open access, the effort is low, and (2) through the analysis it has been shown that even in the presence of grant aid total costs would have been too high for a sustainable fishery of any size to take place. In essence the government's grant aid was a subsidy for mining the Irish orange roughy stock. The analysis with no subsidy suggests that on average the costs were too high, and the prices too low to support entry into the fishery. This supports the work of Sumaila et al. [3] who claim subsidies to be the Achilles heel of deep sea trawl fleets, albeit that they discuss fuel subsidies. There is a broader question as to whether orange roughy fisheries are sustainable in an economic sense, and this issue has received scant attention in the literature. All of the literature on the sustainability of orange roughy fisheries investigates this question from a narrow single species perspective based only on the orange roughy stock and concludes that it is still unclear whether orange roughy fisheries are sustainable [5], [13] and [14]. In what follows this issue is explored from a broader economic perspective and a clear position is taken on this question for the Irish orange roughy fishery. Economic theory suggests that a key condition of weak sustainability is that (a) the aggregate capital stock should be non-declining [55] and, (b) that the rents from a renewable resource that is depleted should be reinvested in other forms of capital. An important condition of strong sustainability is that natural capital itself should be non-declining [56] and [57]. With respect to the weak sustainability condition, the Irish orange roughy fishery is an open access fishery, consequently rents are presumably dissipated, there are no rents to reinvest and rents have never been collected by the Irish exchequer for this fishery. With regards to the second criteria there is growing evidence that the natural capital stock both in terms of the orange roughy population and cold water coral (CWC) habitats are declining. The Irish roughy fishery fails to meet both these sustainability criteria and therefore from an economic standpoint it cannot be argued that it is a sustainable fishery. It is worth noting also that not only did the public exchequer fail to collect the rents but that the public exchequer actually used tax payers' money and bore a lot of the costs in the form of subsidies to establish the fishery in the first place. A final aim of this paper was to evaluate the costs to the Northeast Atlantic orange roughy fishery including the external costs. It is possible to include external costs in the bioeconomic model. However, due to shortage of data such an analysis is outside the scope of this paper. There are some empirical bioeconomic analyses that incorporate externalities such as chemical runoff from agricultural land [58], loss of habitat such as salt marshes, wetlands or cold water corals [59], [60] and [61] and the impacts of coastal zone development [62]. Although this question is not addressed empirically it is worthy of comment in view of the external benefits associated with orange roughy habitat. Managers must balance the benefits of the fishery, for example food, income and employment, against the costs of fishing impacts [63]. It is critical that all impacts are taken into account to ensure that the current gain from the fishing activity is not at the expense of significant reductions in other environmental functions, now or in the future [63]. There are additional costs of harvesting species such as orange roughy, namely the potential loss of deep water habitats such as cold water corals which can be considered a negative externality caused by the trawling industry. Deep sea trawling is thought to represent the single biggest threat to CWC ecosystems which are slow growing, fragile and vulnerable to deep-water fisheries [64] and [65]. This also puts at risk their potential alternative use to humans [66]. The external costs of deep water trawling include the loss of spawning grounds and the amenity value associated with CWC habitat. For example, Armstrong and van den Hove [18] show that coastal fishermen are of the view that CWC areas function as natural marine reserves for fish and thus the corals are valuable in maintaining their fishery. As bottom trawling expands its reach into steadily deeper waters, CWC reefs are getting increasingly damaged. Foley et al. [17] applied a production function approach to reveal that a decline in CWC habitat of between 30% and 50% could explain a drop in the harvest of Norwegian redfish of between 11% and 29%. Hence despite fisheries increasingly being managed, the common nature of fish habitats may be resulting in the classical tragedy. Amenity values such as existence values for CWC may also be significant. Glenn et al. [16] used choice experiments to elicit public preferences for the protection of CWC in Ireland. Although a precise monetary value could not be placed on the resource, results indicate strong preferences for a ban on all areas where CWC are thought to exist and findings suggest that a large percentage of those surveyed valued corals, would like to see them protected for future generations, for their role as an essential fish habitat (EFH), for their pure existence value and also for the option to use or see them in the future. These concerns about habitat damage are not restricted to Ireland. Studies in Norway [67] and [68], the United States [69], Chile [70], Australia [71] and New Zealand [72] have also voiced similar concerns. It has been estimated that between one-third and a half of known deep-water coral habitat in Norwegian waters has already been impacted by trawling. The problem is that the social costs of damaging CWC habitat are typically borne by others, sometimes at considerable distances from the trawling activities. A further problem is that CWC and seamount habitats and to some extent the orange roughy fishery itself are essentially exhaustible resources, at least when seen from an ecological viewpoint. Their destruction may imply the disappearance of ecosystems that have evolved over thousands of years. These CWC and seamount habitats harbour a rich diversity of flora and fauna, only a small fraction of which scientists have properly investigated because scientific enquiry in the deep sea cannot keep abreast of fishing activities [73]. A difficulty in relation to decisions of this type arises because of uncertainty in future valuations of CWC ecosystem services. From the literature of optimal harvest decisions in relation to old growth forests it is known that the presence of non-market amenity values provided by a standing forest has an important impact on when or indeed whether to harvest [74] and [75]. d' Autume and Schubert [76] have shown that the resource stock of an exhaustible resource remains for ever higher when it has amenity value and Conrad [74] and Reed [77] demonstrated that if the value of non-market amenities is high enough it may never be optimal to cut an old growth forest for its timber. In conclusion the findings of this paper suggest that deep sea trawling in Ireland for orange roughy contributes very little with respect to net social benefits (profit and/or employment), and has not been economically sustainable. Though mining of orange roughy can be defended on capital theoretic terms, when resource rent is optimally taxed and reinvested, the trawling after orange roughy can be expected to impose significant external effects in terms of future user costs to the fishery as well as heritage and existence values [16]. For a fishery such as orange roughy, where biological and stock data is limited and where the external costs have yet to be itemised and valued a precautionary approach is well advised. The policy of taking action before uncertainty about possible environmental damages is resolved has been referred to as the ‘precautionary principle’. One justification for this is that the costs of damage to biological resources may exceed the costs of preventative action [78]. Also, as seen irreversible damage may occur, such as species extinctions. The emphasis is thus on avoiding potentially damaging situations in the face of uncertainty over future outcomes [79] and [80]. The precautionary principle could also be implemented by using marine reserves as a part of fisheries management [81]. In 2005, the Irish marine authorities took a decision to impose a temporary ban on fishing for orange roughy thus pursuing a precautionary approach in the absence of information of a more detailed scientific and economic nature. The findings of this analysis indicate that this was a move in the right direction.