1 - Introduction

Summary

This book is directed primarily at business students who wish to learn about the economics of fisheries. It should be useful also for others who take an interest in the fishing industry, such as journalists, politicians and public administrators dealing with the fishing industry and fisheries management and all the issues that arise in that context. These issues can be complex. Fish often migrate over a wide area that extends over the jurisdiction of several sovereign states and into the high seas. The abundance of fish varies substantially over time, partly because of fishing, but even more so because of the variability of nature, for reasons often ill understood and unpredictable. This is a perfect set-up for frustrated expectations and conflicts between different industrial groups and sovereign states.

To understand these issues is a formidable task for scholars and scientists wielding the powerful tools of science: data gathering and formal analysis by mathematics and statistics. This book attempts to communicate the major lessons learned in a way that is accessible to people without much formal training in these disciplines. Formal analysis is mainly by graphs, but equations and manipulations of them cannot be entirely avoided if something meaningful is to be said, and occasionally some simple calculus is used. This should not be beyond the grasp of students of business administration or social sciences. The issues are illustrated with examples from fisheries in various parts of the world: fish stocks that have crashed; conflicts over jurisdiction at sea; and management innovations, such as individual fish quotas.

Sometimes one is left with the impression that the excitement over fisheries issues is way out of proportion to the economic importance of the industry. As an example, the newspapers of early 2020 carried articles to the effect that access to fishing in the waters of the United Kingdom might be an obstacle to a post-Brexit trade agreement with the European Union, despite the fact that the economic contribution of the fish involved is almost negligible for both parties. The fisheries of the United Kingdom are indeed unlikely to be sufficiently important to make or break trading relations with the European Union, but it may nevertheless be noted that the contribution of fisheries to gross domestic product (GDP) underrates the importance of fisheries as an industry.