The Rise and Fall of the Yarmouth Herring Fishery

Suggested Bibliographic Reference: Challenging New Frontiers in the Global Seafood Sector: Proceedings of the Eighteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, July 11-15, 2016. Compiled by Stefani J. Evers and Ann L. Shriver. International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET), Corvallis, 2016.Proceedings of the Eighteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, held July 11-15, 2016 at Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Center (AECC), Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.This paper traces the rise and fall of, in its day, one of the most important fisheries in the world. The fishery exhibits the impact of changes in demand and supply brought about by technological advance in three noticeable shocks. Fishing is said to have commenced in 495AD. So prolific were the stocks that the fishery remained sustainable even with the expansion of demand brought about by the arrival of the railways in the 1800s. The invention of the steam drifter in 1896 led to a rapid growth in total revenue product and overfishing eventually brought about the complete collapse of the fishery and the life-cycle ended in the 1960s. This paper examines why the sustainable equilibrium forecast by the Gordon-Schaefer model did not materialise and the implications of advances in technology for management of a local fishery based on a highly migratory species