Bycatch Credits for Bigeye Tuna in Purse Seine Fisheries

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.Bigeye tunas are bycatch to skipjack tunas when tuna purse seine vessels set their nets on floating aggregator devices (FADs). Current approaches to managing bigeye in both the Eastern Pacific Ocean (EPO) and the Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) entail permanently closed areas, such as the “correlito” in the EPO, temporary time-area closures such as shutting down fishing on the high seas in the WCPO, and closing the entire FAD fishery for extended periods of time (one or more months), such as in both the EPO and WCPO. Such effort management can reduce bigeye bycatch through reducing all FAD catches, but suffers from several inefficiencies: (1) fishing spills over to other modes of fishing, notably setting on dolphins or on free schools with subsequent impact upon biodiversity, notably bycatch, and creating ecological-biodiversity trade-offs; (2) with growing overcapacity, closed periods must become increasingly extended to reduce bigeye bycatch, lowering target catch and profits and even making some vessels unprofitable. By not pricing bycatch at the margin, incentives are not created: (1) to efficiently reduce the proportion of bycatch in total catch as well as all catch; (2) change behavior throughout the supply chain and consumers as the internalized bycatch external cost is passed through the supply chain; (3) to generate dynamic incentives to induce or direct bycatch reducing technological change. Transferable bycatch credit systems and risk pools are proposed to reduce bycatch to incentivize real-time spatial management and induce directed, bycatch-reducing technological change