Bycatch Avoidance under Cooperative Management

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.The US Pacific Whiting fishery is a large industrial fishery with landings over 260 thousand metric tons valued at $64 million in 2014. A catch share system was implemented in the fishery in 2011 with IFQs for shoreside vessels and allocations to a mothership and a catcher-processor cooperative. Bycatch is a very small percentage of total catch, but it includes overfished and protected species with bycatch caps that could potentially close the fishery. Under catch shares, quotas for most bycatch species are allocated to individual shoreside vessels and to the cooperatives. A global bycatch quota is set for Chinook salmon. Bycatch tends to be fairly rare and lumpy creating substantial uncertainty in individual vessel bycatch. Consequently, vessels in each of the sectors have used contractual agreements that pool bycatch quota but require pool members to follow rules designed to reduce bycatch. The structure of these agreements differs by sector. In this presentation we discuss the structure of these risk pool agreements and analyze fishing behavior with respect to the stated rules of the agreements. We examine whether fishing behavior has changed with implementation of these agreements and whether the rules employed appear to be effective at reducing bycatch in comparison to pre-catch share fishing