Fisheries management

The goal of Fisheries management is to produce sustainable biological, social, and economic benefits from renewable aquatic resources. Fisheries are classified as renewable because the organisms of interest (e.g., fish, shellfish, reptiles, amphibians, and marine mammals) usually produce an annual biological surplus that with judicious management can be harvested without reducing future productivity.Fisheries management employs activities that protect fishery resources so sustainable exploitation is possible, drawing on fisheries science and possibly including the precautionary principle. Modern fisheries management is often referred to as a governmental system of appropriate management rules based on defined objectives and a mix of management means to implement the rules, which are put in place by a system of monitoring control and surveillance. A popular approach is the ecosystem approach to fisheries management. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), there are "no clear and generally accepted definitions of fisheries management".However, the working definition used by the FAO and much cited elsewhere is:

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The integrated process of information gathering, analysis, planning, consultation, decision-making, allocation of resources and formulation and implementation, with enforcement as necessary, of regulations or rules which govern fisheries activities in order to ensure the continued productivity of the resources and the accomplishment of other fisheries objectives.

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Objectives

Political

According to the FAO, fisheries management should be based explicitly on political objectives, ideally with transparent priorities. Political goals can also be a weak part of fisheries management, since the objectives can conflict with each other. Typical political objectives when exploiting a commercially important fish resource are to:

• maximize sustainable biomass yield
• maximize sustainable economic yield
• secure and increase employment
• secure protein production and food supplies
• increase export income

For the most recent several decades, the political goals in fisheries management of commercially important species have been rapidly evolving, primarily driven by a recognition of the response of fish and other target animals to changing climate, new technologies for fishing particularly on the high seas, development of competing policy priorities for aquatic environments leading to a more ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management, and  new scientific insights about the processes affecting fish population size and recruitment.

The political objectives operative in recreational fisheries management are often substantially different than those prevalent in commercial fisheries management. For example, catch-and-release regulations are common in some types of recreational fisheries. Thus, biological yield is of less important.

International objectives

Fisheries objectives need to be expressed in concrete management rules. In most countries fisheries management rules should be based on the internationally agreed, though non-binding, Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, agreed at a meeting of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization FAO session in 1995. The precautionary approach it prescribes is typically implemented in concrete management rules as minimum spawning biomass, maximum fishing mortality rates, etc. In 2005 the UBC Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia comprehensively reviewed the performance of the world's major fishing nations against the Code.

Journal of Fisheries Research welcomes submissions via Online Submission System

www.scholarscentral.org/submission/fisheries-research.html

Anna D Parker

Journal Manager

Journal of Fisheries Research

Email: fisheriesres@emedscholar.com