Here we are again! After
a slight hiccup, caused by illness of the last editor, your new Editor and
Assistant Editor are here to resuscitate the Bulletin, record what EAFE
is doing and keep you abreast of fisheries economics news in general. The
most recent event of note was the Annual Conference in Ireland, at Dublin
Castle, which is reported elsewhere in this issue.
Your Bureau emerged from
the Annual General Meeting much as before; the only change being the retirement
by rote of Paul Hillis from the office of Rapporteur, where he is succeeded
by Dominique Rommel. Paul becomes Bulletin Editor, with Erik Lindebo as
Assistant Editor. Pavel Salz, Ramon Franquesa, Aaron Hatcher and Henning
Jørgensen remain as President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer
respectively.
Other than that, EAFE's
mission of striving to strengthen the role of economics in fisheries management
continues. The many separate studies are gradually being increasingly drawn
together by the development forces of the Concerted Action and the Economics
Report presented to the European Commission's Scientific, Technical and
Economics Committee of Fisheries. The goal must always be to promote and
assist the most effective possible management of fisheries, and at present,
management advice, notably its important component embodied in the production
of TACs, is still proving to be relatively ineffective, even if decommissioning,
- while expensive for managers and often traumatic for the decommissioned,
- has reduced overfishing in some fisheries in recent years.
The gradually increasing
co-operation between biologists and economists is a most important step
in the right direction. Economics needs biology to show how the resource
responds to the economic activity of fishing, and biology needs economics
if the relevance of its findings to the supporting of the fishing industry
is to be properly and advantageously analysed. Where, as so often happens,
remedial management appropriate for an overfished fishery is to reduce the
rate of exploitation, the consequential debate between market economists
and socio-economists will be as to whether reduction in the exploitation
rate should take the more natural form of reduction of the labour force,
or whether to adopt the more difficult but often socio-economically preferable
form of using the device of some type of quota to prevent job losses, especially
in the case of remote, emigration prone communities heavily dependent on
fisheries.
In Europe, since the introduction
of TAC and quota management in 1983, many stocks have performed disappointingly,
partly because the right information was not available to the managers.
Application of bio-economic advice which takes account of both growth and
mortality functions and of cost and profit functions will give a much clearer
picture of the state of the resource on which the industry depends. Predictions
which point ahead to the point where initial short term reductions in returns
are counterbalanced by medium- and long-term gains will give a more optimistic
picture of the possibilities facing fleet and industry than predictions
which cover one year only, - (even if they will need to be adjusted annually
as new recruitment strengths and other factors which need updating become
known).
The role of EAFE in developing
accurate data provision and clear analyses to the EU, looks set to involve
increasing co-operation with the biologists who up until recently had a
virtual monopoly on the shaping of the form of such advice. Such developments
provide an example of the possibilities of providing better service to industry
and managers alike, and the increase in co-operation between all who provide
the data which the managers need to do their jobs is a trend which is bound
to increase, and will result in advice based on clearer and mostly less
pessimistic predictions being available to managers and industry alike.
