Elsevier

Marine Policy

Volume 43, January 2014, Pages 80-88
Marine Policy

Factors that influence the entry–exit decision and intensity of participation of fishing fleet for the Galapagos lobster fishery

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2013.05.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Most fishing efforts are concentrated in a few FUPs.

  • A high degree of persistence fishing effort exists for FUPs between years.

  • FUPs understand the economic trade-off of their production decisions.

  • One-size-fits-all fishery policies that neglect economic incentives will likely fail.

Abstract

The Galapagos Islands are a prime example of a place where fishery management policies have been established without first understanding the behavior of fishermen. Since the creation of the Galapagos Marine Reserve in 1998, there has not been a single study in the archipelago that investigates fishing behavior and the factors affecting this behavior. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by describing and analyzing the decisions of the fishing fleet for the red spiny lobster fishery. It focuses on factors that affect the short-term decisions regarding both participation and intensity of participation in the lobster fishery. This paper finds that the fishing fleet in the Galapagos Islands behaves as profit maximizing firms, because they consider all the benefits and costs that affect both their participation decision as well as their decision about how frequently to be active after they have decided to participate. The results also show that there is a large latent effort in the lobster fisheries that could threaten the sustainability of any initiatives aimed at increasing catchability, prices, or markets. It is expected that this analysis will be valuable to policy makers when designing or improving the management plans for Galapagos fisheries.

Introduction

In a paper published in 2007, Ray Hilborn [1] stated that “managing fisheries is managing people” and therefore effective management requires an “understanding of the motivation of fishermen and designing a management regime that aligns societal objectives with the incentives provided to fishermen”. This assertion encapsulates a well-known idea expressed by fishery scientists over several decades [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. But this idea despite its acceptance in the academic world is not yet the norm for fishery management in many parts of the planet [9], [10], [11], [12]; and as Hilborn foreshadowed, ignoring the behavior of fishers when designing management policies has led to the fisheries that depend on such policies to be unsustainable [1].

The Galapagos Islands are an example of a place in which fishery management policies have been established without first understanding the behavior of fishermen [13]. Therefore, it can be argued that this lack of understanding of the fishers' behavior might be one of the reasons of why many of the policies applied in the Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR) have been ineffective in achieving sustainable fisheries, as evidenced by the continued reduction in lobster and sea cucumber landings (Fig. 1).

There have been some attempts to account for behavior, preferences and/or needs of fishers when designing fisheries policies in the GMR. A major initiative for this purpose was the establishment of a co-management approach known as the Galapagos Participatory Management System (PMS) which has as one of its purposes to identify the needs of the fishers when establishing management policies. However, under the PMS, artisanal fishing is managed primarily by regulations enacted by the Galapagos National Park (GNP); those regulations are then adjusted seasonally (under some restrictions) by negotiation among the stakeholders [14], [15]. In other words this is a special type of management system in which the authority (i.e. GNP) imposes the restrictions and the stakeholders determine the implementation of those restrictions. It is also a system where fishers are not the only stakeholders with a voice – naturalist guides, the tourism sector and the conservation sector also have a place in the decision-making system. In this system, regulators and stakeholders have conflicting interests: fishers want to catch as much as possible and the regulators want to restrict the extractive behavior, while non-fisher stakeholders may support or oppose the fishing sector as a strategy to achieve their independent goals. Therefore we would expect that fishers would not necessarily provide truthful information about their behavior and fishing needs, when this might run counter to their objective of maximizing both time and area for their fishing activity.

In the academic literature, from 1999 to 2012, there has been only one quantitative study published in peer-reviewed journals that analyzes any type of individual behavior of either fishers or the fishing fleet in the Galapagos Islands [16]. In this study its authors [16] analyzed exclusively the compliance behavior of artisanal fishermen in the GMR. Specifically, they were interested in determining the factors that influence boat-owners decisions to violate management regulations of the GMR. This study was important for designing monitoring and control policies, but it did not explain the individual fishing behavior and fishing decisions per se (i.e. what, when, where and/or how to fish) of fishers and the fishing fleet in the Galapagos Islands. Other studies have focused more on the heterogeneous nature of the fishing sector and on attempting to explain why the Participatory Management System largely failed to manage the fisheries sustainably over the first decade of its existence [15], [17], [18], [19], [20]. The advent of the sea cucumber fishery boom in particular, which began in the early 1990s, drove rapid growth of the sector, and an influx of part-time fishers who would take time off from their main jobs for the two-month annual fishing season, attracted by the prospect of large earnings [21]. The sea cucumber fishery, involving foreign Asian merchants working behind the scenes, and a series of local conflicts between fishers and other stakeholders, especially the GNP and the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), has been the subject of several studies over the last decade e.g. [15], [17], [18], [22], [23]. To a certain extent, this focus has distracted attention from research about fishing activities per se and from attempts to understand how individual fishers make decisions within this context.

For this reason, the present paper tries to close this gap in the literature through analyzing the fishing behavior of the Galapagos fleet for the Red Spiny Lobster (Panulirus penicillatus) fishery. Specifically, it analyzes those factors that influence the entry–exit decision and intensity of participation for the Galapagos lobster fishery. The results of this paper show that the fishing fleet in the Galapagos Islands behaves as profit maximizing firms. Additionally, it found that there is a large latent effort in the Galapagos lobster fisheries that potentially could be a problem for the management policies of that fishery. Lastly, it is proposed that understanding the decision mechanism of the Galapagos fishing fleet may help to design sound fisheries management policies for the GMR.

Section snippets

Description of the fishery

Since late 1999, there have been approximately 1000 fishermen officially registered in the GMR. The GNP, the control authority of the GMR, classifies those fishermen into two categories: Armadores (∼40% of all fishermen) and Pescadores (∼60% of fishermen). Armadores own at least one boat and Pescadores do not own a single boat. Armadores do not always participate in fishing personally but their vessels are crewed by Pescadores. For these analyses, individual fishing vessels, not fishermen, were

Fishery participation

During a season, vessels can be classified as active and inactive vessels. Thus on average 50% of registered vessels were inactive each year during the period 2001–2008. The frequency of participation of those active vessels in each season was on average 15 days approximately; that is, 12.60% of the total days of a lobster fishing season.

The composition of FUPs given their level of activity differed for each port during the study period. San Cristobal had the highest proportion of inactive FUPs

Latent effort

The main objective of this paper was to describe and explain the fishing behavior of the Galapagos fleet for the spiny lobster fishery, an analysis that is missing in the literature. A descriptive analysis found that FUPs from the three ports in the GMR showed a considerable level of inactivity in the lobster fishery, and that in addition, FUPs that were active during a season showed a low frequency of participation. This is an important result because it demonstrates a high level of latent

Conclusions

This paper is one of the first attempts to quantitatively explain the behavior of Galapagos FUPs, which could help generate more sound marine policies in the archipelago. In this analysis it was shown that the fishing behavior of FUPs in the lobster fishery depends on the potential benefits and costs of their participation in that fishery as well as the particular economic conditions in the ports of origin of FUPs. The latter result suggests that given the heterogeneity of the economic and

Acknowledgements

S.J.B. was funded by Conservation International and the Social Science Research Council. We acknowledge the support of the Galapagos National Park, Charles Darwin Foundation and World Wildlife Fund-Galapagos. We thank James Wilen, James Sanchirico, J. Wilson White, C.-Y. Cynthia Lin, J. Edward Taylor, Anna Schuhbauer, Gunter Reck, Mario Fernandez and an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments on the manuscript. The statements made and the views expressed are solely responsibility of the

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