Elsevier

Ocean & Coastal Management

Volume 78, June 2013, Pages 88-100
Ocean & Coastal Management

Behavior of the Galapagos fishing fleet and its consequences for the design of spatial management alternatives for the red spiny lobster fishery

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2013.03.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • First description of fishing behavior in the Galapagos Islands.

  • Fishing fleets concentrate effort in their home island, with notable exceptions.

  • Fishing behavior is influenced by costs and benefits derived from the activity.

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

Abstract

The two most profitable fisheries in the Galapagos Islands, red spiny lobster (Panulirus penicillatus) and sea cucumber (Isostichopus fuscus), are facing steep declines in abundance and may be on the verge of collapse. This state of affairs has emerged in part because of command and control fisheries policies that neglected the importance of the behavior of the fishing fleet itself. Here we attempt to describe and explain the factors influencing the fishing behavior of the Galapagos red spiny lobster fishing fleet. We estimated a set of econometric models based on a random utility maximization process to forecast how changes in the immediate circumstances (economic, biological, climatic and oceanographic) impact voluntary fishing choices via the personal costs and benefits of various decisions. We focused on the factors that affect not only the decision to participate in fishing but also the decision of where to fish. We then use these models to determine the revenue elasticities for each fishing zone and to analyze the overall response of the Galapagos fleet to hypothetical closures of fishing zones. Our results provide some empirical benchmarks from which it is possible to identify in advance problems related to the spatial management of the red spiny lobster fishery and their potential solutions. For example, we found that fisherman from San Cristobal Island have a strong preference for fishing sites on Floreana Island, which is geographically closer to Santa Cruz Island. This could lead to conflicts between the San Cristobal and Santa Cruz fishing fleets if rights-based fishery management were implemented. We expect that our analysis will be valuable to policy makers when designing new types of management plans for Galapagos fisheries.

Introduction

A quarter of a century ago, Peter Larkin gave a keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society in which he claimed the following: “Back in the dark ages, when I entered the profession of fisheries management, I was in no doubt about the responsibilities of a fisheries manager. Fish habitat was to be protected against all other uses; fish production was to be enhanced wherever nature could be improved upon; the catch was not to exceed maximum sustainable yield (MSY); and fishermen were to be told when, where, and how many fish of what size they could catch, and were to be punished if they did otherwise” (Larkin, 1988). What Larkin described in his keynote 25 years ago is a set of fishery policies known as command and control policies whose main characteristic is to protect only one element of a fishery; that is, the population of fish, neglecting the other important component: the human population that captures the fish, including their behavior and economic incentives.

Nineteen years later, Hilborn (2007a) reminded readers of Larkin's ideas and went a step further, stating 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 (Wilen, 1979, 2004; 2006; Hilborn and Walters, 1992; Fujita et al., 1996; Mahon and McConney, 2004; Hilborn, 2004, 2007a; 2007b). In spite of this, command and control policies are still the norm for fishery management in many parts of the world; and as Larkin's and Hilborn's advices presaged, these policies have largely failed (Worm et al., 2006; Myers and Worm, 2003; Hilborn et al., 2003; Jackson et al., 2001). Indeed, command and control policies have often perversely exacerbated fisheries' overfishing problems by encouraging races for fish instead of resolving them.

The failure of command and control policies underscores the importance of understanding the motivation and behavior of fishermen as a first and crucial step for the design and implementation of any fishery management policy that aligns societal objectives with the fishermen incentives. The Galapagos Islands are an example of a place in which fishery management policies have been established without first understanding the behavior of fishermen (Quiroga, 2009). From the 1970s to 1990s, profitable but largely unregulated fisheries for red spiny lobster (Panulirus penicillatus) and sea cucumber (Isostichopus fuscus) developed in the Galapagos, and both resources were overexploited by the late 1990s. The Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR) was established in 1998 in part to improve the sustainability of these fisheries. However, the GMR has been managed using command and control policies which have been ineffective in achieving sustainable fisheries, as evidenced by the continued contraction of the catch of lobster and sea cucumber (Fig. 1). During this time, the consensus of fisheries scientists has been that fisheries management problems in the GMR are rooted in the moral character and the cultural traits of the Galapagos fishermen (Hardner and Gomez, 2004; Ospina, 2006; Sea Shepherd, 2004; Toral, 2008; González et al., 2008; Hearn, 2008) and not in the policies established there. In other words, fisheries scientists have concluded that the main cause of fisheries problems in the Galapagos has been the “bad behavior” of fishermen.

Some of these fisheries scientists have argued that most Galapagos fishermen are shortsighted, preferring short-term economic growth strategies that lead to rapid, exhaustive exploitation of marine resources (González et al., 2008; Ospina, 2006). Others have asserted that the problem is that most Galapagos fishermen migrated from the mainland and therefore have an exploitation-centered “Frontier Mentality” rather than a sustainability-centered “Island Mentality” (Ospina, 2006; Hearn, 2008; Hardner and Gomez, 2004). Finally, Sea Shepherd (2004) and Toral (2008) have claimed that greed is the root of the fisheries problem in the Galapagos Islands and therefore the problem has no solution.

Based on those arguments, fisheries management in the Galapagos has focused on restricting overall fishing activity. Recent policies in the lobster fishery include: season length reductions, size limits, disallowing take of gravid females, and imposing a total allowable catch. Such policies are designed to restrain short-term exploitative fishermen behavior. However, there has not been a single study that actually investigates fishing behavior and the factors affecting it in the Galapagos. Fisheries scientists still propose new solutions for the GMR with almost no analysis or discussion about fishermen behavior and preference other than the vague admonishment to consider the “people problem” as an ancillary stage for the design of fishery policies (Castrejon and Charles, 2013).

There have been some attempts to account for preferences and needs of fishers 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). However, in 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 (Castrejon, 2011). In other words this is a special type of command and control system in which the authority (i.e. GNP) imposes the restrictions and the stakeholders determine the implementation of those restrictions. 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. Therefore we would expect that fishers would not provide truthful information about their behavior and fishing needs, because that runs counter to their objective of maximizing both time and area for their fishing activity. Consequently, the Galapagos PMS has not been an optimal tool to reveal the preferences and behaviors of the fishers, and it has not accomplished its main purpose of achieving sustainable fisheries in the GMR (Castrejon, 2011).

Another initiative applied in the GMR was the implementation of a ParFish (“participatory fisheries”) process, which sought to improve the co-management framework. At the end, the results obtained from this process were very general and largely consisted of a broad description of the aspiration of the fishers and how they wanted the fisheries policies to be changed. In addition to producing only very general advice, this process was based on the opinion of only a few guild representatives of Galapagos fishermen. The latter is a dubious methodology that raises questions about the validity of the ParFish results, because as Castrejon and Charles (2013) asserted, there is a lack of social cohesion, leadership and representativeness among Galapagos fishers. Thus it is likely that the information provided by those representatives during the ParFish process could be unreliable and potentially a misrepresentation of the needs of the average Galapagos fishermen.

In this paper we address the gap in understanding of Galapagos fishermen behavior and preferences by modeling and analyzing the fishing decisions of the Galapagos fleet for the red spiny lobster fishery. Specifically, we use Discrete Choice Models (DCMs) to predict how changes in economic, biological, climatic and oceanographic conditions would affect voluntary fishing choices via the personal costs and benefits to the fishermen. We focus on factors that affect the short-term decisions regarding both frequency of participation and fishing location. We show that the fishing behavior of the Galapagos fleet is consistent with a utility maximization process. Then we argue that understanding this mechanism would help to design more 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 (Reyes, 2009). The Galapagos National Park (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 ship and Pescadores do not possess any ship at all. Armadores do not always participate in fishing personally but their vessels are crewed by Pescadores. Thus we consider for

Fishery participation

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 (56.20%) and the lowest frequency of participation (7.26%). In contrast, Isabela had the highest frequency of participation (19.02%; only 48.60% of FUPs were inactive) and Santa Cruz had the lowest proportion of inactive FUPs (37.77%; participation frequency was 11.67%). These differences indicate a differential impact of the opportunity

Discussion

The main objective of this paper was to provide the first description and explanation of fishing behavior in the Galapagos Islands. We first conducted a descriptive analysis, and found that fishing units of production (FUPs, equivalent to individual fishing vessels) from the three ports (San Cristobal, Santa Cruz, and Isabela) concentrate most of their effort in their home island. We also found that the effort that they applied in their home island is highly concentrated spatially. This result

Conclusions

In this paper we have presented the first attempt to explain the behavior of Galapagos lobster FUPs, which could help generate more sound marine policies in the archipelago. We have shown that the behavior of Galapagos FUPs depend on the economic conditions of each island and the potential benefits and costs of their participation in the fishery. Based on our analysis, we suggest that given the heterogeneity in economic conditions among the islands and the characteristics of the FUPs, “one size

Ethical statement

We declare that we have no conflicts of interest. This work has not been published previously, is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, and if accepted will not be published elsewhere without consent of the copyright holder. This manuscript has been approved by all authors, and all authors materially participated in the research or article preparation. The work described in this manuscript complied with the laws of the United States and Ecuador.

Acknowledgments

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 Dr. Iliana Chollett for assistance with maps and GIS. We are grateful to Dr. Alex Hearn, Anna Schuhbauer, and two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on the manuscript. The statements made and the views expressed here are solely responsibility of the authors.

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