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An assessment of area licence configurations in the B.C. salmon fishery

University of British Columbia

There has been much discussion of the merits and limitations of area licensing, i.e., a fishery management tool which restricts fishermen to certain geographic areas, in the British Columbia," Canada, salmon fishery. To date there has been little formal evaluation of the implications of this policy tool for salmon fishery management. In the reports by Pearse (1982), Sinclair (1978) and Fleet Rationalization Committee (1982) some insights on the subject are provided, but an evaluation in terms of specific criteria is lacking. This study evaluates five area licence configurations in the context of the B.C. salmon fishery. They are assessed based on evaluative criteria that cover the following subject areas: management operations; socio-economic effects; biological effectiveness; and economic efficiency. Each of these broad subjects are factored into specific elements, in which the emphasis is on the nature of the fishery and the resource. From the analysis it was found that the area licence configurations that factored the coast into two large harvest areas or the configuration that alienated small area(s) as test area(s) are most appropriate for the fishery. These configurations facilitated the attainment of management operations, socio-economic and biological goals, but not the economic efficiency goals. The other configurations, in particular those that factor the coast into a number of smaller harvest areas, result in exacerbating the problems with all criteria except economic efficiency and some biological factors. The appropriate area configurations for the B.C. salmon fishery would be the configurations that factors the coast into two large harvest areas; or the configuration where two or three small harvest areas are alienated from the existing harvest area. There are three fundamental reasons for this: (1) they are least disruptive (i.e., minimum impact on present harvest patterns, least politically sensitive, and minimum distributional effects); (2) they offer greatest flexibility to address political, economic, biological and social uncertainties; and (3) these area configurations provide the greatest ease of implementation and incremental adjustment of the status quo. Acceptance of these configurations will depend on the time horizon and the objectives of the decision makers.

Text

2010-05-22

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/24911

Planning

University of British Columbia

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