Conservation of Pacific Sea Turtles

Chapter 19. Policies to Reduce Stochastic Sea Turtle Bycatch: An Economic Efficiency Analysis

370 Reducing or eliminating sea turtle bycatch is an essential component of a holistic strategy to promote recovery of Pacific sea turtle populations (Bellagio Conference on Sea Turtles Steering Committee 2004). The options for reducing bycatch depend, among other things, on (1) the targeted species; (2) whether the fishing is conducted by vessels of low-, middle-, or high-income countries; (3) whether the fishing is conducted on the high seas or in coastal fisheries; (4) the gear type; and (5) the scale of fishing. For example, the bycatch-reduction options for small-scale and artisanal coastal fishing in low-income countries where drift gill nets are used to target multiple species are likely to differ markedly from those for high-seas pelagic longline fishing in high-income countries that targets specific species such as swordfish. This chapter considers bycatch-reduction options for large-scale individual shallow-set pelagic swordfish vessels that fish in coastal waters or on the high seas, such as the Hawai‘i, Chilean, or Northeast Asian fleets. These vessels can reduce the incidence of bycatch through their decisions regarding gear, fishing location, set depth, and number of sets (see Watson et al. 2005; Gilman et al. 2006b). However, absent any government policy, these vessel owners face little incentive to undertake costly avoidance activities . The overarching question is whether policies can be designed to provide incentives for individual vessel owners to take appropriate actions that CHAPTER 19 Policies to Reduce Stochastic Sea Turtle Bycatch An Economic Efficiency Analysis KatHleen SegerSon Reducing Stochastic Sea Turtle Bycatch | 371 reduce bycatch while recognizing the benefits that stem from harvest of the target species. A number of alternative policy approaches are possible, including taxes on landings of the target species (e.g., swordfish), limits on the number of allowable sets, fines or penalties for all turtle interactions, and bycatch limits or quotas coupled with a variety of alternative responses to reaching or exceeding the limits. For some of these policies, the regulator has the choice of applying the policy at the individual firm or vessel level, or adopting an industry-wide approach where limits or quotas are defined only at the industry level. This chapter summarizes the salient elements and conclusions from a model of the pelagic longline fishing industry whose vessels harvest swordfish in shallow sets and jointly take sea turtles as incidental bycatch;1 full details and model development are given in Segerson (2007). The model is used to evaluate economic efficiency of alternative policy instruments that can affect the decisions of individual firms or vessel owners about fishing and avoidance activities. Because sea turtle bycatch is uncertain , the model explicitly incorporates the stochastic nature of bycatch. As the model shows, this stochasticity increases the challenge of designing policies to reduce bycatch (or, more precisely, to reduce the likelihood of bycatch).2 The chapter first develops alternative policies imposed at the level of the individual vessel or firm. The findings suggest that simple policies, such as a tax on landings, a limit on the number of sets, or a bycatch quota or cap that cannot be exceeded, do not generally provide firms with economically efficient incentives for harvest and turtle avoidance. Nonetheless, there are policies that can generate economically efficient incentives for vessels. These include bycatch quotas coupled with a variety of alternative penalties or fines for exceeding the quota. Although these policies can be economically efficient in theory, imposing vessel-level quotas on turtle interactions can be problematic in practice. For example, when the number of firms or vessels exceeds the desired limit on total interactions, which can be very low for endangered species, it is not possible to allocate the aggregate allowable or target bycatch across individual vessels or firms. Thus a policy applied at the industry level, where, for example, the bycatch limit is imposed on the group rather than on individual vessels, is of interest. The analysis here focuses on one particular industry-level policy, namely, use of an industry-wide bycatch quota with a proportional penalty or fine on all vessels when the industry exceeds the limit but a proportional reward or subsidy for all firms when the industry 372 | KatHleen SegerSon bycatch is below the limit. This policy approach can be designed to provide economically efficient incentives to individual vessels to adjust both fishing effort and avoidance activities in an effort to reduce the likelihood of turtle bycatch. In addition, the policy...