Talking Story With Fisheries Expert Pauly

posted in: June 2003 | 0

Daniel Pauly has shaken to its very core the science of fisheries management. The New York Times has written that critics frequently lump him with two other “doomsayers” – Paul Ehrlich and Peter Vitousek – who form the “Peter Paul and Pauly” trio. Science magazine noted last year that Pauly “is arguably the world’s most prolific and widely cited living fisheries scientist.” He’s variously described as brilliant, iconoclastic, irreverent, wickedly witty, but no one would ever describe him as boring.

This month, Pauly will speak in Honolulu at the meeting of the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council. Patricia Tummons, editor of Environment Hawai’i, recently interviewed Pauly by telephone from his office at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Your work has brought a historical perspective to fisheries management. Instead of looking at a fishery over a short period of time, as managers used to do, you have caused fisheries to be regarded as reflecting changes that occurred over centuries of human involvement with them. What inspired this revolutionary approach?

If you try to identify a phenomenon, it is either in sharp focus or you can’t see it very well. When it is not clear, you have two options. One is to try to use more powerful tools to analyze the data you have – statistics, mathematical models. That’s what I think many fisheries managers do; they add statistical uncertainties around the estimates that the models provide, given the limitations of the data. The other thing is to do what physicists do – build a bigger machine to get better data. When physicists perceive something, say, a weak electric signal, or a little bit of light from a telescope, then what they do, rather than use a statistical approach, is to build a bigger machine, typically 10 times more powerful, and then the phenomenon comes into full view.

For us, we very often argue about the most recent three, four, or five years of a fishery. Is it going up or down? Should we increase or reduce fishing effort, or can we maintain it?

In 1995, when I published this note on the shifting baseline syndrome,1 I pointed out that we miss out on a lot of what has happened previously by using a statistical approach. So in order to understand the last five years, we should put them in the context of the last 100 or 50 years – in other words, construct a bigger machine. That involves constructing time series in different places and interpreting them over the last five to 10 years in light of what has happened the last 50 years and beyond.

The same thing happens spatially. Fisheries managers look at one stock, at one time, in one place – say, over an area of a few hundred kilometers, which is the range of an inshore fishery. With offshore fisheries, the range is more, perhaps 1,000 kilometers, but still small given the range of the ocean. Given that fisheries are operating globally and that capital flows move between countries readily, and that fleets can actually move from one ocean to another, we decided to scale up fisheries analysis to become global. So our machine has a long time span and a broad reach.

And the data you then obtain when you look at fisheries on that scale are rather devastating. What you see is that catches, or, more precisely, catch rates, which are an indication of fisheries’ health, are declining throughout the world. One confirmation of our line of work is coming out in May in Nature – a paper by [R.A.] Myers and [Boris] Worm looking at the global tuna fisheries.2 They find it takes 10-15 years to reduce biomass in a fishery by a factor of 10. This is very much in line with my experience and is what we see everywhere.

In fact, compared with the analysis of Myers and Worm, we are actually quite conservative. In an article to appear in the July Scientific American, we will have maps showing how fisheries of the world have expanded to cover the entire ocean, dragging down the biomasses of especially large fish to a large extent. This is a global phenomenon, happening over decades. When people say it is not so, they are usually referring to a small area, one species.

Overall, would you say fisheries in the Western Pacific are in good health?

I have not yet looked at the Pacific with the same kind of focus as the North Atlantic. The Pacific as a whole has seen decline following World War II. There have been expansions of fleets – Japanese, and Asian generally, but also from North America, especially the United States – in the Pacific. And this is a result of the open waters of the Pacific, especially the tuna areas. It’s the last frontier.

It has been possible for many fleets to maintain profitability for a long time, mainly because of subsidies that they get. Undoubtedly, the biomass of the fish, of the various species of fish, are much lower than before, and they are much lower than they should be to support fishing under any of the normal models which require biomass to be 30-40 percent of unexploited stocks. The biomass of all species of large pelagics are well below that, with all kinds of implications.

When it comes to commenting on the management measures in the area – there are two standards, an absolute measure and a relative measure. In general terms, the United States is generally doing better than other countries, when you make a scale and compare adherence to rules, willingness to enforce, et cetera. When you look at the absolute scale, it looks very bad, because the stocks in the areas for which the United States is responsible are not doing much better than anywhere else – a little better, but not much. And so it’s a tricky question. I will be speaking in Hawai’i on this, and I don’t want to steal my own thunder.

You touched on the issue of subsidies. Could you expand on that?

Subsidies encourage a continuation of fishing on stocks that are depleted. It’s the catch per unit of effort that determines whether you can continue to fish. And effort translates into cost. If that is reduced by subsidies, you can remain profitable with lower catches, which means you can afford to reduce the stock further. So subsidies have the exact opposite of what lawmakers intend. Usually lawmakers are interested in getting a fishery going and keeping it alive to benefit more and more people. Subsidies have the opposite effect; you encourage, almost force, a fishery to develop further. Subsidies are what you need to bring a fishery to collapse.

In the North Atlantic, the pessimistic estimate is that subsidies amount to about 20 percent of the price of the fish. This means that the bulk of the fleets would not break even if they were not subsidized. Remove the subsidies from the North Atlantic fleet, and it would be largely bankrupt. I suspect the same thing is found in the Pacific.

One difficulty in talking about subsidies is that they come in different forms. One country will always see subsidies in the operation of other countries’ fleets, but not their own. You need a standard definition and to apply it rigorously. We haven’t done that for the Pacific yet, but are planning to do so as part of a global analysis. At the moment, there are two estimates of the amount of global subsidies floating around. One is that they amount to between $30 and $50 billion a year, the other is $50 to $80 billion a year. Of these two, the larger puts the value of subsidies as roughly equal to the value of the entire annual fish catch. The lower one puts the value at 20 to 30 percent of the value of fish. I’m not sure how the higher one was obtained.

With regards to fleet operation, subsidies begin with fuel subsidies. It can then continue with permission to import tax-free second-hand vessels in some countries, or in the United States, you get a subsidy when you have a boat built or you have credit guarantees. Then it continues with the whole operation of your fleet, with the research required to operate a fleet being subsidized by the National Marine Fisheries Service, who tells you where you should go to go fishing by providing maps on where the productivity is. And then it continues with subsidies at market level, for example, when fishers’ incomes are subsidized by a price support system. (This form of subsidy is common in Europe.)

So subsidies can vary. In Canada, for example, fishers receive unemployment benefits beyond what other workers would get. Different countries have different ways of giving subsidies. But the effect is the same.

There has been a lot of talk of ecosystem-based fishery management. Some even suggest that rather than target single species at the highest levels of the food chain, such as tunas and billfish, it might be better to utilize a broad swath of fish, including fish now discarded as bycatch.

Nobody has done the research for ecosystem-based fisheries management. There is no such system in place, and no one knows what the implications would be.

What we do have is a concept pushed by non-governmental conservation organizations that advocate ecosystem-based management as an approach in which you consider all elements.

If you want to continue business as usual, though, you can take this concept and subvert it. For example, Japan is going around saying that ecosystem-based management requires that all trophic levels should be exploited, and that we should therefore include whaling as part of an ecosystem based approach. So what you have is a complete perversion of the notion of leaving a chunk of ecosystem intact – that is, unfished areas – so the system can recover. You end up with exactly the opposite: exploitation that had been limited to a certain extent becomes wholesale, occurring at all levels.

One often hears the claim that aquaculture will provide a significant role in meeting market needs in the future. Any thoughts on this? And, as a corollary: there is a proposal for an open-ocean mariculture operation off the Island of Hawai’i that would use wild-caught juvenile yellowfin tuna as seed stock. Is this a problem?

[Loud laughter.] The market for luxury fish products can be met by aquaculture, but it will not meet the demand for food by people who need fish as a source of cheap animal protein, that’s for sure. One has to differentiate between the food that people need to eat – animal protein, carbohydrates, vegetables, all elements of a balanced diet – and food that we eat because we’re invited to a party and are served caviar.

Aquaculture comes into play as a net source of protein when you farm animals that don’t require ground-up fish as food. Shellfish, such as oysters, cockles, you farm these, and that’s a net addition to seafood.

But if you farm salmon, the salmon you produce is not a net addition to fish production, because you need more fish – herrings, sardines, and the like – to produce the salmon than what you produce as salmon. So it is much better to consume ‘forage’ fish directly.

Mariculture, or rather, fattening, of tuna is already happening big-time in the Mediterranean. There are a couple of problems. First, the tuna that are caught for fattening are not counted as part of the catch quota, even though they are removed from the reproductive population. Second, the sardines and anchovies that go to feed these tuna are diverted from the consumers in the Mediterranean that eat these same fish. It’s causing untold grief.

These operations sell the tuna in Japan at such a high price that they can afford to pay good money for the tuna feed – much more than what the local market would pay for the anchovies and sardines in question.

This is a crazy operation in terms of protein and in terms of energy, but this kind of thing is happening because you can concentrate money in a place and divert money to you. People who consume sardines don’t have the same pull as someone who invests in this kind of thing.

We shouldn’t call this aquaculture at all. It’s a feed-lot operation. And feedlot operations require lots of feed, and in these cases, that feed will be fish that could be eaten by people.

1. “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10(10): 430 (1995).
2 “Net Losses,” by Myers and Worm, appeared in the May 15, 2003, edition of Nature.

Volume 13, Number 12 June 2003

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *