The Economics of Overcapacity and the Management of Capture Fishery Resources: A Review

摘要

This paper has its origins in a paper prepared by the author for a 1998 EU sponsored workshop, having the title: Overcapacity, Overcapitalization and Subsidies in European Fisheries (Munro, 1999). The author's workshop paper drew heavily upon a FAO project with which he had been involved, on the management of fishing capacity, a project that was to give rise to the FAO International Plan of Action on Managing Fishing Capacity (FAO, 1999).l Over the intervening decade, the issue of overcapacity in capture fisheries has been brought into sharper focus by calls for a massive resource investment program in the "natural" capital consisting of the world's capture fishery resources. The widely cited World Bank/FAO report, The Sunken Billions (The World Bank, 2009), argues that, if capture fishery resources are to realize their full economic potential, they must be at least doubled in size.