Effort reduction

Effort controls limit the number of vessels or fishers who work in the fishery through licences. Quotas are also used to control effort through restrictions on the gear that can be used and the time the gear can be left in the water. They may also limit the power or size of vessels and periods when they can fish.

 

Advice from ICES to fisheries managers in north-west European waters has long recommended reductions in overall fishing effort as too many fish are being killed for the long-term sustainability of fish stocks. For example, currently approximately 60% of the cod stock is removed annually from the North Sea. An overall aim would be to balance total fishing effort on a particular fish stock at a level that matches the surplus stock that can be taken on a sustainable basis, i.e. matching fishing capacity with available resource. Such reductions would have benefits in terms of reducing other environment effects such as the bycatch (particularly of protected species such as many marine mammals and seabirds) and impacts on the benthic community and the seabed.

 

Since total fishing effort is a product of the number of vessels multiplied by the number of days that they go fishing, it is possible to reduce effort by either reducing the number of vessels in a fishery, or the number of days that vessels may go fishing (or both).

 

Both approaches have been applied. Vessel decommissioning has been funded by Governments for a number of years, and there are days at sea limitations on some fisheries. These attempts to reduce effort have been only partly successful though. This is due, in part, to the continual technical development (for instance of fish finders, gear development and more powerful vessels). Such vessel and gear improvements are called 'technical creep' and are estimated by some sources to have amounted to an improvement of 4% per year in catching power of Europe's fishing fleet over recent years. Thus any effort reductions, if they are to be real, have to start by removing at least 4% of effort per year. In addition, the availability of funds through the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) for fleet modernisation has also confounded efforts to reduce fleet capacity. In the 1980s, the EU adopted a programme to reduce the size of fleet. However, the budget for fleet modernisation was approximately twice that for decommissioning, with an additional four fold increase in the modernisation budget in the latter half of the 1990s. As a consequence, EU fleet capacity has actually increased quite dramatically over the last few decades. Under the new CFP, funds for the modernisation of the fleet have been withdrawn. This will help solve this problem to some extent.