Matteo's mangrove paper

Go here for the very first peer-reviewed article of our former MSc student, Matteo Zavalloni. The article quantifies the trade-off between two different alternative uses of a mangrove ecosystem and finds that it is crucial to take into account spatial links in this process.

The general idea behind the paper is that a mangrove ecosystem can serve many different purposes, but as space is limited you cannot have them all: in other words, we have a typical economic problem of satisfying wants under limited resources. In his paper Matteo (and I, and Paul van Zwieten) focused on the trade-off between two uses: cultivating shrimp in aquaculture ponds; or providing nursery habitat for juvenile wild shrimp. There is a lot more to mangrove ecosystems than just those two functions: tourists also like to come to mangrove forests (I loved the mangrove forest in Ca Mau, for example), and mangroves also form important coastal protection. In this paper, however, we wanted to explore some methodological issues in a spatially explicit manner, and these two uses were the most appropriate for this analysis.

So Matteo developed a model that maximizes the mangrove forest's nursery function, under the restriction that aquaculture production should not drop below some given level. If you run the model for many different levels of aquaculture production, you typically get a picture like this:

(Be aware that this is not the original picture in the paper but a stylized version of it.)

In economics lingo we call this a production possibilities frontier (PPF). It shows all combinations of two goals (in this case aquaculture production and nursery habitat) that are maximally attainable. Combinations above the curve are impossible to attain; combinations below the curve are feasible, but not very efficient.

Why are there two curves? The green curve indicates the PPF you get if you use all available information on differences in habitat quality, and you take into account that in order to function as a nursery, a mangrove forest must in some way be connected to the water course. The blue curve indicates the PPF if you would ignore (or simply not know) that last piece of information. You see that if you ignore the connectivity you arrive at solutions that provide much less benefits in terms of nursery habitat than what would in theory be possible. The reason is that you locate your shrimp farms at the wrong places:

Maximum provision of the nursery ecosystem service at 24% of the possible aquaculture benefits, with and without taking into account the connectivity of nursery habitat

Note that the left picture has all aquaculture clustered together in the west corner of the study area, whereas the right picture has aquaculture located along the water course, blocking the mangrove forest from access to the river. The reason is that farms near the river have lower transport costs, but the consequences for the nursery function are not taken into account.

So how does this help us? First, we wanted to demonstrate that conservation, no matter how noble, has costs, and that those costs should be considered in policy decisions. Second, it illustrates that functions can be combined if you use your information wisely. The approach we developed is one small step towards methods to find the best compromise between different interests in coastal zones.

Random thoughts on freedom

On the day that the Dutch commemorate their liberation from Nazi Germany.

With all the attention going to the Second World War you'd almost forget that this year is also the sad 20-year anniversary of the slaughtering of up to a million Tutsis. I know the Rwandan genocide took place on another continent, whereas the Holocaust happened on our doorstep, so the Dutch could be forgiven for focusing on their own history. Nevertheless, it feels uncomfortable how easy the West seems to forget about one of the most recent, and intense, ethnic cleansings. Every year, when I remember Auschwitz, I also think of Rwanda. And Srebrenica.

Because our commemoration of freedom coincides with the commemoration of the Second World War, the Dutch have a tendency to equate freedom with peace. I consider that too simplistic. If you ask me for my definition of freedom, I would say: the right to deviate. I consider individual rights one of the most important institutions that make us free. Even in a democracy, we need institutions like individual rights to protect us from the government. Without inalienable individual rights, democracy collapses to majoritarianism: two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch. Days like Liberation Day should remind us that although it sometimes feels uneasy or unjust that even the bad guys have individual rights to protect them from the government, the alternative is worse. Just so that next time a criminal gets acquitted because the evidence was acquired through illegal means, we remember what the world would look like if the cops were above the law.

Another reason why I disagree with the "freedom=peace" simplification is that we did not get rid of the Nazis by asking them politely. People were killed. Not just soldiers, but also civilians - my grand parents barely survived the infamous Bezuidenhout Bombing by the Royal Air Force. It's a painful truth that war - any war - kills not only the bad guys, but also lots and lots of innocent people. Nevertheless, we have forgiven the RAF for its mistake (the Brits were quick to offer their apologies after they realized they bombed civilians, not V2 rockets), and we are still grateful to the British (and the Canadians, the Americans, the Polish, and all other Allied Forces) for liberating us. Had those soldiers not taken the unimaginable risks they took, we would "all be speaking German" as some would have it. Therefore, I believe that veterans - all veterans, not just WW2 veterans - should be an integral part of the Liberation Day events. To thank them, and to honour those who died in service.

That even includes the veterans who fought (and died) in wars we now perhaps think we should not have gotten involved in, like the Indonesian war of independence or the 2003 Iraq war. The Dutch still refer to the Indonesian war of independence as the "Politionele Acties" - a preposterous whitewash of a shameful history if you ask me. The Indonesians deserved to be independent of their colonial masters, and we had no right to govern them. Nevertheless, the soldiers who went were not the people who made the decisions. Only a few had the courage to refuse to go, and their refusal was considered high treason at the time.

Americans treat their veterans with a lot more respect than the Dutch do. When I was in Santa Barbara during Veteran's Day I read a letter in the local newspaper by a Californian of German-Jewish descent. He explained how American soldiers rescued him, a little kid more dead than alive, from a concentration camp. He stayed with them because he could translate between German and English, and eventually went with them to the USA and became an American citizen. He wrote the letter to express his gratitude to all American veterans, and to the United States in general, for granting him a new lease on life and his freedom. I never forget that story.

Wanted: matching world maps of EEZs and marine productivity

I want to show to my students that only a minority of fish are caught in the high seas, and it would be nice to compare a world map of EEZs to a world map of marine and coastal productivity. So far I've found two sources of such information:

• GRID-Arendal's productivity map (eps or jpg)
• Marine Regions' EEZ map (shapefile)

For the time being I combined those but the result is not exactly pretty:

(Click on the picture for a closer look.)

The problem is that

1. The two maps have different centres (Pacific Ocean for GRID-Arendal, Atlantic Ocean for the EEZ map)
2. The two maps have different projection methods (Gall-Bertin for GRID-Arendal, and I haven't the faintest idea how to project the EEZ map as such in QGIS)

Are there any maps (preferably shapefiles with the same coordinate systems) of fishing yields and EEZs? Preferably with the Pacific Ocean in the centre? I know the latter is not standard but the Pacific is way more interesting than the Atlantic in this respect.

A simple Python script to make a literature table

Geeky post again - no math this time, but computer code.

I'm sure people have done this before, but I thought it would be a nice opportunity to practice my Python skills to write a small script for the following problem.. Usually when I read a scientific article I watch out for the following elements:

• Innovation: what does the study do what others haven't done before?
• Method: what method did they use?
• Data: where did they get their data from?
• Results: what are the main results?
• Relevance: who benefits from this research, and how?

I also like to place the research in one of the four quadrants in this post. I find it helpful to make an overview of these questions in a table:

1st author	Year	Journal	Quadrant	Innovation	Method	Data	Results	Relevance
Kompas	2005	Journal of Productivity Analysis	4	Estimates efficiency gains quota trade for Southeast Trawl Fishery, AU	Stochastic frontier analysis	AFMA and ABARE survey data	ITQs gave efficiency gains	Policy debate on ITQs
Kompas	2006	Pacific Economic Bulletin	3	Estimates optimal effort levels and allocation across species	Multifleet, multispecies, multiregion bioeconomic model	SPC data	Effort reduction needed; optimal stocks larger than BMSY	Policy debate on MEY

But here's the problem: I usually make my notes in a bibtex file (as a good geek should), which looks like this:

@ARTICLE{Kompas2006PacEconBull,
  author = {Kompas, T. and Che, T.N.},
  title = {Economic profit and optimal effort in the Western and Central Pacific tuna fisheries},
  journal = {Pacific Economic Bulletin},
  year = {2006},
  volume = {21},
  pages = {46-62},
  number = {3},
  data = {SPC data},
  innovation = {Estimates optimal effort levels and allocation across species},
  quadrant = {3},
  keywords = {tuna; bioeconomic model; optimisation; Pacific},
  method = {Multifleet, multispecies, multiregion bioeconomic model},
  results = {Effort reduction needed; optimal stocks larger than BMSY},
  relevance = {Policy debate on MEY}
}

@ARTICLE{Kompas2005JProdAnalysis,
  author = {Kompas, Tom and Che, Tuong Nhu},
  title = {Efficiency gains and cost reductions from individual transferable quotas: A stochastic cost frontier for the Australian South East fishery},
  journal = {Journal of Productivity Analysis},
  year = {2005},
  volume = {23},
  pages = {285-307},
  number = {3},
  quadrant = {3},
  data = {AFMA and ABARE survey data},
  innovation = {Estimates efficiency gains quota trade for Southeast Trawl Fishery, AU},
  keywords = {individual transferable quotas; stochastic cost frontier; fishery efficiency; ITQs},
  method = {Stochastic frontier analysis},
  relevance = {Policy debate on ITQs.},
  results = {ITQs gave efficiency gains}
}

I don't want to copy it all by hand, so I wrote this little script in Python to convert all entries in the bibtex file to a csv file:

import csv
from bibtexparser.bparser import BibTexParser
from dicttoxml import dicttoxml
from operator import itemgetter

def readFirstAuthor(inpList,num):
    author1 = ""
    x = inpList[num]['author']
    for j in x:
        if j != ',':
            author1+=j
        else:
            break
    return author1

def selectDict(inpList,name):
    outObj = []
    for i in range(len(inpList)):
        if name in inpList[i]['author'] and \

            inpList[i]['type']=='article':
            outObj.append(inpList[i])
    return(outObj)

def selectFieldsDict(inpList,fieldNames):
    outObj = []
    for i in range(len(inpList)):
        temp = {}
        for n in fieldNames:
            if n == 'author':
                author1 = readFirstAuthor(inpList,i)
                temp['author'] = author1
            else:
                if n in inpList[i]:
                    temp[n] = inpList[i][n]
                else:
                    temp[n] = 'blank'
        outObj.append(temp)
    return(outObj)

fieldnames = ['author','year','journal','quadrant',\

    'innovation','method','data','results','relevance']

with open('BibTexFile.bib', 'r') as bibfile:
    bp = BibTexParser(bibfile)
    
record_list = bp.get_entry_list()
record_dict = bp.get_entry_dict()

dictSelection = selectDict(record_list,'Kompas')

fieldSelection = selectFieldsDict(dictSelection,fieldnames)


test = sorted(fieldSelection, key=itemgetter('year'))


test_file = open('output.csv','wb')
csvwriter = csv.DictWriter(test_file, delimiter=',',\

    fieldnames=fieldnames)
csvwriter.writerow(dict((fn,fn) for fn in fieldnames))
for row in test:
     csvwriter.writerow(row)
test_file.close()

If you are a Python developer: any comments on this are welcome. I'm sure it's not perfect.

My thoughts on Daniel Bromley's critique (3): Are ITQs private property rights?

In my first post in this series I argued that although open access is just about the worst property rights regime to have in a fishery, it is too simple to blame all overfishing on 'lack of property rights'; rather, we need to go into the details of the institutional setting. In my second post I argued that asking whether private property rights can manage a fishery is a waste of time: marine ecosystems are too complicated to implement any real form of private property.

But wait a minute. Aren't ITQs supposed to be private property? You can find many articles in the scientific literature and the press, whether they're in favour of ITQs or against them, that present ITQs as private property. Daniel Bromley does not agree. In his Fisheries article he lists as one of the deceits of fisheries economics its claim that "ITQs are private property rights." His objection to this idea is that the Magnuson-Stevens act (which is by far the most important fisheries law in the United States) states that ITQs are permits, which can be revoked, limited, or changed by the government without compensation to the owner of the permit.

The reply of some economists is that in practice, even American ITQs are traded between fishers, they are used as collateral for loans, and they are subject to legal disputes over divorce and inheritance, just like houses or cars are. So de jure they might not be private property rights, de facto they certainly are.

In any case, I'm a European, and in Europe we could decide to make ITQs irrevocable rights that have an unlimited life span, and cannot be changed by the government (unless in cases of eminent domain). Would they then be private property rights?

If I were a German I would say: jein. The certificate would be private property: the law can be made such that you can freely trade the certificate, the government cannot take it from you without compensation, you can use it as collatoral, and if you die your kids might fight over it in court. But that's the certificate - not the fish. As I argued in an earlier post: owning an ITQ does not mean that there's a fish with your name on it.

As far as I know the closest equivalent of ITQs (assuming the most extreme case of privatization) would be shares in a corporation (or LLC, PLC, SA, BV, NV, whichever country you happen to live in - I'm no legal expert). In the fishery, the 'company' would be the fish stock; the 'dividend' would be the TAC; the 'shareholders' would be the fishers, who, unlike regular shareholders, are supposed to come and catch their 'dividend' for themselves. I'm no more a business economist than I am a legal expert, so I don't know whether I should consider a corporation private property or common property. If I strictly follow Bromley's terminology I'd guess they are common property, because it is the shareholders who commonly own the asset and have influence - albeit sometimes limited - on the company's management. But I'm glad I'm writing this on a blog and not in a peer-reviewed article (that's what blogs are for, aren't they?).

There are some interesting differences between ITQs and corporate shares, but I'll save that for later.

My thoughts on Daniel Bromley's critique (2): Are private property rights a silver bullet for overfishing?

From the diagnosis that missing property rights drive overfishing it's only a small step to prescribing property rights to manage fisheries. In his Fisheries article Daniel Bromley criticizes that idea that, in his terms, "Private ownership is necessary and sufficient for socially beneficial stewardship." He cites an article that investigates the link between catch shares (i.e. ITQs) and stock collapse. The article fits in a sequence of articles that link 'ownership' of a resource to 'stewardship':

Examining specific cases, Beddington et al. (10), Hilborn et al. (11), Grafton et al. (12), and Griffith (13) argue that rights-based fisheries reforms offer promising solutions. Rather than only setting industry-wide quotas, fishermen are allocated individual rights. Referred to as catch shares or dedicated access privileges, these rights can be manifest as individual (and tradable) harvest quotas, cooperatives, or exclusive spatial harvest rights; the idea is to provide - to fishermen, communities, or cooperatives - a secure asset, which confers stewardship incentives.
Source: Costello et al., 2008, Science

The first author of the article, Chris Costello, explains it as follows in laymen's terms:

The difference [between rights-based management and other sorts of fisheries policy instruments] is comparable to renting an apartment versus the house you own. [...] If you own something, you take care of it - you protect your investment or else it loses value. But there's no incentive for stewardship when you don't own the rights to it.
Source: Marine Science Institute, UCSB

The ownership-stewardship link

This link between ownership and stewardship is also made elsewhere in the literature, and it has explicitly been object of research in at least one article that I have seen. The fundamental idea here is that people must have a stake in conservation of natural assets before they support it: if they don't have a stake in it, why would they care? This idea is also part of the rationale behind many PES schemes, or programs like CAMPFIRE.

Bromley's arguments against this idea are twofold. First, if the interest rate is very high, the owner of the asset is better off depleting the asset and investing the proceeds in, say, a savings account. Second, other people besides the owner might also be affected by how the owner manages the asset.

To hell with Orange Roughy and the Eiffel Tower!

The reply to the first argument is that interest rates are rarely so high that it becomes optimal to deplete a resource and put the proceeds on the bank. Some species do indeed grow so slowly that leaving them in the ocean would be like leaving your money on a low-interest bank account - you would earn more by withdrawing your 'money' from that account and investing it somewhere else. Orange Roughy, with an annual growth rate between 4% and 6%, springs to mind. Most species, however, grow much faster than this. You could also argue that in a well-working market, if it is optimal for the owner to deplete a resource and put the value thus generated on the bank, it would be optimal for society.

But this is probably not a well-working market, and that is how we get to the second argument. People might appreciate natural assets, like fish, for more than just their consumptive value. Economists call this existence value: economic value ascribed to things just for their mere existence, like whales or pandas. But even if you don't like this concept (it's debated), you can still argue that living creatures should be preserved for their own sake: call it intrinsic value, or animal rights. All these are considerations why we don't like leaving natural assets at the mercy of a small group of owners. Imagine how Parisians would react if the Eiffel Tower were sold to the highest bidder, who is allowed to sell it on the scrap market if the steel price is high enough.

But should it be private?

The question, however, is whether we need private property rights to induce stewardship. The Costello paper does not say so explicitly. Other authors do refer to ITQs as a way to privatize ocean resources, and that this is a good thing (but I have to admit I still need to read that book). But making fish resources private property, i.e. making fish stocks the property of a single person or company, is a pipe dream anyway. How do we deal with stocks that cross borders? How do we deal with interactions between species through predation or bycatch? Imagine owners of top-of-the-food-chain stocks getting sued by owners of lower species, just like dog owners are liable for what Brutus does to Fifi.

That's why I think the whole question is moot. Private property rights - real private property rights, like owning land, or a dog - are nearly impossible to implement in a fishery. Some form of property rights, be it state property, common property, or private property, is necessary but not sufficient. Although most fish resources fall under some form of property regime, many are still overfished; nevertheless, high-seas fisheries, which are as close to open access as it gets, are managed worst of all. If you want people to support conservation, it surely helps to give them a stake in it. However, unlike Zimbabwean farmers, who have little to expect from biodiversity conservation but crop damage and sleeping sickness (which is why CAMPFIRE was developed), fishers do have a stake in good management of fish stocks - regardless of the property rights regime. So why shouldn't they be good stewards already?

My take-home lessons from Fish In Figures 2014

Mmm... Marine biodiversity

Friday I ended my working week at a shindig in Catch By Simonis (should definitely have a seafood platter there someday!) where LEI presented the latest edition of their annual status report of the Dutch fisheries sector. My take-home lessons:

The beam trawl, which used to be by far the most important fishing gear in the Dutch demersal fishery, is disappearing rapidly. Its users were squeezed between high fuel prices, low fish prices, and public outrage at discards and disturbance of the sea bottom. So Dutch cutter fishers are lining up to use the pulse trawl, which combines bottom trawling with tiny electric pulses. The biggest advantage for the fishers is the lower cost of fuel: about 30% of revenues where the beam trawl burns about 55%. Environmental NGOs, notably Greenpeace, are less convinced, but I don't agree with them. Yes, some species like cod and sharks might be affected (the effects are still under investigation) but it sure beats the effect of the traditional beam trawl on shellfish and other benthic life, let alone its use of fossil fuels. As for the taboo on electric fishing: pulse trawling is nowhere near what this guy tried to do.

A number of possibilities were discussed to raise prices. There is an interest in MSC certification, but people are skeptical about the price premium. This is a genuine concern as the price premium for certified fish has so far been disappointing. The main 'advantage' of certification seems to be that big players in the value chain (restaurant chains, supermarkets) might simply refuse to sell non-certified fish.

Another development is the involvement with fresh fish markets. This fits within a wider trend towards 'local' food (which is usually a bit too much romanticized, me thinks). So far it's very small-scale but I like it. Why is it that the Dutch don't appreciate fresh fish? Johan Baaij, a fisher who is involved in a project called Vers van de Visser (fresh from the fisher), argued that the consumer has no idea where the fish comes from, or who is involved in it. It reminded me about how many people think kibbeling is a fish species.

All in all I got the impression that the fishing sector is more or less where our farmers were, say, 15-20 years ago: financial problems, public unease with bulk production and its impact on the environment, but also a lot of creativity and entrepreneurship, and a readiness to engage with their critics.