There is a fair bit of controversy in fisheries science on the merits and caveats of ITQs, catch shares, or whatever you want to call them. I won't go into the details of that debate here, but the following news caught my attention (H/T Adam Soliman/Ecology Action Center):
California fishers say quota system is all wet
(...) Commercial fishers, industry experts and government officials are among those who say that while fish populations are recovering, too few people in California are benefiting from that rebound in part because there aren't enough qualified monitors to oversee the program. (...)
Apparently, all fishers under the California catch share system are required to have on-board observers to monitor their catch. This is quite expensive, especially for small-scale fishers. It is one of the great disadvantages of an ITQ system: how do you make sure that fishers do not catch more than their fair share? Monitoring landings, if at all possible, runs the risk of increasing discards. The latest trend in the EU is to install cameras, something which the Californian fishers in the article seem to favour as well.
Monitoring costs are part of the organisational costs of a policy instrument: you need people to do the paperwork, to decide who gets what, to monitor compliance, and so on. These costs usually depend little on the size of the transaction or the parties involved in it. That's why the fishers complain:
Also, operators of small, family-run boats say the costs of the monitors, which are the same for them as for corporate boats, have created inequality.
I'm not sure what to say about this complaint. I don't agree small-scale fishers or farmers should be protected for the sake of being a small-scale fisher or farmer; neither am I buying the argument that small-scale fishers are inherently more 'sustainable', whatever that means. Small-scale fisheries can offer valuable sources of income in developing countries, where poverty is rife and people have little to fall back on when they lose their job. California is not a developing country; although few Europeans would be impressed with its social security system, you cannot expect the local fishery to provide one. But I do believe that transaction costs usually prevent markets from finding efficient solutions, so a system that requires such heavy monitoring costs is likely to cause substantial losses in efficiency.
'Tis the season again. In The Netherlands this means that a bunch of radio jocks have a public fasting exercise to collect donations for the Red Cross. Serious Request it's called, and, guess what, the main thing is to make your donation together with your request for your favourite song. I'm not too much of a listener to 3FM (their radio station), but it's becoming a bit of a tradition for me to request Tom Waits's Tom Traubert's Blues every year:
Waits wrote the song in the 1970s, when his music was usually a bourbon-soaked mix of jazz and blues, with a Sinatraesque ballad thrown in here and there, and as major themes booze, gambling, and bad women. Everything changed, however, when he met Kathleen Brennan. She got him to give up drinking, introduced him to the music of Captain Beefheart, and thereby induced his major shift to the almost absurdistic albums he made from that point on, like Swordfishtrombones, Raindogs, and Bone Machine. I must admit I usually prefer the post-Brennan crazy stuff. His 1970s ballads could verge dangerously on the sentimental and the cliche-ridden; meanwhile, nothing beats the spooky weirdness of What's he building in there?, or the brutal stomp of Singapore.
Except, that is, for this one song. The lyrics conjure up strong images, yet are sufficiently abstract to give the song an enigmatic quality - and to provoke lots of debate on what the song is about. Some think it is about addiction, or even suicide. Tom Waits himself usually introduces the song by saying "this song is about throwing up in a foreign country." Supposedly he wrote the song after a drinking binge in Copenhagen with Danish singer and violinist Mathilde Bondo (hence the subtitle "Four sheets to the wind in Copenhagen"). Another story is that he wrote the song after hanging out with LA's down-and-out ("every single guy...a woman put him there" he is reported to have said).
I used to think the song was about the First World War - seriously. When I started listening to Tom Waits I had been playing Irish music for a few years. The standard repertoire includes The Band Played Waltzing Matilda by the Scottish-Australian songwriter Eric Bogle:
That song is about WW1, telling the story of one of the many Australian soldiers caught up in the murderous meat grinding machine of Gallipoli, in what was in those days the Ottoman Empire. The title of Bogle's song (and the chorus in Waits') refers to Waltzing Matilda, an Australian folksong about a transient worker that was (and still is) Australia's unofficial national anthem. Apparently, 'To waltz Matilda' is Australian slang for travelling by foot with your belongings stuffed in a rucksack. Bogle's song describes how Waltzing Matilda accompanied the soldiers' march to and from the battlefield, their remembrance marches, and perhaps even their afterlife:
And their ghosts may be heard as you pass by a billabong
Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?
So when I heard Waits sing:
I'm an innocent victim of a blinded alley
And I'm tired of all these soldiers here
No-one speaks English and everything's broken
And my stacys are soaking wet
I couldn't help but imagine a lonely American, lost somewhere in a faraway corner of the crumbling Ottoman Empire (say, present-day Egypt, or Jordania), with nothing but his once fancy, but now torn and dirty clothes and shoes. And what about these lines?
You can ask any sailor and the keys from the jailer
And the old men in wheelchairs know
Matilda's the defendant, she killed about a hundred
And she follows wherever you may go
I figured the old men in wheelchairs could very well be the veterans in Bogle's song:
And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Renewing their dreams of past glory
I see the old men, bent, stiff, and sore
These tired old heroes of a forgotten war
And young people ask: what are they marching for?
And I ask myself the same question
Bogle wrote his song in 1971, so it is possible - but I'm quite sure it is a coincidence and Waits did not have The Great War in mind when he wrote Tom Traubert's Blues.
Not that I care much for whether he did. To me, this image of a forlorn Westerner, lost in a country where he does not speak the language while the world is crumbling all around him, fits the lyrics perfectly. The song has a loneliness and a lostness to it that Waits must have recognized in the LA skid row (or in the Copenhagen porcelain truck after his drinking binge with Mathilde). I usually play the song on my mp3 player when I'm abroad for work. When you are in the bus from the center of Reykjavik to your hotel in a depressing office quarter at the border of town, nothing fits your mood better than hearing this grinding voice wail
It's a battered old suitcase
To a hotel some place
And a wound that will never heal
Just writing it gives me goosebumps: a wound that will never heal. When we travel, we leave behind the places and people we know and love. But we also develop a fondness for the place we've travelled to, which only gets stronger as we stay there longer. What I'd give for just one more bike ride along the coast of Santa Barbara, or a Guinness in Gogarty's, Dublin, or a fried fish and a vinho verde in some small unassuming restaurant on the Azores... Wherever you go, even if you go home, part of you still wishes you were back somewhere else.
To me this reeks of the kind of political bias in research I come across alltoooften. What bothers me most, however, is the deafening silence about it in the news media. Accept a cup of coffee from a Monsanto employee and your reputation as an independent scientist is in tatters; but when it comes to furthering your own political views everything seems to be allowed, including sloppy science and misleading, exaggerated headlines. I wonder which is the more damaging.
The other problem is the natural law that it is always the initial headline that sets the image. The retractions, the errata, and the rectifications at best get page three. A few months ago heavy accusations of highgrading and overfishing thrown at a Dutch fishing company were all over the news. The news of its acquittal by the authorities never made the papers.
And the latest contender for the title of "Funniest Titled Environmental Economics Blog" is the UK-based Cow Burps:
We like to think ‘Cow Burps’ is a humorous and unique name therefore reflecting the idea that the blog should be fun both to write and read
We liked the idea of ‘burps’ as a euphemism for the interesting blog posts that we hope to write
The predicament of rising beef/dairy demand from an increase in population and rising middle classes in conflict with climate change impacts and habitat damage/deforestation is a perfect example of a situation where the use of environmental economics can provide better information to decision-makers. You can read more about this on the post How many cows?
And lastly, it reminds everyone to examine conventional wisdom, with cow burps being a much higher source of methane than cow farts!
You can use juvenile tuna as bait, consume it yourself, or sell it. But each juvenile tuna you don't catch may become an adult. This adult tuna would then produce more tuna. It might also fetch a higher market price, especially if it is yellowfin tuna. Granted, it may also be caught in Pacific areas outside Indonesia. In that case Indonesia would not benefit from this one juvenile tuna it leaves in the ocean, although other countries would. So the catch of juvenile tuna is one of the issues WCPFC would like Indonesia to address.
Shinta in action on a handline vessel
Shinta Yuniarta, one of our PhD candidates on BESTTuna, is currently trying to estimate the magnitude of the catch of juvenile tuna (or baby tuna, as the Indonesian fishers call it) through a survey in such ports as Bitung and Ambon. I visited Shinta last week in Bitung to learn as much as I could about the situation on the ground, and to work with her in further sharpening the survey questions and the rest of her research. It was one of those trips that stay with you long after you have boarded the airplane back home.
Everything in Bitung says "fish". And very often, it actually says "tuna". The hotel even smelled of fish when I arrived. It sports a picture of a bigeye tuna right above the breakfast buffet. Small eateries (warung makan as the Indonesians call them) offer pieces of yellowfin tuna in a spicy sauce, or delicious coral fish roasted on a charcoal fire. Everywhere you look there are huge fish processing plants, canneries, or fishing companies that have their own fishing wharf. The small-scale fishers land their fish at the central landing place in the port. Originally it was meant to be an auction, but for some reason the auction never really got off the ground, so fishers sell their fish directly to traders who bring the fish to local markets or to processing companies.
As far as I could see the small-scale fleet featured three main types of fishing. The most common seemed to be the handline fishery, where fishers use a single line with some bait on a hook to catch the tuna. Another important fishery is the pole-and-line fishery, where bait is simply thrown into the water (and water is also sprayed on the surface) to get the tuna into a feeding frenzy, so that it will bite anything that comes along. Fishers then only have to throw in a hook and the tuna will bite; these vessels are usually larger than the handline vessels, and employ a lot of crew. The third common method turned out to be the pajeko, or small purse seine, but this method was mainly used to catch not tuna, but small pelagic species such as anchovies and Indian Mackerel.
Special offer: room with a view in Sulawesi. Water and food not included
In all cases the Fish Aggregation Device (FAD), or rumpon as the Indonesians call it, is important. It's an interesting system. Before I came I was wondering: when you make a FAD and place it in the sea, how do you make sure that it is used by nobody else but you? The solution turned out to be simple: you put a guard on it. Yes, every rumpon has somebody guarding it 24 hours a day. This guy lives in the small hut built on top of it, with probably some sort of radio communication, and makes sure that nobody but the owner catches the fish gathered under it unless the owner is paid a comfortable sum of money. The rumpon guard also informs the owner or his vessels of the amount of fish under it, so they won't waste their time coming to a rumpon with no fish under it.
So what did we learn so far? First, a lot of fishers readily admit that they catch a fair amount of baby tuna. They use it as bait, consume it on board, or take it home to their families. It is not illegal to catch juvenile tuna, so they seem willing to tell us how much they usually catch. And although the weight of baby tuna may be small, the number of baby tuna caught, and the fact that each baby tuna could have become a big, valuable tuna makes that the catch of baby tuna can still be a serious problem. Second, the catch of baby tuna is by far not the only unknown in the Indonesian tuna fishery. There may be unreported or even illegal catch. Some authors argue that Indonesian ports lack sufficient staff to check the accuracy of logbook data. Third, although it was fairly easy to contact and survey small-scale fishers, it turns out to be a lot more difficult to contact large-scale fishing companies.
But perhaps the most important lesson was the reminder that "small-scale" does not necessarily mean "sustainable" or "green". The idea of small-scale fishers tends to conjure up the idyllic images of hardy, honest folk that you see on Discovery Channel, read about in stories like Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea, or hear about in songs like The McCalmans' "Five O'Clock In The Morning". No doubt that the people we spoke to in Bitung are honest, hard-working people who must endure many hardships to scramble a meagre income for themselves and the family they support. But a lot of fishers and consumers may benefit greatly if less baby tuna were caught. It's a difficult dilemma: a lot of very poor people depend on a fishing method that might disadvantage a lot of others.
A thoughtful article in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant of 25 September 2013 deals with publishing in Science and Nature and cites a researcher who wishes to remain anonymous:
We try every now and again to get in the top journals, because Science or Nature look good on your cv (...) But it's nonsense. My two most important articles (...) were not even considered by Science or Nature. On the other hand: I once had a Nature publication on what was absolutely the worst experiment I ever did. But that was on a hot and photogenic topic. (...) What matters to the editing boards of those journals is to keep up the status of the journal, by keeping up their impact factor. This automatically leads to a preference for fields and articles that will be cited a lot. (...) The result is also that editors have less expertise in less popular disciplines, and they have failed recently in that respect.
This is very similar to Ray Hilborn's complaints about the quality of these two journals. But then, why does this researcher want to remain anonymous? What is he or she afraid of? Being sued or ostracized by Nature and Science editors? (If he or she has reason to be afraid, why am I putting this on my blog? Oh wait...)
My impressions after a week of presentations, discussions, and lots of delicious food:
Of all the interdisciplinary conferences I've been to so far, the ICES meeting was the most scientific (read: least political, notwithstanding ICES's role as advisory body for fisheries policy), and the most constructive in its interaction with social scientists (read: economists). Besides EAERE (which I consider a disciplinary meeting) I was once at an ESEE meeting, and once at the European Congress for Conservation Biology. I had mixed feelings about those for their tendency to bash "mainstream economics" (whatever that may be) and to blur the line between science and activism. Perhaps it's because those communities have the hidden assumption that nature is best left alone by man, whereas fisheries scientists investigate, by definition, a form of interference in nature.
Is it just me, or is there a major disconnect between textbook fisheries economics and the practice of fisheries management? Concepts we teach (notably maximum economic yield and the role of the discount rate) are nowhere to be seen - in fact, I once heard a fisheries industry representative refer to maximum economic yield as "a plaything for economists". In our teaching we hardly pay attention to the stochastic nature of fish stocks, but these days fisheries science is all about reference points and harvest control rules - which only make sense in a stochastic context.
Economists can make big contributions to fisheries management by further strengthening how fisheries models describe human behaviour. So far those contributions were largely confined to modelling where fishers fish, but what about investments in gear, or boats? Let alone market structures, global developments (tilapia!), value chains, and policy-makers.
Iceland is like an extreme version of Norway. Thought the Norwegian landscape was rugged? Iceland has volcanoes, and geysers! And where I thought Norwegians don't give a hoot what the rest of the world thinks of hunting and whaling, only Icelanders can serve raw whale meat and rotten shark to a crowd of foreign scientists. (And it was delicious! The whale, that is.) Neither do Icelandic pubs have qualms with playing the entire Velvet Underground & Nico, including John Cale's ear-piercing viola solo in Heroin.
