Biological and economic consequences of alternative SP-ALB stock recovery trajectories

South Pacific albacore is a species of primary importance in the longline fishery of a number of Small Island Developing States in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean. Despite the fact that the stock is assessed as not being subject to overfishing, nor overfished, economic returns have declined significantly over the past decade. This has led to calls for management intervention. Given stated biological and economic objectives for the fishery, members of the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency proposed an interim stock target reference point (TRP) to the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission that imply a larger stock size, higher catch rates and a more profitable fishery. The purpose of this study is to examine the biological and economic consequences along the trajectories of two distinct longline effort reduction regimes that achieve the proposed TRP within 20 years. These are a one-off effort reduction implemented immediately, and a phased reduction under which effort is reduced by a fixed percent each year. The results will be discussed in the light of wider Pacific Island objectives for fishery production and fleet profitability

The Environmental Impact of Partial Substitution of Fish-Based Feed with Algae- and Insect-Based Feed in Salmon Farming

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Economic indicators for the Northern Prawn Fishery

ABARES has undertaken economic surveys of key Commonwealth fisheries since the early 1990s. Financial profit and loss statements as well as detailed capital inventories have been collected in these surveys to provide a large database of primary information. The information contained in this database can be used to construct a range of economic indicators to assist Commonwealth fishery managers meet their economic objective of maximising economic returns to the Australian community from the harvest of Commonwealth fishery resources. ABARES survey data analysis has enabled financial performance (the financial position of the average boat operating in the fishery), and economic performance (net economic returns achieved in the fishery as a whole) for the Commonwealth’s key fisheries to be reported in its annual Australian fisheries surveys report. More recently productivity and profitability indexes, entitlement values and cost of management have been added to this tool kit. This paper shows how fishery surveys data have been used by ABARES to construct a range of indicators, that when taken together help managers to assess their performance against their economic objective. Results from analysis of the Commonwealth Northern Prawn Fishery are used in this paper to illustrate the use of these indicators

Decomposing the drivers of profibility in two key Commonwealth prawn fisheries

This paper uses an index number profit decomposition approach to examine recent drivers of change in profitability in two key Commonwealth prawn fisheries, the Northern Prawn Fishery and the Torres Strait Prawn Fishery. This approach allows for the drivers of profitability that can be influenced by a fishery manager (fish stocks and productivity) to be separated from those that cannot (output prices and input prices). The results reveal that a divergence in the economic performance of the two fisheries has been the result of differences in productivity trends. These differences are the likely result of differences in fishery management arrangements between the two fisheries