Incentivising Selectivity

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Incentivising Selectivity

• How to improve the uptake of selective fishing
  gear

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Barrie Deas

• National Federation of Fishermens Organisations
• North Sea RAC
• NW Waters RAC

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Progress in gear design

• Panels
• Grids
• Separator trawls
• Low headline trawls
• Gear configuration

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Uptake Disappointing -underachievement

• Complex prescriptive rules
• Lost short term marketable catch
• Easier to high grade on deck
• Custom and practise

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Prescriptive rules

• Difficult to understand
• Difficult to write
• Difficult to enforce
• Easy to circumvent
• Leads to disillusion

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Incentives

• Commission Communication in 1996
• Positive incentives to encourage the adoption of
  more selective gear

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850/98

• Any mesh size
• Appropriate catch composition
• Incentive to discard
• Requirement to discard

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2003 - Effort Control

• Incentive to fish more intensively
• Incentive to reduce mesh size

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Contradictions

• Objectives
• Incentives
• Instruments

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Incentives are critical

• Fishing is above all an economic activity
• Measures which undermine economic viability are
  difficult to implement
• The alignment of incentives with management
  objectives will enhance the prospects of
  successful implementation

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How?

• Cod Avoidance plans?
• Under discussion in the RACS

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Cod Avoidance Plans

• Vessel would volunteer to prepare a cod avoidance
  plan for the following year
• Content discussed with authorities
• The plan would specify ways in which the vessel,
  in the coming year would operate to avoid
  catching cod above the vessels legitimate quota

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Cod Avoidance Plans

• Spatial avoidance
• Temporal /seasonal avoidance
• Selective gear
• Other

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Vessels participating

• Would be exempt from effort control in the year
  in question
• Would undertake to provide enhanced data,
  including self-sampling
• Observers

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Incentives

• Similar in concept to the Commissions Discard
  paper
• Outcomes rather than detailed means are prescribed

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Technical Conservation

• Gear is available that can deliver better
  selectivity
• Putting the right incentives in place would
  encourage further refinements and development

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Avoidance plans and gear selectivity

• We will only achieve the full potential of
  selective gear if the man in the wheelhouse wants
  it.
• Cod avoidance plans are an attempt to incentivise
  selectivity
• A genuine bottom up approach

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End

• Thank you