As expounded by Gordon (1954) and later by others (Scott, 1955; Christy and Scott, 1965), a characteristic of all open-access capture fisheries is that in the long run effective fishing effort will expand until an open-access equilibrium is reached where total costs equal total revenues. This implies that the “average” fishing unit is just covering its costs and that all resource rents are dissipated. That is to say, industry profits will be zero.1 Such a fishery is said to be over-capitalized in that a reduction in effective effort and hence costs could result in positive resource rents which could be used for beneficial purposes in the economy as a whole.
The over-fished nature of many tropical capture fisheries has recently been discussed by Smith (1979), Troadec (1981) and Panayotou (1982), all of whom advocate control over access and use as a potential solution to over-fishing. For example, if the underlying stock-recruitment relationship is of the type described by Schaefer (1954), the same yield that is sustainable at the open-access equilibrium could be obtained at a reduced level of effort and costs (Fig.1). Reductions in effort would increase the economic efficiency of the fishery by increasing the resource rents generated. To a point, and depending upon the exact shape of the yield and total revenue curves, reductions in effort could also actually produce increases in yield and total revenues.
Note that the term “common property” was not used above to characterize capture fisheries. Considerable debate has ensued as a result of Hardin's (1968) assertion that the common-property nature of many renewable resources causes over-use as predicted for the fishery above. Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop (1975) took issue with this line of argument and maintained that ‘common property’ institutions; far from being the ‘problem’, in fact offered the potential for effectively managing renewable resources such as fisheries. Although not usually stated in quite this way, this same sentiment appears to be behind much of the recent literature that proposes a rediscovery of traditional fisheries management systems (Johannes, 1981; Alexander, n.d.). Because traditional systems for regulating use have broken down in many fisheries as gears have become more mobile and efficient, it has been proposed that community management, control and regulation may offer the best hope of increasing the social benefits to be derived from fisheries (Bailey, 1982; Christy, 1982; Panayotou, 1982).
The solution to over-capitalization as proposed by Gordon (1954) and Scott (1955) was to permit or mandate sole ownership of the fishery in question. A sole owner would attempt to equate the marginal cost of each added unit of effort to the marginal revenue that it would produce. By so doing, the sole owner would apply that level of effective effort which would produce the maximum economic yield (MEY in Fig.1). In most countries it has been thought politically or administratively impossible to implement sole-ownership approaches. Subsequently, in much of the world, attempts to reduce effective effort have focused on various alternative mechanisms including quotas, closed seasons, gear restrictions, taxes or licences that seek to regulate fishermen as a group (Scott, 1979; Crutchfield, 1979; Stokes, 1979). These alternative approaches to rationalization have produced only a few successes despite years of application and refinement in temperate single-species fisheries (Pearse, 1979).
Enforcement of such regulations is always a problem and fishermen ingenuity has in many cases resulted in effective (legal) circumvention of these mechanisms for controlling effort. In tropical, multi-species, multi-gear fisheries, experience with attempts at economic rationalization is even more limited. The fact that most tropical fisheries are small-scale and mobile in nature with dispersed landings also makes enforcement extremely difficult and costly.
Christy (1982) has proposed a search for and documentation of cases of territorial use rights in fisheries (TURFs). He believes that TURFs offer two potential advantages that are particularly important in settings characterized by over-capitalization and poverty in fishing communities. First, TURFs offer the potential of assigning exclusive use rights so that the resource rents that are lost under open-access can be captured. Second, community control over these use rights and the rents that are generated may provide the means by which the welfare of fishing communities can be improved. Similar arguments have also been put forward by Friedman (1981) in support of a territorial approach to rural development.
1 Profits defined as returns above all costs, including imputed or social opportunity costs.
Figure 1 Simple static model of an open-access fishery
There is an inherently political element to the assignment of territorial use rights, especially if the territory in question is narrowed down to the individual community level. This is because decentralization of authority over resource use is thought by many to be politically unfeasible in environments of centralized authority and control as exist in many developing countries. However, something can be learned from precedents for local territorial authority that can be found in many countries. The best known of these systems is undoubtedly that of coastal fishery rights in Japan where fishing communities exercise complete authority over use and thus provide a useful forum for the resolution of conflicts among users (Hiraswa, 1980; Asada, Hirasawa and Nagasaki, 1983).
A similar precedent exists in the Philippines where coastal municipalities are legally empowered to regulate fishing activity within municipal waters to a distance of 3 nautical miles from the coastline (De Sagun and Bautista, 1979; Santos, 1980). All vessels of 3 gross tons or less must be licensed by municipalities, which also have authority to restrict trawling within municipal waters. Because these municipal licences can be secured for only nominal fees (and frequently are not even obtained), they do not effectively limit access to municipal waters.
However, certain types of municipal fisheries - fish corrals (stationary weirs), oyster beds, and milkfish fry gathering - are awarded on a concession basis and these provide extremely interesting examples of TURFs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the last of these (milkfish fry gathering concessions) to see if they satisfy Christy's two goals for TURFs; the capture of resource rents and increased welfare in fishing communities.
In this examination of municipal concessions, we are particularly interested in the potential for increased economic efficiency. We also examine related issues of enforcement and transferability of resource use rights and the potential role for fry gatherers' cooperatives and likely benefits, if any, from such organizations.
