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| | | Governance of capture fisheries |
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|  International trade rules have developed through several rounds of international trade negotiations under the GATT. The last of these, the 1994 Uruguay Round, agreed to establish the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and a number of important agreements with relevance to fisheries were concluded. The FAOs Committee on Fisheries has a Sub-Committee on Fish Trade, which provides an inter-governmental forum for consultations on technical and economic aspects of trade in fish and fish products.Experience has shown that natural renewable resources such as fishery stocks are depleted in the absence of effective governance as soon as the effective demand for a particular fish grows beyond the biological capacity of the particular fish stcok. Effective governance of those engaged in capture fisheries is therefore essential for the optimal and long-term use of marine fisheries resources. Creating restrictions to open access to the resource is an essential, though not a sufficient, condition for effective governance. Rights, and institutions that surround these rights, need to create a set of incentives that encourage limiting fishing effort to what is consistent with the long-term optimal, sustainable productivity of the resource. But even where these types of rights exist, their enforcement - through MCS - is necessary. | | |  In effect, monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) is a key feature of an effective fisheries management process. This is a particular challenge in small-scale fisheries, which produce about 50% of the harvest used for human consumption of world's capture fisheries. Where large numbers of fishers are involved, using a large number and variety of vessels, effective monitoring control and surveillance needs innovative arrangements that involve fishers, at a local level, in the design and implementation of the process. Technical innovations such as Vessel Monitoring Systems and the Global Positioning Systems have facilitated MCS in a growing number of fisheries. In addition, aquatic resource distribution often extends into more than one jurisdictional area and effective governance requires that the management authority exercises control over the whole of the range of the target fisheries resources. This has implications at all scales, from local decentralised management systems to international fisheries management and from shared stocks to straddling stocks. | | | | While there is agreement that free and open access to fishing is not an option, there is still an ongoing debate about the most effective and equitable way of authorizing access and allocating resources. The existence of an excess fishing capacity adds considerably to the pressure on governments and fishing authorities to agree to higher (more lenient) limits, larger quotas, higher number of permits, etc., than otherwise required for responsible fishing. It is being realised, however, that the political, economic and social cost of rehabilitating collapsed fisheries may be much higher that the costs of effective management. | | | | |
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