Use of Economics in Fisheries: Some Observations

Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Aug 2005 by Griffin, Wade L

I am honored to be a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Don Ethridge, who received this award in 2002, said, "Whatever any of us accomplish is attributable in large part to many other people . . . ." I heartily agree with this statement. All of my research has been in cooperation with many different colleagues and students, and I am very grateful to them. I am also grateful to God because looking back, I can see that he has guided and directed my life both professionally and personally.

When Dr. Myers informed me that I would receive this award, he said that this presentation is an opportunity to talk about the highlights of my career and offer comments on opportunities and challenges for the profession. What I want to do in this paper is tell you about how economics has played a role in fisheries management in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf of Mexico Shrimp Fishery

Upon completing my Ph.D. in 1972 at Oregon State University, I had three job offers: Hawaii; Washington, D.C.; and Texas A&M University. The job at Texas A&M was to work on a grant from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). I would like to say that I came to Texas A&M because I had been inspired by the pioneers in fisheries economics like Crutchfield, Gordon, Schaefer, Scott, and others, but the fact is, my wife said that she had been in a foreign country long enough (we are both from Texas), so we came to Texas A&M. That began my career in fisheries, which I am still in today. Most of this work has been related to the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf) shrimp fishery. To give you some idea of the importance of the Gulf shrimp fishery, in 1972 it was valued at $163 million (ex vessel), whereas tuna was $89 million and salmon was valued at $62 million. In 2003, the Gulf shrimp fishery was valued at $362 million, whereas salmon was $201 million and tuna was valued at $87 million. Crabs from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf together were valued at $483 million in 2003.

The grant I worked on was titled "An Economic Appraisal of the Gulf Shrimp Fishery." The study was to estimate fishing effort for the industry and to examine the cost and returns for shrimping. The data for the project consisted of landings and revenue on a trip-by-trip basis collected by NMFS port agents. A subset of these trips had been interviewed by NMFS port agents to determine the days fished (fishing effort). A regression model was developed on the basis of the interviewed trips to estimate effort for the noninterviewed trips. The cost and return data for the shrimp fishery consisted of 13 offshore shrimp trawlers-not exactly what you would call a representative of the thousands of shrimp vessels in the Gulf, but it was all that was available. I learned two important lessons from this study. First, an economist cannot publish in a journal controlled by biologists when the research is viewed as their territory. Second, fisheries economic data was nonexistent except for revenue data.

Given the lack of economic data in fisheries, and particularly in the shrimp industry, I obtained funding from Sea Grant to collect economic cost and return data from shrimp fishermen. About the same time, Fred Prochaska and others at the University of Florida began to do marketing studies of the Gulf shrimp fishery.

200-Mile Extended Jurisdiction

During the period 1975-1978, countries with coastal waters began to extend their jurisdiction to 200 miles. The U.S. Congress passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 1976 (now called the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act). The Act gave management authority to the United States over the fishery resource within a fishery conservation zone (FCZ), now called the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), extending seaward from the state's territorial waters to 200 miles (Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council). The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council (Council) is one of eight regional Fishery Management Councils established by the Act who are responsible for developing plans to manage fishery resources in the EEZ.

Shrimp was first on the agenda for establishing a management plan. Shrimp spawn in the Gulf and move into the bays and estuaries as postmyses. They grow to juvenile shrimp in the bays and then move into the Gulf where they mature as adults, completing the annual cycle. Thus, shrimp fishing occurred on both state and federal waters. The states have management authority in their respective state waters, and now the federal government has management authority in the EEZ. In 1976, in anticipation of the United States going to a 200-mile extended jurisdiction, a Gulf Shrimp Management Plan Task Force was established to develop a regional management plan for Gulf shrimp that described the resource, the fishery, the management system with associated problems, and a proposed a system for managing the fishery (Christmas and Etzold). In this proposed management system, the need for modeling the shrimp fishery was identified. As a member of this Task Force, I saw an opportunity and linked up with William Grant, a system ecologist in the Wildlife and Fisheries Science Department at Texas A&M University, to develop a model that would incorporate both the biological and economic aspects of the shrimp fishery. We called our model the general bioeconomic fisheries simulation model (GBFSM).