Less fishing to create more and better jobs

If I asked you, you’d probably agree that “more jobs” are a good thing. Of course, some sectors have greater job-producing potential than others. That’s one reason why my employer is now focusing on five industries, such as tourism, that have good potential for creating “more and better-paid jobs”. Even so, it’s natural to wonder about the potential of other industries. In marine fisheries (fishing in the ocean), most projects focus on reducing how much fishing takes place. When fish populations are depleted, fishing less leads to catching more. This is good for economic profits, food production, and wildlife populations. But “fishing less” would seem to require fewer jobs. Also, aquaculture produces more food than marine fisheries and it continues to grow, while marine fish catch is stagnant. Are more and better jobs possible in marine fisheries? Focusing on African fisheries Many fish populations in African countries are depleted because of weak regulation of fishing. The realistic reform path is not tradable quotas, which receive most of the academic attention, but moving from open-access (anyone can fish) to regulated open-access: reducing fishing capacity, regulating fishing equipment, or closing fishing seasons or areas. Inshore Exclusion Zones (IEZs) are an example of regulated open-access. IEZs exclude industrial vessels from fishing in nearshore waters, reserving the best locations for artisanal, small-scale fishers. Under open access, too many fishers chase too few fish, and everyone earns little. Better regulation lets fish populations recover, so each remaining fisher catches more. Even if the number of fishers falls, revenue per fisher can rise. But revenue is not the same as fisher labor income. For example, my and Aishwarya Agarwal’s paper on African IEZs calculates roughly $253 million per year in additional artisanal revenue from the policy, but we do not estimate how much of this becomes labor income. In most fisheries, crew are paid through some form of revenue-sharing arrangement rather than a fixed wage, so additional catch revenue would typically increase labor income. Jobs along the supply chain Labor income from fisheries is not just what fishers earn. Processing, cold chain, transport, and marketing employ many more people than fishing itself, and these activities offer opportunities for value-addition. Women comprise about one-third of the artisanal fisheries-associated workforce, concentrated in processing and marketing. More reliable supply from better-managed fisheries could support more processing and exports. Iceland is the textbook example of a fisheries value chain transformed by better fisheries management, with processors making higher-value products from more parts of the fish, and fishers responding to processor and consumer demand for quality rather than just volume. Iceland’s success resulted from decades of coordinated efforts, not an automatic consequence of good fisheries management. Two sectors, two stories The industrial and artisanal sectors call for different approaches. Regulating industrial fisheries is more politically feasible because the sector employs relatively few people. Industrial vessels in African waters are also often foreign-owned, which can attenuate how much of any revenue gain from industrial regulation reaches the host-country labor force. But because industrial and artisanal fleets often compete for the same fish populations, regulating the industrial sector can raise artisanal catch and therefore artisanal labor income. This is why African IEZs, which regulate industrial fishing, can increase artisanal fisher catch. Artisanal fisheries are the opposite case on both counts. They dominate employment in African coastal countries and serve as a food-security and safety-net for coastal communities, so the labor-income gains from reform would accrue locally and at scale. But boats are votes: any reform that limits fishing threatens the livelihoods of large numbers of fishers, processors, and marketers in the short run, which makes artisanal reform politically very difficult. For example, this survey documents Ghanaian artisanal fishers’ extremely negative perceptions of the government's closed fishing season policy. Nonetheless, artisanal reform is where the largest potential gains in fisheries labor income lie. Existing evidence There is little causal evidence on how realistic management reforms change fisheries-associated labor income in developing-country settings. The best paper I found is a difference-in-differences estimate of the effect of a fishing equipment restriction in Kenya. Trying to create more and better jobs in marine fisheries seems less foolhardy to me than it did at first. To increase total labor income from marine fisheries, such efforts should often focus on reducing the number of fishers. This raises total catch when marine fish populations are depleted, allowing increases in income per fisher and in labor income from processing and marketing. Open questions include how much of the revenue gain from feasible reforms reaches labor, and how much more value African countries can add to their fish through processing and marketing.