Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2018 Jun 6;4(6):eaat2504.
doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aat2504. eCollection 2018 Jun.

The economics of fishing the high seas

Enric Sala  1 , Juan Mayorga  1   2 , Christopher Costello  2 , David Kroodsma  3 , Maria L D Palomares  4 , Daniel Pauly  4 , U Rashid Sumaila  4 , Dirk Zeller  5
Affiliations

The economics of fishing the high seas

Enric Sala et al. Sci Adv. .

Abstract

While the ecological impacts of fishing the waters beyond national jurisdiction (the "high seas") have been widely studied, the economic rationale is more difficult to ascertain because of scarce data on the costs and revenues of the fleets that fish there. Newly compiled satellite data and machine learning now allow us to track individual fishing vessels on the high seas in near real time. These technological advances help us quantify high-seas fishing effort, costs, and benefits, and assess whether, where, and when high-seas fishing makes economic sense. We characterize the global high-seas fishing fleet and report the economic benefits of fishing the high seas globally, nationally, and at the scale of individual fleets. Our results suggest that fishing at the current scale is enabled by large government subsidies, without which as much as 54% of the present high-seas fishing grounds would be unprofitable at current fishing rates. The patterns of fishing profitability vary widely between countries, types of fishing, and distance to port. Deep-sea bottom trawling often produces net economic benefits only thanks to subsidies, and much fishing by the world's largest fishing fleets would largely be unprofitable without subsidies and low labor costs. These results support recent calls for subsidy and fishery management reforms on the high seas.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. The high-seas fishing fleet.
High-seas vessels by flag state and gear type, as detected by GFW in 2016.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2. Global patterns of fishing in the high seas.
(A) Fishing effort, (B) economic costs, (C) revenue (landed value of the catch), (D) profits before subsidies, (E) profits after subsidies, and (F) profits after subsidies and low labor costs. Values for costs and profits are scaled averages between lower and upper bound estimates.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3. Net economic benefit of high-seas fishing.
Range of estimates of fishing profits (US$ millions) before (π) and after (π*) subsidies for (A) major fishing countries and (B) gear types.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4. National patterns of fishing in the high seas.
Average high-seas fishing profits with and without subsidies for the five main fishing flag states.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5. Spatial patterns of high-seas fishing profits.
(A) FAO regions, (B) profits before subsidies by country, and (C) fishing gear.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Sumaila U. R., Lam V. W. Y., Miller D. D., Teh L., Watson R. A., Zeller D., Cheung W. W. L., Côté I. M., Rogers A. D., Roberts C., Sala E., Pauly D., Winners and losers in a world where the high seas is closed to fishing. Sci. Rep. 5, 8481 (2015). - PMC - PubMed
    1. Norse E. A., Brooke S., Cheung W. W. L., Clark M. R., Ekeland I., Froese R., Gjerde K. M., Haedrich R. L., Heppell S. S., Morato T., Morgan L. E., Pauly D., Sumaila R., Watson R., Sustainability of deep-sea fisheries. Mar. Policy 36, 307–320 (2012).
    1. Clark M. R., Althaus F., Schlacher T. A., Williams A., Bowden D. A., Rowden A. A., The impacts of deep-sea fisheries on benthic communities: A review. ICES J. Mar. Sci. 73, i51–i69 (2016).
    1. McWhinnie S. F., The tragedy of the commons in international fisheries: An empirical examination. J. Environ. Econ. Manag. 57, 321–333 (2009).
    1. ISSF, “Status of the world fisheries for tuna. Feb. 2018.” ISSF Technical Report 2018-02 (International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, 2018).

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources