THE FISHERMEN'S DILEMMA continued from home page

James Acheson, lobster commons expert, author of The Lobster Gangs of Maine, and co-author of “Modeling Disaster: The Failure of Management of the New England Groundfish Industry earlier this year. ©Photo by Sam Murfitt

By contrast, the study says, the groundfishery is heterogeneous and factionalized. Groundfisher- men are spread out, roam widely, and often don’t know each other. They’re out for themselves, the study says. The situation is complicated by a history of largely outside management by federally formed councils and the consequent antagonism that arises on the part of fishermen.

The localized nature of the state management system for lobster contributes to the fishery’s success, Dr. Acheson said in a telephone interview.

Just whether the sector system can contribute to localized stewardship of the groundfishery remains in doubt, he said.

“I think it would take a real turnaround not only in the culture of the industry but also in the agencies, and I just don’t see that happening very easily,” he said. “Maybe it will. Maybe Amendment 16 will be that turning point. I hope so.”

Dr. Acheson, professor of anthropology and marine sciences at the University of Maine, is best known as the author of the 1988 best-selling book, Lobster Gangs of Maine, a work on the culture and economics of lobster fishing, and the 2003 work, Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Industry, a case study of the management of one of the world’s most successful fishery. He has had a long-term interest in the culture and social organization of Maine fishing communities, and the social science aspects of fisheries management, with a focus on the common property problem and on applying the principles of institutional economics to a variety of problems in anthropology, including the development of local level institutions to manage resources and promote economic change.

In recent years, much of Acheson’s research has focused on using rational choice theory to understand the conditions under which people will constrain their own exploitive efforts in the common good and develop effective conservation institutions.

Written with Dr. Roy Gardner, a professor of economics at Indiana University, “Modeling Disaster” summarizes the history of groundfish management and uses several concepts taken from a branch of applied mathematics called “game theory.” Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual’s success in making choices depends on the choices of others.

“Most of the world’s marine fisheries are overexploited or endangered, including the New England groundfishery, once one of the world’s most prolific,” says the study. “After 35 years of management, stock sizes and catches are lower now than ever. We argue that New England groundfishermen are caught in a prisoner’s dilemma, from which they have failed to escape. We then suggest a set of policies to get these groundfishermen out of their dilemma.”

The “prisoner's dilemma” is a fundamental problem in game theory that demonstrates why two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so.

The classic example of the prisoner's dilemma involves two suspects arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated the prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation.

If it is assumed that each suspect cares only about minimizing his own time in jail, then the prisoner’s dilemma forms a game in which two prisoners may each cooperate with the police. The only concern of each individual prisoner is maximizing his own payoff, without concern for the other prisoner’s payoff.

Groundfishermen, the authors write, are caught in a prisoner’s dilemma, from which they have failed to escape.

“Until they do escape, this fishery will continue its downward spiral,” the authors write.

The authors rename the problem “the fishermen’s dilemma.” If conservation of the resource is the heart of fishery management, they write, then fishermen, to put it simplistically, have two choices – to follow the status quo, which represents overexploitation, or to follow a better management scheme. If the industry continues to follow the status quo, they write, there is no long-term payoff because the resource will continue to spiral down. If the industry follows a better management scheme, the payoff will be equal to the benefits of the scheme minus the costs. The full benefit of following a better management scheme is only achieved if everyone in the fishery follows the rule. Otherwise, the benefit is proportional to the number following the rule – that is, the fewer people who follow the rule, the lower the benefit.

Rationally speaking, the authors write, the benefit of better management would be so great that every fisherman would choose to adopt it. “Unfortunately for the New England fishery, this is not the case that applies,” they write.

Conversely, fishermen have no incentive to follow a better management scheme if no one else does, the authors write. “It is hard to get out of a prisoner’s dilemma, as the experience of these fishermen will show,” the authors write.

Typically, the authors write, a “prisoner’s dilemma” can be solved if the “prisoners” can communicate with each other. In the case of the groundfishery, communication is vastly complicated by the heterogeneous nature of the industry, they write.

“Not only are different types of gear used (trawls, gill nets, long lines), but the size of boats varies from 40-footers that go to sea for a day or two to 120-footers that remain at sea for weeks at a time. Electronic gear, fish-cooling apparatus, crew size, and vessel configuration also vary.

Groundfishing vessels are highly mobile and sell their catches in a number of ports. Some of the smaller boats concentrate on inshore grounds within 50 miles of their home harbors; the larger vessels roam widely over the Gulf of Maine and beyond. Crews of groundfishing vessels are part of a social network, but people in the network do not all interact, and many vessels fishing on the same grounds are from different harbors and have crews that scarcely know each other.”

The problem is further complicated, they write, by the “abject” history of federal groundfish management, including the government’s push to build a bigger and modernized fleet.

“The key trick is, how are you going to get the benefits of a high-quality rule?” Acheson said. “In the groundfish industry, everything is lined up against it.” During his own time at NMFS in the 1970s, Acheson said, he observed the effects of the federal government’s rules, as bigger, better boats came online and American boats were forced out of Canadian water and into a smaller area in the Gulf of Maine.

“It was a hell of a mess,” he said. He continued: “Top-down management has its problems. You get a single set of rules for the entire range of the stock and even if there are major ecological and economic differences, too bad – one size fits them all. And that’s what we’ve had ever since.”

Today, said Acheson, the new sector management system might provide some conservation benefits in particular areas. But there are also “a whole lot of big boats from Gloucester and some from Portland and they want to fish all over the Gulf of Maine,” he said. “If you have rules in a particular area to constrain effort, you’ll conserve the fish,” he said. “But the second you conserve the fish, you have the big boats coming in and taking them. So you’ve got a round-robin; it’s one mistake after the other. And the fishermen are basically responding in the worst of all possible ways. They’re overfishing, and they run to Congress and say, We need to have more fish.”

The lobster industry does provide some pointers, he said. There, the rules are based on how fishing is conducted – constrained by conservation measures such as V-notching and size limits, for example; not how much product is taken. While the quota system built into the groundfish sector management has potential, he said, the problem is lack of accuracy in the stock assessment; no one knows whether the quotas are accurate, and fishermen don’t trust the numbers.

“The industry just isn’t in control here,” he said. “You have the lobster industry able to get most of the rules they want, if they’re able to get together, which they have a hell of a time doing.”

But history shows, he said, that top-down politics in the groundfish industry is a non-starter. “You have to have some success to get the fishing industry behind it,” he said. “And if they don’t see resurgence in the stock, or even if they do and they think it’s due to something else beside the rule, they’re not going to go along with it.”

However, the study expresses some optimism that the downward spiral can be stopped through management at the local level and a cultural change in thinking when it comes to conservation.

The paper “Modeling Disaster: The Failure of Management of the New England Groundfish Industry” has been submitted to the North American Journal of Fisheries Management. Acheson has also submitted his historical study of the groundfish industry, “Coming up Empty,” to the journal Comparative Studies of Society and History.