Analysis of an Incentive-Based Chinook Salmon Bycatch Avoidance Proposal for the Bering Sea Pollock Fishery By

• Main Authors: Levis A. Kochin, Christopher C. Riley, Ana Kujundzic, Joseph T. Plesha Abstract
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bering Sea; Pacific
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.161.4821; http://www.fakr.noaa.gov/npfmc/current_issues/bycatch/salmonbycatch109/SalmonAvoidProposal209.pdf

Too many Chinook salmon are incidentally harvested in the Bering Sea pollock fishery and in response the North Pacific Fishery Management Council is considering measures to reduce the bycatch of Chinook salmon. In June of 2008 the Council adopted a Preferred Preliminary Alternative that allows the pollock industry, on its own initiative, to develop a program that “provides explicit incentives for each participant to avoid salmon bycatch in all years. ” This paper is a response to that invitation. The concept at the heart of this paper is an incentive-based proposal in which each pollock vessel puts up a financial ante that is redistributed among the pollock harvesting fleet in proportion to each vessel’s success in avoiding Chinook salmon. This incentive-based proposal operates to provide very strong incentives to avoid Chinook, especially when Chinook abundance is low. The paper describes the incentive-based proposal and how it interacts with a transferable hard cap to create incentives to minimize Chinook bycatch. The paper also examines the reduction in bycatch predicted to result from these incentives. 1 I.