Skip Navigation


ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil Advance Access originally published online on April 30, 2008
ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 2008 65(6):832-840; doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsn070
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
65/6/832    most recent
fsn070v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Sumaila, U. R.
Right arrow Articles by Pauly, D.
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by Sumaila, U. R.
Right arrow Articles by Pauly, D.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© 2008 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Oxford Journals. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Fuel price increase, subsidies, overcapacity, and resource sustainability

Ussif Rashid Sumaila1, Louise Teh1, Reg Watson1, Peter Tyedmers2 and Daniel Pauly1

1 Fisheries Centre, Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory (AERL), University of British Columbia, 2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada
2 School for Resource and Environmental Studies (SRES), Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

Correspondence to U. R. Sumaila: tel: +1 604 822 0224; fax: +1 604 822 8934; e-mail: r.sumaila{at}fisheries.ubc.ca.

Sumaila, U. R., Teh, L., Watson, R., Tyedmers, P., and Pauly, D. 2008. Fuel price increase, subsidies, overcapacity, and resource sustainability. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 65: 832–840.

Global fisheries are currently overcapitalized, resulting in overfishing in many of the world’s fisheries. Given that fuel constitutes a significant component of fishing costs, we expect recent increases in fuel prices to reduce overcapacity and overfishing. However, government fuel subsidies to the fishing sector reduce, if not completely negate, this positive aspect of increasing fuel costs. Here, we explore the theoretical basis for the expectation that the increasing fuel prices faced by fishing enterprises will reduce fishing pressure. Next, we estimate the amount of fuel subsidies to the fishing sector by governments globally to be in the range of US$4.2–8.5 billion per year. Hence, depending on how much of this subsidy existed before the recent fuel price increases, fishing enterprises, as a group, can absorb as much as this amount of increase in their fuel budget before any conservation benefits occur as a result of fuel price increases.

Keywords: fisheries subsidies, fuel subsidies, global fisheries

Received 8 August 2007; accepted 24 March 2008; advance access publication 30 April 2008.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.