Progress and Problems in the Application of Management Procedures to South Africa's Major Fisheries

Management procedures have formed the basis of the regulation of two of the three major fisheries of South Africa (the demersal trawl fishery for hake, and the purse-seine fishery for anchovy and sardine) since 1990, and have recently been developed and implemented in the third (west coast rock lobster). Essentially, these procedures comprise a set of preagreed and possibly simple rules, tested by simulation to give an appropriate catch vs. risk tradeoff in the medium term, that routinely translate data from the fishery into a TAC (total allowable catch) each year. Uncertainty is dealt with directly, by requiring rules that provide robust performance over a range of plausible scenarios for resource status and dynamics. This can circumvent issues such as appropriate weightings of different data sources, which can prove problematic if TACs are to be based on an annual “best assessment” coupled to some biological reference point. The paper discusses some key experiences in developing and implementing management procedures for the three fisheries above, specifically: that robustness to model structure uncertainty is of greater importance than “optimal” estimation; that feedback-control procedures do indeed self-correct in practice; and that short-term sociopolitical considerations undercut longer-term objectives in selecting between alternative candidate procedures when quota holders do not have established long-term rights.