A LINEAR PROGRAMMING APPROACH TO DETERMINING HARVESTING CAPACITY: A MULTIPLE SPECIES FISHERY

The U.S. Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 (P.L. 94·265) requires that fishery management plans specify the capacity ofa fishing fleet. However, the Act does not provide a definition of capacity. This paper considers some of the problems of defining and measuring capacity in the harvesting sector ofthe fishing industry and suggests an estimation procedure. A linear programming model is used to estimate the economic capacity of a fishing fleet. The model provides estimates of the expected output in a multiple species fishery. Measurement of capacity in the U.S. fishing in­ dustry has become of increasing importance as a result of the passage of the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of1976 (FCMA). The FCMA requires (Section 303 (a) (4) (A)) fishery manage­ ment plans prepared by Regional Fishery Man­ agement Councils or the Secretary of Commerce to: "assess and specify ... the capacity and the extent to which fishing vessels of the United States, on an annual basis, will harvest the op­ timum yield .... " The FCMA, however, does not provide a func­ tional definition ofcapacity that can be used in the preparation of fishery management plans. This raises operational difficulties since "capacity" can be based on economic or physical concepts. For example, physical capacity can be measured in terms of the hold space of a fishing vessel, al­ though this generally exceeds the catch. An economic measure would simply be past catches (assuming these reflect equilibrium conditions), but this does not necessarily provide an accurate indication of future catches. It is apparent that the hold space or past catches are only "first" approximations to "capacity" and that better indicators are needed in order to have meaningful estimates of the expected catch of the fleet. Since estimates of capacity are of obvious