Management of Pacific island inshore fisheries
Adams T and Dalzell P. 1995. Management of Pacific island inshore fisheries. In Author unknown: 3rd Australasian fisheries managers conference. Rottnest Island, Western Australia. August 2-4, 1995. Integrated Coastal Fisheries Management Project. Noumea, New Caledonia
Apart from Papua New Guinea, the Pacific Islands are not set on continental shelves. Outer reef slopes quickly give way to the abyss and the area available for inshore fishing is thus limited. Even so, counting the potential local market value of subsistence fisheries, the Pacific Islands produce around US$250,000,000 worth of fish and invertebrates per year, amounting to around 100,000 tonnes. About 80% of this production is by rural villages and never enters the cash economy. Although each country has preferred and high-volume species, the typical catch is very heterogeneous, consisting of 200 or more fish and invertebrate species caught on a regular basis. Pacific Island inshore fisheries were not actively managed by Governments until recently. A longstanding tradition of resource allocation by coastal villages has always been taken for granted and overfishing is not yet a serious problem in most areas. Legal measures were designed to prevent major damage with a minimum of institutional resources. More recent Government interventions have resulted from the need to manage export fisheries, and fisheries involving foreign fishing effort or capital, which tend to bypass existing community measures and resource-ownership systems. One of the main research areas for Pacific Islands inshore fisheries management in the near future is the development of management regimes that take advantage of existing jurisdictional competences of rural communities but take into account modern fishing practices and modern markets (particularly the cash economy).