The Promise of Transferable Fishing Concessions on EU Fisheries

Two of the primary issues of the next Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reform are maximum sustainable yield (MSY) and transferable fishing concessions (TFCs). The European Commission agreed on implementing TFCs under some major principles including reserving a part of total quotas for small-scale fishermen in order to prevent the reduction in the fish catching sector employment. Besides, the European Commission set the goal of achieving MSY for all European fisheries by 2015. The interrelation between these two objectives should be well understood. In this study, the impact of fishing on total biomass is analyzed under an age-structured model, and the potential effects of TFCs on the achievement process of MSY harvesting conditions are explained. It is shown that the implementation of TFCs, under the major principles defined by the European Commission, has an impact on both the total biomass growth and the time path to reach the goal of MSY. The paper concludes that initial allocation of quotas does matter since reserving quotas for small-scale fishermen reduces the time needed to achieve MSY.