This document has been long in preparation for no fault of the author. In the summer of 1996 Prof. Arnason agreed to prepare a report on the economics of marine ranching. He prepared the report according to his terms of reference and within the time prescribed. The draft was reviewed in FAO and comments forwarded to the author in the middle of 1997. For various reasons the report was not finalised until the author spent two months at FAO Headquarters in Rome at the end of 2000. Although the experiences of ocean ranching that the author describes are no longer recent, they are valuable as a statement of the situation of ocean ranching in the mid 1990s. The sections concerning the fundamental externality of ocean ranching and the discussion and description of the methodology used for assessing the costs and benefits of ocean ranching constitute a valuable addition to today’s literature on this subject.
