This study has been prepared to assist directors of fisheries and fisheries planning staff of developing countries in the African region in meeting the challenges presented by extension of national jurisdiction. The discussion focuses on procedures and steps in systematic planning essential for ensuring well balanced development in the fisheries sector.
The presentation of the material illustrates procedures and steps in planning. While planning does not have to follow a rigidly sequential pattern, it is nevertheless useful to distinguish between various phases of the planning exercise.
Following the introductory chapter, general observations are made on plans and planning. They are followed by a discussion of preplanning requirements. Additional chapters deal with preparation of sectoral plans, major issues faced by coastal developing countries as a consequence of the institution of new fishing limits, and the choice of tools for achieving objectives of development under the new Law of the Sea.
Under the principle of the freedom of the seas, nationals of other countries had free access to fishery resources off the shores of coastal developing countries up to the limit of the territorial waters of the latter. Under the new law, extension of jurisdiction has brought over ninety percent of all marine fishery resources under the control of coastal states. Foreign fishermen who want to fish - or want to continue to fish - in the extended zone must now obtain authorization to do so. The new law confers certain rights and imposes certain obligations on the coastal state. Specifically, the coastal state has the right to determine the “allowable catch” of fishery resources under its jurisdiction and to determine its own capacity to harvest it. It also provides that, where own capacity does not exceed the allowable catch, other states are to be given access to the surplus, subject to conservation and management regulations and other conditions set by the coastal state.
For all coastal states, conversion of additional fishery resources from international into national common property as the result of limits extension is providing an opportunity to increase benefits from national fisheries management. These states are now in a position to exercise control over the bulk of the resources off their shores and, with good management, to optimize exploitation through careful regulation of catches and capital and labour inputs.
The benefits which may be derived from the increased scope for fisheries management differ substantially from one coastal country to another.
Countries with resources which are of special interest to distant-water fleets may reap large immediate gains as the result of their strong bargaining position with foreign fishermen. Other coastal countries, with resources that are less attractive to foreigners, may gain less.
Foreign fleets operating under open access conditions have, as a rule, concentrated their fishing effort on species of value in the markets in the countries in which the fleets are based and in international markets. In many instances, species less popular in these markets have been ignored by them. Some coastal developing countries may feel that these neglected species have a significant home market potential and, after institution of their EEZs, may wish to direct increased fishing effort toward their exploitation.
The countries which have lost control over resources traditionally exploited by them are, for the most past, developed as well as some developing coastal countries, e.g. Korea and Taiwan, which have been (or still are) operating long-distance fleets. Some developing countries, e.g. Ghana, which have been fishing with smaller-sized industrial vessels in waters that have now come under the jurisdiction of neighbouring countries in their region also have been adversely affected. Many of the countries concerned are seeking to conclude agreements that will allow them to continue to fish in the waters from which they have been excluded as the result of the institution of new limits by their neighbours. Where they have not succeeded in this endeavour, they try to find other coastal countries with surplus resources which are willing to enter fisheries agreements with them. Other forms of adjustments to reduced opportunities include:
intensification of efforts to boost output, including by development of new, heretofore unfished, resources;
the trimming ofcosts of fishing on fishing grounds to which the countries continue to have access;
conversion to other uses, sale, or scrapping, of fishing craft where continued operations appear uneconomic in the long run.
The opportunities the coastal countries have under the new law, to prevent, by appropriate management measures, overinvestment in, and over-exploitation of, their fishery resources may be of limited practical significance if the countries lack the know-how, or determination, for instituting and enforcing effective management controls.
There are no provisions in the new law for ensuring that coastal countries comply with the obligations to determine total allowable catches, catch capacity, and surplusses harvestable by foreign fleets. In the absence of enforcement clauses, conflicts that might arise between international law (as laid down in the new regime) and national development objectives may sometimes be resolved in favour of the latter. This may prevent maximum sustainable exploitation, desirable in the interest of reducing the net global shortage of animal protein food.
The benefits which coastal states are able to derive from their fishery resources ultimately depend on their ability to formulate and implement rational plans for their exploitation and utilization.
Dictionaries define “planning” as “the process of working out how to achieve an objective or objectives in practice” (FAO/Swedish Funds-in-Trust, 1974).
The economic plan of a country is concerned with national aggregates of population, investment, savings, foreign exchange, etc. It sets development targets for the economy as a whole, targets for growth in gross national product, etc., including investment levels for both public and private sectors. It also allocates scarce resources such as foreign exchange and investment funds to particular sectors.
Sector plans deal with specific areas of production, such as fisheries, analyzing their role in meeting plan objectives and targets, setting sectoral goals consistent with these, and defining policies and activities needed within the sector in order to attain these goals. A basic need for systematic planning of fisheries development arises from the realization that uncontrolled fishing effort reduces catch per unit effort and sometimes may even entirely destroy a particular fish stock. To make sure that objectives laid down in the sectoral plan will be attained, exploitation has therefore to be regulated through appropriate management measures.
Since both the economic and the sectoral plans deal with aggregates, they are referred to as macro-plans.
Micro or project planning concerns the identification and appraisal of individual components of programmes chosen to carry out plan objectives.
Regional planning is concerned with a specific geographic area which may be a province or a state in a federal system or a municipal administration in a unitary state. Planning an individual enterprise is referred to as entrepreneurial planning.
Development (as distinguished from entrepreneurial) planning implies some form of participation by government in the planning process.
Form and degree of public participation permit a distinction between directive planning involving the issue of instructions from the central planning agency to the individual economic units (or sectors) and indicative planning involving the central planning agency merely in defining the allocation of resources necessary to achieve certain objectives, and leaving it to the individual economic units (or sectors) to decide to follow the advice.
Incentive planning involves devising a system of economic inducements which make the planned course of action for economic units at the same time the most desirable or profitable of them. Indicative and incentive planning are found mainly in market economies. As most economies are now “mixed,” planning, in practice, tends to combine elements of two or three of the basic types of planning.
In fisheries planning, the circumstances that the resources of the sea are common property, and that fish are a renewable resource which may be destroyed through uncontrolled activity of the fishermen, account for the need for the state to shoulder responsibilities for managing and developing marine fisheries.
According to the time period encompassed, a distinction is made between perspective plans, medium-term plans and annual or short-term plans. The purpose of a long-term plan is to establish the broad lines of what will or should take place over an extended period of time such as a decade. The long-term plan provides a framework for medium-term plans which may be broken down into annual plans to conform with the periodicity of budgetary appropriations.
National development planning is of fairly recent origin and has been possible only since the development of appropriate planning tools, such as national income statistics. Although sector planning has had a longer history, its usefulness had been limited by the lack of national plans.
As planning is the process of working out how to achieve an objective, the objective must be relevant and attainable; the necessary resources must already exist or, if not yet in existence, must become available within the plan period. As there can never be sufficient resources to achieve all objectives, planning requires the setting of priorities and national and sectoral objectives will reflect political compromises.
Planning is not a magic formula for achieving development progress. Poor planning will yield results that may not be any better than if no provisions for planning had been made.
The process of producing national plans tends to proceed either from the top down or from the bottom up. Neither approach is satisfactory by itself. Macro-planners usually do not know in sufficient detail what can and cannot be done in practice with the resources and constraints that actually obtain at the operational level. At the same time, the operational unit is unlikely to be sufficiently aware of national constraints (in terms of availability of capital, foreign exchange, etc.) which determine the desirable balance between different sectors, projects, and activities. Effective planning requires a flux of information in both directions, giving the lowest level in the hierarchy the opportunity to fully digest guidance coming from above, and providing the top level with an understanding of what can and cannot be implemented in practice.
The following terms are commonly used in the literature on planning (FAO/Swedish Funds-in-Trust, 1974):
Objectives - are formulated by governments and, therefore, based mainly upon political considerations.
Goals and targets - interpret the political objectives in physical and monetary terms.
Policies or strategies - indicate how the objectives, and the consequent goals and targets, are to be achieved by an executive agency, e.g. the Fisheries Department.
Policy instruments and measures - tools, such as legislation and taxes, employed to pursue strategies.
Programmes, projects and activities - concrete elements which translate the plans for achieving the objectives into actual development.
The economies and the fisheries sectors of developing coastal countries of Africa are so varied that it would be futile to attempt to generalize on planning systems and requirements in the region. The majority of the countries have market-oriented economies, where the state, in view of the scarcity of private entrepreneurship, has to carry a very large burden of the planning task. The region also includes a number of countries with centrally planned economies, where the state has an even more pronounced role in determining the objectives and direction of development.
Some of the countries look at fisheries as the main opportunity to expand development of their economies, whereas others enjoy a wider choice in this respect. In some countries, inland fisheries and aquaculture present additional or alternative opportunities for promoting fisheries. In these fisheries, common property ownership considerations and the need for national planning may not apply to the extent they do in marine fisheries. Even in those countries, however, where they hold out equally good, if not superior, development prospects, there are likely to arise important socio-economic problems in marine fisheries that can be solved only by systematic planning.
Extension of national jurisdiction has conferred great immediate benefits on some countries and opened up longer-term prospects for other countries of the African region. For a few countries which have been excluded from fishing in neighbouring countries, the prospective gain from extension of their national jurisdiction is likely to be smaller than the loss resulting from the exclusion from fishing in previously fished waters.
From a global perspective, the countries of the east central Atlantic are considered to be potentially the greatest beneficiaries of the extension of jurisdiction. This is because of the presence in their EEZs of large quantities of resources which, in the past, have been attracting a great part of the fishing effort by long-distance fleets of a variety of European and East Asian countries. The major task of the sectoral planners of these countries is to decide on the scope of a domestic increase in fishing operations and on allocation of permits to foreign fishermen so as to maximize national benefits from exploitation.
All coastal countries in the region have small-scale fisheries of some significance. In some countries, these fisheries account for an important addition to food supplies in the area within the radius of distribution from smaller harbours or landing sites. Elsewhere, the employment factor plays an important role, whereas still elsewhere, where opportunities to transfer to other employment or areas are limited or non-existent, preservation of small-scale fisheries is considered a social responsibility rather than an opportunity to derive benefits for consumers or producers.
Replacement by domestic operations, following institution of the extension of jurisdiction, of long-distance fleets, which, in the past, have often interfered with small-scale fisheries, may ease the problems of the latter to some extent. Where, however, expansion of domestic industrial fishing is contemplated, planners will still have to try to make sure that future interests of small-scale fishermen are safeguarded.
