Marine Fishing (Research Paper Sample)

Student’s Name
Instructor’s Name
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Marine Fisheries
Introduction
Theis and Tomkin suggests that overexploitation in marine fisheries has been made prone due to their physical nature. These are mainly due to the fact that the oceans can be accessible to anyone in possession of a boat that contains a gear (243). The effect that this usually creates is the reduction of the number of catch for the other boats and consequently the diminishing in number of stock that need to produce in order to ensure there is enough stock to be able to sustain availability of next year’s catch. Hence going by the economic theory, what this will result to if inefficient legal institutions fail to regulate marine fisheries is fishery will experience excessive entries which will increase the total amount of the annual catch that will eventually lead to the fish stock being inefficiently low (Theis and Tomkin, 243).
Utilitarianism which is consequentialism paradigm case regards pleasure (preference and/or desire) as being the world only intrinsic value. While pain, is considered as the world only intrinsic disvalue. Additionally, it is of the view that, what will produce balance of features that has pleasure over pain being greatest, will constitute the right actions. Hence with regards to marine fishing it should be established what constitute the right actions.
Statement of the problem
Due to marine fishing, the number of stock that is available for the fish breed to ensure their sustainability for the next years has always reduced. Therefore, there is need to ascertain whether marine fishing has reached to appoint that it threatens the extinction of some species of marine fish and relate these to environmental ethical issues.
Objective
The main aim of the study is to ascertain the impact of marine fisheries and how it relates to some of the environmental ethical theories. The following research questions will assist in attaining these research objectives. They will include: is the level of marine fisheries threatening the sustainability of some marine fish and how these does relate to the environmental ethical theories like utilitarianism.
Literature review
Any entity that is engaged in harvesting or raising of fish is referred to as a fishery. The terms that typically define a fishery are types of fish or species, individuals involved, area of seabed or water, fishing method, the activities purpose or the class of the boats. Fishers and fish are usually combined in the definition with the latter utilizing similar gear types to fish similar species. Aquatic culture, fish farming or capturing wild fish may be involved in a fishery. Fish stocks are continuously being reduced due to overfishing that has led to fish being taken beyond sustainable levels. (Jennings et al, 78)
The various reasons that the fisheries are harvested include: for their recreational, commercial or subsistence value. They are either farmed or wild, fresh water or salt water. Examples include the Eastern Pacific tuna fishery, the Lofoten Islands cod fishery, China shrimp fish fisheries, or the Alaska Salmon fishery. The majority of the fisheries in the world are from the seas and oceans and not inland waters.
Methodology
The method of data collection that was employed for this study was the use of secondary sources of data as well as primary sources of data. The primary source of data collection involved administering questionnaires to scholars and fishery management. The questionnaires aimed to ascertain the impact that overfishing has had to the environment and how it relates to some theories such as utilitarianism. For the secondary sources of data collection, it mainly involved research from information contained in books and articles from journals. This method of data collection was deemed efficient since the information from books and journals is relatively accurate as its meanings are not destroyed over time. Additionally, since the information was from different authors, it covered many different ideas that were compared. Further more books and journals were readily available and at a relatively cheap price.
Data analysis
From the data obtained it was evident that the stocks of fish that were being caught were excessive. Some of the species that are threatened with extinction include the blue fin Tuna. Some of the fisheries that had abundant fish such as the Mediterranean sword fish and North Atlantic cod have been over fished to both biological and sometimes commercial exhaustion. Overfishing has been documented by scientists to be responsible for loss of biodiversity among marine and fish stocks collapse. Due to these, it has become impossible for open-ocean and costal ecosystems to provide a variety of ecosystem services such as water filtration, food provisioning and detoxification (Theis and Tomkin, 244).
In fewer isolated cases, scholars have documented cases like the one of lobster gangs where informal management of the community ensured that the resource is not overexploited. Although such cases, have been observed to be the exception as opposed to being the rule.
Several kinds of regulation were employed in early attempt to control overfishing such as in some places boats were forbidden from fishing by utilizing the conventional longlines due to the reason that they result to a high by catches. The high by catches result in leatherback turtles being killed and getting endangered. Fishery management in some cases put a limit to the maximum number of the fish that the fishermen can catch in an entire fishery. The total allowable catch allows the fishermen to fish whenever and in whichever form they want till the maximum allowable limit is reached. From there on, it has to stop till the next season. The total allowable catch policies have been found to have their own shortcomings. The underlying problem of fishermen competing for fish is not solved by these policies. As a result, overcapitalization and perverse incentives have been witnessed in the market. These are due to fishermen boat crews racing to catch adequate amounts before the limit is attained. In extreme cases such as the Alaskan Halibut fishery, the race between the fish crews grew so extreme to a point that the season was reduced to only 24 hours a season of mad dash. Since fish is perishable, the clumping of high numbers of catch is not a desirable outcome.
Theis and Tomkin suggest that in order to help manage fisheries, a tradable permit scheme idea was developed by resource economists (245). Cap and trade policies were established for fishing that employed the individual tradable quota schemes. With these policies, the total catc...