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North Pacific Halibut Fishery
Management
The goal of management of a commercially important resource is to
resolve the conflict between maintenance and exploitation. Unfettered
exploitation often leads to disappearance of the resource, as in the cases
of whales, passenger pigeons, and buffaloes. But management that is too
conservative leads to inefficient use of the resource. One approach to the
conflict in fishery management has been to use the idea of some maximal
sustainable yield that can be taken from the fishery. Unfortunately, owing
largely to unpredictable variations in the environment, maximal yields are
usually not sustainable for very long. The management of the Pacific
halibut by the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) is an
example of the responsive (adaptive) approach to management. Addition-
ally, in this case there has been strong commitment to an understanding
of the biology of the species, and the activities of IPHC have been superbly
documented, as has the biological information obtained.
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Case Study
DAVID POLICANSKY, National Research Council, Washington, D.C.
INTRODUCTION
The International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) was established
by a convention between the United States and Canada in 1923, which
was revised in 1930, 1937, and 1953 (Bell, 1969) and again in 1983.
(The commission was originally named the International Fisheries Com-
mission and renamed in 1953; I use the abbreviation IPHC throughout.)
The purpose of the Commission was to provide a mechanism for joint
management of the Pacific halibut (Hippoglossus stenolepis Schmidt),
whose abundance had been declining up to 1923. The management ob-
jective, originally the maximization of sustainable yield, was changed in
1983 to the optimization of sustainable yield (R. B. Der~so, personal
communication); the idea of "optimal" sustained yield includes the "qual-
ity of the fishery," as well as the weight of the harvest (Roedel, 19751.
The primary ecological problem has been stock assessment; some related
issues have also been important.
The Commission originally had four members and now has six, drawn
from industry and government. Half the members are Canadian and half
are from the United States. The Commission is supported by a scientific
staff, headquartered in Seattle, with a full-time director appointed by the
commissioners; a Conference Board composed of fishermen and vessel
owners, which makes recommendations to the Commission with respect
to regulations; and an Advisory Group composed of 14 fishermen, dealers,
and fish-processors, half of whom are selected by the Conference Board
and half by the Halibut Association of North America. Members of the
Board participate in the Commission's meetings as observers.
The history of IPHC can be traced in its many thorough reports and in
other sources; the following account relies especially on Thompson and
Freeman (1930) and Bell (19811. Until 1888, the Indians had conducted an
important halibut fishery, with a catch probably exceeding 3 million pounds
a year. The Northern Pacific Railroad was completed in 1888, and the
Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1892. These new railroads profoundly affected
the development of the halibut fishery by providing ready access to large
markets for halibut in the East. Attracted by the new profitability of the
Pacific halibut fishery, men and boats from the eastern fishery arrived, and
the annual catch increased rapidly. The next 30 years saw depletion of known
halibut banks, maintenance of yield by discovery and exploitation of new
banks, and technical innovations. By the time of World War I, it was obvious
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NORTH PACIFIC HALIBUT FISHERY MANAGEMENT
139
that, from an economic point of view, the banks were being overexploited.
For this reason and because winter fishing was dangerous and expensive, a
winter closed season was desirable to the fishermen.
Thus, economic pressure was the impetus for the birth of IPHC. The
institution of a closed season required international regulation, which
required a treaty. Many attempts to enact fishery treaties between the
United States and Canada had failed, because they included both conser-
vation and unrelated economic considerations (such as reciprocal port
privileges). However, when the halibut treaty was finally ratified in 1924,
it contained only a conservation measure (a closed season) and provision
for the establishment of IPHC.
An IPHC report to the two governments in 1928 offered specific rec-
ommendations for the development of the fishery and the conservation of
the resource. The report detailed the decline in abundance of halibut in
all the areas where they were exploited. It recommended establishment
of management areas in each of which the total catch of halibut could be
reduced until the yield was stable, with the amount of the reduction being
responsive to the catch per unit of effort (CPUE); closure of the nursery
grounds; prohibition of the use of destructive gear; extension of the closed
season; provision for future modifications of the closed season; and li-
censing of all vessels for statistical and other purposes. These recom-
mendations, based on scientific activities of IPHC under the direction of
W. F. Thompson (including tagging experiments, analyses of catch sta-
tistics, and hydrographic studies), resulted in the Halibut Convention of
1930~ which gave IPHC broad regulatory authority.
BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF MANAGEMENT
The overriding issue here is the ecological problem of stock assessment,
i.e., knowing how many fish are in the sea. If that is known and the catch
is known, then the effect of fishing on the fish stocks can be determined.
Other aspects of the biology of the halibut have also been studied and are
discussed below.
Assessment of Stock
Knowledge of stock abundance is desirable if a fishery is to be moni-
tored. The assessment of fish stocks is perhaps the major fishery problem
and is often intractable. IPHC has relied heavily on CPUE as an index of
stock abundance (Skud, 19781; but the catch has been measured in biomass
(weight), rather than numbers of fish. Number of fish is also important,
because declining numbers can be masked by increased growth rate if
only information on biomass is used (Schmitt and Skud, 1978~. In part
for that reason, mark-and-recapture (tagging) experiments have been done.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
halibut fishery
