An Agent-based Model of the South African Offshore Hake Trawl Industry: Part II Drivers and Trade-offs in Profit and Risk

Rachel Cooper and Astrid Jarre

Ecological Economics, 2017, vol. 142, issue C, 257-267

Abstract: In South Africa's most valuable fishery, the offshore demersal hake trawl, participant companies differ in their rightsholdings, product streams, core business structure and their numbers and types of vessels. HakeSim, an agent-based model of this fishing industry, is used to explore these interactions, how companies could cope with increased fuel prices, and to provide insight into profit-risk trade-offs and vulnerabilities of companies. Apart from increasing catch per unit effort (CPUE), which is often detrimental to fish stocks, fuel price increases could be offset by increasing hake market value, achieved by processing fish to higher value end products with a lower catch cost per tonne. Industry's present fleet size and composition is demonstrated to result from profit-risk trade-offs: the flexibility to respond to mismatches between total allowable catch and CPUE, market demands for frozen and fresh product types, and environmental variability. Smaller companies have less risk-averse strategies and are more vulnerable to uncertainty in catches than larger companies, which may explain ongoing trends in consolidation in the industry. Increasing the proxy for environmental uncertainty increased risk to all companies without increasing profits. Incorporating more realistic environmental effects and feedbacks with industry in HakeSim could be an exciting future direction.

Keywords: Fleet-size; Trawl fishery; CPUE; Fuel price; Profitability in fisheries; Mean-variance analysis; Risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180091630893X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:142:y:2017:i:c:p:257-267

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.06.027

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().