Global Overfishing: A Last Call for Our World Natural Resource

抄録

Global overfishing has been a severe problem for the last 37 years. The research objectives were to 1) study the situation of global overfishing as our common property 2) examine factors influencing global overfishing and 3) explain the global overfishing policy implementation. Secondary data were collected from the database of Food and Agriculture of the United Nations from 1979 to 2016 as well as additional countries. Descriptive statistics were applied as a tool for data analysis. The inferential statistics were an applied econometric model to examine factors affecting global overfishing. Research results found that 1) for the last 37 years, the situation of global overfishing: according to the FAO database (2016), the world has been faced with overfishing for 37 years, with 3 percent underexploited, 20 percent moderately exploited, 52 percent fully exploited, 17 percent overexploited, and 7 percent depleted; 2) factors affecting global overfishing were comprised of the world amount of fish caught, the world quantity of consumption demand, the world fishery product price, the world population and the fishery technology index; 3) for the global overfishing policy and its implementations: in China, they launched a policy called legal regulations on the price of access-rights to fisheries resources in China. Also, they have resource fishery taxes, which are about 1 to 3 percent of the total production value. In Australia, they applied Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) of southern bluefin tuna (SBT) as policy implementation resulting in about 67 percent by average. ITQs reduced the amount of SBT caught. As common property, global overfishing has been, and still is, one of our world problems that everyone in the world should pay attention to. It is a last call for this world natural resource.